Blas Roca Calederio, born on July 22 in 1908, was a Cuban communist revolutionary and radical journalist. Roca helped lead the 1933 general strike that ousted Gerardo Machado, and served in Fidel Castro's revolutionary government.

Born into a poor family, Roca began working at age eleven, shining shoes. According to Castro, Roca was already a prominent communist organizer in the province of Oriente at 21 years old.

At age 25, Roca helped lead a two week general strike that ousted dictator Gerardo Machado. By 1936, he was head of the Cuban Communist Party and began serving as a politican, helping author the 1940 Cuban Constitution.

Under Roca's leadership, Cuban communists were instrumental in providing an organizational and ideological structure for Castro's revolution, as well as playing a pivotal role using the party's long-standing ties with the Soviet Union to promote increasingly closer ties during the early days of the revolution.

In 1961, Blas Roca, leading a party delegation, presented a Cuban flag to Nikita Khrushchev during a meeting of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Roca served on the first central committee and politburo of the new Communist Party of Cuba, founded in 1965.

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  • emizeko [they/them]
    ·
    4 months ago

    Ludwig: Marxism denies that the individual plays an outstanding role in history. Do you not see a contradiction between the materialist conception of history and the fact that, after all, you admit the outstanding role played by historical personages?

    "You say that people don't fall out of coconut trees, but I have definitely heard of this happening."

    Stalin: No, there is no contradiction here. Marxism does not at all deny the role played by outstanding individuals, nor the fact that history is made by people. In Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy and in other works of his you will find it stated that it is people who make history. But of course, people do not make history according to their own fancy or the promptings of their imagination. Every new generation encounters definite conditions already existing, ready-made, when that generation was born. And great people are worth anything at all only to the extent that they are able correctly to understand these conditions, to understand how to change them. If they fail to understand these conditions and try to alter them according to the promptings of their imagination, they will land themselves in the situation of Don Quixote. Thus it is precisely Marx’s view that people must not be counterposed to conditions. It is people who make history, but they do so only to the extent that they correctly understand the conditions that they have found ready-made, and only to the extent that they understand how to change those conditions. That, at least, is how we Russian Bolsheviks understand Marx. And we have been studying Marx for a good many years.

    "People fall out of coconut trees if being up in a coconut tree is the context that they exist in and all that is around them."

    quotes from https://redsails.org/stalin-and-ludwig/