The daughter of a doctor from the town of Pilón, in Cuba’s Oriente Province, Sánchez was one of the finest representatives of a generation of revolutionaries who were ready to take any risk and make any sacrifice in the struggle to rid their country of the Batista tyranny and build a decent society in Cuba.

“Founder and leader of the July 26 Movement in the southern region of the old province of Oriente, she distributed History Will Absolve Me [Castro’s 1953 courtroom speech denouncing the Batista regime], and organized and consolidated the Movement in Manzanilo, Sofia, Estrada Palma, Calicito, Campechuela, Ceiba Hueca, San Ramón, Media Luna, Niquero, Pilón, and other places,” said an editorial in the January 12 issue of the Cuban daily Granma.

Sánchez worked together with Frank Pais in laying the July 26 Movement’s vital underground network in the cities. This, together with the guerrilla struggle in the mountains and countryside, eventually destroyed the Batista dictatorship.

It was Sánchez who was in charge of the camouflaged trucks that waited for the rebels sailing to Cuba in the boat named Granma on November 30, 1956.  
 
January 31, 1955
The fighting power of the German workers was seen once again in the 24-hour protest strike of close to a million industrial Ruhr workers on Jan. 22. Despite government efforts to forestall the strike demonstration, the coal miners and steel workers of the Ruhr kept solid ranks and received pledges of support from the Railroad Workers Union and from hundreds of thousands of workers throughout West Germany.

Officially the strike demonstration was a protest against attempts to deny union representatives voting rights in the co-management holding companies set up in the coal and steel industries after World War II. The unions also protested the arrogant statement of the Ruhr industrialist, Herman Reusch, that the co-management concession won by the workers was obtained by “blackmail” when the government was too weak to resist.

While this protest was the immediate issue, it was generally recognized that the strike was a part of the growing opposition to the Paris agreements for German rearmament that are now before the Bonn government for ratification.

The struggle against the rearmament program has been conducted under the leadership of the Social Democrats, the second largest political party in West Germany.  
 
 
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