For historians of Latin American communism, Cuba is a special case. Since 1959 it has been the only Communist country in Latin America, yet research on the history of Cuban Communism has been uneven and poor. Until the publication in Cuba in 2004 – 5 of Angelina Rojas Blaquier’s important two-volume account of the first decades of Cuban Communism we have not had a single synoptic study of Cuba’s first Communist Party (PCC). There have been monographs dealing with particular conjunctures (the soviets episode during the 1933 Revolution; Cuban volunteers in the Spanish Civil War), but there have been few biographies of key figures in the party or of people close to it in its first decade. There are no decent biographies of the party’s major figures (Lázaro Peña, Raúl Roa, Blas Roca, and Fabio Grobart). We lack studies of the party’s sociology, of its involvement with particular groups of workers, peasants, and immigrants or its pioneering intersection of Afro-Cuban society, and of its early insertion into civil society (music, film, radio, journalism). Even more seriously, we have no substantial study of the early Communist Party’s relations with the Comintern and Profintern, or of its relations with subunits of the Comintern such as the Caribbean Bureau.One of the few figures of early PCC history that has attracted attention consistently over the years, especially within post-1959 Cuba, has been Julio Antonio Mella. A student leader in the early and mid-1920s and one of the founding members of the PCC, Mella erupted onto the national stage during the hunger strike he declared in December 1925 in protest against the repression of the Gerardo Machado government. Opting to leave Cuba in early 1926, Mella made his way to Mexico City, the key node in the network of revolutionary émigrés who fled repressive Latin American regimes during the 1920s. There, Mella used his links with the young Mexican Communist Party and with revolutionary diasporas of émigré Venezuelans, Peruvians, Cubans, and Central Americans to mount one of the earliest examples of transnational revolutionary endeavors known in Latin America.Christine Hatzky’s biography of Mella originally appeared in German in 2004. It has now been published in a Spanish translation by a Cuban publisher, and the broader scholarly community may now benefit from this splendid study that transforms our understanding of Mella’s life and significance. Using a rich array of Cuban, Mexican, and Soviet (Comintern) resources, Hatzky has succeeded in assembling a book that assesses Mella’s significance for the history of both Cuban and Mexican radicalism. One of the many merits of the study is its refusal to indulge in the hagiographic and excessively ideologized analysis which has been the rule in most Cuban examinations of Mella’s life and career. The assessment of Mella’s life is nicely balanced, and for once we get to see important glimpses of the private, sentimental life of the man, and especially his difficult relationship with his wife and, later, with his lover, Tina Modotti. Hatzky also provides us by far the most detailed examination available so far of Mella’s parents, childhood, and upbringing, as well as of his early life in Cuba as athlete and student activist.Mella was a supremely iconoclastic figure, always reluctant to toe the party line — both in Cuba, where he was briefly expelled at the end of 1925 by the Communist Party that he had helped form a few months earlier, and in Mexico, where differences of political line led to increasing tension with the party leadership.Mella’s main preoccupation, indeed obsession, was with the effort to overthrow the repressive government of Gerardo Machado in his native Cuba. This led him to fund an international action group of Cuban exiles, ANERC, and to develop plans for mounting a military expedition to Cuba to link up with internal bourgeois opposition to the Machado regime, surely the most dramatic antecedent of the 1956 – 59 project of Castro and Guevara. The scale of Mella’s activities and his growing Cuban and Latin American profile contributed to Machado’s decision to have the athletic young Cuban murdered, which occurred in Mexico City in January 1929. The background to these developments is beautifully reconstructed by Hatzky, who also deals convincingly with the weakly documented claims concerning Mella’s Trotskyism. Finally, the book concludes with a careful discussion of the impact in Cuba of Mella’s assassination and of the murky details surrounding the Machado government’s role in his murder. This, then, is a book which should find a place on the bookshelves of all those scholars who are interested in Mexican and Cuban history during the 1920s as well as those who want to explore the complex tributaries of the Latin American revolutionary left in its formative stages.
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Jan 1, 2025
Anne Garland Mahler 
Open Access