Chapter 4 examines how anarchists handled the ramifications of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The revolution shaped the next decade and a half of anarchist agitation in the region as radicals attempted to figure out not only how to engage the new Communist state in Moscow, but also how to attract Marxists with whom anarchists worked and lived side by side. The post-1917 era also forced anarchists to confront the spread of US-backed anti-Communist surveillance. US intelligence agencies and their Caribbean partners tracked down and tried to suppress radicalism by expanding the Red Scare’s surveillance and repression into the Caribbean and targeting Caribbean anarchists who, from the heights of officialdom, were now seen as “Bolshevikis.”

Chapter 5 reflects on the role of US neocolonialism from the eve of the Great War to the mid-1920s. In 1916, anarchists launched the first general strike against the US-controlled Panama Canal. Several months later, both Panama and Cuba declared war on Germany within hours of President Wilson’s war declaration. Cuba developed a military draft law modeled on the US law. Puerto Rico’s residents acquired US citizenship in 1917, and thus the island’s male population became eligible for the draft. Anarchists throughout the network emerged to challenge this new wave of regional militarism. Around the same time in Puerto Rico, a pro-independence movement began forming. Anarchists debated the meaning of the island’s independence from the USA, asking just how “free” and independent could a nation be in the “American Mediterranean”? Finally, anarchists began a campaign to counter the growing US friendship with dictators who ruled so-called “banana republics” for the benefit of US corporations. As such, anarchists continued their long critique of US expansionism in the Caribbean, reflecting their long role as anti-imperialist actors in Latin America.

Chapter 2 explores the decade and a half following the Cuban War, noting how anarchists emerged and evolved across the region. In Cuba, the visit by Errico Malatesta and the creation of ¡Tierra! helped anarchists build Havana into the network hub. Meanwhile, anarchists in Florida and Puerto Rico developed dual relationships by working with the anti-anarchist American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions on the ground while communicating with and funding ¡Tierra! as their newspaper. By the early 1910s, anarchists in Florida abandoned the AFL associations and forged the first Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Locals in the network. In Panama, anarchists migrated to the construction project shortly after it began, organized anarchist groups throughout the Canal Zone, linked themselves with Havana, and in 1911 created the isthmus’s first anarchist publication. Throughout all of this, anarchists – no matter where they were – attacked US intervention, capitalism in the region, oversight of the canal, and US-designed political systems then being developed across the Caribbean.