J

ulio Antonio Mella was one of the most important pioneers of Marxism in Latin America. In the course of his brief life, Mella was a notable leader of the Cuban student movement, a founder of Cuba’s Communist Party, and the driving force behind various popular and revolutionary organizations. He also won wide recognition as a daring and provocative intellectual.

Born in Havana in 1903, Mella spent his youth studying at schools in Cuba as well as one in New Orleans. Before finishing high school, he had already read works by José Enrique Rodó, Manuel González Prada, José Ingenieros, and Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, but he was mainly influenced by the ideas of José Martí, one of the key figures in Cuba’s struggle for independence.

In 1921, he joined the University of Havana as a student of law, philosophy, and letters. It was from this moment that Mella’s career as a revolutionary activist and intellectual really began. Several events would mark the new generation, including the reverberations of the Mexican Revolution, the economic and political crisis after the end of World War I, and the influence of the Russian Revolution.

Revolutionary Youth

The Argentine university reform of 1918, which gradually spread to other parts of Latin America, also played a fundamental role in stirring up the spirits of Cuban youth. It was through his involvement in the student movement that Mella began to stand out. He was one of the founders (and later president) of the Federation of University Students, an organization created in December 1922 on his initiative, as well as serving as editor of the magazine Alma Mater, which he founded. In addition, he headed the first National Student Congress and created the magazine Juventud.

Mella would always try, whenever possible, to bring the workers’ movement and the students together in a broad, unified struggle.

From this point on, Mella would always try, whenever possible, to bring the workers’ movement and the students together in a broad, unified struggle. His contacts with labor leaders such as Carlos Baliño and Alfredo López were a product of that time. He was one of the main protagonists of the university reform movement and played a key role in setting up the Universidad Popular José Martí (José Martí Popular University), an experiment that would ultimately be closed down by the government of Gerard Machado, who Mella dubbed the “tropical Mussolini.”

In 1924, Mella founded the Anticlerical Federation of Cuba as part of the continental organization of the same name, which was based in Mexico. He also set up the Ariel Polytechnic Institute with some friends and became a member of the Agrupación Comunista (Communist Group) of Havana. During the same year, he married a law student named Oliva Zaldívar Freyre.

Mella’s next task was to establish the Cuban section of the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas in July 1925. This was an organization that had been founded the previous year in Mexico by US and Mexican communists, along with its periodical El Libertador.

In 1925, still only twenty-two years of age but with an impressive range of political experience under his belt, Mella took part in the founding of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC). He was expelled from university the same year. Machado’s government also came to power in 1925 and began an intense campaign of political repression. Several opponents of the regime were jailed, murdered, or (in the case of foreigners) deported.

Shortly after taking office, Machado ordered the arrest of two dozen communist and anarcho-syndicalist militants, many of whom were then released on bail. In September, however, there were explosions in different parts of Havana. A number of opposition activists were blamed for the attacks and taken into custody, including Mella, who was sent to prison at the end of November.

A Life of Struggle

On December 5, he began a hunger strike, which was unusual in Cuba at the time, and a national campaign for his release began. Mella’s hunger strike became the main topic of discussion in the press and a real national drama. However, this greatly displeased the PCC, which ordered him to stop the fast immediately, although he did not comply with the instruction.

In January 1926, facing the possibility of being sent to prison again, Mella decided to leave Cuba in secret for exile in Mexico.

Party leaders accused Mella of being vain, undisciplined, and prone to petty-bourgeois attitudes. Some considered him disobedient and inclined to break with the party hierarchy. Mella was even branded by his political cothinkers as a traitor and a deserter and accused of wanting to constitute his own current, “Mellism,” which was not true. He spent eighteen days on hunger strike and suffered a heart attack because of the seriousness of his condition. But Machado eventually gave in under the weight of public pressure. On December 23, 1925, the order was given for Mella’s release.

In January 1926, facing the possibility of being sent to prison again, Mella decided to leave Cuba in secret for exile in Mexico. (He left the country without his wife Oliva, who was pregnant at the time and went weeks without hearing from her husband.) In the same month, he was expelled from the PCC (according to some, “temporarily excluded,” “sanctioned,” or “suspended” from the party), even though he belonged to its Central Committee and had been one of its founders.

This attitude toward Mella isolated the Cuban communists at the time. The Comintern considered his removal to be a sectarian move and demanded a review of the decision. When he arrived in Mexico, the country’s president Plutarco Elías Calles immediately granted political asylum to the young militant. Mella joined the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) with the support of the Comintern.

During his time in Mexico, Mella led the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas, worked on the editorial staff of the publication El Machete, and became involved in a range of other political activities, both national and international. At the same time, he resumed his studies at the law faculty of the National University of Mexico, founding the Association of Proletarian Students and its organ El Tren Blindado.

Mella was also a member of the Comité Manos Fuera de Nicarágua (MAFUENIC) and of the Executive Committee of the Venezuelan Revolutionary Party. He was even arrested for a few days after taking part in protests against the conviction of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti outside the US Embassy (along with his wife, who had by this point moved to Mexico to live with him).

This exhausting routine of political activism and the financial difficulties that Mella endured left virtually no room for a traditional family life. After a stillborn pregnancy in 1926, his wife gave birth to their daughter Natasha the following year. Soon afterward, missing her family, unhappy with the constant monitoring of their activity by the police and Machado’s agents, and worn out by the daily deprivations they experienced, she returned to Cuba with Natasha. Mella never saw them again. Within a short time, he began a relationship with the photographer Tina Modotti.

“A Delegate of Unusual Brilliance”

Mella’s political work during this period included a trip to Europe in February 1927 to participate in the founding congress of the League Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression in Brussels, where he denounced fascism and the Ku Klux Klan while demanding freedom for the African peoples. The congress brought together 174 delegates from twenty-one different countries. Some of those in attendance, such as the Argentine communist Vittorio Codovilla and Peru’s Haya de la Torre, reportedly made unfavorable comments about Mella, but the novelist Henri Barbusse described him as “a delegate of unusual brilliance.”

Mella’s political work included a trip to Europe to participate in the founding congress of the League Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression.

After the event, Mella visited the Soviet Union for a few weeks, where he was invited to take part in the second conference of the International Red Aid and was elected to its committee as the Central American representative. He prepared two detailed political reports, one on Cuba and the other on Mexico. He also seems to have had contact with members of the Left Opposition on this occasion. Codovilla is said to have levelled various accusations against Mella, branding him as a petty-bourgeois intellectual and an opportunist with no revolutionary discipline.

From Moscow, Mella went to Paris before returning to Mexico in June 1927. He was so impressed by the Soviet Union that he described himself in a letter as having come “back from paradise.” Mella went on to write several articles about the USSR, which were generally quite laudatory.

Vladimir Lenin appears in Mella’s writings as a fundamental reference point: the Bolshevik leader was for him “the master of the international proletariat” and “the most accurate and practical of Karl Marx’s interpreters.” He mentions Leon Trotsky in some articles, usually in a positive way: in one text, Trotsky is described as a “human dynamo.” Joseph Stalin, on the other hand, does not feature in any of the young man’s works.

The PCM had enough confidence in Mella to appoint him as the party’s interim general secretary in June 1928. However, when a party delegation returned from the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in September of that year, Mella was removed not only from this interim post, but also from the Central Committee. In December 1928, Mella decided to leave the Mexican Communist Party. According to party secretary Rafael Carrillo, he delivered an “insulting disavowal” to the PCM leaders.

The cue for this was a letter that the PCC sent to the Mexican communists, requesting that the “Cuban group” (Mella and his associates) subordinate themselves to the PCM’s Central Committee instead of working on their own, which could compromise “in a truly criminal manner” the comrades working on the island itself. Mella’s response was supposed to have been so impulsive that the PCM leaders intended to circulate a resolution on the matter to all the Latin American parties.

However, Mella reconsidered his decision a few days later and apologized in a letter, asking to remain in the party. At the time, Carrillo stated that Mella had always had “Trotskyist weaknesses.” The party accepted his request, on the condition that he would not take up any leadership role for the next three years.

Machado’s Enemy

Supporters of the Machado regime accused Mella of being unpatriotic, portraying him as a mercenary and a puppet of the Soviet Union. This was clearly a false picture intended to reduce his great popularity in progressive circles. In fact, Mella belonged to a generation of highly original Latin American intellectuals who had the ability to grasp the national reality of their countries, identifying potential paths for action and adapting various lines of thought, both Marxist and non-Marxist, in order to comprehend history and the local conjuncture.

Mella belonged to a generation of highly original Latin American intellectuals who had the ability to grasp the national reality of their countries.

In the first half of 1928, Mella carried out his most important project by creating the Association of New Cuban Revolutionary Émigres (ANERC), an anti-imperialist, cross-class, and avowedly “democratic” organization based in Mexico City. It was clearly inspired by José Martí, Nicaragua’s Augusto Sandino, and the Venezuelan Revolutionary Party. Its immediate goal was to remove Machado from power.

For Mella, the organization should unite the struggles of all those who opposed the regime — students, workers, intellectuals, and even members of the liberal-bourgeois Nationalist Union — in order to start an armed uprising in Cuba, without losing sight of the ultimate socialist goal. However, the main focus was always upon the working class; after all, the official publication of ANERC had a title — ¡Cuba Libre! Para los trabajadores (Free Cuba! For The Workers) — which clearly indicated what the group’s chief objective was.

The idea was to prepare a military expedition that would set sail from Mexico and start an insurrection on the island. The group was outside the purview of the PCC: neither its structure nor its strategy were necessarily in line with the projects of the Cuban communists. According to some writers, Mella thought that the armed struggle in Cuba would open up a new front against US imperialism, which was already engaged in the occupation of Nicaragua.

ANERC was a source of friction between Mella and members of the PCM leadership. The Mexican communists considered the project to be “putschist” and petty bourgeois in character, involving alliances with reformist and liberal sectors and not prioritizing the action of the proletarian masses. He was accused of not following the instructions of the Comintern and of harboring sympathies for Trotskyism.

At the same time, Mella’s plans greatly displeased the Machado regime. On January 10, 1929, around 9 p.m., while he was walking down a street in Mexico City with Tina Modotti, he was shot twice in the back at point-blank range. Although he was taken to a hospital for surgery, Mella did not survive the attack, drawing his last breath around 2 a.m. the following day. He was still only twenty-five years old.

Although there were various speculative theories about the motive behind the attack — from a “crime of passion” involving Modotti to assassination by communist militants acting on behalf of Stalinism — it became clear that the killers were agents hired by Machado to eliminate his political rival. From that moment on, the legend surrounding Julio Antonio Mella would grow and grow.

Mella’s Influences

Like any complex character, Mella cannot be placed neatly in a theoretical or ideological box. He fought for the revolution without dismissing the possibility of achieving radical reforms along the way. He was anti-racist but placed particular emphasis on the class struggle. He defended the proletariat as the main political protagonist while still including middle-class sectors, students, and progressive intellectuals in his projects. He was a “nationalist,” but always kept hold of an internationalist and continental perspective. He was a Marxist while remaining committed to the legacy of Jose Martí.

Like any complex character, Mella cannot be placed neatly in a theoretical or ideological box.

Mella could work both inside and outside the parties to which he belonged in very heterogeneous organizations. Controversial and sometimes contradictory, he was an excellent organizer, and his activism on various fronts was constant and frenetic. He fought the dictatorship of Machado with a project of democracy, institutional modernization, economic development, and true independence for Cuba. Mella supported education that would embrace the popular classes, uncompromising anti-imperialism, and (ultimately) a social revolution led by the workers.

To understand Mella’s ideology, we need to identify the different theoretical influences that shaped his thinking. His first major influence was undoubtedly José Martí. Mella set out to “rediscover” and “reinterpret” the work of the poet, reclaiming his life and thought for popular struggles.

The link between Martí and Mella was most likely to have been Carlos Baliño. Known as the first Cuban Marxist (and perhaps even the first Marxist in all of Latin America), Baliño was a contemporary of Martí who became his friend and joined the party that he founded. He understood the particularities of Cuban history and the need for real political and economic independence, combining these elements with knowledge of the workers’ movement, participation in trade union struggles, and commitment to socialist revolution.

Baliño was probably the first to unite the ideas of Martí and Marx on the island, as well as being an excellent political organizer and a great admirer of Lenin and the October Revolution. He later had a close relationship with Mella and was one of the founders of the PCC. We should remember his role in the development of the young man’s thinking.

The anarcho-syndicalist printer Alfredo López is also worthy of mention. Mella recognized López as his “master” in many ways. When Mella was a student leader, he learned a lot from his colleague, who helped bring university students closer to the workers.

Of course, Marx would be a defining influence upon Mella, along with Lenin and the Russian Revolution. While he read works by Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin, it was Lenin’s work that had the greatest impact upon him at that time.

Mella believed that the existence of “apostles,” “heroes,” and “martyrs” was essential for the cause to triumph, along with “professional revolutionaries.” In his view, the revolutionary had to dedicate himself entirely to the cause and subordinate his own personality to political and social needs.

Pátria Grande

On the one hand, Mella defended “revolutionary nationalism” with a clear class character, popular and proletarian. On the other, he sought the union of Latin America as a Pátria Grande for the whole continent. He called for a fight to realize “[Simón] Bolívar’s old ideal, adapted to the current time” — the “unity of America,” a “free America,” not the exploited, colonial America that was the fiefdom of a few capitalist companies, supported by governments that acted as the agents of imperialism.

Mella based his view of imperialism mainly on Lenin’s book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and on the writings of Martí. He may also have read and been influenced by the works of Scott Nearing, whom he referred to as a “formidable American sociologist.” (Nearing’s The American Empire was translated into Spanish by Carlos Baliño.) Mella believed that the Leninist theory of imperialism was “universally applicable,” rather than being specific to certain regions, “as some ‘revisionists’ simplistically try to prove.”

Mella was one of the staunchest opponents of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), the movement founded by Haya de la Torre. He wrote a pamphlet that was arguably the most important critical text about APRA from that period. For Mella, APRA represented a variant of populism with a program that would in practice make it the instrument of a reformist policy for the bourgeoisies of Latin America.

Mella was certainly concerned about issues of “race” and racism. In one interview, he remarked that one-third of Cuba’s population had “African blood” and that they were terribly exploited, encountering major obstacles in the fields of politics and education. He also indignantly denounced the lynching of African Americans in the United States. In spite of this, Mella nonetheless considered that the class struggle took precedence over the racial question.

His position became more explicit in his criticism of APRA, especially in relation to the role of Latin America’s indigenous peoples. According to Mella, it was mistaken to speak about the revolutionary potential of the indigenous peoples:

The penetration of imperialism has put an end to the problem of race, in its traditional sense, insofar as imperialism transforms Indians, mestizos, whites, and blacks into workers, that is, it gives the problem an economic basis, not an ethnic one.

In Mella’s view, experience had already shown that “the peasant — the Indian in America — is extraordinarily individualistic and that his highest aspiration is not socialism, but private property.” Only the working class could free the peasantry from this error, “on the basis of the alliance that the Communist Party establishes between the two classes.”

Of course, there are limitations to the texts of Mella, which are generally quite short and do not necessarily develop the ideas that he puts forward in great depth, perhaps because of his lifestyle and lack of time, with the large amount of political activities he was carrying out simultaneously. We are talking about someone who was still very young and who often prepared articles on the immediate political conjuncture, many of which had a propagandistic slant and a deterministic view of history. His aim was to be as direct as possible, resulting in works that had a polemical and provocative content.

Even so, one can find in Mella a marked sensitivity and a tremendous capacity to understand the time in which he lived and the needs of the moment. His life and work continue to inspire people in Cuba and deserve to be known by today’s progressive youth beyond the island.