By Alejandra Garcia on January 10, 2023 from Havana
Antonio Mella statue near the University of Havana. photo: Bill Hackwell
Ninety-four years ago today, Cuban communist leader Julio Antonio Mella was assassinated in Mexico City by the Cuban dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. He was just 26 years old at the time, and had already written dozens of progressive texts, initiated several student organizations and founded the Cuban Communist Party that prevails and honors his legacy. Resumen Latinoamericano traveled the streets of Cuba’s capital in search of his memory.
The house where Julio Antonio Mella spent his childhood is still standing. It is an old three-story colonial building with four balconies of iron railings, which was the residence in Cuba of the Irishwoman Cecilia Mac Partland, Mella’s mother. The building at Obispo 67, in Old Havana, is marked today with the numbers 311 and 313, but no signs remind the passerby that the founder of the Communist Party of Cuba and the University Student Federation spent most of his short life in these streets.
The Obispo Street that Mella knew was “magnificent, already paved, with big stores,” as Cuban politician Segundo Curti, a contemporary of the student leader, recalled in the compilation book La Habana Que Va Conmigo (The Havana That Lives in Me) by the architect and urban planner Mario Coyula.
Today, people come and go along the busiest boulevard of colonial Havana, which recovered its splendor after the closure caused by the pandemic the recent pandemic. Still, the house where Julio Antonio Mella was born goes unnoticed. On the first floor two small food stores occupy what would have been the main entrance of the building. On the left, there is a private pizza business. On the right, there’s a state-run stall selling soft drinks and other beverages.
A few blocks away, on the first floor of Obispo 463, his father, Nicanor Mella Breá, ran a tailor shop in the emblematic Casa Stein at the beginning of the 20th century. “They say that Mella spent a lot of time here as a child with his father. It is said that he played with his brother, hidden among some of the wooden furniture we still have in this place,” said Carlos Paret, a worker in the old tailor shop, now a men’s clothing store.
When Mella’s mother fell ill with tuberculosis and emigrated to the United States in 1910, seven-year-old Julio Antonio and his five-year-old brother Cecilio were left in their father’s care, according to Adys Cupull and Froilan González, in their book Julio Antonio Mella en Medio del Fuego (Julio Antonio Mella amid fire). Therefore, the world of little Nicanor, as he was registered at birth, was circumscribed to the most vital street of the Cuban capital at that time, which began at the port of Havana and ended at the Manzana de Gomez.
Mella acquired his interest in politics in the business of his father, a descendant of Dominican patriots, because the place was “a meeting point, a center of culture, a place distinguished by good taste and good manners… The most important aspects of national and international events were discussed there, ” according to researchers Adys Cupull and Froilán González.
The Stein House maintains the elegance of the early 20th century, thanks to the restoration work carried out by specialists from the Office of the City Historian. From the days when the young man frequented the tailor’s shop, “shelves, mirrors, and some Singer brand old sewing machines are also preserved,” Paret explains.
However, no other clues remind us of Mella in that place. To the right of the entrance, only a discreet plaque indicates that “in this house was born the painter Servando Cabrera Moreno (1923-1981)”, referring to one of the apartments on the upper floors of the tailor’s shop and where several historians also locate another of Mella’s Havana homes.
In 1915, Julio Antonio and his brother traveled to the United States, where they lived with their mother, Cecilia. Upon his return two years later, Mella entered the Secondary School of Havana, also located at Obispo (No. 8), on the corner of San Ignacio, the same one attended by José Martí in 1866. There is no trace of the building, which was demolished in the 1950s to build the headquarters of what was once the Secretariat of Education of Fulgencio Batista’s administration. Today, the San Geronimo de La Habana University College is located there.
After finishing his studies at the Institute, Mella enrolled at the Newton Academy, located a few meters from there, on San Lazaro and Aguila streets. It is not hard to imagine him traveling by trolley bus from Obispo to his new school to receive Literature and History classes from the Mexican poet Salvador Díaz Mirón, who contributed to the political formation of the young leader, and helped him to unleash his passion for the thought and work of José Martí. It impressed him so deeply that, inspired by his classes of Roman Law, Mella changed his name from Nicanor to Julio Antonio, the conjunction of Julio Cesar -statesman, warrior, and historian-, and Marco Antonio -military and politician.
As of 1921, when Mella entered the University of Havana, the young leader’s story is better known: his student struggles, his communist militancy, his intellectual and journalistic projection, his assassination in Mexico on January 10, 1929 by hired assassins under the orders of dictator Gerardo Machado. But being an idol of the Cuban youth, where he forged his sense of Homeland, shouldn’t he at least be remembered with a plaque on the many places that are still standing many in these places where Julio Antonio spent his childhood and early youth?
Source Resumen Latinoamericano – US