Towards noon without sunset 

January 10, 1929: “They went down to the street with a black coffee in their stomachs, because today the money would be spent on the telegram. (...) Sometimes, through the window, Tina would see him walking away, his head darkened, a black dot advancing on the sidewalk, until suddenly he no longer had a head, he was no longer there, he was no longer...”.
Thus, the writer and journalist, Elena Poniatowska narrates, in her novel Tinísima, the end of the love story, at least at the physical level, between Modotti and Julio Antonio Mella. That was the last day in the life of the 25-year-old Cuban revolutionary. Tina saw her companion gunned down. “I die for the Revolution,” he told her in agony.
The grief of the beloved woman was not alone. In Mexico itself, and back in Cuba - the Island for which Julio breathed - his assassination implied a sad and seething commotion. Gerardo Machado, the dictator, his fearsome adversary annihilated, could not rub his claws for long: Mella would stand, determinant, among his generation, and the later ones.
He was not reborn a romantic hero, nor a cold martyr, but a revolutionary hope: behind and towards the future remained the renovating ideas, collected in his articles; and the strength of his action, anti-imperialist, courageous, rebellious before the supposedly immobilizing disciplines.
“That extraordinary talent, that fruitful life”, according to Fidel, ‘encouraging, exemplary, victorious and invincible banner of the Socialist Revolution’ had founded three essential institutions that remain to this day: the first Communist Party of Cuba, the University Student Federation and the Alma Mater magazine.
Nicolás Guillén expressed the decisive way in which Mella established himself as a symbol of the volcanic, transforming youth, and the image of a fighter who, from his light, moves forever:
He departed later with his deep step / and a song that to the future warns, / Mella towards the noon without sunset. // His downed blood is strong wine / Raise up, let us raise in the rough glass / The victorious blood of his death.