Online at: http://politicalaffairs.net/article/view/6546/1/317/

The Caribbean Labor Movement and the Cold War

By Political Affairs
Archives - Dates and Topics 2008 – online Jan. – Feb. 2008 Feb. 25 – Feb. 29 click here for related stories: labor movement

2-29-08, 9:50 am


Gerald Horne
Editor's Note: Gerald Horne is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and the author of many books, including White Pacific: U.S. imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas after the Civil War; The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade; Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950. We interviewed him recently about his latest book, Cold War in a Hot Zone (Temple University Press).

PA: What is the origin of your new book, Cold War in a Hot Zone. Where did the idea for the book come from?

GERALD HORNE: The original idea came from living for a number of years in New York City and becoming aware of the fact that the Black community of New York has a high percentage of people from the former British West Indies, that is to say, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados. That direct contact then led me into the literature about their experience, studying their migration northward, studying how they came to be a central part of Harlem, and how some of the earliest Black members of the Communist Party, for example, had roots in the former British West Indies or in the West Indies generally.

PA: Is there a connection with your earlier book on Ferdinand Smith, Red Seas: Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica?

HORNE: Absolutely. In a sense it’s a sequel to the Ferdinand Smith book. Ferdinand Smith was born in Westmoreland, Jamaica. Before migrating northward, he was a seaman, and he then became the highest-ranking and probably most powerful Black trade unionist of his era, probably even more powerful than A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The National Maritime Union (NMU), of which he was the leader, had a stranglehold over imports and exports, and therefore the NMU was strategically important to the economy. Ferdinand Smith was also a member of the U.S. Communist Party. The research that I did on Smith led me deeper into the history of the British West Indies. I went to Jamaica to do research in the Jamaican archives, and I also did a lot of research in London, where I became much more familiar with the sources concerning the British Labour Party, what they were doing in that part of the world, in the former British West Indies. So certainly Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica was a good preparation for researching and writing Cold War in a Hot Zone.

PA: Two other figures that play in important role in this story are Marcus Garvey and Cheddi Jagan.

HORNE: After his deportation from the United States, Marcus Garvey returned to Jamaica, where he pursued a Black-nationalist agenda that drove him into conflict with the colonial authorities. And because the people he was speaking for were mostly poor and working-class people, this inevitably had an impact on the growing workers’ movement in Jamaica and also throughout the region.

Cheddi Jagan, who was of South Asian origin and born in the former British Guyana, attended school in the United States and became a dentist. Upon returning home to the Guyana, he got involved in the worker’s movement and became a trade union leader. He also was the leader of what became the People’s Progressive Party of Guyana, which was a Communist party. Jagan surged to power as early as 1953, but because of his progressive agenda, which, as I point out in the book, really sought no more than the kind of democratic rights that, at least on paper, workers enjoyed in the United States – the right to trade union representation, for instance.

Additional coverage:
Podcast #59 - The Caribbean Labor Movement and the Cold War, interview with Gerald Horne
Because of that agenda, which was perceived as unduly radical, he was deposed from office after a mere 100 days in power. When Jagan came to power in 1953, Guyana was still a colonial appendage of Britain, and so it was only a limited form of power he was exercising at any rate. The overthrow of Cheddi Jagan came at around the same time as similar events, for instance, the overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala and the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran.

At this point, U.S. imperialism was at high tide, blatantly interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign states everywhere. In my book I argue that what happened to Cheddi Jagan in Guyana basically cast a pall over the entire region, and it continued to reverberate, in that Colossus of the North was thereby sending a signal that even the simplest forms of progressivism could not obtain in the hemisphere. It was to the benefit of the Cuban Revolution of January 1, 1959 that it directly challenged that edict from Uncle Sam, and of course challenged it successfully.

PA: The formation of the Caribbean Labour Congress was an important event. Its key features were that it was both a progressive labor movement and international in character. Could you talk about the role the CLC played in building the Caribbean labor movement, but also at the period when some of these British colonies were moving toward independence?

HORNE: Something I try to stress in this book is the abysmal poverty that existed in the former British West Indies. It was no accident that this region was referred to routinely as the “slum of the British Empire.” It shocks the conscience to look back now and see the kind of terrible housing, the kind of atrocious healthcare, etc. that people were then subjected to. It was these kinds of horrible conditions that led directly to the thriving trade union movement that came together regionally around 1945 in the form of the Caribbean Labour Congress, although it is fair to note that even before the formation of the Caribbean Labor Congress there were efforts, once again emanating, as early as the 1920s, from the former British Guyana in the person of Hubert Critchlow, a well-known trade union leader and Guyanese personality who was trying to organize workers on a regional and pan-Caribbean basis.


The agenda of the Caribbean Labor Congress was quite simple. It was not only pushing for the rights of labor, it was also pushing for regional sovereignty and a break with British colonialism by establishing independence and also a federation of these small islands, some of which, speaking figuratively, are no larger than postage stamps. What happened was that after World War II, when the British Empire began to go into eclipse, it is supplanted, sometimes quite aggressively, by U.S. imperialism.

U.S. imperialism was quite concerned about the prospect of independence for these British colonies, not least because they had all established close relations with Black America. There was therefore a fear that the kind of radicalism, or perceived radicalism, that was growing in that region, would act like a contagion, spreading into Harlem and elsewhere to the detriment of U.S. imperialism. That is one of the main reasons you had the dislodging of the Jagan regime, the sidelining of the Caribbean Labor Congress, and the rise of a number of leaders, such as Grantley Adams in Barbados, who decided to share their destiny and fate with Washington and London.

PA: That ties into the next question. What was the impact on the labor movement?

HORNE: Basically what it meant was a retreat from any improvement in the wages and working conditions of the people. It is interesting that a number of leaders, in Antigua, for example, and St. Kitts, allied with the left, were not opposed to working with Communists. This was at a time when they were campaigning vigorously against the kinds of atrocious working and living conditions I mentioned earlier. After the onset of the Cold War, however, you see some of these very same leaders flip, and that retreat on their part did not work to the advantage of the working class in the region. This led to a sharp deterioration in the wages and living standards of the people, so that I dare say in 2008 the working class of the region is still suffering the after-effects of that tragic retreat, the seeds of which were planted in the early 1950s.

PA: Does the CLC have a legacy? Is there a similar movement now, or has that yet to be repaired?

HORNE: It definitely has a legacy. First of all, you still have a pan-Caribbean labor movement, and you still have a strong and vibrant Left in the Caribbean, which I think people in this country need to pay more careful attention to. Just recently, for example you had the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, which has been engineered by the Venezuelans and the Cubans. They have had a very important regional meeting, and at that meeting the tiny island nation of Dominica signed on to the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas.

You also have CARICOM, the Caribbean Community, which in a sense is a child of the Caribbean Labor Congress. CARICOM, you may recall, refused to recognize the government that was installed in Haiti after the overthrow of President Aristide just a few years ago. CARICOM stood very tall in that respect, basically staring down U.S. imperialism in the face of rather bruising and blatant threats and intimidation. So I would say that a progressive, Left, and even Communist tradition continues to exist in the region, and I think it would be to the benefit of us all to learn about this tradition and this movement, and indeed to link up with this movement.

PA: Finally, what are you working on now?

HORNE: I’m working on a history of the radical, Communist and working-class movement in Hawaii. It is not well known, I’m afraid, that before statehood in 1959 probably the most vigorous, communist and radical trade union movement under the U.S. flag was in Hawaii. To cite one example among many, in 1953, when you had the Smith Act trials of alleged and actual Communist leaders in Hawaii, and they were convicted, 20,000 workers went out on strike. Nothing like that happened on the mainland. I make the suggestion in this book that Hawaii, which had been a colony of the United States from 1894, was taken on as a state even though it is 2000 miles from the U.S. mainland, not least because the rulers in Washington could not decide whether the best way to contain the communists and the radicals and the working class movement there, was to keep it as a colony or to accept it as a state, and it was decided that the latter was the better part of wisdom.

I’m also working on a book – actually I’ve finished the first draft – on the anticolonial movement in Kenya and its relationship to the Black liberation struggle in the United States. The title is Mau Mau in Harlem? The United States and the Liberation of Kenya. It talks about the manifold connections that existed between the U.S. and Kenya, not only in terms of the Council on African Affairs that featured Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois, but also the fact that a leader like Medgar Evers of the NAACP studied very carefully what was known as Mau Mau in Kenya, and in fact considered establishing a so-called Mississippi Mau Mau, as did Malcolm X, who contemplated a Harlem Mau Mau. It’s a story that needs to be told, and hopefully the book will be published next year.


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