Movimiento Libertario Cubano

 

 

Cuban Anarchism: The history of a movement – Frank Fernandez

 

Frank Fernandez’s 2001 book Cuban Anarchism: The history of a movement, which gives a historical account of the rise and fall of Cuba’s inspiring anarchist movement.

 

It is now mostly out of print. However, he writes extensively on many trends and schools of thought related to Cuba and its history.

 

Thanks to See Sharp Press for permitting this book to be posted online. This text was taken and slightly edited by libcom.org from the Anarchist People of Colour (US) website. Is available in http://libcom.org/library/cuba-anarchism-history-of-movement-fernandez

 

·             Introduction

§             Preface

§             Chapter 1 : Colonialism and Separatism (1865-1898)

§             Chapter 2: Intervention and Republic (1899-1933)

§             Chapter 3: Constitution and Revolution (1934-1958)

§             Chapter 4: Castroism and Confrontation (1959-1961)

§             Chapter 5 : Exile and Shadows (1962-2001)

§            Chapter 6 : Reality and Reflection

§             Bibliography

§            Appendix: Acronyms

 

 

Anarchism and countercultural politics in early twentieth-century Cuba // Introduction

 

Kirwin R. Shaffer

[http://raforum.info/article.php3?id_article=3061&lang=es]

[http://raforum.info/article.php3?id_article=3675&lang=es]

 

[From the book: Anarchism and coutercultural politics in early twentieth-century Cuba, Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2005. 304 pag. ISBN 0813027918]

 

* “This is the first critical in-depth study of the anarchist movement in Cuba in the three decades after the republic’s independence from Spain in 1898. Kirwin Shaffer shows that anarchists played a significant – until now little-known – role among Cuban leftists in shaping issues of health, education, immigration, the environment, and working-class internationalism. They also criticized the state of racial politics, cultural practices, and the conditions of children and women on the island. In the chaotic new country, members of the anarchist movement interpreted the War for Independence and the revolutionary ideas of patriot Jose Marti from a far left perspective, embarking on a nationwide debate with the larger Cuban establishment about what it meant to be “Cuban.” To counter the dominant culture, the anarchists created their own initiatives to help people – schools, health institutes, vegetarian restaurants, theater, and fiction writing groups – and as a result they challenged both the existing elite and the U.S. military forces that occupied the country. Shaffer also focuses on what anarchists did to prepare the masses for a social revolution. While many of their ideals flowed from Europe, and in particular from Spain, their programs, criticisms, and literature reflected the specifics of Cuban reality and appealed to Cuba’s popular classes. Using theories on working-class internationalism, countercultures, popular culture, and social movements, Shaffer analyzes archival records, pamphlets, newspapers, and novels, showing how the anarchist movement in republican Cuba helped shape the country’s early leftist revolutionary agenda.”

 

 

Introduction

 

It is necessary to turn toward new directions, to purify the environment. In a phrase: it is necessary to constantly agitate among the workers, in every sense of the word if we do not want the workers to continue being exploited by opportunistic politicians and crafty monks.

Antonio Penichet (1918)

 

A telephone repairman who wrote poetry, a librarian who wrote short stories and advice on health, a printer who wrote novels and helped to start schools, vegetarian restaurant managers, health clinic coordinators for fellow workers, cigar rollers, full-time teachers, housewives, clerks, waiters, bookstore managers, sugarcane cutters, and railroad workers: these were Cuba’s anarchists in the three decades following independence from Spain in 1898. While some published fiction or verse, others staged plays and recited poems in front of audiences. Others put their children on stage to demonstrate the power of an anarchist education. Many more listened; no doubt some of them were bored, wondering when the “real” action would begin. Thousands more read the books or saw the plays or perused the newspapers. Even a few rejected civilization and experimented with nudism. In early twentieth-century Cuba, anarchist culture flourished in many different forms.

 

Previous study of anarchism in Cuba has mirrored the traditional approach to anarchism throughout Latin America by examining the system primarily as a branch of a country’s labor movement. However, by seeing anarchism more broadly as a social movement that engaged in a series of political and cultural conflicts with the larger Cuban society, a fuller picture of these diverse people emerges. By taking a sociocultural approach—an approach detailed later in this introduction and in chapter 1—this book arrives at three overarching conclusions. First, when anarchists challenged the cultural, economic, political, and religious institutions, they did so not only during the eight- to fourteen-hour workday in the workplace but also through their writings, rallies, and alternative health and educational initiatives; anarchists challenged Cuba’s power holders throughout the rest of the day outside the workplace and inside the daily cultural milieu.(1) Second, this anarchist challenge reflected how the international anarchist movement operated within the context of a unique national situation in which Cuba’s political culture was shaped by the wars for independence, the U.S. occupations following independence, and the foreign domination of the economy.As anarchists engaged and criticized the larger hegemonic culture and created their own counterculture (see chapter 1), anarchists modified the larger impulses and issues of international anarchism to fit the specific cultural, ethnic, and political realities on the island; thus, they “Cubanized” anarchism. As a result, one becomes aware of how anarchists, via their cultural critiques and initiatives, struggled to create their own specific sense of cubanidad (Cubanness). Third, this study sheds light on Cuba’s leftist revolutionary heritage by illustrating an important but largely ignored early chapter of that heritage. In the early twentieth century, Cuba’s anarchists played important roles in shaping the Cuban Left by agitating for not only labor reforms but also socialist internationalism, worker-initiated health reforms, radical education, revolutionary motherhood, and gender equity while rejecting the political system, capitalism, and religion.

 

Anarchism is a philosophy of freedom. As historian Peter Marshall puts it, anarchism “holds up the bewitching ideal of personal and social freedom, both in the negative sense of being free from all external restraint and imposed authority, and in the positive sense of being free to celebrate the full harmony of being.”(2) One of the world’s best-known and celebrated anarchists, Emma Goldman, defined anarchism as “the philosophy of a new social order based on the liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all the forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.”(3) I prefer a broader definition of the term along the lines of what Murray Bookchin calls social anarchism: a philosophy that “celebrates the thinking human mind without in any way denying passion, ecstasy, imagination, play, and art. Yet rather than reify them into hazy categories, it tries to incorporate them into everyday life. It is committed to rationality while opposing the rationalization of experience; to technology, while opposing the ‘megamachine’; to social institutionalization, while opposing class rule and hierarchy; to genuine politics based on the confederal coordination of municipalities or communes by the people in direct face-to-face democracy, while opposing parliamentarianism and the state.”(4) While most anarchists agreed with these sentiments, anarcho-communists, syndicalists, and naturists often disagreed on the best ways to bring forth a state of anarchy.

 

Anarcho-communists followed the ideas of Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who believed in the communist principle of “from each according to his ability to each according to his need.” In this way, anarcho-communists argued that, because humans are by nature social and cooperative beings, then society should be nonhierarchical and everyone should be equally rewarded for their labor contributions. The anarchist “commune” would be composed of free and equal people who were both consumers and producers. There was no single, agreed-upon route to achieve this ideal community; rather, some followed the “propaganda of the deed” belief and engaged in violence, others mobilized workers in labor actions, and still others created social and cultural institutions designed to foster that commune. In Cuba, anarcho-communists mostly organized their own groups independent of labor unions in order to propagandize for their cause, publish newspapers, and at times start schools. The anarchist advance to communism differed from that of the Marxists: the former rejected political parties, engagement with the political system, and the Marxist concept of a socialist state that would make a transition from capitalism to socialism and ultimately to communism. Anarcho-communists distrusted all governments, including dictatorships of the proletariat.

 

Anarcho-syndicalists evolved from the collectivist ideals of Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and tended to follow a socialist line of “from each according to his ability to each according to his work.” To this end, anarchosyndicalists created revolutionary labor unions and worker-based organizations while the communists focused mainly on creating their autonomous groups. Anarcho-syndicalists hoped that their revolutionary unions would stage a worker-led revolution after which workers would control the industrial means of production. However, the considerable overlap between anarchocommunists and anarcho-syndicalists focused on a general belief in “mutual aid” and the possibility of a cooperative labor organization that operated without state intrusion.Anarcho-syndicalists also took the view that the revolutionary unions had to be concerned with more than just wages. Consequently, they took on educational, cultural, and social functions, like their communist brethren. The central difference between the two groups tended to revolve around the role of the group and the role of the union, which led to different emphases on creating cooperative communes or egalitarian factories and shops. Organizational differences often led to tactical differences when syndicalists used strategies of resistance that targeted workplaces with boycotts, strikes, and other forms of “direct action.”(5)

 

A third strand within the island’s anarchist movement was anarcho-naturism. Naturism was a global alternative health and lifestyle movement. Naturists focused on redefining one’s life to live simply, eat cheap but nutritious vegetarian diets, and raise one’s own food if possible. The countryside was posited as a romantic alternative to urban living, and some naturists even promoted what they saw as the healthful benefits of nudism. Globally, the naturist movement counted anarchists, liberals, and socialists as its followers. However, in Cuba a particular “anarchist” dimension evolved led by people like Adrián del Valle, who spearheaded the Cuban effort to shift naturism’s focus away from only individual health to naturism having a “social emancipatory” function.(6)

 

Although these definitions are rather fixed, people’s ideas tended to be more fluid. People were certainly free to change their ideas, and followers often breeched these delineations. For instance, nothing inherently prevented an anarcho-syndicalist in the Havana restaurant workers’ union from supporting the alternative health care programs of the anarcho-naturists and seeing those alternative practices as “revolutionary.” For this reason, at times throughout this book such terminological delineations, for all their specificity, actually cloud the truth. Thus, when such specific categorization is not necessary, I use the word anarchist, as Peter DeShazo did in his labor study of Chile: “a person who has expressed by work or deed a commitment to any of the various strains of libertarian thought.”(7) Furthermore, the use of anarchist throughout this book reflects the usage of the term during the time period covered in this study, from 1898 to 1925. It was rare for anarchist newspapers, columnists, or fiction writers of the time to break down the terms; rather, anarchist, anarchism, and anarchy became the umbrella terms used by the movement and its various strands. Where it is necessary to highlight divisions in this book, such distinctions are noted.

 

The exact arrival of anarchist ideas on the island is uncertain. By 1857 followers of French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had established the first mutual aid society in Cuba, and a form of reformist populism, influenced in part by socialist ideas, emerged.(8) In the 1860s, the young tobacco worker Saturnino Martínez founded La Aurora, the first weekly newspaper devoted to workers’ issues. Through his paper, Martínez, though not an anarchist, provided the springboard for educating workers on the need for cooperative, workingclass organizations.(9) In 1872, the same year that Bakunin and his followers were expelled from the Hague Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association, anarchist cigar makers Enrique Roig San Martín and Enrique Messonier established the Instruction and Recreation Center (Centro de Instrucción y Recreo) in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba, and started the newspaper El Obrero.

 

In the 1880s, anarchism became a force on the Cuban labor scene. Messonier served as secretary of the anarchist-dominated Workers Circle (Círculo de Trabajadores), and Enrique Creci became secretary of the Central Board of Havana Artisans (Junta Central de Artesanos de la Habana) by 1885. In 1887, Roig San Martín launched the anarchist weekly El Productor, which became the island’s dominant labor newspaper until it was closed in 1890. El Productor and the labor organizations were coordinated through the Workers Alliance (Alianza Obrera), an anarchist-based organization that supported better wages and working conditions for Cuban workers as part of a larger revolutionary agenda. By organizing workers in the far-flung tobacco industry that stretched from Havana to Key West and Tampa, the Alianza became quite possibly the first international workers organization in the Americas.(10)

 

During the 1890s, anarchists played important, though sometimes conflictive, roles in the struggle for Cuban independence. Some anarchists doubted the efficacy of aligning with a largely nationalistic independence movement led by middle- and upper-class exiles. Others saw the war as a means to liberate the island from monarchy and imperialism.(11) These latter anarchists, who fought with the liberation forces, hoped that independence would lead to a social revolution where anarchist ideals of social equality would find fertile soil in a newly freed people. Yet, independence brought a new imperial power, the United States, and the return of a Cuban, Spanish, and North American economic elite.

 

During the first decade of political independence, anarchists published a series of newspapers beginning with El Nuevo Ideal (1899–1901) —a paper that first appeared the same month that the United States took formal control of the island. While continuing their propaganda via the press, anarchists remained committed to social change, especially through the labor movement, which after independence had split into two competing organizations: the more reformist General League of Cuban Workers (Liga General de Trabajadores), led by the more moderate Enrique Messonier, and the anarchist-supported Workers Circle (Círculo de Trabajadores). Initially rooted heavily in the urban tobacco trades, restaurants, and skilled occupations, anarchists began to reach out to rural sugar workers shortly after independence. Anarcho-syndicalists made contacts through their activities in the Círculo, and anarcho-communists did likewise through their own independent organizations. Both communists and syndicalists supported the major labor actions seeking better wages and workplace conditions in the first decade of independence, especially the Apprentice Strike of 1902. This was important for anarchists because strikers protested employers’ preference for hiring Spanish immigrant workers. Because Spaniards were so prominent in the anarchist movement, this support became an important symbolic action linking anarchists with the larger concerns of the Cuban-born workforce.(12)

 

By 1909, anarchists were publishing three weekly newspapers in Cuba: La Voz del Dependiente, Rebelión!, and ¡Tierra!. The latter even became a daily paper for a brief stint. By the 1910s, anarchist activity among workers was profound. Havana’s food industry employees, radicalized by anarcho-syndicalism in particular, published their own long-running weekly newspaper El Dependiente and called attention to government and employer failures to provide safe workplace conditions; in addition, the paper offered a means through which workers could organize a revolutionary party. As sugar again became the leading sector of the Cuban economy, dominated by foreign capital, anarchosyndicalists stepped up their radicalism in the rural zones. Successful alliances between Havana-based anarchists and labor organizers in the economically crucial sugar zones of central Cuba led the government to crack down on all anarchists at the end of 1914 and throughout 1915, a repression that temporarily crippled anarchist unions, organizations, and educational initiatives. With sugar prices soaring during World War I, the government responded to not only sugar capitalists’ interests but also the fears that a radical labor movement could usher in another U.S. intervention. Officials shut down the longrunning ¡Tierra!, deported anarchists as “pernicious foreigners,” and suppressed strike activity until 1917 when strikes again swept the island. General strikes in Havana, coupled with a string of bombings that authorities attributed to anarchists, led the government to again repress anarchists in 1918 and 1919.

 

By the early 1920s, the war-era economic boom—the famous “Dance of the Millions”—came to an end. Led by anarcho-syndicalists like Antonio Penichet, Alfredo López, Marcelo Salinas, and others and inspired by the Russian Revolution, Cuban workers began to form new labor organizations. Anarchists dominated the Havana Workers Federation (Federación Obrera de La Habana [FOH]), founded in 1921. The FOH renewed attempts to unite workers in the cities and rural zones into one labor organization strong enough to fight for better wages and conditions. The FOH also put resources into building and staffing schools for workers and their children. These schools were modeled after schools that anarchists had created since the early 1900s on the island. Then in 1925 workers created the first nationwide labor federation, the Cuban National Workers Confederation (Confederación Nacional Obrera de Cuba [CNOC]). Led by anarcho-syndicalists, Marxists, and immigrant labor leaders the CNOC was structured to prevent the creation of a highly centralized, nondemocratic bureaucracy.

 

By 1925, anarchists enjoyed their greatest success in the labor movement since the 1880s and early 1890s. But the inauguration of President Gerardo Machado in 1925 undermined this success in Cuba. President Machado believed that he had to pacify an increasingly powerful labor movement in order to protect Cuban nationalism. Fearing that increased labor militancy could serve as a pretext for U.S. intervention, Machado, never a friend of organized labor, launched an all-out repression against anarchists and communists by closing anarchist-dominated unions, deporting striking workers, and colluding in the assassinations of several prominent anarchists, especially Enrique Varona of the railway union (1925), Alfredo López (1926), and Margarito Iglesias of the manufacturers union (1927). Many surviving anarchists went underground or fled the island. Others, forming militant groups to struggle against Machado, ultimately led to the 1933 Revolution that brought down the dictator but paved the way for Cuba’s next political strongman, Fulgencio Batista. Although Machado failed to completely destroy the anarchists, the movement never regained the stature and influence that it had in those first three decades following independence.

 

Anarchists were one of many groups struggling to shape Cuba in the thirty years following independence from Spain. Along with black activists, feminists, and socialists, anarchists struggled to define Cuba’s future; in the process they challenged the institutions of the Cuban state, national and international capital, the Catholic Church, and periodic rule by the U.S. military. I acknowledge the importance of these other social groups by noting the anarchists’ criticism of or cooperation with them; moreover, the other groups provide context by which to better understand anarchist ideas and actions. This book, however, remains dedicated to exploring and analyzing anarchists from the far left wing of Cuban society and politics. Their views reflect understudied viewpoints and perspectives on issues of national identity formation, immigration, race, health, education, and gender relations at the beginning of the twentieth century. In short, anarchist critiques and initiatives shed new light on the cultural and political struggles occurring in and shaping Cuba from 1898 to the 1920s.

 

Cuban and International Anarchism: A Historiography

 

In Cuba’s rich history of social conflict, Cuban anarchism has been pushed into relative obscurity. This is not because the movement was minuscule. Although it is impossible to say how many anarchist activists and followers existed at any one time, intelligence reports and the anarchists’ own propaganda put the numbers in the thousands by the end of the first decade of independence. These figures grew by the early 1920s when anarcho-syndicalists dominated the thriving labor organizations on the island. For a country whose labor history was a key factor in developing the island and in particular the island’s leftist heritage, and in a country where anarchism played a contentious role in that heritage, little has been written on the anarchist movement. In fact, except for a handful of rather polemical works, some of which I discuss in later chapters, one has to read the scattered secondary literature focused on Cuban labor history to find the anarchists. In addition, because most of these histories have been published since the 1959 Cuban Revolution, historians have tended to analyze the anarchists through the lens of the Revolution with often ideologically driven results.

 

Until the end of the twentieth century, one’s view of anarchists generally resulted from how one felt about the Cuban Revolution. Cuban authors on the island have tended to focus on finding the “socialist” (that is, Marxist or proto-Marxist) roots of the 1959 revolution; in so doing they either denied an important role for anarchism in those roots, downplayed the anarchist beliefs of many people by describing them in studies as “socialist” and “Marxist,” or labeled anarchists as misguided or naïve. The varying degrees of negative treatment of anarchism in Cuba can be found in works by Mariana Serra García, José Antonio Portuondo, Joaquín Ordoqui, Olga Cabrera, José Cantón Navarro, José Rivero Muñiz, Gaspar Jorge García Gallo, and various official publications. At the same time, writers in exile and writers abroad, sympathetic to anarchism, have tended to overrepresent the accomplishments of anarchists by portraying them as unsung heroes and heroines who were betrayed by the Communists. We see this especially in proanarchist works by Frank Fernández and Sam Dolgoff, as well as in Peter Marshall’s history of anarchism where even Che Guevara’s “anarchism” is noted.

 

Two examples illustrate these ideological interpretations of anarchism and their service to larger political objectives: Carlos Baliño and Alfredo López were key figures in Cuban labor history from the early 1900s. Writers on the island have portrayed Baliño as a “Marxist.” Carlos del Toro, Cabrera, Cantón Navarro, García Gallo, and others focus on Baliño’s role in founding the Cuban Communist Party in 1925; they ignore or downplay his history as an anarchist at the beginning of the century. Meanwhile, Dolgoff, Fernández, and Marshall stress his anarchist activities but neglect his role in founding the Communist Party. Thus, neither perspective is entirely correct. Carlos Baliño was a leftist typical of his time. In the early 1900s, he followed anarchism and gradually converted to socialism. Socialism, an undoubtedly vague term in the first decade of the twentieth century, could have meant anything from a parliamentary socialist to the most radical of anarchists. Like many “socialists” during the era, he became a Communist following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Even though he became a Communist, he continued to work closely with anarcho-syndicalists in an anarchist-Marxist alliance that dominated Cuba’s main labor organizations in the early 1920s.

 

A second example is a leading anarcho-syndicalist printer in the 1920s, Alfredo López. Sympathetic and scholarly literature from outside Cuba clearly portrays López as a key anarcho-syndicalist in the island’s labor movement. However, in Cuba, Alfredo López plays a different role. For instance, in her insightful biography of López, Olga Cabrera places the man squarely within the larger social dynamics impacting the Cuban labor movement, which portrays him as the “teacher of the Cuban proletariat,” but his anarchist ideas are downplayed. This portrayal of him as a labor leader, while dismissing his anarchism, is reflected further in the Museum of the Revolution in Havana—the official post-1959 shrine and interpretation of Cuban history. In the museum’s wing dedicated to the island’s pre-1959 history, one can see a portrait of López with a brief discussion of his accomplishments; however, his anarchism is never mentioned. In her sweeping history of Cuban labor history, Los que viven por sus manos, Cabrera treats anarchists more fairly than earlier historians; yet, her argument is that only a truly national labor movement was possible after, among other things, anarchist leaders in the 1920s came to see the “truth” of Marxism-Leninism. This is the light into which López and other anarchists are cast: the anarchist-Marxist alliances of the 1920s were not mutual meetings of the mind; instead, anarchists “saw the light” of Marxism and joined the Communists.

 

Other international scholars have helped to chart a better analysis of anarchists, though still tied explicitly to a labor history perspective and mostly rooted in the nineteenth century. For instance, Gary Mormino and George Pozzetta analyzed immigrant labor communities in Florida’s cigar factories. Though it comprises a small part of their book, they illustrate how Spanish, Cuban, Italian, and American anarchists (as well as other labor radicals) worked and agitated side by side, exposed one another to different cultures and cultural perspectives, and thus helped to educate anarchists on a truly “international” perspective. In his research on Cuban communities in the United States from 1852 to 1898, Gerald Poyo shows the close links between major parts of the Florida émigré community and island anarchist leaders. He illustrates how these links and the strong influence of anarchist ideology posed problems between workers who sought a social revolution and other forces involved in a political nationalist independence movement. He analyzes how José Martí pulled these two strands together into a revolutionary movement in the early 1890s and by extension illustrates the impact of anarchists among Cuban workers in both Florida and Cuba. Jean Stubbs reflects on tobacco workers and the role of anarchists in this important economic sector, again with a focus on the nineteenth-century labor movement. She argues that, far from what is commonly believed, nineteenth-century Cuban anarchism was not a direct by-product of Spanish anarchism, and she notes that some anarchist leaders, like Enrique Roig San Martín, were not Spanish immigrants; in fact, many in the island’s anarchist movement did not come from anarchistdominated regions in Spain. All three studies illustrate the importance of understanding the Cuban anarchist movement as one branch of an international anarchist movement, though with specific local characteristics. In addition, all reflect an agreement that anarchists in Cuba (and Florida) modified the movement to represent the specific realities of Cuban labor. I argue that twentieth century anarchists continued and expanded this trend beyond the workplace to the larger Cuban culture of politics, ethnicity, health, education, and gender.

 

Arguably the most important labor study that analyzes anarchism on the island is Joan Casanovas’s Bread, or Bullets! Casanovas illustrates the central impact of anarchism in Cuba’s late nineteenth-century urban labor history. Like Stubbs, he emphasizes the Creole, as opposed to Spanish or in particular Catalonian, influences on Cuban labor at this time. And like Poyo, Casanovas excellently portrays the reformist-anarchist split in the labor movement and its translation into a general, though not unanimous, anarchist support for the Cuban independence movement. Casanovas’s especially valuable study de-scribes thoroughly the role of urban labor, and ultimately urban-based anarchists, in shaping the evolution of Spanish colonial Cuba. Thus, Casanovas shows how the island’s workers played a key role in challenging Spanish colonial rule and providing the backbone (both figuratively and literally) for independence forces.

 

In short, these works have helped students of the region understand the interactions between anarchists and the larger nineteenth-century workers’ movements on the island without the polemical undertones. However, even these historians have studied anarchism as part of a larger analysis of Cuban labor history. Thus, students of Cuba now know far more about nineteenthcentury labor history than early twentieth-century labor history. But there is little known about anarchists beyond their roles in the labor movement. Consequently, this study takes a more focused analysis of the men, women, and sometimes even children who took part in all facets of Cuban anarchism both inside and outside the workplace.As a result of this more thorough description of anarchism, the larger Cuban political culture, with which the anarchists regularly engaged, emerges in new ways.

 

To this end, I have followed broader global trends in the study of international anarchism. Beginning in the 1980s, historians moved away from institutional and biographical approaches and toward a focus on anarchist culture. Significant in this trend are studies reassessing anarchism in the United States, Latin America, and Spain. For instance, through an examination of rank-andfile newspapers and anarchist art forms, Salvatore Salerno shows how the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the United States was a hybrid creation of rank-and-file attitudes and foreign-born intellectual impulses. In this same vein of international influences on anarchist movements, Mormino and Pozzetta looked at the role of anarchists and immigrant labor in radical unions in the United States. Research has focused on the sometimes contradictory challenges that U.S. anarchists faced, such as how to uphold revolutionary idealism while making a living in capitalist America. For instance, Blaine McKinley examines whether anarchists believed one could be a lawyer or merchant and still be an anarchist. On other fronts, McKinley and Donald Winters have discussed the seeming contradiction in U.S. anarchist anticlericalism by showing the repeated use of Christian symbolism in anarchist writings. Bruce Nelson’s examination of “movement culture” illustrates how anarchists drew together different ethnicities and traditions to challenge American power brokers and influence American workers in one of the few social spaces that remained open to agitation: culture.

 

The study of Latin American and Spanish anarchism also received renewed life as scholars shifted to a focus on cultural issues and conflicts. Dora Barrancos reflects this shift in the study of Argentine anarchism in her analyses of anarchist education and cultural issues like health and sexuality. Other studies by Barrancos and Maxine Molyneux illustrate the complex nature of Argentine anarchism by focusing on anarcho-feminism and the impact of female anarchists in a mostly male movement. The research by Barry Carr and Donald Hodges on anarchism in Mexico has shed light on the lingering impact of anarchism on Mexican politics, especially in the formation of the Mexican Communist Party. Anton Rosenthal’s study of turn-of-the-century Montevideo, Uruguay, illustrates how anarchists and the city’s leaders each used the streetcar to define their own ideas of progress. Scholars in Spain likewise have moved away from an institutional focus to emphasize culture, such as Lily Litvak’s examinations of anarchist art and aesthetics. In addition, lesser-known cultural dimensions of anarchism like the anarcho-naturists and their approaches to health and population issues have become topics of new interest, as pursued by Eduard Masjuan. Consequently, to study Cuban anarchism, one has to move beyond the workplace and labor disputes (though by no means forsaking them entirely) to explore and understand the cultural creations of anarchists, how they used their culture to put forth their own ideas and initiatives, and how they challenged those who ran Cuba.

 

Cuban Anarchism

 

The chapters that follow provide a cultural and political history of anarchism that unfolds in layers. Readers who expect a traditional chronological account of the anarchists in Cuba will not find it here. For that one may consult the often polemical but nevertheless useful accounts of Sam Dolgoff (The Cuban Revolution: A Critical Perspective, 1977) and Frank Fernández (Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement, 2001). Both focus primarily on the labor struggles involving anarchists from the 1800s to the Castro era. Rather, by building on trends in anarchist historiography since the 1980s, this book explores the cultural history of the anarchist movement topically. Each new topic adds another layer to our understanding of the complexity of anarchism in Cuba. The following chapters concentrate on three important aspects of anarchist cultural politics in Cuba following 1898, what I see as “three sites of cultural conflict”: nationalism and internationalism; health and nature; and education and gender. Each topic has its own section in this study. The first chapter of each section follows a chronological overview of how anarchists addressed each site of conflict. Subsequent chapters in each section turn to anarchist culture, especially fiction, for a more thematic analysis of the topic.

 

Following chapter 1, which looks at the larger theoretical concerns guiding this study, I turn to part 1 to focus on the relationship between anarchism, nationalist politics, and issues of immigration and race. Chapter 2 addresses the anarchist critique of Cuban nationalism and how anarchists “Cubanized” anarchist internationalism after independence. Chapter 3 examines independence symbolism in Cuban anarchism by illustrating how anarchists avoided becoming “nationalists” themselves, yet still used the symbols of national independence to localize the international movement to fit Cuban reality. In particular, they interpreted important images of the island’s political culture — the war itself and José Martí — into their critiques of postwar social relations. Chapter 4 explores how anarchists addressed issues of Spanish and Antillean immigration to Cuba. While anarchists described workers of all countries in noble terms, they attacked other “foreign” immigrants like international business-men. These latter were portrayed as the immigrants that workers of all nationalities should see as their enemies. Chapter 5 examines how anarchists dealt with the particularly thorny issue of race in Cuba. This proved to be another means of localizing anarchist internationalism to meet the specific racial realities of the island. By addressing immigration and race, anarchists tried to overcome attempts by employers, politicians, and nationalistic labor unions to divide Cuban workers from Spanish, Haitian, and Jamaican workers.

Part 2 demonstrates how anarchists dealt with “real life” health and safety concerns of the popular classes. Chapter 6 shows how U.S. occupation forces from 1898 to 1902 and from 1906 to 1909 helped to control yellow fever and to develop improvements in sewers and sanitation. However, anarchists charged that such reforms did not go far enough and that rural and urban workers still suffered from unsanitary conditions both at home and in the workplace. Chapter 7 illustrates how anarcho-naturists helped to create health institutes that utilized alternative medicine and treatment, urged people to grow their own food and eat vegetarian diets, and at times promoted alternative lifestyles like nudism. These anarchists promoted such lifestyles as forms of preventative health care, but anarcho-naturists added a “social liberating” dimension to naturismo. Chapter 8 reflects the debate between anarchists over the impact of “Civilization” and its relationship to “Nature” by examining the role of Nature in anarchist statements and fiction. Anarcho-naturists promoted a rural ideal, simple living, and being in harmony with Nature as ways to save the laborers from the increasingly industrialized character of Cuba. Besides promoting an early twentieth-century “back-to-the-land” movement, they used these romantic images of Nature to illustrate how far removed a capitalist industrialized Cuba had departed from an anarchist view of natural harmony.

 

In addition to making people healthy, anarchists believed that Cubans needed an appropriate education. Part 3 addresses the anarchist critique of Cuban educational systems and anarchist educational initiatives, particularly as they impacted women and children. Chapter 9 describes how anarchists rejected state- and church-run schools and developed their own coeducational institutions. During the day, schools operated for the workers’ children. At night, schools taught the workers themselves. Anarchists recognized that for-mal schools could reach only a small number of people, so, as explained in chapter 10, they broadened their educational audience by utilizing their cultural meetings, newspapers, fiction, and theater to teach anarchist theories of freedom, egalitarianism, internationalism, and progress. These experiments in popular education also stressed the importance of avoiding greed, politics, and vice within the larger culture. Finally, chapter 11 analyzes how anarchist culture functioned as “texts” when directed particularly at women. Because anarchists saw the family as the seed from which to grow a cooperative society, they believed that women in particular needed to be targeted. Anarchist plays and stories served as educational tools that could instruct women and children on how to behave in an anarchist, egalitarian fashion while waiting for that revolutionary society to materialize.

 

Notes on Sources

 

In the fluid situation of Cuban cultural, political, and social life in the thirty years after independence, anarchists and most radicals on the Cuban political left understood that a social revolution was a long time away. Consequently, anarchists of all delineations believed that cultural work in the present was necessary not only to lay the groundwork for the future revolution but also to help people live better, healthier, more enlightened lives in the meantime. It was also essential to help Cubans imagine a reality and a future conducive to the anarchist agenda. To unlock this cultural history of Cuban anarchism, I have focused primarily on the printed cultural sources produced by anarchists themselves. These sources serve as the best surviving record of the movement, its actions, and its ideas and visions. Thus, to understand the anarchist critique and cultural vision, this book is based largely around three types of sources: anarchist ideological books and pamphlets, anarchist newspapers, and anarchist cultural productions like novels, plays, and short stories. When relevant, I have incorporated archival material such as intelligence reports on anarchist activity. I have also relied on censuses, other official governmental reports, and publications from the anarchists’ rivals and friends to provide context to understand just what the anarchists were challenging. Most of this book’s insights were gleaned from anarchists’ own political and cultural creations uncovered in institutes and libraries in Havana, Cuba, and Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

 

Although I pay considerable attention to the men, women, and children whose names and activities emerge, disappear, and sometimes reappear throughout the record, I pay special attention to the literary works and activities of the two most prominent of these anarchists,Adrián del Valle (aka Palmiro de Lidia) and Antonio Penichet.

 

Del Valle was a core personality in Cuban anarchism from his first step in Cuba in 1895 to his death on the island fifty years later. He was born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1872, and came of age in the politically charged atmosphere of late nineteenth-century Catalonia. By 1890, he wrote for and collaborated with the Spanish anarchist newspaper El Productor, for which he occasionally wrote under the pen names “Palmiro de Lidia” and “Fructidor.” In 1892, while living in New York City, he immersed himself in the city’s radical politics. He quickly became the manager of the Spanish-language anarchist newspaper El Despertar where he was exposed to the numerous Spanish and Cuban anarchists who passed through the city. As tensions between Spain and Cuba increased in the early 1890s, Spanish-speaking anarchists in the United States began to agitate for Cuban independence. In February 1895, Del Valle left New York and arrived in Havana, just as the island began to explode in its final war for independence. Soon, he befriended the leading anarchists in Havana, but, unable to get from Havana to the separatist-dominated sections of Cuba, Del Valle returned to New York where he wrote in support of the war in El Rebelde under the name “Palmiro de Lidia.” Following Spain’s defeat, Del Valle immediately returned to Cuba, where, in the first month of the U.S. occupation of the island (January 1899), he founded the anarchist newspaper El Nuevo Ideal.(13)

 

Over the following decades, Del Valle became a constant presence in not only the anarchist press that proliferated in Cuba but also mainstream literary publications. He regularly contributed columns for the leading anarchist newspapers ¡Tierra!, Rebelión!, and Nueva Luz. From 1912 to 1913 he edited the freethinking journal El Audaz. Then he began his largest publishing job by helping to found and edit the monthly alternative health magazine that followed the anarcho-naturist line Pro-Vida. While a mainstay in the anarchist press, Del Valle’s prolific pieces of social commentary won him a seat at the more mainstream table of Cuban journalism. He served a fifteen-year stint as an editor for the periodical Cuba y América before he became an editor of the highly regarded journal Revista Bimestre Cubana, published by the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País in Havana. During his years at the Sociedad Económica he served as a librarian, and in that role he became a leading force in reorganizing the society’s extensive library holdings. This rather erudite existence isolated him from the day-to-day realities of physical labor in Cuba’s expanding rural agri-industrial complexes and urban shops. But it afforded him considerable time to interact with the leading authors of his day as well as write for newspapers and magazines. Immersed in the atmosphere of revolutionary politics, labor radicalism, and literary dynamism, Del Valle wrote a series of novels, plays, and short stories, which today serve as key sources in understanding the cultural vision laid forth by the anarchist movement’s leading artist. This cultural vision, which I describe throughout this book, was recognized by more than the anarchists who read and published his essays or fiction, staged his plays, and followed his advice on seeking alternative health regimens. In fact, he was recognized by Cuba’s literary elite; in 1927 he was the subject of a prestigious public reception at the National Academy of Arts and Letters in which the Cuban Socialist and novelist Carlos Loveira —author of important social novels like Los Inmorales, Juan Criollo, and Los Ciegos— gave the honorary speech praising Del Valle’s literary and social career. Del Valle remained a constant presence in Cuban anarchism until his death in February 1945.

 

Antonio Penichet was Del Valle’s contemporary, who likewise produced anarchist fiction and short plays. Whereas the latter’s world mainly revolved around intellectual circles, Penichet’s world was that of a skilled laborer. As a young man, he arrived in Havana from the Cuban town of Güines after Spanish forces drove out rural Cubans in their infamous “reconcentration” policy during the war in the 1890s. Upon arriving in Havana, Penichet stayed at the home of Manuel Comas Segu’, who not only taught Penichet the printer’s trade but also urged him to study anarchist ideas.(14) Penichet helped to edit the printers’ Memorándum Tipográfico from 1913 to 1916, but during these years he shied away from openly supporting anarchism in the pages of the newspaper. This changed by 1918 when Penichet became a leading anarcho-syndicalist figure in a Cuban labor movement that rapidly recovered from several years of repression during World War I by staging a broad array of strikes. In 1919, Penichet and other anarchists were arrested for their involvement in the strikes. In June, while hiding from authorities, he managed to publish the novel La vida de un pernicioso and a short story “El soldado Rafael.” Coming on the heels of the Bolshevik Revolution, which Penichet supported,“El soldado Rafael” was suppressed by authorities who feared its call for a military-worker alliance to overthrow the state. He landed in more trouble in 1920 when authorities accused him and other anarchists of inciting workers to engage in bombings throughout Havana.(15)

 

During the first half of the 1920s, when the labor movement surged in power, Penichet became one of anarchism’s leading voices. In 1922, he founded and became editor of the anarcho-syndicalist newspaper Nueva Luz, to which he contributed frequent columns on education, the historical and social importance of different inventions and technology, and the overall status of the labor movement.At the same time, Penichet became intricately linked with the FOH school for children. From this experience, he helped to found the CNOC in 1925 and led the organization’s Education Committee. To illustrate his prominence in the labor movement, he had to publicly reject efforts by delegates to name a special honor for him during the CNOC’s founding convention because Penichet believed such honors were inappropriate. Following the crackdown by the Machado government beginning in 1925, Penichet found himself on the run. He fled to Mexico for a time but returned to Cuba in the 1930s. His involvement in anarchist activities declined after that as he became a historian, an advocate for liberal education, and a librarian like Del Valle. He died in Cuba in 1964.(16)

 

Del Valle’s and Penichet’s works are worthy of study in and of themselves, but I focus on their literary works as primary sources that illuminate the anarchists’ cultural challenges. As outlined in the next chapter, their fiction and actions served as important cultural frames for the anarchist movement—frames that gave ideational shape to anarchist interpretations of Cuban reality and anarchist goals for the island’s future. At the same time these two men themselves were key actors in the movement’s educational and health initiatives. I do not argue that all anarchists agreed with everything written by these two key literary and political figures. In fact, many found Del Valle a little too “bourgeois,” especially considering his accolades from the larger culture and his life removed from hard labor. In addition, Penichet and Del Valle did not always agree; for instance, in the 1920s anarchists of all stripes debated whether or not to align with Marxists. Penichet and most anarcho-syndicalists thought it a good idea but Del Valle and the anarcho-communists kept their distance. Thus, in this regard, both their individual lives and their ideas, expressed in their plays and fiction, represented a cross-segment of the anarchist community at any given time on the island: some agreed completely with one, the other, or both, while people could easily sympathize or take issue with, say, Del Valle’s romantic rural landscapes or Penichet’s creation of heroines out of Havana’s prostitutes. However, to undertake a cultural history of a social movement, one must rely heavily (though not exclusively) on the leading cultural creators of that movement. In Cuba, many people staged plays, wrote columns, ran schools, and more; but among these activists, Del Valle and Penichet were the two most prolific, widely read, and widely heard cultural figures in Cuban anarchism.

 

Alan West has noted that “the artistic realm offers us a distinctive way of understanding both present and latent meanings of Cuban reality and history. The greater freedom in the aesthetic realm means that fiction, myth, folktales, popular music, and poetry can be brought to bear on the historical as a ‘dialogue between intentional subjects,’ as originating thought. And . . . I agree that ‘a philosophy of history may well lie buried in the arts of the imagination.’”(17) West’s “arts of the imagination” become central to understanding anarchism and anarchist culture in Cuba. West calls Cuban history and culture a manigua, a Ta’no word referring to a dense, lush landscape—practically a jungle, a “natural profusion of confusion, a locus of escape from oppression and a new spot from which to begin a life of freedom.”(18)

 

We require our own arts of imagination to slice through the dense layers of Cuban history and culture to make sense of the past. At the same time, we must recognize the arts of imagination used by history’s actors to understand the historical images they used to describe their present and shape a picture of Cuba’s potential future.Again, to this end, I draw heavily on the anarchists’ arts of imagination, especially their cultural creations. Literature can help us understand the values and attitudes of historical actors. As E. Bradford Burns once noted,“on one level the novel reflects the writer’s points of view [‘world view’] on a topic. On another level, it is a document of, a mirror to, a period.”(19) Fiction helps us to understand what the anarchists were seeing, interpreting, and imagining. By the same notion, it helps us understand how anarchists tried to get their readers and viewers to imagine Cuba’s past, present, and potential future.

 

After all, anarchist culture was meant to be not only descriptive but also prescriptive; it was designed as a useful way to raise the consciousness of their audiences. In addition, people like Del Valle and Penichet tapped into the larger Cuban culture to write their fiction in their efforts to Cubanize the movement. Consequently, from a rarely heard viewpoint, literature and the arts can tell us a great deal about Cuba’s anarchists, their vision for the island, and the island itself.

 

For thirty years after Cuban independence from Spain, the island’s anarchists provided alternatives to the directions promoted by Cuba’s economic, political, and cultural leaders. At times, when their agendas overlapped, they cooperated with reformist groups. Sometimes they disagreed among themselves. However, anarchists of all stripes believed that over time, as the social environment became purified of injustice, oppression, and vice, the imagined anarchist New Dawn of individuals—free, thinking, healthy, and equal—working in a spirit of cooperation and mutual aid would evolve until a day, which they hoped would not be too distant, of a social revolution. Against a wide array of political, economic, and cultural forces, Cuban anarchists struggled to keep that hope alive in the unions, the health clinics, the shops, the schools, the literary world, and even the stage.

Freedom Teaching: Anarchism and Education in Early Republican Cuba, 1898-1925

 

Kirwin R. Shaffer   ///   Penn State University

[http://libcom.org/library/freedom-teaching-anarchism-education-early-republican-cuba-1898-1925]

 

Many individuals say to me: “those ideas that you profess are very good, but, who straightens men out? Who is capable of convincing an egoist that he ought to give up his egoism?” To this one can answer: in the same way that a religious person has convinced him to sacrifice himself for religious beliefs, and in the same way that the patriot has taught him to die defending his flag. For men to be able to live in a state of anarchy, they must be educated and this is precisely the work that has been done by those generous people who have been educators throughout the ages. To them is owed the existence of synthetization. Without these athletes of thought, progress would be in its infancy.

—Julián Sánchez “¿Qué es la libertad?” (1)

 

* Like so many of their fellow residents on the island, Cuban anarchists quickly grew disillusioned after independence from Spain in 1898. They agitated towards social revolution, but believed these efforts would be, if not useless, then at least less effective if the people were not educated. Consequently, anarchists saw education as an essential revolutionary tool to raise the consciousness of the popular classes. This article focuses on two distinct eras of Cuban anarchist education (1898-1912 and 1922-1925) within the context of Cuban education generally and the island’s anarchist movement specifically.

 

Following independence from Spain in 1898, Cubans hoped to create a new independent, more egalitarian nation built on the dreams of numerous well-known revolutionaries like José Martí and Antonio Maceo as well as lesser known radicals like the anarchists Enrique Creci, Enrique Messonier, and Adrián del Valle. Like so many of their fellow residents on the island, though, the anarchists quickly grew disillusioned with independence. Their disillusionment rested on repeated U.S. military occupations, a business and commercial class that put individual profits over the well-being of all, a government that seemed to repress labor and the popular classes in order to curry favor with international and national investors, and educational systems that anarchists charged taught obedience and subservience instead of freedom.

 

Within this context, anarchists directed their revolutionary programs specifically to help workers and their families not only to live a better life in the present but also to prepare them for a social revolution sometime in the future. To accomplish this, they led strike activities, helped to create alternative health institutes, and championed the cause of a working class united across racial, national and gender lines. Yet, as Julián Sánchez made clear in the opening quotation, anarchists believed all of these efforts would be, if not useless, then at least less effective if the people were not educated. Consequently, anarchists saw education as an essential revolutionary tool to raise the consciousness of the popular classes. To this end, Cuba’s anarchists devoted considerable time and scarce resources to develop day schools for children during the first decades of independence from Spain when education was hotly debated across the island.

 

This article focuses on two distinct eras of Cuban anarchist education (1898-1912 and 1922-1925) within the context of Cuban education generally and the island’s anarchist movement specifically. First, anarchist schools were but one of many educational options for Cubans following independence from Spain. Like Cuban nationalists and proponents of public education, anarchists believed that religious schools, especially Catholic institutions, increasingly educated only the rich and thus countered ideals of equality and freedom from religion indoctrination. However, anarchists also disliked public schools, which they believed taught a blind form of “patriotic nationalism.” Anarchists believed that this patriotic education countered socialist working-class internationalism while stifling free, individual thought in children.

 

Second, the schools’ periodic successes (measured by growth in the numbers of students as well as the continuation of established schools and the opening of new ones) generally coincided with the ups and downs of the anarchist cause within the Cuban labor movement. From 1898 to 1912, with the Cuban working class divided and in disarray, anarchist educational experiments foundered due to a combination of personality conflicts, shortages of funds, lack of worker interest, and governmental repression. Over the next decade, anarchists and other labor radicals reorganized and focused their attention away from education. In the 1920s, the Cuban working class created the largest labor organizations on the island since the late nineteenth century. As before independence, anarchists occupied central leadership positions in these organizations, and they were able to make alliances with Marxist leaders. Better organization, larger membership, pan-sectarian alliances, and increased resources provided more funds to open schools across the island. Still, while the island’s labor organization was as strong as ever in the mid-1920s, and the schools created by anarchist-led groups and union organizations expanded, Cuba’s labor radicals could not escape the impending governmental crackdown against radicals and foreigners. By 1925, anarchist-based schools, now squarely adopted not only by anarchists but also socialists and communists in Cuba, came to an abrupt end with the presidential administration of Gerardo Machado, who pledged to crush worker militancy. The anarchist movement on the island would never recover from this wave of governmental repression, nor would the anarchist-based educational systems. However, their educational radicalism contributed a chapter to the island’s leftist heritage and built a monument to leftist, worker-based education to which later revolutionary generations owe a relatively unacknowledged debt.

 

Cuban education after independence

 

The state of education in 1898 was, by most contemporary accounts, dismal. Such assessments, made by Cuban liberals and North American occupiers alike, undoubtedly reflected a level of anti-Spanish bias designed to justify completely overhauling the educational system that lay in ruins following the war from 1895-1898. Whatever the bias, the system was in fact in total disarray and did not meet the standards expected for a new nation that was to be founded on liberal republican values. Following Spain’s defeat, US occupation authorities examined Spanish education on the island. They concluded that compulsory education rarely had been enforced due to insufficient public expenditures, insufficient numbers of schools, wealthy families choosing to send their children abroad, and Spanish Captain-General Valeriano Weyler closing most schools except in provincial capitals and garrisoned towns occupied by Spanish forces during the war. (2) The results were disastrous, as one North American traveller, James Williams Steele, noted even before the war. In his 1881 book Cuban Sketches, Steele wrote: «Noticing casually the system of education in Cuba, I have wondered what, besides mischief, might have been the themes of study in the ancient and famed universities of Salamanca and Cordova. Pursuing the theme, it has sometimes seemed to me that Church and State had undoubtedly combined to force a flimsy and inadequate system upon Cuba, the main purposes of which should be political and religious. If such is the case the plan is a manifest failure; they have never made of a Cuban schoolboy a Spaniard, or a very religious man.» (3) With a de-emphasis on the liberal arts and sciences, one wonders if these schools even made a Cuban a very educated man or woman.

 

From 1898-1902, U.S. occupiers completely overhauled the island’s educational system. US administrators appointed the respected Cuban intellectual Enrique José Varona as Secretary of Public Instruction. Varona and Commissioner of Public Schools Matthew E. Hanna redesigned Cuban public education to follow models in vogue in the United States at the turn-of-the-century. The new educational system stressed a mix of formal classroom instruction in the liberal arts as well as manual instruction. Manual instruction would help a child learn real-life skills, especially in agriculture.(4) But manual instruction also had a specific civics-oriented purpose that would be reinforced by creating the “School City,” a model first tested in New York City schools in 1897 by its creator Wilson L. Gill. The School City, chartered in Havana by Gill in the Spring 1901, aimed to teach the rights and obligations of living in a republican democracy. Gill and Hanna argued that to educate students without some specific training in republicanism would invite disaster for the society. In Cuba, students without this instruction in republicanism were believed to be especially at risk:

 

«He [the student] lives in a democratic country, under a free flag, where he is told that the will of the people is supreme, but in the schoolroom he is surrounded by the influences of a monarchy, where authority is wielded with the rod and the will of the teacher is supreme.

 

The impressions made on the mind of the child by constant association are indelible, and if in the schoolroom he lives in an atmosphere of republicanism, feels that he has certain duties towards his playmates and certain rights in his relations with them, and that he is a part of the government, as well as one of the governed, the foundations will have been laid for a good citizen when this boy of to-day becomes the man of to-morrow.» (5)

 

Ultimately, U.S. reformers believed that education not only should teach trades, but also should be a key component to create democracy-loving Cubans.

 

Education, then, was central to post-independence political socialization whereby children were to develop their political values. This process to “republicanize” Cuban children not only emulated the United States model, but also it included teaching English in Cuban classrooms, sending nearly 3000 Cubans to the United States for teacher training, and introducing U.S. textbooks in Spanish translation—an important consequence of which was to emphasize U.S. history over Cuban history and privilege a decidedly U.S. interpretation of all history.6 Just as the School City promoted acquisition of North American political and cultural values, language training would encourage further acculturation. Those gaining proficiency in English could look forward to individual mobility as trade relations were sure to intensify between the United States and Cuba. Ultimately, in the immediate post-independence years, public schools increasingly exposed Cuban children to a secular, liberal education. Throughout the first U.S. occupation, a rapidly expanding number of children learned the arts, civics and trades. While only 30,000 students attended classes in 1899, two years later 177,000 students enrolled in public education, with an average attendance of 138,000 of those students.(7)

 

However, this is not to say that Cuban education after independence was entirely an American construct. Beginning in 1909, the administration of President José Miguel Gómez began to implement new education laws that superseded those created during the U.S. military occupations of 1898-1902 and 1906-1909. For instance, these laws created daily and weekly curriculum guides and restructured the curriculum to meet the different needs of rural and urban students. By 1914, Enrique José Varona had become Cuba’s vice president, creating a climate of heightened expectations for educational reform. These partially were met by the new Secretary of Education and the Arts, Dr. Ezequiel García Enseñal, who further reformed the curriculum by emphasizing the need to stimulate children’s imagination, decrease the emphasis on rote memorization, raise the study of nature and natural history, and promote pride in one’s self, home and country.(8) Despite some fifteen years of educational reforms since independence, however, there were many shortcomings: education funds siphoned off via corruption, insufficient numbers of schools being built, overcrowding in the existing schools, too few books and resources, and an “unhygienic” school environment in which most schools lacked playgrounds, had no running water or bathroom facilities, were located too close to distracting factories, and were rarely surrounded by shade trees. The last two factors caused teachers to close windows and curtains, thus depriving the overcrowded classrooms of fresh air.(9)

 

For those parents seeking an alternative to overcrowded public education, Cuba offered a plethora of private school options. For instance, in 1909 there were 316 private schools in Cuba, increasing to 606 by 1925.(10) The leaders in private education were religious organizations, with Catholic and Protestant schools generally receiving praise by U.S. officials and Cuban leaders for their levels of instruction and moral discipline.(11) The variety of private schools had similar curricula but different goals. For instance, Jason Yaremko shows how North America-based Protestant schools developed throughout the island, especially in eastern Cuba. Besides offering a traditional curriculum of arts and sciences, the schools’ ultimate goal was “a ‘Christian education’ oriented toward conversion and salvation” in which students were taught to be “‘good Christians’” and “‘useful citizens.’” To create useful citizens, Protestant schools taught ideals central to an expanding North American capitalist economy by training students from the lower classes to be workers, housekeepers, and secretaries while emphasizing skills for middle- and upper-class students that would help them to become foremen and managers of the expanding sugar interests.(1)2 Not only religious institutions offered education. Feminists played a key role too. While Cuba’s public school system was coeducational, Cuban feminists had long argued that girls and women needed special educational opportunities. For instance, as K. Lynn Stoner shows, María Luisa Dolz in the late 1800s was the “first woman to link educational reform with nationalism and feminism,” believing education of women was key to righting social injustices. While Dolz’s schools aimed at the upper class in Cuba, twentieth-century feminists would expand this notion to working-class women by creating night schools and free classes, hoping to educate women on how “to become men’s companions” and thus temper men’s inclination to violence.(13)

 

Consequently, in the first decades following independence, Cuba was awash in schools. The public schools were free, coeducational, racially integrated, and made great leaps forward after independence. Enrollment levels rose and some new school construction ensued. By the 1910s, educational theorists were promoting, if not actually implementing, innovative ideas about creative learning and the need for clean, safe, hygienic schools. Private schools competed for students, especially those from the more privileged classes who could afford tuition. In these schools, children could learn the basic arts and sciences, but for families seeking boys- or girls-only education with heavy doses of moral teaching, the Catholic schools were available, while those seeking more to align themselves with the growing export economy linked to North American capitalism found the Protestant schools to be an important option.

 

Anarchists and Cuba’s post-independence educational system

 

Anarchists hated the Cuban school system after 1898. Even though the public schools were secular and tried to be pragmatic by teaching skills and trades, anarchists were never comfortable with larger political and ideological forces surrounding public education. They criticized everything from the conditions of schools to pedagogy to outright patriotic indoctrination. The anarchist Vicente Carreras complained that he often saw children leaving their schoolrooms with an almost savage joy, as though leaving captivity. And what did they do upon release from “captivity”? They would fling stones at old transients, place rocks on tram rails “for the thrill of seeing them derail,” and torment birds and animals. To Carreras, it was not the chil-dren’s fault but the larger social environment in which they were raised and schooled, especially “the false instruction they receive, the routines which they repeatedly faced.”(14)

 

While the claustrophobic conditions of the public schools raised their ire, anarchists reserved their sharpest attacks for what they perceived as questionable political education and patriotic indoctrination of students. In his 1906 article “La imbecilidad triunfante” (“Triumphant Stupidity”), Tomás S. Gutiérrez complained that recent public school graduates merely had gone through the motions of mimicking their teachers’ words about the government. When one asked these students about the “rights” and “obligations” they had supposedly studied, not a student could explain what a right or duty was. In essence, charged Gutiérrez, the public schools had created a mindless herd of youth.(15) The anarchists would claim that these non-thinking followers provided cannon fodder a few months later during the 1906 uprising between Liberal and Conservative Party followers. This conflict placed the country on the verge of full-scale civil war that initiated the second U.S. intervention, which lasted until 1909.

 

Following the U.S. withdrawal that year, officials throughout Cuba began to emphasize the link between “patriotism” and “education.” This was not entirely new on the island. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Cuban educational thinkers had linked nationalism and patriotism in education.(16) After 1909, both the Liberal government under Gómez and the Conservative government under Mario G. Menocal supported using the schools to develop a sense of Cuban identity in children. For instance, in 1910 the government decreed that at the beginning of every day, students should say a pledge of allegiance to the Cuban flag. A 1914 regulation from the Secretary of Public Instruction explicitly called for patriotic education in the classroom in order to develop “‘love of country’” and “‘to form habits in children that facilitate the carrying out of their political and civil duties.’” To accomplish this, students were taught to love flag and country, study Cuban history and Cuban poets, and sing the National Anthem.(17) The irony is that such “nationalist” educational sentiments occurred exactly as the island plunged ever deeper into economic dependency on the United States.

 

Anarchists wasted little time in attacking these patriotic reforms. For instance, in April 1909, M. Moros related a day’s lesson that his son had learned. According to Moros, the teacher told the children they should love the Cuban flag because it was a symbol of la patria and the children should respect the laws of the fatherland whether they were good or bad. Moros shamed teachers for creating and fostering what he saw as the artificial and unnatural sentiment of patriotism. He added that these self-proclaimed patriots professed that “la patria is territory where all individuals live under the same flag. I say that la patria is where all villains take refuge.”(18) The weekly newspaper ¡Tierra!, the leading mouthpiece for anarchists during the first decade of the century, regularly echoed these anti-patriotic sentiments in anonymously written columns. In September 1910, the paper decried the recent decision by the Secretary of Public Instruction to have schools regularly pledge and honor the Cuban flag. Referring to themselves as “antibanderistas,” the editors of the paper urged its readers to talk to their children and encourage them to reject paying allegiance to a “rag on the end of a pole” (trapo en la punta de un palo) that symbolized closed mindedness and divisiveness.(19)

 

Anarchists detested patriotic nationalism, seeing it as a way to artificially divide people who otherwise could be united around class interests. As was common in the global socialist and anarchist movements of the time, Cuban anarchists believed in socialist internationalism. They hoped to unite workers across all trades, skill levels, genders, races and nationalities to fight not only what they viewed as the surge and scourge of international capitalism but also those who would promote isolation and insular pride, i.e., nationalists. In the first decades following independence, anarchists had seen how “nationalist” elites regularly pitted Cuban workers against Spanish workers in order to break strikes, cause dissension in the island’s labor movement, and thus undermine a strong, united labor force that was ineffective in pushing for higher wages and better conditions. Thus, when anarchists saw young Cubans being taught “Cuban” pride and other patriotic notions, they viewed this as one more trick by the state to undermine international worker solidarity.(20)

 

As discussed earlier, the Catholic Church played a key role in colonial educational affairs in Cuba. The first U.S. occupation effectively ended outright Church interference in public affairs and likewise public schools. In fact, as Stoner points out, unmarried women were considered to be the best teachers in these new public schools. As she puts it, “Righteous women made appropriate replacements for the Religious who had been teachers. . . .In a sense, mother nationalists replaced the Mother Church as the guardians of Cuba’s morality and the teachers of the young.”(21) However, after the U.S. concluded its first occupation, anarchists expressed alarm at efforts to weld the Church once again to public education. The Church had willing accomplices in the Department of Public Instruction. In his report to Provisional Governor Charles E. Magoon during the 1906-1909 U.S. occupation, Acting Secretary of Public Instruction Lincoln de Zayas worried about what he saw as the overall failure of Cuba’s public education system. He particularly lamented that many Cuban elite chose to send their own children to private schools. The Acting Secretary argued this was not about keeping their sons and daughters from being educated in the company of blacks or the poor. Rather, he found a religious explanation. Elite families, he wrote, considered teaching religion to their children to be of primary importance, so they crowded their children into private religious boarding and day schools on the island. Many in the elite objected to co-educational instruction as well, preferring that their daughters be sent to sex-segregated Catholic schools. What was Zayas’ proposed solution? Teach God in the classroom:

«This is the cause which keeps the sons and daughters of our best families from public school: and unless something be done to introduce God, not within the limits of any sect, but in His grand and glorious concept of Our Father in Heaven, the public schools of Cuba will not attract the children of our most distinguished families.»(22)

 

Zayas continued this theme in talks at the prominent Jesuit school of Belén in Havana.(23)

 

The anarchist Adrián del Valle edited the freethinking, anti-clericalist magazine El Audaz. In an April 1913 article “Los resultados de la enseñanza religiosa” (“Results of Religious Education”), an anonymous author offered “proof” on the effects of religious instruction in France. Ninety-five percent of criminals under 21 years of age had received religious instruction and 90% of these were Catholics, with 85% receiving religious instruction after their first communion. The author then alluded to the same results for Cuba if religious instruction were not curtailed. “It is an eloquent answer to those who insist on discrediting secular and rationalist education.”(24)

 

Not only did anarchists equate religious schools with subservience to Rome and increased crime, but also they alleged that religious education failed to teach courteous behavior. In one short, anecdotal story, the author told of a Jesuit teacher lecturing to an audience of women from well-to-do families. The Jesuit urged mothers to prevent their children from using obscenity. After the talk, one mother approached the Jesuit and told him that she had heard her children speak profane words; what could she do? The Jesuit responded by telling her to send them to a good Jesuit school like the Belén Academy in Havana for religious and spiritual education. With a confused expression, the mother looked at the priest and responded that her sons already attended Belén.(25)

 

When taken as a whole, Cuban anarchists implied that the same types of patriotic and Catholic forces that had ruled the island for over 400 years had not been removed at independence. They had merely been replaced by a more localized elite, which had no intention of creating a revolutionary democracy full of enlightened, free individuals. This was further proof, anarchists charged, that Cuba’s independence from Spain had been subverted. To this end, they claimed that new schools emphasizing individualized, rationalist instruction were necessary to break these forces’ hold on Cuba. Only through the free, individual pursuits of knowledge with the teacher serving as a guide could children come to see the truth and beauty of the anarchist ideal and thus Nature’s “true” harmonious plan for humanity. For inspiration they looked to the Spanish radical educator Francisco Ferrer Guardia and his Escuela Mod-erna, which operated in Barcelona from 1901-1906.

 

Francisco Ferrer Guardia and the Escuela Moderna

 

Francisco Ferrer based his Escuela Moderna system on a larger eighteenth- and nineteenth-century trend in education rooted in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Herbert Spencer, Leo Tolstoy, Peter Kropotkin, and others. Intellectually, Ferrer drew most heavily upon William Godwin’s 1793 attack against states and state-sponsored education in his “Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.” Godwin argued that governments used schools to create loyal followings, just as churches developed loyal parishioners and manufacturers developed obedient workers. State-run schools then, while professing to be “free,” were actually in the business to keep out ideas deemed threatening to the status quo. The traditional practice of “instruction” in schools facilitated this. Instruction meant lecturing and reinforcing the teacher’s opinions to students. Because the teacher was a functionary of the state, Godwin believed that the teacher disseminated state-sponsored ideas. Education, then, was really in the hands of the ruling class who controlled the state. This environment, Godwin concluded, stifled a student’s free inquiry to experiment, experience and discover, thus assuring that no new ideas would enter into the classroom and challenge the status quo.(26)

 

The state of Spanish education in 1901 was as dismal as in its former Caribbean colonies in 1898. Following the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, Spain fell into turmoil. Within this turbulent environment there arose a growing debate about education. In 1901, only about 15,000 of 45,000 towns had a public school. Not only were these schools ill equipped, but also they were forced to teach and uphold Catholic dogma—a job made easier because Church officials supervised schools just as they had in Cuba before 1898.(27) After inheriting a sizeable amount of money from a student to whom he had taught Spanish, Ferrer traveled to Barcelona and opened the Escuela Moderna in 1901 to offer an educational alternative.(28) In fact, the Escuela Moderna presented the most radical challenge to educational orthodoxy during this contentious period of Spanish history. Within the curriculum, Ferrer created a school intended for both sexes and all social classes. Boys and girls together studied math, science and social studies to develop their mental attributes. They also learned about hygiene and enjoyed large amounts of free playtime to develop healthy bodies and explore their imaginations. The school itself rebuked hierarchy by incorporating a non-dog-matic curriculum devoid of strict discipline, tests or rewards.

 

Though “non-dogmatic,” political issues did creep into the rationalist curriculum. In his book La Escuela Moderna, Ferrer included sections of compositions from children ages 12-17, who would have had but a few years of rationalist education at most. One 12-year-old boy wrote, “Poor social organization assigns an unjust separation between men, so that there are two classes of men: those who work and those who don’t.” Another boy the same age wrote, “Aren’t the children of the bourgeoisie and the workers both made of flesh and bone? Then, why in society are they different?” A 13-year-old girl wrote, “Fanaticism is produced by the state of ignorance and backwardness in which women find themselves. Therefore, Catholics don’t want women to be instructed, since women are the Church’s primary sup-port.”(29) Thus, while rationalism was to be rooted in the scientific foundations of human and natural existence, an obvious amount of class-conscious political education found its way into the classroom.

 

Ferrer also urged that “play” and “education” be more closely intertwined. Allowing a child to engage in free play benefited the child because it created a greater sense of joy. A joyful child was not only likely to learn more, but a child could take this joy and apply it to living a happy existence. This had direct counter-cultural consequences, especially versus the Church:

 

The idea that life is a cross, a bothersome and weighty burden, which has to be tolerated until providence satiates itself with seeing us suffer, radically disappears. Life, we are told, is about enjoying life, living it. What torments and produces pain ought to be rejected as a mutilator of life.(30)

 

Thus, allowing children ample opportunities for free play and enjoyment would not only stimulate the body but also the human spirit to enjoy life in the here-and-now.

 

Ferrer saw another important lesson from free play. Children’s spontaneity in their play activities often led them to “play as” adults, whether pretending to build houses, tend gardens, be doctors, be teachers, etc. To Ferrer, this activity was more than imitating adults. Rather, it revealed that the instincts of children and adults were not that different. “Spontaneous play, which is the child’s preference, indicates his occupation or natural dispositions. The child plays as a man, and when he reaches adulthood he does seriously that which he enjoyed as a child.”(31) In essence, allowing for free, spontaneous activity permitted a child to develop his or her own interests and talents. Thus play itself was a useful preparation for life.

 

Another issue regarding freedom underlay the Escuela Moderna’s program. Students should not be coerced or disciplined by teachers, nor should students be rewarded or punished through examinations or grades. Discipline, reward and punishment created a hierarchy or even a “class” system within the schoolroom. In this environment the teacher served as authoritarian. Ferrer found this completely unacceptable, especially recalling how the Escuela Moderna was dedicated to teaching all sexes, races and social classes in order to undermine a stratified social order. In Ferrer’s school, students could come and go from the classroom as they saw fit. After all, they were free individuals. In addition, students could approach the chalkboard, read or engage in an activity of their choice if they felt compelled or just became bored with what they were doing.(32) Free children had to have the liberty to enjoy themselves and find their own proclivities without being forced or disciplined by some overbearing, self-important teacher.

 

The success of Ferrer’s initiatives can be seen in the rapid spread of schools, literature, and ultimately ruling-class repression. By 1904, 32 schools in Spain, including nine in Barcelona alone, received pamphlets and books printed by the Escuela Moderna publishing house.(32)

 

But this early success came to a sudden halt in June 1906 when a would-be assassin tried to kill the king. On June 15, in the midst of a crackdown on radicals, Spanish authorities closed the Escuela Moderna and Ferrer fled into exile. In April 1908 Ferrer returned to Barcelona and started the International League for Children’s Rational Education (Liga Internacional para la Educación Racional de la Infancia). The Liga coordinated establishment of rationalist schools in Europe and the Americas while publishing educational reviews in French, Italian and Spanish.(33)

 

But again politics and militarism intruded on Ferrer’s efforts. In 1909 Spain attempted to ignite a sense of nationalist, patriotic fervor by going to war against Morocco. Anarchists led the resistance to this war, prompting the government to unleash a wave of repression in the summer of 1909. In this repressive atmosphere, authorities arrested Ferrer, accusing him of fomenting massive popular resistance. He was found guilty and went before the firing squad on October 13, 1909.(34)

 

Ferrer’s efforts and his martyrdom actually stimulated the spread and development of anarchist, rationalist educational experiments throughout the Western Hemisphere, especially in the U.S., Argentina and Uruguay. One of the more vigorous of these movements arose during two distinct waves in Spain’s former colony, Cuba.

 

The escuelas racionalistas in Cuba to 1912

 

During the first thirty years after independence, anarchists struggled to create rationalist schools that would effectively challenge Cuba’s public and religious schools. The actual drive for worker-based, but not necessarily anarchist-based, education predated independence. In the 1850s and 1860s, elite-run cultural centers (liceos) offered classes and activities for workers, but the “lessons” did not have a revolutionary content. Beginning in 1865, lecturas appeared in cigar factories. The lectura read newspapers, political ideas, histories, and fiction aloud from an elevated platform while workers rolled cigars. The practice quickly spread from the Havana cigar factories to most of the large factories and workshops in Cuba and eventually to the cigar factories of Florida. In 1866, inspired by the success of the lectura, Havana-based artisans established the first evening school for workers. As anarchists came to dominate the labor movement in the 1880s, they too pushed for worker-based education. In the late 1880s, the Círculo de Trabajadores, the largest labor organization in Cuba, dominated the labor scene. Led by anarchists, the Círculo was anti-nationalist and anti-racist. These sentiments carried over into the Círculo’s early focus on education that included a library, a periodicals reading room open to the public, speakers, and a school. In 1889 the school taught over 100 men at night plus some 800 boys and girls during the day. This success led to the opening of new schools around the island.(35)

 

From 1899 to 1912 anarchists began dozens of schools on their own. Workers in the San Lázaro barrio of Havana initiated a school in the Spring 1899 and the first calls for a Social Studies Center (Centro de Estudios Sociales [CES]) and a Sociological Library (Biblioteca Sociológica) in Havana were heard in September 1900. In 1903 a CES was organized in Guanabacoa, across the bay from Havana. However, the major push for chil-dren’s rationalist schools began in 1905.(36)

 

In 1904 the royal Spanish priest Eduardo Martínez Balsalobre’s Conferencias sobre el socialismo revolucionario (Lectures on Revolutionary Socialism) was published in Havana with the Bishop of Havana’s seal of approval. Martínez explicitly criticized the anarchists for their supreme faith in reason, arguing that human reason was neither independent nor infallible and in trying times one of the greatest errors was to believe in the power of reason.(37) Rationalism itself, wrote Martínez, appeared to be little more than a school of thought that “had as its only mission the defense of the rights of reason.”(38)

 

Incensed by the circulation of Martínez’s writings, anarchists renewed their educational efforts. In a two-part column in January and February 1905, J. Fueyo, an early regular contributor to ¡Tierra!, recalled that several preschools (planteles) formerly functioned in Cuba, but these had mostly closed by 1905. Only “La Enseñanza” in the Havana barrio of San Lázaro still remained, led by the anarchist Jovino Villar. To remedy this situation, Fueyo called for the creation of more educational centers.(39) Villar answered this call in November 1905 by opening “Verdad,” a co-educational primary and secondary school. Located in the heart of working-class Havana on Calle Neptuno, “Verdad” offered elementary instruction for boys and girls, as well as special and short courses for girls only. The school provided older students with opportunities to learn trades and to become teachers. Besides offering courses in French, English, typewriting, telegraphy and music, “Verdad” also housed the only school in Cuba for educating the deaf, mute, and blind.(40)

 

Up to this point, and continuing really since the Círculo de Trabajadores school from the previous century, the anarchist movement’s approach to education had been rather traditional. As Joan Casanovas points out regarding the Círculo school (and which is true for schools until 1906), “[t]he rather traditional educational system of the Círculo contrasts with the advanced pedagogical methods of the Spanish anarchist schools at the time.” This began to change in 1906. That year in Regla skilled tradesmen and the Ship Caulkers’ Guild (Gremio de Calafates) founded their own CES. The gremio had long been involved in radical activities. In 1890 members founded the “Flores de Mayo” Mutual Aid Society in memory of the executed Chicago Haymarket anarchists. “The Internationale” was first heard in Cuba in the calafates’ meetings. The CES school itself was the brainchild of Roberto Carballo, who was also known as El Curro (literally a person displaying a certain freedom of manners). Carballo was a calafate, who immigrated to Regla from the Canary Islands in 1875. Known as the “spirit and life of the CES” throughout its four-year existence to 1910, he even painted the portrait of Francisco Ferrer Guardia that would hang above the CES door.(41) In the spring of 1908, anarchists formed the group “Educación del Porvenir” in Regla in order to run a Ferrer school out of the CES. In May and June 1908, the group published a manifesto inserted in the leading anarchist newspapers of the day, ¡Tierra! and La Voz del Dependiente. The manifesto disparaged the government’s obligatory educational system. It described the teachers in the public school system as “teachers and men who aspire to be capitalists” because they taught only to make a living, and leveled criticisms against public and religious schools for undermining chil-dren’s intelligence through lessons on patriotism and through hymns and prayers. The manifesto called for rationalist schools modeled after Ferrer’s Escuela Moderna first to take root in Regla, and then to branch out across the island. Teachers trained in rationalist education would be brought in and all of the publications utilized in the Escuela Moderna and printed by its publishing division would be available at the same cost as in Spain.(42)

 

Later that year, Miguel Martínez Saavedra arrived in Regla from Spain. Ferrer personally selected Martínez to re-organize the Regla school under the auspices of the recently created Liga.(43) Martínez became the Liga’s foreign secretary, as well as the Regla school’s first full-fledged, rationally trained teacher. The school offered all the methods and programs of the Escuela Moderna in Barcelona, but a noted feature that seems to have appealed greatly to the predominantly working-class community of Regla was the school’s choir. Every Friday, under the direction of one of Martínez’s daughters, also a student, the choir paraded in front of the school on Calle Calixto García behind the Plaza del Mercado singing “The Internationale.”(44) Dozens of children parading through the streets and singing the anthem of the international socialist movement directly challenged the patriotic drive to sing the National Anthem and worship the Cuban flag.

 

From 1908 to mid-1909, anarchists extended the success of the Regla school across the island. They made plans and raised money for schools in Matanzas, San Antonio de los Baños, Havana, and even Cobre in the eastern province of Oriente. In May 1909 Martínez left his teaching post at Regla, resigned his position as foreign secretary of the Liga, and established a night school in the western Havana suburb of Marianao where the anarchist group “Redención Social” had been struggling to found a school since the previous December. Sebastián Aguiar, a Spanish anarchist who had fought for Cuban independence, became the Liga’s foreign secretary.(45) Meanwhile, Ricardo Vera and Tomás Echeverría initiated a rationalist school for illiterate agricultural workers and their nearly 90 children at the “El Corralito” estate on the western end of Cuba in Pinar del Río.(46) Thus, in less than two years, anarchists developed a fragile, embryonic rationalist education system from one end of Cuba to the other.

 

However, a series of internal conflicts and shortage of funds ultimately undermined this initial wave of anarchist schools. By May 1909 controversy enveloped the Regla school. The anarchist weekly La Voz del Dependiente first alerted readers that something was amiss in Regla. The paper reported that books from the school were being replaced from the private collection of the new teacher Juan Pérez. If this and other rumors such as his dislike for teaching girls were true, then Pérez had to go, urged the paper.(47) Two weeks later, the paper again attacked Pérez for not being a rationalist teacher and for having exalted patriotism by praising both the Cuban and Argentine national flags in the classroom. In addition, La Voz del Dependiente accused Pérez of accepting the job while never intending to teach a rationalist curriculum, preferring instead to live off the contributions of workers while at the same time betraying those workers’ trust.

 

In response to attacks against its teacher, the new CES top officials Abelardo Saavedra and Francisco Sola defended their selection of Pérez as the Regla teacher and asserted that they knew what they were doing. The following week, Saavedra had a change of heart when he viciously attacked Pérez as an ex-dancer in a Havana café, and a man who had been expelled from several workers’ centers apparently for past collaboration with police. Reflecting the anarchist movement’s general belief that homosexuality was “un-natural” and a sign of degeneracy, Saavedra then called Pérez a lover “of sodomite practices, according to a comrade who caught him disgustingly living with a mulatto male.”(48) Pérez’s ouster temporarily quieted the storm.

 

Unfortunately, the real fireworks of personal conflicts were about to explode, and the timing could not have been worse. The 1909 revolt in Barcelona and Ferrer’s arrest were hot issues in the Cuban anarchist press and important topics at rallies. However, the tragic events in Spain that could have unified the anarchist movement and initiated a successful building of rationalist schools occurred just as new conflicts erupted among leading anarchist figures in Cuba. On October 5, 1909, only two weeks before the news of Ferrer’s martyrdom reached the island, Rebelión! published the article “Algo Injusto” (“Something Unjust”). The author reported that José Requeña, a frequent contributor to the paper and activist for “free unions” between men and women, was living with a public school teacher in Güira de Melena, a town just west of Havana. Upon discovering that their teacher lived with an anarchist, the town’s leading priest, mayor and several businessmen forced Requeña’s female companion from her job. The author questioned anarchists who would pay good, hard-earned money for people like Martínez, Pérez and “many others who come to Cuba to enrich themselves on the backs of workers, always shouting that we need our own education for our children.” These same men shout “solidarity,” but abandon a good woman victimized by clerical and bourgeois repression.(49)

 

Martínez tried to respond, but of the three weekly anarchist newspapers in Havana and Regla, only one, La Voz del Dependiente, would publish his letters. In a not-so-subtle jab at Saavedra and Sola, Martínez warned that the rationalist and anarchist movement was being endangered from within like a virus.(50) By printing the letters, La Voz del Dependiente asserted that it was not siding with Martínez specifically, but argued that in the name of free speech offended parties had the right to defend themselves in the press. The editorial group of ¡Tierra!, allied with Saavedra and Sola, was not impressed and broke relations with La Voz del Dependiente in January 1910.(51)

 

Unfortunately the conflicts grew deeper, more divisive, and more personal, resulting in the Regla school’s collapse by the late spring of 1910. Yet, despite the internecine divisions that brought down the school, anarchists remained committed to Ferrer’s dream. Other rationalist experiments emerged. On the eastern end of Cuba at El Cobre, anarchists were collecting funds to start a new school.(52) Workers organized the “Enseñanza Mútua” school at the corner of Calle 19 and Calle F in the Havana suburb of Vedado.(53) They also created new schools in Havana’s working-class suburbs. By January 1911, a school and supplies to teach 30 students had begun in Sagua la Grande. Even though the school’s organizational group “Sociedad Racionalista” had dissolved by April, the school continued to function and began to ask for monetary support.(54) In the Havana suburb of Cerro, members of ¡Tierra! and their allies formed the anarchist group “Agrupación Ferrer,” an organization to rival the Liga.(55) The group organized a CES in April 1911 with the aim of creating a new school.

 

The Cerro school was the most ambitious educational effort since the Regla school folded in 1910. Throughout 1911, funds were raised through individual donations, money collected at weekly meetings and cultural events, and by way of subscription. One of the by-laws of the Cerro CES included a ten-centavo weekly payment for members, part of which went to creating a school.(56) By June, ¡Tierra! had collected 145 pesos for the Cerro school. By October, the school was operating under the teaching of Antonio Juan Torres and J. F. Moncaleano, the latter a Colombian university professor who greatly admired Ferrer. They soon were educating forty boys and girls, three of whom were Moncaleano’s own children.(57) The school operated until the summer of 1912, when Moncaleano, feeling the urge to join the Mexican revolution, left his family in Cuba to start a rationalist school in the revolutionary state of Yucatán, Mexico.

 

Buttressed by financial support in the form of cash donations, Mon-caleano’s wife, Blanca, tried to keep the school operating, even offering summer school classes for anyone who wanted them and offering the building as a “boarding school” for students who lived too far away to commute back and forth. Blanca Moncaleano’s appearance in the anarchist educational world was new. In fact, contrary to the Cuban public school system where women dominated the classrooms, women occupied few spots in anarchist educational leadership in general and as teachers specifically. This possibly contributed to what some saw as lack of concern for the Güira de Melena teacher in 1909. Not until 1911, when Isabel Alvarez sat on a CES board in Cerro, when Blanca Moncaleano spoke and taught in the same school from 1911-1912, and when María Luisa García wrote a column on rationalist education in 1914, did women play important roles in the educational movement.(58) Women, however, regularly took part in public cultural events designed to raise money, propagandize for anarchism and anarchist schools, and educate audiences from the stage. This was particularly noted by U.S. intelligence officials on the island. For instance, during the 1906-09 U.S. occupation of the island, Captain John Furlong wrote to the U.S. Chiefof Staff and Governor Charles Magoon that the “meetings are being attended by women as well as men. The women bring their children and the meetings seem to be part of an educational system established by these anarchists.”(59)

 

Despite Blanca Moncaleano’s efforts, however, the Cerro school withered away, with ¡Tierra! even ceasing publication of the school’s financial accounts by late Summer 1912.(60) The failure of the Cerro school, which appears to have been the last rationalist school effort in this first wave of anarchist activity, came at an unfortunate time. In late May and throughout June 1912, white Cubans turned on black Cubans in what has become known as the “Race War of 1912.” Cuban authorities and white vigilantes violently turned on black groups supporting the outlawed Partido Independiente de Color. Racists used the opportunity to attack innocent blacks, so that by the end of the violence, death toll estimates reached as high as 6000 people. Anarchists watched in horror, but did and said little. On June 22, 1912, the anarchist Eugenio Leante published a column in ¡Tierra! lamenting the continuation of racism and questioning those (both black and white) who focused on issues of color. Racism in Cuba, Leante began, was caused “by our religious education” that had created “the dangerous prejudice” of thinking that whites were superior to blacks. This “religious” thinking was backed up by the popular pseudo-science of craniology that some used to say whites were superior to blacks because the latter had smaller brains. “This prejudice,” he continued, “will disappear when we educate our children in good sense and rational thinking, conscientiously teaching them anthropology, psychology and physiology.” Through such education, people would come to reject craniology and begin to recognize that blacks and whites were first and foremost human beings. Rationalist education, Leante believed, would be key to this, but unfortunately rationalist education was going into hiatus on the island right at this time.(61)

 

Ultimately, a combination of internal conflicts and insufficient funds undermined the initial wave of rationalist schools in Cuba. Above all, the constant struggle to get money may have been the movement’s Achilles heel. The schools were financed by subscriptions, money raised at cultural events, periodic donations from individuals and small groups, and small tuition payments paid by children’s parents.(62) Whereas anarchist schools in places like Argentina had large labor organizations like FORA to help back their schools, no such sweeping labor organizations existed in early republican Cuba.(63) Yet another factor played into the financial instability of rationalist schools: a plethora of demands for contributions. From 1910 to 1912, anarchists in Cuba were besieged by requests to fund a number of local and international concerns. Not only did sympathizers send money for schools, but also they made donations to fund three anarchist newspapers publishing more or less simultaneously at this time in Cuba: Rebelión!, La Voz del Dependiente (and its successor El Dependiente), and ¡Tierra!. Supporters also sent contributions to help families of deported radicals as well as the wives and children of those revolutionaries like Moncaleano who voluntarily went abroad while leaving families behind. Finally, this period marked the beginning of the Mexican Revolution. Anarchists throughout the island regularly contributed funds to be sent to Mexico to finance various revolutionary projects.

 

Consequently, there were potentially substantial sources of revenue from supporters. Had there been no Mexican Revolution or wave of deportations, or even more than one weekly newspaper, then perhaps those responsible for creating and running the schools would have been more successful in raising funds. Still, while the anarchists’ internal divisions and constant financial dilemmas weakened the drive to establish schools, the conflicts and problems also illustrated how important education was to the anarchists. To these men and women, issues of finance as well as the personal character of teachers and movement operatives mattered a great deal. It might be argued that the anarchists were more interested in name-calling and petty squabbles; however, it makes more sense to remember that the squabbles derived from a heightened passion to establish an appropriately correct rationalist school system. While the anarchists’ divisions helped to undercut the educational movement, the passion that drove these people toward conflict with each other was the same passion that motivated their repeated efforts to create the escuelas racionalistas in the first place.

 

The resurgence of anarchism and rationalist schools in the 1920s

 

Governmental repression during the first years of World War I stymied anarchist agitation. With this decline came a corresponding dearth of educational activity. However, by 1917 the anarchist movement began to recover. Anarchists came to dominate a resurrected labor movement and used their positions in that movement to renew rationalist education.(64) Central to this expansion was a growing alliance between anarchists and other leftists in the 1920s. This alliance first became obvious in 1922 with the widely distributed pamphlet Tácticas en uso y tácticas a seguir. Written by the anarchist printer Antonio Penichet, the 45-page pamphlet highlighted and explained different strategies that Cuban revolutionaries might employ. The final strategy discussed by Penichet, and arguably the most important considering its placement, concerned the development of rationalist schools. Penichet argued that, more than ever before, workers had to create schools that served workers’ interests and not the interests of the Church or the state. “While we do not have our own schools, we will continue to see our future obstructed. We must save our children from becoming social debris. We must save the future with our cause.”(65) Without the schools, Penichet believed, the future was lost.

 

While the pamphlet up-dated traditional anarchist discourse concerning education and Ferrer’s educational philosophy, it is significant that Penichet chose the old, respected socialist Carlos Baliño to write a prologue for the pamphlet. From before independence, Baliño had flirted with the whole spectrum of socialism. First he was an anarchist, then a reformist socialist and by the 1920s a committed Marxist. Baliño, who with University of Havana student Julio Antonio Mella would found the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) three years later in 1925, wrote how he greatly respected Penichet and considered him a comrade and friend.(66) The formal linking of Baliño and Penichet laid the foundation for close ties between anarchists and communists in the development of Cuban rationalist education in the 1920s.(67)

 

In August 1922, anarchist labor leader José Peña Vilaboa noted that the recently formed Workers’ Federation of Havana (FOH), the largest labor organization on the island and one in which anarchists held a commanding presence, led the way in uniting Cuban working-class organizations. For Peña Vilaboa, education remained central to creating a strong social movement: “The Federation’s most basic objective and which will soon be obtained is Rationalist Education—fundamental to our emancipatory endeav-ors.”(68) A year in the making, the FOH inaugurated its rationalist school and library in the Havana Workers Center on October 4, 1922. José Miguel Pérez, the future first general secretary of the PCC, served as the school’s teacher with Carlos Baliño filling in as a substitute teacher.(69) The school opened with eleven students, two of whom were the children of FOH head and anarchist leader Alfredo López. Two other girls in the initial class were daughters of FOH Financial Secretary and anarchist Alejandro Barreiro.(70)

 

Supporters hoped that the school would be the first in a series scheduled to open throughout Havana. In particular, these rationalist advocates thought that the timing was right. Public education had made few inroads into Cuba’s unschooled population since independence. Upon first glance Table 1 seems to illustrate a general improvement in Cuba’s public schools. Yet, while the figures reflect a gross doubling of the number of teachers and enrolled students from 1901-1922, the percentage of children aged 5-17 actually attending school remained relatively stagnant. Furthermore, in 1920 President Menocal vetoed pay raises for public school teachers, only discouraging more people from becoming teachers.(71) Such moves, according to anarchists, forced teachers to take on second jobs just to survive, thus making it difficult for teachers to properly dedicate themselves to teaching children.(72) To top this, public school classroom sizes remained unimaginably large. From 1920 to 1924, Cuba’s public classrooms averaged 108 students each, with a student-teacher ratio of 60 to 1. This ratio had barely improved from the 61 to 1 figure from 1901-1902.(73) Consequently, educational conditions in public schools were as poor as at independence.

                       

         Number of   Number of    Percentage of Students

         Teachers      Students        Enrolled Attending School

1901     3000           177,000           na

1907     3649           122,214           31.6%

1919     5743           335,000           31.2%

1922     6075           344,331           35.0%

[Chart constructed from the following sources: Matthew Hanna. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Public Schools, June 1901, 184-185; Cuba: Population, History and Resources, 122-123; León Primelles. Crónica Cubana, 1919-1922. Havana (1957), 104-105 and 567.]

 

The lingering inadequacy of public education throughout the 1910s had bolstered the popularity of private (mostly religious) education. Private schools remained a source of bitter contention in Cuba as nationalists, like the school inspector Ismael Clark in 1915, argued that private schools maintained poor educational standards, perpetuated class and racial differences, and undermined nationalist sentiments critical to developing a citizenry rooted in civic virtues. Because the island’s elite were most likely to send their children to such schools, nationalists argued that the elite, as Laurie Johnston puts it, “developed a low level of patriotism” that fostered Cuba’s dependence on foreign business and accepted the penetration of foreign cultural influences.(74) Proposed legislation in 1915 would have forced private schools to come under state inspection, use only state-approved texts, be directed by Cuban-born individuals, teach civics and Cuban history, and fly the Cuban flag. The measure failed largely because most of Cuba’s politicians had received private education themselves, and they continued to send their own children to private schools.(75) Ironically for anarchists, the elite preference for private education, which led to the rejection of tough new regulations for private schools, would ultimately protect future private rationalist school experiments.

 

Nationalist objection to private education partially revolved around antireligious, in particular, anti-Catholic sentiments. Seen as a holdover of colonial rule, many viewed Catholic education as fostering a sense of anti nationalism.(76) Anarchists and supporters of rationalist education, while condemning the public schools in the 1920s, built on this larger anti-clericalism in the national education debates. Throughout 1922-1924, advocates for rationalist schools described both public and private education as anti rational because they taught children to worship “gods,” one represented by the flag and the other by the cross. In its coverage of the inaugural founding of the FOH school, Nueva Luz described the school as a reaction to the growth in private religious education. The rationalist school “is necessary to prepare the worker and to save the worker’s child from the clutches of religion,” asserted the writer.(77) An anonymous columnist in the same issue urged readers to send money and lend support for a rationalist school to save workers’ children because all Cuban children, according to the writer, were being beseeched by religious groups to send money to help fund new priests and missionaries.(78) Referring to the growth of Protestant schools, another writer urged the expansion of rationalist schools to counter those of “Catholics, Protestants, Baptists, etc.”(79) In fact, left-wing anti-religious sentiment became especially prominent in the anarchist press at the same time that Nueva Luz’s editors, linked to the FOH, regularly promoted rationalist education. Nearly every issue included cartoons lampooning the Catholic clergy for its purported corruption and sexual peccadilloes.(80)

 

Consequently, anarchists found themselves in a unique position in the Cuban educational debates of the 1910s and 1920s. They agreed with nationalists on the need to counter religious education, seeing such schools as fostering class divisions. While the nationalists also criticized religious schools for their anti nationalism, anarchists criticized them for what they saw as anti-human, mystical dogma. Yet, rationalist school supporters continued to condemn the government’s public education system. To anarchists, public schools failed in pedagogy, erred by emphasizing unwavering patriotism, and condemned primarily working-class children to overcrowded and under-funded classrooms. In fact, true to the anti-patriotic sentiments imbedded in rationalist education, rationalist schools during the 1920s would neither display nor have their students pledge allegiance to the Cuban flag. Continuing their fierce hatred of patriotism, supporters regularly reminded readers why one should not honor the Cuban flag. For instance, in September 1923, one writer in Nueva Luz lamented that public school children were being forced to worship a piece of cloth “that only serves to divide humanity,” especially Cubans, and that such worship was inhuman and immoral.(81) Such a symbol and its reverence would have no place among the anarchists.

 

Rationalist schools quickly spread after 1922. Schools opened in Cárdenas in western Cuba, Caibarién in central Cuba, and Banes in eastern Cuba.(82) Over one hundred people attended the Banes school opening on July 1, 1923, after nearly six months of planning by the various labor groups. Ultimately organized by the Banes Workers Union and its “Education and Publicity Committee,” the school began with 74 children and 80 adults in day and night classes respectively —an impressive figure considering that anarchists traditionally found their strength in the central and western provinces. Because their classroom held only 25 desks with three chairs each, the school was literally full from the start, and the Committee made appeals throughout the community and surrounding sugar centrales for financial support to expand. Such help came in the form of donations collected in small amounts. For instance, workers on the Central “Cieneguita” sent five pesos to the school at one time that fall.(83) In September 1923, in the port city of Cárdenas, the Unión de Obreros Industriales, which was one of the few links to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Cuba, organized a rationalist school. The school grew over the next year, ultimately moving into its own building and being supported by a workers’ theatre group.(84) The anarchist-led Sindicato Fabril opened a second Havana school in the Puentes Grandes neighborhood.(85) Still the longest-running and most successful was the FOH school in Havana. While only eleven students began in October 1922, by February 1923 there were 55 attending the day school and 72 adults attending the night schools. A month later day school attendance climbed to 76 children.(86)

 

The FOH school looked like many public schools in several ways. Desks in rows, a chalkboard, the teacher’s podium at the front of the classroom and bookshelves surrounding the room gave the rationalist school a physical likeness to its public school counterparts. Even the curriculum had certain similarities. Children attended classes for two hours in the morning and two hours after lunch. They studied arithmetic, geography, grammar, history, natural history, spelling, and basic science. Yet, the rationalist school complemented these topics in ways that distinguished it from the public school system. Teachers set aside time for students to explore their artistic inclinations through drawing. In addition, two class periods per week taught physiology and hygiene since rationalists believed that formal education was a means to teach healthy lifestyles to children, who would hopefully take those lessons home to their parents. Teachers devoted Saturday mornings to educational lectures or trips to either workshops or the countryside. Educators believed that trips to workshops exposed children to the work environment that they would some day enter. Perhaps the visit would awaken an innate interest in a certain trade or heighten awareness of abysmal working conditions. Teachers designed journeys to the countryside to allow students time to frolic freely in Nature. While playing in and exploring the natural world, teachers hoped students would, on their own, come to understand and appreciate what anarchists considered the cooperative natural order that existed outside of the competitive and corrupting influences of the bour-geois-constructed, vice-filled industrial city.(87) In short, education was key to creating future revolutionary generations, a sentiment that Antonio Penichet expressed a few years earlier in his novel La vida de un pernicioso. The novel concludes with the main character lying on his death bed, urging his fellow workers and activists to start a school for children, which they do, calling it “El Porvenir” (The Future).(88)

 

Yet, before schools could create these future revolutionary generations, qualified teachers had to be found. This was not just an anarchist dilemma. Finding appropriately trained teachers, willing to work for low pay, was a common problem throughout Cuba and had been since independence. After 1909, the government had created teachers examinations, but not until 1916 were there teachers schools and special correspondence courses for teachers. Still, most highly qualified people went into other, better paying fields.(89) Of course, rationalist education had its own unique educational foundations, and not just any type of teacher would suffice. Taking their cue from problems during the first wave of anarchist schools, supporters urged school councils to be particularly cautious about whom they hired to teach.(90) Soledad Gustavo noted that after teaching several years in a co-educational academy, she had deduced that the greatest influence of the teacher was as a role model to students. To this end Gustavo proposed founding a school to train teachers in rationalist education.(91)

 

Vicente Canoura, the first manager of Nueva Luz and author of several pieces on education, echoed the caution regarding teachers. He questioned whether there were enough qualified teachers to fill the number of rationalist schools springing up around the island. After all, he warned, not just anyone could hop up to the podium or stroll inside a classroom and instruct in rationalism. One had to be trained to know how to recognize individual learning patterns and create appropriate individualized learning programs. While supporters did not immediately solve these problems in Cuban schools, all concerned were pleased with the selections of Alberta Mejías Sánchez and Ramón César in the Banes school as well as the FOH’s selection of José Miguel Pérez as that school’s teacher. Pérez had taught in private schools in Cuba after he emigrated from the Canary Islands in 1920. However, his activism in social struggles in Spain and his association with radical working-class elements in Havana eased the minds of those who questioned a private school educator in the rationalist schools.(92) Still, other anarchists who apparently lacked formal training nevertheless served in teaching roles at the FOH school, including the longtime Afro-Cuban anarchist Rafael Serra.(93)

 

The larger question of pedagogy arose in other less formal but still important educational forums as well. Creating and running schools not only was expensive and time consuming but also reached limited audiences. To expand and promote their messages while at the same time complementing the schools, anarchists used their movement culture, especially social gatherings (veladas), both as fund-raisers and as venues to “teach” people outside of the schoolhouse walls. Women and children recited most of the poetry and sang most of the songs at the veladas, while other women and children sat in the front rows. It was common for young children, frequently sons and daughters of anarchists, to recite revolutionary poems they had learned by heart. Some radicals believed it was crucial that children serve in the veladas. The children’s presence and participation illustrated that future generations were being prepared for the coming struggles. Also, by participating these children gained the sense of a larger social purpose in their lives. However, Zoilo Menéndez, a frequent writer on educational issues for Nueva Luz, criticized this practice on two pedagogical grounds. First, the processes of rote memorization and recitation were antithetical to the rationalist belief of experience over memorization. Second, Menéndez suggested that memorization for recitation was akin to what religions and political parties did. They taught doctrine to children before the children had developed sufficient mental and emotional faculties to understand the issues. In other words, fanaticism was being taught before one’s reason could be devel-oped.(94) Few took Menéndez’s criticisms to heart as children remained prominent in the veladas.

 

Besides pedagogical concerns and the need to find qualified teachers, rationalist education supporters had to fund the schools, which were to be free to students. Supporters resorted to old ways of financing the bulk of many schools’ expenses: worker donations. Yet, unlike funding concerns from the earlier era of 1908-1912 when rationalist schools primarily were financed on the backs of small, scattered anarchist groups, by the 1920s rationalist education had become a more “mainstream” idea in Cuban labor radicalism and thus the schools drew on a wider resource base for donations. For instance, individuals frequently sent between 50 centavos and five pesos to Nueva Luz, which distributed the money to the schools. Some unions, like the Havana Electric Workers Union, decided to take the money that they would normally spend semi-annually on pamphlets and send it to the schools instead.(95) Other groups of workers in places like the Cieneguita sugar mill in Abreus, or Havana, or Ciego de Avila appointed delegates to collect larger amounts of funds from throughout an individual workplace and then send the funds to schools.(96) And, like the earlier era, veladas were held as fundraisers.(97) It was the FOH school in Havana, though, that benefited most from the increased efforts of pan-sectarian organizing. The FOH had the benefit of drawing funds from the various labor unions under its umbrella.(98) For instance, unions and individuals federated with the FOH paid the school’s utility bills and the salaries of three teachers at the school (Pérez, José Peña Vilaboa, and Eloisa Barreiro —the latter the wife of the prominent labor leader Alejandro Barreiro and whose children were part of the FOH school’s first class).(99) Still, like in the earlier era, anarchists and other radicals on the island found a large list of worthy causes toward which to send their money, especially political prisoners in the United States (Sacco and Vanzetti, Enrique Flores Magón) and Cuba, as well as sending money to Havana to keep Nueva Luz in print. Thus, securing enough funding for schools remained a persistent worry.

 

Whatever optimism existed within anarchist circles came crashing down with the presidential election of Gerardo Machado in 1924. Promising to clamp down on an insurgent labor movement, Machado unleashed a wave of repression on anarchists and communists just as a new nationwide labor movement sought to expand rationalist education. In February 1925, labor leaders, including the most prominent anarchists of the day, held a national workers’ congress in Cienfuegos. Like earlier workers’ conferences, education was a key plank in the platform. Antonio Penichet headed the congress’ Education Commission, which called on workers to create a Worker Education Commission in every Cuban town, even if no organized unions yet existed. Each commission was charged with purchasing workers’ newspapers for the community, creating rationalist schools, collecting small monthly dues to print propaganda and educational pamphlets, organizing popular universities, identifying people who could give public talks, and encouraging the use of phonographs, cinema and other communications technology to educate people.(100)

 

However, before these efforts could bear much fruit, the Machado government began its efforts to destroy the strengthening workers movement. In August 1925, Machado closed the Sindicato de la Industrial Fabril and arrested its anarchist leader Margarito Iglesias. The closure cut off a major financial contributor to the FOH and thus the schools.(101) In September, the anarchist railroad union leader Enrique Varona was jailed and then murdered. In October 1925, anarchist labor leader and head of the FOH Alfredo López was arrested and not released from jail until January 1926. In the meantime, anarchists fled the island to Florida and Mexico. In July 1926, López was kidnapped; his remains not discovered until seven years later.(102) This wave of repression, aimed particularly against anarchists and their allies, resulted in the abandonment of the schools. In fact, this abandonment was precipitated by one of the government’s first repressive measures. In August 1925, Pérez, the FOH school teacher, was deported as a “pernicious foreigner.” In response, students from the FOH school issued a manifesto. They noted how they had become accustomed to assaults on workers, but taking aim at teachers was something new. This was reminiscent of Spanish repression during the war for independence. “Just as our parents tell us of the horrors committed by [General] Weyler, with his kidnappings, concentration camp policies, crimes and oppressions, we will tell our own children of the crimes committed against us.”(103) Once again, from the anarchist worldview, independence had brought little progress. Pérez’s deportation symbolized the government’s larger crackdown against radical labor. The repression first unleashed in 1925 brought about the collapse of the rationalist education movement just as it was reaching the height of its success.

 

Conclusion

 

While generally small and short-lived, the rationalist schools illustrate several important processes at work on the island in the decades following independence from Spain. First, an examination of the schools expands our knowledge of leftist politics in Republican Cuba before the founding of the Cuban Communist Party in 1925. Educational initiatives reveal how anarchists challenged the state and the Church not only in the workplace and the streets but also in the meeting halls and the classrooms. Second, the anarchist conflict with the Cuban educational system reveals how one inadequately studied segment on the margins of the population pursued a vision for Cuba that fell squarely outside the bounds of official notions. While government officials struggled to educate the population with high doses of moral and civics training, anarchist education emphasized freedom of thought, the sciences, and rejection of patriotic overtures like flag saluting, pledging allegiance, and singing the National Anthem. Third, just as anarchists condemned public education, they likewise spoke out vehemently against religious education, taking part in a long-running debate in the larger society about the role of private, especially religious, schools and what they meant to a democratic Cuba. Finally, for all of their words and deeds to create an alternative educational system that would offer a new vision of Cuba’s future, anarchist education supporters ran into the same problems as the public schools. They had both too few resources and a shortage of qualified teachers. Yet, the schools, first developed by anarchists and then adopted by Cuban leftists in general, must be regarded as nearly forgotten monuments to Cuba’s leftist heritage that emphasized education for revolutionary change decades before the rise of Communist mass educational reforms after 1959.

 

In the decades following the 1959 socialist revolution in Cuba, supporters trumpeted education as one of the government’s great success stories. This top-down implementation of educational reforms thus became a key component of Cuban socialism. Yet, the role of leftist education in pre-1959 Cuba is less well known. Anarchists played a central role in tying together educational methods and early twentieth-century socialist values. They brought these methods to Cuban socialism from the working-class fringes of Cuban society, not the privileged position of state control. As such these educational experiments from the margins provide a unique perspective into the larger dimensions of Cuban education and culture in the first thirty years following independence from Spain. Beyond this, rationalist schools, first introduced by and always central to the program of anarchists, reveal much about the history of anarchism on the island and how dedicated anarchists were to promoting a cause that would benefit children and workers in the present while preparing them for a future social revolution. Finally, anarchist education provides important new insight into the revolutionary culture of Cuba’s leftist tradition before 1959 and a critical early phase of that tradition in which socialists of all varieties worked together to promote an alternative form of education to challenge the state and the Church.

 

 

1. Nueva Luz, January 22, 1925, p. 7.

2. Edward Fitchen. “Primary Education in Colonial Cuba: Spanish Tool for Retaining «La Isla Siempre Leal?»”, Caribbean Studies 14,1 (April 1974), pp. 115-118.

3. See a selection of Steele’s account in Louis A. Pérez, Jr., ed. Slaves, Sugar, & Colonial Society: Travel Accounts of Cuba, 1801-1899 (Wilmington DE: Scholarly Resources, 1992), p. 202.

4. Enrique José Varona, “Report of the Secretary of Public Instruction for the six months ending June 30, 1901,” United States War Department, Civil Report of Brigadier General Leonard Wood, Military Governor of Cuba (Washington, D.C.: U.S. War Department, 1901), vol. 7, pp. 7-8.

5. Matthew E. Hanna, “Annual Report of the commissioner of Public Schools, June 1901,” ibid., vol. 7, 128. Louis Pérez argues, probably correctly, that such noble-sounding republican sentiments had their insidious undertones, however. While Cubans like Varona may have been involved in reorganizing the educational system, U.S. policy makers in Washington believed an educational system was being devised not merely to teach Cubans how to be good republicans. Instead, the system was being designed to acculturate Cubans to U.S. political and cultural values. In this regard the educational system was part of a larger restructuring of the political and economic orientation of the country that would lead, if not to outright annexation of the island by the United States, then to “‘annexation by acclamation’.” See Louis A. Pérez, Jr., “The Imperial Design: Politics and Pedagogy in Occupied Cuba, 1899-1902,” Cuban Studies 12,2 (July 1982), p. 6.

6. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., “The Imperial Design,” p. 9. A teacher shortage at independence prompted U.S. officials to recruit teachers from throughout the island. The recruiters focused especially on youth from elite families who were most sympathetic to the U.S. occupation. From 1900-1901, 1500 Cuban teachers went to summer school at Harvard University (where their “decidedly superior class” status was recognized by the U.S. press) to study English, U.S. and Spanish-American History, physical geography and special courses of which manual training was popular. Education officials turned to U.S. publishers to supply readers, along with grammar, math, science, and history texts, that were then translated into Spanish. See Sylvester Baxter, “The Cuban Teachers at Harvard University,” The Outlook, 65:14 (August 4, 1900), p. 780; and Hanna, “Annual Report of the Commissioner of Public Schools, June 1901,” pp. 34-35.

7. Hanna, “Annual Report of the Commissioner of Public Schools,” pp. 184-185.

8. Perla A. Cartaya and José A. Joanes Pando, Raíces de la escuela primaria pública cubana, 19021925 (Havana: Editorial Pueblo y Educación, 1996), pp. 13, 16, 27-29.

9. Cartaya and Joanes Pando, Raices, pp. 15-18.

10. Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 143-146.

11. Charles E. Magoon, Provisional Governor, “Report of Department of Public Instruction,” Report of Provisional Administration from October 13th, 1906 to December 1st, 1907 (Havana: Republic of Cuba, 1908), p. 342

12. Jason Yaremko, U.S. Protestant Missions in Cuba: From Independence to Castro (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), pp. 64-75.

13. K. Lynn Stoner, From the House to the Street: The Cuban Woman’s Movement for Legal Reform, 1898-1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 36, 133-135.

14. Rebelión!, December 14, 1908, p. 2. Boring routines may have been as much the fault of the economics of teaching as it was pedagogy. Teachers were so poorly paid that most needed second jobs to survive, leaving little time for creative, innovative instruction. See Nueva Luz, September 14, 1922, p. 1.

15. ¡Tierra!, June 30, 1906, p. 1.

16. Cartaya and Joanes Pando, Raíces, pp. 4-5.

17. Cartaya and Joanes Pando, Raices, pp. 21, 30; and Laurie Johnston, “Education in Cuba Libre, 1898-1959,” History Today 45,8 (August 1995), p. 28.

18. ¡Tierra!, April 3, 1909, p. 1. Italics in the original.

19. ¡Tierra!, September 24, 1910, p. 1.

20. For a fuller discussion of the conflict between the anarchists’ internationalist vision for Cuba and the nationalist backlash they regularly faced, see Kirwin Shaffer, “‘Cuba para todos’: Anarchist Internationalism and the Cultural Politics of Cuban Independence, 1898-1925,” Cuban Studies, 31 (2000), pp. 45-75.

21. Stoner, From the House to the Streets, p. 35.

22. See Charles E. Magoon, Provisional Governor, “Report of Department of Public Instruction,” Report of Provisional Administration from October 13th, 1906 to December 1st, 1907 (Havana: Republic of Cuba, 1908), p. 328.

23. Rebelión!, July 3, 1909, p. 2.

24. El Audaz, April 15, 1913, p. 12. Responding to a Diario de la Marina column by Nicolás Rivero who called for a resurgence of Christian and spiritual education to accompany all learning, El Audaz columnist “Ana Clorhidrico” recalled a March 30, 1905 open letter to the President of Cuba. In the letter, the writer warned of Rivero as the man with “toda la refinada malicia de un jesuíta de sotana corta” who would, if he had his way, enslave the Cuban conscience “a favor del fraile y del cura españoles para hacer de ese modo irrisorio el triunfo de la Revolución,” and that Rivero was not even a good Cuban because he preferred to educate, not citizens, but servants “para mayor abominación, siervos de un extranjero.” See El Audaz, May 15, 1913, pp. 1-2.

25. Nueva Luz, June 7, 1923, p. 6.

26. William Godwin, “Enquiry Concerning Political Justice,” Patterns of Anarchy, eds. Leonard I. Krimerman and Lewis Perry (Garden City, NY, 1966), pp. 434-435. For an excellent overview of Godwin and other intellectual precursors of Ferrer, see Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 1-33.

27. Avrich, The Modern School Movement, p. 6.

28. Avrich, The Modern School Movement, pp. 4-6. See also L. Portet’s prologue to Francisco Ferrer Guardia, La Escuela Moderna (Barcelona: Tusquets Editor, 1976), pp. 24-28.

29. Ferrer Guardia, La Escuela Moderna, pp. 189-199. See also Angel Cappelletti, Francisco Ferrer y la pedagogía libertaria (Mexico City: Editores Mexicanos Unidos, 1980), pp. 35-41.

30. Ferrer Guardia, La Escuela Moderna, p. 112.

31. Ferrer Guardia, La Escuela Moderna, pp. 113-114.

32. Ferrer Guardia, La Escuela Moderna, pp. 113-114, and Angel Cappelletti, Francisco Ferrer y la pedagogía libertaria, pp. 67-68.

33. Ferrer Guardia, La Escuela Moderna, pp. 186-187.

34. Avrich, The Modern School Movement, pp. 23-24; Angel Cappelletti, Francisco Ferrer, pp. 86-90. Authorities had accused Ferrer’s friend Mateo Morral of the assassination attempt. On June 4, 1906 they used this friendship as a pretext to arrest Ferrer for inciting Morral. Eleven days later, with Ferrer in jail, the Escuela Moderna was closed. A year passed until Ferrer was acquitted and released on June 12, 1907, at which time he toured Europe before returning to Barcelona to reopen the publishing house, though authorities refused to allow the school to reopen.

35. Joan Casanovas, Bread, or Bullets! Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 1850-1898. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), pp. 72-73, 84-85 and 162-163.

36. See El Nuevo Ideal, June 30, 1899, p. 2; and September 15, 1900, p. 2 respectively. The Guanabacoa school and a 1905 effort between anarchists and café workers in Havana to form a CES apparently failed after only a few months.

37. Eduardo Martínez Balsalobre, Conferencias sobre el socialismo revolucionario, (Havana: La Moderna Poesia, 1904), pp. 37-40.

38. Martínez Balsalobre, Conferencias, p. 1.

39. ¡Tierra!, January 28, 1905, p. 2; and February 4, 1905, p. 3.

40. ¡Tierra!, February 7, 1906, p. 2.

41. Eduardo Gómez Luaces, Monografía histórica del movimiento obrero en Regla (1833-1958). This unpublished manuscript is housed in the Museo Municipal de Regla. Pages are not numbered.

42. ¡Tierra!, May 23, 1908, p. 3; May 30, 1908, p. 3; La Voz del Dependiente, June 16, 1908 (insert).

43. La Voz del Dependiente, October 8, 1908 (insert); ¡Tierra!, October 31, 1908, p. 3. In October 1908 “Educación del Porvenir” dissolved itself in order to form the Cuban section of the Liga. The Liga attempted to organize rationalist groups throughout the island, with each group sending a delegate to the section’s office in Havana. The Liga secretary would collect monthly dues of twenty centavos from each member of Liga-associated groups to be used for starting more schools.

44. Gómez Luaces, Monografía histórica del movimiento obrero en Regla.

45. ¡Tierra!, November 21, 1908, p. 1; March 13, 1909, p. 4; La Voz del Dependiente, May 13, 1909,

46. Rebelión!, April 8, 1909, p. 3.

47. La Voz del Dependiente, June 24, 1909, p. 3.

48. Rebelión!, July 16, 1909, pp. 2-3.

49. Rebelión!, October 5, 1909, p. 2.

50. La Voz del Dependiente, October 28, 1909, p. 3; and November 18, 1909, p. 3.

51. La Voz del Dependiente, November 18, 1909, p. 3; ¡Tierra!, January 15, 1910, p. 1.

52. ¡Tierra!, September 3, 1910, p. 3; October 29, 1910, p. 4.

53. ¡Tierra!, March 26, 1910, p. 4; La Voz del Dependiente, March 3, 1910, p. 2 and September 3, 1910, p. 3.

54. La Voz del Dependiente, January 20, 1911, p. 3; April 22, 1011, p. 4; June 6, 1911, p. 3.

55. ¡Tierra!, October 22, 1910, p. 2.

56. Bases y Reglamento. Centro de Estudios Sociales del Cerro. Havana: Imprenta de Castro, 1911.

57. ¡Tierra!, October 21, 1911, p. 2.

58. For brief references to these women, see ¡Tierra!, July 18, 1911, p. 3; October 14, 1911, p. 2; October 22, 1914, p. 2.

59. “Memo for the Chief of Staff from John W. Furlong, Captain, General Staff, Chief, Military Information Division, January 3, 1908,” Records of the Provisional Government, Record Group 199, National Archives, Washington, DC.

60. ¡Tierra!, June 8, 1912, p. 3; January 14, 1913, p. 2.

61. ¡Tierra!, June 22, 1912, p. 1.

62. To gather a picture of school finances, one need look no further than the back pages of most issues of ¡Tierra!, which regularly published weekly collections. For the 1911-1912 Cerro CES school, for example, see ¡Tierra!, November 18, 1911, p. 4; November 18, 1911, p. 4; December 2, 1911, p. 3; February 17, 1912, p. 4; March 7, 1912, p. 3; April 6, 1912, p. 4. The figures illustrate how after rent and teachers’ salaries, there was little left to buy supplies. The Cerro school did run surpluses in its first months, but by April 1912, slight deficits caught up with the school.

63. See Dora Barrancos, Anarquismo, educación y costumbres en la Argentina de principios de siglo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Contrapunto, 1990).

64. I address the recovery of anarchism within the labor movement after World War I in my article “‘Cuba para todos’:” pp. 45-75.

65. Antonio Penichet, Tácticas en uso y tácticas a seguir (Havana: El Ideal, 1922), p. 45.

66. Penichet, Tácticas en uso, 3.

67. As with relations between anarchists and communists throughout the world after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, not all anarchists were comfortable with this alliance. In particular, anarcho-syndi-calists who published the newspaper El Progreso, the anarchist and anti-Marxist Acción Libertaria, as well as anarcho-naturists like the leading anarchist literary figure on the island, Adrián del Valle, questioned this linkage and cooperated only loosely with non-anarchists.

68. Nueva Luz, August 17, 1922, p. 6. The association “Cultura” initiated efforts to resurrect rationalist education in Cuba by trying to construct a school in January 1921, though the efforts seem to have failed. See Educación Obrera, January 15, 1921, p. 2.

69. Nueva Luz, September 7, 1922, p. 8; Nueva Luz, November 2, 1922, p. 1.

70. Nueva Luz, October 12, 1922, p. 2.

71. León Primelles, Crónica Cubana, 1919-1922, 2 vols. (Havana: Editorial Lex, 1957), p. 269.

72. Nueva Luz, September 14, 1922, p. 1.

73. Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 144.

74. Laurie Johnston, “Cuban Nationalism and Responses to Private Education in Cuba, 1902-1958,” Ideologues and Ideologies in Latin America, ed. Will Fowler (Westport, CN: Greenwood Publishing, 1997), pp. 30-31.

75. Johnston, “Cuban Nationalism,” p. 33; Yaremko, U.S. Protestant Missions in Cuba, p. 72.

76. Johnston, “Cuban Nationalism,” pp. 30-31.

77. Nueva Luz, October 19, 1922, p. 1.

78. Nueva Luz, October 19, 1922, p. 2.

79. Nueva Luz, January 25, 1923, p. 1.

80. For a particularly illuminating front-page visual, see Nueva Luz, February 15, 1923, p. 1.

81. Nueva Luz, September 16, 1923, p. 2.

82. Ôlga Cabrera, Los que viven por sus manos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1985), p. 248; Nueva Luz, November 16, 1922, p. 6; September 16, 1923, p. 6.

83. Nueva Luz, January 4, 1923, p. 8; and July 19, 1923, pp. 1 and 3.

84. Nueva Luz, September 30, 1924.

85. Nueva Luz, March 15, 1923 p. 6.

86. Nueva Luz, February 8, 1923, p. 6; and March 15, 1923, p. 7.

87. Nueva Luz, November 2, 1922, p. 7.

88. Antonio Penichet was a leading anarchist figure in Cuba in the late 1910s and 1920s. A typographer by trade, Penichet became a leading anarchist fiction writer in the 1910s. He helped found the anarchist newspaper Nueva Luz in 1922. Penichet also headed the Education Committee of the National Confederation of Cuban Workers, building on his emphasis in education through his Nueva Luz columns. In 1938, Penichet contributed a chapter entitled “El proceso social” for a general history of Cuba, Curso de introducción a la historia de Cuba (Havana: Municipio de la Habana, 1938). The chapter was essentially a basic history of anarchism on the island. Later, Penichet served as director of the National Library. In that capacity, he helped initiate an island-wide educational reform movement in 1941 to protect the island’s liberal and democratic aspects from fascist and Vatican encroachments. See Por la escuela cubana en Cuba Libre. Trabajos, acuerdos y adhesiones de una campaña cívica y cultural (Havana: Cárdenas y compañia, 1941), pp. 11-19.

89. Cartaya and Joanes Pando, Raíces, p. 53.

90. Nueva Luz, January 25, 1923, p. 6.

91. Nueva Luz, February 22, 1923, p. 2.

92. Nueva Luz, May 3, 1923, p. 3; and Cabrera, Los que viven por sus manos, p. 247.

93. Nueva Luz, March 4, 1924.

94. Nueva Luz, December 28, 1922, p. 7.

95. Nueva Luz, December 21, 1922, p. 8.

96. Nueva Luz, February 1, 1923, p. 5; February 22, 1923, p. 8; and May 24, 1923, p. 1.

97. See Nueva Luz, December 21, 1922, p. 8; and February 25, 1924, p. 6 for examples.

98. These included unions representing trolley workers, cigarette makers, printers, construction workers, painters, confectioners, and others whose contributions were specifically dedicated to the school.

99. Nueva Luz, April 24, 1925, p. 7.

100. Nueva Luz, March 25, 1925, pp. 4-6.

101. During the period from October 1, 1923 to the end of December 1924, the Sindicato gave $1,133.95 to the FOH out of a total $6,280.93 of total contributions from all sources, i.e., nearly 20%. See Nueva Luz, April 24, 1925, p. 7.

102. Frank Fernández, El anarquismo en Cuba (Madrid: Fundación de Estudios Libertarios Anselmo Lorenzo, 2000), pp. 64-65.

103. From “Manifiesto” published in Nueva Luz, September 5, 1925. See also “Nueva Protesta de la Federación Obrera de la Habana” from September 2, 1925, in Mirta Rosell, ed., Luchas obreras contra Machado (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1973), pp. 83-84.

The Radical Muse: Women and Anarchism in Early-Twentieth-Century Cuba

 

Kirwin R. Shaffer

[http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/cuban_studies/v034/34.1shaffer01.pdf]

 

ABSTRACT

 

Following independence from Spain in 1898, Cuba’s anarchists focused attention on what they regarded as elite hypocrisy regarding the larger social problems besetting Cuba. In the hope of drawing Cuba’s popular classes into the global anarchist movement, their critique addressed the manner in which industrial, bourgeois society victimized women, especially those of the working class. Cuban radicals used the image of women and women’s issues as foils to analyze and criticize health, workplace, and family issues. They also used women as symbols of obstruction to anarchist-defined notions of progress. Finally, they showed how women could aspire to be female heroines, by promoting an ideal type of ‘‘noble woman’’ and the concept of ‘‘revolutionary motherhood’’ to which women should strive. Anarchists directed their messages to women and men through the movement’s popular cultural forms. Newspapers, novels, short stories, plays, and social gatherings in which plays were performed or revolutionary songs were sung all played a part in anarchist appeals to female followers and functioned as a form of education.

 

RESUMEN

 

Después de la independencia de España en 1898, los anarquistas en Cuba pusieron su atención en lo que consideraban la hipocresía de la elite sobre el problema social mayor que acosaba a Cuba. Sus críticas sostenían que las mujeres, especialmente las de la clase trabajadora, eran víctimas de la sociedad industrial burguesa. Al enfatizar estos problemas, los anarquistas tenían la esperanza de atraer a las clases populares cubanas al movimiento anarquista global. Los radicales cubanos emplearon la imagen y los problemas de la mujer como una forma de analizar y criticar temas laborales, familiares y de salud pública. Los anarquistas también usaron a las mujeres como símbolos que obstruían las nociones de progreso, según las definiciones de los anarquistas. Finalmente, pintaron cómo la mujer podía aspirar a ser una heroína femenina al promover el tipo ideal de ‘‘mujer noble’’ y ‘‘madre revolucionaria’’ al que debían aspirar las mujeres. Los anarquistas dirigieron su mensaje a mujeres y hombres a través del movimiento cultural popular. Periódicos, novelas, cuentos cortos, obras de teatros y reuniones sociales en las que se desarrollaban estas obras teatrales o se entonaban canciones revolucionarias, contribuyeron a atraer a las mujeres al anarquismo y funcionaron como una forma de educación.

 

 

How could it happen? Independence from Spain was supposed to usher in a new Cuba filled with justice, freedom, equality—in short, a social revolution was to have taken place. Yet to anarchists, the most radical leftists on the political spectrum, reality had fallen far short of this revolutionary ideal. In the decades following political independence from Spain in 1898, anarchists claimed that the social goals for which they and others had fought had been abandoned by the elite. This political and social elite promoted patriotism while allowing the island to be carved up by urban and agribusiness industrialists. Anarchists charged that the elite and their industrial partners were turning Cuba into a cesspool of vice and exploitation that differed little from the days of colonial rule.

 

The island’s anarchists repeatedly focused attention on what they regarded as elite hypocrisy and the larger social problems besetting Cuba in the first three decades of independence. Within this critique they regularly addressed women’s issues and how industrial, bourgeois society affected women, especially of the working class. Women’s victimization moved anarchists to address interlocking gender, race, and class issues as they reflected Cuban reality. By highlighting these issues, in which women played a central role, anarchists hoped to draw Cuba’s popular classes into the global anarchist movement. These Cuban radicals employed the image of women in several ways. First, they used women and women’s issues as foils to analyze and criticize health, workplace, and family issues. In essence, if women could be treated inhumanely in an increasingly capitalist Cuba, then men and children would also suffer, both at work and at home. Second, anarchists used women as symbols of obstruction to anarchist-defined notions of progress. Many women were members of class and religious groups that opposed anarchism. Other women were portrayed as mothers lacking revolutionary and working-class consciousness. These women and mothers exploited children or aped the bourgeoisie. As such, they became symbols for the type of behavior women should avoid—and what men and women should try to correct. Finally, while anarchists portrayed women as victims and reactionaries, they also showed how women could aspire to be female heroines. Anarchists promoted an ideal type of ‘‘noble woman’’ and the concept of ‘‘revolutionary motherhood,’’ to which women should strive. Such women and mothers would help lead society to recover a world of mutual aid, cooperation, and harmony, which anarchists believed industrial capitalism, politics, and religion were destroying. Not only did these heroic images offer a vision of how women should act, but also the images reflected how anarchists idealized family relationships. Nevertheless, this view of women and motherhood, while challenging bourgeois society, failed to blame the patriarchy for women’s problems and in fact tended to incorporate patriarchal notions of women as mothers.

 

Cuban anarchists directed their messages to women and men through the movement’s popular culture, which functioned as a form of education. Thus, anarchist newspapers, novels, short stories, plays and the social gatherings in which plays were performed or revolutionary songs were sung all contributed to anarchist appeals to female followers. Besides trying to attract women to the movement, these cultural forms expressed the very images of women that anarchists used to criticize bourgeois society and to promote revolutionary motherhood. For anarchists, ‘‘woman’’ became a radical muse in the tradicional sense of the word. That is, ‘‘woman’’ inspired anarchists. They portrayed these different images of women throughout Cuba’s public and private spheres, at work, in schools, on the streets, and in the home. Anarchists used ‘‘woman’’ as a source of inspiration to illustrate the shortcomings and ‘‘unnatural’’ qualities of Cuban bourgeois society, while also showcasing an anarchist idealized future for the island.

 

Anarchism, Health, and Women

 

Despite waves of health and sanitation reforms created under the U.S. military occupations of 1898–1902 and 1906–1909, numerous health problems persisted, both in the general populace and within the workplace, with tuberculosis leading the way. Anarchists argued that the only solution for tuberculosis was prevention, but this required large investments from the government and/or factory and tenement owners. All were reluctant to make such investments. Thus, more Cuban adults died from tuberculosis year after year than from any other single disease (see Table 1).

 

Table 1

Ten Leading Causes of Deaths in Havana during 1901

 

Cause                                             Number of deaths     Death rate/1,000

Tuberculosis of lungs                       833                           145.62

Diarrhea/enteritis

(under 2 years)                                 742                            129.70

Organic disease of the heart             447                             78.14

Affections of the arteries

(atheroma, aneurism, etc.)               336                              58.74

Diarrhea/enteritis

(2 years and older)                           304                              53.14

Simple meningitis                            273                              47.72

Bronco-pneumonia                          193                              33.74

Cerebral congestion/hemorrhage     166                              29.02

Tetanus                                            148                              25.87

Intermittent fever and malarial

cachexia                                           135                              23.60

 

Table adapted from W. C. Gorgas, ‘‘Report of Deaths in the City of Havana during the Year 1901,’’ in Leonard Wood, Civil Report of Brigadier General Leonard Wood: Military Governor of Cuba (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1902), 14–17.

 

In 1886, 1,187 habaneros died from TB. By the close of the war in 1898, these figures had escalated, due to the hideous sanitary conditions experienced by the great masses of Cubans forced to live in what amounted to refugee camps during the war. In that year, 2,795 people in Havana died of the disease. Over the next two decades, poor living and working conditions facilitated a continued high occurrence of TB, so that even by 1919 TB was a leading cause of death (1,209 deaths in Havana alone).(1)

 

Anarchists regularly complained about this disease, which they saw as synonymous with the growth of bourgeois industrial society. Besides frequent discussion of the disease in the anarchist press, creators of Cuban popular culture merged TB and gender in a form of social criticism. In his two novels, Cuban anarchist and labor union leader Antonio Penichet wrote about tuberculosis deaths, especially the deaths of working-class women, to illustrate the painful reality experienced by the working class. In Penichet’s La vida de un pernicioso, the main character Joaquín is in jail for anarchist activities. While he is imprisoned, his compañera, Natalia, a former prostitute, is forced to live in unsanitary conditions and eat poorly. Ultimately, she becomes ill and dies from tuberculosis.(2) A similar situation befalls the main character, Rodolfo, in Penichet’s ¡Alma Rebelde!, Novela histórica. In this novel Rodolfo’s girlfriend likewise succumbs to the disease.(3) In both novels, the deaths of women associated with anarchists, and who were themselves anarchist supporters, illustrated several things. First, workingclass readers recognized the common sight of one of their own falling to TB.

 

By 1920, 61 percent of the total population ten years old and older was literate. Generally, whites had higher literacy rates, with foreign-born white men and women the highest (77.3 percent and 69.3 percent, respectively). Still, despite one’s color, sex, and place of origin, over half of the people in all categories in the 1919 census could read. As a result, large numbers of men and women of all colors and classes could receive these anarchist messages and note how the novels’ characters reflected the readers’ own reality.(4) Second, anarchists characterized women, especially anarchist women, as representations of a noble womanhood to which all women should aspire, but who often fell victim to the elite and conditions in capitalist industries. These women were on the road to being, if not already, in harmony with nature and had developed a workingclass consciousness. That these women could succumb to such a disease as TB illustrated the truly horrendous, antinatural, life-endangering features of contemporary bourgeois Cuban society. Third, in both cases, the deaths prometed Joaquín and Rodolfo to reinvigorate their struggles to fight for improved health conditions, but more importantly, to fight for an anarchist future that would bring society more in line with nature and justice.

 

Besides using female characters as tools to discuss larger health issues in Cuba, anarchists used the real-life situations of female factory workers to draw attention to what they regarded as antihuman, and especially antifemale, conditions in capitalist Cuba. This was best seen within the female workforce employed in the tobacco industry. Women tobacco factory workers had specific health and economic dilemmas to overcome in addition to the dust and lack of fresh air in the factories. The destemmers (despalilladoras) of tobacco leaf were mostly women, and they suffered some of the lowest wages in the industry.(5) Beyond this economic issue was an important health issue. From six in the morning to five in the afternoon, these women would stoop over a barrel of tobacco leaves with little rest, fresh air, or sunlight. Anarchists charged that due to the combination of poor diet, the necessity of eating in filthy workplace surroundings, and constantly working in a bent over position, women suffered from bad digestion as well as intestinal and uterine problems. Anarchists further alleged that the youngest female stemmers were particularly vulnerable. Quoting an unnamed health practitioner, the writer Adriano Lorenzo noted that the girls ‘‘who have not begun to menstruate, usually find their development retarded, her reproductive system corresponding to the overall development of her body. Her chest narrows, her back contorts, her breasts do not develop, her hips narrow—in a phrase: her whole body stops developing.’’(6) Another writer asked what would happen when these girls, whose bodies were not adequately developed, began to have babies—assuming they could become pregnant or carry a fetus to term?(7)

 

The anarchist concern with female laborers’ health had less to do with keeping women out of production, as later labor codes throughout Latin America would do, and more to do with concerns over safety for female workers who might be future mothers. These mothers-to-be would have to be healthy and strong to rear the next generation of enlightened children and future workers. When health and safety standards in the workplace threatened women, they threatened the next generation of the working class. This concern with health, children and working-class motherhood was certainly justified. Infant mortality was a very serious issue in Cuba and one with which anarchists regularly concerned themselves. In 1901 diarrhea and enteritis (inflammation of the intestinal tract) was a leading cause of death among Havana’s children. Children under two years old died at a rate of 129.70 per 1,000 population, and children two years old and older died at a rate of 53.14 per 1,000 population. Of 5,720 reported deaths in Havana that year, more than one-fourth (1,453) were children under one year old and more than one-third (1,940) of total deaths were children ten years old and younger.(8) Eighteen years later, the islandwide 1919 census would show a slight worsening of these figures for the youngest children (see table 2).

 

Table 2

Deaths by Age Group (population based on 1919 figures and deaths registered in 1916)

 

Age                        Population    Number of deaths    Deaths/1,000   

Less than 1 year         74,918            11,206                     149.6

1–4                           335,340              6,400                       19.1

5–19                      1,110,250              1,705                         1.5

20–39                       839,666              6,580                         7.8

40–59                       390,185              6,121                       15.7

60+                          138,645               8,931                      64.4

Total                     2,889,004             40,943                      14.2

 

Censo de la República de Cuba Año de 1919, 249.

 

Thus, by the late 1910s, more than one-fourth of reported deaths islandwide were of infants under one year old and nearly half of all deaths (47 percent) were of youth under twenty years old. These figures merely give an aggregate overview of something truly dismal occurring in Cuba in the decades after independence. Not only did anarchists blame infant mortality on women’s workplace conditions but also on dietary issues related to motherhood. In 1903 one anarchist commentator suggested that high infant mortality and disease were in large part caused by nutritional problems. According to the anonymous author of the column ‘‘Por la raza,’’ which appeared in the pages of the anarchist weekly newspaper ¡Tierra!, it was increasingly rare to see mothers nursing their young. Of course, wealthy and middle-class mothers could and did resort to employing wet nurses, but obviously this was not an option for poor families. Poorer families were resorting to bottle feeding. However, ‘‘especially in Havana, the milk that was sold generally was impure,’’ and the purest milk available was too expensive. While families living on the outskirts of town were able to get fresh milk from nearby cattle barns, most families, the author argued, were reduced to buying condensed canned milk imported from the United States. The writer concluded that such a practice, besides being expensive and making the poor that much more dependent on imports (and less so on what was available naturally!), was leading to high infant mortality and later childhood diseases, especially tuberculosis.(9)

 

Childbirth provided a venue for anarchists to address their concerns over the growing use of injections by the Cuban medical community. Anarchists considered injections dangerous to women during childbirth. True to the theories of what later practitioners would label ‘‘natural childbirth,’’ one writer criticized doctors for their continual search for pain-relieving substances to inject into birthing mothers. Obstetricians could not safely use ethyl-bromide or ethyl-chloride, and chloroform and ether were too dangerous to use except in the final stages of pushing out the baby. Instead, obstetricians increasingly relied on opiates for pain relief, even though the same doctors acknowledged that these drugs were “inconvenient” because they tended to paralyze the mother’s intestines. Instead of so quickly deciding to give injections to deaden the pain of contractions, the writer suggested that doctors should consider a series of hydrotherapy treatments, such as hot water and steam baths, to relax muscles and ease tension. To better prepare for childbirth, mothers should adopt a vegetarian diet, which would cause less stress on the digestive and intestinal organs ‘‘and effectively prepare the mother to better raise the child.’’(10) Elsewhere, writers challenged the supposed health-threatening women’s fashions of middle-class culture, which anarchists claimed many working-class women were trying to emulate. In 1918 the writer “Apolonio” warned girls and young women of the health dangers associated with fashion, particularly the wearing of corsets, high heels, and makeup. Corsets and heels not only led to disfigurement of the natural human body, but also impeded blood flow, the writer warned. As for makeup, it was worse. Not only did makeup disfigure the natural face, it also caused premature aging of the skin and blocked pores that were necessary ‘‘for the flow of oxygen through the body in order to fortify the blood and enrich our life.’’(11)

 

Anarchists’ concerns with women’s health issues expanded to a larger concern for all of Cuban society. If women’s health was jeopardized, then all of society was jeopardized. Anarchists saw several threats to women’s health, especially that of working-class women: the temptations of antinatural bourgeois fashion, the injection-happy state of the professional medical community, the increase in reliance on canned as opposed to breast milk, infant mortality, and poor workplace conditions. Anarchists were generally concerned with the health of working-class women. After all, these were their wives, lovers, daughters, and friends. Some of these women were anarchists themselves. In addition, by focusing on women’s health concerns and issues, anarchists used female images as a foil to criticize the larger culture. In so doing, they focused light on the poor conditions facing Cuba’s masses after independence and thus illustrated how the goals of independence had been subverted for both men and women alike.

 

Women, Social Events, Anarchist Theater, and Education

 

For anarchists, education went beyond schoolhouse walls, extending into public gatherings (veladas) and the home. While anarchists started their own schools in the decades following independence, these schools could only reach a small number of children during the day, as well as an equally small number of male and female workers at night. Anarchists used their popular culture as a form of education to reach a larger audience. By examining the content of anarchist novels, plays, and short stories, one discovers that women and women’s issues were constant themes in this literature and, by extension, that women were a primary audience for this education.

 

Whether they were on a propaganda tour or participating in weekly gatherings, anarchists regularly held veladas. These were social events where workers and their families could come, usually on Sunday evenings, to hear lectures on anarchism, health, education, and family-oriented topics. From a cultural standpoint, the veladas were important acts of revolutionary popular culture where men, women, and children also sang revolutionary hymns, performed libertarian plays, and recited anarchist poetry. All ages and both sexes attended, so that these anarchist cultural events became important educational tools for critiquing Cuban and global politics while suggesting an imaginable anarchist future.

 

Women were very prominent in the audience at the veladas, and newspaper descriptions usually reported that large numbers of them were seated in the front areas closest to the stage and podium. This was confirmed after 1910 when anarchists began to publish photographs of audiences in their newspapers. U.S. military intelligence also noted the presence of women and their children at these gatherings. For instance in January 1908, a Capt. John Furlong wrote to U.S. Military Governor Charles Magoon that the ‘‘meetings are being attended by women as well as men. The women bring their children and the meetings seem to be part of an educational system established by these anarchists.’’(12)

 

On occasion, noted Cuban female anarchists would appear as speakers at the gatherings. These included anarchist women like Teresa Faro, Emilia Rodríguez, and María Luisa Bustamante.(13) These women had prominent roles in anarchist propaganda illustrating women’s revolutionary abilities to women and men alike. They demonstrated their rejection of traditional gender roles and highlighted the capabilities of rationally inspired women. Besides large female attendance and occasional female participation in the talks, speakers often discussed the role of women and the family.

 

While the speeches were important elements of the veladas, the truly invigorating cultural work was found in the songs, poetry, and plays. A typical velada began with either an opening speech or a band piece followed by a speech. Speeches then were interspersed with poems with titles like ‘‘Himno al pueblo,’’ ‘‘La libertad,’’ ‘‘A la anarquía,’’ ‘‘Los parías,’’ ‘‘Una limosna,’’ ‘‘El sol perdido,’’ and ‘‘Las dos grandezas.’’ Children always recited the poetry. Most often, the children were the sons and daughters of anarchists, such as the son of Miguel Martínez Abello who recited poems at veladas from 1905 to 1907, or Rafael García’s daughter Celia who did the same in 1913.(14) In a discussion of his brief stay in 1911 with the family of Havana anarchist Jesús López, the noted labor organizer and later government official and celebrated novelist Carlos Loveira also observed how anarchists employed their children in cultural events. López had seven children, one of whom (Jesuito) was a public speaker; the others (all with good anarchist names: Germinal, Rebeldía, Aurora, Libertad, Igualdad, and Fraternidad) recited poetry and performed songs at meetings and veladas.(15)

 

Anarchist plays were important cultural ingredients at the veladas and were thus important sources of popular education aimed particularly at women. From 1904 until the 1920s, no other play was performed as frequently as Fin de fiesta, written by the Spanish-born but Cuban-resident anarchist playwright and novelist Palmiro de Lidia (Adrián del Valle). This brief, seven-scene play captured most of anarchism’s central themes: worker solidarity, exploitative capitalists, and backward religious or social customs, particularly regarding marriage and its effects on women. In the play, Elena, the daughter of wealthy factory owner Don Pedro, is in love with her poor, struggling, working-class lover Julián. However, Don Pedro wants to marry her off to an old friend. When Elena tells her priest about her predicament, the priest reminds her that she must follow the wishes of her father no matter what. By the end of the play, the audience discovers that Don Pedro intends to close the factory. But workers have gone on strike and set fire to the building, preventing him from liquidating his assets. In the final scene, with his factory in flames, Don Pedro confronts the strikers with pistol in hand. However, Elena charges in and places herself between her father and the workers just as the pistol is fired, killing her. For women audience members the play illustrated the crippling role of traditional marriage and patriarchal authority that anarchists imagined were the lot of women. Yet it also offered women a female martyr—someone who, inspired by love and justice, threw herself between a capitalist and workers to defend the workers, one of whom she loved, and who paid the ultimate price for her sacrifice.(16)

 

While audience members saw the heroine Elena die for a higher revolutionary cause, they also saw a women who lacked a revolutionary or workingclass consciousness. This is clear in Antonio Penichet’s play ¡Salvemos el hogar! in which Matías is the father in an anarchist-defined dysfunctional family. Matías, a worker who regularly attends meetings and talks at the Workers’ Center, increasingly becomes convinced of the justness of the workers’ revolutionary message. Meanwhile, his wife and children have completely different interests. The son Daniel is primarily interested in the sporting and gaming scene. Daughter María echoes the bourgeois and religious dogma of the middle classes, whose trappings she and her mother strive to emulate. The entire family views their father with contempt, believing that he is wasting his time at the Workers’ Center. In one scene, the mother Magdalena wants Matías to accompany her to the baptism of a friend’s child, but Matías declines because he must go to the Center, where an assembly on an upcoming strike is to be held. Matías’s friend Domingo arrives to escort Matías to the assembly and berates him for the condition of his family, which is ‘‘like a summary of current Women and Anarchism in Early-Twentieth-Century Cuba : 139 society, all its prejudices, all its errors and all its fanaticisms.’’ To top it off, Matías’s youngest son has even joined the Boy Scouts —a youth paramilitary organization to prepare soldiers!

 

In the play’s third and final act, the strike has been violently repressed, with fights breaking out between strikers and strikebreakers. Magdalena, María, and Daniel are smugly pleased with themselves for having recognized what they see as the foolishness of working-class actions because there will always be rich and poor. But Magdalena is bitter, too, yelling at Matías and Domingo that because of the strike and the lack of income coming into the home, ‘‘Now I will not be able to buy the ribbons and scalloped lace to adorn my dress for the dance!’’ Ultimately, for Matías, it is almost too much to stand, and he threatens to abandon the family, but Domingo convinces him to stay. ‘‘No, don’t drive yourself to despair, Matías. Calm down. What is happening to you is happening to the majority of workers.’’ Workers, Domingo argues, must educate the family to save it, by bringing home books, pamphlets, and other materials and by taking the family to the Workers’ Center to hear talks and see performances. Domingo closes by explaining to Matías, and, by extension, to all workers and especially their wives or compañeras, ‘‘In the harmonious home, there must exist an affinity for ideas so that through a clear explanation all family members come to understand the humanity of our mission.’’(17)

 

Women were the special targets of anarchist educational and popular theater initiatives for two important reasons. First, anarchists regularly commented on the religious inclinations of Cuban women. From this perspective, women were the ones who attended mass and filled the confessionals. Through this interaction, the Church was able to influence the religious, and thus the political, beliefs of Cuban mothers. Operating under this influence, mothers would indoctrinate the children in jesuitismo, with all its mysticism, emphasis on the soul and an afterlife, and antirational dogma. If this was allowed to continue, then children and the family would not be prepared to lay the groundwork for the coming social revolution.

 

Second, and completely opposite of this first scenario, was the concept of ‘‘woman’’ occupying an almost reverential place in anarchist discourse. Women were portrayed as liberated beings who had broken the chains of slavery. Women were likewise shown as leading the light of progress in a social climate full of deception, struggle, and vice. Most importantly, women were valued for their roles as mothers and nurturers of children. It was as a revolutionary mother that a woman could best lay the foundations for not only her children but also for social progress. However, before fully exploring the anarchist notion of the ‘‘noble woman’’ and the ‘‘revolutionary mother,’’ we should look a bit more at the anarchist-defined negative roles women were to avoid and the ways in which plays dramatize this.

 

Prostitutes and Bad Mothers

 

Prostitution was widespread in Cuba, particularly in the capital city. For instance, from 1912 to 1931, the number of prostitutes in Havana alone rose from 4,000 to 7,400. Historical accounts and travelogues tell of the sexual free-forall that a person with disposable income could enjoy. One such ‘‘treat’’ was enjoying the bodies of girls and young women.(18) Anarchists incorporated this reality into their fiction as a critique of the larger culture. The prostitution of girls and young women appears in a particularly disturbing scene in Penichet’s ¡Alma Rebelde! In this story, the Cuban-born Rodolfo makes his way to Havana near the end of Cuba’s War for Independence. Along his way, Rodolfo confronts the evils caused by the war and its lingering effects, which have been exacerbated by a hypocritical elite. He meets a judge whose daughter sleeps with a priest; a pharmacist’s daughter who sleeps with two different men, one of whom was paid by yet another man to sleep with his own wife; the two sons of ‘‘Don Daniel’’ and ‘‘Don Domingo,’’ who are caught in ‘‘una posición repugnante’’; and Petrona, the madam of a whorehouse where, in the last days of the war, business has slowed. Petrona hears about a military encampment nearby, and in order to raise much needed cash, she entices the soldiers to the bordello, where two girls begin to service them. After the tenth pair of soldiers, the girls are unable to continue ‘‘because the girls were spewing forth blood from all over, especially the mouth.’’ Both girls die, but there is little scandal because Petrona herself lives with the chief of police. Petrona simply finds new girls as replacements.(19)

 

In Adrián del Valle’s short story ‘‘En el hospital,’’ the heroine Marta’s mother and father die before she becomes a teenager, so she travels to Havana to live with her poor aunt who works as a laundress. While living at her aunt’s house, Marta’s cousin rapes her. When the aunt loses her job due to illness, she and her son arrange to prostitute the girl. After several years as a prostitute, Marta leaves the house and enters a bordello, where she contracts syphilis and eventually must go to the hospital. While del Valle’s description of events leaves very little sympathy for the aunt and her son, he argues that they are not entirely to blame, having acted out of economic necessity.(20) Consequently, the story is not only about the fall of a pure spirit (Marta) but also the larger social environment that drove family members to exploit a young female relative in order to survive.

 

As these two examples illustrate, the girl-turned-prostitute either dies or becomes incapacitated. At times, anarchist writers portrayed how turning girls into money-making enterprises often resulted in them committing suicide. In Penichet’s La vida de un pernicioso, Joaquín is a Spanish soldier who switches sides to fight with the Cubans in the War for Independence. After independence, he resumes his trade as a shoemaker and begins anarchist agitation. In a strike aimed at the Havana shoe workshop owned by Rosendo, Joaquín is arrested, and while he is in jail his live-in companion Natalia dies from tuberculosis. The noble free-union relationship between Joaquín and Natalia is held up as an ideal. Penichet contrasts Joaquín and Natalia’s relationship with that of Rosendo and his young live-in servant, the orphan Rosa María. Rosendo sexually molests Rosa María before arranging her marriage to Rosendo’s friend and confidant Gumersindo. Appalled at the prospect, Rosa María clips from the newspaper an article titled ‘‘Aburrido de vivir,’’ which describes how a girl soaked her clothes in alcohol and then lit them, killing herself. Rosa María believes that suicide is the only way out of the sexual abuse she has already experienced and a future life of misery: ‘‘That was her only means of freeing herself. How sad that she found herself in such a situation! To be born, to live, and then in the prime of her life, to have to end her life before Nature had fulfilled its mission.’’ One day, Rosendo returns to his home only to find the girl’s charred remains.(21)

 

Penichet’s short story ‘‘La venta de una virgen’’ is even more sinister in discussing a mother’s exploitation of her first child Lucía. The mother, Jacinta, wants a child but does not care who the father is. What is important is that she give birth to a child so that her breast milk can come in. Then she can sell herself as a wet nurse to a rich couple to nurse their child. She, in fact, succeeds at both of these endeavors after giving birth to Lucía, and then has two sons so that she can continue to make money as a wet nurse. However, after several years of this, Jacinta recognizes that her body is wearing out and she desperately thinks up new schemes to earn a living. As Lucía is approaching puberty, her mother begins to recognize that the young girl’s striking blue eyes and blond hair can be used for economic advantage. Jacinta begins to take Lucía to work with her, in the hope that some rich man will lay his eyes upon her and pay handsomely for ‘‘the enjoyment of her angelic, tender body.’’(22) Ultimately, Jacinta conspires with Godínez, a wealthy man who apparently has a history of taking the virginity of many young girls. He brings presents to Lucía, who rejects his advances. Frustrated, Jacinta and Godínez entrap Lucía one day, and this culminates with Godínez raping the girl. Fraught with despair, Lucía flees from her mother and leaps to her death into the crashing sea waves along Havana’s Malecón sea wall. Jacinta, thoroughly distraught, begins to cry upon hearing the news of her daughter’s death. Yet, the tears are not because she has lost her daughter, but because she has lost her ‘‘business.’’(23)

 

Anarchists did not damn prostitutes for their activities. Rather, anarchist blame fell more squarely on the pimps and hustlers who coerced young women or girls to sell or trade their sexual services. Women and girls who fell victim to prostitution and other exploitative sexual situations were more frequently portrayed as innocents caught in a larger world of deceit, vice, and corruption. In this sense, ‘‘prostitutes’’ (women exploited for someone else’s economic advantage), like the girls at Petrona’s, or even Lucía, were held up as noble figures who had been victimized by other women, such as the madame Petrona or the ‘‘bad mother’’ Jacinta. Ultimately, fictionalized prostitutes symbolized the suffering of the popular classes under the weight of postindependence bourgeois Cuban society. Their female exploiters (particularly when they were mother figures) represented what women had to avoid but also illustrated how a corrupt, postindependence Cuba could drive women away from their noble mission to be strong, progressive mothers and noble women.

 

Noble Women, Family, and Revolutionary Mothers

 

The image of the ‘‘noble woman’’ and ‘‘revolutionary mother’’ are familiar symbols in the history of twentieth-century Latin American revolutionary struggles. One recalls the famous images of female soldiers with bandoleers slung over their shoulders during the Mexican Revolution. Revolutionary movements in Cuba in the 1950s and in El Salvador in the 1980s also promoted the image of an armed female militia or revolutionary brigade. Likewise, millions of people around the world have seen the famous image of a young Nicaraguan mother with a rifle hanging from her shoulder while an infant suckles at her breast. The antecedents of such twentieth-century images can be found in early-twentiethcentury anarchist images of women. To anarchists, the ideal woman was an enlightened mother who educated her children in the revolutionary ideals of equality, justice, and mutual aid. She also attended and participated in anarchist social gatherings or taught in anarchist schools. She was strong, in tune with the highest ideals of Nature—equality, freedom, and cooperation—and she considered herself an equal partner with her male companion. She struggled against capitalist exploitation and rejected religion as antirational.

 

On the surface, this ideal of woman as ‘‘noble’’ and as ‘‘mother’’ in many ways appears to resemble the ideal of the dutiful homebound wife that was essential for the development of a Latin American middle class in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Throughout Latin America, such a middle-class ideal sought to reinforce the notion that women should be restricted to the private realm of the home. There, she would educate her children and purify her husband, who daily ventured into the filth and vice of the public sphere.24 In Cuba, middle-class women both challenged and expanded this construction of motherhood after independence. As Lynn Stoner has illustrated, feminist organizations formed between 1902 and 1940 were primarily composed of middle-class members. These organizations influenced legislation, challenged the U.S. military occupations, and rejected the individualist tendencies of U.S. feminism. In their quest to expand democracy in Cuba, the island’s feminists sought to retain their femininity and their roles as mothers. They believed that as Cuban ‘‘matriarchs’’ they could bring forth a fuller notion of democracy in Cuba. These feminists, though, were not revolutionaries. They did not seek to end patriarchy or even to achieve complete social equality. Rather, Cuban feminists sought to use their femininity to gain recognition of the importance of motherhood as a divine right. Motherhood would then play a role in creating a ‘‘feminine space’’ within the government where women could use their traditional roles as ‘‘mothers and guardians of morality’’ to oversee welfare programs for children, women, and families.(25)

 

The anarchist ideal of motherhood challenged these middle-class notions. The anarchists’ ‘‘revolutionary mother’’ came from the working class and had nothing but contempt for bourgeois society and values. In addition, anarchists completely rejected the idea of working within the government. Rather, anarchists held up the working-class mother as a symbol to which all women should aspire. As such, the ‘‘revolutionary mother’’ was not just a revolutionary alternative to bourgeois values but a condemnation of those values and their effects on Cuban women. In addition, the ‘‘revolutionary mother’’ was the guiding force of the family unit. Cuban anarchists, while denouncing the legal and religious institutions of marriage, held the family in high regard. In fact, anarchists came to argue that the family was the basis for an anarchist form of communism, in which the ‘‘revolutionary mother’’ was both the leading caretaker and the leading symbol.

 

For anarchists, ‘‘marriage’’ and ‘‘family’’ were not synonymous. While anarchists belittled marriage as an entrapping institution sanctioned by the state and the Church, they emphasized the importance of the family for the development of a communistic society of free, equal, cooperative individuals. One such anarchist was Antonio Penichet. In his widely disseminated pamphlet ‘‘Tácticas en uso y tácticas a seguir’’ (1922), Penichet used five of his forty-five pages to outline this idea. ‘‘First, it is necessary to triumph in the home and then triumph in society,’’ he advocated.26 However, the home and family were more than just the first battle zone in the larger social struggle. The home and the family were actually the bases for communism. Penichet saw the basic familial relationship as nothing short of a small-scale form of communism: An individual, who appears to have no obligations toward anyone else, meets someone with whom he wants to enter a conjugal life. And we see that this individual, who did not know this person earlier, comes to share with her all his sadness, all his joy, and the product of his labor. Then from here is born a familiarity with other family members, parents, brothers, uncles, nieces, etc. and a bond forms between all of them —something that indicates the march toward communism. . . . The home, then, is the most pronounced origin of communism and its best field for experimentation.(27) Penichet’s idea of communism was anarchist in nature. For Penichet, the roots of communism do not derive from a revolutionary state that imposes communism downward upon the masses. Rather, communism arises out of peoples’ everyday lives. The family, then, served as the most basic grouping of people and the site for the development of human sentiment and cooperative actions. The development of this ‘‘natural’’ process of cooperative relationships was the seed from which larger forms of communist cooperation would emerge. Ultimately, the family was crucial in this development—a development that required a strong, noble, revolutionary mother to guide it and serve as an example of the virtues of a cooperative, just, and humane Nature.

 

Noble Women, Revolutionary Mothers, and Cuban Anarchist Fiction

 

The notion that women could embody the noble sentiments of humanity in a hypocritical social environment occurs throughout anarchist literature.(28) In the novella La eterna lucha Adrián del Valle describes a bar scene where two men, who are getting drunk, persuade a beautiful, artistic woman to sit with them. One man, a poet, continues drinking and eventually falls asleep at the table. His companion, however, listens intently to the woman, who speaks about struggling for ‘‘the ideal.’’ Struggling, she argues, is never in vain when it is for an ideal, but struggling for survival is a truly horrible thing. Still, she notes, struggle is part of Nature’s law; the problem is that humans have misinterpreted it to mean struggling against each other. The Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin was del Valle’s most important intellectual influence, and in this novella del Valle is clearly drawing upon Kropotkin’s book Mutual Aid, when he has his revolutionary female character describe her ideal: ‘‘My ideal, the ideal of all generous hearts is this: To replace the brutal struggle of man against man with mutual aid, with mutual love and to see that the eternal struggle to which Nature condemns us has as its final goal the conquest of a free, beautiful, happy life.’’ With that, the young man joins her and both leave the bar; the drunk poet rises to protest, only to fall forward on the table in front of him.(29)

 

In La flor marchita, del Valle continued this theme in a conversation between an unnamed man and woman. As the couple walks, she picks up a fallen rose and begins plucking it apart petal by petal. The man asks his female companion, ‘‘What is woman, but the ‘flor humana’ whom bad and weak men pick for their own adornment and to enjoy the fragrance.’’ When a man is done with a woman, our narrator continues, the woman (like the flower) is thrown out. Still, the man notes that women have a special characteristic. Unlike the flower, women can rebel against the brutal hand that picks them and thus against human brutality. It is not that the flower and the woman were born to suffer. To the contrary: ‘‘Woman, like the flower, was born to enjoy life.’’(30) While women may have been born to enjoy life, as were all people, the social environment in which they lived often prevented this. Such simple enjoyment of life was difficult to come by in postindependence Cuba, anarchists argued. As noted earlier, women suffered from joblessness or from working long hours as despalilladoras in tobacco factories or as laundresses and seamstresses in homes and shops. They had few educational opportunities, and they lived in an environment that anarchists described as deceptive and antirational. Consequently, when some women found the strength to perform noble acts in such a degenerate setting, anarchists saw them as embodying the noble revolutionary sentiment that would guide humanity into the future.

 

One such woman appears in del Valle’s novella En el mar: Narración de un viaje trágico. Though not set in Cuba, the story is poignant. A ship at sea is engulfed in flames and all but the captain go to the life boats. One passenger, Lord Vilton, who clearly represents the aristocracy and upper classes with his diamond-encrusted tooth and pompous affectations, tries to bribe his way onto a lifeboat ahead of the women and children. Once safely away from the burning ship, one young mother becomes hysterical and jumps overboard with her infant child, but another female passenger, described only as La Rusa, saves the baby. At sea, hunger sets in among the survivors, a fact made unbearable by the continuous cries of the starving infant. In a moment of true noble revolutionary motherhood, La Rusa bares her virgin breasts and offers her milkless nipples to the child. In contrast, Lord Vilton is so hungry that he pays a sailor five thousand pounds sterling so that Vilton can make a gash in the sailor’s arm and suck the sailor’s blood. After three days at sea, the baby dies from hunger and dehydration. Lord Vilton tries to wrestle the infant from La Rusa’s hands in order to eat it. In the ensuing struggle, La Rusa throws Vilton’s suitcase full of money into the sea, shouting, ‘‘Get it. . . . Buy some shark’s blood with it!’’ Then someone hits Vilton over the head and dumps him into the sea. Upon being rescued some time later, La Rusa is still holding the little corpse.(31) La Rusa’s actions reflect the anarchist notion of the noble woman struggling against the rich. In addition, her unselfishness regarding the starving infant exemplifies a quality associated with revolutionary motherhood that Cuban anarchists praised as an ideal capable of saving society. Society had to stop seeing women as merely furniture, money makers, or playthings. Their gifts of motherhood and a nurturing instinct, bestowed on them by Nature, had to be rescued from the downward spiral of society and the dogma of the Church. Women were not merely fallen flowers tossed aside when their sexual charms wore out. Neither were women the embodiment of original sin and the fallen Eve. Women, when their ‘‘true’’ sentiments and proclivities were recognized and employed, were the guiding forces for steering society in accord with the dictates of an anarchist-defined Nature. Women, in fact, had the capacity to be the true revolutionaries in a despoiled age, as well as the standard bearers of what Nature held for humanity. Only by reasserting their true, noble gifts could women then teach their children truth and justice, as anarchists defined these ideals.(32)

 

While many women practiced what they believed to be their anarchist calling as women, anarchist popular culture sought to convince those who did not practice these beliefs (or whose commitment was shaky) to abandon bourgeois ambitions and actions. Anarchists urged women to look toward more noble sentiments and actions as revolutionaries and mothers. In ¡Alma Rebelde!, Penichet describes Rosa, the mother of the main character Rodolfo’s best friend Miguel. Rosa is a widow, a strong woman raising her sons and continuously thwarting the advances of middle-class men. Midway through the novel, Miguel gets his girlfriend pregnant. While the young woman wants to terminate the pregnancy, Miguel says no and Rodolfo agrees. Rosa, too, rejects the idea of an abortion, telling her son that once she too had considered it, but she is now thankful that she had the child, for that child was Miguel. Abortion raises an important issue concerning the anarchist ideal of women’s natural role as mother. While anarchists supported birth control, terminating a life was unacceptable, as Penichet clearly expressed through his character Rodolfo. No one had the right, notes Rodolfo, to commit those mysterious murders that frequently occur with impunity. The child ought to be preserved, for nobody knows what its designated mission is on Earth. It seemed to be an abomination to destroy the child brought forth from a woman’s vital organs, and the common excuses many used to avoid social gossip were neither reasonable nor humane.

 

Ultimately, anarchists believed that bourgeois Cuban society used abortion and casas de beneficencias (orphanages) for the same reason: to remove the evidence of ‘‘passionate moments.’’ The unborn child became the victim of an immoral society made up of ‘‘traficantes de conciencias’’ (traders in consciousness) and ‘‘asesinos autorizados’’ (authorized murderers).(33) When we understand that in anarchist thought children have the same rights as adults, even abortion of the unborn child amounts to murder. Abortion also challenged the natural role of mother and nurturer, which anarchists found so fundamental to a woman’s true nature. Abortion, then, was more than murder. It destroyed a little bit of Nature and undermined anarchist progress toward reestablishing the natural order of mutual aid.

 

Perhaps the strongest female character in Cuban anarchist literature, and thus the character that most embodies the noble woman and revolutionary mother, is del Valle’s Soledad in his novel La mulata Soledad. Soledad is a working-class mulatta in Havana who comes from an interracial anarchist household. The story begins with Carlos, a young medical student, encountering Soledad on the long tram ride from the Vedado section of Havana to the city’s old town shops and factories. Carlos is first initiated into anarchist ideas through his mentor Dr. Anaya, who not only devotes time to working with the poor but also urges Carlos to consider the ideas of anarchism, especially those of Kropotkin. Then, because of Soledad’s attempt to live according to the anarchist ideal, Carlos embraces anarchism for the first time. When Soledad begins to date the white Carlos, her family expresses a number of different race and class concerns. Her brother sees whites as the enemy, while her sister questions the intentions of a white man toward a darker woman. Soledad’s working-class father Jaime also questions his daughter’s actions, not because Carlos is white but because he is a doctor-to-be from the bourgeois class. Still, Jaime leaves the decision to his independent, rationally minded daughter. Carlos and Soledad join in free union and establish a home together. However, Carlos represents the ambivalence of someone from the middle class. He struggles between meeting societal expectations and doing what he knows is right. He leaves Soledad so that he can marry a white woman of his own social rank on the very night after Soledad tells him that she is pregnant. Soledad eventually gives birth to a son.

 

From this point in the story, we see two anarchist views of Cuban women. Carlos’s white wife Estela merely wants the legal recognition of a marriage to enjoy social privilege and middle-class materialism, but she does not want children. In essence, Estela rejects her natural calling of motherhood for the hypocritical, unnatural world of bourgeois social graces. Meanwhile, Soledad continues sewing in the home, a common practice for working-class women, while never abandoning her principles. She continues to raise her child in difficult circumstances but with the solid support of her anarchist parents. When Carlos discovers that his wife has cuckolded him, he returns to Soledad. Meanwhile, his family had disinherited him and he suffers the social repudiation of living outside of marriage with a nonwhite woman. With his savings drying up, Dr. Anaya reappears and offers his clinic to Carlos for treating the poor. After an official divorce from Estela, Carlos and Soledad move in together and jointly raise their son.

 

Ultimately, La mulata Soledad exemplifies how anarchist popular culture could focus on the debilitating social environment that shaped people’s behavior, while also illustrating how average people could cooperate and live up to the ideals of anarchism in preparation for the social revolution. As noted previously, anarchists used women as metaphors for both good and ill, and La mulata Soledad reflects this. Through the character of Estela, the novel portrays the type of woman and habits to be avoided. Just as important, the novel offers an example of a woman—a revolutionary mother—living a life full of love for humanity and children while striving for justice in her own and others’ lives.

 

Race, Women, and Free Unions

 

As noted, La mulata Soledad’s heroine was of mixed race. Del Valle characterizes one of her strengths as her ability to reject ‘‘using’’ white men for social advancement. Early in the novel, Soledad is seen doing piecework in a shop where her fellow black and mulatta workers discuss how they hope to seize the first white man who will take them away from their working-poor lives. Soledad rejects this sentiment, noting how mulatas have always sold themselves to whites in hopes of social advancement. One of Soledad’s colleagues responds by arguing that linking up with whites is preferable. From her viewpoint, she might then have a lighter-skinned child, which, she believes, would advance the black race. Soledad has been taught by her white father and black mother to reject such discussions of race and racial characteristics. Race merely divides people, whereas anarchism seeks to unite them. Soledad answers her coworker by saying that when she speaks of love she means the love that is in all humans and that the love must be mutual.(34)

 

In del Valle’s novella ‘‘Jubilosa,’’ a very light-skinned mulatta female character becomes another venue to address anarchist notions of race and class. ‘‘Jubilosa’’ in many ways resembles La mulata Soledad. A young law student, Gonzalo, dreams of giving up his studies in order to take a job and move in with his girlfriend Jubilosa. Jubilosa responds that Gonzalo’s parents would never let him marry the seamstress daughter of a mulatta. In time, Jubilosa confesses to Gonzalo that she is pregnant, but when Gonzalo offers marriage, claiming that Jubilosa could ‘‘pass’’ as white, the following exchange takes place:

«Jubilosa: Mulattas who love whites know how rare it is to find themselves standing before a judge or in a church.

Gonzalo: But you’re not a mulatta.

Jubilosa: Neither am I white, even though you say that I appear to be. And I am not going to renounce the African blood that runs through my veins. »

 

Jubilosa makes Gonzalo promise not to marry another woman so that they may at least live together. Breaking his promise to Jubilosa, Gonzalo runs off to marry his wealthy white cousin, but continues to send money for his and Jubilosa’s child. She refuses the money. Meanwhile, a black anarchist named Perucho is living in Jubilosa’s home, having rented a room there for ten years. Perucho becomes the child’s ‘‘grandfather,’’ helping out financially as well. Then one evening, as Perucho walks to his room, he passes by Jubilosa’s door. He hears a soft voice call his name from inside the room. He walks through the open door, feels two arms wrap around him and lips press against his mouth. The forty-three-yearold anarchist ‘‘grandfather’’ becomes the lover of twenty-one-year-old Jubilosa and the new ‘‘father’’ of the child.35 The themes in ‘‘Jubilosa’’ echo those of La mulata Soledad. A mulatta meets and has a baby with a white male who is studying to enter a bourgeois profession. In La mulata Soledad, the woman is betrayed but her lover eventually returns to her, inspired by the anarchist influences of both his mentor and his mulatta lover. In ‘‘Jubilosa,’’ the woman is betrayed by her white lover, but finds love and redemption in a black male anarchist.

 

This confluence of race and gender is important for understanding the dynamics of postindependence Cuba. By the time of independence, slavery had formally been abolished on the island for only a generation. People of African descent, as well as increasing numbers of black and mulatto Caribbean laborers, made up a significant portion of the Cuban population. Any social movement hoping to make inroads into the collective consciousness and imagination of such a racially diverse population would have to appeal to the Afro-Cuban and mixed-race peoples on the island. Adrián del Valle, with the publication of La mulata Soledad, clearly recognized this. Yet Soledad represented more than just the black and mixed-race populations playing a role in a future anarchist Cuba. Soledad represented the blending of African and European influences that by the 1920s increasingly characterized what it meant to be Cuban. This notion of cubanidad, though, is not only associated with a nationalist identity. Instead, del Valle merged Soledad’s anarchist principles and revolutionary motherhood with her mixed-race and Cuban female worker status. 36  Soledad, the mulatta heroine, came to represent a female working-class Cuban who was part of a larger international anarchist movement.

 

In addition, del Valle’s focus on women of color allowed him to address directly the importance of free, consensual unions outside of marriage. It is significant that both Soledad and Jubilosa are of mixed race, have anarchist links, and live in free unions. Anarchists rejected the institutionalized slavery, as they saw it, of legal marriages sanctioned by the state and Church. Thus, men and women should be free to live together outside of these institutional encroachments on individual freedom. Since independence, the proportion of all Cubans living in what the government classified as ‘‘illegitimate unions’’ had declined. For instance, from 1907 to 1919 the percentage of people living together outside of marriage had fallen from 8.6 percent to 6.1 percent of the island’s population, whereas in 1919, 23.1 percent of the population was legally married.(37) However, while the overall percentage of popular free unions (the anarchist term for unions outside legal sanction) may have fallen, the practice was still widespread among the nonwhite population. In 1919, 6.1 percent of the population lived in uniones ilegítimas (the government term). If one breaks this statistic down by racial categories, as the 1919 census did, one sees that a far larger number of nonwhites than whites lived together outside of legal marriage. Among whites, only 3.5 percent, or 73,000 persons, were in consensual unions. In contrast, 13 percent of the nonwhite population (104,310 persons) were in such unions. The 1919 census also reveals the following ratios, which show a more dramatic contrast: whereas there were only 13 consensual unions per every 100 legal marriages among whites, the ratio was 95 per 100 among nonwhites.(38)

 

Obviously, nonwhite adults more frequently cohabited without legal sanction, or in anarchist terms, they more frequently engaged in free union than their white counterparts. The ratios suggest that there were nearly as many nonwhite illegitimate unions as there were legal unions in 1919. When broken down by province, the census shows that in Pinar del Río and Matanzas more nonwhite couples lived together outside of legal sanction than within legal marriage (112 and 172 illegitimate unions per 100 legal unions, respectively). In Oriente there were 95 illegitimate unions for every 100 legal ones. Consequently, when in the 1920s del Valle wrote these stories of nonwhite women in free unions, he was acknowledging an obvious fact in Cuba’s nonwhite population and based his stories in Cuban reality: nonwhite couples lived in anarchistdefined free unions almost as commonly as they lived in formally recognized legal marriages. By blending racial and gender realities explicitly into his stories, del Valle put a Cuban face on the international anarchist movement. Bringing together gender, race, and free-union status was a way to appeal for increased black, mulatto, and female participation in the anarchist movement, because doing so reflected the diversity of Cuban reality. In anarchist fiction, women of color and the relationships they had with men of different colors provided a means by which to celebrate anarchists’ preferred relationships, and as a means of propaganda, to attract followers of all races.

 

Conclusion

 

Depending on the message they tried to put forth, Cuba’s anarchist movement portrayed women either as victims, misguided reactionaries, or noble revolutionaries. Drawing upon Cuban social reality, anarchists showcased how female workers suffered in the capitalist workplace, in exploitative commercial settings, and in the home. Such victimhood existed in all races and in all classes, reflecting how a focus on gender issues mirrored larger exploitation issues revolving around class and race. At the same time, anarchists depicted some women as deceivers and reactionaries. These women’s actions, whether as church-going mothers, deceptive parents, or enterprising brothel owners, impeded the march to transform society. Still, at other times, anarchists put forth the ideal of women as revolutionaries. These women joined with men as equals, raised their children in a spirit of rational cooperation at home and ventured into the public realm to teach and speak.

 

Undoubtedly, these images of women’s true destinies as noble partners, and especially as revolutionary mothers, reflected a certain patriarchal bias imbedded in Cuban anarchism. Mostly male authors dominated the Cuban and international movements, and their writings of idealized women sound almost reactionary to the modern ear. In addition, it is difficult to estimate how many women actively joined the movement. Certainly, there were women who rejected the promotion of motherhood as an ultimate destiny, which they had no desire or ability to fulfill. Even more women embraced motherhood and believed in its sacred mission, and they preferred to live it out within the sanctions of formal marriage and traditional sex roles. Other Cuban women, like socialists and feminists, wanted state support for motherhood and saw women’s mothering natures as beneficial reasons for why women should be in the government. In addition, anarchists appealed to some of the most marginalized sectors of Cuban society: poor women of all races. Almost by definition, these were some of the least politicized people on the island and quite naturally this would result in limited numbers of female adherents.

 

In addition, many obstacles blocked the path of women living and working an anarchist ideal. Poor-quality jobs and unsafe working conditions, inappropriate health care, problems surrounding high infant and child mortality, the world of prostitution, and the lack of a working-class consciousness all impeded women’s development. Also, anarchists competed with feminists, socialists, and trade unionists, all of whom had their own programs designed to benefit poor women and liberate them from overbearing men. Undoubtedly, women moved in and out of these different groups, and there was little that would prevent a woman from participating in any combination of groups at the same time.

 

Still, we know from press reports, photographs, and intelligence reports that many women regularly attended meetings and actively took part in plays, readings, and singing at anarchist social gatherings. Periodically, a few would write for the anarchist press. In Cuba during the first three decades following independence, many women actually came to live the anarchist ideal —women like Teresa Faro, Emilia Rodríguez, María Luisa Bustamante, and Blanca Moncaleano. These revolutionary women spoke at rallies, taught in anarchist schools, and raised a brood of free-thinking children. Ultimately, though, ‘‘woman’’ was a radical icon of Cuban anarchism. While anarchists hoped to use their popular culture to attract female followers, the image of woman was primarily used as a muse for anarchist ideals. Readers of anarchist newspapers, novels, and short stories, or viewers of anarchist plays could gain an internationalist, nonracist, working-class consciousness from seeing the way women were treated and victimized in Cuban society and at the workplace. Yet women also inspired anarchists to put forth an ideal for women and the family that could serve as a model for Cuba’s popular classes. Those same readers and viewers, who recognized how Cuban reality victimized women, could also observe ideal types of female behavior that could be encouraged in spouses, daughters, and friends. Likewise, men were exposed to strong, noble women whom they would have to respect as intellectual and emotional equals. That was the anarchist agenda for Cuba—equality and freedom in all manifestations, whether racial, gender, or class. When anarchists discussed women in their newspapers, at talks, or in their popular culture, they made a conscious and conscientious choice to use images of women not only to reflect reality but also to inspire social change.

 

 

Notes

 

1. Censo de la República de Cuba, Año de 1919 (Havana: Maza, Arroyo y Caso, S. en C., 1919), 253.

2. Antonio Penichet, La vida de un pernicioso (Havana: Avisador Comercial, 1919), 130.

3. Antonio Penichet, ¡Alma Rebelde!, Novela histórica (Havana: El Ideal, 1921), 90.

4. Censo de la República de Cuba, Año de 1919, 366–67.

5. Jean Stubbs, Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History, 1860–1958 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 77–78.

6. El Nuevo Ideal, 25 February 1899, 3.

7. ¡Tierra! 17 October 1903, 2.

8. ‘‘Report of Deaths in the City of Havana during the Year 1901,’’ in ‘‘Report of W. C. Gorgas,’’ Civil Report of Brigadier General Leonard Wood, Military Governor of Cuba, 1901 (Washington, D.C.: War Department), 17.

9. ¡Tierra! 24 October 1903, 2.

10. Pro-Vida, February 1915, 1–2.

11. Pro-Vida, 30 April 1918, 4.

12. Memo for the Chief of Staff from John W. Furlong, Captain, General Staff, Chief, Military Information Division, 3 January 1908, Records of the Provisional Government, Record Group 199, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

13. ¡Tierra! 12 June 1907, 2; 10 August 1907, 2, 4.

14. ¡Tierra! 11 November 1905, 4; 30 November 1907, 1; 8 August 1913, 3; El Dependiente, 20 August 1913, 1; 17 September 1913, 4.

15. Carlos Loveira, De los 26 a los 35: Lecciones de la experiencia en la lucha obrera (1908–1917) (Washington, D.C.: Law Reporter Printing Company, 1917), 78. The use of children for revolutionary cultural events is still popular in Cuba today. In a public forum with a local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution in Camagüey in 1989, a group of scholars and librarians and myself were treated to several children reciting memorized revolutionary poems.

16. Palmiro de Lidia, Fin de fiesta, cuadro dramático (New York, 1898).

17. Nueva Luz, 10 April 1925: 4–6.

18. Louis A. Pérez Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 193. See also Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); and T. Philip Terry, Terry’s Guide to Cuba (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929).

19. Penichet, ¡Alma Rebelde! 25.

20. Adrián del Valle, ‘‘En el hospital,’’ in Por el camino (Barcelona: F. Granada y Comp., 1907).

21. Penichet, La vida de un pernicioso, 139.

22. Penichet, ‘‘La venta de una virgen,’’ in ibid., 193–210 (quote is on p. 198).

23. Penichet, ‘‘La venta de una virgen,’’ in ibid., 193–210 (quote is on p. 210).

24. To understand how this functioned in various parts of the Americas, see, in particular, William French, ‘‘Prostitutes and Guardian Angels: Women, Work, and the Family in Porfirian Mexico,’’ Hispanic American Historical Review 72, no. 4 (November 1992): 529–53; and David McCreery, ‘‘‘This Life of Misery and Shame’: Female Prostitution in Guatemala City, 1880–1920,’’ Journal of Latin American Studies 18, no. 2 (November 1986): 333–53. As McCreery states, ‘‘Attempts to regulate prostitution must be understood as a part of a liberal drive to mobilize and control society as a whole in the interest of a class-defined vision of national development’’ (334).

25. See K. Lynn Stoner, From the House to the Streets: The Cuban Women’s Movement for Legal Reform, 1898–1940 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991).

26. Antonio Penichet, Tácticas en uso y tácticas a seguir (Havana: El Ideal, 1922), 38.

27. Ibid., 40–41.

28. ¡Tierra! 5 June 1925, 4. In fact, the Barcelona-based La Novela Ideal series, which published many of del Valle’s short stories in affordable booklet forms, explicitly aimed ‘‘to make the hearts of women and children pulsate.’’ Del Valle’s Mi amigo Julio was the series’ first installment.

29. Adrián del Valle, ‘‘La eterna lucha,’’ in Cuentos inverosímiles (Havana: Nuevo Ideal, 1903), 110. Del Valle was a great admirer of Kropotkin’s works, even publishing a brief biography of the anarchist intellectual.

30. Adrián del Valle, ‘‘La flor marchita,’’ in Cuentos inverosímiles, 193.

31. Adrián del Valle, ‘‘En el mar: Narración de un viaje trágico,’’ in Cuentos inverosímiles, 163.

32. In Cuban reality, one found this in the work of women like Blanca de Moncaleano, who taught in anarchist schools with her husband while raising her children with anarchist sentiments. Likewise, Emilia Rodríguez, a female anarchist agitator in Matanzas, was a leading anarchist figure; she organized the 1912 Cruces Congress and in 1913 directed a school in Yabucito while raising her four children—all after her partner’s deportation (¡Tierra! 12 June 1907, 2; 10 August 1907, 2, 4; 8 June 1912, 3; 14 January 1913, 2).

33. Penichet, ¡Alma Rebelde! 91–92.

34. Adrián del Valle, La mulata Soledad (Barcelona: Impresos Costa, 1929), 50.

35. Adrián del Valle, ‘‘Jubilosa,’’ La Novela Ideal series, no. 10 (Barcelona: La Revista Blanca, n.d.), 6–7.

36. For more on the anarchist notion of revolutionary motherhood and Soledad’s role in it, see Kirwin Shaffer, ‘‘Prostitutes, Bad Seeds, and Revolutionary Mothers: Imagining Women in the Anarchist Fiction of Adrián del Valle and Antonio Penichet, 1898–1930,’’ Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 18 (1999): 1–17.

37. Censo de la República de Cuba, Año de 1919, 348–49.

38. Ibid., 353. Censuses taken in Cuba combined all nonwhite populations into the category ‘‘de color.’’ These included blacks, people of mixed race, and Asians. The ratios concerning legal and nonlegal cohabitation do not delineate unions between people of different races, e.g., a white and black or a black and mulatta—the two examples from del Valle’s fiction.