In September-October 1925, there occurred in Panama a tenants' strike that helped define the development of the left and workers' movement in that nation. This article presents an overview of the strike—important because no synthetic English-language account exists—and then analyzes the role of black West Indians in the event.Footnote 1 West Indians were prominent among the ranks of workers in Panama, and among the slums of Panama City and Colón. Nonetheless, they were not central to the rent strike. This absence reflects the historic relationship between West Indian and Hispanic workers in the isthmus, the effect of the recent defeat of strikes led by West Indians in the Panama Canal Zone, and the lack of attention paid to attracting West Indian support by the Hispanic leadership of the tenants' strike.Footnote 2 This division between the West Indian population and the broader labor movement in Panama had lasting effects in the history of the Panamanian left, reinforcing divisions between the struggle for Panamanian self-determination and the struggle against racist oppression of West Indians and their descendants in Panama.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, amid industrialization and urbanization, the struggle of poor and working-class people for decent housing intensified throughout the Americas. As Andrew Wood and James Baer argue, a series of tenant strikes, from New York City's in 1904 through Panama's in 1925, “challenged the older laissez-faire attitudes that market forces could successfully resolve housing problems.” Wood and Baer focus on the effects that such mobilization had on government policy, but the strike in Panama also played a key role in the development of the labor movement and the left, as this article will show.Footnote 3
The strike halted most commerce in Panama City and Colón, and the Panamanian government found itself unable to stop the strike on its own. Strikers soon confronted the military might of the United States—and found themselves lacking the power to defeat this enemy. Tenants had no direct connection to the means of production, and Hispanic workers in Panama were concentrated in non-strategic sectors of the economy. The mainly West Indian workforce in the Panama Canal had the power to paralyze the Panamanian economy—and international commerce. Remaining aloof from the tenants' strike, West Indian workers did not bring this power to bear. The tenants' movement, absent the West Indians, was channeled into nationalism, a nationalism defined in such a way as to exclude black West Indians.
This not only divided the West Indian population from the struggle for national rights, but deprived the struggle for self-determination of the power of West Indian workers. Rather than creating the basis for working-class unity between West Indian and Hispanic workers, the rent strike cemented the division at the center of the Panamanian proletariat. This division was rooted in the history of Panamanian society, which had at its inception been divided into an outright US colony (the Canal Zone) and a republic dominated by the United States. But this division also reflected the lack of attention given to the issue by Panamanian leftists, including what would become the nucleus of the Communist movement.
The Liga de Inquilinos
In February 1925, Panama's national assembly approved Law 29, which modestly raised taxes on rental gains, to the dismay of landlords, who comprised a key sector of the Panamanian ruling class, the so-called oligarchy, along with merchants and rural landowners.Footnote 4 Landlords, who had been underreporting their profits, shifted the burden of the new taxes onto their poor and working-class tenants, sometimes tripling rents. In response, the Liga de Inquilinos y Subsistencia (Tenants' Subsistence League) agitated against rent increases and poor living conditions.Footnote 5 The Liga de Inquilinos had been organized in late 1924 by the Sindicato General de Trabajadores (SGT), a left-wing split from the more conservative Federación Obrera de la República de Panamá (FORP). Its leadership drew on the Grupo Comunista, a circle of radicals including Spanish-born anarchist José María Blázquez de Pedro and Panamanian intellectuals such as Domingo H. Turner and Diógenes de la Rosa, as well as South American Communists such as the Peruvian-born Jacobo Hurwitz. The Panamanian intellectuals in the group had roots in Panamanian liberalism. Turner, for example, was a lawyer and journalist who had been a diplomat in Chicago a decade earlier, as well as a prominent member of the Panamanian national assembly. By the autumn of 1925, the Liga de Inquilinos claimed 6,000 dues-paying members. As with the other tenants' leagues in Latin America during this period, its growth reflected both specific national conditions and a continent-wide phenomenon.Footnote 6
In September 1925, the league organized protests and a non-payment campaign in Panama City and Colón, Panama's most important cities. Later in the same month, the mayor of Panama City, Marco Galindo, met with representatives of the landlords and the FORP. The landlords in Panama City proposed rolling back rents to rates in place at the end of June, and the FORP representatives agreed. However, the SGT protested to the mayor that the tenants' representatives invited to the meeting had been appointed by the FORP and not the SGT, which had organized the tenants' league. Galindo rejected the SGT appeals, and continued to attempt to resolve the issue with the FORP and the landlords, provoking the SGT to complain to President Chiari that the “rent increase is simply a pretext by the landlords to continue with their prolonged [inveterada] exploitation” of tenants. A moratorium on rents was not the solution, according to the SGT. Instead, the SGT demanded “a complete rearrangement in the relationship between renters and landlords” [un reajuste completo en las relaciones de inquilino y propietario]. The letter concluded by urging that the president try to find a solution to the tenant problem, and not accept the FORP as the voice of the workers.Footnote 7
The government's response was to try to repress the tenants' movement. After a meeting of the cabinet, the Panamanian government ordered the expulsion of the anarchist Blázquez de Pedro, who had been resident in Panama for more than a decade. Despite the efforts of lawyers retained by the SGT, he was expelled, several days before his habeas corpus hearing.Footnote 8 Whether to escape repression or by chance, Domingo Turner left Panama in late September for the United States, where he planned to stay for several months, according to an article by Diógenes de la Rosa on the front-page of the Estrella de Panamá.Footnote 9 On the last day of September, at a mass meeting in Panama City, the tenants' league announced a rent strike to start at midnight. In response, the national government ordered the expulsion of five “undesirable” foreign leaders of the tenants' movement, for threatening “public order” in both the Republic of Panama and in the area near the canal.Footnote 10
At the same time, the government sought to diffuse the situation by talking publicly about reforms and affordable housing. President Chiari advocated “workingmen's villages” with affordable housing, although Tomás Gabriel Duque, the secretary of Agriculture and Public Works (and publisher of the Estrella de Panamá and the Star and Herald) announced that there was no concrete plan to do so.Footnote 11 Landlords proposed to the mayor a seven-person committee to adjudicate the rent issue. Three would represent landlords, three would represent tenants, and the final representative would be appointed by the government. On October 4, the mayor of Panama City accepted the proposal, but by then the tenants' strike was under way.Footnote 12
A week later, on October 10, the Liga de Inquilinos defied an order by the mayor against public meetings. Police attacked protesting tenants, killing several and bloodying dozens more, on the pretext that the tenants had fired first. More than 30 tenant leaders were arrested.Footnote 13 In Colón, five foreigners involved in the tenant movement—two Colombians and three Peruvians—were arrested and deported.Footnote 14 In Panama City, an estimated 4,000 people turned out for the funeral of tenant organizer Marciano Mirones. Police set out to raise a force of 300 volunteer policemen to maintain order.Footnote 15
In the face of such repression, according to the Star and Herald, the tenants' strike “became a general strike involving all crafts” in Panama City and Colón.Footnote 16 On October 12, the police raided the Liga de Inquilinos' offices in Panama City and killed an organizer; later that day, they fired on a tenants' rally, killing another protester.Footnote 17 That day, the president and cabinet of Panama, fearing that there were not enough loyal police officers to maintain order, requested that the Canal Zone authorities send US troops into Panama City. After the US authorities refused to allow their troops to be subordinated to the Panamanian police, the Panamanian government ceded temporary control of Panama City to the US troops. By this time, US intervention was likely inevitable, since Article 136 of the Panamanian Constitution of 1904 gave the United States the right “to intervene, in whatever part of Panama, to reestablish public peace and constitutional order.” However, the manner in which this right was exercised laid bare the neocolonial relationship between the two governments.Footnote 18
Escalation of Conflict
On October 13, at 1:30 pm, three US infantry battalions and a machine gun battery entered the city. For more than a week, the US army occupied Panama City to “disperse all gatherings of more than five persons, maintain order and prevent fires.” The right to bear arms was restricted to US soldiers and police, and all bars and saloons were closed.Footnote 19 When strikers tried to meet in defiance of military orders, more than 66 were arrested. “The Military forces are in complete control of the situation,” according to the Star and Herald published that day.Footnote 20 The American Communist Party's Daily Worker ran a front-page story, datelined Panama, which observed that “Panama City since yesterday has been an armed camp with the invading United States forces swarming the street in full war regalia and brutally dispersing even the most casual gathering of workers.”Footnote 21
On October 15 public-sector workers returned to work, as another striker died and “two agitators were arrested on their way to Colon to print subversive handbills” according to the Star and Herald. In response, the United States reduced the number of troops in Panama City.Footnote 22 After order was restored, Panamanian authorities tried to diffuse and co-opt tenants' anger. President Chiari announced that landlords had agreed to reduce rents to the January 1925 levels, plus offer a 10 percent discount, through September 1926. At that time, the national assembly would meet to resolve the issue.Footnote 23 In Colón, provincial governor Juan D. Arosemena claimed sympathy with anger over rents. With the goal of pressuring landlords to lower rents, he requested that the local Liga de Inquilinos provide examples of landlords having raised rents. At the same time, more moderate leaders sympathetic to the FORP and willing to work with the government came to the fore within the Liga de Inquilinos to replace the foreign radicals who had been arrested and deported.Footnote 24
The government continued to meet with tenant and landlord representatives in Panama City. The Star and Herald reported that the Panamanian government had rolled out a plan to intensify public works programs that would relieve the situation of the working class, including expansion of the main hospital in Panama City, construction of a mental hospital, and the building of 200 low-rent units. Tomás Gabriel Duque, in his capacity as Agriculture and Public Works secretary, ordered landlords to submit a listing of all rental properties, including their conditions and rental rates.Footnote 25 The governor of Colón announced new public works projects to provide jobs.Footnote 26
In Panama City, the government continued to combine the carrot and the stick. A week after the police attacked protesters, the government announced a shake-up of the national police, purging and replacing many officers. Duque announced a census of the unemployed, both foreign-born and native Panamanians. A rent claims commission met three hours daily to hear complaints by tenants. President Chiari blamed the landlords for an “unwarranted” rent increase and promised that the national assembly would address the issue. The number of US troops was reduced, until, on October 24, they were withdrawn completely.Footnote 27
In Colón, the government took the lead on trying to end the strike. The city's mayor requested that landlords reduce rents 5 percent from the January rates, and the Liga de Inquilinos announced that they would end the strike if this actually occurred. On October 30, the league and landlords signed an agreement to end the strike, and tenants began to present their claims to the rent claims commission.Footnote 28 At the same time, the government increased repression against tenant leaders in Panama City. In late October, Blázquez de Pedro, having briefly returned to Panama, was deported again, along with his brother, Martín. Using documents supposedly seized from the Blázquez de Pedro brothers, the government conjured up the specter of an anarchist invasion, claimed that anarchists from Argentina and Peru planned to meet in Panama on November 1. In early November, the tenants' league was banned from meeting in Panama City. The meetings proposed earlier to discuss tenants' issues, the printing or distributing of leaflets, public demonstrations with red flags, or the singing of the Internationale were all now forbidden.Footnote 29
In the short term, this repression broke the strike and destroyed the groups that had organized it. The SGT soon disappeared.Footnote 30 Leading left-wing foreigners were deported. An attempt after the strike to organize a branch of the League Against Imperialism—a pro-Comintern organization comprising nationalists, Communists, and other leftists—faltered.Footnote 31 The founding of Panama's Communist and Socialist movements was delayed another five years. The reforms instituted by the government—a rollback of rents and public works programs—likely alleviated some of the worst conditions in Panama and Colón, but the fundamental conditions that had caused the strike did not disappear. In fact, over the next six years rents in Panama City rose between 50 and 75 percent, even as conditions deteriorated. In 1932, a reborn Liga de Inquilinos led another tenant strike.Footnote 32 Thirty years later, there had been little change.Footnote 33 And the domination of Panama by the United States continued, as shown by the events of 1964, and the US invasion of 1989.
The long-term importance of the tenants' strike was that it gave birth to a tradition of social struggle in modern Panama. As Luis Navas has argued, the Panamanian working class was created before the Panamanian bourgeoisie, but there was a discontinuity in its history.Footnote 34 Although there was a long history of strikes among workers, primarily railroad and canal workers, it is the tenants' strike of 1925 that is seen as the start of the modern labor movement. Writing in the shadow of the January 1964 clashes between Panamanian students and Canal Zone police and US soldiers, Alexander Cuevas described the tenants' strike as the “the event that began the struggle by the popular classes in Panama for their rights.”Footnote 35 According to the influential left-wing historian Ricaurte Soler, “1925 is a decisive moment in Panamanian history, which clarified for all of society the commitments, limitations, and historical destiny of existing classes.”Footnote 36 The 1970 pamphlet Panamá, 1903–1970, issued by the Partido del Pueblo (successors to the Communist Party), argues that the tenants' strike brought together “workers of all types, the unemployed, youth from poor neighborhoods [jóvenes de los barrios populares], housewives, peasants from near the capital, and progressive intellectuals and professionals.” The strike “raised social struggle to new levels in Panama, and the working class, at the front of this movement, exposed the exploitative and anti-national essence of the oligarchic-imperialist regime. The people's movement began, with these events, to evolve in content and orientation into a nationalist movement, in which Marxist ideas were also fighting for leadership.”Footnote 37
As this formulation indicates, the lack of significant West Indian participation in the struggle would have a lasting impact on the relationship between the left in Panama, and the West Indian population. In essence, West Indians were excluded from the ranks of the militant proletariat in the consciousness of the working class—this in spite of the long history of West Indian labor militancy. West Indians were also excluded from the struggle for national independence, cementing their identity as foreign (and threatening), and thus placing them outside Panama's struggle against US imperialist domination. This deprived the struggle for better living conditions and the fight for national independence of the power that West Indian workers wielded. This exclusion weakened these movements at the same time that it marginalized West Indians.
West Indians and Panamanian Society before the Rent Strike
During the construction of the Canal, from 1904–14, some 150,000 West Indians—mainly from Barbados, but also from other British and French colonies—migrated to Panama to work.Footnote 38 Although many later left Panama, many stayed or later returned. By 1930, more than 15 years after the completion of the Canal, one-quarter of the population of Panama City and almost half of Colón was foreign-born. West Indians (in Spanish, antillanos or afroantillanos) represented some three-fourths of the Canal workforce. In the Canal Zone, West Indian workers (called “silver workers” because they were paid in a silver-backed local currency) faced racial discrimination at the hands of the white management and skilled workers (called “gold workers” because they were paid in gold-backed US dollars). Before the Canal, Panama already had a significant black population going back to colonial times; these black Panamanians were known as Afro-Coloniales, and while they faced racism, were integrated into Panamanian society, spoke Spanish, and were Catholic. The Afro-Antillano and Afro-Colonial populations remained separate through the early twentieth century. The growing emphasis on Hispanic culture and Catholicism as defining features of panameñidad meant that West Indians could not assimilate into Panamanian society without renouncing their religion, language, and culture. This exclusive nationalism sent a message to West Indians that they had no role to play in forging a Panamanian identity, and helped strengthen black West Indians' identification with the racist US authorities.Footnote 39
West Indian workers in the Canal Zone had a history of militancy. In 1916, a quarter of the West Indian workforce struck in response to a decision that gold workers—but not silver workers—would be granted rent-free housing. The strike resulted in a what the Star and Herald called a “Canal tie-up.” Although the combination of US and Panamanian repression broke it after five days, the strike showed that West Indian workers were able to organize, and also highlighted the possibility of joint Hispanic-West Indian labor action. The West Indian strikers were punished with eviction from Canal Zone housing; thus the strike increased the West Indian presence in Panama City and Colón.Footnote 40
In 1919, as many as 1500 West Indian longshoremen struck, along with workers in coaling plants, laundries, and cold storage facilities.Footnote 41 Nearly a year later, from February 24 to March 3, 1920, between two-thirds and three-fourths of silver workers in the Canal Zone struck. They demanded higher wages, regularized promotion rules, equal wages for male and female workers, an eight-hour day, fair treatment and due process by Zone officials, and protection for workers engaged in union activities outside of work hours. The strike also took aim at racial discrimination. The Canal authorities took a hard line; on the third day of the strike, military intelligence declared that the authorities “did not intend to make any concessions and are able to break the strike with Panamanian and loyal negro laborers.”Footnote 42
The Canal Zone authorities then broke the strike, using some 2,000 Panamanian and Colombian scabs (who were allowed to keep their jobs after the strike), and white American citizens when necessary. After they evicted the strikers from their housing in the Canal Zone, the Canal authorities announced that strike leaders detained in the Zone would be deported to the West Indies and demanded that Panamanian officials deport leaders caught in the Republic.Footnote 43 Panamanian labor leaders, at the outset of the strike, announced that they would not call out their members in solidarity. While the 1920 strike posed the possibility of joint Hispanic-West Indian working-class struggle, its defeat poisoned relations between West Indian workers and the organized labor movement for at least a decade. This defeat, coupled with a declining economy marked by misery and xenophobia, underlined the marginality and vulnerability of West Indians in Panama.Footnote 44
In the wake of the strike, significant numbers of West Indians left Panama, some to Cuba and the United States. At the time, there was a need for workers in Cuba's sugar plantations. Cuba was discouraging Spanish immigration because of the strong presence of anarchists and union activists in Spain, so the West Indians were made welcome. The United States already had a large, established West Indian community, especially in New York City. As the West Indian newspaper Workman put it in 1920, “If the conditions of labor in Cuba are inviting enough to call people there, the conditions on the Canal Zone are rough enough to drive them faster. The people would rather go to Cuba and ‘rough it’ than stay here and ‘suck it.’”Footnote 45 In 1922, thousands of West Indians in Panama were laid off, leaving 9,000 unemployed and 25,000 destitute, according to British diplomatic correspondence. In 1924, there were some 25,000 unemployed West Indians in Panama.Footnote 46
After the 1920 strike, the organized labor movement in Panama was at best indifferent to West Indian workers. There was no effort to fight for working-class unity between Antillanos and Hispanic Panamanians, and the movement did not see West Indians as allies in the struggle to free the country from US domination. Soon after the strike, the Federación Obrera de la República de Panamá (FORP) was organized. Among its ranks was a union formed by Hispanic Panamanians to demand gold-worker status and preferential employment over West Indians. Not one West Indian was among the FORP leaders. Indeed, in 1921, the FORP considered the demand to expel Antillanos from Panama; of 15 member unions, six supported expelling West Indians while five opposed such a move.Footnote 47
The 1920 strike was a catalyst for West Indian militancy. This overlapped with the growth of “New Negro” radicalism in the United States, in which West Indians played a prominent part.Footnote 48 The defeat of the strike caused many West Indians in Panama to retreat from radicalism. Many members of Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) supported or participated in the strike. With the strike's defeat, the Garvey movement in Panama became hostile to labor radicalism.Footnote 49 While the labor movement among Hispanic Panamanians was taking its first steps, it faltered among West Indians. The Panama Canal West Indian Employees' Association (PCWIEA) was organized, with a more conservative approach than previous unions. In late September 1925, as the tenants' strike was about to heat up, the Star and Herald published a letter in its West Indian News column. The writer bemoaned that after 21 months, the PCWIEA had managed to enroll only 500 people, out of the 7000 West Indians working for the Panama Canal and Railroad. “A very large majority have,” the writer complained, “expressed themselves as ‘resolved not to join anything else’ or as ‘watching for a while.’”Footnote 50
This step back from militancy highlighted a contradiction in Panamanian labor history: although the labor movement there was one of the oldest in Latin America, the predominance of migrant workers in its ranks undercut its continuity and hindered its ability to assimilate the lessons of past struggles.Footnote 51 This division contributed to the fact that the two most important social struggles in early Panama—the struggle against US control and the struggle against the racism inflamed by the same United States—were seen as distinct, if not counterposed. The defeat of the strikes also led many West Indians, finding themselves despised by Panamanian and American authorities alike, to look to the British government for protection, driving yet another a wedge between West Indians and the movement for Panamanian self-determination. According to one British official, in 1925 West Indians made more than one thousand complaints to British authorities about racist mistreatment, especially at the hands of American supervisors or Panamanian police.
The belief that a British intervention would result in better treatment than would social struggle undercut support for the tenants' strike. In his diplomatic report the British major Charles Braithwaite Wallis saw this in a positive light:
Happily, the thousands of British West Indians, many of whom were directly concerned on the rent question, did not join with the strikers, notwithstanding the efforts of the Federation of Labour to induce them to do so. This was most fortunate, because, had they done so, a most embarrassing situation would have arisen. Their nonparticipation in the strike is largely due to the action taken by the British Legation and the efforts of Acting Consul de Comeau at Colón.
The report noted also that the British officials had cultivated relations with more conservative West Indians to undermine radicalism:
The British West Indian Committee has been in existence for some time at Panamá, and has been able to render the Legation and consulate-general considerable assistance from time to time, among many other functions, investigations and advising upon native cases and local customs, &c. Its existence has been more than justified, and it is both anti-‘Red’ and pro-British, and is doing good work in counteracting the subterranean burrowing of the Communists. The personnel of the committee consists mostly of professional men, all West Indians, and there is a doctor, a lawyer and a clergyman among its members. A similar society to the West Indian Committee at Panamá has been started in Colón.Footnote 52
Many of the tenant movement leaders were from Spain, Colombia, or Peru. In response, the Panamanian government used expulsion or the threat of expulsion against foreign radicals. On October 1, as the tenants' strike heated up, a Star and Herald headline read, “Foreigners Warned Against Meddling in Panama's Social Problems.”Footnote 53 Although not aimed at West Indians, the possibility of summary expulsion likely also prevented many West Indians from participating in the tenants' strike.Footnote 54
Laying Bare Deplorable Living Conditions in Panama
The 1925 tenants' strike highlighted the horrible living conditions that plagued much of the population. Not surprisingly, Major Charles Braithwaite Wallis, a British diplomat in Panama, blamed Communist agitation for the uprising:
Although the tenants appear to have a genuine grievance on account of the high rent charged for inferior accommodation, the general unrest has been caused by foreign communistic and other “Red” agitators. In fact, “Red” literature of Russian origin has been discovered. It was largely through the efforts of these people that so many sections of the working classes were induced to join in the strike.
What Wallis, with British imperial understatement, referred to as “a genuine grievance,” were the atrocious housing conditions for the working-class population in Panama City and Colón. Families often lived in two- or three-room flats in tenements housing as many as 24 families. “The slums were congested,” historian Elizabeth McLean Petras has written. “Sanitation systems were inadequate, and the disease rate, especially from tuberculosis, was high.”Footnote 55 Seeking to maximize profits, landlords subdivided their holdings to cram in as many tenants as possible. Tenements of two or three stories, each story with a common balcony and often a common sink and toilet, were built around a courtyard and divided into rooms with walls that did not reach the ceiling. In a tropical country, the corrugated zinc ceilings protected tenants from water, but not noise when it rained. Tenants often cooked on charcoal stoves on the balcony, which created a danger of fire.Footnote 56
West Indian writer Eric Walrond described the slums of Colón in his novel Tropic Death, published in 1926:
Below Gerald's porch there spread a row of lecherous huts. Down in them seethed hosts of French and English blacks. Low and wide, up around them rose the faces and flanks of tenements high as the one Gerald lived in. Circling around these one-room cabins there was a strip of pavement, half of which was shared by the drains and gutters. But from the porch, Gerald was unable to see the strip of pavement, for the tops of these huts were of wide galvanize, which sent the rain a foot or two beyond the slanting rim.Footnote 57
From 1905 to 1930, Panama City's population grew from some 22,000 people to more than 114,000. From 1911 to 1930, the population of Colón increased from 32,000 to 58,000.Footnote 58 Part of this growth was the result of in-migration from the Panamanian countryside. In late September 1925, the newspaper Estrella de Panamá remarked on the “depopulation of the interior” and “the exodus of the residents of the interior of the Republic towards the capital in search of work.”Footnote 59 At the same time, the lack of decent housing, like many problems in the Republic of Panama, was rooted in the US-controlled Canal Zone. A 1921 report by the British consul stated, “The labour conditions in the Canal Zone are intimately bound up with those in the Republic of Panama, for whereas there are some 20,000 manual laborers employed in the zone, about two-thirds of them live in the Republic.”Footnote 60 In 1926, the Canal Zone's governor admitted that “for alien colored employees there is not now, nor has there ever been, nearly enough quarters to meet the demand.”Footnote 61 Furthermore, Canal Zone housing was racially segregated, with crowded towns for silver workers and American-style suburbs for gold workers.
Canal authorities could evict workers from company-run housing in the Zone for any reason, including labor organizing.Footnote 62 After the Canal was completed, Canal Zone authorities began charging silver workers rent and utilities, which they did not do for gold workers. Canal Zone housing for black workers was horrible. One Zone town, Red Tank, had 30 barracks to house 12 families, equating to about 60 persons to a building. Each building had only four toilets, two sinks, and two baths. Many West Indian workers who were unwilling to accept such conditions or put up with segregation left the Canal Zone. In 1913, 12,000 silver workers and their families lived in the Canal Zone, but by 1930, this number had fallen to 4,000.Footnote 63
Retired, laid-off, or disabled West Indian workers were forced to leave the Canal Zone. After the Canal was completed, the Canal authorities offered to repatriate West Indians. Thousands of West Indians agreed to return to their islands of birth, but many stayed and thousands of others continued to migrate to Panama.Footnote 64 Many of these moved to Panama City or Colón. According to sociologist John Biesanz in 1950, “the Zone uses Panama as a dumping ground for worn-out labor.” Many West Indian workers preferred living outside the Zone. As Biesanz observed, the “lack of sufficient housing in the Zone [for West Indians] forces many to live in even more crowded and expensive quarters in the Republic.”Footnote 65 The Canal Zone's housing policies were forcing people into Panama City and Colón, but the Zone boundaries themselves curtailed those cities' expansion. Panamanian landlords opposed building more housing in the Canal Zone for West Indians, since the increasing population density and limited housing stock had allowed them to raise rents.Footnote 66 In the lead-up to the strike, rents had risen between 25 and 50 percent.Footnote 67
West Indians' Role in the Tenants' Strike
Historians have provided conflicting analyses of West Indians' roles in the tenants' strike. Since many tenants were West Indians, it seems logical that they would have played an important role in the strike. Luis Diez Castillo claims that West Indians made up the majority of participants in the rent strike, which George Priestley echoes, if not so categorically.Footnote 68 Alberto Smith Fernández describes the strike as the time when “the renters, by a large majority Antillanos, rebelled against the ruthless rent increase for houses that belonged to the oligarchy.”Footnote 69 Michael Conniff, on the other hand, argues that while “few West Indians participated in the events,” they were scapegoated for the rising cost of living.Footnote 70 Alfredo Reid Ellis echoes this.Footnote 71 Alexander Cuevas's standard history of the strike does not mention West Indians. Diógenes de la Rosa's recollections of the strike, first published in 1984, also did not mention West Indian participation in what he called an “authentic mass movement.”Footnote 72 In a recent study of West Indians in Panama, Robin Elizabeth Zenger poses the obvious contradiction: West Indians' numbers and role in the tenements of Panama would indicate that they “almost certainly” participated in the strike, even though “scant evidence in the public record suggests positively that West Indian[s] participated in the 1925 movement.”Footnote 73
Contemporary sources indicate a subdued West Indian role. The Negro World, published in New York by Marcus Garvey's UNIA, carried regular news from the West Indian community in Panama, but in the lead-up to the tenants' strike the newspaper did not mention social or economic discontent. Indeed, an extensive article datelined Colón, October 12, 1925, detailed a theatrical performance at the UNIA's hall.Footnote 74 Major Braithwaite Wallis stated that during the tenants' strike, West Indians “did not join the rioters.” The six articles sympathetic to the strike that were published by the American Communist Party's Daily Worker do not mention West Indians.Footnote 75
The English-language West Indian newspaper in Panama, the Workman, treated the protests as a Panamanian affair, with little West Indian involvement. In late August, in the lead-up to the rent strike, the paper ran an editorial titled “The House Rent Problem.” Perhaps with rose-tinted glasses, it recalled that “in the good old days after the Frenchmen had gone away leaving the unfinished canal and even during the early period of the American occupation, house rent was a pleasant thing. . . . But as soon it was perceived that the building of a canal was a certainty house rent took an upward flight and has continued soaring to such altitudes that it has stirred the populace to action, in the hope of invoking governmental intervention for the adjustment of the knotty house rent problem.”Footnote 76
A front-page article in Workman after the October 10 police attack, “mostly translated from the Spanish section of ‘El Tiempo’ and what we were able to gather for ourselves,” sympathized with the tenants' strike, but did not mention West Indian participation.Footnote 77 In the next issue, an editorial addressed the “great deal of mischievous palabra about discrimination.” Specifically, there were rumors that West Indians would be excluded from the reduction in rent that was agreed on at the end of the protest, “despite the fact that the Tenants League on more than one occasion invited West Indians to cooperate which [West Indians] ignored.” Furthermore, the Panamanian government “warned all foreigners to keep out, a warning that foreigners generally and West Indians especially heeded to the letter, even though they were equally or even more affected than the natives.” The editorial counseled its readers “to wait patiently the outcome” of a government-appointed committee “now seeking to adjust the vexed question.”Footnote 78
Accounts of people arrested or active in the tenants' strike include mainly Spanish names, although it is impossible to categorize somebody's ethnicity, race, or national origin by last name alone, especially in a country like Panama.Footnote 79 All the people in a Panamanian police officer's report on the clash between police and protesters on October 10 had Spanish first and last names. Of those identified by nationality, the majority were Panamanians, with some Colombians and Peruvians.Footnote 80 Similarly, a list of the dozens of people arrested between October 10 and October 12 shows two Jamaicans and the rest Hispanic, described as Panamanians.Footnote 81 The strike's six dead were not identified by nationality; however, all but one, Lorenzo Brown, had Spanish last names.Footnote 82 Since both the English- and Spanish-language newspapers frequently reported the nationality of West Indians who were arrested for various crimes, it is likely that they would have mentioned any significant West Indian support for the tenants' strike.
There is evidence that the potential for significant West Indian support to the tenants was appreciated by observers, but never realized. As the Workman indicates, tenant activists appealed for West Indian support—and these appeals fell flat. According to Braithwaite Wallis in the diplomatic report cited earlier: “During the recent disturbances in Panamá the thousands of British West Indians did not join the rioters, although continued efforts were made months before to induce them to do so.” The 1926 Annual Report of the PCWIEA contained an October 1925 letter to the governor of the Canal Zone, advocating housing for West Indians in the Zone. The letter hinted that the continued presence of West Indians in the Republic's slums would cause instability. Claiming that the 1916 strike by canal workers had been “engineered by Latin-Americans in Panama, who coerced the West Indians to cooperate,” the report continued:
Other strikes have furnished similar testimony and at the same time the employees who are not sympathetic to the strike idea are always mistreated. Coupled with the possible disruption of the strike, is the menacing attitude of the Panamanian population. At the present time there is open manifestation of hatred, and the most effected remedy for this state of affairs will be the withdrawal from the two cities of possibly five thousand West Indians who are employees of the Canal and Railroad, with possibly 10 or 15 thousand of their dependents in addition.Footnote 83
The Rise of Acción Comunal
The failure of the organizers of the tenants' strike to deal with the role of West Indians in Panamanian society, meant that they were neither in a position to combat the anti-West Indian sentiment common among many Panamanians, nor to confront the Anglo chauvinism among West Indians. The strike against high rents soon was subsumed by Panamanian nationalism, which had a strong anti-West Indian component. The wedge that this exclusive nationalism drove between West Indian and Hispanic workers allowed the justified resentment at US domination to be co-opted by Acción Comunal (AC), a right-wing Panamanian nationalist group founded in 1923. Acción Comunal, the group's paper, railed against “Chinese, Syrian, Coolies, Greek, etc.” merchants who were supposedly driving up residential and commercial rents. Acción Comunal's answer to high rents was to “prohibit or make more difficult, under whatever pretext, opening new shops” by foreign merchants.Footnote 84
Isidro Beluche Mora's sympathetic account of Acción Comunal, Surgimento y estructuración del nacionalismo panameño (1981), blames West Indians for conditions that led to the strike. “The avalanche of foreigners,” this former Acción Comunal member claims, “displaced Panamanians, not only in terms of space, but also as tenants. Landlords preferred West Indian laborers from the Canal Zone because they paid their rent punctually due to their higher salaries and lower cost of living as a result of their ability to shop at the tax-free Zone Commissary.”Footnote 85
According to one of its founders, Acción Comunal's ranks comprised “professionals, young lawyers, doctors, dentists, engineers, and businessmen” who “had the impression that the country was becoming foreign to us” [teníamos la impresión de que el país estaba extranjerizando].Footnote 86 Its militants, upset by Liberal corruption, felt blocked from social advancement by professionals from the United States. They also grew distressed by the increasing diversity in Colón and Panama City. Anti-Americanism and xenophobia were prominent in its political program, as summed up in its slogan: “Speak Spanish, count [your money] in Balboas, and read Acción Comunal.” At the organization's founding, Víctor F. Goytía, one of the group's leaders, declared: “The foreigner who comes to the country must focus only on work and not interfere in either the country's politics or its private affairs.” The young organization focused on getting Panamanian professionals hired in public works projects and Panamanian doctors and nurses hired at the nation's main hospital, Hospital Santo Tomás.Footnote 87
“The foreigner” in Acción Comunal members' thinking was usually a white North American, and the group's politics reflected in a distorted way justified grievances regarding the US domination of Panama. Still, the group's xenophobia, mixed with anti-black racism, also targeted West Indians, who like their American bosses spoke English and worshipped in Protestant churches—and were a more vulnerable target than American citizens. As Marixa Lasso put it, “They were accused of being both the accomplice of the imperialist Americans and another evil consequence of the American presence in Panama.”Footnote 88 In 1924, Olmedo Alfaro, a contributor to Acción Comunal, published a pamphlet titled: El peligro antillano en la América Central: la defensa de la raza (The West Indian Danger in Central America: Defense of the Race). One of these “dangers,” according to Olfaro, was that “the black West Indian does not absorb our civilization, but remains perfectly foreign to it.”Footnote 89
In its pages, Acción Comunal bemoaned that it was “shameful to see how these immigrants little by little have taken over entire neighborhoods in our main cities, where they live and multiply as if they were in their native land.” They also believed that many foreign companies preferred West Indian workers for cultural reasons. This supposedly created “a ruinous competition for native-born workers.” The organization advocated “saving measures” [medidas salvadoras] including “closing the door” on West Indian migrants, who were “undesirable and had caused, were causing, and would continue to cause fatal consequences to Panama, ethnically speaking.” Acción Comunal demanded a prohibitive tax on any company with a workforce more than a third foreign-born. Fearing that English-speaking but Panamanian-born children of West Indians would be able to vote and stand for office, they called for prohibiting West Indian immigration.Footnote 90
Opposition to foreign domination, along with paeans to Latin America's distinct Hispanic culture as opposed to European or North American values, was central to Latin American nationalism throughout the continent in this period, whether of a right-wing or left-wing form. This reflected the oppressive role of the United States throughout Latin America. Just as anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe has been labeled the socialism of fools,Footnote 91 anti-West Indian sentiment was in part an ersatz anti-imperialism: West Indians, a vulnerable population, stood in for American interests, who were less vulnerable. Just as West Indian migration was a phenomenon throughout the Greater Caribbean, so was anti-West Indian sentiment. This reflected racial, cultural, religious, and economic hostility and competition.Footnote 92
While anti-West Indian sentiment in Panama was similar to anti-West Indian hostility elsewhere, in Panama there was the added twist that the very concept of national identity was new and unsure in this period. Panama had only recently become independent from Colombia and had been dominated by the United States from its inception. Mainstream Panamanian nationalism shared much with Acción Comunal's racism and xenophobia, if in less extreme form. In the popular imagination, panameñidad was based on hispanidad, mestizaje, and Catholicism. Rather than forging a Panamanian identity based on both national self-determination and the recognition of the rights of the large Antillano population, reactionary Panamanian nationalists sought a national identity based on expelling West Indians.
From this national identity, American citizens in the Canal Zone, along with the larger West Indian population who unlike most white Americans wanted to stay in Panama permanently were excluded.Footnote 93 In late March 1925, Panama enacted Law 55, which required immigrants who arrived to Panama in maritime third class to deposit 150 balboas with the government for a year. Although the only immigrant groups named were “Syrians and Lebanese,” the law's goal of reducing West Indian immigration was clear to British diplomats, who did not oppose the law.Footnote 94 A related issue was West Indians' citizenship. Migrants were British subjects if they were born in the British Caribbean, but according to British law, only “legitimate” children born in Panama could claim this status through the parents. West Indians were ineligible for United States citizenship, even if they were born in the Canal Zone.
After the tenants' strike, xenophobia and racism increased in Panama. In 1926, Law 13 prohibited the immigration of “Chinese, Syrians, Turks, Japanese, East Indians, Dravidians, and blacks from the Antilles and the Guyanas whose first language is not Spanish.”Footnote 95 Laws passed in 1927 and 1928 further limited West Indian and other immigration. A new constitution in 1941 stripped many Antillanos of Panamanian citizenship, leaving them stateless. In 1946, this provision was reversed: Panama-born Antillanos were now eligible for Panamanian citizenship, but to obtain identity papers expeditiously, they had to display familiarity with Spanish and knowledge of Panamanian history.Footnote 96
Historian Thomas Pearcy asserted that Acción Comunal's members “helped organize” the strike. In fact, one study notes the absence of any evidence in the press of support by the middle class for the 1925 tenants' strike. Landlords and the government denounced the strike as anarchist and communist, while the petty bourgeoisie distanced itself from the movement.Footnote 97 Nonetheless, it is likely there was an ideological overlap between some tenants and Acción Comunal. A commemorative article in Acción Comunal, published a year after the strike, recalled that the strikers' “cause was so just” even as it complained of the “poorly understood and dangerous socialism that directed the ignorance of the majority of the tenants . . . amid an inexplicable passionate blindness.”Footnote 98 In an interview decades later, Celedonio Gálvez Berrocal, the group's founding secretary, noted that Acción Comunal “as an institution did not take part directly in the famous movement, but many of its individual members” did.Footnote 99 Beluche Mora paints the strike as a vindication of Acción Comunal's program. The “sordid spectacle” of the military occupation after the strike “provided palpable justification to Acción Comunal's patriotic movement.”Footnote 100
In 1926, Acción Comunal became more prominent as leaders of the struggle against the Kellogg-Alfaro treaty. One result of this struggle was that Panama's national assembly rejected the treaty, which would have ceded more power to the United States. Acción Comunal assumed the lead against the treaty, and the SGT backed them. Harmodio Arias, a leader of Acción Comunal, and Domingo H. Turner, future leader of the Communist Party, were the loudest voices of opposition in the national assembly.Footnote 101 This struggle helped to strengthen Acción Comunal's support. Five years later, the organization staged a coup that placed Harmodio Arias in the presidency. In the immediate sense, the apparent bloc between Acción Comunal and left-wing militants, not to mention the strong anti-West Indian sentiment among the mainstream labor movement, must have served as an obstacle to West Indian support for the early Communist movement. From a Marxist standpoint, the Communists' opposition to imperialist subjugation was correct, but the Communists failed to forcefully differentiate themselves from Acción Comunal's reactionary nationalism by not taking up the banner of West Indian rights along with the banner of national liberation. No doubt, the deportation of foreign cadres of the Grupo Comunista in the aftermath of the tenants' strike weakened the Communists' position in the face of growing nationalism. But the ultimate weakness was political.
By this time, it should be noted, the Comintern had adopted the concept of “socialism in one country.” Touted by Stalin, this direction jettisoned the original Bolshevik program of working-class revolutions throughout the world in favor of a perspective that Communist parties outside of Russia should seek to pressure their capitalist governments for policies favorable to the Soviet Union. In the colonial and neocolonial world, including Latin America, the Stalinist concept of two-stage revolution meant that the goal of Communists was subsumed by support for bourgeois nationalists.
The Labor Movement and West Indian Workers
Given the tradition of West Indian militancy in Panama, it is likely that many West Indian workers would have responded with support, had the labor movement, especially its left wing, tied its struggles to the fight to defend their rights. West Indians' historic militancy and the fact that West Indians were among the primary victims of high rents could have provided fertile ground for a resurgent radicalism, counteracting the conservatism and defeatism of many. Instead, the right wing of the Panamanian labor movement embraced nativism, while its left wing largely ignored the issue.
The Federación Obrera de la Républica de Panamá (FORP) was organized in the wake of the defeat of the silver workers' strike. Supported by president Belisario Porras and his Liberal party, the ranks of the early FORP included conservative leaders who sympathized with Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in the United States, as well as pro-Bolshevik and anarchist militants.Footnote 102 As noted earlier, much of the FORP leadership opposed the West Indian presence in Panama. Writing in early 1925, a British diplomat reported on this situation to his superiors in London:
The Panamanian Federation of Labour [the FORP?] continued their activities against the West Indians during the year. The members of the federation are mostly Panamanians; that is to say, they are ‘mestizos’, with a considerable admixture of negro blood, &c. Owing to the fact that the federation is fairly well represented in the [National] Assembly, and command a number of votes, the Government has been obliged to take them seriously, and have been adopting a conciliatory attitude toward the organisation. The federation was instrumental in the passing of a municipal regulation prohibiting chauffeurs and other drivers of public vehicles who are unable to read and write Spanish from pursuing their business. . . . This law created some unrest amongst the West Indians, who called a number of mass meetings and vigorously protested against it.
Due to British intervention, the diplomat claimed, the implementation of the law was postponed for one year. He noted that the labor unions demanded that the government nationalize public services, and hire only Panamanians.Footnote 103
Five FORP representatives, including federation president Enoch Adames V., attended the Fourth Congress of the Pan-American Federation of Labor in Mexico City in December 1924. This conference of AFL and Latin American union federations had been organized by Gompers to strengthen AFL influence in Latin American and combat labor radicalism. The FORP delegates to the conference submitted a motion advocating “the repatriation of Jamaican and Barbadoes [sic] workers who were brought by the government of the United States of North America for the construction of the Panama Canal, and who are at the present time and in their great majority in the cities of Panama and Colón, thereby constituting a serious check to the economic improvement of the working people of the Republic of Panama.”Footnote 104
Opposition to immigration was common in the labor movements of many countries at the time. For example, the AFL opposed Asian worker immigration to the United States, in racist terms.Footnote 105 In the United States, the AFL opposition to Chinese workers was that they undermined the wages of white workers by accepting poorly paid jobs. In contrast, Panamanian nationalists opposed West Indians for supposedly being more privileged than Hispanics in obtaining jobs. Ironically, the white American “gold workers,” the most privileged section of the Canal workforce, were represented by the AFL-organized Metal Trades Council, which supported the segregation system. Closer to home, there were other labor leaders, politicians, and nationalists in other parts of Central America who opposed black West Indian migration for reasons similar to those of the FORP.Footnote 106
Shortly after the tenants' strike, FORP president Enoch Adames V. attended a meeting of the Metal Trades Council. According to the Star and Herald, Adames asked the white trade unionists “to help Panamans [sic] get preference over West Indians in Canal Zone.” He also complained about the presence of Communists in the Panamanian labor movement.Footnote 107 The demand by the FORP leadership for job preference for Hispanic Panamanians over foreigners dovetailed with the xenophobic perspective of Acción Comunal. According to Isidro Beluche Mora, one of the group's early goals was “fomenting close relations with the mass of workers through the Federación Obrera de la República.”Footnote 108 Although Acción Comunal drew upon sympathies with European fascism—its coat of arms included a swastika and two fasces with axes—it also shared its xenophobic nationalism with much of the trade-union leadership, so it could not be overtly anti-labor. Had the labor movement embraced West Indian workers, instead of excluding them, this probably would have not been the case.
Communism in Panama
It is not surprising that the FORP, as the right wing of the labor movement, was hostile to West Indian workers. Although the government favored the FORP as a counterbalance to the more left-leaning SGT, the latter group pushed aside its conservative rivals. The SGT and Grupo Comunista, the left wing of the labor movement, appear to have been free from such nativism and racism. Before splitting from the FORP in December 1924, the SGT founders opposed FORP's efforts to expel West Indians from the country. They argued that “the lack of work for the West Indian workers . . . was a product of capitalism,” according to historian Hernando Franco Muñoz.Footnote 109
There is little written on the history of Communism in Panama, especially its early years, and the Moscow files of the Communist International (or Comintern) do not contain anything before 1927.Footnote 110 Despite its geopolitical importance, Panama was not central to the Communist universe in the decade after the Bolshevik Revolution. Although leftists in Panama sympathized with the Communist movement in the 1920s, a Communist party was not founded until 1930. In 1920, the British Consul reported a short-lived journal that was “Bolshevik in tendency, and hostile to Allied action in regard to Germany and Soviet Government in general.”Footnote 111 This description likely referred to Cuasimodo, an anarchist journal founded in 1919 and edited by Julio Barcos from Argentina, José María Blázquez de Pedro from Spain, Nemesio Canales from Puerto Rico, and José Moscote from Panama. Cuasimodo was published in Panama until 1921, when Barcos and Canales moved to Buenos Aires, where they continued publishing the increasingly pro-Bolshevik journal.Footnote 112
In July 1921, the Grupo Comunista was formed in Panama, under the guidance of Blázquez de Pedro, who had been in Panama since 1914. Prominent in its ranks were several Peruvian exiles, along with leftists from Venezuela, Colombia, and Spain. Among the Panamanian members were Diógenes de la Rosa, Clara González, Domingo H. Turner, and José A. Brower. Espousing a “mixture of revolutionary anarcho-syndicalism and Marxism-Leninism,” according to historian César del Vasto, the group advocated working-class solidarity, class struggle instead of class collaboration, and support for the Soviet Union and the Communist International. In 1929, many of the Panamanian militants who had been active in the group formed the Partido Laborista, which was represented at the First Conference of Latin American Communist Parties, held that year in Buenos Aires. In 1930, both the Communist and Socialist parties were organized, with many of their founding cadres having been members of the Grupo Comunista.Footnote 113
In the Communist International in the 1920s, Communist parties in imperialist centers were assigned the responsibility of organizing Communist work in colonies or semi-colonies under their governments' influence. Communists in the United States were thus accorded an important role in Mexican and Central American communism. In the early 1920s, the most significant Communist movement near Central America was in Mexico, where a Communist party had been founded in 1919. The Mexican Communist Party was unstable. Centered in Mexico City, it was far from Panama. In 1923, there is evidence that Central American Communists “complained bitterly” about being ignored by their comrades in the United States.Footnote 114
In 1925 Mexican Communists helped organize the Communist Party of Central America (PCCA), which was to coordinate Communist activity in all the Central American countries, including Panama. In reality, the PCCA was centered in Guatemala and El Salvador. By the early 1930s, when the PCCA dissolved, there were Communist parties in several Central American countries, but the organization apparently had never had anything to do with Panama.Footnote 115 By 1925, however, there was contact between Communists in the United States and the Grupo Comunista. Blázquez de Pedro's address in Panama City was included on a list of “labor and socialist groups, communist sympathizers” in Central America that was found in the files of the US Communist party.Footnote 116
In October 1925, at the time of the tenants' strike, in response to a inquiry about a Communist presence in the Canal Zone, the US Communist leadership responded that “we have no connection in the Panama Canal Zone.” The writer urged a contact to become a member-at-large of the American Communists.Footnote 117 This indicates the lack of radicalism within the Canal Zone, but also the view that Communists in the Canal Zone should act under the supervision of American Communists, not Panamanian Communists—and this at the height of a massive social struggle, when support among workers in the Canal Zone could have been useful to Panamanian Communists.
Lenin's Bolsheviks were distinguished by their opposition to ethnic, national, and other types of oppression that were not reducible to economic exploitation. This stemmed from the Bolsheviks' experience in the tsarist empire, what Lenin called a “prison house of peoples,” and where such oppression was a bulwark of tsarist autocracy. In his seminal book What Is To Be Done? which describes the type of party the working class needed for victory, Lenin stressed that a Communist needed to be “a tribune of the people,” exposing and combating social oppression, not merely fighting for economic gains for workers. The Comintern, which Lenin and other Bolsheviks founded after the October Revolution to organize Communist parties internationally, stressed the right to self-determination and opposition to national chauvinism and ethnic oppression. This emphasis differed from the understanding of most social democrats, even the most left-wing, who saw national and racial oppression as distractions from the class struggle.
In the United States, the Comintern waged a decades-long struggle to get Communists to take up the fight against black oppression.Footnote 118 In Panama, national and racial oppression were key components of capitalist society. The leadership of early Communist movement in Panama drew heavily upon Spanish anarchist leaders. The anarchist movement in Panama had paid little attention to the importance of race in maintaining capitalist exploitation in the Canal Zone. Some Spanish anarchists had been hostile to West Indian workers, believing that they were being used by the bosses to divide workers and drive down wages.Footnote 119
In the Central America of the early 1920s, there was little formal connection between the Communist movements and the Comintern. Most Communists were white or mestizo urban intellectuals or craft workers, equally as distant from a Bolshevik understanding of party-building as they were from the peasants and indigenous masses.Footnote 120 There is no evidence that the Communist Party in the United States stressed the fight against racial or ethnic oppression in its dealings with Central American leftists. Besides a political and geographic distance from Latin America, this inattention reflected the problems that Communists in the United States had dealing with the “Negro Question.” It also reflects that the intersection of nationality, ethnicity, and race was different in Central America and the United States.
Little documentation of the interventions of Communists in the United States into Panamanian Communism in the 1920s exist. One is a report written by Jack Johnstone, a leading American Communist, concerning the 1924 Pan-American Federation of Labor convention. What evidence exists focuses on the Communists' struggle against American imperialism, not racial oppression. This is not surprising, given the United States' domination of the isthmus. Along with Bertram Wolfe, an American Communist then active in the Mexican Communist Party, Johnstone tried to organize a left wing at the convention, which was “composed of the Panama delegation . . and the Guatamalians [sic].” Johnstone recalled that he and Wolfe “met with these delegates in their hotel, and gave the Panama delegation all the material on the AF of L imperialistic policy and their attitude in the discrimination against the natives of Panama and the Canal Zone.”Footnote 121 Johnstone and Wolfe's approach emphasized “the national liberation movement” against American imperialism but ignored the role racial oppression played in maintaining American domination. The Daily Worker’s extensive coverage of the tenants' strike did not mention West Indian workers. In 1927, at a meeting of the American Communist Party's central executive committee's trade-union committee, Johnstone put forward a motion “stressing the demands such as the ‘Equal Rights for the Panamanians with the American Citizens within the Canal Zone’.”Footnote 122
Early Communists' failure to develop a Marxist analysis of race and labor relations in Panama must be taken in the context of a small group operating in a new and complex society in which race, ethnicity, nationality, and imperialism intersected in varied ways. The activity of the early Panamanian Communists seems to have consisted of translating and distributing basic Marxist texts in Spanish, and joining the international campaign to save Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists on death row in the United States.Footnote 123 The weaknesses of the Communists in Panama must also be taken in light of their very recent organization. Although there were Communist parties scattered throughout Latin America, the Comintern did not focus on Latin America in a concentrated way until its Sixth Congress in 1928.Footnote 124 Issues surrounding race and ethnicity in Latin America were similarly distant from the Comintern's attention. That such a young group found itself at the head of a social struggle like the tenants' strike is impressive.
Regardless, the emphasis on national liberation without attention to racial oppression helped condition the lack of support among West Indian workers for the tenants' strike. Communists could have put forward demands addressed to the situation Antillanos faced, including advocating full citizenship rights for West Indian and other immigrant workers and opposing the “silver” and “gold” labor system. The legitimate demand by Hispanic Panamanians to not be excluded from working in the largest enterprise in their country—and more broadly their just struggle for national self-determination—could have been coupled with the fight against racist discrimination on the Canal and a struggle to defend the West Indian population. Such an effort would have been in the interest of the entire working class in Panama.
Along with advancing the goals of the strike in favor of affordable housing, such demands could have helped undercut the pervasive hostility and mistrust between Panamanians and Antillano workers, and it could have helped connect the discontent of the slums of Panama and Colón to the power of the West Indian workers in the Canal Zone. It could also have connected the struggle for national liberation to that against racial oppression, joining both to working-class struggle. Given the US army occupation and the power of the United States more generally this would not have guaranteed victory in the tenants' strike, but the failure of the Communists in the leadership of the tenants' strike to raise the issue did not help.
As indicated above, the tenants' strike failure to find significant support among West Indians isolated the strike from the social power that could have made it more effective. It also helped to isolate West Indian workers from Panamanian popular struggle, and from the growing fight for self-determination in Panama. As evidenced by the agitation against the Kellogg-Alfaro Treaty, Panamanian nationalism continued to grow, but by this time, West Indian workers and their history of massive struggles had been written out of Panamanian working-class history. This weakened the working-class movement, since the canal workers were the most powerful component of the proletariat. This is the only way to make sense of the Panamanian Socialist Party's goals, which were summed up in 1947 by Demetrio A. Porras, the party's founder: “Petty-bourgeois and peasant agrarian revolution, not proletarian revolution without proletarians.” The connection between agrarian reform and socialism was contentious on the left, but Porras ignored the fact that, despite the poor condition of the Panamanian countryside, the country had a significant working class with power not only in the national economy but also in international commerce.Footnote 125
Much of the left shared the Socialist Party's perspective in overlooking the largely Antillano working class. For example the Partido del Pueblo's 1970 pamphlet, Panamá, 1903–1970, does not mention the West Indian silver workers' strikes in its treatment of “elements that were breaking from Liberal ideology and that made themselves evident in the early 1920s.” Instead, the pamphlet argues, after thousands of workers were laid off after the completion of the canal, “a portion of those from foreign countries were returned to their countries of origin”; it goes on to say that at the same time “the ideological crisis of Panamanian Liberalism was made clear by highlighting the anti-popular and anti-patriotic nature of the oligarchic merchant-latifundista regime that had had ruled since 1903 in alliance with imperialism.” In other words, the interests of the West Indian workers and the Panamanian nation were distinct—a vision that reflects the same approach that the Communists' predecessors had taken almost 50 years earlier.Footnote 126 The tenants' strike, the pamphlet stresses, helped turn popular struggle into a nationalist direction.Footnote 127 In 1936, as Communist parties internationally were forming popular fronts with their theretofore enemies, the Communist and Socialist Parties of Panama even joined a section of Acción Comunal in forming the Frente Popular electoral alliance, along with dissident Liberal groups.Footnote 128
In the 1970s, the struggle for Panamanian control of the Canal Zone was an important reason that attracted people to the Communist Party.Footnote 129 In the 1980s, Jorge Turner, son of Domingo H. Turner, argued that “the great banner of working-class and popular unity must be the struggle to achieve national independence.”Footnote 130 This strength of nationalism is understandable, given the situation of the Canal Zone to 1979, the invasion of Panama in 1989, and the continued domination of Panama by the United States to this day.
At the same time Panamanian nationalism has long had an anti-West Indian strain. Thus, one Panamanian leftist intellectual recently emphasized, in regard to the fight against United States imperialism, the importance of the struggle for “Latin American unity, whose fundamental objective is the nation, understood as a community of language, culture, history, and customs.”Footnote 131 Since some nationalists, going back to Olmedo Alfaro and Acción Nacional have used West Indians' language, culture, history, and customs to exclude them from hispanidad and panameñidad, such talk could be seen as exclusionist. Although the 1925 rent strike had the potential to undercut this anti-West Indian sentiment, bridge the division between West Indian and Hispanic workers in the isthmus, and join them together in struggles against U.S. imperialism and against racist oppression to the fight for workers' power, this is not what happened.
