Julio Antonio Mella (1905-1929)

Nom de guerre of Nicanor McPortland, a principal leader of the reform movement of the 1920s.  He became a powerful speaker and anti-American agitator at the University of Havana where he founded (and was elected secretary-general of) the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria.  He also established the Universidad Popular José Martí.  Mella shared with his fellow students a desire to improve the educational and political situation in Cuba and end its tutelage to the United States.  He differed, however, in rejecting his generation’s romantic nationalism and vague ideological conceptions, embracing instead the Communist goal of a proletarian dictatorship.  By 1925 he had become a leader in the Unión Revolucionaria Comunista and its foremost propagandist.  He organized a political strike of students at the university against the authoritarian president-elect Machado.  Arrested on a bomb charge he went on hunger strike and was deported to Mexico.  There his activities won him the post of secretary general of the Mexican Communist Party, but after visiting the Soviet Union, he shed his affiliation with the Communists.  Soon afterwards, on January 10, 1929, he was shot dead in a Mexican street.  The crime was attributed to the Porra(Machado’s police), and (although later allegations blamed Vittorio Vidali, alias Carlos Contreras alias Enzio Sarmiento, a Kremlin executioner), a 67^thanniversary commemoration held in Mexico in 1996 assumed Mella to have been a victim of Machado. His writings include La Lucha revolucionaria contra el imperialismo (1940) and the compilation Documentos para su vida (1964).  The town of Julio A. Mella is named after him.