It was on the night of January 10, 1929, in Mexico City, when treacherous bullets fired in a treacherous manner cut short the fruitful career of Julio Antonio Mella, student, communist and anti-imperialist leader whose actions include the foundation of the Communist Party of Cuba, the contribution to develop a Marti consciousness among the working masses, together with the gestation of the University Student Federation, the Anti-imperialist League and the José Martí Popular University.
He was born on March 25, 1903 and although he is registered in the Civil Registry as Nicanor Mac Pórtland, it is known that he was the grandson of General Ramón Matías Mella, hero of the independence of the Dominican people; his mother Cecilia Magdalena Mac Pórtland y Diez, was a young British woman from the city of Hampshire, England, who came to love deeply the land of her first two children and was a militant in the ranks of those who opposed the Platt Amendment.
In 1915 he traveled to New Orleans, United States, with his brother Cecilio and his mother, and enlisted in the army, claiming to be older than his real age; a friend of his father managed to get him out of the army and returned him to Cuba, where he entered the Newton Academy and was a student of the Mexican poet Salvador Díaz Mirón, who made him discover the ideology of José Martí.
Julio Antonio Mella’s dream of being a military man and fighting for the American Homeland becomes a strong resolution; at a very young age he definitively identifies the main enemy, and he will consider the path of Latin American unity to defeat it; in 1921 he obtains his bachelor’s degree at the Secondary School of Pinar del Rio; that same year he enters the University of Havana, where he enrolls in Law, Philosophy and Letters, and publishes his first journalistic works in the university magazine Alma Mater, of which he was the administrator.
In January 1923 he was leader of the student struggle for the university reform, in October he organized and directed the First National Congress of Students, and in November he inaugurated the Popular University “José Martí”, with the purpose of giving political and academic instruction to the workers and to link this center of studies “with the needs of the oppressed”.
Mella was director and editor of Juventud, founder of the Anticlerical League; in 1924 he published a pamphlet entitled “Cuba, a people that has never been free”; in 1925 he founded the Ariel Polytechnic Institute together with Alfonso Bernal del Riesgo, and he was also the first secretary of organization of the Communist Party of Cuba.
When Gerardo Machado assumes the presidency of the Republic he outlaws the Communist Party and the University Student Federation, and expels Julio Antonio Mella from the University imprisoning him without evidence, under the accusation of terrorist; after starring in a hunger strike he is released and goes into exile in Mexico, country where he is linked to the continental and international revolutionary movement, establishes contact with revolutionaries and democrats throughout the region.
In the homeland of Benito Juarez Mella collaborates in the newspapers Cuba Libre, El Libertador, Tren Blindado, El Machete and Boletín del Torcedor (the latter in Havana); he gives lectures, publishes critiques on Mexican muralism, founds several anti-imperialist, student and peasant organizations, and attends, in 1927, the World Congress against colonial oppression and imperialism, held in Brussels.
Mella’s ashes were transferred to Cuba on September 29, 1933, and deposited in 1976, in a solemn ceremony, in the Memorial erected in his honor next to the steps of the University of Havana.
