Communist Party of Cuba (1925)
쿠바 공산당 (1925)
Cuba’s first Marxist–Leninist party, founded on 16 August 1925 by Carlos Baliño, Julio Antonio Mella and others. It merged with the Revolutionary Union in 1939 to form the Communist Revolutionary Union and was renamed the Popular Socialist Party (PSP) in 1944. After the 1959 revolution it joined the Integrated Revolutionary Organisations (ORI) in 1961; it is distinct from today’s Communist Party of Cuba (1965).
In depth
According to the Spanish source, the party was founded on 16 August 1925 under the name Communist Party of Cuba by José Miguel Pérez, Carlos Baliño, Alfonso Bernal del Riesgo, Julio Antonio Mella, Fabio Grobart and others. The English source says it was formed with the help of Soviet officials through a merger of smaller groups and immediately became the Comintern’s Cuban section. Its first secretary general, Pérez, was arrested and deported by the Machado government, and Mella was expelled in 1926 for staging a hunger strike without the party’s permission, then readmitted in 1927. Blas Roca was secretary general from 1934 to 1961.
The party remained underground until September 1938, when President Laredo Brú legalised it with the support of Batista. In August 1939 it merged with Juan Marinello’s Revolutionary Union to form the Communist Revolutionary Union, and Lázaro Peña led the Confederation of Cuban Workers founded that year. Six of its members sat in the Constituent Convention that drafted the 1940 Constitution. The party backed Batista’s first presidency of 1940–1944, and Marinello and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez were successively ministers without portfolio. On 22 January 1944 it took the name Popular Socialist Party.
According to the English source, the party’s electoral support peaked in 1948 but fell in the 1950s. The Prío government banned its daily Hoy in 1950, and Batista’s dictatorship outlawed the party in 1953. The party condemned Fidel Castro’s 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks as “adventurism of the bourgeois opposition” and only in late 1957–1958 agreed on joint action with the 26th of July Movement. Raúl Castro had been active in the PSP’s youth organisation long before the Moncada attack.
After the 1959 revolution the party supported Castro’s government while keeping its organisational independence. In 1961 it joined the 26th of July Movement and the 13 March Revolutionary Directorate in the Integrated Revolutionary Organisations (ORI), which became the United Party of the Cuban Socialist Revolution in 1962 and the new Communist Party of Cuba on 3 October 1965. Former PSP leaders such as Blas Roca, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Lázaro Peña and Juan Marinello entered the new party’s Central Committee.