64: Who killed Mella?

In real history, no one knows. Cuban general-dictator Gerardo Machado’s goons were accused. It’s possible they did it. But from Stalinist Moscow they also hated the young leader Julio Antonio Mella, and it’s well-known that Mexico served as the KGB’s contract scaffold for years. His lover Tina Modotti is suspected of direct complicity in the crime.

It doesn’t matter, though, because returning to Havana we finished him off with blows of neglect and manipulation of historical reality; we put him on the untouchable altar where rust hardly dares to corrode his Apollonian silhouette. From a scratched present, Mella still contemplates us today. With his classic communist curiosity, he no longer recognizes any shred of communism in the communism now embodied in Cuba. Luckily.