CUBA: Holiday in Havana

The best organized and best disciplined Communist party in the New World showed its strength last week. For eight hours on May Day, Cuba’s workers downed hammers, laid sickles aside. While everything in the country stopped but a few trains and trams, members of the Communist-controlled Cuban Confederation of Labor swung past Havana’s presidential palace to the conga beat of a hit tune called America Immortal. Their secretary, Communist Làzaro Peña, stood with President Ramón Grau San Martin as he reviewed the parade from his balcony.

The party’s 151,000 cell-builders manage Cuba’s organized labor, own one of Havana’s big newspapers, swing the voting balance in the Senate, take a noisy if not decisive part in President Grau’s policymaking. Through indirect control of the Ministry of Labor, the party forced the Government to seize Havana’s U.S.-owned streetcar lines and a slaughterhouse in order to enforce labor demands. The working arrangement with the Grau regime helped put Communist Party Chief Juan Marinello in the Senate Vice-President’s chair, may help the Communists pick up provincial mayorships and congressional seats in the June elections.

A propaganda machine that includes the newspaper Hoy (Today), schools, sound trucks, cut-rate bookshops, a big radio station, and a troop of “Socialist Boy Scouts” attacks U.S. foreign policy daily. Hoy’s Moscow-syllabled appraisal of last week’s march past: a demonstration of “workers’ opposition to Anglo-American reactionary maneuvers and imperialistic penetration.”