Race To Revolution by Gerald Horne

Author:Gerald Horne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Published: 2014-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

War! And Progress?

LANGSTON HUGHES AND HIS CUBAN COMRADE, Nicolás Guillén, were under fire.

In 1937 both were in Barcelona—headed south to Valencia—where they, along with many others, had come to show solidarity with the valiant Spanish republic, now being bombarded by the descendants of those responsible for foisting distress upon countless Africans over the centuries—the precursors of fascism, in other words. Paul Robeson, the famed artist and activist, was there too along with, as Hughes indicated, “ordinary Negroes like those I met in the Cuban club in Barcelona.”1

Hughes and Guillén had arrived in Barcelona at a time when there were no lights and pitch darkness greeted them as they decamped from their train. They managed to flag a bus to their large hotel and snared rooms on an upper floor. The next day Hughes and his comrade were sitting in a sidewalk café on a tree-lined boulevard when they encountered a Puerto Rican friend who knew Hughes from New York and who invited him to visit the “Mella Club” where Cubans and “West Indians” gathered. It occupied the second floor of a large building near the center of town and featured a beautiful courtyard for games and dancing and a little bar where (mostly) Cuban drinks were mixed. There they encountered other Cubans—both “black and white,” Hughes was keen to say. But pleasantness soon departed, for after returning to their hotel, suddenly all of the lights were dashed, as a siren blared louder and louder. The lobby was jammed with men, women, and children chattering nervously in Spanish, English, and French, as they awaited what well could have been a death sentence.2

Hence the escape to Valencia, and from there Hughes emerged to say that his experience in Spain was “one of the greatest” of his life: “It is itself a heroic poem, a living poem,” but he and his comrades were not able to stave off defeat.3 Later Hughes in a poem would link “Spain, Alabama, Cuba” to the flamenco and the blues and the son of Cuba,4 as a further expression of anti-fascist solidarity meant to shred the shards of fascism and racism that tormented all three sites. By way of unlikeness, Hughes compared Dixie invidiously to what he had experienced in Soviet Central Asia.5 It was no secret that Hughes and Guillén and many of their compatriots who arrived in Spain were close to Communists, as exemplified by their joint reverence for Julio Antonio Mella, founder of the party of Cuban Communists, who had spent time in Moscow before being murdered in Mexico in 1929.6

The rise of fascism can readily be seen as an ineluctable outgrowth of the racism to which Africans had been subjected for centuries. The European fascists most notably believed that slavery and relentless persecution should not be limited to Africans alone but should be extended across “racial” lines. Those with the most acute sensitivity to this onrushing trend often were those of the left—like Hughes and Guillén—not least since they were lined up to be double victims of this process: on both political and racial grounds.

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