Example of dedication and loyalty to the Revolution, was Blas Roca Calderío. Man of town and follower of socialist ideas, was almost self-education, because only he could take until the fourth grade of primary education.
Modest and simple man, won the respect and admiration of the Cuban people. He was uncompromising in his ideas of unity and class struggle.
He joined the Communist Party and elected member of the Central Committee. General Secretary of the Workers' Federation of Manzanillo, took an active part in the shoemakers strikes in 1929 and in the stevedoring in1930.
Actions abound in his fervent revolutionary support and communist, is arrested in July 1932 and detained for a year in Guantanamo. In prison he writes works that circulate clandestinely. He published mimeographed newspapers "Proletarian Voice" and "Communist", the latter after the fall of Gerardo Machado.
Brilliant leaders like Lázaro Peña, Jesús Menéndez and others came under the wise leadership and the teaching of Blas Roca, and the working class achieved considerable social and political achievements.
He had many tasks and carried out with the revolutionary integrity that characterized it: headed the Cuban delegation to the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in the Soviet Union. He was also member of the Political Bureau where the Party held its first congress, deputy to the National Assembly in November 1976, a month later a first president, a post he held with his usual dedication and brilliance for nearly five years.
Perhaps none of his revolutionary tasks shone and showed both more relevant to his intellectual ability and skills as a politician and statesman in the tasks related to the development of the new Constitution of the Cuba Republic. In that document Blas turned his wisdom and gave part of his own life as a revolutionary, with the immeasurable joy to see embodied in the Socialist Constitution his highest hopes and dreams of being a communist. In many other institutions, codes and laws of the Revolution are present Blas efforts, such as a teacher and self-learning throughout his life.
Today Blas Roca is one of the great patriots of our history and its outstanding achievements as a man, worker and political leader and as a communist revolutionary and glorifies his status as the first Hero of Labor of the Cuba Republic.
On April 25th, 1987, at 78 years old, Blas Roca died, he spent 58 years as exemplary communist, for decision of the Revolution Directorate is buried at Cacahual with honours of General dead in the field, and according to his desire in "bare earth"
Fidel says him the last good bye and his words are:
"It has stop ceased an exceptional man of singular virtue and extraordinary talent. A revolutionary exemplary who devoted his life to the cause of the humble, teacher and conductor of Communists for more than half a century, indomitable combatant for nearly three decades, led the first Marxist-Leninist party of Cuba.