In 1956—1957, the Communists of Martinique suffered a severe split when Aimé Césaire, Communist member of the French National Assembly and Mayor of the Martinique capital of Fort de France, strongly opposed the Soviet repression of the 1956 uprising in Hungary. He said that no Socialist country had the right to carry out such an invasion, adding that the French Communist Party had a “colonialist” attitude toward Martinique and Guadeloupe. Césaire, one of the leading French poets of the period and one of the founders of the concept of “Negritude,” broke with the Communists, and organized the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (PPM), which for a number of years was the largest party on the island.[419]
In the 1960s and early 1970s there was a Maoist organization in Martinique that reportedly had “some following.” However, according to one of the principal leaders of the pro-Soviet Communist Party, by 1979 it had “virtually disappeared” as a result of Chinese hostility to the Castro regime and the friendliness of the Chinese regime to the dictatorship of General Pinochet in Chile.[420] In 1985 it was reported that “Ex-Maoists published the newspaper Apel or Ase plere au nou lite, which is Creole for Stop complaining and let’s fight.”[421]
In 1988 Brian Weinstein reported that a delegation from the Martinique Communist Party had recently visited China for the first time since 1967. They met with members of the Central Committee of the Chinese party “and expressed hope for expanded relations in the future.” A mission from the Chinese party had visited Martinique in August 1987.[422]
Mexican Maoism
Several Maoist parties appeared in Mexico in the middle 1960s, at least one of which had more or less extensive contacts with the Chinese party. However, after the student strikes of 1968, culminating in the massacre in the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Mexico City, where troops fired into a large demonstration, the Maoist groups seem largely to have disintegrated. Efforts by the Progressive Labor Party of the United States, both before and after its break with the Chinese, to help bring about establishment of a party in its own image in Mexico bore no fruit.
The traditional Mexican Communist Party, although in later years adopting a “Eurocommunist” position, was loyal to Moscow during the 1960s. Thus, its 14th National Convention in December 1963 “unanimously condemned the stand taken by the leadership of the Communist Party of China on the basic problems of the time, such as the fight for peace and peaceful coexistence. The position of the Chinese comrades, it declared, runs counter to the general lines of the international Communist movement.”[423]
The most significant of the pro-Maoist parties of the 1960s was the Mexican Movement of the Marxist-Leninist Antirevisionist Unification (MUMAM). It was led by two former members of the pro-Moscow Mexican Communist Party (PCM), Javier Fuentes Gutiérrez and Federico Emery Valle. It published a Spanish-language version of “Chairman Mao Tse-tung on a People’s War” with a preface that supported Mao’s theories on the subject and rejected those of Ché Guevara. It also published a newspaper, Chispa.
When he was arrested in 1969 on charges of having bombed two government buildings, Emery Valle said that he had twice visited China. He also said that he had circulated materials sent to him by the Chinese.[424] However, according to Ricardo Ochoa, writing in the U.S. Trotskyist periodical Intercontinental Press in July 1971, the MUMAM had “vanished virtually without a trace. There is only a dying echo for some of its members who have stayed in some skeleton ‘Comites de Lucha’ (Struggle Committees), the organs of the 1968 student movement, which have degenerated and no longer have any representative character.”[425]
Another significant pro-Maoist party in the late 1960s was the Bolshevik Communist Party of Mexico (PCBM). It was mentioned by a U.S. State Department source in 1968 as the most important of the pro-Maoist groups. The same source said that the PCBM’s operations had been hampered by the banning of the return to Mexico of the official representative of the New China News Agency.[426] The PCBM was led by Leonel Padilla, Arturo Velasco, Félix González and Antonio Farfán, and its official publication was El Machete.[427] This name was taken from a newspaper published by the original Mexican Communist Party in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Another Maoist group was the Communist Spartacus League (LCE), which published El Militante and was led by Professor Bernardo Bader Campo.[428] According to José Revueltas, who was then a Trotskyist, the LCE was “Maoist but not as unconditionally followers of Mao’s thought” as the people of the MUMAM.[429]
According to Ricardo Ochoa, the LCE “took an outspokenly ultra leftist and ultimatist position” at the time of the 1968 student uprising. He alleged, “As the Maoists’ cadres succumbed to the pressure of events, the organization cracked.”[430]
In 1972, Ochoa wrote, “The Liga Comunista Espártaco… was dealt a mortal blow by the 1968 movement. It broke up into a movement of ‘brigades’ in which a primitive populism and a complete lack of political perspectives led hundreds of activists to dissipate their energies in a strike ‘march to the people.’”[431]
By the late 1970s and early 1980s there still existed several small Maoist groups in Mexico, although apparently those of the 1960s had disappeared. According to Jorge Villamil, a leader of the Partido Mexicano de los Trabajadores, a non-Marxist leftist party, the two most significant Maoist groups in this period were the Organization of the Revolutionary Left-Line of the Masses, and the Popular Revolutionary Movement.[432]
The Progressive Labor Party, the organization that held the “Chinese franchise” in the United States until its break with Mao and the Chinese leadership in 1971—1972, sought to keep in touch with events in Mexico. However, it is interesting to note that in an article by Federico Orozco, “Who Won the Mexican Revolution?” in the PLP newspaper Challenge (October 1966), which sketched the parties of the Left at that time, there was no mention of any Mexican counterpart of the PLP.[433]
In 1970, the PLP still did not regard any of the Mexican political groups to be genuinely Maoist. This was indicated by a letter to the editor of Challenge from Cuauhtemoc Reyes that ended, “Finally I am very grateful for your printing my letter in your newspaper. I will continue reading it since you think like real communists and not like the traitors, self-styled ‘communists’ of Mexico.”[434]
After the PLP had abandoned Maoism following President Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972, it was still lamenting the lack of a true revolutionary Communist party in Mexico. This was reflected in an unnamed “sympathizer of the PLP in Mexico,” who wrote a letter to the editor of Desafio lamenting the lack of and need for “the construction of the Revolutionary Communist Party.”[435]
419
Interviews with Leon L. Valère, head of Union Démocratique Martiniquais in Fort-de-France, June 17, 1969; and Aimé Césaire, Mayor of Fort-de-France, head of Parti Progressiste Martiniquais, member of French National Assembly, in Fort-de-France, August 10, 1978.
420
Interview with Philibert Dufeal, Secretary of Organization, Central Committee, Parti Comuniste Martiniquais, Fort-de-France, August 10, 1979.
421
Brian Weinstein, in
422
Brian Weinstein, in
423
“Mexican Communist Party Convention,”
424
Lynn Ratliff, in
425
Ricardo Ochoa, “Mexican Stalinists in Crisis over Student Upsurge,”
426
427
Lynn Ratliff, in
429
José Revueltas, “The Witch-Hunt Continues in Mexico,”
431
Ricardo Ochoa, “Situation in Mexico Four Years After Tlatelolco,”
432
Interview with Jorge Villamil, Secretary of Ideological Orientation,
433
Federico Orozco, “Who Won the Mexican Revolution?”
435