Anarchism as a social movement in Cuba held great influence with the working classes during the 19th and early 20th century. The movement was particularly strong following the abolition of slavery in 1886, until it was repressed first in 1925 by President Gerardo Machado, and finally by Fidel Castro's Marxist government following the Cuban revolution in the late 1950s. Cuban anarchism mainly took the form of Bakuninist anarcho-collectivism and, later, anarcho-syndicalism. The Latin American labor and by extension the Cuban labor movement itself was at first more influenced by anarchism than Marxism.
Famous quotes containing the words cuban and/or anarchists:
“Because a person is born the subject of a given state, you deny the sovereignty of the people? How about the child of Cuban slaves who is born a slave, is that an argument for slavery? The one is a fact as well as the other. Why then, if you use legal arguments in the one case, you don’t in the other?”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“Whether we immoralists do any harm to virtue?—Just as little as anarchists do to princes. It is only because they have been shot at that they once again sit securely on their thrones. Moral: we must shoot at morals.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)