Popular Socialist Party (Cuba)

Popular Socialist Party Partido Socialista Popular
General Secretary	Blas Roca Calderio (longest-serving)
Founded	18 August 1925 (18 August 1925)
Dissolved	24 June 1961 (24 June 1961)
Merged into	Integrated Revolutionary Organizations
Headquarters	Havana
Newspaper	Hoy
Youth wing	Popular Socialist Youth
Labor wing	Confederación Nacional Obrera de Cuba
Ideology	Communism Marxism–Leninism
Political position	Far-left
National affiliation	Democratic Socialist Coalition (1939–1944)
International affiliation	Comintern (1925–1943)
Colors	Red
Party flag
Politics of Cuba Political parties Elections

The Popular Socialist Party (Spanish: Partido Socialista Popular, PSP) was a communist party in Cuba. It was founded in 1925 as the Cuban Communist Party (Partido Comunista Cubano) by José Miguel Pérez, Carlos Baliño, Alfonso Bernal del Riesgo, and Julio Antonio Mella. The party later merged with the Revolutionary Union (Unión Revolucionaria) to form the Communist Revolutionary Union (Unión Revolucionaria Comunista) on 13 August 1939. The party was renamed Popular Socialist Party on 22 January 1944, but with the Auténticos' victory in the 1944 elections, the party went into decline.

The party published the daily newspaper Hoy ("Today") until 1950.

History

The party was founded in 1925 with the help of Soviet officials. It immediately became the Cuban representative for the Comintern and would remain a member until the Comintern's dissolution in 1943.

The party supported the first presidency of Fulgencio Batista from 1940 to 1944, primarily due to his early advocacy of strengthening labour laws and labour unions, as well as his pro-American stance during World War II. As a result, two of the party's leaders, Juan Marinello Vidaurreta and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, were successively appointed ministers without portfolio.

The party formed an alliance with the Orthodox Party in the 1944 general elections, but was defeated by the Auténticos-Republican alliance, winning only four seats in the House of Representatives. They went on to win five seats in the 1946 mid-term elections.

In the 1948 general election, the party put forward Juan Marinello as its presidential candidate. While he finished fourth, the party won five seats in the House elections. They later won four in the 1950 mid-term elections.

The Auténticos government under President Carlos Prío Socarrás banned the party's daily newspaper, Hoy, in 1950. Following Fulgencio Batista's 1952 coup d'état, the party itself was banned, but it managed to continue publishing its newspaper.

The party was initially critical of Fidel Castro. In 1961, the party merged into the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI), the precursor to the current Communist Party of Cuba.

References

Sources

Books

• Dominguez, Esteban Morales; Prevost, Gary (7 March 2008). United States-Cuban Relations: A Critical History. Lexington Books. ISBN 978-1-4616-3463-8.
• Hudson, Rex A. (2002). Cuba: A Country Study. Federal Research Division, Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8444-1045-6.
• Manke, Albert (2015). "Chinese in the Cuban revolution". Ethnicity as a Political Resource: Conceptualizations across Disciplines, Regions, and Periods. Transcript Verlag. pp. 237–252. doi:10.14361/9783839430132-018. ISBN 9783837630138. JSTOR j.ctv1xxstw.20. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)
• Nohlen, Dieter (2005). Elections in the Americas: A data handbook, Volume 1. New York. ISBN 978-0-19-928357-6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

Journal articles

• Carr, Barry (1998). "Identity, Class, and Nation: Black Immigrant Workers, Cuban Communism, and the Sugar Insurgency, 1925–1934". The Hispanic American Historical Review. 78 (1): 83–116. doi:10.2307/2517379. ISSN 0018-2168. JSTOR 2517379.
• Jeifets, Víctor; Jeifets, Lazar (April 2017). "El encuentro de la izquierda cubana con la Revolución Rusa: el Partido Comunista y la Comintern". Historia Crítica (in Spanish) (64): 81–100. doi:10.7440/histcrit64.2017.05.