Black Flag Boricuas

Anarchism, Antiauthoritarianism, and th eLeft in Puerto Rico, 1897-1921

Kirwin R. Shaffer

• Éditeur: University of Illinois Press
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780252094903
• Sujet: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Sous-sujet: Politik

This pathbreaking study examines the radical Left in Puerto Rico from the final years of Spanish colonial rule into the 1920s. Positioning Puerto Rico within the context of a regional anarchist network that stretched from Puerto Rico and Cuba to Tampa, Florida, and New York City, Kirwin R. Shaffer illustrates how anarchists linked their struggle to the broader international anarchist struggles against religion, governments, and industrial capitalism. Their groups, speeches, and press accounts--as well as the newspapers that they published--were central in helping to develop an anarchist vision for Puerto Ricans at a time when the island was a political no-man's-land, neither an official U.S. colony or state nor an independent country. Exploring the rise of artisan and worker-based centers to develop class consciousness, Shaffer follows the island's anarchists as they cautiously joined the AFL-linked Federación Libre de Trabajadores, the largest labor organization in Puerto Rico. Critiquing the union from within, anarchists worked with reformers while continuing to pursue a more radical agenda achieved by direct action rather than parliamentary politics. Shaffer also traces anarchists' alliances with freethinkers seeking to reform education, progressive factions engaged in attacking the Church and organized religion, and the emerging Socialist movement on the island in the 1910s. The most successful anarchist organization to emerge in Puerto Rico, the Bayamón bloc founded El Comunista, the longest-running, most financially successful anarchist newspaper in the island's history. Stridently attacking U.S. militarism and interventionism in the Caribbean Basin, the newspaper found growing distribution throughout and financial backing from Spanish-speaking anarchist groups in the United States. Shaffer demonstrates how the U.S. government targeted the Bayamón anarchists during the Red Scare and forced the closure of their newspaper in 1921, effectively unraveling the anarchist movement on the island.

1.	The Roots of Anarchism and Radical Labor Politics in Puerto Rico, 1870s–1899

Since February 1895, Spanish soldiers had been chasing independence fighters around Cuba. For the third time in thirty years, men and women of all colors rose up against Spanish colonial rule. But it was not just the Cuban-born who sided with those seeking a violent repeal of European imperialism. Anarchists born in Spain but living and working in the tobacco industry in Havana, New York, Key West, and Tampa joined the struggle, putting aside their skepticism about a nationalist revolt and deciding that the fight for collective freedom was what mattered most. Among those European-born radicals in late 1896 was the twenty-four-year-old carpenter and cabinet maker Santiago Iglesias Pantín. For eight years Iglesias had been working with Havana’s anarchist community, and although he had never been arrested for his leftist activism or support for Cuban independence, he nevertheless grew fearful that the colonial noose was tightening. By December of that year, Spanish authorities were clamping down on anarchists. Those born in Cuba increasingly saw the insides of jail cells. Those born in Spain faced deportation to the Spanish penal colony on Fernando Poo off the West African coast and other isolated places. After witnessing one comrade after another fall into the clasp of Spanish authorities, Iglesias prepared to flee Cuba for England, where in the past European anarchists had gone into exile, including Pedro Esteve, Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and Adrián del Valle. However, before setting sail across the ocean, the ship first stopped in Puerto Rico, Spain’s other Caribbean colony. Upon docking in San Juan, Iglesias slipped off the ship and into the city.

The Puerto Rican political atmosphere that Iglesias found in late 1896 and early 1897 could not have appeared more different from the Cuban. Not only was there no organized armed uprising seeking independence, but neither was there a particularly well-organized labor movement or much more than a superficial anarchist community. In Cuba and Florida, anarchists were emerging as strong blocs within their respective labor movements before Cuban independence from Spain in 1898. However, the slow, limited development of Puerto Rican anarchism mirrored the slow, gradual rise of working-class consciousness and organized labor on this eastern Caribbean island, where there was very little worker interest in anarchism or in political independence. In fact, no significant labor movement had existed in Puerto Rico until the late 1890s. Nevertheless, several features characteristic of an embryonic anarchism had emerged as early as the 1870s, including the role of the lector (reader) in tobacco workshops as a means of radical consciousness-raising, the creation of mutual aid societies as well as recreational and study centers to foster cooperativism and education, and the artisan tradition of challenging authority to maintain autonomy. Santiago Iglesias, the longtime labor activist, would quickly find like-minded spirits in San Juan, where they tapped into these embryonic forms of worker resistance and solidarity.

The Origins of a Labor Left in Puerto Rico

The lector played a key educational role in the development of worker and artisan consciousness in the tobacco industries of Cuba and Florida.¹ In Puerto Rico, the lector was also instrumental in spreading leftist ideas among cigar rollers. In 1890, the first lector appeared at San Juan’s Ultramarina factory. The rollers paid lectores to read for three hours each day.² The lector read what the workers chose, usually newspapers, novels, pamphlets, and short stories. In this way, workers heard liberal and radical critiques of society as expressed in those publications. Because tobacco and cigars were primarily export products, port systems arose that also facilitated imports. In late-nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, where few roads hampered intraisland travel and communication, the region served by a port had better relations with that port than it did with neighboring regions. As a result, communities could be better tied to international influences than with cross-island ones. Spanish-language newspapers arrived in these ports, especially San Juan. As newspapers emerged in local tobacco factories and on the cigar-rolling floors in towns and cities across Puerto Rico, gradually workers and artisans came to hear these radical ideas.³

While the reader’s influence and thus the audience’s reception to radical ideas is difficult to measure, other dynamics reinforced this educational practice to help develop a consciousness among Puerto Rico’s artisans and workers. For instance, mutual-aid societies, which can be seen as inherently conservative institutions, furthered this growth. Workers contributed a small part of their income to a pool in case of injury or death. There was little that was radical or controversial in the practice. Certainly, this was not a fund used for political agitation or rebellious activities. Yet, mutual-aid societies were actually significant small ventures in worker collective behavior. Creating a fund separate from their employers and the state, artisans and laborers sacrificed small amounts of money to support themselves and their families should there be an accident or death. In a sense, individuals contributed to a cooperative effort for their collective and personal benefit. The first mutual-aid society emerged in Puerto Rico in 1873 when Spanish authorities issued the first libertad de asociación (free-association decree). Immediately, San Juan artisans, led by the carpenter Santiago Andrades, created the Sociedad Amigos del Bien Público (Friends for the Public Good Society). In the coming years, more mutual-aid societies arose across the island and were often linked to the creation of new artisan centers.⁴

The centers provided fertile ground for an emerging labor consciousness or even a radical agenda. Beginning in 1872, and growing in number after the free-association decree, urban artisans created the island’s first organizations dedicated to the laboring classes. These casinos de artesanos appeared to be little more than recreation centers for dancing, drinking, and mimicking habits of the island’s elite. However, these centers played important roles in resistance and solidarity. In San Juan, Ponce, Mayagüez, and San Germán, members of the casinos held regular veladas (social gatherings) where politically liberal plays were staged and readings held. While entertaining, these events grew to become as two historians note “a vehicle for class self-affirmation.”⁵ Along these lines, perhaps the most important and long-lasting impact emerging from the centers was the rise of educational efforts targeting artisans. While members staged plays at veladas, artisans also developed theater groups to act out their growing understanding of exploitation and injustice. Plays, thus, became educational tools. In addition, the casinos developed night courses for members, taught music and drawing, and established libraries.⁶

By the 1890s, radical artisans expanded these educational efforts beyond the casinos to create CESs. In Cuba, anarchists considered CESs central to their educational goals. Labor radicals in Puerto Rico did too. While Cuban anarchists were embroiled in war by 1897, Puerto Rican radicals—facing no such conflagration on the island—used CESs to advance their goal of transforming artisan education from bettering oneself for a job to freeing oneself from those who enslaved them.⁷ As leaders in the emerging labor movement saw it, CESs would play a role in educating workers politically. Such political work radicalized workers to launch a wave of strikes in the 1890s, helped to push the Spanish government to grant Puerto Rico a level of autonomy within the Spanish empire in 1897, and mobilized workers to confront the island’s changing political and economic structures with the emergence of U.S. control after 1898.⁸

The best-known CES opened in 1897. That year, labor radicals José Ferrer y Ferrer, Eduardo Conde, Santiago Iglesias Pantín, Eusebio Félix, Fernando Gómez Acosta, and Ramón Romero Rosa created the newspaper Ensayo Obrero in San Juan to agitate for workers’ rights and benefits. These men were “socialists” in the most all-encompassing of late-nineteenth-century meanings. They freely moved back and forth within different strands of leftist thought, publishing articles and opinions from a wide range of socialist camps, especially anarchism. While launching the newspaper, these men also opened the CES called El Porvenir de Borinquen (the Future of Borinquen) in July 1897. Twice weekly, the CES held meetings to discuss anarchism, socialism, and various tactics and strategies of movements in history and around the world. At other times of the week, workers were free to read from the growing library of socialist and anarchist works, some of which were translated into Spanish by members themselves.⁹ While El Porvenir de Borinquen was the most famous CES, it was certainly not alone. CESs stretched around the island with no fewer than thirty in existence by 1900. All important cities had at least one, with some cities hosting numerous centers. There were three in Cayey, four each in Ponce, Yauco, and Mayagüez, and six in San Juan.¹⁰ However, the future anarchist enclave in the tobacco city of Caguas would not gain a CES for several more years.

As workers and artisans slowly organized, capitalist labor relations penetrated various sectors of the island workforce at different times. The 1849 jornalero (day-laborer) law required landless Puerto Ricans to register with the government, carry passbooks, and get jobs on farms. The number of agricultural wage laborers rose after the end of the three-year obligatory contract that former slaves were forced to observe when slavery ended in 1873. By the 1880s, a coffee boom began replacing sugar production and landless workers increasingly worked the highland coffee fields as rural proletarians. Consequently, even before the arrival of U.S. industrialized agriculture after 1898, Puerto Rico’s workers were becoming proletarianized.¹¹

Throughout the nineteenth century, cigar makers primarily created their products in small shops or sometimes at home. As the artisan tradition implies, they were responsible for the entire production of the cigar, from selecting the leaf and de-stemming it to rolling the cigar. The proletarianization of the tobacco industry slowly emerged alongside that of sugar and coffee. However, cigar rolling remained a largely artisan activity until the island came under U.S. control. By the turn of the century, the American Tobacco Company (ATC, or the Trust) was expanding into tobacco-growing areas, especially Cuba and Puerto Rico. In the latter, the ATC dominated Puerto Rico’s tobacco industry by the early 1900s. The ATC had expanded industrialized cigar production in the United States and now wanted to take advantage of an almost union-free workforce on the island to break up the artisan shops and create modern capitalistic enterprises. In doing so, master cigar makers increasingly found themselves only rolling the cigar while other workers did the preliminary tasks. The ATC added new steps into the labor process, expanding from just selectors, de-stemmers, and rollers to include new divisions of labor such as dryers, humidifiers, sorters, packers, and weighers. Small shops began to disappear as the ATC built new multistory factories. The total effect, as it had been in the United States, was to undermine artisanal control of the workplace, proletarianize all tobacco workers (especially cigar rollers), and spur the process of alienation.¹²

The alienation and incipient class consciousness resulting from this process helped to radicalize some workers to accept anarchist principles, which were combined with a longer Puerto Rican artisan tradition of parejería, which Ángel Quintero Rivera describes as “disrespect for hierarchy and pride of self”—a distinct quality that he locates specifically in the island’s artisan labor force.¹³ Such acts of resistance and self-preservation were nothing new in the global artisan world. Throughout Europe and North America, artisans had long fought to preserve their autonomy and secure their livelihoods. As did their comrades in Cuba and elsewhere, anarchist-influenced Puerto Rican activists and workers blended the ideas of international anarchism with the local tradition of parejería. In doing so, they came to understand their island condition within a larger global political and capitalist context, thus developing “a very strong sense of internationalism, which they incorporated into their struggles and their traditions” by the 1890s.¹⁴

The growing division of labor, combined with the rise of large production centers employing over one hundred workers each by 1910, resulted in a 197 percent increase in tobacco workers between 1899 and 1909, while the overall workforce on the island rose only 24.5 percent during this time. As a result, cigar production soared, as did ATC control over the tobacco industry. In fact, by 1909, 79 percent of the island’s tobacco value was controlled by the ATC. Thus, changes in the labor process that began in the 1880s and 1890s revved up in the first decade of U.S. rule and capital investment. As cigar rollers lost their autonomy and became proletarianized, they changed their interests to be more sympathetic to the plight of rank-and-file wage laborers. Some brought anarchist ideas and critiques of the United States and the Trust to fellow workers. As a result, socialistic doctrines merged with the historic parejería to critique and challenge U.S. political and economic domination of Puerto Rico.¹⁵

While anarchist ideas existed on the island in the 1890s and would be espoused by activists in the coming decades, anarchism was only one of several socialistic tendencies among the island’s workers. But anarchism would play an important historical role. As Rubén Dávila Santiago concludes, “libertarian socialism [i.e., anarchism] in our country offered theoretical bases to a series of developing principles in the forging of the working class and that oriented the worker point of view.”¹⁶ In the end, it is impossible to know exactly when anarchism arrived on the island. Undoubtedly, some Spanish migrants as well as Spanish newspapers brought these ideas to Puerto Rico, but there was no formal anarchist organization or press. It was not until the mid-1890s that “libertarian socialists” began organizing, just as the Cuban war for independence erupted. Out of that conflict would emerge a key person in the early years of Puerto Rican labor radicalism: Santiago Iglesias Pantín.

Santiago Iglesias Pantín

For anarchists in Puerto Rico, Iglesias could be a confusing, vexing man. Over the decades following the end of Spanish rule, Puerto Rico’s anarchists developed a love-hate (though eventually mostly “hate”) relationship with the man who would lead the most important labor movement on the island. Born in La Coruña, Spain, in 1872, Iglesias came of age in a politically charged era in that country. As he put it decades later: “Born and raised in an environment sympathetic to the social, economic, and politically progressive revolutionary movements … I received in my adolescence the first influences of that modern, philosophically revolutionary libertarian spirit of the workshop. I was converting and directing my thoughts, though still very young, toward becoming an incipient and enthusiastic militant of the great tragedies and human struggles for the emancipation and justice advocated by workers.”¹⁷ By the age of fourteen, he was apprenticing as a cabinetmaker and carpenter while visiting local workers centers. There, he read revolutionary works by Francisco Pi y Margall, Élisée Reclus, and other radicals. He also claimed that he began to see the United States as “the greatest example of freedom, democracy, and justice” in the world. While Iglesias would claim in his retrospective Luchas emancipadoras (Emancipating struggles) that he did not understand much of the radical literature that he read as a boy of fourteen, he did not say that he misunderstood the United States.¹⁸

The same year of his teenage “radicalization” and growing fondness for America, Iglesias boarded a ship bound for Havana. A case of yellow fever in Havana forced him to return home, where he continued to read about and make sense of the growing internecine struggles between anarchists and Marxists within the Spanish Left. In 1888, the now sixteen-year-old Iglesias returned to Cuba, where he lived and worked until late 1896—nearly two years after the outbreak of the Cuban War for Independence. In the 1880s, radical elements among Cuba’s workers and artisans took advantage of that island’s free-association decree and began developing labor organizations out of the workers and artisans centers in Havana. From th...