Carlos Baliño (1848-1926)

As a tobacco worker in Florida during the 1890s, he represented the escogedores (tobacco leaf selectors) in the Cuban independence movement and directed Tampa’s La Tribuna del pueblo.  A follower of Martí, in 1892 he signed the Bases, a document outlining the ideas and program of Martí’s Partido Revolucionario Cubano.  After Independence, Baliño moved to Cuba.  Although originally a believer in anarchism, he gradually turned to Marxism; and at age 70 he founded the Asociación Comunista de La Habana, to which he recruited the student leader Julio Antonio Mella.  In 1924 the Association, with Baliño as president, sought to unite all Cuban communists, and the Communist Congress of 1925 resulted in the Unión Revolucionaria Comunista, of which Baliño was briefly a leader until his death.