The publications, each form with their own material histories in China, highlights the unofficial formation of the Workers’ Autonomous Federation (WAF) in the wake of Tiananmen protests in the Spring of 1989. The protests, named after the massacre on Tiananmen Square on June 4th where many workers, students, protestors, civilians and soldiers lives were lost. WAF expressed solidarity with the struggle of the students and held a unified ground for the mobilisation of a labour movement, which included the different sects of labour and their specific outcries. The Chinese workers’ role during Tiananmen lies thus not only in their organizing contributions in the streets of Beijing in May but in their vigorous use of counter-institutional publications to carve out alternate discursive spaces to develop socialist ideas external to the state and yet make demands on it.

In other words, the circumstances and form of workers’ writing was inseparable to how the workers independently practiced new ideas of struggle in Tiananmen. These writings demand “completely independent” forms of autonomous governance that would “supervise” the Communist Party and develop a system of socialist pluralism to take control of and reorganize the Chinese society’s means of production. These perspectives informed the means and tactics of workers’ struggle, from how the workers negotiated their relationship to the students to why they decided to take over certain factory production lines as a means to assist the struggle. The diverse forms of writing were tactical and timed to respond to different moments of the struggle in May from day to day, varying from adjusting their demands with different manifesto flyers to verse poetry and more personalized open letters to specific student bodies.

Across 104 issues, Mediodía published a dazzling constellation of authors, including Cubans such as the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, the lawyer and feminist activist Ofelia Domínguez Navarro, the novelist Alejo Carpentier, and the Afro-Cuban poet Regino Pedroso. They also included Latin American, US, and European writers of radical sympathies, from Langston Hughes to César Vallejo, and from André Malraux to Isaak Babel. It was initially a literary monthly before becoming a weekly magazine with a strong political and current affairs focus. Within months it had a circulation of 10,000 copies, its readership spread across the island. Mediodía was centrally concerned with Cuban domestic politics, and with the struggles for democratic representation and for racial and gender equality. But amid the ferment of the 1930s, these battles could not be disconnected from the broader turbulence afflicting the world. The magazine’s coverage reflected this sense of global interconnection: reportage on the Spanish Civil War nestled alongside essays on racial discrimination in Cuba; accounts of Chinese resistance to Japanese occupation featured next to warnings of the looming threat Nazi Germany posed to Czechoslovakia.

Mediodía provides a compelling window onto Cuban politics in the 1930s, where a populist revolution had been thwarted in 1933–34, yet the democratizing impulses the revolution had unleashed had not yet been contained. Urgent questions about imperialism, Cuba’s national sovereignty, racial inequality, and social injustice were in the air, prompting fervent and wide-ranging debates, and these were all reflected in Mediodía’s pages. At the same time, for the magazine’s editors, the boundary between internal questions and global issues was entirely permeable: the anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, and anti racist struggles were bound together into a single battle with many interconnected fronts.