The student founder of the Cuban Communist Party martyred at 25: a face of Latin American anti-imperialism
December 1928, at a tense party meeting in Mexico City, Vittorio Vidali shouted at Mella: "Never forget — there are only two ways out of the International: expelled or dead!" A month later, Mella was assassinated on the street.
Student leader who co-founded the Communist Party of Cuba, organizing anti-imperialist student struggles at the University of Havana and establishing Cuba's first Marxist-Leninist party with Carlos Baliño in 1925. Exiled in Mexico for resisting the Machado dictatorship, he was assassinated at 25 in 1929 and became a foundational martyr of the Cuban revolutionary left, later claimed as a precursor by the Castro movement.
Career Timeline
- 1922Enters University of Havana law school — co-founds FEU, serves as secretary
- 1923Becomes FEU president — convenes First National Student Congress, founds José Martí Popular University
- 1924Joins Havana Communist Group, creates Cuban section of the Anti-Imperialist League
- 1925Co-founds the Communist Party of Cuba with Carlos Baliño — Central Committee member; arrested, conducts 18-day hunger strike
- 1926Expelled from university and party — flees via Honduras and Guatemala to Mexico City
- 1926–1927Founds ANERC — writes for Cuba Libre and other revolutionary papers
- 1927Attends World Congress Against Colonial Oppression in Brussels — Moscow for RILU Fourth Congress
- 1929Shot dead on 10 January walking home in Mexico City — aged 25
Socialist University Reform and the Mystery of His Assassination
Julio Antonio Mella's revolutionary thought crystallized in the struggle for university reform. In his essay 'The Socialist Concept of the University Reform,' published in September 1928 in the journal Tren Blindado ('Armored Train', an allusion to the train from which Leon Trotsky directed the Red Army during the Russian Civil War) during his Mexican exile, Mella argued that the university functions as an institution serving the interests of the ruling class, and that genuine reform was possible only within the framework of proletarian social revolution. For him, every reform was not a final goal but a step toward the 'final fight.'
His position within the Mexican Communist Party, however, was precarious. In July 1928 he was expelled from the party's Central Committee for 'Trotskyist views,' and he came into sharp conflict with the Italian Comintern agent Vittorio Vidali. At a tense party meeting in December 1928, Vidali reportedly shouted at Mella: 'There are only two ways out of the International, expelled or dead!'
On 10 January 1929, Mella was shot at close range while walking along a Mexico City street with the photographer Tina Modotti. Mexican authorities initially attempted to implicate Modotti, releasing nude photographs of her in an effort to sway public opinion, but Diego Rivera and others came to her defense. Officially a man named José Agustín López was charged, but two competing theories persist: that he was killed by agents of the Cuban Machado dictatorship, or that the Stalinist Vidali pulled the trigger himself, a view held even by some Cuban scholars today. Mella had rejoined the Mexican Communist Party just two weeks before his assassination.
After the Cuban Revolution, the Castro government canonized Mella as a martyr against the Machado dictatorship. His bust stands near the University of Havana, where it remains a site of Marxist veneration to this day, periodically blown down at night and restored by morning.