Facts and circumstances of a fourth generation of anarchists in Cuba
From Federación Anarquista de México-IFA
July 20, 2024
An organization like this formed the backbone of a large group of young people of that time who managed to recover from the Stalinist kidnapping, with police support, of the National Workers' Confederation of Cuba (CNOC), a masterpiece of the Cuban anarcho-syndicalists, with Alfredo López as one of the most representative figures of the collective efforts of the second generation of anarchists in Cuba. The Youth Federation of the mid-1930s also managed to give new impetus to the legendary, but already declining, Federation of Anarchist Groups of Cuba (FGAC), leading in 1942 to the creation of the Libertarian Association of Cuba (ALC). relevant and today forgotten anarchist-inspired organizations such as the Federation of Peasant Associations, the Association of Anti-Fascist Combatants, the more discreet, but equally active, Local Defense Committees and a serious failed attempt to intervene in the world of Cuban work such as the Confederation General of Workers, to confront the Stalinist monopoly on the union world that had been established since January 28, 1939, with the creation of the Cuban Workers' Central (CTC).
This organizational framework of the third generation of Cuban libertarians also gave rise to lively sociability and a flourishing anarchist publishing movement, which renewed the long presence of anarchist press media and public activities in Cuba. Thus, three Libertarian Congresses were organized (1944, 1948, 1950), activities and practices with anti-authoritarian perspectives in peasant associations, neighborhood associations, and in regions of the country expanded throughout the rest of the geography and social fabric of the country. marginalized by other trends of ideas, some attempts in the Afro-descendant associative movement and in the artistic sphere, a whole legacy of experiences that the fourth generation of anarchists in Cuba are trying to reconstruct and rediscover in the Cuba of the last three decades, with the intermittent support from those veteran comrades of the ALC, especially Frank Fernández, who in the '90s founded the Cuban Libertarian Movement in Florida and published that valuable and warm book Anarchism in Cuba , beautifully edited by the Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation of Madrid.
In the absence of a detailed record of anarchist activity in Cuba between 1961 and the beginning of the 2000s and taking as reference our own personal experience, the fourth generation of anarchists in Cuba acquired an explicit organizational form with the creation on May 1, 2013 of the Workshop Libertarian Alfredo López, in homage to the leading figure of anarcho-syndicalism in Cuba and the Chicago Martyrs. “The workshop”, as we affectionately call it, in these ten years of existence, has tried to take care of all the long void of forgetfulness generated by the long Stalinist-Fidelist night that has handcuffed Cuban society, but also of all the disintegration social, authoritarianism scientifically naturalized in the mentality of several generations and the scant reflection on means and organizational forms, which flourished in Cuba before 1959, with the third anarchist generation in Cuba.
We have had to carry out all of the above in the midst of the gigantic and efficient apparatus of preventive social repression that has been organized by the political police in Cuba during the last six decades, where all minimally autonomous social expression of state institutions has almost always been disintegrated. and methodically repressed.
In this context, a small group of people with anti-authoritarian intentions created the Critical Observatory Network of Cuba in 2006, a space that became an assembly coordinator of self-managed projects, where almost a dozen initiatives collaborated in areas such as anti-authoritarian education (El Trencito Project ), self-didactism (La Escuelita), intellectual history of liberation thought (Cátedra Haydee Santamaría), environmental activism (Colectivo Guardabosques, the environmental initiative La Rueda), sexual dissidence (Colectivo Arcoiris), anti-racist activism and Afro-descendant memory (Cofradía of Negritude, the performative poetic brotherhood Chekendeke, the Anamuto Anti-Racist Alliance, the autonomous initiative Corner of the decolonization of Cuban popular historical memory November 27), the laboratory of proposals for socialist renewal in Cuba Participatory and Democratic Socialism (SPD group ), then the anarchist initiatives Taller Libertario Alfredo López, Locación Cristo Salvador and the Almario publishing initiative
The Alfredo López Libertarian Workshop, the Guardabosque Collective, Cristo Salvador Location were the ones who, in a context of decline of autonomous initiatives, developed the Libertarian Springs Days of Havana, which began in 2013, developing them almost without interruption until the recent June 2024, which In the end they had almost no activity. In that period of time we developed a large number of activities in family and public spaces (related and in dispute). We founded the small monthly Tierra Nueva. Space for interaction of anarchist people and ideas , the Guillotina Inútil publishing label , we contributed to launching the first autonomous environmental magazine in Cuba Guardabosque, the magazine Almario and under a common spirit Carne Negra. Fanzine about Visual Arts .
We reposition an anarchist perspective in the public debate of ideas in Cuba and repopulate with forgotten dates the calendars of historical events in Cuba dominated by Stalinists, liberals, Trotskyists and social democrats. After half a century we managed to regain presence in prestigious international anarchist spaces such as the Caracas Anarchist Video and Magazine Fair, the London Anarchist Book Fair, several IFA congresses, we received invitations or coordinated meetings with anarchist federations and initiatives in Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Holland, Czech Republic, Slovakia . In 2018, thanks to the international visibility we achieved in the anarchist media around the world, we closed a successful crowdfunding campaign that allowed us to buy a space in Havana and we founded ABRA, the first anarchist social center in Cuba, after more than a century of absence in Cuba and in 2016 we launched to promote the creation of the Anarchist Federation of Central America and the Caribbean (FACC), which currently tries to survive minimally as a space for communication and intermittent coordination between comrades in the region.
2019 is the year of the beginning of the ongoing paralysis that leads to the crisis of the Libertarian Spring Days 2024 and the rest of the spaces that we started in 2013. This has occurred in the midst of a material situation marked by the global effects of the pandemic of COVID 2019, in which many of the coordination spaces for autonomous social initiatives were dismantled, but also for everything that has come with the post-pandemic in Cuba: the extinction of the public transportation system in the country, collective precariousness of salaries due to rampant and out of control inflation, the collapse of food supply systems, the national electrical system, the mass exodus of more than a million people in less than two years, the precarious aging of our parents, with poverty pensions and no medication coverage for our sick, with the government's liquidation of the public health system in Cuba, prioritizing real estate and hotel investments, which has condemned us to a life of reinforced hardship, where the central issue is survival. A survival under a more strengthened police surveillance and a more arbitrary legality, after the historic days of massive protests of July 11-13, 2021, against precariousness and government despotism, which have left a balance of more than 1,000 political prisoners , subjected to long sentences and terrible prison conditions, for the sole crime of exercising the right and duty of protest in the face of widespread misery, with no prospects for a government solution.
The small fourth generation of anarchists in Cuba are living, like the rest of Cuban society, the long agony of the so-called Cuban Revolution, devoured by the “Socialist State” born from it and which has given rise to a military-business oligarchy, entrenched in the powerful Cuban oligopoly GAESA (Grupo de Apoyo Empresarial SA), which manages million-dollar funds and investments in Cuba and outside Cuba, a mafia control of the dwindling state productive network, the hotel industry, the juicy export of medical services under conditions of semi-slavery to the workers and health professionals involved, the administration is also mafia-like about the use of the large remittances that Cuban emigrants send annually to their families, in conditions of kidnapping in Cuba and other dissimilar businesses, from which that oligarchy exploits to Cuban society itself and its capabilities, as an attached colonial territory and successfully finances an imposing repressive police and prison apparatus, with a gigantic and unquantified prison population, which allows them to manage the ongoing social collapse without large doses of explicit violence, as a true State within the Cuban State.
At the same time that they entrench themselves like parasites in the social body of the country, this oligarchy at the international level cries pitifully every year at the UN for its favorite mantra: “the immediate and unconditional lifting of the inhuman Yankee blockade of Cuba”, as “the problem most important thing that afflicts the Cuban Revolution", which is nothing other than the luxury exit to which these oligarchs aspire, which would allow them to stabilize for another decades, as a dominant group within Cuba, as the administrators and direct beneficiaries of the reestablishment of a neocolonial relationship with the United States, a relationship that they themselves broke in 1960-61 and now regret having founded “the first free territory in America,” under the thoughtless anti-Yankee impulses of the founder of the current Castro dynasty. Overcoming this moment of overflowing authoritarian and militaristic anti-imperialism of the Castro oligarchy would allow them to protect their domination of Cuba, under the Yankee protectorate, and sit at the table with them, before the Cuban bourgeoisie of Florida does so, as the pigs did. of Manor Farm with the humans they once expelled, with their victorious animal revolution, in George Orwell's masterpiece.
Regarding none of the questions raised above, we anarchists in Cuba have the slightest possibility of defining absolutely anything. In our hands we only have meager but essential tools: exercise and disseminate the desire for self-organization, mutual aid and free grassroots initiative in all issues of daily life, erode and denature internalized authoritarian logics, even among those we fight. governmental despotism, banish the need for new humanist commanders-in-chiefs from our lives and take charge among equals and like-minded people of our own precarious existence, in solidarity and, without doctrinal arrogance, attentive to the terrains, themes and spaces where the felt need arises of the grassroots organization and the assembly among equals, to contribute our proposals and our ideas. Anarchist tension runs through us all everywhere and is not the monopoly of those who define themselves as anarchists.
The collapse of the monumental Kafkaesque State that has been built in Cuba, supposedly to protect the Cuban Revolution, is part of an ongoing global crisis and we know that it will not be an automatically liberating event . It will depend on the wills, desires and organizational capacities of the communities and peoples that make up Cuba and the world. The three generations of anarchists in Cuba who have preceded us have been there and we will also be there.
Organized people, Matrias without States
Abelard