Cubans today commemorate the creation 59 years ago of the first Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), an event that consolidated the ideological and organisational unity of the vanguard grouping of the Revolution.

From that moment on, a Party was structured with organs, bodies and grassroots organisations throughout the nation and in the armed institutions.

Its foundation, said historic leader Fidel Castro, was one of the most transcendental steps in the history of Cuba, uniting the revolutionary people closely and achieving the highest degree of unity and organisation around the political conceptions of the process of transformation that began in 1959 on the island.

At the founding ceremony, which took place on 3 October 1965 at what was then the Chaplin Theatre in the capital, now the Karl Marx Theatre, Fidel Castro presented the farewell letter of the Argentinean Cuban guerrilla Ernesto Che Guevara, who had left Cuba to continue his anti-imperialist work in other countries.

«There is an absence in our Central Committee of someone who possesses all the merits and all the virtues necessary in the highest degree to belong to it and who, nevertheless, is not among the members of our Central Committee,» he said.

During his speech, he also reported on the merger of the newspapers Revolución and Hoy into a single official organ of the PCC, under the name of Granma, in homage to the yacht which in 1956 brought the architects of the Revolution to Cuba.

The first issue of this newspaper went to press on 4 October, with a circulation of 498,784 copies.

The Communist Party of Cuba is the organisation that constitutes the leading political force of society and the state in the Caribbean nation.