The students’ movement showed particular radicalism and it will soon go beyond its initial purpose of a university reform under the leadership of Julio Antonio Mella and to assume open revolutionary scope.
	Julio Antonio Mella Mac Partland (1903-1929). One of the the outstanding figures of the Cuban revolutionary movement in the neocolonial republic. Founder of the Federacion de Estudiantes Universitarios, La universidad Popular José Martí, the Liga Antimperialista and the Partido Comunista de Cuba. He was murdered in Mexico on January 10, 1929, by Machado agents.

The labor movement, which origins went as far back as the last decades of the 19th century, had followed also an upward course characterized by strikes -the Apprentices’ (1902), and the currency strike (1907)- among the most important ones. The inflation resulting from World War I would thus favor the subsequent wave of strikes. At the same time, the development of the proletariat reached -both organizational and ideological- due to the influence of the October Revolution in Russia, brought about the constitution of a national workers’ union in 1925.

Coincidentally and as an expression of de conjunction of the most radical political trends of the labor movement personified by Mella and Carlos Baliño, the first Communist Party will be founded in La Habana.

The political and social unrest had profound roots. The Cuban economy had grown quickly during the first two decades of the century, encouraged by the Treaty for Commercial Reciprocity with the United States and the favorable situation after the world war. However, such economic growth was unilateral, based almost exclusively on the production of sugar and on the relations with the US market. US capitals increasingly being invested in the Island had been practically the sole beneficiaries of the economic growth, for they controlled 70% of the sugar production apart from controlling also the infrastructure and other collateral businesses. The economic wellbeing originated by this process -testimony of which can be found in the magnificent houses in El Vedado- would be extremely fragile and unequally distributed. This became evident by 1920, when the sugar prices dropped dramatically creating a bank crack and producing the bankruptcy of almost practically all the Cuban banking institutions in the country. Shortly after, at a time sugar production in Cuba went up to 5 million tons, saturation of the markets became evident, a clear sign of the fact that the Cuban economy could not continue to grow based exclusively on sugar. The other options were either stagnation or diversification of production, though this last choice was hindered by the monopoly existing in land owning and by commercial dependency to the United States.

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