Blas Roca Calederio, born on July 22 in 1908, was a Cuban communist revolutionary and radical journalist. Roca helped lead the 1933 general strike that ousted Gerardo Machado, and served in Fidel Castro's revolutionary government.
Born into a poor family, Roca began working at age eleven, shining shoes. According to Castro, Roca was already a prominent communist organizer in the province of Oriente at 21 years old.
At age 25, Roca helped lead a two week general strike that ousted dictator Gerardo Machado. By 1936, he was head of the Cuban Communist Party and began serving as a politican, helping author the 1940 Cuban Constitution.
Under Roca's leadership, Cuban communists were instrumental in providing an organizational and ideological structure for Castro's revolution, as well as playing a pivotal role using the party's long-standing ties with the Soviet Union to promote increasingly closer ties during the early days of the revolution.
In 1961, Blas Roca, leading a party delegation, presented a Cuban flag to Nikita Khrushchev during a meeting of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Roca served on the first central committee and politburo of the new Communist Party of Cuba, founded in 1965.
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So a couple months ago I decided I wanted to branch out from my usual reading habits and pick up some contemporary litfic. I did some searching, and the book Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann caught my attention. Mostly I liked the cover, honestly. Read a very positive review of the book, decided to buy it, but because all the bookstores near me closed* I had to order the book online. So I added it to my cart and forgot about it until last week when I finally clicked on buy.
I received the book today and what I didn't realize, having never seen a copy for myself, is that it is over a thousand pages long. Not that that's unique or something, I just didn't expect it. When I think litfic I think of slim books with difficult prose, not a doorstopper that would be long even by the standards of the genre books I normally read. As part of my decision to expand my reading habits I also bought Dubliners by James Joyce and The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (there's pretty good odds I'll never read these books. Most of the books I own I haven't read. Yet. I haven't read them yet. I definitely will) and they're both the very picture of what I expected. Dubliners is about 300 pages, 49 isn't quite 200.
*
except the used bookstore where I could have my fill of forgettable '80s-'90s thrillers, ancient pulpy westerns, reams of christian nonsense, and probably multiple copies of every book Stephen King has ever writtenwhat can i say but lol
Dubliners is great, but I can't say I've remembered much about it besides the last and longest of the short stories "The Dead" which I've read multiple times.