The International Workers Day in Cuba is was celebrated in Cuba for the first time in 1890, a date agreed a year earlier by the Congress of the Second International held in Paris.
The Cuban proletariat has the historic honor of having participated in the world premiere of International Workers’ Day. Although the Cuban labor movement was incipient at the time, that struggle echoed when the Havana Workers’ Circle organized a parade that culminated in an act with more than 3000 people and a score of speakers.
The tradition of the May Day was born when the Second International agreed in Paris in July 1889 to organize a large demonstration so that in all countries and in all villages at the same time, workers would put the public authorities before the obligation of legally reducing to 8 hours the working day and other resolutions of the International Congress of Paris, for May 1, 1890, date adopted by the American Federation of Labor at its Congress of December 1888, celebrated in San Luis, as a tribute to the martyrs of Chicago.
In Cuba, where all that has taken about the aforementioned judicial process in Chicago had been followed by the newspaper El Productor, and following the call of Paris, about three thousand workers in the capital participated and after the parade through the streets they congregated in Consulate and Virtudes.
Argentina in America and a handful of countries also complied with the invitation. Thus began the tradition that became simultaneous in a large part of the world, with the participation of millions of people mobilized by the most just causes of humanity.
Thus was born the commemoration of May Day which was neither the invention of Karl Marx, who had died in 1883, nor of the Communists, since it is above all a call to unity, above all tendencies, of all workers Workers.
In 1891 some countries re-developed the mobilization. In Cuba, an act was performed at the Irijoa Theater, then Teatro Marti, at Dragones and Zulueta, but it also took place in the city of Camagüey. Since then May Day has been incorporated into the forms of struggle of the workers in a national and international projection.