Translocal Anarchist Communities: Multiethnic and Multinational Movements in the Port Cities of Havana, Cuba, and Panama City, Panama, in the Early 1900s

From the early 1890s to the mid-1920s, anarchists across the Caribbean organized a transnational network that linked South Florida, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Panama. Havana, Cuba was the eastern node of the network and Panama City, Panama was the western node. This paper utilizes anarchist newspapers and cultural productions like fiction, plays, and poems to illustrate how anarchists formed countercultural port communities on either side of the Caribbean. Because of their importance as gateways to the Caribbean, both cities developed into trans-local, multi-ethnic, and multi-national enclaves where radical community organizing emerged to challenge political, economic, and religious elites while working to generate and live in alternative community structures. Both cities became important destinations for migrating anarchists and like-minded radicals. Both cities developed their own anarchist press, radical labor organizations, cultural initiatives, and social events. These alternative communities sought to unite people of different races and ethnicities at times when racism was rampant against Afro-Cubans in Cuba and West Indians in Panama.

As both Cuba and Panama were newly independent countries with emerging nationalist politicians, anarchists created alternative communities that rejected nationalism and instead sought to unite native-born and immigrant workers into radical labor and social organizations. In short, anarchists in these port cities used meetings, newspapers, cultural productions, and alternative health and living experiments to develop radical countercultural working-class communities where men and women “lived the revolution” in the present.