The period between 1900 and 1935 was marked by rising public power, popular demonstrations and labor conflicts; May Day was celebrated for the first time in 1913.
A paradoxical result of the Liberal ‘civilizing mission’ was the forming of a new ‘radical’ generation. By the 1900s the majority of Costa Rica’s population was literate and politically engaged to some extent, including the new laboring classes. European and Soviet literature was easily accessible, anarchist and socialist ideas began to circulate within both middle and working-class culture and the contradictions behind the ‘glitter of the golden bean’ 21 and certainly within the banana industry, began to be detected.
This ‘radical’ generation saw a growing ‘abyss’ between an elite wealthy few and the lower classes. The heightened political consciousness and increased class awareness, combined with the global economic collapse of the Depression – which had a catastrophic effect on both industries, discrediting the Liberal elite’s free-market dogma – resulted in the formation of two independent leftist political parties. The Reformist Party was founded in 1923, followed by the Communist Party in 1931. These parties participated in elections and won seats throughout the 1930s and 40s.
Revolutionary uprising had previously been avoided primarily due to the absence of any mass base. However, within the banana industry Communism finally found its proletariat to organize. The plantation and dock workers, recruited from the poorest regions of the country; indigenous groups, descendants of slaves, Nicaraguan and Jamaican immigrants, united to offer the first real counter-ideology, an ideology from below, comprised of those voices excluded from the cafetalero vision of social harmony , existing outside of the coffee industry and its social structures.
The Costa Rican Communist Party, founded on June 16th, 1931, and led by Manuel Mora Valverde, initially shared the extreme rhetoric of the Third International, waging battle against ‘the capitalist assassins’. However, its somewhat restricted base meant that it quickly adapted to Costa Rican style politics – becoming more moderate; an early form of Euro-Communism with a largely social democratic agenda.
Mora became the voice of a separate, national brand of communism, labeled Tico-Comunismo or Comunismo-Criollo, whose program asked for improvements in the lives of working people; social security, national health, a minimum wage, an eight hour day, union laws and a nationalization of monopolies. In 1945 Mora himself reiterated this departure from communist orthodoxy stating, ‘in Costa Rica the class struggle has been replaced by class collaboration,’22 a profound reflection of the entrenched social relations of the coffee order and of the Costa Rican tendency to keep the peace at whatever cost.
However, the Communist Party did play a major role in organizing the ‘Great Banana Strike’ of 1934, the largest in Costa Rican history. On August 9th, 1934, Carlos Luís Falla, author of ‘Mamita Yunai’, and chief organizer of the protest, led 10,000 workers out to the strike, which was not resolved until mid-September when the government sent in armed police forces.
The strike did bring about improvements in living and working conditions on the plantations. However, it also encouraged a strengthening and increased converge of ideas within the coffee sector who united in an anti-communist stance which would eventually lead to the suppression and outlawing of the party.
Communism came to represent all those forces threatening change to the established order and rural way of life; the poor, the dark-skinned, landless banana workers, the unemployed, the growing urban proletariat, even the forces of industrial capitalism itself, and anti-communism became a part of the national identity.
The capitalist relations of the new industry came hand in hand with radical social conflict and an increasing polarization between the two worlds of those included and those excluded from the country’s ‘national ideology’. In the 1940s this polarization brought the country to civil war and the bloodiest event in Costa Rica’s history.
This ‘radical’ generation saw a growing ‘abyss’ between an elite wealthy few and the lower classes. The heightened political consciousness and increased class awareness, combined with the global economic collapse of the Depression – which had a catastrophic effect on both industries, discrediting the Liberal elite’s free-market dogma – resulted in the formation of two independent leftist political parties. The Reformist Party was founded in 1923, followed by the Communist Party in 1931. These parties participated in elections and won seats throughout the 1930s and 40s.
Revolutionary uprising had previously been avoided primarily due to the absence of any mass base. However, within the banana industry Communism finally found its proletariat to organize. The plantation and dock workers, recruited from the poorest regions of the country; indigenous groups, descendants of slaves, Nicaraguan and Jamaican immigrants, united to offer the first real counter-ideology, an ideology from below, comprised of those voices excluded from the cafetalero vision of social harmony , existing outside of the coffee industry and its social structures.
The Costa Rican Communist Party, founded on June 16th, 1931, and led by Manuel Mora Valverde, initially shared the extreme rhetoric of the Third International, waging battle against ‘the capitalist assassins’. However, its somewhat restricted base meant that it quickly adapted to Costa Rican style politics – becoming more moderate; an early form of Euro-Communism with a largely social democratic agenda.
Mora became the voice of a separate, national brand of communism, labeled Tico-Comunismo or Comunismo-Criollo, whose program asked for improvements in the lives of working people; social security, national health, a minimum wage, an eight hour day, union laws and a nationalization of monopolies. In 1945 Mora himself reiterated this departure from communist orthodoxy stating, ‘in Costa Rica the class struggle has been replaced by class collaboration,’22 a profound reflection of the entrenched social relations of the coffee order and of the Costa Rican tendency to keep the peace at whatever cost.
However, the Communist Party did play a major role in organizing the ‘Great Banana Strike’ of 1934, the largest in Costa Rican history. On August 9th, 1934, Carlos Luís Falla, author of ‘Mamita Yunai’, and chief organizer of the protest, led 10,000 workers out to the strike, which was not resolved until mid-September when the government sent in armed police forces.
The strike did bring about improvements in living and working conditions on the plantations. However, it also encouraged a strengthening and increased converge of ideas within the coffee sector who united in an anti-communist stance which would eventually lead to the suppression and outlawing of the party.
Communism came to represent all those forces threatening change to the established order and rural way of life; the poor, the dark-skinned, landless banana workers, the unemployed, the growing urban proletariat, even the forces of industrial capitalism itself, and anti-communism became a part of the national identity.
The capitalist relations of the new industry came hand in hand with radical social conflict and an increasing polarization between the two worlds of those included and those excluded from the country’s ‘national ideology’. In the 1940s this polarization brought the country to civil war and the bloodiest event in Costa Rica’s history.
