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*Red International and Black Caribbean: Communists in New York City, Mexico and the West Indies, 1919–1939*, by Margaret Stevens. London: Pluto Press, 2017. $28.00. Pp. 303. Margaret Stevens’ *Red International and Black Caribbean* is an exciting and in many ways groundbreaking addition to the recent surge of new scholarship on radical black internationalism. Unlike much of the new work, Stevens centers her study almost entirely in the Western Hemisphere, tracing the relationships and reciprocal exchanges between black radicals in the Americas primarily Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Mexico, the Anglophone Caribbean, and the United States, rather than focusing on the old triangle of Europe, the Americas, and Africa. She demonstrates that the connection between the black left and Garveyite nationalists was far closer than has often been allowed, particularly on the grassroots level. Finally, Stevens shows how important the Comintern and its positions on the “national question” and “Negro liberation” were to interactions among black radicals in the Americas. One great virtue of the book is the close attention it pays to left journals and newspapers that have often been overlooked in discussions of black radical internationalism since the apogee of the Garvey movement. The organization of the book is basically chronological, with three sections: the immediate post–Bolshevik Revolution period; the era of “Third Period” class against class ideology; and the Popular Front. Within the sections are chapters generally focusing one particular locale or another. The first section is in many respects an account of the black and brown reaction to the Russian Revolution, particularly in Mexico, the Anglophone Caribbean, Haiti, and the United States. One important point this section makes is the way the Russian Revolution energized liberation movements around the black world in varying ways. It also reminds the reader that rank-and-file Garveyites and left black nationalists often participated in the same organizations at the grassroots level and saw no real contradiction in shuttling back and forth between Garveyite Liberty Halls and Communist lectures and schools. What is also seen is the uneven development of the organized political expressions of these post–October Revolution sentiments. For example, Communist parties developed quite early in Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, and the United States, while no similar groups appeared in the Anglophone Caribbean during the periods covered by the book. It was also during this period, as the Comintern grappled with the “national question” and its relation to the populations of African descendants in the Western Hemisphere, that black U. S. Communists began to play important roles as Comintern representatives in the Caribbean and Mexico. This led both to the advance of the influence of the Comintern in the Caribbean Basin, but also presented some problems, as many of the relevant Communist-led organizations in the Americas — notably the Anti-Imperialist League and the International Labor Defense — were headquartered in North America. The result was that the people making decisions regarding the application of Comintern policy and practice were often quite far away from the Caribbean Basin. The second section takes up “Third Period” policy around the beginning of the Great Depression. This coincided with the rise of the Comintern’s “Black Belt Thesis” that African Americans in the Southern “Black Belt” constituted a nation. The “Black Belt Thesis” was applied to African-descended populations in the Caribbean and Latin America unevenly, if at all. Still, as this section describes, black activists throughout the hemisphere themselves adopted and adapted this formulation, whether in countries, notably Cuba, where a demographic “black belt” existed or other places, such as Haiti, where essentially the entire nation was a “black belt.” The third section examines the strengths and weaknesses of the Popular Front as a strategy in the Caribbean and Mexico. Stevens argues that one of its strengths was creation of the multi-class National Negro Congress in the United States, which allowed groups in Mexico and the Caribbean to work directly with a relatively mass-based and influential black left organization. At the same time, Stevens sees the Popular Front’s emphasis on nation and national unity against fascism as having quite negative results in the Caribbean and Latin America. As she notes, the Comintern was not able to successfully build Communist parties in the Anglophone Caribbean, despite the pressures of the Great Depression and a labor unrest that matched or exceeded that of the USA in the heyday of sit-down strikes, labor marches, and the rise of the CIO. The book ends with a description of the gross inadequacy of Popular Front politics and institutions in responding to the 1937 racist and anti-labor massacre of tens of thousands of Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic. One shortcoming of *Red International and Black Caribbean* is that it has no conclusion. It would have been good if Stevens had summed up the longer term significance of the moments and movements taken up in the book. Also, some consideration of the black radical diaspora in Britain and France, where black activists from the Americas interacted with African radicals to a greater degree than in the Western Hemisphere, might have been helpful in more fully understanding the networks described in this study. This may be another way of saying that Stevens’ book should be read in conjunction with Hakim Adi’s *Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919–1939* and Minkah Makalani’s *In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939*. Nevertheless, this is an important book that makes and illustrates connections between black and brown radicals in the Western Hemisphere during the 1920s and 1930s that have seldom been discussed in print. It is a fresh and invaluable look at the in uence of the Communist left in the Americas, and one that changes our notions of the black radical tradition and the circuits of ideological and organizational transmission of Third International influence. James Smethurst University of Massachusetts/Amherst P.O. Box 446 329 New Africa House Deerfield, MA 01342 jsmet...@afroam.umass.edu https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2019.83.4.568 Sent from my iPhone _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
