Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08263663.2014.940718
“For the liberty of the nine boys in Scottsboro and against Yankee
imperialist domination in Latin America”: Cuba’s Scottsboro defense
campaign
Frances Peace Sullivan*
History and Literature, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
(Received 15 January 2013; accepted 3 March 2014)
In the spring of 1931, death sentences imposed on nine young African Americans
arrested on trumped-up rape charges in Scottsboro, Alabama, ignited a worldwide
wave of protest. This article explores Cuba’s Scottsboro defense campaign and
argues that Scottsboro protests were a means of criticizing rising anti-black racism
on the island from within the narrow confines of permissible racial dialogue in
Cuban society. Additionally, it contends that the communist-led defense campaign
became a vehicle for a broad range of actors to condemn imperialism and participate
in a wider pan-American surge in oppositional politics. Ultimately, popular outrage
over the convictions and sentences boosted the communist party’s appeal in Cuba
during a time of heightened restiveness on the island and cemented the ideological
link between anti-racism and anti-imperialism for future generations of radical
activists.
Au printemps 1931, on condamna à mort pour viol neuf jeunes Afro-Américains de
Scottsboro, Alabama, sur la foi de témoignages falsifiés. L’événement provoqua une
vague de soutien à travers le monde entier. Cet article explore la campagne de soutien
aux “Scottsboro Boys” menée à Cuba et démontre que les manifestations cubaines ont
été, dans le cadre restreint de liberté d’expression touchant aux questions raciales, un
moyen de critiquer un racisme anti-noir croissant sur l’île. En outre, l’article suggère
que la campagne de soutien, menée par les communistes, a permis à un grand nombre
d’acteurs de condamner l’impérialisme états-unien et de prendre part à un mouvement
de protestation qui s’est étendu à l’Amérique entière. En dernier lieu, le soulèvement
populaire à l’annonce des peines auxquelles furent condamnés et exposés les neuf
victimes a renforcé l’attrait du parti communiste à Cuba, en une période d’agitation
croissante sur l’île. L’événement a également scellé de façon durable l’association
idéologique entre antiracisme et anti-impérialisme pour des générations d’activistes
radicaux.
Keywords: Scottsboro Nine; Cuba; racism; Comintern; South-North solidarity
On 25 March 1931, nine young African Americans were pulled off a freight train
near Scottsboro, Alabama, and charged with raping two white women who, like the
young men, had been illegally riding the rails. Despite no evidence of rape and
despite contradictory testimony from the women, juries quickly convicted all of the
defendants and sentenced eight to the electric chair.1 This travesty of justice was far
from unique in the US south. Rather, the Scottsboro case – based primarily on a fear
of black male sexuality, tried by all-white juries, and continually disrupted by the
threat of mob violence – was emblematic of Jim Crow justice. What made the
*Email: [email protected]
© 2014 CALACS
2
F.P. Sullivan
incident exceptional, however, was the worldwide attention it garnered when the
Communist Party USA (CPUSA) took up the young men’s defense and launched a
global campaign demanding their release, firmly establishing the “Scottsboro Nine”
among the most well-known victims of American racial injustice in the twentieth
century.
A vast body of historical scholarship reflects Scottsboro’s significance in the history of
race and civil rights in the United States, focusing largely on the case as “the most
celebrated racial spectacle in the history of the United States” (Miller 2009, 3). Indeed,
Scottsboro has formed the basis for countless American cultural productions in the realms of
music, fiction, poetry, and theater. The case also falls firmly into histories of American
communism, as the CPUSA-affiliated International Labor Defense (ILD), an organization
founded in 1925 to provide legal counsel to and build support for political prisoners, led the
young men’s defense and orchestrated mass protests on their behalf. Occurring at the height
of the CPUSA’s new-found attention to the plight of African Americans, the case cemented
a close ideological relationship between black liberation and the radical Left in the 1930s
(Gilmore 2008; Howard 2008; Kelley 1990; Naison 2004; Solomon 1998). Scottsboro,
however, was more than a key episode in American history. It was also a defining moment
in the history of Leftist internationalism during the interwar period, as demonstrations
protesting the convictions took place in Latin America, Europe, South Africa, Australia,
and Japan (Solomon 1998, 197). Scholarship on Scottsboro’s international ramifications,
however, is still in its early stages, initiated by James A. Miller, Susan D. Pennybacker, and
Eve Rosenhaft’s seminal article on the European travels of Ada Wright, mother of two
Scottsboro defendants. In this article, I take a cue from their move to “reinterpret the
dynamics of the international Scottsboro campaign as a central episode in the global racial
politics of the 1930s” (Miller, Pennybacker, and Rosenhaft 2001, 389).
Specifically, I focus on Cuba and the groundswell of support for the young men that
erupted on the island from the earliest days of the trial. Like the US south, Cuba in the
1930s was a post-emancipation society still deeply immersed in systemic racial discrimination and a pervasive racism that not infrequently led to violence; the issues that
rendered the Scottsboro case salient in the United States were quite familiar to Cubans.
Moreover, the Cuban Communist Party, like the CPUSA, was similarly in the midst of an
energetic campaign to reach black workers, and the Scottsboro defense was a hallmark of
these efforts. Despite these similarities, however, Cuba was fundamentally distinct from
the United States in that it was a neocolonial society locked in a relationship of economic
dependency and politically beholden to its northern neighbor, which, through the 1902
Platt Amendment, maintained the right to intervene in Cuban domestic affairs at the
slightest sign of turbulence. The communist insistence that the Scottsboro convictions
implicated not just southern racism but also imperial aggression would have a profound
resonance on the island.
Although this article focuses on Cuban responses to events in the United States, I am
less interested in “transnationalizing American history” than in exploring the Scottsboro
case through a perspective rooted specifically in the history of race and activism in
republican Cuba, and, more broadly, in the history of Latin America’s Old Left.2 Doing
so sheds light on the myriad meanings attached to Scottsboro, as defending the nine
young men in Alabama came to embody the local battle against racism at a time when
such discussions were highly circumscribed, a pan-American call for unity in the face of
imperial aggression, and global anti-capitalism. Although this intersectional struggle
against racism, imperialism, and class exploitation predates by decades revolutionary
Cuba’s ideological role as a haven for African American radicals in the 1960s, later
Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
3
figures such as LeRoi Jones and Robert F. Williams would reformulate the American
struggle against racism within the broader context of global anti-colonialism in ways that
clearly echoed the Scottsboro campaign. Indeed, the roots of what Besenia Rodriguez and
others have called “Tricontinentalism” – that is, the anti-racist, anti-imperial political
sentiment of Third World solidarity captured most clearly at the 1966 Havana
Tricontinental Congress – can be found in the island’s 1930s Scottsboro defense movement, which theorized the relationship between American racism and imperial aggression
for an earlier generation of Cubans (Rodriguez 2005).3
Popular outrage over the Scottsboro convictions was widespread in Cuba, leading to a
significant campaign to defend the young men. News about the trials was ubiquitous,
appearing in local dailies, internationally-circulated newspapers such as the New Yorkprinted communist Mundo Obrero, and in flyers distributed at demonstrations. As in the
United States, the local communist party, the Partido Comunista de Cuba (PCC), and the
ILD’s Cuban arm, Defensa Obrero Internacional (DOI), led the island’s Scottsboro
defense campaign. DOI instructed supporters to organize “small ACTIVIST
BRIGADES” in solidarity with the Scottsboro Nine, demonstrate near the American
embassy and consulates, and hold letter-writing assemblies.4 Party-affiliated labor unions
heeded these instructions early on, sending letters to the US Embassy as early as July
1931.5 The Confederación Nacional de Obreros de Cuba (CNOC) demanded the men’s
release in a statement mailed to Alabama’s governor and signed by an “endless” list that
included local worker associations from across the island as well as national unions of
drivers, typographers, commercial employees, carpenters, and metallurgical workers
(Diario de la Marina, July 8, 1931). Smaller groups of workers often took their own
initiative in sending protest messages, such as when several employees of the Nazábal
sugar mill sent a cable pleading “for the lives of the nine negros of Scottsboro”.6
In addition to the letter-writing campaign, Scottsboro-related demonstrations erupted
across Cuba, with solidarity protests frequently taking place near spaces symbolic of
American power (Mundo Obrero, June 1, 1932). On the evening of 22 May 1932, for
instance, between 40 and 50 young men “of the laboring class” gathered outside the US
consulate in the south-eastern port city of Manzanillo, demanding liberty for the young
defendants, throwing rocks and bricks, and chanting “down with Yankee imperialism!”7
On another occasion, in April 1933, a group of “approximately twenty boys and young
men, all coloured and of the peon type” attacked the American consulate at Santiago,
throwing stones through the office windows. They left behind circulars that condemned
fascism and addressed other issues, but included “of course the Scottsboro case”, according to the local consul, whose choice of words reflects the extent to which agitation
around Scottsboro had become a regular concern for American foreign service personnel.8
Historian Pedro Serviat (1986, 112) wrote that at least one Scottsboro demonstration
ended in fatal violence when authorities opened fire.
Participation in Scottsboro defense crossed multiple social boundaries, including those
of class, race, and nationality. Sympathy for the young men was not limited to the “peon
type[s]”, as even the conservative Havana-based Diario de La Marina, which gave the
story regular front page coverage, claimed that the “entire world is interested in acquittal
from death sentences” (Diario de La Marina, October 14, 1932; see also November 7,
1932). Significantly, black activists of all strata in Cuban society mobilized around the
case. Members of an exclusive Afro-Cuban society, the Club Atenas in Havana, sent a
telegram to the governor of Alabama, protesting the incarcerations and calling the case an
example of “racial prejudice and capitalist cruelty” (Guridy 2010, 135). In an intriguing
incident, an “unknown Cuban negro” entered a soup kitchen for destitute Spaniards in
4
F.P. Sullivan
Santiago de Cuba in July 1931 and called for a protest, addressing, among other matters,
“the sentence of death imposed upon several negroes in Scottsboro, Alabama”. The
agitator waved a red flag and suggested a march, but police began firing, wounding
five individuals and arresting 10.9 The informal nature of this man’s protest suggests that
the campaign resonated beyond inner party circles. Moreover, that a black Cuban could
mobilize or even consider mobilizing (presumably white) Spaniards around Scottsboro
indicates that condemnation of the convictions spanned racial and national lines. Finally,
the unidentified man’s choice of venue suggests he may have seen a link between the
Scottsboro defendants, poor young men riding the rails in search for work – a point
continually highlighted by the communist press – and Cuba’s own Depression-era poverty, which sent many to food banks.
Such incidents of black activism around Scottsboro in Cuba are particularly striking in
light of limitations on black organizing and increasing violence against Cubans of color in
the 1930s. As others have demonstrated, with the 1910 Morúa Amendment outlawing
racially-exclusive political parties still on the books and with the massacre of Afro-Cubans
in the aftermath of the Partido Independiente de Color’s 1912 uprising a recent memory,
possibilities for black political mobilization were severely limited in Republican Cuba.
Those who denounced racism risked repression and violent retaliation, as white Cubans
labeled such protest unpatriotic and divisive (de la Fuente 2001; Helg 1995, 16–17,
185–6, 245–6).10 Black Cubans, like their counterparts in the United States, continued
to experience political, social, and economic exclusion in the early 1930s. Although early
twentieth-century public expressions of racism in Cuba tended to sidestep the biological
notions of race common in the United States, reflecting instead a coded language of
culture (including, for example, ordinances against witchcraft and requirements that job
applicants be “cultured” persons), anti-black mob violence and public lynching were far
from unheard of. As in the United States, accusations that black men had raped white
women justified violent attacks, and in 1919 sensationalized press coverage of supposed
brujería triggered a wave of anti-black violence (Bronfman 2004, 83, 99–104).11 By the
time the Scottsboro story unfolded, openly racist language modeled along the lines of
North American white supremacy was increasingly common, most clearly with the
founding of Ku Klux Klan Kubano branches in 1928 and 1932 (Bronfman 2004; de la
Fuente 2001; Guridy 2009, 55). In the turbulent months leading up to Cuba’s Revolution
of 1933 and the overthrow of President Gerardo Machado, racial violence peaked as white
Cubans of differing political affiliation cast their opponents as “black” (Guridy 2009).
Bombs exploded in buildings housing Afro-Cuban societies in Havana, Cienfuegos, and
Santa Clara.12 During the revolution itself, rumors of an imminent black uprising circulated on the eastern part of the island, as they had during the Cuban Independence Wars
and the Independiente protests of 1912, and increased racial tensions.13 In short, in the
context of ongoing racial struggles and a spike in racist violence, defending the Scottsboro
Nine was, for Cubans of color, a clear and straightforward opportunity to speak out
against racism from within the narrow strictures of permissible racial dialogue in Cuban
society.
That black Cubans entwined denouncements of racism with concerns about poverty
and “capitalist cruelty” and increasingly found common cause with the PCC is unsurprising. Founded in 1925, the PCC had spent its infancy overlooking the specific problems of
inequality and discrimination faced by black workers, implicitly suggesting instead that
racial problems would be resolved through class struggle.14 The 1928 Sixth Congress of
the Communist International (Comintern), which launched the “Third Period” of international communism and an era of increased contact between Moscow and Latin America,
Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
5
however, marked a change in the global communist approach to race.15 The Sixth
Congress declared that black subjugation was a nationalist matter and called constituent
parties to organize black workers.16 While historians cannot and should not credit
Moscow alone with a newfound commitment to black liberation – rather, a host of New
Negro intellectuals (including Surinam-born Otto Huiswoud, Jamaican Claude McKay,
and Americans Lovett Fort-Whittman and Harry Haywood) aggressively pushed Moscow
to address matters of racial oppression – the new stance undoubtedly compelled reluctant,
white-dominated communist parties to address the unique obstacles faced by black workers rather than subordinate racial concerns in an ideological commitment to class struggle
(Adi 2009; Kelley 2002; Sullivan 2012, 208–12). By the early 1930s, with the Comintern
addressing head-on the “Negro Question”, black participation in and leadership of
radical Leftist movements was on the rise globally, and Cuba was no exception.
At its 1932 First World Congress in Moscow, the International Red Aid advised the DOI
and other Caribbean affiliates to become “true parties of the masses” and to expand their onthe-ground reach, instructions which Cuban communists interpreted as a call to organize
black workers.17 The Cuban Communist Party’s transition to an expanded rank-and-file and
a more inclusive popular base, however, was not always smooth. Across Latin America, this
push into popular politics entailed reaching previously-neglected constituencies such as
rural wage laborers (particularly those working for powerful American sugar and fruit
companies), peasants, Indians, and people of African descent.18 During this time, the
PCC sought to mobilize Cuba’s working classes around an ideal of transracial, transnational
proletarian solidarity that by late 1932 included Afro-Caribbean immigrants working in the
island’s sugar industry.19 The party avidly defended antillanos in the face of labor nationalization laws and forced deportations during and after the Revolution of 1933.20 In another
attempt to appeal to black workers, the PCC followed the CPUSA’s lead and declared itself
in favor of the right to self-determination in the black-majority regions of Oriente Province
(Arredondo 1939; Grobart 1985; Serviat 1986, 116–21). These efforts, however, proved
unpopular, as the “black-belt” policy was quietly removed from the platform within a year,
and widespread support for labor nationalizations pushed the PCC not only to drop its
defense of immigrant workers but to reverse abruptly its position and become a vocal
proponent of labor nationalization in 1935.21
The failure of these other attempts to build support from among Cuba’s racially- and
nationally-diverse working class puts into sharp relief the popularity of the Scottsboro
case. Quickly, the campaign to free the young men in Alabama became fundamental to
party expansion, particularly among black Cubans. Defensa Obrero Internacional regularly updated members on the particulars of the trials and directed local divisions to “take
advantage of all events related to the nine youths in Scottsboro to recruit new black
members to our ranks”.22 DOI leaders emphasized the need to recruit black Cubans
“through fortifying [. . .] the campaign in defense of the 8 young black workers in
Scottsboro”.23 Their efforts seem to have met with a degree of success, as by 1933 the
PCC claimed that over a third of its rank-and-file was black, and the DOI claimed that, of
its 500 members, 175 were black, including some 42 Antillean immigrants. Cubans of
color led the longshoremen’s union, builders’ syndicate, the sugar workers’ union, and
CNOC, and several black activists, including sugar organizer Jesús Menéndez and PCC
General Secretary Blas Roca, rose to prominence during this period (de la Fuente 2001;
Pappademos 2011, 217).24 Although a definitive causal relationship is difficult to establish between the Scottsboro defense and increased black membership, with Scottsboro at
the forefront of its recruitment efforts the PCC had succeeded in integrating its leadership
and rank-and-file by mid-decade.
6
F.P. Sullivan
Scottsboro defense, however, was about much more than recruitment: it was also a
tool to promote internationalism. For communist parties worldwide, the Third Period was
a time of avowed internationalism.25 The DOI explicitly claimed that its mission was to
“advance the international education of the Cuban masses”, and the Scottsboro defense
figured prominently in party plans to educate all Cubans on the importance of worldwide
proletarian solidarity.26 Communist outlets carefully catered individualized messages
about Scottsboro to particular constituencies, such as workers, young people, mothers,
and intellectuals. To poor peasants, for instance, Mundo Obrero wrote that the same
“dominant class” that locked up the nine men “also throws you off of your farms” (Mundo
Obrero, October 1, 1932). Most prominently, the party incorporated notions of racial
struggle into the global fight against imperialism. The DOI bridged multiple abuses of
black people into a singular narrative of expanding US power, arguing that “imperialist
Yankees” were “oppressors of black people on an international level” and that US Marine
invasions in the Caribbean and mob violence in the US south were “all part of the legal
lynching” at Scottsboro.27 Indeed, party outlets offered supporters of the Scottsboro Nine
a systemic analysis of their story as part of a larger drama in which the same “Yankee
capitalists” who divided working classes by fostering racial antagonism were also expanding across the hemisphere, exploiting its people and resources, and dominating the region
politically and militarily.
Imperialism, then, was the umbrella under which Scottsboro fell and around which the
party hoped to lead Cuba’s diverse working classes in protest. Like other international
campaigns of the interwar period, most notably condemnation of the Sacco and Vanzetti
convictions and the Hands-Off Ethiopia campaign, Scottsboro mobilized thousands in the
global struggle against imperialism. The Comintern’s Third Period resolution that
“Negroes [everywhere] are oppressed by imperialism” positioned the case under the
rubric of “oppressed nations”, a framing that linked the defendants in Alabama with all
Latin Americans, similarly oppressed by US imperialism.28 A Mundo Obrero article
claimed that “the same imperialists who murder workers and peasants in the Caribbean,
who condemn to hunger and misery millions and millions of workers [. . .] are the ones
who have hatched the mass lynching of the nine young negros of Scottsboro” (Mundo
Obrero, August-September, 1933). The ILD and others proclaimed that Latin Americans,
who had personally “suffered a very great misery and terror at the hands of the US
imperialists and their native instruments”, should be particularly driven to fight for the
Scottsboro defendants, arguing that “we workers and peasants and honest intellectuals of
the Caribbean, as well as of all of Latin America, have a special task to achieve in the
fight to save the young Negroes of Scottsboro” (Mundo Obrero, June 1, 1932). In
associating Scottsboro with US imperialism in the popular imagination, international
communist print outlets made possible the local DOI slogan, “For the liberty of the
nine boys in Scottsboro, and against Yankee imperialist domination in Latin America!”,
which appeared in dozens of fliers, broadsides, and circulars in the 1930s.29
The anti-imperialist message resonated widely, as protestors on the ground largely
replicated this narrative. Tobacco workers in Santiago, for instance, condemned “imperialist assassins of the United States”, and signed their Scottsboro protest letter “down with
anti-black oppression in the United States and Cuba!”, uniting the struggles for racial
equality and against imperialism.30 Scottsboro protestors in Manzanillo claimed that the
American system responsible for the “criminal racial discrimination under which the
majority of blacks suffer” served only the interests of “big-time bankers, industrialists,
and powerful moguls [working at the outermost] limits of American empire”. The
“Yankee bourgeoisie”, they argued, extended across the Americas, “imposing hunger
Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
7
and terror on the Cuban people”.31 Even less formal, spontaneous Scottsboro protests
indicate that the defense of the nine young men was associated with wider anger at US
economic expansionism. On 22 November 1933, when unknown assailants attacked
several American company offices in Havana, including those of the Ward Line, the
Grace Line, and the Cuban Electric Company, messages attached to stones used to smash
office windows stated: “We demand the release of the Scottsboro Negroes!”32 The
vandals’ choice of targets suggests that they regarded American private firms operating
in Cuba as part of a wider system behind the miscarriage of justice in Alabama.
This big-picture narrative of a transracial, global struggle against imperialism unified
diverse regional opposition efforts. The Mundo Obrero contended that the young men in
Alabama shared a struggle with workers and peasants waging resistance battles across the
region, including those fighting US occupations in Nicaragua and Haiti, strikers massacred on a United Fruit Company plantation in Colombia, and insurgent peasants in El
Salvador (Mundo Obrero, May, 1932). Of course, agitation around Scottsboro overlapped
with Cuba’s own early 1930s surge in oppositional politics, which entailed unemployment
marches, street battles between students and the police, and strikes in the cities and
countryside, and which resulted in the dramatic toppling of the Machado administration.33
Protestors condemned US “lynch justice” in the same breath as “Machado’s fascist
government” in their defense of the nine young African Americans.34 When Scottsboro
supporters argued that that victims of racial injustice in the United States had something in
common with their own battle against Machado, as well as with labor activists, antiimperialist guerrilla warriors, and all Latin Americans subject to politically repressive
regimes, they deliberately claimed participation in a united global struggle against racism,
political oppression, and imperialism during what Barry Carr has astutely called “the Red
Years of the Caribbean and Central America” (2012, 217–40, 233).
An early example of transnational protest, Scottsboro galvanized tens of thousands in
condemnation of American racial injustice. In Cuba, sympathy for the young men’s poverty
and anger at ongoing racial violence pushed many to the young men’s defense, and the case
became a vehicle to critique racism within Cuban society at a time when such discussions
were highly circumscribed. With a message heavily filtered by the international communist
press, however, Scottsboro was also deeply enmeshed in a wider, transnational struggle
against US imperialism. The fact that the communist Left clearly leveraged popular outrage
over the Scottsboro convictions to gain support for its wider anti-imperialist struggles makes
the campaign no less significant in the history of black Cuban activism. For one, the PCC
could not have achieved this maneuver without a degree of popular agreement. After all,
even the elite and decidedly non-communist Club Atenas called the Scottsboro convictions
a matter of “capitalist cruelty”, perhaps unconsciously repeating the party line. Moreover,
the party’s interpretation of the Scottsboro case – and the relative popularity of that
interpretation – highlights the distinctive character of Cuba’s oppositional politics in the
1930s, when Cubans of color increasingly joined forces with labor unions and Leftist
political parties, and of the global Left during the interwar period, when the line between
pan-Africanism and proletarian solidarity was blurred.
As both a unifying symbol bringing people together across class and racial boundaries
and a multivalent prism through which various actors could mobilize around distinct
causes, the Scottsboro case reinvigorated the ideological appeal of the communist party in
the early 1930s and contributed to the restiveness of a nation on the brink of revolution.
Further, the Scottsboro defense campaign propelled Cuban participation in panAmericanism and the rising tide of transnational, transracial activism that characterized
the Caribbean and Central America during the interwar years. The nature of the
8
F.P. Sullivan
Scottsboro protests – often spontaneous and led by “unknown” men – illustrates that
Cuban involvement in these “red years” was not strictly the domain of those leading
activists who traveled widely between hubs of political agitation in Havana, Mexico City,
New York, and Moscow. Rather, average men and women living in Cuba’s cities and
towns exhibited an internationalist vision and saw themselves as actors at the forefront of
the most significant struggles of their time. In many ways, their internationalist vision
anticipated a later generation of Cuban and African American radicals who, in the 1960s,
similarly positioned the American struggle for civil rights within the context of global
anti-imperialism.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
Standard histories of the Scottsboro case include Carter (1979) and Goodman (2005).
In recent decades, several historians have sought to transnationalize US history and particularly that of US Old Left (see McGirr 2007; van der Linde 1999). While this is a worthy
project, I seek to decenter the United States in the story I tell here.
For the relationship between black radicals in the United States and Revolutionary Cuba, see
also Plummer (1998, 133–55).
“Circular de DOI en solidaridad con los jóvenes negros de Scottsboro”, Mella, 1932, in
Instituto de Historia de Cuba (1975, 299–301).
United States National Archives (hereafter USNA), College Park, MD, Record Group 84,
Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State (hereafter RG 84), vol. 325,
no. 841.1, President and Secretary of the Union de Torcedores, Santiago de Cuba, to American
Consul in Santiago de Cuba, 6 July 1931.
Instituto de Historia de Cuba, Havana (hereafter IHC), fondo 5, sig. 5/19:104/207/Lit,
“Entrevista efectuada a Compañeros que participaron en el Soviet del Central Nazabal: La
compañera Maria Tomasa González”.
USNA, RG 84, vol. 23, no. 800, Telegram from Bertot, American Consular Agent at
Manzanillo, to Edwin Schoenrich, American Consul at Santiago de Cuba, 23 May 1932.
USNA, RG 84, vol. 377, no 600, Schoenrich to Edward L. Reed, American Chargé d’Affaires,
Havana, 11 April 1933.
USNA RG 84, vol. 338, no. 800, Schoenrich to Harry F. Guggenheim, 13 July 1931. Guridy
and de la Fuente also make use of this source (see de la Fuente 2001, 190, footnote 55; Guridy
2002, 219, footnote 97).
This phenomenon occurred again after the initial years of Cuban Revolution, when open
discussions of racial problems were again taboo because official discourse claimed that racial
discrimination had been overcome (de la Fuente 2001, 279).
Helg (1995, 18) describes images of the “black rapist of white women” as an “icon of fear”,
justifying violence against black Cubans.
IHC, Fondo 1, sig. 1/8:223:5.1/1-109, DOI Comité Ejecutivo Nacional, “Circular – Asunto: 3
de Enero, culminación de la campaña contra el terror a los negros y embarque de Haitianos”,
21 December 1933.
The practice of discrediting black political mobilizations as incidences of “race war” and
“black uprising” has a long history in Cuba (see Castro Fernández 2002; Ferrer 1999; Helg
1995).
At its 1934 Fourth Congress, CNOC conceded of its early years: “one of our fundamental
failures has been to neglect [. . .] the black question in general”. CNOC, “Resolución sobre el
trabajo entre los trabajadores negros”, January 1934, in Instituto de Historia de Cuba (1975,
560–1).
So named because it followed a first period of revolutionary upsurge after the Soviet victory
and a second period of capitalist restructuring, the Third Period was marked by a highly
sectarian “class against class approach” to international communism (Worley 2004). For the
relationship between the Comintern and Latin American communist parties, see Carr (1998a)
and Hatzky (2008, 147–53).
For an overview of the Comintern’s position on the “Negro Question”, see Foner and Allen
(1987, Introduction).
Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
9
For a summary of Moscow’s instructions, see Mundo Obrero, February 1, 1933.
Discussions about organizing among new constituencies took place at two seminal conferences of Latin American communist parties and labor unions: the May 1929 founding
congress of the Confederación Sindical Latinoamericana in Montevideo and the June 1929
Primera Conferencia de los Partidos Comunistas de América Latina in Buenos Aires
(Caballero 1986; Confederación Sindical Latino Americana 1929).
The party shift, from neglecting braceros antillanos to advocating forcefully for their rights, is
best demonstrated by comparing two documents: CNOC’s call to organize a sugar workers’
union, which made no specific mention of foreign workers, and the founding document of that
union, the Sindicato Nacional Obrero de la Industria Azucarera, which, just 10 months later,
advocated explicitly for the rights of immigrant workers (IHC, Fondo 1, sig. 1/8:7/17.1,
CNOC “¡Obreros Azucareros, preparan vuestras luchas!”, 8 February 1932; IHC, Fondo 1,
sig. 1/8:87/2.1/1-8, “Manifestó de la Primera Confederación de Obreros de la Industria
Azucarera”, December 1932).
Carr (1998b, 196–198); IHC, Fondo 1, sig., 1/8:7/4.1/1-3 p. 1, CNOC, César Vilar, Secretario
General del Pleno del CEN a Central Mabay, 2 November 1933; IHC, Fondo 1, sig., 1/
8:223:5.1/1-109, Defensa Obrera Internacional- Comité Ejecutivo Nacional, “Circular –
Asunto: 3 de Enero, culminación de la campaña contra el terror a los negros y embarque de
Haitianos”, 21 December 1933.
For the PCC’s defense of antillano workers and abrupt reversal, see Sullivan (2012, 281–311).
IHC, Fondo 1, sig. 1/8:223/11.1/1-7, “El Organizador: Boletín del Departamento de
Organizacion del Comité Ejecutivo Nacional de DOI”, November 1934.
IHC, fondo 1, sig. 1/8:223:5.1/1-109, DOI- Comité Ejecutivo Nacional, “Circular – Asunto: 3
de Enero, culminación de la campaña contra el terror a los negros y embarque de Haitianos”,
21 December 1933 (emphasis in original). Of the nine young men at Scottsboro, all but the 13year-old Roy Wright were sentenced to the electric chair. Because eight were given death
sentences – not nine – defense campaign materials alternatively referred to the “eight young
men at Scottsboro”, the “Scottsboro Nine”, and other variations.
IHC, Fondo 1, sig. 1/8:223/5.1/1-109, p. 108, DOI “Composición de DOI” (1933).
At its Sixth Congress, the Comintern critiqued member parties for “a certain provincialism”
and urged a renewed commitment to internationalism; Sixth Comintern Congress, “Extracts
from the Theses of the Sixth Comintern Congress on the International Situation and the Tasks
of the Communist International 29 August 1928”, in Degras (1971, 461).
IHC, fondo 1, sig. 1/8:223/2.1/1-42, “Circular sobre la reunión y preparación del Primer
Congreso Nacional de ‘Defensa Obrera Internacional’” [NA].
IHC, fondo 1, sig. 1/8:223:5.1/1-109, DOI-CEN “Circular – Asunto: 3 de Enero”, 21
December 1933.
The Sixth Congress of the Communist International, “The Communist International
Resolution on the Negro Question in the US”, International Press Correspondence, 12
December 1928, pp. 1392–1393, reprinted in Foner and Allen (1987, 189–198).
For example, see IHC, fondo 1, sig. 1/8:223/7.1/1-25 p. 13–14, DOI – Seccion Cubana del
SRI, Comité Ejecutivo Nactional, “A Las federaciones obreras, sindicatos, grupos de oposicion, sociedades y demas organizations”, 26 January 1934.
USNA, RG 84, vol. 325, no. 841.1, President and Secretary of the Union de Torcedores,
Santiago de Cuba, to American Consul in Santiago de Cuba, 6 July 1931; New York Times,
July 8, 1931.
USNA, RG 84, vol. 23, no. 800, Cédula Número 4 Liga Juvenil Comunista de Cuba to Raoul
Bertot, “Agente consular de la dominación imperialista yanqui en esta cuidad”, 11 May 1932.
The National Archives, Kew, UK, Records of the Foreign Office, no. 371/16576, Grant
Watson to John Simon, “South and Central America, Confidential Report”, 13 December
1933.
For the Revolution of 1933, see Carr (1996), Whitney (2001), Soto (1995).
USNA, RG 84. vol. 23, no. 800, Liga Juvenil Comunista to Bertot, 11 May 1932.
10
F.P. Sullivan
Notes on contributor
Frances Peace Sullivan is a Lecturer of History and Literature at Harvard University. Her scholarship
focuses on transnational activism, particularly movements for racial and class solidarity, in the greater
Caribbean.
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