GROBART, FABIO

GROBART, FABIO (Avraham Simchovich; 1905–1994), Cuban Communist leader. Grobart was born in Trzciany (Poland) as Avraham Moishe Grobard to an Orthodox family. His father cleaned hogs' skins and his mother was a servant. He was sent to school to Goniondz, where his uncle trained him to become a tailor. Attracted by Marxist ideals, he became an active member of the Communist Youth League in Bialystok. In 1922 he had to flee from the police and changed his name to Avraham Simchovich. He reached Cuba in 1924, where he joined the small Sección Hebrea de la Agrupación Comunista de la Habana (Jewish Section of the Communist Organization of Havana), which had been founded shortly before. On August 16, 1925, he was one of the ten founders of the Cuban Communist Party, and was active in diffusing its doctrines among Jewish workers. After his arrest and deportation (1930) he reached Moscow, where he was probably trained to return to Cuba under a covert identity (as Otto Modley). He became a central figure in the Cuban Communist Party, although he acted mostly behind the scenes. From 1952 to 1960 he represented the Cuban workers in the World Labor Organization in Vienna and Prague. In 1960, shortly after the outbreak of the Castro Revolution, he returned to Cuba, and in 1965 he was appointed director of the journal Cuba Socialista. He was considered the ideologist of the Cuban Communist Party. He founded the Institute of History of the Cuban Communist Party (1973) and was a deputy of the Cuban Parliament. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: M. Corrales, The Chosen Island: Jews in Cuba (2005). (Margalit Bejarano (2nd ed.)