Cuba – Fernando Tarrida del Mármol (1899)

From ‘Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Communism’, July 1899, London, UK

Our Havana contemporary, the Nuevo Ideal, an Anarchist weekly, informs us that our ideas are making rapid progress in the islands of the Greater Antilles. The revolutionary proletarians, after their heroic struggle against Spanish tyranny in favor of political independence, are now prepared to fight the politicians of Cuba and the United States in order to secure social emancipation and absolute liberty. Here is an extract from the manifesto of the courageous propagandist Palmiro de Lidia which appears in a recent number of the Nuevo Ideal:

“Those who desire to see our beloved country freed from every tyranny must understand that the independence of Cuba is not merely a political but a social question.

Politics imply simply the art of making and imposing laws; whereas the independence of Cuba is the aspiration of an entire nation, that is to say the social aspiration of a collective body of people who wish to shake off every yoke and rise to the position of a nation free and independent in every relation. It is this two-fold aspiration, social as well as political, which should guide the Cuban people. And we workers, who are condemned to give to the workshops and plantations such blood as we have not lost upon the battlefield, we, more than ever, are ready to concentrate our enthusiasm and energies on this object, and to do our duty as social revolutionists in order that the political independence of the country may be quickly followed by the independence of its inhabitants.”

Those words only serve to confirm previous information received as to the activity that is being manifested by those who have been raising the standard of Revolutionary Socialism in the Pearl of the Antilles and under which are already ranging themselves all the most active and capable elements of the Cuban proletariat. They also prove that as soon as the American troops once [and] for all consecrate the political independence of the island by quitting it, the Cuban Socialists, far from wasting their energies in the barren struggle of parliamentary politics, will turn themselves resolutely to the conquest of the economic and social reforms demanded by Justice and Humanity.

T. del MARMOL.