First Published: The Call, Vol. 7, No. 37, September 25, 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
Recently, The Call interviewed Julio Garcia, a veteran Puerto Rican working class fighter whose struggle against U.S. imperialism spans seven decades. As a member of the CPUSA from 1936 to 1950, his experiences in trade union work, community organizing and anti-revisionist struggle offer many lessons for today’s new generation of fighters.
The Call: Can you tell us about your family and childhood in Puerto Rico?
Garcia: I started work when I was ten years old as a water boy in the tobacco fields, making 6u: a day. I used to go to school half a day until I was about 12. Then I left to learn how to make cigars. That was around 1914.
My mother worked in a tobacco shop stripping leaves. She made 25 cents a day. My mother died of starvation, so to speak. You can’t eat steak on 25 cents a day! I never knew my father, who died when I was very young.
I worked in Puerto Rico until 1918. At that time, the U.S. government organized an expedition of workers from Puerto Rico to come to the south of the U.S. I went to North Carolina. It was during the First World War.
These people who came to the U.S. during the war came as workers in the military camps to clean the barracks and do other jobs. I came to this country not to fight in the army but to work. When the war was over, I went to New York. I’ve been living in the U.S. ever since.
What were your first experiences in the labor and revolutionary movements?
When I was still a boy in Puerto Rico I was a socialist and a trade union man. The cigar makers were very well organized and you had to be a member of the cigar union to work as a cigar maker. There was a Socialist Party, and, even though I was a boy and couldn’t vote, I joined because I was a socialist. I consider that as my beginning.
When I arrived in New York, I joined an anarchist group of Italians and Puerto Ricans because there was no communist party then. I was with them a couple of years.
I left New York for Chicago in 1923 and remained active in the tobacco industry and cigar makers’ union, although I didn’t join any revolutionary political movement at that time. I went back to New York again in 1936 and joined the Communist Party.
Later on I became part of the Party section committee and a few years later I became section organizer in Lower Harlem, among mostly Latin people, especially Puerto Ricans.
When you joined the Party, the country was going through the Great Depression and the world was watching the growth of fascism.
What was it about the CPUSA’s work that attracted you to their ranks?
At that time the CPUSA was very active around the civil war in Spain. I liked that. The American people were very active against the Nazis and I was part of that movement. I attended several meetings against Nazism in Madison Square Garden with 20,000 people, including one sponsored by the Society for Chinese Friendship.
All the conditions were there to build a strong Communist Party in the U.S. We told the people that the main way to get rid of the Nazis is to get rid of capitalism, and the people listened to us. Who was Hitler but a representative of the German imperialists? And of a section of the American imperialists, too! The American ambassador to France gave Hitler the key to the city of Paris when that city fell.
Of course, you have to link this up with all the issues. The CPUSA was fighting for relief benefits. They were participating in the struggle for the working class and as a member of that class, I liked that! With those intentions, I joined.
What kind of work did you do in the cigar workers’ union?
You know that the cigar workers were organized by Samuel Gompers, who later became the big leader of American trade unionism. At that time, the cigar union was organizing the unorganized workers. But you also know that the AFL leadership became bureaucrats and around 1936 the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) began to organize many AFL union locals to “jump” to the CIO. Among them was my local in New York.
We made the transition from the AFL to the ClO in 1937 under the leadership of Hernando Ramirez, a Cuban from Key West, Florida. But, it was the struggle in our union around the change that made it possible for us to expose the old leadership of the AFL to the cigar workers in the shops.
I remember a particular shop in New York by the name of Buck Cigar Co. We went there and those people struck in a sit-down that lasted two months! We organized every shop in New York!
The conditions were very difficult, but the new leadership of the CIO went out and fought against the bourgeoisie, the owners. They organized one of the strongest unions in the country! That was how the union came about – through struggle. That’s the only way you can organize workers, by fighting for their rights.
In the meantime, the Party did some propaganda and political work, and workers were recruited into the Party.
How did the Party carryon work around the independence of Puerto Rico?
We had a newspaper in Spanish, financed by the Party, called “La Liberacion” (Liberation). It was dedicated in the main to the independence of Puerto Rico and was distributed mainly among Puerto Ricans. Every section of the CPUSA in New York distributed the paper because Puerto Ricans are all over the city. We also worked among other Latin Americans because Puerto Ricans alone will never win independence. They have to fight, but they need to have help from other peoples, especially the American working class.
We used to have Sunday forums on the Puerto Rican question maybe every month or two. If we didn’t have an office, we went out to the parks.
This newspaper, these forums, visiting people at night – all this was financed by the Party to build up an organization dedicated exclusively to the independence of Puerto Rico. We exposed the imperialists and also showed the people why the imperialists give out reforms like the food stamps today.
You see, Puerto Rico isn’t isolated from the rest of the world struggle. The fight for liberation is one thing that certain nationalist leaders tried to isolate! You have to bring forward all the revolutionary forces to fight for Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic or any other country! If we dedicate ourselves just to the question of Puerto Rico, I believe it would be wrong. We would become nationalists ourselves and I’m not a nationalist by any means. I’m a communist!
Gradually we were winning over the Puerto Rican workers in New York about the need for independence for Puerto Rico. The Party combined this theory with everyday practice in the fight of the Puerto Rican people, like the fight for jobs.
How was the fight for jobs linked to the Puerto Rican national question?
The people always immigrate because they are searching for better conditions of life. In Puerto Rico, there is a permanent depression. It is permanently depressed and there is always high unemployment, since it’s a colony.
So all these Puerto Ricans came to New York searching for a better life, for jobs. But there were no jobs. They had to fight their way just to eat, to put it plainly.
So, they joined the Party. Around the time of the Depression, there were maybe1,000 Puerto Rican members of the CPUSA. They came looking for jobs then, just like today, and just like it will always be as long as that colony is under the heels of U.S. imperialism. That’s why people immigrate!
Today, the Puerto Ricans are still fighting for their lives and they know that the only way they can win is by fighting!
How were you and other Puerto Rican workers given revolutionary training inside the CPUSA?
There were schools that the Party ran that taught Marxism-Leninism. There were city schools, state schools and national schools. Very few Puerto Ricans went to national school that I know of. I only know of three and I was one of them.
From all your experiences with the CPUSA, how do you evaluate the Party’s work around Puerto Rico?
They were helping, but there was always a certain amount of chauvinism. Some leaders believed that “these Puerto Ricans don’t understand things”! You know how chauvinism manifests itself in different ways!
In Puerto Rico there was also a Communist Party led by Juan Rivera. But it was under the direction of the CPUSA. There’s no question but that the CPUSA was telling them what to do!
But, William Z. Foster went to Puerto Rico and when he got back he wrote a pamphlet exposing U.S. imperialism for the conditions under which Puerto Ricans were living. He called it “El Fangito,” which is the name of a very, very poor slum in Puerto Rico. “Fangito” means “mud hole.“ The Party also sent money for the struggle in Puerto Rico. Not a great deal, but a little bit.
The leader of the Nationalist Party in Puerto Rico was Albizu Campos and he met many leaders of the CPUSA when he was in prison in the U.S. After they were released, there was cooperation in the struggle for independence.
But, after the Party totally abandoned the national question, including the question of the Afro-American nation in the U.S. in the 1940s, they never again mentioned the Puerto Rican question.
When the Party went revisionist, how many Puerto Rican members broke away?
Most of them! At least 90 forgot all about the CPUSA, like the Negro people who left the Party, too. In 1950 I quit the Party here in Chicago.
As a communist without a party, what did you do?
I got in touch with the Provisional Organizing Committee. [The POC was an organization that broke away from the CPUSA and attempted to regroup the Marxist-Leninists in the U.S. – Ed.] Harry Haywood speaks about the POC in his book Black Bolshevik. But, like he says very well, the POC soon became a debating society just to criticize each other.
They spent all their time criticizing each other and forgot about the working class. They never went out to the workers. The only “activities” they had was every Sunday three or four guys went out with their newspaper Vanguard, and they slipped it under people’s doors. They never even gave the paper to the people in person!
They had a conference in New York that I went to. I spoke there and said that I couldn’t understand why they didn’t go out and talk to the working class. They threw me out and that was it. I lost all contact with any revolutionary group until 1976, when I came into contact with The Call.
Today, the question of Puerto Rican independence is debated widely on the island and among Puerto Ricans in the U.S. How can revolutionaries unite the people on the demand for independence?
We communists should be realistic. When we talk about independence, many Puerto Ricans are against it, some are in favor of it and some are neutral.
If you take a vote today to decide, statehood will win! Why? Because there has been constant pro-American propaganda since Puerto Rico was invaded by the American imperialists in 1898.
But about one-third of the Puerto Rican people are in favor of independence – real independence. But, even though they are in favor they ask questions. They say, “Puerto Rico is a very small country! It’s not industrially developed!”
Yet for all the pro-American propaganda, every Puerto Rican is consciously or unconsciously a nationalist! How can I say that statehood would win if an election were held today, but that every Puerto Rican is a nationalist? Because, in the main, everybody wants freedom! We’ve got to patiently expose that it’s the U.S. imperialists who have robbed the working class and resources of Puerto Rico.
What do you think about the situation among the imperialists today?
The conditions are being created for a new war because the capitalists always have contradictions among themselves. One group always wants to swallow the other! It’s no different now, when there are really only two nations that dominate the whole world, the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
The people are fighting these two giants. If they engage in a war today, both of them will disappear because the working class of the whole world will take over: The working class will not tolerate another war!