Radical Mutual Aid, International Working-Class Struggle, Antiracist Organizing: An Interpretation of Club Cubano Inter-Americano’s History

Abstract

This article excavates the histories interwoven through the functioning of Club Cubano Inter-Americano (CCI), an organization founded in 1945 by a group of mostly Afro-Cuban migrants in New York City. In essence, the transnational nature of CCI’s space of reception and congregation offered a significant opportunity for mutual aid to supranationally networked peoples with distinct ideologies, cultural backgrounds, and interests. Operating at the overlaps of micro-cultural change and macro-cultural diffusion, leaders consolidated preexisting transnational information networks that shaped the relationship between Cuba and its diaspora in New York City. Examining émigré legacies of community-building and organizing, as lived during the mid-twentieth century, the paper establishes transhistorical linkages that show the daily articulations of resistance to structures of anti-immigration and anti-Blackness. In particular, the analysis highlights efforts in the context of a struggle against discrimination, environmental racism, and geographies of cultural alienation. By telling a story of communal uplift, the paper brings to life a history that lays bare the undergirding logics of public health shortcomings for urban populations, past and present, in a period of intensifying imperialism.