Today Cuba commemorates the founding in 1925 of the first Communist Party of Cuba, with a Marxist-Leninist orientation and an expression of continuity of the emancipatory struggles in the Caribbean country.

According to historical notes, an old mansion in the capital’s Vedado district was the venue for some 17 delegates from various communist groups, convened by the revolutionaries Carlos Baliño, Julio Antonio Mella and José Miguel Pérez, at the time its first general secretary.

In this context, the contributions to the nascent political organisation of Baliño, the veteran combatant who joined the National Hero, José Martí, in the creation of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, and Mella, the student leader and fervent defender of the Apostle’s ideology, were decisive.

Like other forces of the same ilk that emerged in the 1920s, the Party was affiliated to the Third International, founded by Vladimir Ilich Lenin, the leader of the first socialist revolution in the world, in Russia.

Although it did not have a strong theoretical knowledge of communism, its members proposed programmes of demands for workers and peasants, and were active for women’s and youth rights.

This founding moment, together with the creation, a few days earlier, of the Confederación Nacional Obrera de Cuba, marked a new upsurge in trade union struggles against the regime of Gerardo Machado (1925-1933), a general from the war of independence who had launched a fierce repression against the Party.

Barely 15 days after it was founded, the political grouping had to go underground, since, under the pretext of being Spanish, the elected secretary general was deported and several of its members were arrested, among them Baliño, who died the following year.

For his part, Mella suffered legal proceedings and the incipient workers’ movement was repressed, as part of the persecution and prohibitions established by the Machado regime, which prevented the public life of this political force, which was illegal on the island until 1938.

The members of this political affiliation were recognised for their honesty, prestige and self-sacrifice, qualities that earned them enormous prestige among the forces that aspired to Cuba’s sovereignty and independence.

History highlights the performance of communist leaders at the head of the workers’ movement such as Jesús Menéndez and Aracelio Iglesias, Lázaro Peña, and intellectuals of the calibre of Juan Marinello and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez.

With the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959, a process of unification of the forces that fought against the regime of Fulgencio Batista (1952-1959) took place. The Popular Socialist Party joined the 26th of July Movement and the Revolutionary Directorate of the 13th of March in the Integrated Revolutionary Organisations (ORI) in 1961.

The ORI became, almost a year later, in 1962, the United Party of the Socialist Revolution of Cuba, until in October 1965 it took on the name of the Communist Party of Cuba.