The notion of a burgeoning network of anarchists, working across the Caribbean to resist authoritarianism, fighting for workers and communal rights, and generally fomenting revolution, seems at first glance, fantastical. Yet, startlingly, such an alliance, if necessarily loosely constructed, did function with significant effect—especially in Cuba and Puerto Rico, Panama, Mexico, Tampa, Florida (among Cuban and Spanish tobacco workers), and New York City (among Caribbean immigrant communities)—during the first two decades of the twentieth century.
As Shaffer outlines in his careful, even lovingly researched compendium of sketches of individuals, popular incursions, newspaper publications, and literary interventions, anarchists gained significant mass support, battled for cultural and political space with competitive radical trends (particularly Bolshevik/communist parties), and attracted the baleful attention and openly hostile reaction of local ruling elites and the United States. Meeting and organizing through nodal centers in Havana, Panama City, New York, Miami, and San Juan, individual anarchists like...