Interview with Tony Wood, author of “Another Country: Cuban Communism and Black Self-Determination, 1932–1936”
Tony Wood is assistant professor of Latin American history at the University of Colorado Boulder. His forthcoming book “Radical Sovereignty: Debating Race, Nation, and Empire in Interwar Latin America” (University of California Press) focuses on radical transnational debates on race, class, and the nation-state in Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s, retracing links between Mexico, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. He is a member of the editorial board of New Left Review, and his writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the Nation, and n+1, among other outlets. You can read his article “Another Country: Cuban Communism and Black Self-Determination, 1932–1936” in HAHR 102.4.
1. You have written two books dealing with Russian politics and history, Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War and Chechnya: The Case for Independence. How did you come to study Latin American history? Does your previous research into Russia in any way inflect the way you approach Latin American history?
My interest in Latin America is a very personal one. You wouldn’t know from my name, but I’m half-Mexican – my mother is from Mexico City, and I spent a significant chunk of my early childhood there and grew up speaking Spanish alongside English. So Latin America has always been a part of my life. When I decided to do a doctorate in Latin American history, it was partly because I wanted to develop a deeper and broader understanding of a place with which I had this long-standing relationship. But when I went to school and college in the UK, I originally chose to study Russian. Having trained as a specialist on that part of the world, I visited Russia frequently in the 2000s and wrote the two books you mentioned. But implicit comparisons with Latin America were always there in the background of my understanding of Russia – a sense of how these different places have their own intense specificity, but also how they are connected to the wider world and shaped by similar structural forces. And yes, at the same time, my experiences in Russia definitely inflected my research on Latin America, partly because I chose a research project that would enable me to make use of my unusual combination of skills.
2. Your article traces how the Cuban Communist Party from 1932 to 1935 formulated the policy that the majority-Black population of Oriente, the island’s easternmost province, should be granted the right to national self-determination. What is the contemporary legacy of this policy, if any, and how does your article hope to inform this legacy?
The article is part of my forthcoming book, Radical Sovereignty: Debating Race, Nation, and Empire in Interwar Latin America. The book reconstructs some intense and fascinating debates that took place in this period, in which a range of leftist groups took part – principally Communists but also other groups and radical intellectuals. One of the ideas that emerged in these discussions was the idea that ethnic or racial groups should be redefined as “nations” and given the right to territorial self-determination. My article deals with the Cuban case, focusing on the island’s Black population, but elsewhere the idea was applied to Indigenous groups, and in the book I also look at what happened to this concept in Mexico.
In Cuba today, the idea of Black self-determination is mostly forgotten, and when it does come up it is very quickly dismissed as an aberration, a wrong-headed policy the island’s Communists adopted under pressure from Moscow. But it seemed to me that there was a note of discomfort in these dismissals, a desire to create some distance, and that made me curious. Drawing on Cuban sources and Comintern archives in Moscow, I was able to piece together a different picture, in which Cubans played a much more central role in adopting and elaborating the policy. I also go on to argue that the policy was much more central to the evolution of the Cuban Communist Party’s anti-racist politics than is commonly realized.
If the policy has a legacy in Cuba today, it’s mainly one of rejection. Part of my impulse in doing this research was just to set the historical record straight, since the rejection also relies on some significant misunderstandings. But perhaps the more important impulse was to highlight how much real debate and contention there was around race in the Cuban Communist movement 1930s. Race is a notoriously sensitive topic in Cuba, and it can be difficult even today to broach questions of racial discrimination and inequality, because doing so can be seen as “divisive” or as implying criticism of the revolution’s approach to race. There are many activists and scholars in Cuba who have been working hard to change that – to open up possibilities for the kinds of critical thinking that are needed to address the real and ongoing issues of racism. It’s not my place to intervene in those conversations directly, but I hope there is a value in scholars like myself showing that there are precedents for them – that similarly crucial discussions unfolded within the island’s radical left in the past.
3. What challenges did you face in assembling the archival source base for this article? Was there one discovery in particular that surprised you?
While working on the larger project from which this article is drawn, I spent time in archives across multiple sites in several countries – mainly Moscow, Havana, and Mexico City, but also in Oriente itself, drawing on local sources in Holguín and Santiago de Cuba. I was also able to visit two of the smaller towns in Oriente where, in 1933, sugar workers took over the mills and declared “soviets” – events memorialized today in monuments and local folklore. There were a lot of logistical challenges in my research, but I was extremely lucky in being able to even contemplate a project of this nature. Doing my graduate work at a US institution, and one with a strong graduate union at that, meant that I had a combination of funding and research time that all too few scholars have access to. I also benefited hugely from the help of friends, colleagues, and archivists in Cuba, and I want to put on record my appreciation for their warmth, their curiosity and generosity.
Perhaps the most surprising discovery I made was that, when it comes to the Cuban Communist Party, there are often more complete records in Moscow than in Havana. For most of the period I’m looking at, the PCC was illegal and had to operate clandestinely, so it’s not surprising that the party files from this aren’t totally comprehensive. But the PCC sent copies of a lot of key documents to the Comintern, where they were neatly filed away, and those files helped fill in a lot of crucial gaps. So, while I did find a lot of what I was looking for in the Instituto de Historia de Cuba in Havana, I didn’t expect to be able to get a week-by-week sense of the PCC’s internal discussions in Moscow.
4. What lessons, if any, do Communist debates over self-determination have for our present moment?
My book focuses on the 1920s and 1930s, and in many ways the issue of self-determination faded from view after that – only to return with a vengeance in the 1960s, the era of decolonization in Africa and Asia. It was partly under the influence of the global anticolonial surge that Indigenous movements in Latin America took up the idea of self-determination again, and from the 1970s onwards “autodeterminación” became a kind of keyword to express a range of demands – from self-government to cultural self-expression. Though there has been much greater recognition of Indigenous rights in recent years, many core demands have not been realized, and the question of self-determination remains highly relevant. The most recent example is the draft Chilean Constitution, which among other things promised to give greater autonomy to the country’s Indigenous groups, and which was rejected in a referendum in September 2022. There were a lot of reasons for that outcome, but tensions over Indigenous self-determination were certainly a factor. To me, it’s very striking that some of the arguments used against greater Indigenous autonomy in Chile were exactly the same as the ones used to reject the Communist version of the idea in the 1930s – that it posed a threat to national unity, or even that it would bring about the territorial disintegration of the country. The similarity, it seems to me, stems from a parallel set of anxieties about the political consequences of more fully recognizing Latin America’s racial and ethnic diversity, and about the scale of transformative change that would be required to address the many forms of inequality that have accompanied those differences. These questions are still very current, and they aren’t going away.
5. What are you working on for your next project?
The book I mentioned is due to come out at the end of 2025 from the University of California Press, and I’m planning some articles that have developed out of the research I did for it. One is on the shifting meanings of “autodeterminación” in the postwar period, which turned out to be a slightly different story from the one I’m telling in the book, and one worth telling in its own right.
6. Read anything good recently?
Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is indispensable; I enjoyed Yuri Herrera’s Season of the Swamp, a novel about Benito Juárez’s little known period of exile in New Orleans; and Antonio Scurati’s M: Son of the Century, a relentless and immersive account of the rise of fascism in Italy.