A-Infos (en) Mexico, FAM-IFA: Facts and circumstances of a fourth generation of anarchists in Cuba. Notes from within. (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 An organization like this formed the backbone of a large group of 
young people of that time who managed to recover from the Stalinist 
kidnapping, with police 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 efforts of the second generation of anarchists in Cuba. The 
Youth Federation of the mid-1930s also managed to give new impetus to 
the legendary, but already declining, Federation of Anarchist Groups of 
Cuba (FGAC), leading in 1942 to the creation of the Libertarian 
Association of Cuba (ALC) and to relevant and today forgotten 
anarchist-inspired organizations such as the Federation of Peasant 
Associations, the Association of Anti-Fascist 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 
Confederation General 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 lively sociability and a flourishing 
anarchist publishing movement, which renewed the long presence of 
anarchist press media and public activities in Cuba. Thus, three 
Libertarian Congresses were organized (1944, 1948, 1950), activities and 
practices with anti-authoritarian perspectives in peasant associations, 
neighborhood associations, and regions of the country expanded 
throughout the rest of the geography and social fabric of the country. 
marginalized by other trends of ideas, 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 from those veteran comrades of 
the ALC, especially Frank Fernández, who in the '90s founded the Cuban 
Libertarian Movement in Florida and published that valuable and warm 
book Anarchism in Cuba, beautifully edited by the Anselmo Lorenzo 
Foundation of Madrid.

In the absence of a detailed record of anarchist activity in Cuba 
between 1961 and the beginning of the 2000s and taking as reference our 
own personal experience, the fourth generation of anarchists in Cuba 
acquired an explicit organizational form with the creation on May 1, 
2013 of the Workshop Libertarian Alfredo López, in homage to the leading 
figure of anarcho-syndicalism in Cuba and the Chicago Martyrs. "The 
workshop", as we affectionately call it, in these ten years of 
existence, has tried to take charge of all the long void of 
forgetfulness generated by the long Stalinist-Fidelist night that has 
handcuffed Cuban society, but also of all the disintegration social, 
authoritarianism scientifically naturalized in the mentality of several 
generations and the scant reflection on means and organizational forms, 
which flourished in Cuba before 1959, with the third anarchist 
generation 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 during the last six decades, 
where all minimally autonomous social expression of state institutions 
has almost always been disintegrated. and methodically repressed.

In this context, a small group of people with anti-authoritarian 
intentions created the Critical Observatory Network of Cuba in 2006, a 
space that became an assembly coordinator of self-managed projects, 
where almost a dozen initiatives collaborated in areas such as 
anti-authoritarian education (El Trencito Project ), self-didactism (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 of 
Negritude, the performative poetic brotherhood Chekendeke, the Anamuto 
Anti-Racist Alliance, the autonomous initiative Corner of the 
decolonization of Cuban popular historical memory November 27), the 
laboratory of proposals for socialist renewal in Cuba Participatory and 
Democratic Socialism (SPD group ), then the anarchist initiatives Taller 
Libertario Alfredo López, Locación Cristo Salvador and the Almario 
publishing initiative.

The Alfredo López Libertarian Workshop, the Guardabosque Collective, 
Cristo Salvador Location were the ones who, in a context of decline of 
autonomous initiatives, developed the Libertarian Springs Days of 
Havana, which began in 2013, developing them almost without interruption 
until the recent June 2024, which In the end they had almost no 
activity. In that period of time we developed a large number of 
activities in family and public spaces (related and in dispute). We 
founded the small monthly Tierra Nueva. Space for the interaction of 
anarchist people and ideas, the Guillotina Inútil publishing label, we 
contributed to launching the first autonomous environmental magazine in 
Cuba Guardabosque, the magazine Almario and under a common spirit Carne 
Negra. Fanzine about Visual Arts.

We reposition an anarchist perspective in the public debate of ideas in 
Cuba and repopulate with forgotten dates the calendars of historical 
events in Cuba dominated by Stalinists, liberals, Trotskyists and social 
democrats. After half a century we managed to regain presence in 
prestigious international anarchist spaces such as the Caracas Anarchist 
Video and Magazine Fair, the London Anarchist Book Fair, various IFA 
congresses, we receive invitations or coordinate meetings with anarchist 
federations and initiatives in Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Colombia, 
Brazil, Mexico, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Holland, Czech Republic, 
Slovakia. In 2018, thanks to the international visibility we achieved in 
the anarchist media around the world, 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 to promote the 
creation of the Anarchist Federation of Central America and the 
Caribbean (FACC), which currently tries to survive minimally as a space 
for communication and intermittent 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 pandemic of COVID 
2019, in which many of the coordination spaces for autonomous social 
initiatives were dismantled, but also for everything that has come with 
the post-pandemic in Cuba: the extinction of the public transportation 
system in the country, collective precariousness of salaries due to 
rampant and out of control inflation, the collapse of 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 poverty pensions and no medication coverage for our sick, 
with the government's 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 government despotism, which have 
left a balance of more than 1,000 political prisoners , subjected to 
long sentences and terrible prison conditions, for the sole crime of 
exercising the right and duty of protest in the face of widespread 
misery, with no prospects for 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 from 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 manages 
million-dollar funds and investments in Cuba and outside Cuba, a mafia 
control of the dwindling state productive network, the hotel industry, 
the juicy export of medical services in conditions of semi-slavery to 
workers and professionals of the health involved, the administration is 
also mafia over the use of the large remittances that Cuban emigrants 
send annually to their family, under conditions of kidnapping in Cuba 
and other dissimilar businesses, from which that oligarchy exploits 
Cuban society itself and its capabilities, like an attached colonial 
territory and successfully finances an imposing repressive police and 
prison 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 State Cuban.

At the same time that they entrench themselves like parasites in the 
social body of the country, this oligarchy at the international level 
cries pitifully every year at the UN for its favorite mantra: "the 
immediate and unconditional lifting of the inhuman Yankee blockade of 
Cuba", as "the problem most important thing that afflicts the Cuban 
Revolution", which is nothing other than the luxury exit to which these 
oligarchs aspire, which would allow them to stabilize for other 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 overflowing authoritarian and 
militaristic anti-imperialism of the Castro oligarchy would allow them 
to protect their domination of Cuba, under the Yankee protectorate, and 
sit at the table with them, before the Cuban bourgeoisie of Florida does 
so, as the pigs did. of Manor Farm with the humans they once expelled, 
with their victorious animal revolution, in George Orwell's masterpiece.

Regarding none of the questions raised above, we anarchists in Cuba have 
the slightest possibility of defining absolutely anything. In our hands 
we only have meager but essential tools: exercise and disseminate the 
desire for self-organization, mutual aid and free grassroots initiative 
in all issues of daily life, erode and denature internalized 
authoritarian logics, even among those we fight. governmental despotism, 
banish the need for new humanist commanders-in-chiefs from our lives and 
take charge among equals and like-minded people of our own precarious 
existence, in solidarity and, without doctrinal arrogance, attentive to 
the terrains, themes and spaces where the felt need arises of the 
grassroots organization and the assembly among equals, to contribute our 
proposals and our ideas. Anarchist tension runs through us all 
everywhere and is not the monopoly of those who define themselves as 
anarchists.

The collapse of the monumental Kafkaesque State that has been built 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 who have 
preceded us have been there and we will be there too.

Organized people, Matrias without States

Abelard

https://www.federacionanarquistademexico.org/index.php/hechos-y-circunstancias-de-una-cuarta-generacion-de-anarquistas-en-cuba-notas-desde-dentro
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