Source: Daily Worker, May 26, 1934
Transcription/Markup: Paul Saba
Copyleft: Internet
Archive (marxists.org) 2018. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the Creative Commons License.
The Communist Party of Cuba held its historic Second Congress on April 20 to 22 at a time of great development of and perspective for the agrarian-anti-imperialist revolution in Cuba.
In spite of the ferocious terror unleashed by the national concentration government of Mendieta, in spite of the savagery of Col. Batista, army head, who attempted to prevent the congress with bayonets, 67 delegates from the provinces, representing the lower organizations of the Party, militant workers steeled in the struggle against Machado and the lackey governments which succeeded him, gathered at the Congress.
This meeting marked a great step toward the clarification of the basic tasks which confront the revolutionary movement in Cuba, for the preparation for and organization of Soviet power.
Called at the moment when the Mendieta government was confronted with a wave of mass protest against his fascist decrees evidenced in a series of militant strikes against the decrees, the Second Congress drew up a balance sheet of the period of development of the Cuban Party since the First Congress. It made a critical analysis of its experiences through the revolutionary battles of the Cuban masses headed by their leader, the Communist Party, toward opening up the road toward the agrarian anti-imperialist revolution.
Comrade Martinez, general secretary of the Communist Party, in his penetrating analysis, pointed out as the central perspective the rapid sharpening of developments leading to decisive struggles for Soviet power in Cuba, calling upon all the Party through the delegates to forge a Bolshevik Party as the only force capable of leading the proletariat in alliance with the peasantry and Negro masses to the overthrow of the power of the exploiters and the yoke of yankee imperialism, to the only way out of the crisis – the revolutionary way. The development of strikes during the Congress confirms the perspective given by the report of the Central Committee in the National Congress.
The strike of the telephone workers accompanied by tremendous mass sympathy and violent disputes with the armed forces of Mendieta-Batista; the occupation of the Austria mill; the militant strike of the workers and employees of Sarra in Havana; the preparations for a general strike of the railroad workers; spontaneous uprisings of the peasants, especially in Oriente; the battles of the omnibus workers of Havana, demonstrate the inability of the Mendieta government successfully to apply its anti-strike decrees. All this, together with the wave of popular sympathy for the hunger strikers, first victims of the decrees, proved the appreciation of the Congress of a greater revolutionary upsurge for which the Party must multiply its forces in order to give political and organizational direction to the decisive battles which are developing.
The report of the Central Committee was very informative on the tremendous advances made by the Party since its first constituent congress in 1925. During a profound silence marked by the concentrated attention of the delegates, they listened for two and a half hours to a report of all the stages of development of their Party.
Since its beginning the Communist Party of Cuba, which was then only a sectarian group, isolated from the masses, has forced itself through the struggles of the proletariat and under the leadership of the Communist International, applying in Cuba the great experience of the world proletariat and especially the experiences of the Russian Bolsheviks, into a Party with mass influence which is now entering on the road toward the winning of the majority of the working class.
The political thesis presented by the Central Committee underlined the fact that the development of the Party has been possible only through the heroic struggle carried on against the dictatorship of Machado and Yankee imperialism, and through a ruthless struggle against all the tendencies foreign to Communism.
The Party has achieved great results in its efforts to clarify the application of the line of the Communist International in Cuba, purifying its ranks of opportunist elements of the right or left. The implacable struggle against the Trotskyism which sprang up in Cuba a little before the fall of Machado and which held the counter-revolutionary theory of the impossibility of a revolution in Cuba without a proletarian revolution in the United States. This has worked out in practice as a constant collaboration of the Trotzkyites with the governments which followed Machado, in their carrying out a role of strikebreaking.
(To Be Continued)