Sandalio Junco

After going into exile following arrest, Junco travelled from Mexico to South America to the Soviet Union, developing and advocating his views in the interest of workers and people of color.

Through the organization, the Second National Workers’ Congress was held, where participants aired demands for improvements such as equal wages for similar jobs and an 8- hour work day, as well as complaints of US interventionism in the island.

[2] However, by 1925 Junco realized the FOH was too regional and was constrained by class limitations, and he went on to form the Confederation of Cuban Workers (Confederación Nacional Obrera de Cuba, CNOC).

With Junco as its International Secretary, the CNOC worked for the interests of Cuban laborers, often demonstrating against the repressive rule of the president at the time, Gerardo Machado.

[5] Through the CNOC he attended the Congreso de la Conferencia Sindical Latinoamericana, where he delivered his speech "The Negro Problem and the Proletarian Movement" among other comments.

[1] He managed to organize a defense with the help of a regional campaign as well as support from the ANLC, and AAAIL and the newspaper the Negro Champion, all defending him as "the primary voice for anti-racist, pro-Communist advocacy."

[4] In the decade before his death, Junco continued to work both as a leader in labor, and as a trotskyist figure in the struggle against the Comintern aligned Cuban Communist Party.

In 1933, President Ramon Grau San Martin took power, and the PBL rose to support his short-lived radical nationalist government against attacks from the CNOC and the PCC.

[1][3] The day was to be the 7th anniversary of the death of Antonio Guiteras, founder of Joven Cuba and "the most left-wing of the members of the Grau San Martin government", and a meeting was organized to commemorate him.