By the early 1900s, anarchists penetrated the far corners of the Western Hemisphere. In Cuba, Florida, Puerto Rico, and Panama, activistslike their comrades everywherestruggled to create their own anarchist visions of a free, egalitarian society for all, regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, or gender. 1 To accomplish this, they challenged the power structures of society in international and domestic capitalism, religion (especially Catholicism), and the state. These men and women always thought of themselves as internationalists. They rejected nationalist and patriotic rhetoric they believed falsely divided humanity for the material and political interests of a few elites. They saw their local and national struggles as part of a regional Caribbean antiauthoritarian network linked to a larger global movement (Figure I.1). Now, some may see the anarchists as unimportant and marginal in the region before the 1930s. After all, they did not achieve (nor even seek) state power. They did not believe in governments, though some modified this view when the Bolshevik Revolution emerged. Thus, some readers together in the Communist Group in the early 1920sa group that idolized the Industrial Workers of the World, that is, anarchosyndicalism. Thus, anarchists were the first to attack the spread of global capitalism and the growing imperial presence of the United States in the Caribbean. Second, in an era of new "independent" entities like Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Panama, anarchists were the rare activists in the region to oppose nationalism and nationalist movements as they advocated non-nationalist, non-Marxist alternative futures for the Caribbean. A third compelling reason for the importance of anarchists in the Caribbean is what anarchists created: a substantial, regionwide transnational network to coordinate communications and organizations, bring down US-backed capitalist politics, and illustrate their internationalist as opposed to nationalist agendas. They were enough of a threat that intelligence agencies launched their own coordinated transnational surveillance system and repression measures, seeing anarchists and their feared networks as legitimate targets of a regional anti-Red campaign that began decades before what we know as the post-1917 Red Scare in the United States. Puerto Rico. The United Fruit Company so dominated tropical-fruitfor-export production that one automatically associates this massive transnational corporation with the image of a banana republic in the Caribbean. Milton Hershey had his own sugar plantation and town in Cuba to fuel a growing cheap chocolate craze in the United States. The spread of transnational agribusiness coincided with the spread of other US economic enterprises in the region. US-based tram, railroad, and electric companies poured in to develop modern infrastructure. At the same time, the United States built (with public funds, privately produced materials like steel and concrete, and a multinational workforce) the Panama Canal for transoceanic military and economic tr...
