[Marxism] Carlos Baliño: a web-page devoted to his life and work

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(This is another in the CubaNews list's series of English
translations from the works of and about some of the Cuban
leaders of the past less-known to English-speakers today.
To read all of the material, please see the URL below.)
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Carlos Baliño, 1848-1926
Cuban Revolutionary Leader

Carlos Baliño was a unique Cuban revolutionary leader. His
life spanned two centuries. He was born in 1848, the year
that Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels issued the Communist
Manifesto. This page is a selection of his writings,
translated to English for the first time by Ana Portela, to
bring his life and work work to the attention of a broader
international audience.

Together with Jose Marti, he was a founder, in 1892, of the
Cuban Revolutionary Party. He later became a founder of
Cuba's earliest socialist political organizations. He
actively supported the Russian Revolution of 1905. He
rallied to support the Russian Revolution of 1917, and
became a staunch advocate of its ideas. In 1925, he was one
of the founding members of Cuba's first Communist Party,
together with Julio Antonio Mella and Fabio Grobart and
others.

This page is dedicated to this remarkable man and is an
introduction to his life and work. In time I hope to
provide additional writings by Carlos Baliño. Here you will
find an essay he wrote on the Black struggle in the United
States in 1922. An earlier article, written in 1889, THIS
IS THE ROAD TO TAKE, discusses the concept of socialist
agitation and makes special reference to the struggle
against slavery in the United States.

We also have the obituary to him in the cigar workers union
journal, to which he had frequently contributed. Then, a
memorial lecture about Baliño by Blas Roca (Rafael
Calderio) General Secretary of the Popular Socialist Party,
the name which the pre-Revolutionary Communist Party took
after its legalization in the late 1930s. It served as the
principal introduction to an anthology of his writings
published in 1976. Then, a series of quotations from Jose
Marti about Baliño. Finally, a chronology of Baliño's most
remarkable life.

Carlos Baliño, like Marti, spent long years in exile in the
United States and was fully fluent in English. He wrote
extensively in English and translated important political
works from English into Spanish, as well as writing in the
left and Communist press during his lifetime.

These texts come from an anthology of Baliño's writings,
CARLOS BALIÑO: Documents and Articles,Published by the
Instituto de Historia del Movimiento Comunista y de la
Revolución Socialista de Cuba, 1976.

Edited and prepared for the web by Walter Lippmann,
December 2004.

THE NEW AMERICAN NEGRO

by Carlos Baliño, 1922

Men who hold a fervent belief in human dignity in their
hearts and who have lived for many years in the United
States, going deeply into the life and customs of that
country, have suffered a moral torture and bitter deception
observing the spectacle of the monstrous treatment
inflicted by white men on those of a black skin.

Among the whites of the South an abhorrent social moral
principle was set down: "The black man has no rights that
the white man is forced to respect".

The law of castes was included in this synthesis. The black
person reduced to the condition of a pariah. Without a
right to life, absolutely no rights and restricted to the
wife, with nor authority over the children. At the same
time that the arrogance and harshness of the white man was
offensive, the debasement and servility of the Black man
was upsetting. One felt ashamed of belonging to the human
species.

For the Cuban it was a reason of legitimate pride to
compare the social life of that people, considered a model
of democracy, paragon of justice, the shining light that
teaches the peoples to be free and happy, carrying this
leprosy in the blood, this cancer in its bowels and the
social life of our people where the races mixing and
brought together in the workshops and countryside.

Sometimes we looked at a painting of Washington mounting a
horse and his Black slave holding the stirrups for him and
we thought: "Ah yes! Washington was a great liberator of
whites, but our teachers, our Apostles, our warriors were
liberators of blacks and whites.

In the workshops, the revolutionary clubs, expeditionary
ships, in the field of our battle, in the forest, the
colors and races are confused, joined by the sublime
communion of heroism and martyrdom, the dying white man
rests on the strong and generous chest of the black man,
with dying eyes looking to the heavens of Cuba, as witness
of that fraternity that they bequeathed to its people,
sealed by the kiss of death and forever untouchable.

Here we do not have to feel indignant of a white man's
arrogance and harshness, nor must we feel depressed by a
debasement and servility of the black man.

But, my intention was to talk of the new American Negro.

The slave owners were not the only ones who relegated the
Negro to the condition of a pariah. The whites of the
exploited class, the wretched slaves of a salary, left
behind in the march forward of the proletariats of the
world, systematically excluded the man of dark skin form
their unions, who often broke the strikes of those who
unjustly ignored them.

Trying to find a light in these dark shadows, a tailor from
Philadelphia, Uriah Stephens, gathered his colleagues, and
those seven men, and those seven men, conscious of the
power of suggestion of the secret societies for the
Americans with their symbols and rites, organized the
Knights of Labor order, with three degrees and a ritual
chock full of teachings. In the door of the meeting houses,
a sphere was hung signifying "universal organization"
because here, regardless of nationality, sex or color.

Soon the Order spread throughout the American Union and for
the first time, Blacks and Whites were intermixed in
workers meetings.

When the great convention of Richmond was held, 800
delegates gathered representing the 800 000 members the
Order had, by that time.

The author of this paper was the only Cuban delegate and
represented the Knights of Labor from Florida.

An incident occurred there that is worthy of mentioning
because it marked a new stage in the American workers
movement. Representing the number 49 District Assembly of
New York were seventy delegates, intelligent and advanced
workers. Among them was the eloquent socialist, Victor
Drury and only one Black man, a machinist named Frank
Farrell. In the first hotel they requested accommodation
they were told that they would gladly accept sixty nine
white delegates but under no conditions would they accept
the black man. After touring several hotels with the same
results they all decided to stay and a poor little hotel of
Blacks where they were rather uncomfortable because they
could not accept the fact that the Black comrade had been
barred.

Since then, the ill fated race prejudice between white and
black workers in the United States has begun to disappear
to the extent that there are only one or two unions that do
not accept black workers. These are the unions of the
railroads and soon, they must bow to the pressure of the
other railroad unions and erase that hateful division.

But the American black workers has taken long to approach
the organizations from which they had been barred. The
legacy of slavery, the persecutions and ill treatment have
made him mistrust the white comrade.

But the time will come for all those who were on knees to
stand high.

An admirable woman, Mrs. Randall, an American, one of those
chosen souls who only live in the heights of moral
grandeur, in love with justice, consecrated to the service
of human freedom and, coincidentally, of great fortune,
spent a large part of her capital and energies to the
abolitionist propaganda when, in the North of the American
Union, a legion of apostles and self sacrificing agitators
decided to down with blows that somber Bastille that was
called slavery of the Black.

Mrs. Randall had the great satisfaction of seeing direct
slavery abolished but the satisfaction was short lived
because in a few years that noble woman understood that
slavery had only changed in form, that direct slavery in
the plantations had been substituted by indirect slavery in
the workshops and mines, the slavery of the salary.

She was not disheartened with the pessimism that falls on
the weaker persons. She thought that humanity would have to
move to another stage and she quickly gave her cooperation
to the socialist movement as soon as it began to take root
in the United States. That cooperation has been and is
invaluable.

As Mrs. Randall understood, the socialists were
abolitionists of indirect slavery and that efficient
support could be given by teaching the minds and awakening
the conscience. She set aside a considerable part of her
capital to set up a foundation to broadly cover the costs
of a school of socialism. That is the origin of the
"Randall School" that functions today in New York with a
body of distinguished professors and has more than five
thousand students. Many thousands of socialists have
graduated from the Randall School to spread the idea of
human redemption by all means, from the press to tribunes.

The American capitalists, through their faithful servants
in the Government have begun a fierce campaign against the
school that they view as "as an armed force with the claws
of a lion opening the wings of the archangel" and threaten
to destroy the social regime funded in the exploitation of
man by man. Already some actions have been committed to
weaken the rights granted by the constitution of that
country.

As part of the faculty of that school are two brilliant
Black men: Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph.

These two public champions in New York City publish a
monthly journal entitled "The Messenger". The publication
prints articles for people of color and its mission is to
raise up the great mass of American blacks subjugated by a
servile humiliation in which they have lived up to now. It
calls on men of their race to fight decidedly against the
lynching of blacks and not permit blacks to be killed like
pigs, to sell their lives dearly; at the same time it calls
on them to join the organized workers who accept them in
their meetings and, above all, the join the socialist
movement for the final redemption of all the oppressed and
abused.

We quote the following paragraph from their brave
publication:

WORKERS AND LYNCHINGS

"A Black workers organizer, from Bogalusa, state of
Louisiana, was save by his white comrades from being
lynched by a mob of white ruffians of the so-called "League
of Loyalty". The black man had been actively organizing the
workers in the timber felling to demand a raise in salary,
a reduction of the work day and improved conditions of
work. The owners pointed to him as an agitator who promoted
racist uprisings. Three white workers lost their lives
trying to save the live of a black comrade".

To avoid lengthening this article more, the brave journal
of comrades Owen and Chandler, their commentaries will not
be added at this moment.

The regenerating propaganda spreads like a new gospel among
the worker masses that have been divided up to now by
backward concerns. We feel a breath of fire that crosses
the Atlantic that shakes and moves the multitudes deeply,
who approaches and receives men of all races joining them
to the invincible movement and prepares them for when the
time comes for the supreme battle shoulder to shoulder for
an ideal of freedom, fraternity and justice, for the
socialist ideal.

Espartaco. Revista Ilustrada. Año 1, Havana, October 1922.

READ MUCH MORE ABOUT BALIN~O HERE:
http://www.walterlippmann.com/carlosbalino.html



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