Graphic design: Juan Pablo Estrada

From Tierra Nueva, Spanish to English translation by Anarchist News

5th Libertarian Spring Gathering in Havana

On the last weekend of May, our small group of friends, which gives intermittent life to the Alfredo López Libertarian Workshop and the ABRA Social Center with our friendship, held the 5th Libertarian Spring Gathering in the middle of a city that is enduring a chronic collapse of its transport systems, of food, of health supplies, of meeting spaces, of rice, or poetry. All of this in an environment where the spiritual burnout and the massive exodus of hundreds of thousands of people leave gaps that are difficult to fill, and exhausted creativity leaves us with redoubled feelings of isolation and of living in a time that no longer exists.

In this adverse context, our affinity group believed that it was a good time to call for a gathering animated by the good old principles of anti-authoritarianism, the will to cultivate teamwork, mental independence with respect to the dominant mental codes, and the capacity for grassroots initiative without official permission. These are topics that are always timely and valid, given the persistent paralysis in which the daily life of Cuba takes place today.

Taking the pulse of the signs of generalized burnout, as well as the atmosphere of preventive repression and generalized police control that is perceived these days, against all forms of wild collective interaction in Cuba, we reached an agreement to organize only three activities, each in a different space that has relative autonomy in the city.

The activities began in one of the majestic halls of the Loyola Center, an active and pluralist cultural space of the Catholic Church in Havana, with the theme: "Spaces, figures and ideas in 20th Century Island Socialism," borrowing the name from the book by the careful researcher José Luis Montesinos. The gathering unfolded into a remembrance of the contribution of women to the history of socialism in Cuba, in its different tendencies and militancies, a subject that is rarely taken into account, both because of the scarce feminist movement in Cuba and because of the official narratives. We commemorated the rarely-remembered Emilia Rodríguez, a female leader of the anarchist movement from the center of the island in the first three decades of the 20th Century and leader of several national gatherings of the anarcho-syndicalist movement in Cuba. Her story is part of a broader work-in-progress by Montesinos.

This was followed by the young researcher José Julián Valiño who presented his research in progress on the life story of Ofelia Rodríguez, a Havana woman active in defense of women, who, in the midst of the convulsive 1930s, delved into socialist perspectives with a pioneering critique of the middle and upper class feminist movement in Cuba at that time.

Closing those presentations, Mario Castillo shared his inquiry "Amparo Loy Hierro: psychogeography of a neighborhood communist militant in 20th Century Havana," an analytical reconstruction of the life story of a woman who, thanks to the rise of the testimonial genre in the Cuba of the 60s and 70s, became a known as a social fighter with a rich life story in her tragic journey through three Havana neighborhoods, leading to her affiliation with the Cuban group, the Popular Socialist Party (Stalinist) from the 1930s-40s, her expulsion from that organization and subsequent marginalization from political life. A story that offers very valuable material for understanding the psychosocial impact of Stalinist policies in the sphere of popular life.

The dialogue generated by this trio of presentations was very enriching for several reasons. One reason is because it was a collective exercise of recovering the heritage of socialism in Cuba, monopolized by the Stalinist elite that, from the PCC, exerts a grotesque deformation and impoverishment of the wealth of the socialist movement in Cuba, which directly feeds all anti-communism, also obscene, which increasingly takes more defined forms everywhere.

Another reason for the richness of this gathering was that it contributed to expanding a not-exclusively theoretical, conceptual, and intellectual history of socialism in Cuba, which is what is usually done: silencing the human and quotidian dimension of the idea. We also made room for female leadership in the future of socialist practices in Cuba, an area also habitually monopolized by men. No less important was an implicit message that this gathering left for the present and the future that ongoing collapse brings us: the anarchists who organized this meeting recognize the diversity of ideas and tendencies within the history of socialism in Cuba and the world and we do not practice mutual exterminations of life's wealth for the sake of any -ism, including our own.

2nd Activity

The second day of the gathering was spent on one of the delicious rooftops of Old Havana, which offered us the panorama of the contrast between the supposedly glittering gold of the dome of the Havana Capitol on the near horizon and the misery of the thousands of settlements informal buildings that surround it, hidden in the heights of the majestic Neoclassical, Art Nouveau, Art Deco and eclectic buildings that surround this imposing monument of the tropical authoritarianism of the 20th Century Cuban republic. Pierced by this view and enveloped by the freshness of the trade winds of spring in Havana, a small but lively group of friends began the session that we named “Alternative and anti-authoritarian pedagogical experiences”, with the audiovisual “Planting Seeds”, the name of a pedagogical experience with children between 5-6 years old in a school on the southern periphery of Havana, which in eight gatherings had as its theme the interrelated issues of the regeneration of a space of land and the various forms of reproduction and dispersal of plants present in the territory. Issues that, through non-competitive and dialogical games, we relate to the ways in which humans interact, placing mutual aid and collaboration in this space as a form of relationship that is always present and silenced.

“(Un)Drawing School” was the other audiovisual material that was presented in the space, a work carried out by Arliz Plasencia, Lena Castillo, and Mery Cartaya. Three generations of women; mother, granddaughter, and grandmother, who think and seek alternatives to the moral dilemmas generated by the clash between the insistent vocation of the youngest of them for drawing and free experimentation with color and, on the other hand, compulsory schooling, with its burden of standardization and depersonalization from the earliest ages. An audiovisual that gave rise to a lively dialogue that allowed Leonardo Romero Negrín, a Physics teacher, and Aixa Negrín, his mother, a Literature teacher for thirty years, to intervene in the space with their teaching experiences in Cuban secondary education.

Leonardo presented his research of methods to interconnect physics with semantics, hermeneutics, and the socio-political debates that are taking place in Cuba today, in which adolescents and young people often participate in an uncritical and passive way, against which it is proposed to reverse this attitude, activating the student’s capacity for their own analysis and positioning parting from their Physics lessons.

The veteran professor also addressed the problems of the literature programs, their biases and silences regarding the work of great Cuban literary creators who, due to their divergences with the prevailing government regime in Cuba, are not included in the educational system. The session concluded with a recollection of moments in our lives as students, teachers who have marked us, and what characteristics in common allowed us to identify them.

3rd Activity

The last day of the 5th Libertarian Gathering of 2023 ended in the same place as the 4th Gathering of 2019: in the El Trencito [Little Train] space, a veteran laboratory for non-competitive and solidarity games, located near the Almendares river, a space where several generations of children have learned for almost twenty years and it is already a pedagogical reference in the countercultural environment of the city of Havana.

For this occasion, we coordinated with the young musicians Jonathan Formell and Simón Ibáñez, who empathize with anti-authoritarian perspectives of creating and projecting, in the organization of a collective musical creation session with the children, integrated into the dynamics of non-competitive games that the two generations of entertainers of El Trencito have developed. The experience was arduous and full of challenges to overcome, due to all the competitive and non-collaborative habits internalized from the earliest ages, which take their toll at all times.

Derived from this, we perceived the importance in these situations of an organizing direction aware of its provisional nature, which can give way to forms of decentralized coordination of that preliminary direction. In the experiment it was possible to perceive that if this organizing direction does not assume its provisionality, this leads to endorsing the collective dependence on that initial guiding focus, as the supposed only way of acting together.

Against this notion of the provisionality of all organizational management, a very generalized and assumed common sense rises up, which maintains that permanent centralized management in all spheres of social life is a triumph of comfort, well-being, and collective tranquility, for which the dominant educational systems seek to suppress individual responsibility and promote submission to various forms of authority and, at the same time, competition among equals, the perfect environment to reduce the idea of democracy to freely choosing who will exercise the centralized management of our existence, as consumers of representative programs which represent of our passivity.

In the midst of these chains of authoritarian notions, spaces like El Trencito reveal all their psychosocial importance, as a place for prefiguring alternative forms of social interaction, something so significant, especially in childhood, since experiences like these can become guiding compasses when, as we enter adulthood, we receive all the barrage of the authoritarian logic of the predominant institutions, without having previous referents to de-naturalize these mass dynamics.

A closing picnic was planned for the end of the 5th Gathering, a moment where we intended to present the text “Anarchism and Prisons” by the Venezuelan comrade Rafael Montes de Oca, available online, a very useful text to think about anti-prison activism in Cuba, where around 1,000 people are currently serving long prison sentences, just for exercising their right and duty to protest, given the appalling living conditions in Cuba today, while another hundred are "regulated", according to the language used by the police, prevented from leaving Cuba, under conditions of control and direct surveillance, as is the case of the brave professor and historian Alina Barbara López, who was able to attend the first session of the 5th Conference "Spaces, figures and ideas in 20th Century Island Socialism”.

Nor was it possible to exchange with comrades outside of Cuba, from Argentina, Germany, Spain, the United States, with whom we had coordinated a contribution to the closing event, due to the very dynamic that was generated at the end of the activity in El Trencito, where very diverse people came together, with very unequal age ranges and with few references in common, apart from fortuitously coinciding in that space.

Despite these issues that remained pending, in the midst of the grassroots organizational setback that we are experiencing in Cuba once again and the militarized collapse and surveillance that prevails throughout the country, the desire for insubordination and the anti-authoritarian imagination once again opened spaces for the anarchic, communizing and fraternal event, a small but persistent task of wild sociability, a narrow but warm terrain to keep fertilized the seeds of other and greater libertarian springs.

Written by Tierra Nueva [New Earth]

A space for the interaction of anarchist ideas and people, and those in affinity with them, from Cuba and affiliated with the Anarchist Federation of Central America and the Caribbean.

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