Julio Antonio Mella in the vanguard and in combat

He dedicated his short life to the Revolution and died for it, according to his own words, youth leader Julio Antonio Mella, born on March 25, 1903 in Havana, is considered one of the Cuban heroes with the greatest work in a very short time.

122 years after his birth, Mella's legacy remains, because he was always at the forefront for his political, patriotic, communist and anti-imperialist thinking and for not giving up the fight for freedom and social justice during the tyranny of Gerardo Machado.
His parents were Nicanor Mella, Dominican, whose illegitimate son he was, but who took care of his studies and maintenance, and the Irishwoman Cecilia Mc Parland.

He died at 25 in a street of Mexico City, on January 10, 1929, assassinated by hired assassins of the dictator Machado, when he was preparing from his condition of exile the return to the country by means of an armed expedition that he organized with libertarian aims, at the same time that he was directing political entities of the left at the continental level.

He never rested in the fulfillment of his tasks and objectives, this sort of titan of Cuban youth, whose trajectory does not age and can even be almost guessed when contemplating photographic images of him, taken by his sentimental companion, Tina Modotti.

In them he has the imprint of a modern young man, full of vitality, very similar to that of a sportsman or citizen of today. That is why he is still close to us.

He carried out the political struggle by weaving it with the threads of the exercise of thought, theory and the most innovative actions contributed to his fellow men, above all, the dispossessed. He was a Martiano and a Marxist-Leninist.
He studied humanistic subjects at the University of Havana, where he stood out as a student leader and sports lover.

Machado, president of Cuba since 1925, corrupt and surrendered to the designs of the United States, was a furious anti-communist and went beyond the limits when it came to committing outrages.

Mella and his compatriots of struggle had to assume their fights against corruption and injustices in the midst of the repression and the wave of crimes unleashed by the dictator Machado, both in the University and in the work of approaching the national workers' movement that was gaining strength in those times.

That is why he moved to the Mexican capital in 1926, which did not prevent him from continuing to fulfill what he considered his political and revolutionary duty in that other place. So he joined the ranks of the Communist Party of that country and became a member of the Political Bureau.

Before that, he managed to plant two pillars in Cuba: he founded in 1922 the University Student Federation, the emblematic FEU, which soon became a bastion of the struggle, and also the Jose Marti Popular University, to offer free higher education to workers and laborers.
He made efforts to extend the institution's links with society and other growing organizations.

In 1923 he sponsored the 1st National Congress of Students and founded in 1925 -together with the independence fighter Carlos Baliño- the first Communist Party of Cuba. In addition to being a convinced Marxist, he was an anti-imperialist, since he conceived that sovereignty and national emancipation would only be achieved when the ties of dependence with the United States, a northern foreign power that had been dictating the island's destiny since 1898, were eliminated.

From Mexico he traveled to Brussels as a militant of the continental Communist International.

In 1924, he founded the Cuban section of the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas and later joined the ranks of the Mexican section. He also worked in the dissemination of Marxist ideas through journalism and was a promoter of university reform in Latin America.
Mella's activism gained intensity every day, and he even had to face misunderstandings and false accusations circulated by enemies infiltrated in the ranks of the communists.

When he thought the time had come, in 1928, he organized an armed expedition to Cuba against the tyrant Machado, for which he obtained a cache of weapons. Whistle blowers pretending to be opponents of the dictator divulged the plan. Gerardo Machado then ordered the execution of the crime that put an end to the life of this extraordinary patriot.