Transnational Communism across the Americas offers an innovative approach to the study of Latin American communism. It convincingly illustrates that communist parties were both deeply rooted in their own local realities and maintained significant relationships with other communists across the region and around the world. The essays in this collection use a transnational lens to examine the relationships of the region’s communist parties with each other, their international counterparts, and non-communist groups dedicated to anti-imperialism, women’s rights, and other causes. Topics include the shifting relationship between Mexican communists and the Comintern, Black migrant workers in the Caribbean, race relations in Cuba, Latin American communists in the USSR, LuÍs Carlos Prestes in Brazil, the U.S. and Puerto Rican communist and Nationalist parties, peace activist networks in Latin America, communist women in Guatemala, transnational student groups, and guerrillas in El Salvador. Contributors: Marc Becker, Jacob Blanc, Tanya Harmer, Patricia Harms, Lazar Jeifets, Victor Jeifets, Adriana Petra, Margaret M. Power, Frances Peace Sullivan, Tony Wood, Kevin A. Young, and Jacob Zumoff
Table of Contents:
Introduction: From the National to the Transnational Marc Becker, Margaret M. Power, Tony Wood, and Jacob Zumoff
Part I: Bolshevism and the Americas (1917-43)
1. The Comintern, the Mexican Communist Party, and the “Sandino Case”: The History of a Failed Alliance, 1927-30
Lazar Jeifets and Victor Jeifets
2. Black Caribbean Migrants and the Labor Movement and Communists in the Greater Caribbean in the 1920s and 1930s
Jacob A. Zumoff
3. The “Negro Question” in Cuba, 1928-36
Frances Peace Sullivan
4. Semicolonials and Soviets: Latin American Communists in the USSR, 1927-36
Tony Wood
5. A Relationship Forged in Exile: LuÍs Carlos Prestes and the Brazilian Communist Party, 1927-35
Jacob Blanc
Part II: Latin American Communism in the Cold War Frame (1945-89)
6. Latin America and the Communist World in the Early 1950s: The Networks of Soviet Pacifism and Latin American Anti-Imperialism
Adriana Petra
7. Breaking the Silence: Communist Women, Transnationalism, and the Alianza Femenina Guatemalteca, 1947-54
Patricia Harms
8. A Political and Transnational MÉnage a Trois: The Communist Party USA, the Puerto Rican Communist Party, and the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, 1934-45
Margaret M. Power
9. Transnational Youth and Student Groups in the 1950s
Marc Becker
10. Our Vietnamese CompaÑeros: How Salvadoran Guerrillas Adapted the “People’s War” Strategy
Kevin A. Young
Afterword: Remapping the Past
Tanya Harmer
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
About the Author :
Marc Becker teaches history at Truman State University. He is the author of The CIA in Ecuador. Margaret Power is professor emeritus of history at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She is the author of Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, 1964–1973. Tony Wood teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author of Russia without Putin: Money, Power, and the Myths of New Cold War. Jacob A. Zumoff teaches at New Jersey City University. He is the author of The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike.
Review :
“An important contribution for those interested in studying the Latin American politics of the twentieth century and for those who study the global history of communism. These works develop different transnational perspectives that inspire us to think about the exchanges of ideas and people between the communist world and the Latin American left, and the challenges and dilemmas that these experiences faced.”--Aldo Marchesi, author of Latin America’s Radical Left: Rebellion and Cold War in the Global 1960s "The quality of the contributions in this edited volume is uniformly high. The respective contributors clearly lay out the issues at stake in the debates on local communist strategy that emerge from their diligent archival research. The book represents a historiographic building block for further work in the field." --International Affairs
