Remapping Cuban Political Imaginaries in the Age of Caribbean Insurgency

In the 1920s and the 1930s, Cuba (and indeed much of Latin America and the Caribbean) experienced a wave of popular oppositional politics. This restiveness was characterized by both moments of transnational radicalization (such as the US government executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, the massacre of striking workers on a United Fruit Company plantation in Columbia, and the 1932 peasant revolt in El Salvador) as well as mobilizations longer in duration, most prominently the rising movement against president-turned-dictator General Gerardo Machado, culminating in the toppling of his regime in 1933. This paper explores this era, which might be called the Age of Caribbean Insurgency, through the lives and actions of nonelite Cubans.

While studies of radical leftist and Pan-American movements emerging in Latin America during this period often concentrate (with good reason) on well known and well traveled activists and intellectuals, Cuban archival evidence reveals that “unknown” or lesser known individuals very often led spontaneous protests and demonstrations in Cuban streets. These everyday Cubans, from all walks of life, expressed clear visions of transnational solidarity and believed themselves to be at the forefront of their time’s most important struggles, including anti-racism, labor solidarity, and anti-imperialism. Significantly, many of these uncelebrated activists forged literal and figurative conceptual alliances, not necessarily with famous centers of political activism in New York, Paris, and Moscow, but with other “southern” spaces of radicalism such as El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Caribbean Columbia. The stories of their actions challenge scholars of interwar internationalism to rethink notions of core and periphery and pose new questions about the formation of south-south solidarities.