Kirwin Shaffer says (p. 10) that the crisis of the old Eurocentric approach to anarchism is demonstrated by the increasing appearance of studies which talk about the influence of anarchism in territorial spheres very distant from Europe (Africa, Asia, or Latin America) and by the progressive circulation of research which, from a social and cultural viewpoint, has brought us notably closer to the cultural production of the anarchists, to their countercultural challenges or to their educational and artistic proposals. This is an author who has been notable over recent years for extracting and communicating the characteristic aspects of the activity carried out by the anarchist movements in Central America and the Caribbean, fundamentally in those territories which were Spanish colonies, and which subsequently came to depend more or less directly on the United States of America. For some of us, this renewing impulse justified the idea that there is life beyond canonical studies on anarchism (we find it difficult to see ourselves in this Anglo-Saxon concept of radicalism), and that the roots of a heterogeneous, dynamic, and ground-breaking movement lie in diversity.
Why Puerto Rico, though? Shaffer recalls that it is clear that the nerve centre of Spanish-speaking libertarian activism in the Caribbean area was based in Cuba, more precisely in Havana. Acting as a real hub, the anarchists from Havana generated a wave of ideological, cultural, and trade-union effervescence which extended through the neighbouring states and which was notably echoed in the powerful neighbour to the north, in particular in the Florida peninsula and in the New York area. Organized around newspapers such as Tierra, Cuban anarchism was capable of fostering a transnational movement which could act as a vehicle for conflicts and realities which originated in the local sphere, but which culminated in achieving a supranational dimension within the broader framework of the struggle against capitalism and its related interests, and the gestation of international labour solidarity. Nevertheless, Puerto Rico was obviously not Cuba.
As Shaffer understands it, the development of Puerto Rican anarchism is, however, especially attractive, precisely because of what could be insignificant: its specificity. For Shaffer, the originality of anarchism in Puerto Rico, the fact that it followed a unique path in the history of anarchism in Latin America, is based on two aspects. (1) The Puerto Rican anarchists were colonial subjects of the United States, a scenario only comparable with the Panama Canal zone controlled by the North American power. (2) In contrast to what occurred in other areas of Latin America, in Puerto Rico we are not faced with a process of adaptation from global anarchist ideals to a heterogeneous and plural construction of identity because there were hardly any immigrants from Spain and Italy among the anarchists of the island and their racial composition was very diverse. For better or worse, Puerto Rican anarchists did not receive a supplementary ideological or organizational contribution from across the ocean from more advanced territorial scenarios. Also for better or worse, the island's anarchists had to undertake their process of growth based on their own strengths (pp. 6 and 7). We should recall that this specificity is the most interesting conceptual basis of Shaffer's book.
The author's personalization of the Puerto Rican anarchist movement in the figure of Juan Vilar is especially suggestive for two fundamental reasons. The first is the recognition of the central role played by very specific individuals in the ideological and organizational shaping of the libertarian world in small territorial scenarios. At the heart of a group which was not especially large numerically, Vilar set himself up as a central figure among the anarchists of Puerto Rico, this becoming a model for subsequent generations. The second reason involves a characteristic which has been highly valued by Shaffer throughout his work, breaking away from the stereotypes that many researchers still have who approach the study of anarchism.
Anarchism was not a movement anchored in a simplistic anti-system rhetoric, and it could not remain on the sidelines of the contradictions which penetrate the internal fabric of people and social groups. Both Vilar and the anarchists who followed or accompanied him had to act in a complex social and labour context. They had to share struggles and expectations with workers who expressed themselves with more moderate approaches, with others who lacked well-prepared ideological baggage, and even with sectors which were openly opposed to the social struggle. The message given by Vilar, in the face of possible isolationist temptations, was that of taking on an important responsibility as a political intermediary between the workers of the Left, both those of the Free Federation of Workers (FLT) and of the Socialist Party (PS), despite the notable differences which distanced him from the reformist trade unionism predominant in the FLT and from the populist personalism which defined the personality of Santiago Iglesias Pantín, the main instigator within the FLT and the PS of the Americanization of Puerto Rican workers and of participation in institutional politics.
Unable, due to their small numbers, to implement their own trade-union initiatives, guided by direct action and the struggle for the complete emancipation of the proletariat and like, for example, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Puerto Rican anarchists had to modulate their influence in the FLT in order to combat the economic and partisan drift of a Gomperian orientation which distanced the island's workers from any hope of redemption, without hindering improvements in their labour and salary conditions. This contradiction, now without Vilar, was as alive as it was twenty years earlier. At the beginning of the 1920s, the active anarchist group known as the Bayamón Bloc, the editors of the island's most important libertarian newspaper, El Comunista, became an ardent defender of the conquests of the 1917 Soviet revolution, in clear contrast to the anti-communist discourse supported by the FLT, and also by almost the entire international anarchist movement.
One last note about specificity: for Shaffer there are two guiding lines of anarchist thought in Puerto Rico which, in addition to supporting its transnational dimension, give his book's euphonic title its true meaning: anti-authoritarianism, and anti-imperialism. In actual fact, they are both substantiated by the requirement, for any transformational proposal, to adjust the discourse to the specific characteristics of the social subject. During the first third of the twentieth century, Puerto Rico continued to be a colony, a new-style colony but still a colony. Beyond pro-independence or nationalist inclinations, the Puerto Rican anarchists also understood that their ideals shared with international anarchism (a stateless, anti-capitalist society, free from any religious influence), the black flag that Shaffer talks about, could only be exercised if they were capable of merging it with the collective identity of Puerto Rican resistance, which the island's inhabitants had forged for hundreds of years.
To recapitulate, this is a splendid book, elegantly edited, which positions Kirwin Shaffer as an essential reference in the history of the Spanish-speaking anarchist movement of the Caribbean. It also shows how, from the most local sphere, we can understand the true essence of a transnational project.
