In 1925, as a result of the growing organization of the labor and the influence of socialist ideas, the first Cuban Marxist-Leninist Party was founded. The Communist Party of Cuba was built thanks to the efforts of a very outstanding group of communists, among whom Carlos Bali�o and Julio Antonio Mella played an extraordinary leading role.
Since the Constituent Congress of the Party in August 1925, discussions had arisen about the necessity to create a youth organization that, according to the fundamental principles stated in the 3rd Communist International, would serve as support and vehicle to spread and distribute ideas and strategies from the party to the youth.
In 1928, as a proposal of Rub�n Mart�nez Villena, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba named a commission with the aim of organizing the Young Communist League, which was officially created on December 12th, 1928. This founding process ran until 1931 when its Central Committee was fully organized.
The Young Communist League (YCL) of Cuba was the first Marxist-Leninist Organization of the Cuban youth, having a selective nature and supporting the Party as its main young back-up force. It was born in the hardest times of clandestineness and terrorism and was organized by means of units, committees in the different municipalities, constituencies, provinces, and a central committee.
The YCL concentrated its activities in cultural, sports and workers youth clubs, as well as in the middle level education centers, taking full advantage of the few legal opportunities that existed at that time.
Formative period: 1928-1931
The YCL began deveoping contacts with workers, combining both legal and clandestine work by means of lectures, talks, theater performances, tours, journeys through countryside municipalities, and sports activities.
The YCL founded its first journal, Labor Youth, and mobilized young workers for the strike against the dictator Gerardo Machado. The YCL also mobilized for the communist demonstration of students and laborers on September 30th 1930, when Rafael Trejo, 20 years old, lost his life while fighting the police.
Consolidation: 1931-1935
The YCL of Cuba continues to recruit workers and students for its struggles. The organization wisely combines the struggle against Machado�s dictatorship and against imperialism with the struggles for economic, political and social demands.
Later in 1931, the YCL founded the League of Pioneers of Cuba, an organization of Cuban children. In the 1930s, the YCL strengthened its relationship with the students through the Left Wing Student movement, characterized by a strong anti-imperialist tendency, which had been founded in 1931 and gathered the most radical members of the student movement of the epoch. The Student Left Wing movement became the genuine representative for students� demands and turned into the main vehicle for the Party and the YCL to work with the masses.
Young communists in the period actively participated in the transformation of the Communist Party into a National Party; as well as in the creation of the first National Trade Union of Sugar Workers in 1932. They also contributed to the organization and actively participated in the general strike of August, 1933, which led to the defeat of Gerardo Machado; and also to the successive strikes from 1934 on demanding the 8 hour work day, against the payment of receipts and checks, and in defense of the right to assemble and to strike.
In 1933, the YCL was accepted as member of the Young Communist International (founded in Berlin, November 20th, 1919). Since that moment, the YCL functioned as a section of this body and received its support and guidance.
The YCL participated, together with the Party, in the hard days of the general strike of March 1935, which ended with the failure of the popular revolutionary struggle, due to (among other reasons), the fact that the people were neither united nor armed well enough to counter domestic reaction and US intervention.
Dissolution of the YCL: 1935-1938
The retaliation and repression that followed the failure of the general strike of March 1935 led to the imprisonment and/or assassination of about a 50 % of the members of the Party.
At the same time as this defeat in Cuba, fascism progressed in Europe with growing risk of a new world conflict and an attack to the USSR. Led by Giorgi Dimitrov, the 7th Congress of the Communist International declared that the short-term and main task of the international labor and communist movement was the creation of a United Front of antifascist popular struggle.
The Assembly of the Central Committee of the YCL of Cuba, which covened from October 21-22, 1935, stated the necessity of creating in the country a single anti-imperialist and anti-reactionary front, and the need to turn the YCL into a mass organization with an anti-imperialist program and a political, economic, social and sports content aimed at organizing clubs, sports teams, cultural centers, trade union units, etc., in other words, a mass organization of the youth linked to no party. The Student Left Wing movement was entrusted to fight for the integration of all students into a single organization.
The YCL, with its name and very well known cadres, persecuted by the regime, could not become a legal organization of the masses and thus started to work on the creation of organizations meeting the necesities of the time. Once these organizations were built, the YCL dissolved on October 1938. The members of the YCL gathered in youth units of the Party and led the mass organizations that it itself had given birth to.
The YCL was the first Marxist-Leninist organization of the Cuban youth, playing a very important mobilizing and educational role despite the terrible conditions of clandestineness and repression under which the work with the masses was done.
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