ROAPE’s Chinedu Chukwudinma, unearths two previously unknown draft texts by Walter Rodney in the archives in Atlanta. He writes how Rodney was inspired by the lessons of the Cuban revolution, and that during a prolonged visit to Cuba between 1968-1969, he began to imagine a world without racism and inequality. Rodney argued that black people in Jamaica and the US could build a socialist society through a guerrilla revolution. Both texts concern radical development and class struggle which lay at the centre of Rodney’s work after 1970. Chukwudinma examines an incredible seven month visit to Cuba by the Guyanese revolutionary.
By Chinedu Chukwudinma
Little is known about Walter Rodney’s visit to Cuba from November 1968 to June 1969. When I explored the Walter Rodney Papers in the Atlanta archive in the autumn of 2022, I only stumbled upon one correspondence about his stay on the island. It was a letter dated 4 July 1969 from the University of Dar Salaam (UDSM) to Pinar de Rio, the capital city of the most western province of Cuba. Its author thanked Rodney for his mail on 10 May, in which he applied for a “lectureship in African history”.
I can only imagine Rodney walking down the streets of the provincial capital named after heroes of Cuban independence, Jose Marti and the Afro-Cuban General Antonio Maceo. Perhaps his interest in the history of African slavery in Cuba led him to Pinar Del Rio’s tobacco plantations, which sprawled over plains surrounded by limestone mountains on the horizon. After all, it is the site of the world’s finest cigars. However, I can only say with certainty that the letter failed to reach the Afro-Guyanese historian in Pinar del Rio; he had already made up his mind and left Cuba for Dar es Salaam.
In this essay, I aim to bring attention to the details and motivations surrounding Rodney’s obscure journey to Cuba. I then shed light on the significance of his visit for his political development by presenting two unpublished drafts I suspect he wrote from Cuba. I argue they represent an expansion of Rodney’s case for guerrilla revolution in Jamaica and the United States in the aftermath of 1968, the year of global revolt.
Returning to Cuba again and again
It was not the first time Rodney had visited Cuba. During his undergraduate years at the University of the West Indies (UWI), he first visited Cuba only a year after the revolution of 1959 and again in early 1962. He returned from his journeys with literature, including Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare. A decade later, Rodney remembered his travels with the utmost enthusiasm. “Because I was with Cuban students”, he wrote, “I got some insight at an early period into the tremendous excitement of the Cuban Revolution. One must live with a revolution to get its full impact, but the next best thing is to get there and see a people attempting to grapple with real problems of development”.
To live with the revolution, he planned a longer visit to Cuba in November 1968. But this third visit was motivated by peculiar circumstances. Only a month before his departure, the Jamaican government had banned Rodney from Jamaica upon his return from the Montreal Black Writers Conference. Rodney, who had spent nine months lecturing history UWI, had gained the respect of radical students, Rastafarians and unemployed youth for his Black Power agitation on campus and off-campus while raising the fears of Jamaica’s elite. So, when news of his ban spread, the masses rebelled against the Jamaican state from 15-16 October.
“The Rodney Riots” and “Rodney affair”, as they became known in newspapers, had raised Rodney’s international profile making him famous among activists, but notorious among governments. Forced to linger in Canada, Rodney arranged his travel to Cuba in between his frantic schedule of speaking at rallies and community meetings against his ban and giving interviews to the Canadian press. “He wanted a break and to do some writing,” said Patricia to me when reflecting on her husband’s banning. She continued with more information on his state of mind. “He was unsure whether he wanted to go back into academia”. Rodney had suffered a profound existential crisis. His time in Jamaica had left him bitter towards pretentious ivory tower academics, satisfied with learning and teaching for the sole sake of it. He was of a different breed. He was devoted to learning and teaching for the oppressed working masses who could change history. Doubting whether academia could support his aims, he went to Cuba to find himself.
There may have been a more pressing reason for his departure in November 1968. An acquaintance of Rodney’s in Montreal, Afro-Canadian activist Raymond Watts claimed he learnt about an urgent threat to Rodney’s life from the Montreal-Based Haitian socialist Dr Max Chancy, who was in touch with Cuban intelligence. In this scenario, the Guyanese historian left for Cuba because he received a tip that his life was in danger. This rumour, which is unfounded, somewhat satisfied my soul. I have found Walter’s decision to leave his family for Cuba puzzling – he left between his wife’s near miscarriage and the end of her pregnancy. Although Walter had arranged for his wife and three-year-old son to accompany him, his family could not obtain a visa. When the Rodneys reunited in late October 1968 in London, Patricia was recovering from the tremendous hardship she suffered after her husband’s expulsion from Jamaica. Whilst in the middle of her pregnancy, Patricia had joined the UWI student protest to reinstate her husband. Because of police tear gas and repression, she was hospitalised almost losing her unborn daughter.
In December 1968, the tireless seven-month-pregnant Patricia moved her family to Tanzania to live with friends in a city she knew and adored. She has always praised her husband for performing his share of household chores, encouraging her to pursue her studies, and being a good and loving father. I found countless examples in Rodney’s life supporting her assertions. But, in those days, could the young historian have shown an aloofness toward family responsibilities at the expense of his own wants and desires? This would not be uncharacteristic of most men of his time and most today. Or did the couple agree that Rodney should leave for his safety? In March 1969, Patricia gave birth without a husband by her side. The couple’s second child was three months old when Walter returned from Cuba in June 1969.
Fragments of Rodney’s activities in Cuba
I found few details of Rodney’s third visit to Cuba. They begin with a strange, declassified CIA document from 1969. The document is a newspaper article that shares the information of a Cuban whistle-blower, once employed at the Cuban Consul in Paris. The Cuban defector had alerted the Americans that Rodney had travelled to Havana in November 1968 via Paris and Prague. The document underscores the international notoriety Rodney had acquired after the riots of October 1968, but says no more about his journey.
Next, we have the memories of the Jamaican scholar-activist Horace Campbell. This close friend of Rodney told a Cuban scholar, Samuel Fure Davis, that Dr Armando Entralgo was the main contact of the Afro-Guyanese historian in Cuba. In the late 1960s, Dr Entralgo was on the path to becoming Cuba’s most reputed expert on African affairs, history, and culture. In 1963, he opened Cuba’s first African embassy in Accra to forge relations with national liberation movements. He worked as the ambassador to Ghana until Nkrumah’s overthrow in 1966. Upon his return to Cuba, Dr Entralgo became a professor of African history. He worked toward the establishment of a specialisation module in African and Asian history within the School of History at the University of Havana. Amongst these efforts, Dr Entralgo had invited Rodney to Cuba to write something on African history and its ties to Europe. “Walter told me the Cubans inspired him to write How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, wrote Campbell to me. He explained that the Cubans had asked Rodney to recommend a good book on African history, but he could not think of a title worthy of being read. Aside from Dr Entralgo, Rodney befriended Osvaldo Cardenas, a young Afro-Cuban sociologist who would later become the ambassador to Jamaica. Some years ago, he had told Afro-Cuban Scholar Zuleica Romay via email that “Walter Rodney studied Spanish, did research and read a lot”.
Finally, Patricia remembers some information about her husband’s activities in Cuba which she followed from Tanzania. “He was very excited about the Cuban revolution” she told me remembering Rodney’s letters to her. As Patricia was a nurse, Rodney shared with her his fondness for the reorganisation of Cuba’s health care system. However, his journey was tainted by his silence as shown in Patricia’s letter from 6 January 1969. “Still no word from Walter”, she wrote to her Guyanese friends in London, Jessica and Eric Huntley, whom she had stayed with from late October until she departed for Tanzania in December 1968. She was alluding to Walter’s lack of communication two and a half months after he had landed in Cuba.
“Walter was doing a lot of writing and reflecting,” Patricia told me. She implied elsewhere that Walter had to overcome stationery shortages and broader material scarcities bought on by the imperialist embargo on Cuba: “He wrote in whatever paper he had in his hands, mainly on napkins”, she specified to Zuleica Romay. The result of this diligent labour was a manuscript, which none can find today. “We’re still looking for the manuscript. It’s called Black Struggles… somehow it got misplaced” Patricia said to me, “lots of things got lost along the way”.
Encounters with two powerful drafts
Today, I have come to the conclusion that the completed manuscript is lost and perhaps will remain so forever. I had often daydreamed about going to Cuba to locate this precious item before some scholars warned me about the troubles of accessing Cuban archives. Six months ago, during my visit to the Atlanta archives, my hopes turned towards finding something there that Rodney could have written from Cuba.
A few hours before the end of a routine visit to the archives, I caught sight of two strange documents that awakened my curiosity and excitement. Entitled Africans Abroad in Jamaica and African Abroad in America, they looked like two draft chapters of a larger manuscript at first glance. “Perhaps they were parts of speeches that Rodney made”, I then wondered to myself, pondering over their casual prose. Although they seem to fit nicely with the lost manuscript his widow told me about, nowhere could I find a reference to the title Black Struggles. Rodney had typed out 41 pages of the first chapter and 31 pages of the second draft. But he had not concluded the American document, which ends abruptly. Rodney edited sections of the unpolished document. Sometimes he crossed out words, sentences, and even entire paragraphs towards the end of both manuscripts. Sometimes he retyped those very paragraphs or enhanced them with handwriting on extra pages.
From my reading of the documents, I suspected that Rodney had written them from Cuba in early 1969. The only explicit date I found was a reference to Guyana’s “fraudulent election in December 1968”, which combined with an allusion to Hugh Shearer as the “present” prime minister of Jamaica. On several occasions, Rodney appears to educate a foreign audience: “Until today many blacks in Jamaica will tell you that Garvey is not dead physically”, he writes before explaining how Garvey remains a symbol of resistance in Jamaica. The text also bristles with references to Cuban history, culture and praises of the 1959 revolution. Plunged into frenzied thoughts over what I had encountered, I began pacing up and down the archival room, until realising that I annoyed the poor staff member left with me that evening.
African abroad in Jamaica: A sequel to The Groundings
In these powerful unpolished drafts, Rodney reveals his optimism at the possibility of a Black Power revolution led by guerrilla fighters in Jamaica and the United States. Part one, Africans Abroad in Jamaica, reads like a sequel to Rodney’s The Groundings with my Brothers – a collection of the speeches he made during his time in Jamaica, published by his London comrades. In the same polemical style as Groundings, Rodney offers a more vivid account of Jamaican underdevelopment under neo-colonialism than any of his prior writings. In poetic prose, he tells us how the collusion between the local elite and Western companies through foreign investment in development programmes has increased wealth inequality on the island:
Black people in the Kingston slums can glance up and see the private mansions which the local capitalists are building on the hillsides, each at the cost of thousands of immoral pounds, luxury hotels are never very far from the shacks of the local population in the tourist resort areas; American cars of the latest model pass by as workers in the hot sun and the hot tar are waiting on the inefficient capitalist bus; whites roll up in their limousines and photograph the peasant on his donkey; peasants heroically cultivate little patches of rock land clinging to the hillside while beneath them the level fertile land is monopolized by sugar estates and other lesser capitalist.
Although Rodney’s class anger runs through Africans abroad as it does in Groundings, his concerns in the draft diverge from his Black Power manifesto. Africans abroad reveals a shift in Rodney’s main political priorities after his departure from Jamaica. Rodney devoted much of Groundings to challenging African history and attacking the multiracial character and politics of Jamaica’s elite to empower black minds. Yet, he moves the theme of black empowerment into the background in Africans Abroad to focus on the class struggle, (under)development, and the question of revolutionary violence.
His new focus partly came from what he witnessed in Cuba during his visit. Fidel Castro’s state had launched the Revolutionary Offensive of 1968, responding to the failures of its previous self-sufficient development model. The Offensive was an aggressive campaign of industrialisation and expansion of export agriculture. It also nationalised small businesses to increase state control over agricultural production. Rodney believed that Cuba’s industrialisation enabled farmers and workers to “control their own destinies” by raising living standards. Consequently, he argues in Africans abroad that Jamaica’s path out of underdevelopment should follow Cuba’s example by breaking with imperialism, ending unequal divisions of wealth and modernising through technology. Furthermore, he praises the ban on prostitution and gambling in Cuba, which Castro completed under the “New Man” ideology that accompanied state-led development. This state ideology promoted an identity that glorified rural life and devotion to the revolution while attacking religion, Afro-Cuban anti-racist agitation, and everything the regime considered heresy. In Africans Abroad, Rodney does not mention such acts of oppression in Cuban society, as he appears blindsided by his enthusiastic support for Castro’s state-led socialism.
Although he spends time praising Cuba’s free health care and education in his draft, Rodney stresses that these benefits are the fruits of armed struggle. And yet, the theme of violence has been so often overlooked by those who have studied Rodney’s activity in Kingston. But luckily for us, the Guyanese historian provides his explanation for his ban from Jamaica in his Cuban manuscript.
It turned out that Rodney was regarded by the government as a threat because he put himself at the service of a black power movement both within the university and outside, and because he was prepared to discuss the question of revolutionary violence as a means of ending injustice.
Perhaps, Rodney’s reference to himself in the third person underlines that he was writing objective history, not a memoir. It conveyed his commitment to presenting the real course of events leading to the “Rodney riots” of 1968, and that exercise required him to include his role as a Black Power agitator keen to discuss armed struggle.
Throughout the draft, Rodney adamantly argues that violence is not a foreign concept to Jamaican society. It stands at the heart of historical acts of resistance to imperialist oppression and is part of the contemporary class struggle flourishing in all corners of society. He illustrates this fact throughout the document with examples from the peasant Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 to the Caribbean labour unrest of 1938 which bought the colonial system to a standstill. In his analysis of the October riots in 1968, he conceives them as a step forward in deepening revolutionary consciousness in the country. He argues that the uprising and its brutal repression helped bring students and academics out of their idle embrace of non-violence to consider other possibilities. He praises black youth for leading the way in moving from the theorisation of violence to its concrete application. “For some hours, on October 16, the city of Kingston was in the hands of black youth who showed a high degree of creativity and organisational ability. Those brothers took a step forward from theory to practice” writes Rodney. This spontaneous riot, he argues, represents the culmination of the efforts of individuals and small groups who hitherto promoted a theory of armed struggle.
In his praise of spontaneous action, Rodney rejoices at the formation of independent trade unions outside of the elite-led organisations, calling these workers’ initiatives “the most outstanding development in the labour movement since 1938”. He thereby considers the rivalry between the two major unions, Bustamante Industrial Trade Union and National Workers Union and their respective parties, the Jamaica Labour Party and the National People’s Party, as dividing workers and pulling them away from the struggle against the elite. He compliments these new unions for trying to unite workers by building their own educational classes and newspapers while suggesting that they might be “the kind of organisation upon which worker power will be based”. Rodney, however, hardly mentions strikes and their importance in bringing down the state. The worker’s struggles stood far behind the strategy of guerrilla warfare of the urban youth in the coming revolution.
Rodney then elaborates on how a guerrilla war might unfold in Jamaica. While he supposes Jamaica’s insurgency will take inspiration from Vietnam and Cuba, he thinks its practical application will diverge. The island is not big and mountainous enough to accommodate long-term guerrilla camps. “Consequently, the confrontation will have to be both urban and rural at the same time”, he writes. Rodney’s intelligence as an independent thinker is summed up in that quote. When discussing the strategy of armed struggle, he considers that accounting for the geographical and historical peculiarities of Jamaica and connecting with the urban workers is of the utmost importance for victory.
African abroad in USA: The conditions for guerrilla struggle
When I read Africans abroad in the USA, the second manuscript unearthed in the Atlanta archives, I instantly felt the impact of the Black Power uprisings that swept American cities in the spring of 1968 on Rodney. Rodney’s chief concern in the draft is to discuss the strategies for building successful guerrilla warfare in the United States. Rodney first proposes the creation of an independent black political organisation and a black united front. He argues that black people should have their own organisation where they can meet one another without any interruptions while stating that whites have too often attempted to lead black people into reformism. He offers an illustration from his experience at the Black Montreal Congress in October 1968. “Many black delegates retired from the main conference hall to hold a special session. While gathered in another room, they had to defend the doors against a mob of whites who wanted to come inside” he writes.
Make no mistake Rodney was not against interracial alliances, yet he was frustrated with white activists who failed to understand that sometimes it is best to move out of the way. Rodney’s points reiterated the reasons that pushed the Black Panther Party and many other Black nationalist groups to refuse membership to white Americans. His second suggestion is that organising armed struggle should rest on building alliances with other oppressed groups in the United States, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, and creating bonds of solidarity with anti-imperialists in the Global South.
Rodney then offers the third and vital condition for a triumphant armed struggle: a political strategy for the creation of links with white progressives in the United States and the West. “Most fundamental of all the black revolution will have to define a political perspective in relation to white workers”, he writes. This was not his sentiment when he spoke at the Montreal Congress back in October 1968. On the contrary, he argued for black people to focus on themselves rather than work on a strategy to convince or “impress” whites. That contention rested on his assumption that white workers in metropolitan capitalist countries are complicit in the oppression of black people alongside their ruling class. His pessimism on interracial alliances is still apparent in Africans abroad when he observes that the condition for racial solidarity do not exist in the USA as no white workers have joined the anti-racist and class struggle. However, these ideas are overhauled by passages where Rodney includes the prospect of white workers joining the struggle against racism and capitalism to defend their class interest:
When white workers join the movement against racism in the USA they will do so not out of love of blacks but because of their own awareness that their best interest as workers can be served by taking over the means of production in the state, which means an end to capitalism and racism.
Back in Montreal, Rodney had only mentioned that whites might join black people for profound anti-racist reasons. But the quote above shows that he had come to explain those profound reasons as rooted in objective class interests. It is not an accident that Rodney writes such a hopeful statement from Cuba in 1969. He had found a clear image of what a multiracial socialist society should look like:
The whole of Cuba is reaching out to grasp its total cultural heritage, including that which derived from Africa, but the African descendants are no longer just ‘African abroad’ they are black Cubans who can afford to walk proud because they have their ‘thing’, which they utilised to make the revolution, and which they keep to defend the revolution alongside their fellow Cuban citizens.
Cuba reinforced Rodney’s belief that a united armed struggle can create an inclusive society that empowers black people, instilling in them a complete sense of pride and belonging. In the earlier pages, he argues that Cuban society managed to free itself from the effect of slavery and racism, which has fostered the inequality between races in the United States. He perceives that imperial oppression had united black and white Cuban over their interest enabling them to join ranks during the Cuban War of Independence and the revolution of 1959. So perhaps Rodney inferred that capitalist oppression would one day bring American workers together. That might partly explain his optimism in those months of 1968-1969.
Another more important reason for his optimism is related to his developing theory of revolution, which rests on the idea that the black community is the revolutionary vanguard of American society. Not unlike Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton, Rodney argues that the black struggle will destabilise capitalism and create the conditions for winning over other workers to the revolution. In his scenario, black revolutionaries play the leading role, yet the success of the revolution depends ultimately on racial solidarity. He even criticises Black Nationalists who think that organising the black minority is an end itself:
There are black militants who believe that blacks will carry through a ‘minority revolution’ from start to finish because within the USA they do not expect to win the support of white workers. However, this view underestimates the kinds of changes, which are possible once a revolutionary situation comes into existence, and it also gives very little weight to trends of revolutionary interracial alliance.
Rodney saw in the Vietnamese armed resistance to US intervention and the ensuing multiracial American anti-war movement a sign confirming his optimistic theory. The Vietnamese struggle had done more than inspire the oppressed; its sustained challenge to imperialism created conditions whereby white workers in the West are forced to take a stand on a murderous and costly war. Rodney illustrates his argument by quoting a conversation between two conscious white workers. ““The blacks got the real resistance going against the machine”” Rodney quotes, ““if we want to help ourselves, it’s time we helped them by getting our lily white ass into their fight, the most meaningful anti-war struggle in this country”” With this example, Rodney advances the idea that black and white workers can forge an alliance through the anti-war campaign. Yet, his main argument is black people must follow the example set by Vietnamese fighters by starting a resolute struggle in America that will awaken the passive white workers.
One of the shortcomings in Rodney’s case for interracial alliances is he cannot conceive of them going beyond a coalition or taking place within a single revolutionary organisation. Could black people not sometimes caucus between themselves while working within an integrated political party? Would they not be better positioned to ensure that white comrades remain accountable to them and the demanding task imposed by the anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggle? He nevertheless had made a shift in his thinking. However, his optimism towards multiracial alliances appears to have vanished from his later work. In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, he develops his stance that the white working class is an accomplice in the oppression of blacks. He might have returned to the subject of racial alliance during his many visits to the United States in the mid-1970s when black radicals quarrelled over ideology after the defeat of Black Power. By then, he was preoccupied with the divisions between the Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese workers in his homeland.
From November 1968 to June 1969, Rodney found the time to reflect upon the year 1968 in Jamaica and the United States by writing Africans Abroad. Inspired by the lessons of the Cuban revolution, he could imagine a world without racism and inequality. Therefore, he argued with optimism that black people in Jamaica and the USA could build that socialist society through a guerrilla revolution. These drafts that I encountered with their concern for radical development and the class struggle lay the foundations for Rodney’s future work.
Leaving the archive for the last time, I could only imagine the 27-year-old Rodney’s departure from Pinar del Rio for Dar es Salaam with a newfound determination for producing intellectual and activist work that would inspire anti-imperialist movements in the Global South.
Chinedu Chukwudinma is a socialist activist and writer based in London. He writes on African politics, popular struggles, and the history of working-class resistance on the continent. Chinedu is a member of ROAPE’s editorial board, and an editor of roape.net.
Please click here to read the Chukwudinma’s A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney serialised on roape.net. To order Chinedu’s book, A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney from the publisher, Bookmarks, click here.
Featured Photograph: Walter Rodney speaking at a public meeting with Rupert Roopnaraine and Clive Thomas.
