4 ideas
The Russian-written script was so ignorant of American life that Hughes judged it implausible. The production was then abruptly cancelled, a move many in the group attributed to Soviet efforts to win U.S. diplomatic recognition and American engineering contracts. The case shows ideological solidarity with the oppressed being staged by people who do not understand them, and dropped when state interests shift.
In Haiti, a Black republic under U.S. Marine occupation, Hughes found a light-skinned, French-speaking elite that looked down on the dark-skinned peasantry and the manual labor it did. Removing white rule did not dissolve the ranking of skin tone, class and language. The elite reproduced the colonial hierarchy internally, so race functioned as a class marker even where nearly everyone was Black.
Hughes measured each country he visited by how it treated its darkest and most colonized people, not by its official ideology. In Soviet Central Asia he compared Uzbek and Turkmen life directly with the Jim Crow South. The removal of segregated seating and the opening of schools to former colonial subjects impressed him more than Marxist doctrine did. Seen this way, segregation is a legal and administrative artifact that can be switched off, which makes its persistence in America a choice.
Reporting from Civil War Spain for the Baltimore Afro-American, Hughes focused on the Moroccan Moorish troops Franco brought over to fight the Republic. Colonized men were being used as shock troops for the fascist side that kept them colonized. Meanwhile Black Americans in the International Brigades fought against it. His point was that oppressed people can be recruited against liberation movements, so a soldier's race or origin does not predict which side of a freedom struggle he ends up on.