In the early 1930s, as the Great Depression squeezed Cuba’s working class further and further, a surge of strikes shook the country. In tobacco, sugar, transportation, and other industries, workers demanded union recognition, eight-hour days, overtime pay, and protections against retribution. The Partido de Cuba (PCC) sought to harness these bread-and-butter demands towards wider struggles against dictatorship, capitalism, and imperialism. International figures and institutions agreed; the Communist International in Moscow and the Caribbean Bureau in New York pressured the PCC to activate the Cuban masses as the Caribbean frontline against US expansion. In short, communists on and off the island believed labor mobilizations had great revolutionary potential but were not enough. In this climate, the PCC pushed to transform what its leaders (somewhat disparagingly) called “economic demands” into an awakened political awareness on the part of workers. Yet, attempts to expand the consciousness of Cuba’s working classes reflected the party’s own myopia about vanguardism, about who counted as revolutionary.
This paper addresses the PCC’s goal for an “internationalist education of the masses” on the eve of and during the Revolution of 1933, which resulted in the overthrow of a dictatorship. Cuban historiography often describes this moment as one in which workers finally elevated their demands towards a higher level of political awareness, largely under the PCC’s guidance. Drawing upon archival collections from Cuba, the US, and Russia, I probe the distinction between economic and political struggles, and ask if workers’ demands weren’t already political and internationalist to begin with. Without diminishing the significance of the 1933 revolution, the chapter challenges the idea that the revolution marks a fundamental rupture the working class political trajectory and it tells a broader story in which the PCC often joined, and sometimes trailed behind, an already-mobilized Cuban proletariat.
