A Soviet Caribbean: The Comintern, New York’s Internationalist Diaspora, and the Forging of Post-War Caribbean Visions, 1931-1936

russian history 41 (2014) 255-268

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/18763316-04102011

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A ‘Soviet Caribbean’The Comintern, New York’s Immigrant Community, and the Forging of Caribbean Visions, 1931–1936

Sandra PujalsUniversity of Puerto Rico

[email protected]

Abstract

The article discusses the participation of the Communist International (Comintern, 1919–1943) in the Caribbean region throughout most of the 1930s, mapping an international dimension for local and regional developments and counting the Soviet Union as an imperialist contender along with the customary colonial powers. The essay also enumerates examples of the sort of international, cultural networks fostered by the Comintern’s agenda and its political agents throughout the area, pointing out the connection between this sort of communication and the region’s leap into modernity that defined the decolonization process in the late 1940s. In these developments, New York as the center of a Caribbean diaspora becomes instrumental as the point of departure and confluence for the agents of international communism and Caribbean nationals during the decade of the 1930s. The evidence, in turn, implies a call to reformulate the historical evolution of the Caribbean diaspora in New York between the 1920s and the 1940s, taking into consideration the Comintern’s contribution to the transnational aspect of Caribbean radicalism, politics and culture in the postwar era. Finally, it also suggests a possible revision of the chronological framework for the Soviet Union’s presence in the Caribbean region long before the Cuban revolution of 1959, in view of declassified documentation from the Comintern archives.

Keywords

Communist International – Caribbean diaspora – Latin America – Alberto E. Sánchez – Rubén Martínez Villena – transnational experience

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1 This article is dedicated to my dear professor and friend, David Goldfrank. Words can hardly express my appreciation for the kindness, support and guidance he has so gracefully offered to me throughout the past three decades. This essay is part of an ongoing research project on the Comintern in the Caribbean under the title, Su Casa Es Mi Casa: The Caribbean Bureau of the Comintern and the Charting of a Soviet Caribbean, 1930–1943. The research for this article was funded in part by a shortterm grant of the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Institution, and a grant from the Decanato de Estudios Graduados e Investigación of the University of Puerto Rico. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the College of Humanities and the Department of History of the University of Puerto Rico for my project.

2 Antonio GaztambideGeigel, “The Invention of the Caribbean in the 20th Century: The Definitions of the Caribbean as a Historical and Methodological Problem,” Social and Economic Studies 53, no. 3 (2004): 127–57.

During the first half of the 1930s, the Caribbean Bureau of the Comintern outlined a new political, economic, social, and cultural map for a region that had been until then isolated and fragmented. These new regional boundaries went beyond the traditional demarcations of geography, culture, language, and race that segregated the zone, by bringing together into one geographical unit – the islands of the Caribbean, the Central American republics, and several costal countries of the southern continent (Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador). Not only was this vision uniquely Caribbean, but also unprecedented, since local leaders themselves had not contemplated this configuration as a unit before. Thus, Comintern agents redesigned the radius and agenda for their activity by charting a separate map for a region that shared similar historical, economic, social, and political backgrounds, unique and distinct from other Latin American countries or the industrialized metropolises that dominated the area. After 1945, concepts of regional unity, workers’ rights, and racial justice first introduced as part of the Comintern’s Caribbean agenda, became the groundwork for the cultural definition of a “modern” Caribbean identity. The institutionalization of earlier communist proposals, recycled and deradicalized as a scaffold for postwar decolonization, and the consequent reaction to it from friend and foe alike, in the long run contributed to the reconfiguration of the Caribbean region as a social, ethnic, and cultural unit.1

The historiography on the Caribbean has been recently enriched by an exchange concerning the question as to what accounts for the Caribbean people’s sense of belonging to the region. In his article on the Caribbean as a historical and methodological problem, Antonio GaztambideGeigel points out that the concept of the Caribbean is an “invention of the twentieth century,” and that the term itself was not used within the region as an element of selfidentity until World War II.2 In turn, Norman Girvan suggests that the concept has been “redefined and continues to be constantly reinterpreted in

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3 Norman Girvan, “Reinterpreting the Caribbean,” in New Caribbean Thought, ed. Brian Meeks and Folke Lindhal (Jamaica; Barbados; TrinidadTobago: The University of the West Indies Press, 2002), 3–21.

4 The Caribbean Bureau also organized a school in New York, and a curriculum on Marxist theory and organizational strategies, which probably operated between 1932 and 1934. See Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii (rgaspi), Karibskoe Buro Secretariata Latinskoi Ameriki, f. 500, op. 1, d. 3, ll. 1, 7, 42, 52. A digital copy of this fond is available at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

accordance to external influences and internal currents,” since the region itself has developed as a multilinguistic as well as transnational entity.3 Both scholars seem to agree that the “idea” of the Caribbean as a geopolitical, historical, cultural, and even economic unit, is a hologram that merges the interests of the foreign powers that once dominated the area on the one hand, and the attitudes of certain native thinkers in reaction to imperialist designs on the other.

However, this blueprint does not take into account another set of circumstances that affected the region and its transnational community abroad between the decades of the 1920s and 1940s: the international projection of socially, culturally, and politically radical ideas, coordinated by the Soviet Union through the activities of the Communist International or Comintern (1919–1943) and its front organizations in the zone. Although focused on exporting communism, the Comintern’s expansionist agenda also promoted working together with ideologically diverse, local radical groups in order to organize a variety of enterprises and activities such as trade unions, demonstrations, committees in defense of political prisoners, workers’ education programs, and female workers’ groups.

Along with this political and social plan, the Comintern’s Caribbean Bureau, located in New York during the first half of the 1930s, was also in charge of identifying and recruiting immigrant cadres who could organize unions and manage radical activity in their places of origin, after a training period in Moscow.4 The Comintern’s agenda thus provided experience for young natives in designing progressive, political, social, and labor programs that would later be reactivated as part of the regional decolonization and “democratization” process of the postwar era. Consequently, the relationship between the agents of international communism and Caribbean natives also indirectly contributed to the development of visions of a shared Caribbean experience, in which the struggle for justice, racial equality, and freedom, rather than traditional Western standards of language, culture, and nationality, would serve as common denominators. In this process, former radicals with a communist past or

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5 See: Omar Hamid Ali, The Balance of Power: Independent Black Politics and Third-Party Movements in the United States (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008); Paul Buhle, Tim Hector: A Caribbean Radical´s Story (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2006).

a shortlived love affair with communism, were reborn as icons of the new Caribbean democratic rule and the region’s cultural awakening, bringing about an almost imperceptible fusion of ideological contradictions. The theoretical extremism of past political aspirations gave way to a cultural idealism in a new era. As a result, communists’ “extreme” demands of the thirties, including an eighthour work schedule, workers’ compensation, and the struggle against racial discrimination, transmuted into “democratic” standards of modernity for the region.

This article discusses the interaction between the Caribbean Bureau of the Comintern and the Caribbean immigrant community in New York during the first half of the 1930s, and the possible contribution of this relationship to the development of cultural and political visions for the region. It also identifies several future Caribbean political and cultural leaders, pointing out their earlier ties with the Comintern’s organizational network. In these developments, New York becomes instrumental not only as the center of a Caribbean diaspora at the time, but also as the point of confluence between the region’s immigrants and the agents of international communism. The evidence of the relationship between the two spheres suggests the need to reevaluate the Caribbean “transnational experience,” particularly in relation to the historical evolution of the Caribbean community in New York between the 1920s and the 1940s, taking into consideration the Comintern’s contribution to Caribbean radicalism, politics and culture.5

The longterm repercussions of the Soviet presence in the Caribbean during the first half of the 20th century cannot be understood in its political context, but rather must be evaluated in its social and cultural impact. For the most part, the communists’ clout was, and still is, mostly unsubstantial in the local, political and trade union power structure. Communism’s tacit yet pervasive impact probably had much more to do with the socially progressive program it proposed for the region, which strived to develop a consciousness of a cohesive, collective identity and unity in which local idiosyncrasy and conditions also played a part.

This is not to say that other militant groups did not participate in the development of a Caribbean blueprint for action or unity. However, while other political contenders were careful not to cross the boundaries of “proper” demands, particularly when addressing workers’ claims, gender, and race, the communists’ slogans reflected the proverbial “nothing to lose” attitude. Radical

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6 See, for example: Gordon K. Lewis, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); and Sidney Mintz and S. Price, Caribbean Contours (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).

7 Bonham C. Richardson, The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492–1992: A Regional Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

enthusiasts in the zone may have not yet mastered the organizational skills or the discipline to follow the Soviet dotted line to revolution, but their mentors’ audacious visions captured their imagination, if only for a moment. With time, some of the guidelines that defined communist strategy would enter the regional mainstream as key metaphors for progress, political reform, social justice, cultural unity, and even national identity, which ultimately contributed to the construction of the neverending patchwork of representative images identified by Caribbeanist scholarship.6

The point of departure for the definition of geographical and ideological boundaries for a Soviet Caribbean coincides with the establishment of the Caribbean Bureau of the Comintern in 1931. Located in New York, the new agency was responsible for the organization of radical activity in the area, as an intermediary office for the Latin American Secretariat and liaison office for Comintern front organizations, such as the Antiimperialist League. Geographically, the Caribbean Bureau extended the traditional boundaries for the region, which now comprehended the Greater Antilles, the British and French territories, Central America and Mexico, as well as Venezuela and Colombia. This expanded, more inclusive, heterogeneous vision of a “Caribbean Basin,” which supposedly did not begin to be considered until after 1945 according to most historians, was thus first proposed decades before by the international communist agency as a means to manage radical activity as an integrated, regional unit.7

The unprecedented, geographical distribution in turn responded to the circumstances at that moment, which supposedly evinced the region´s revolutionary potential. Several distinct areas were defined according to their particular conditions. The first one was Central America, where Augusto Sandino’s antiimperialist struggle was seen as a springboard for other revolts in nearby territories. The second comprised Venezuela and Cuba, then under very unpopular, dictatorial regimes. Another was the Lesser Antilles under British and French rule, in which racism and the plantations’ unchecked exploitation of workers were the main issues. Finally, there were support zones close to the main centers of action, including Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Panama, as well as Colombia, where the Venezuelan communist, Gustavo Machado, coordinated radical activities from Cúcuta in the

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8 rgaspi, f. 500, op.1, d. 10, l. 15 (“Acts for the meeting on 16 February 1933”). For a biographical summary of the agents of international communism and local radical leaders involved in Comintern activity, see Lazar Jeifets, Victor Jeifets and Peter Huber, La Internacional Comunista y América Latina, 1919–1943: Diccionario biográfico (Geneva: Instituto de Latinoamérica, 2004).

9 rgaspi, f. 500, op. 1, dd. 1–3 (“Acts for the meetings, 1931”).10 rgaspi, f. 500, op. 1, d. 11, l. 7 (“Acts for the meeting of 8 March 1933”).

ColombiaVenezuela border.8 Meanwhile in New York, several leaders of the Communist Party of the United States (cpusa) shared the administration of the Bureau’s operations with several exiled Cuban and Venezuelan leaders.9

Throughout the first half of the 1930s, the Comintern’s Caribbean Bureau focused on a radical, yet generic propaganda that strived to project a sense of unity among workers and peasants, beyond nationality, gender, race, and local conditions, exploiting what the communists understood to be a revolutionary crisis in the making within the region. This strategy also contributed leftist, antiimperialist foundations to local opposition movements, which later resurfaced in the region’s political culture of decolonization and social welfare.

Communist propaganda may have also contributed to the visions of a Caribbean dreamed in immigration beyond the ideological confines of Marxist rhetoric. For instance, the communist press was sometimes the only means of accessing news from territories usually ignored by the mainstream newspapers, a particularly important consideration for Caribbean expats in New York, where the Caribbean Bureau operated. At least in the case of Puerto Rican immigrants, this seems to have been the case. In 1933, the Caribbean Bureau decided to “include in all the issues [of Mundo Obrero] one article on Puerto Rico, since the experience has shown an increase in the sales among Puerto Rican workers in New York every time that an article about… [the island] is published.”10

The establishment of the Caribbean Bureau in New York fostered a unique dynamic within the local, radical scene, which most probably contributed to a particularly “Caribbean” interpretation and implementation of the communist design. As agents of a regional, liaison office for the Comintern, Soviet internationalists began to chart a political map for radical activity in the region. But the success of any plan of action presupposed the active collaboration of local militants. Even if unwillingly, the Comintern’s organizational platform had to provide space for local, radical leaders to participate within the administrative structure of the multinational ideological conglomerate. Thus, the participation of native leaders within the structure most likely added a more inclusive, local idiosyncrasy to an altogether Eurocentric and ideologically orthodox entity.

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11 See, for example, the guidelines for the Sacco and Vanzetti anniversary demonstrations: rgaspi, f. 500, op. 1, d. 4, l. 14 (“Carta de directivas, 11 de junio, 1931”). See also the communist publications of the period, El Comunista, El Machete, and La Correspondencia Sudamericana, for this sort of integrated vision connecting the workers´ movements throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States.

12 rgaspi, f. 500, op. 1, d. 2, ll. 31, 38 (“Letters from the Secretariat of Latin America to the Caribbean Bureau of the Comintern for 20 June 1931 and 27 July 1931”).

13 rgaspi, f. 500, op. 1, d. 2, l. 35 (“Letter from the Secretariat of Latin America to the Caribbean Bureau of the Comintern of 29 June 1931”); d. 3, l. 26 (“Plan de trabajo, julio a diciembre, 1931”); d. 4, l. 15 (“Carta de directivas, 11 de junio de 1931”).

14 rgaspi, f. 500, op. 1, d. 4, l. 15 (“Carta de directivas, 11 de junio de 1931”).

The Comintern’s internationalist concept of a workers’ world without boundaries also played a part in creating the holographic projection of a Caribbean struggle for freedom and justice. The keyword was unity. According to this design, the antiimperialist armies in Sandino’s Nicaragua for example, now struggled in tandem with forces against the Juan Vicente Gómez dictatorship in Venezuela and the Gerardo Machado regime in Cuba. Even when so far apart, and despite their national particularities, these antiimperialist legions and the movements to end dictatorships in Venezuela and Cuba also joined those who opposed the lynching of Blacks in the Southern states of the u.s. or the death sentences for the two anarchist workers, Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and simultaneously marched along those who opposed racial discrimination of Black workers in Jamaica and Trinidad or indigenous plantation workers in El Salvador.11

The Caribbean Bureau’s radical agenda also pioneered a number of local initiatives and propaganda strategies that later informed mainstream geopolitical and cultural visions in the region. In addition, the agency spearheaded the use of a language of inclusion that later became a standard of modernity and democracy for the zone. The emphasis on communication delineated the strategy. But while language traditionally segregated Caribbean territories, now it served to represent the many voices of one and the same, common struggle. Directives not only called for a “clear and simple language” when addressing regional political and social issues in the communist press, but insisted on including ethnic and racial groups traditionally ignored even by radical opposition groups.12 In recruiting campaigns, the agency acknowledged the importance of these demographic elements, along with that of women workers, in view of their significant presence in the area.13 In the case of important celebrations such as antiimperialist demonstrations, instructions also pointed out that “special manifestos for Indians and Blacks – in their own languages – are of great importance….”14

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15 Barry Carr, “Identity, Class, and Nation: Black Immigrant Workers, Cuban Communists, and the Sugar Insurgency, 1925–1934,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 78, no. 1 (Feb. 1998): 83–118. The insurgency Carr identifies in the sugar mills in Cuba also spread to Puerto Rico during the early 1930s. See Georg Fromm, “La huelga de 1934: Una interpre-tación marxista (II),” Claridad (1–7 July 1977): 34.

16 rgaspi, f. 500, op. 1, d. 4, ll. 14–15 (“Carta de directivas, 11 de junio de 1931”).

Guidelines took in consideration the subtle social and ethnic nuances within the region, and focused on minorities usually considered insignificant or outsiders by native radicals. For example, in Spanishspeaking Cuba, Blacks from nearby British and French colonies had become the most exploited and destitute group of sugar cane workers. The focus of Comintern agents on special, local circumstances, particularly in the case of these migrants’ revolutionary potential, resulted in the creation of an apparently successful, longterm organizational platform in Cuba as well as in neighboring islands. It may have also provoked a sort of domino effect, extending the sugar insurgency to other territories of the region.15

Another key feature of the Caribbean Bureau’s legacy had to do with the articulation of concepts by means of a powerful, iconographic language that conveyed messages with cultural rather than linguistic precision. Most likely, the process also contributed to the construction of cultural holograms in which completely different issues fused together into an apparently coherent, believable formula of reality. “Yankee imperialism,” for example, a term that would progressively identify the radical rhetoric particularly in the Spanishspeaking territories, was one of the phrases Comintern agents exploited when referring to Caribbean conditions. Instructions to the Caribbean Bureau, for instance, turned the commemoration of the Sacco and Vanzetti executions into an “Antiimperialist day,” since the two anarchists had been supposedly “murdered by yankee imperialism, the main enemy of the working masses of the Caribbean….”16

The directives called for a rhetorical fusion of “the struggle against yankee imperialism and complete national independence of the countries of the Caribbean…,” adding the racial issue into the formula. Guidelines pointed out that the anticolonial movement was also “a struggle against white supremacy of yankee imperialism against discrimination….” Within this outline, “yankee imperialism” in the Caribbean almost imperceptibly blended with notions of “lynching yankees,” in the United States, while the struggle against unemployment and salary cuts simultaneously merged with the striving for “complete equality” not only for Blacks, but for women workers and youngsters as well. In the United States and Europe, communist ideology singled out capitalism as

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17 Ibid., d. 4, ll. 14–15.18 On Puerto Rico’s Commonwealth party, Partido Popular Democrático, and the ideological

foundations of its program, see: Emilio González, “Class Struggle and Politics in Puerto Rico During the Decade of the 40’s: The rise of the P.D.P.,” Two Thirds 2, no. 1 (1979): 46–57; Emilio Pantojas, “Puerto Rican Populism Revisited: The ppd during the 1940’s,” Journal of Latin American Studies 21, no. 3 (1989): 521–57; and Angel G. Quintero Rivera, Bases sociales de la transformación ideológica del ppd, 1940–1950 (San Juan: cerep, 1975).

the enemy; in the Caribbean, “yankee imperialism” identified a variety of categories of exploitation in the region. The racial differentiation of “white” versus “Black” also blurred national nuances, particularly in the case of the differences between u.s. and British imperialism, which in turn made it easier to classify the two as one and the same sort of evil.17 Throughout the next decades, the term evolved into a linguistic stereotype in the Caribbean radical lexicon, signifying political, as well as social, economic, racial, and even gender exploitation and abuse.

The longterm effects of the Comintern’s Caribbean Bureau activity and propaganda also included iconographic messages that subliminally connected with popular concepts of liberation and justice and that were later recycled as ideological parameters for the region’s political culture. Populist, rather than ideologically communist, these “progressive” components, such as labor and welfare benefits, and land reform, were probably rendered harmless enough for the traditional oligarchies and foreign interests to stomach. Thus, they were able to survive as part of the moderate political and cultural glossary of the postwar decolonization era.

For example, when Puerto Rico inaugurated its first constitutional government in 1952, the ruling party’s campaign slogan – Pan, Tierra y Libertad (Bread, Land, and Freedom) – became an iconic characterization of the new government’s policies.18 The slogan, however, was actually a carbon copy of a local communist party slogan during the late thirties.

As was the case with other territories in the Soviet Caribbean, Puerto Rican democracy in the postwar period exhibited traces of its radical roots. The original constitutional project for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, for instance, established employment as a human right for all citizens, an item only the Stalinist constitution flaunted at the time. According to u.s. Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) records, the new governor, Luis Muñoz Marín, had offered the position of head of the Labor Department to the former Secretary General of the Puerto Rican Communist Party (pcp), Alberto E. Sánchez, who had joined Muñoz’s Popular Democratic Party after the liquidation of the pcp in

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19 Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín (flmm), Correspondencia, Colección Jaime Benítez (not catalogued), Intelligence Report from the Intelligence Division, Office of Chief Naval Operations, Navy Department, nos. 175–42, 1–3.

20 flmm, Serie 6, Sección 4, Sub-serie nos. 323–25: “Asociación de Choferes” (no. 378); “Comité de Organizaciones Obreras Pro-Legislación Social” (no. 880); “Congreso General de Trabajadores, 1944–1946” (no. 881); “Congreso Pro-Independencia.” On Sánchez, also see Fromm, “La huelga de 1934,” 34.

21 flmm, Correspondencia, Colección Jaime Benítez (not catalogued), “Weekly Summary of Subversive Activities in Puerto Rico for the Period August 20–25…,” 3. On the Comintern file for Muñoz Marín: rgaspi, f. 495, op. 254, d. 27. On the fbi files on Governor Muñoz Marín: “Puerto Rico Files Show fbi’s Zeal; For Decades, Secret U.S. Dossiers Targeted Suspected,” fbi Files on Puerto Ricans, http://www.prsecretfiles.net/news_details .html?article=73 (last accessed on 10 August 2012).

22 rgaspi, f. 500, op. 1, d. 8, ll. 29, 30; d. 11, ll. 1, 3, 7, 12, 57.23 An Insular Police report to the Governor on Sánchez corroborates his relationship with

the communists while working in New York: flmm, Sección V, Serie 1, Sub-serie 12, Cartapacio 247, Documento no. 2, 1951, “Correspondencia general; Informes confidenciales individuales; Sub-tema: Sánchez, Alberto E;” flmm, Sección V, Serie 2, Cartapacio 249, Documento no. 3, 1956,“Sánchez, Luis Alberto [sic.].”

1944.19 It is not clear whether Sánchez also negotiated the inclusion of a constitutional right to employment with the new governor. Whatever the case, the u.s. blocked both the constitutional statute on the right to work and Sánchez’s appointment. However, the former pcp Secretary General did win a delegate seat in the House of Representatives, which he held throughout the next twenty years.20 As for the governor’s surreptitious relationship with the communists, although implied in fbi surveillance documents, the details remain shrouded in mystery, as does his classified personal file in the Comintern archives.21

“Populist” and “democratic” as the Commonwealth party he represented, Alberto E. Sanchéz serves as an example of the silent but powerful repercussions of the underground networks established by international communism in the Caribbean. Bureau’. Acts for a Caribbean Bureau meeting, in early 1933, mention an Alberto E. Sánchez in attendance when a report on Puerto Rico was read, and in another when he was included as member of a new editorial board troika for Mundo Obrero.22 According to other reports, while living in New York, Sánchez had been recruited as delegate to an international congress in Moscow in 1932, where his connections with Comintern agents probably led to his participation in Caribbean Bureau meetings once back in New York.23

In addition, although the Communist Party of Puerto Rico was particularly weak, the subliminal, symbolic codes inherent in the Comintern’s holographic

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24 flmm, “Correspondencia, Colección Jaime Benítez (not catalogued),” “Headquarters Post of San Juan, Office of the Post Commander,” 20 August 1936, 1–2.

25 For a short discussion concerning the Nationalist Party’s relationship with the Comintern and a list of related documents in the Soviet archive, see Sandra Pujals, “¿Una perla en el Caribe soviético?: Puerto Rico en los archivos de la Internacional Comunista en Moscú,” Op. Cit., no. 17 (2006–2007): 117–57.

26 Manuel Caballero, Entre Gómez y Stalin, la sección venezolana de la Internacional Comunista (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, Consejo de Desarrollo Científico y Humanístico, 1989); Robert J. Alexander, Rómulo Betancourt and the Transformation of Venezuela (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1982); Rodolfo CerdasCruz, The Communist International in Central America, 1920–36 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993).

27 Steven Schwartzberg, “Rómulo Betancourt: From a Communist AntiImperialist to a Social Democrat with U.S. Support,” Journal of Latin American Studies 29, no. 3 (Oct. 1997): 613–65; Steven Ellner, “The Venezuelan Left in the Era of the Popular Front, 1936–1945,” Journal of Latin American Studies 11, no. 1 (1979): 169–84.

propaganda of solidarity and alliance permeated radical activity long after the original policies were in place. For example, when in 1936, u.s. federal authorities arrested the ultraradical leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist party, his supporters called for the organization of a committee to negotiate his release. As a result, members of an array of radical associations formed a commission under the trademark, “Frente Unido,” a term the Comintern had coined as a strategy in the 1920s but had long since abandoned.24 However, for the Nationalists, who apparently had a shortlived interlude with the Comintern in the late 1920s, the concept of a convergence of radical forces for a common cause, represented in the Comintern strategy a decade before, still seemed to express the notion of the sort of antiimperialist coalition they sought to organize.25

The enduring legacy of the Caribbean Bureau’s propaganda and strategies is also evident in Venezuela’s political evolution. For instance, Rómulo Betancourt’s communist affiliations have been the subject of an intense historiographical debate.26 Apparently, Betancourt left the Communist Party of Venezuela after a heated controversy with the Caribbean Bureau representatives in the early 1930s. During the next decade, he became a charismatic, Populist leader and later, President of his country by 1945. Staunchly anti communist, Betancourt is still today remembered as the “Father of Venezuelan Democracy,” although his government’s policies of labor welfare, land reform, and social justice for the peasantry clearly resembled the communist program of the Comintern years.27

Bringing the racial issue to the political frontline was most likely one of the most significant contributions of the Comintern´s Caribbean agenda to the

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28 rgaspi, f. 500, op. 1, d. 9, l. 99.29 Ibid., d. 9, ll. 97–99.30 Ibid., d. 9, l. 99.31 Eric Williams, “Contemporary Pattern of Race Relations in the Caribbeans,” Phylon 16,

no. 4 (1955): 367–79.32 On Sinani, whose real name was G. Skalov, see Jeifets et al., La Internacional Comunista y

América Latina, 306–08.

future development of a sense of unity and identity in the region. It was perhaps also the most enduring yet controversial, since racial discrimination was not even contemplated as an item within Caribbean radical politics at the time. Caribbean Bureau guidelines, for example, stressed the need to organize indigenous groups “in a struggle against the special forms of national oppression and discrimination to which they are subjected, leading them into a struggle for selfdetermination… against the expropriations of indigenous lands…, the destruction of communal life, and the confiscation and distribution of the lands they inhabit.”28 However, even the apparently most progressive and radical local groups could not grasp the sort of racial integration that the communists had already charted as part of their vision of Caribbean. The Caribbean Bureau repeatedly complained about the lack of support local leaders conferred to its racial policies, calling for a “turnabout” on this matter.29 The Bureau also recommended the formulation “of specific demands concerning [these nationalities’] particular interests,” while reminding the local comrades that these groups were “important segments of the Caribbean population....”30 It would take at least another decade for racial equality to advance to the forefront as a constitutional issue in the Spanish Caribbean, and even longer in the British West Indies.31

Caribbean Bureau directives on the race issue may have had a local scope, but their essence was international. In fact, the Bureau´s call for a strategy of “struggle for the selfdetermination” of racial minorities according to the concept of “oppressed nationalities,” may have actually responded to a Soviet mandate dictated from Moscow. Prior to serving as head of the Secretariat of Latin America, G. Sinani, had been one of the chief political organizers in Turkestan and other areas of Central Asia during the years following the Russian Revolution. Sinani’s coordination of the campaign for the formal policy of “selfdetermination” of the nonRussian minorities had helped to secure Bolshevik control over those territories.32 Apparently, his experience in the East helped him develop a perspective on issues related to imperialism, which he applied to the Caribbean situation. It is possible that the concepts of “oppressed nationalities” and “selfdetermination” that later became staples of

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33 See, for example: Oscar Berland, “The Emergence of the Communist Perspective on the ‘Negro Question’ in America: 1919–1931, Part One,” Science and Society 63, no. 4 (1999): 411–32; and Hakim Adi, “PanAfricanism and Communism: the Comintern, the ‘Negro Question’ and the First International Conference of Negro Workers, Hamburg 1930,” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 1, no. 2 (2008): 237– 54.

34 Gary Edward Holcomb, Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2007).

35 Tatiana Tagirova, “Claude McKay’s Liberating Narrative: Russian and Anglophone Caribbean Literary Connections” (PhD diss., Department of Comparative Literature, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, 2005).

the democratic rhetoric of decolonization may have been tested by the Soviets in the Caribbean radical arena more than a decade before they were articulated before the United Nation’s General Assembly by the proponents of Caribbean political modernity.

Most Caribbean scholars recognize color, race, and the experience of slavery as defining elements in the evolution of a Caribbean cultural identity, particularly as conveyed in the works of outstanding literary figures and intellectuals of the region. However, the connection between these visions and an author’s past relationship with communist activism is usually brushed aside or simply obviated. For instance, C.L.R. James’ and Eric Williams’ works are underscored as significant foundations in the evolution of a Caribbean identity for the West Indies, without taking into account that the racial identity articulated in their arguments was a byproduct – even if unwillingly as in the case of Williams – of the legacy of Comintern propaganda in the region.33 Another example is the distinguished Jamaican poet and writer, Claude McKay, considered one of the most emblematic figures of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as a leading author in modern Caribbean literature. As in the case of C.L.R. James, scholars often downplay McKay’s ideology, focusing on his use of Caribbean elements and his deeply engrained racial consciousness instead. However, according to new research, McKay’s communist principles greatly enhanced his discourse, and actually remained a defining element for his persona well into the late 1930s.34 The evidence also suggests his direct relationship with the Soviet Union, and his covert work for the communists under the code name “Sasha,” a double identity as secret as his uncertain sexuality.35

Scholars have usually downplayed the role of the communists and the Soviets in the development of Latin American and Caribbean radicalism before 1959, in view of their inconsequential political participation and the lack of electoral support for their programs. However, the evidence presented here suggests the creation of social and cultural networks between communist

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international agencies and local radicals, who later adapted and articulated elements of the communist agenda to their visions of a new Caribbean.

Some of the cultural and political leaders of the new Caribbean remained loyal communists to the end, while others adopted a more moderate and acceptable persona, in tune with the new atmosphere of decolonization after 1945. Others relied on their literary skills to provide metaphors of liberation, and racial pride and identity that could assist in advancing the Caribbean antiimperialist agenda. Finally, a few spitefully rejected their shady radical past, while surreptitiously calling their communistinspired agenda “democratic” or “progressive.” Whatever the case, the exchange between the agents of communist internationalism and local Caribbean activists throughout the first half of the 1930s, organized from the hub of Caribbean immigration in New York, contributed to setting the political and cultural stage for the next decade in the zone.

The examples discussed above suggest a relationship between agents of international communism and Caribbean immigrants in New York during the 1930s. They also emphasize the participation of the Caribbean Bureau of the Comintern in the development of cultural, social and political visions that may have served as a catalyst for a Caribbean sense of identity, especially after 1945. Interpretation and personal experience, both past and present, no doubt played a part in the configuration of political, social, and cultural visions of Caribbean unity, identity, and “sense of belonging,” all so influential in the evolution of the region in the postwar period. But the Comintern´s ability to tap into unexploited, perpetual elements of social discontent, such as gender, race, and generational conflicts, must also be taken into account, as must its skillful articulation of concepts in a vivid, iconographic language of the region’s popular culture.

When it comes to the territories of the Caribbean Basin, the results of this exchange are particularly significant in their historical context. Most of the revolutions with Marxist overtones in our hemisphere since the 1920s happened within the geographical area that the Comintern’s Caribbean Bureau charted for its organizational activity. As weak as communism might seem now as a political alternative in the region, its persistent appeal can hardly be denied. It is therefore important to understand the dynamics that contributed to the enduring effect of communism beyond its political façade, in the subliminal lexicon of visions and messages its agents left behind. Only then will we be able to understand how and why this radical ideology spoke to local populations, and how these groups translated ideology into their own mental holographs of themselves and others.

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A Soviet Caribbean: The Comintern, New York’s Internationalist Diaspora, and the Forging of Post-War Caribbean Visions, 1931-1936

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