Anarchism as a social movement in Cuba held great influence with the working classes during the 19th and early 20th century. The movement was particularly strong following the abolition of slavery in 1886, until it was repressed first in 1925 by President Gerardo Machado, and more thoroughly by Fidel Castro's Marxist–Leninist government following the Cuban Revolution in the late 1950s. Cuban anarchism mainly took the form of anarcho-collectivism based on the works of Mikhail Bakunin and, later, anarcho-syndicalism. The Latin American labor movement, and by extension the Cuban labor movement, was at first more influenced by anarchism than Marxism.
History
Colonial era
In the mid-19th century, Cuban society was highly stratified, consisting of a Spanish creole ruling class of tobacco, sugar, and coffee plantation owners, a middle class of black and Spanish plantation workers, and an underclass of black slaves. The upper echelons of society were also deeply divided between the creoles and Spaniards (known as peninsulares), with the Spaniards benefiting greatly from the colonial regime. Cuba was a colony of Spain, although there were movements for independence, integration into the U.S., and integration with Spain. The roots of anarchism were first seen in 1857, when a Proudhonian mutualist society was founded. After being introduced to the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon by José de Jesus Márquez, Saturnino Martínez (an Asturian immigrant to Cuba) founded the periodical La Aurora in 1865. Directed at tobacco workers, it included the earliest advocation of cooperative societies in Cuba. By the Ten Years' War, the insurgents against Spain included expatriates from the Paris Commune, and others influenced by Proudhon, including Salvador Cisneros Betancourt and Vicente García.
Early development of the movement
By the 1880s, the first explicitly anarchist influence had manifested when José C. Campos established links between Cuba and Spanish anarchists operating in Barcelona by importing anarchist pamphlets and newspapers. At the same time, many Spanish anarchists emigrated to Cuba, and it became very common for workers to read anarchist literature aloud in the tobacco factories, thereby greatly helping the dissemination of anarchist ideas amongst the workers. During the 1880s, and up through the early 1890s, Cuban anarchists favored an anarcho-collectivist method of organizing and action similar to that of Spain's Federación de Trabajadores de la Región Española (Workers' Federation of the Spanish Region, FTRE), following an "each to his contribution" line, as opposed to the "each to his need" line of the anarcho-communists.
Enrique Roig San Martín founded the Centro de Instrucción y Recreo de Santiago de Las Vegas in 1882, to advocate the organization of labor and distribute literature from anarcho-collectivists in Spain. The Centro had a strict policy accepting all Cubans, "regardless of their social position, political tendency, and differences of color." The same year, the Junta Central de Artesanos (Central Group of Artisans) was founded following Roig San Martín's statement that "no guild or working class organization should be tied to the feet of capital". Roig San Martín wrote for El Boletín del Gremio de Obreros, and for the first explicitly anarchist periodical in Cuba, El Obrero, which was founded in 1883 by republican-democrats but quickly turned into a mouthpiece for anarchists when Roig San Martín took over as editor. He then founded El Productor in 1887. In addition to San Martín, El Productor had writers in the Cuban cities of Santiago de Las Vegas and Guanabacoa, and the cities of Tampa and Key West in Florida, and published reprinted articles from the French-language Le Revolté and Barcelona's La Acracia.