Julio Antonio Mella was probably the revolutionary most hated by the dictator Gerardo Machado, who did not hide his homicidal intentions when -in the face of arguments to free him from arbitrary detention- he told his lawyer Ruben Martinez Villena: “I do not know what communism is, nor anarchism, nor socialism. But neither the students, nor the workers, nor the veterans, nor the patriots, nor Mella. And I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him!”.
Faced with the threat, Mella declared: “I am not afraid of death, the only thing I feel is that they are going to kill me in the back”.
That prediction would unfortunately come true on January 10, 1929, in the Mexican capital, where he was in exile and preparing an insurrectionary plan.
On the night of that day he was strolling carefree with Tina Modotti, Italian revolutionary and photographer, when henchmen of the Machado dictatorship shot him twice in the back. They only left him time to tell his beloved, already on the ground: “Machado ordered me killed. I die for the Revolution. Tina, I am dying”. In two months he would be 26 years old.
The assassins traveled to Mexico with the complicity of the Cuban ambassador to that country and the Cuban ambassador to Washington, from where the U.S. government was aware of the sinister pl