Jesús Hernández Tomás was a Spanish communist leader. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) he was Minister of Education and Fine Arts, then Minister of Education and Health. After the war he went into exile in Oran, Moscow and then Mexico. He was expelled from the party in 1944 for disloyalty to the leadership, and purged from the official history of the party after writing a book in 1953 critical of the Stalinist role in the Civil War.

Spanish coup of March 1939, in historiography often referred to as Casado's coup, was a coup d'état organized in the Republican zone against the government of Juan Negrín. It was carried out by the military with support of the Anarchists and the Socialists; its leader was commander of the Army of the Centre, Segismundo Casado. The conspirators viewed the Negrín government as a hardly veiled Communist dictatorship. Most concluded that the government-endorsed strategy of unyielding resistance against the Nationalists would produce nothing but further deaths and sufferings while the war had already been lost. The military and some politicians intended the coup as a first step towards opening peace negotiations with the Nationalists; for the Anarchists and Socialists the priority was to remove the Communists from power.