An organization like this brought together a large group of young people
of that time who managed to recover from the Stalinist kidnapping, withpolice 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 effort of the
second generation of anarchists in Cuba. The Youth Federation of the
mid-1930s also managed to give a new impetus to the legendary, but
already declining, Federation of Anarchist Groups of Cuba (FGAC), giving
rise in 1942 to the creation of the Libertarian Association of Cuba
(ALC) and to relevant and now forgotten organizations of anarchist
inspiration such as the Federation of Peasant Associations, the
Association of Antifascist 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 General Confederation
of Workers, to confront the Stalinist monopoly on the union world that
had been established since January 28, 1939, with the creation of the
Central Workers of Cuba (CTC).
This organizational framework of the third generation of Cuban
libertarians also gave rise to a lively sociability and a flourishing
anarchist editorial movement, which renewed the long presence of
anarchist media and public activities in Cuba. In this way, three
Libertarian Congresses were organized (1944, 1948, 1950), activities and
practices with anti-authoritarian perspectives in peasant associations,
neighborhood associations, in regions of the country marginalized by
other tendencies of ideas, spread throughout the rest of the country's
geography and social fabric, 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 of those veteran comrades of the ALC,
especially Frank Fernández, who in the 1990s founded the Cuban
Libertarian Movement in Florida and published that valuable and warm
book Anarchism in Cuba, beautifully edited by the Anselmo Lorenzo
Foundation in Madrid.
In the absence of a detailed record of anarchist activity in Cuba
between 1961 and the beginning of the 2000s, and taking our own personal
experience as a reference, the fourth generation of anarchists in Cuba
acquired an explicit organizational form with the creation on May 1,
2013 of the Alfredo López Libertarian Workshop, in homage to the leading
figure of anarcho-syndicalism in Cuba and to the Chicago Martyrs. "The
workshop," as we affectionately call it, has attempted in these ten
years of existence to take charge of the entire long void of memory
generated by the long Stalinist-Fidelist night that has shackled Cuban
society, but also of all the social disintegration, the authoritarianism
scientifically naturalized in the mentality of several generations and
the scant reflection on organizational means and forms, which flourished
in Cuba before 1959, with the third generation of anarchists 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 the
political police in Cuba has organized over the last six decades, where
any social expression that is minimally autonomous from state
institutions has almost always been disintegrated and methodically
repressed.
In this context, a small group of people with anti-authoritarian
intentions created the Red Observatorio Crítico de Cuba in 2006, a space
that became an assembly-based coordinator of self-managed projects,
where almost a dozen initiatives collaborated in areas such as
anti-authoritarian education (El Trencito Project), self-teaching (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 de
la Negri). At the same time, they entrenched themselves as parasites in
the social body of the PTUD, the poetic-performing brotherhood
Chekendeke, the Anamuto Anti-Racist Alliance, the autonomous initiative
Esquina de la decolonización de la memoria histórica populares cubana 27
de noviembre), the laboratory of proposals for socialist renewal in Cuba
(Participatory and Democratic Socialism). (SPD group), then the
anarchist initiatives Alfredo López Libertarian Workshop, Cristo
Salvador Location and the Almario publishing initiative.
The Alfredo López Libertarian Workshop, the Guardabosque Collective, and
the Cristo Salvador location were the ones who, in a context of decline
in autonomous initiatives, developed the Libertarian Spring Days of
Havana, which began in 2013, developing them almost without interruption
until the recent June 2024, when they finally had almost no activity.
During that period of time we developed a large number of activities in
familiar, 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 house, we contributed to
launching the first autonomous environmentalist magazine in Cuba
Guardabosque, the Almario magazine and under a common spirit Carne
Negra. Fanzine on Visual Arts.
We repositioned an anarchist perspective in the public debate of ideas
in Cuba and repopulated the calendars of historical events in Cuba
dominated by Stalinists, liberals, Trotskyists and social democrats with
forgotten dates. After half a century, we managed to recover our
presence in prestigious international anarchist spaces such as the
Caracas Anarchist Video and Magazine Fair, the London Anarchist Book
Fair, various IFA congresses, and we received invitations or coordinated
meetings with anarchist federations and initiatives in Venezuela, the
Dominican Republic, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, France, Italy,
Germany, Holland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. In 2018, thanks to
the international visibility we achieved in the world's anarchist media,
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 the creation of the Anarchist Federation of Central America and
the Caribbean (FACC), which is currently trying to survive minimally as
a space for intermittent communication and 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 COVID pandemic of
2019, in which many of the spaces for coordinating autonomous social
initiatives were dismantled, but also by everything that has come with
the post-pandemic in Cuba: the extinction of the public transportation
system in the country, the collective precariousness of wages due to
galloping and out-of-control inflation, the collapse of the 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 miserable pensions and no drug coverage for our sick, with
the government 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 governmental despotism, which
have left a balance of more than 1,000 political prisoners, subjected to
long sentences and terrible prison living conditions, for the sole crime
of exercising the right and duty to protest in the face of widespread
misery, with no prospect of 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 of it and which has given rise to
a military-business oligarchy, entrenched in the powerful Cuban
oligopoly G.A.E.S.A. (Business Support Group S.A.), which handles
million-dollar funds and investments in Cuba and outside of Cuba, a
mafia-like control of the dwindling state productive framework, the
hotel industry, the juicy export of medical services in conditions of
semi-slavery to the workers and health professionals involved, the also
mafia-like administration on the use of the large remittances that Cuban
emigrants send annually to their families, under conditions of
kidnapping in Cuba and other dissimilar businesses, from which this
oligarchy exploits Cuban society itself and its capacities, like an
attached colonial territory and successfully finances an imposing police
and prison repressive apparatus, with a gigantic and unquantified prison
population, which allows them to manage the ongoing social collapse
without large doses of explicit violence, like a true State within the
Cuban State.
At the same time that they entrench themselves as parasites in the
social body of the country, this oligarchy at the international level
plaintively cries out every year at the UN for its favorite mantra: "the
immediate and unconditional lifting of the inhuman Yankee blockade of
Cuba," as "the most important problem that afflicts the Cuban
Revolution," which is nothing other than the luxurious way out to which
these oligarchs aspire, which would allow them to stabilize for several
more 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 overwhelming
authoritarian and militaristic anti-imperialism of the Castro oligarchy
would allow them to safeguard their dominion of Cuba under Yankee
protectorate and sit at the table with them before the Cuban bourgeoisie
of Florida does, as the pigs of Manor Farm did with the humans they once
expelled with their victorious animal revolution in George Orwell's
masterpiece.
On none of the questions raised above, do we anarchists in Cuba have the
slightest possibility of defining absolutely anything. We have only
meager but essential tools in our hands: to exercise and disseminate the
desire for self-organization, mutual aid and free grassroots initiative
in all matters of daily life, to erode and denature internalized
authoritarian logic, even among those of us who fight governmental
despotism, to banish the need for new humanist commanders-in-chief from
our lives and to take charge among our equals and like-minded people of
our own precarious existence, in solidarity and, without doctrinal
arrogance, attentive to the areas, themes and spaces where the felt need
for grassroots organization and assembly among equals arises, in order
to contribute our proposals and our ideas. Everywhere the anarchist
tension runs through us all and is not the monopoly of those who define
themselves as anarchists.
The collapse of the monumental Kafkaesque State that has been raised 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 that
preceded us have been there and we will be there too.
Organized People, Motherlands without States
Abelardo
https://www.federacionanarquistademexico.org/index.php/hechos-y-circunstancias-de-una-cuarta-generacion-de-anarquistas-en-cuba-notas-desde-dentro
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