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The mistake is still remembered as "the August error." Bias Roca survived the purge that followed, and even moved up to boss the Oriente provincial party machinery. He made a pilgrimage to Moscow as a delegate to the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, and there he obviously impressed his superiors, Jacques Duclos, the pudgy French Communist who once strongly influenced North American Communists, once described Roca as the most clear-thinking Red in the Americas. On Roca's return to Cuba, the middle-class intellectuals who had been running things were deposed. Shoemaker Roca, a man of the proletariat, was installed as the secretary-general and big boss, a post he has held ever since.
All for Cuba. Soon, like his predecessors, he was searching for a deal. Fulgencio Batista, the tough army sergeant who rode a coup to power in 1933, was now the man in charge. In return for what support the Communists could give, he allowed the party to start publishing its newspaper Hoy, and then, as the friendship warmed, gave the Reds what they wanted—control of the Cuban Labor Confederation. The next objective—real popular appeal—was somewhat harder to achieve. Hoping to disguise Moscow's controlling arm, Roca set out to "Cubanize" the party. The word commissar was banned from party publications, and the Communists even spoke gently of their bitterest enemy, the Roman Catholic Church, to which 90% of all Cubans belong. Yet Roca did not mistake where the orders came from. "We must never forget that the important thing is the security of the Soviet state," he once told a Hoy editor.
When Batista's term ended in 1944, the party tumbled back into obscurity. In true Communist fashion, Roca recognized no defeat: "Of course, Cuba will be a socialist country some day." he told a U.S. newsman. " 'When is the only question suitable for discussion." But he had little to go on. Batista's freely elected successors, first Grau San Martin, then Prio Socarras, wanted no part of the Communists, stripped away their control of the labor confederation. In two years from 1948 to 1950, registered party members dropped from 150,000 to 55,000. Even Batista, when he returned to power at gunpoint in 1952, had no deals to offer this time. Anxious to stay on the right side of the U.S., whose sugar and tourist dollars filled Cuba's (as well as his) pockets, he went so far as to outlaw the Communists and drive them underground. There they stayed until Castro came along seven years later.