Julio Antonio Mella

Julio Antonio Mella founded the Cuban Communist Party at twenty-two and was shot dead in a Mexico City street at twenty-five, walking beside Tina Modotti. He was the illegitimate son of a Dominican tailor and an Irish woman, and became a student leader at Havana University, where he ran the campaign for university reform that won student representation in the governing bodies and founded a workers' night school. He helped establish the Cuban Communist Party in 1925, was arrested under Gerardo Machado's dictatorship, went on hunger strike for nineteen days, and was released to enormous public pressure and then effectively exiled. In Mexico he wrote, organised among exiles and worked with the Comintern, and lived with Modotti, who photographed him - the portrait of him asleep, and his typewriter with a line of Trotsky in it, are among her best-known images. On 10 January 1929 two men shot him as the couple walked home. Machado's agents are the usual explanation; the Mexican press instead ran a campaign accusing Modotti, who was tried in the newspapers, cleared, and deported the next year. Cuban institutions carry his name and his ashes are in Havana. He had been a champion oarsman and was physically imposing, which the iconography has made much of. Modotti s photograph of his typewriter is one of the most reproduced images of the Mexican avant-garde. The bullet that killed him was fired from behind at close range. A Cuban film about the killing was made in 1975. He had been expelled from the Cuban Communist Party shortly before his death over disagreements with the leadership, and was posthumously reinstated.

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