At the exact place where he was assassinated 96 years ago on order from dictator Gerardo Machado, participants in the event laid wreaths in homage to Mella, a Cuban student leader.

“He was a man of profound thinking and vast action, which corresponded to the accurate analysis he made of the national and international sphere in which he lived,” Cuban Ambassador to Mexico Marcos Rodríguez stated.

Despite his young age, “he was the protagonist of events in our national history that contributed significantly to the construction of unity, of which he was a distinguished defender, as an indispensable element to fight imperialism.”

Rodríguez mentioned examples such as the creation of the University Students Federation (FEU) when he was barely 19 years old, which contributed to uniting the revolutionary student body of Cuba in the fight and defense of their rights.

Mella also founded the José Martí Popular University in November 1923, an extraordinary step in the necessary unity between students and the emerging working class, and was one of the founders of the First Communist Party of Cuba in August 1925.

The latter “consolidated the organization of the most advanced Marxist thinking of the time in Cuba in the 1920s, and was the seed of the guiding force of the socialist society that is being built today in our country,” the ambassador explained.

Rodríguez described Mella’s contribution to the continuity of the Cuban Revolution as invaluable and noted that with irrefutable arguments he exposed US imperialism and characterized the neocolonial system with which it subjected Cuba.

He also “exposed the atrocities of the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, who paid the hitmen who in a vile and cowardly way mutilated the life of the young Cuban leader in this place where we meet today,” the diplomat said.

In his opinion, “Julio Antonio Mella’s short but fruitful life makes him worthy of being a symbol and paradigm for the revolutionary youths of Cuba and the world.”

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