Solidarity With Latin America and the Caribbean

SOLIDARITY WITH LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN. For well over a century, support movement activists within the US Left have leveled vigorous denunciations of imperial aggression, with racism and economic exploitation at the core of their accusations.

African Americans have most consistently opposed US imperialism in the hemisphere. Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and others organized to support Cuban independence and the abolition of enslavement in that country’s “Ten Year’s War” (1863-1873). Others offered critical vocal support for Haiti, as racist forces launched broadsides against the first Black republic in the Americas. Leading voices opposing US military intervention in Haiti and, later, in the early twentieth century in the Dominican Republic also came from African-American lecturers and the Black press. As critics of racism, they interrogated the “civilizing mission” rhetoric of the US government. Sentiment grew more radical after World War I, when growing anti-colonial struggles and the rise of the Communist International provided new channels and languages of national self-determination within the colonized world. Cuba continued to be a touchstone for US activists throughout, with Black intellectuals alongside Leftwing groups the most consistent supporters for the Cuban Revolution of 1959, especially as anti-communist US liberals turned away.

The New Left years ushered in a new wave of solidarity efforts, particularly for the Caribbean. Some organized against the US intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965. Puerto Rican activists led a wave of US-based solidarity work within the colonized archipelago. Partly inspired by the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords Party organized Puerto Rican and other youth of color in the US Northeast and Midwest. In this era of intense and broad-reaching support for global Third World liberation, veteran African American organizer Ella Baker led the Puerto Rico Solidarity Committee. Demanding the independence of Puerto Rico, the committee inspired more than 20,000 people to rally at Madison Square Garden in 1974. For the US-based Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), the Puerto Rican national liberation struggle also offered an important arena for their broader fight against sexism, racism, and imperialism. A wide spectrum of activists along with those in the TWWA built ties with Chilean activists, especially after the assassination of socialist president Salvador Allende and the coup of Augustin Pinochet led a variety of US leftists to take up the cause of freeing the country from the right-wing dictatorship.

The work for Chile as well as for Central America in the 1980s encompassed a new and wide range of actors in solidarity politics. Working through the emerging frame of “human rights,” a range of US liberals, from Democratic politicians to union activists to progressive Christian organizations, took up the cause of Latin America solidarity in ways that both broadened the movement but also introduced new contradictions and power hierarchies, diluting its leftwing content.

The threat of US intervention in Central America in the 1980s, amidst socialist revolutionary activity in that region, led to an unprecedented wave of leftwing solidarity movements. Erstwhile New Left activists labeled Central America the “new Vietnam” and called for resistance on the scale of opposition to the Vietnam War. Around 80,000 people ultimately signed a “pledge of resistance” to stop intervention in Nicaragua, and major protests occurred throughout the country. Some activists, mostly those tied to Christian or interfaith networks, engaged in direct action at military installations to stop the transport of arms. Unions and Christian humanitarian groups, likewise progressive politicians, tended to express opposition to US intervention in terms of “peace” rather than openly supporting socialist forces, given the political constraints of the Reagan era. Others chose to openly support revolutionary Central American groups, with many working with Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), an organization with close ties to the FMLN in El Salvador. The ties between militarism, imperialism, and heterosexism prompted lesbians and gay men to play noteworthy public roles in Central America organizing in San Francisco, Boston, and elsewhere.

Much as the Puerto Rican struggle in the 1960s and 1970s, diasporic communities led or created new and distinct kinds of solidarity activism, sometimes in tension with broader, largely white-dominated formations. Central American exiles, refugees, and immigrants formed many of the US-based solidarity organizations crucial to that region’s Left movements. Humanitarians and Christian groups engaged in the complicated politics of creating safe spaces (or “sanctuary”) for unauthorized Salvadoran refugees, but so did Salvadoran families and friends, usually outside the view of scholars, activists, and the state. Other diasporic actors, such as Puerto Rican radicals, articulated a politics of “anti-colonial anti-intervention,” organizing against US intervention in Central America. Immigrant organizations likewise disrupted the presumed boundary between “domestic” and “abroad” in the US Left, revealing the ways in which imperialism forced people to migrate from their homes in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico in 1994 served to galvanize new kinds of solidarity work in the United States and elsewhere. Strategically using the mass media and the Internet to draw in international support, including support in the Mexican diaspora, the Zapatistas contrasted the daily life and struggles of indigenous people in southern Mexico with the promised opulence of the newly inaugurated North American Free Trade Area, created by the governments of the United States, Canada, and Mexico in the early 1990s. The Zapatistas’s call for worldwide resistance to neoliberal trade agreements led to the creation of People’s Global Action, a decentralized protest network partly responsible for the militant kinds of direct action in the emerging wave of protests against corporate-led globalization, most spectacularly the 1999 “Battle of Seattle.” This decentralized and global movement tarnished the reputations of international financial institutions and provided an important context for the creation of the World Social Forum and the US Social Forum, which was designed to bind popular struggles abroad with those of working-class Black, Indigenous, and people of color in the United States.

Blain, Keisha N. and Tiffany M. Gill, eds. Afterword by Michael O. West. To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019.

Brock, Lisa, and Digna Castañeda Fuertes, eds. Between Race and Empire: African Americans and Cubans before the Cuban Revolution. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.

Hobson, Emily K. Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.

Larson, Eric D. “Anti-Colonial Anti-Intervention: Puerto Rican Independentismo and the U.S. ‘Anti-Intervention’ Left in Reagan-Era Boston.” Journal of Transnational American Studies. 9, 1 (2018): 93-118.

Striffler, Steve. Solidarity: Latin America and the US left in the Era of Human rRghts. London: Pluto Press, 2019.