Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (102 page)

In the mean time, another uprising had ousted President Díaz in the capital after fraudulent presidential elections. The free-thinking liberal Francisco Madero formed a government which tried to end corruption. Madero had managed to persuade many supporters of the PLM to join forces with his party. Ricardo Flores Magón however insisted that the
Maderistas
merely wanted political reform whereas the PLM was fighting for economic as well as political freedom by handing over the land to the people, without distinction according to sex. In
Regeneración
on 25 February 1911, Ricardo attacked bitterly Madero as ‘a traitor to the cause of liberty’ and reasserted his own anarchist principles:

Undeterred, Madero signed a peace treaty with Díaz and began to suppress the PLM. But his government was unable to assert its authority over the regions where land expropriation continued on an increasing scale. In September 1911, Ricardo wrote a new manifesto for the Junta of the PLM, declaring war against ‘Capital, Authority and the Church’ and calling on the people of Mexico to fight under the red flag with the cry of ‘Land and Liberty’.
¹⁷
The manifesto most fully expressed his anarchist-communist ideas. It not only called for the expropriation of the land and the means of production by those who worked them, but for armed struggle against those in power in order to bring about equality.

When Madero became president in October 1911, Zapata rose against him after issuing his
Plan de Ayala.
It was based to a large extent on Ricardo Flores Magón’s September manifesto. The peasant leader had finally lost all faith in politicians. In his
Plan de Ayala
, he criticized bitterly the ‘deceitful and traitorous men who make promises as liberators but who, on achieving power, forget their promises and become tyrants’. He called for: ‘The land free, free for all, without overseers and masters. Seek justice from tyrannical governments, not with a hat in your hand but with a rifle in your fists.’
¹⁸
Although Zapata was not strictly speaking an anarchist, he did much to disseminate Flores Magón’s ideas.

In February 1913, right-wing rebels tried to overthrow Madero who
managed to put them down during ten bloody and tragic days (
Década Trágica
). A week later Madero was assassinated on the orders of the commander of his own forces, General Victoriana Huerta. The revolution then flared up again between the federal army and the various revolutionary forces. When Huerta was forced to resign in 1914, Zapata’s forces, in alliance with armies led by Pancho Villa, and Venustiano Carranza from the North, entered Mexico City. Where Zapata had strong libertarian sympathies, Villa was more motivated by revenge without any clear ideology, and Carranza, as commander of the Constitutional Army, was in a mould similar to Madero.

When two conventions failed to reach an agreement between the three leaders, fighting broke out between their forces. Carranza seized power in Mexico City and got the US government to recognize him and send him arms. With uprisings on his hands from the Left and Right, Carranza in 1916 further managed to enlist the support of the industrial workers organized in the anarcho-syndicalist Casa del Obrero Mundial (House of the World Worker). They agreed to join Carranza’s army and formed ‘Red Battalions’ to fight against the peasant armies of Villa and Zapata. Tricked by their leaders, the workers destroyed what remained of the social revolution. Carranza then repaid them by threatening strikers with the death penalty and by closing down the Casa del Obrero Mundial.

Zapata and his army were beaten back to Morelos. Although the province was laid waste, they fought on for four more years from a mountain stronghold. ‘Men of the South’, he told his comrades, ‘it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!’ But despite his defiance, he was eventually betrayed in an ambush and killed in 1919. With him expired any hope that the Mexican Revolution would create a genuinely free and equal society. He died as he lived, an honest and courageous peasant, fighting for land and liberty for his people.

Ricardo Flores Magón, meanwhile, criticized the Mexican anarcho-syndicalist workers for betraying the natural class interests they shared with the peasants. He was arrested in the United States again after issuing a manifesto in March 1918 addressed from the PLM to ‘the anarchists of the world and the workers in general’. It announced the approaching death of the old society and called for the social revolution. It also insisted that

At his trial, Ricardo Flores Magón was sentenced to twenty years for allegedly violating the US Espionage Laws. Four years later, he was found
murdered in Leavenworth Penitentiary, Kansas. Like Kropotkin’s funeral in Russia two years before, Flores Magón’s in 1923 became a public demonstration. As the banners declared he ‘died for Anarchy’, but ironically the Mexican State presently came to honour its most rebellious citizen. The foremost Mexican anarchist of the twentieth century now lies entombed in the Rotunda of Illustrious Men in Mexico. City, and he is remembered throughout Mexico as ‘a great precursor of the Mexican Revolution’.
²⁰

Despite the failure of the Mexican Revolution, the labour movement remained predominantly anarcho-syndicalist. It had its first national congress in Mexico in 1921 and in 1922 the Mexican CGT was represented at the 1923 Syndicalist Congress in Berlin, claiming a membership of thirty thousand. As elsewhere in Latin America, it then steadily became more reformist.

The Mexican Revolution was the first major revolution in the twentieth century and had widespread repercussions. Although it degenerated into a squabble amongst politicians for power and privilege, its call for ‘Land and Liberty’ echoed across the Latin American continent. It has been taken up by the Zapatistas who rebelled in 1994 in Chiapas province and established a democratic form of self-government.

Like Argentina and Uruguay, the anarchists in Cuba exerted the greatest influence on the labour movement at the turn of the century. Cuba was not only the largest island in the Caribbean, but also one of the richest. Despite two long wars of independence, slavery had not been abolished until 1886, and Cuba did not become nominally independent until after the Spanish-American War of 1898. Anarchists however played an important role in the independence struggle and when the labour movement developed it rapidly moved in an anarcho-syndicalist direction.

The earliest anarchist groups appeared in Cuba in the 1860s, largely organized by Spanish immigrants. They quickly influenced the tobacco workers who were the most militant and politically conscious in the country. From 1865, they published the libertarian journal
La Aurora
(Dawn) and a year later formed the first trade union in Cuba, the Association of Tobacco Workers of Havana. Other trades followed suit but the first Workers’ Congress of Havana was not held until 1885. Inspired by the militant organizers Enrique Roig de San Martín, Enrique Messonier, and Enrique Cresci, Cuban workers, especially those in the tobacco industry, backed the openly anarchist organization La Alianza Obrera founded in 1887.

The paper
El Productor
, edited by Roig, called the members of the alliance ‘revolutionary socialists’, but they were known as anarchists for
their rejection of political parties and for their militancy. While Cuba was still fighting for its independence from Spain,
El Productor
argued that there was a basic contradiction between nationalism and socialism. In an article on ‘The Fatherland and the Workers’, it asked pointedly: ‘Is it that an independent fatherland consists in having its own government, in not depending on another nation … although its citizens are in the most degrading slavery?’
²¹
Its own message was that only a society without government could be free and that the true fatherland of the workers should be the world.

Anarcho-syndicalist ideas spread rapidly. At the Workers’ Congress held in Havana in 1892, the resolutions drafted by the anarchists Enrique Cresci, Enrique Suárez, and Eduardo González were passed, including the principle that ‘The working class will not be emancipated until it embraces revolutionary socialism, which cannot be an obstacle for the triumph of the independence of our country.’
²²
Indeed, the anarchists were so influential at this time that they had from the mid 1880s persuaded the Cuban tobacco workers in Florida and New York to bypass the political movement for national independence in favour of the social revolution.
²³

Even José Martí was affected by this libertarian tendency. He wrote in his journal
Patria
:

Known today as the ‘intellectual author’ of the Cuban Revolution, Martí knew that ‘To change the master is not to be free’. But while he published the writings of Elisée Reclus in
Patria
, he cannot be called an anarchist. He appealed to the emerging Cuban working class but also cultivated conservative Cuban groups in exile by stressing the need for class co-operation and by trying to defuse the anarchist influence on the workers.

This did not prevent the anarchists from controlling the Cuban labour movement organized in the Confederación de Trabajadores Cubanos (CTC) from the 1890s. Many anarchists were also at the forefront of the struggle for independence, including Armando André, a commander in the rebel army. When Malatesta was invited to visit the island by the anarchist group publishing
El Mundo Ideal in
1900, he was not allowed by the authorities
to use the word ‘anarchy’, but he was able to trace the strong libertarian tradition of the Cuban independence movement:

In the first two decades of this century, the anarchists, with papers like
Tierra!
and
El Rebelde
, spread the ideas of Bakunin, Kropotkin and Reclus. They led the 1902 strike of the apprentices, the first major one of the new Republic. They helped form agrarian co-operatives and built up peasant organizations. They continued to be especially strong amongst the tobacco and construction workers.

The success of the Russian Revolution led to the CTC being eventually taken over by the communists in the 1920s. The anarchists formed the rival Confederación Nacional Obrera Cubana (CNOC) with the typographer Alfredo López as its general secretary. During the underground struggle against the Machado dictatorship, it led the call for the general strike, despite opposition from the communists, which eventually succeeded in ousting Machado in 1933. The communists however soon took over the CNOC and collaborated with Batista’s dictatorship during the thirties and forties.

A minor revival of anarchism occurred during the Second World War, when the Asociación Libertaria de Cuba was formed. It held its first congress in 1944 which was attended by delegates from all over the island. Its rapid growth was strong enough for Batista to declare: ‘The anarcho-syndicalist influence is as dangerous as communist intrusion!’
²⁶
But where Batista went on to court the communists, even appointing some as ministers, he did his best to suppress the anarchists.

While Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and their small band of guerrillas were fighting in the Sierra Maestra mountains, the anarchists played an important role in the urban underground. Their paper
El Libertario
had a wide circulation, and they put out clandestine radio broadcasts. The organized food workers, an important group in the tourist paradise of Havana, were mainly anarchist and published the journal
Solidaridad Gastronómica.

After the fall of Batista early in 1959, the anarchists continued to exert an influence on the course of the revolution. They were ready to go along with Castro when he promised, on the guerrillas’ triumphant entry into Havana, ‘humanistic democracy on the basis of liberty with bread for all
peoples’. Slogans went up all over the city: ‘Freedom with bread, bread without terror’; ‘Neither dictatorship from the right nor dictatorship from the left.’ The Agrarian Reform which distributed land to the peasants was widely popular. The old communists, who had collaborated with Batista, were kept out in the cold.