A cup product lemma for continuous plurisubharmonic functions

A version of Gromov's cup product lemma in which one factor is the (1,0)-part of the differential of a continuous plurisubharmonic function is obtained. As an application, it is shown that a connected noncompact complete Kaehler manifold that has exactly one end and admits a continuous plurisubharmonic function that is strictly plurisubharmonic along some germ of a 2-dimensional complex analytic set at some point has the Bochner-Hartogs property; that is, the first compactly supported cohomology with values in the structure sheaf vanishes.