Forty years ago, the leadership of the Revolution determined to institutionalize the Cuban State and, in the case of a strategic decision that would decisively influence the life of all the people and in the very future of the Revolution, it was decided to make an experiment first in the province of Killings As the Commander in Chief, Fidel Castro Ruz, later said in his speech on the occasion of the commemoration of the 21st anniversary of the assault on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks: “Experiment in a sense, not in terms of decision or security of our Party, of carrying out these ideas throughout the country; The experiment is precisely to test the methods, mechanisms, regulations and everything that concerns the constitution of the Popular Powers before applying them nationally. That is, the experiment will help us perfect the idea; but the idea is to apply these principles throughout the country. ”Historically, the province of Matanzas had a guarantee that allowed it to develop that experience. It was here that, in 1510, the first victorious resistance to the Spanish conqueror was staged; in his soil the heroic opposition to the slave regime developed with great force; a part of its inhabitants saw for the first time wave what would be the National Teaching; It was through the Yumurino port where the last Spanish Captain General was finally defeated, and in the sands of Playa Girón, his first military defeat in Latin America suffered.

To these concrete historical considerations it was necessary to add that Matanzas was, at that time, a small province, without geographical complications or large mountain systems; there were no isolated areas and it had a well distributed population. It presented good results in the organization, in the production of material goods, and had an adequate political climate. In the previous analysis carried out by the senior management of the Revolution, it was considered that in the future political-administrative division that would be undertaken, the province It would not undergo major modifications, which reaffirmed the validity of the experience. The proximity to Havana was also taken into account, which allowed a better monitoring of the development of the experiment, in addition to having good internal communications throughout the territory.
The experience was undertaken in three main directions:

    To test the mechanisms, decisions and national considerations about how to create and develop the work of the Popular Power.
    Take concrete experiences in the organization and development of the work of state organizations, from neighborhood assemblies to the operation of the Provincial Assembly, its Executive Committee and the Work Commissions.
    Know how the administrative activity and the decisions that were previously taken at the central level were to be restructured, and that now had to be made in the local bodies.

On the shoulders of the leaders, cadres and people in general of the province, an enormous responsibility fell, because never before in Cuba had a political-social experiment of this magnitude been developed, and few countries in the world had faced a similar task, in the creation of an experimental model whose results would configure the state system, the future organization of the State and citizen participation. It was a question of radically modifying pre-established ideas and behavior patterns, with respect to the election processes that were carried out before the triumph of the Revolution, marked by politicking, fraud and bribery, for which the entire population had to be educated . In accordance with the success in Matanzas, the rules presented to the First Party Congress were elaborated. The implementation of the ideas conceived by Fidel and the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Party, demonstrated with precision the importance of what happened in the province of Yumurina.
The results of the historical process, carried out forty years ago, constituted a momentous contribution of the people of Matanzas to the implementation in the country of the Popular Power system, carried out later, in 1976, which was recognized by the Commander in Chief, Fidel Castro Ruz, in his speech on the occasion of the 21st anniversary of the assault on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks, in 1974, when he said: “Therefore, comrades of the Matanzas Party, comrades of mass organizations, comrades and companions, Matanzas and Matanzas, we congratulate you for the brilliant work you have done in this revolutionary way of building the Popular Powers of Matanzas, and we urge you to continue working and fighting with the same enthusiasm, with the same energy, with the same determination and with the same Immovable faith in the future.

 
(*) Notes taken from the book Genesis of Popular Power, by the authors Martha Alina Arencibia, Arnaldo