Vittorio Vidali

Vittorio Vidali (27 September 1900 – 9 November 1983), also known as Vittorio Vidale, Enea Sormenti, Jacobo Hurwitz Zender, Carlos Contreras, and "Comandante Carlos", was an Italian communist.

After being expelled from Italy with the rise of Fascist Benito Mussolini, he went to Moscow, where he became an operative for the Soviet Comintern.

He was exiled to Mexico, where he was implicated in assassination attempts of Cuban communist Julio Mella and Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

Modotti was known to keep an M1911 pistol in her house.

Officially, José Agustín López (said to have no particular political affiliations) was charged with Mella's murder; two other known criminals, Jose Magriñat and Antonio Sanabria, were also suspects.

Police investigators received conflicting eyewitness reports, which are notoriously unreliable.

In one version, Mella and Modotti were walking alone, whereas another said that Vidali was walking together with the two.

Mella was shot at point-blank range, and neither Modotti nor Vidali were injured.

Modotti gave a false name to the investigators, and, although police were suspicious of her alibi, she was released soon after being arrested.

In 1922, he was expelled from the country after Benito Mussolini ascended to power with the Fascist movement.

Vidali was described as a Bolshevik in the file kept on him by the police in Fascist Italy.

Vidali found refuge in the Soviet Union, relocating to Moscow.

Working for the International Red Aid, Vidali was sent by the Comintern to Mexico to discipline its national party, according the Mexican Communist Party.

During this period, Vidali became romantically involved with photographer and communist activist Tina Modotti, who had a previous liaison with artist Diego Rivera and was then involved with Cuban communist Julio Antonio Mella, then in Mexico.

According to Gary Tennant, Vidali's interest in Modotti was related to his killing her current lover, Mella.

Mella was among the founders of the Comintern version of the Communist Party of Cuba.

He had fled Cuba for Mexico in Gerardo Machado’s time, where he joined and then left the Mexican Communist Party.

In early December 1928, Mella was expelled from the Mexican Communist Party for his association with Trotskyists, but he was readmitted two weeks later.

Mella was killed by gunshot in Mexico City on January 10, 1929, an incident believed to have been a political assassination.

Modotti was by Mella's side when he was shot.

She was seen holding his arm, allegedly in a manner similar to her portrayal in Diego Rivera's mural of the three.

Vidali is believed to have used the revolver he commonly carried to murder Mella.

Magriñat was also set free: he was ultimately killed in Cuba (allegedly by communists) in 1933

The official position of the present Cuban government is that Mella was killed on Machado's orders.

It acknowledges that Modotti was known to have been a Stalinist operative in a number of countries.

Some in Cuba continue to believe that Vidali killed Mella.

How Machado's men could have operated alone and independently in the highly politicized environment of Mexico City is not explained.

According to Secondo Abers, both Magriñat and Rivera (who had just returned from Cuba) would have warned Mella that he was in danger.

He led efforts to prepare, supervise and coordinate the Antifascist Worker and Peasant Militias (MAOC), organized by the Spanish Communist Party since 1934.

This was before the Spanish Civil War broke out.

Because he had performed military training in the Soviet Frunze Academy, Vidali, and other comrades such as Enrique Líster, are credited with markedly improving the preparation of the militias.

As a senior advisor for the Comintern in Spain, Vidali headed the 5th Regiment (Quinto Regimiento).

It was responsible for the political formation of MAOC's regiments.

Vidali was ordered to go to Spain, where he arrived in May 1936 under the pseudonym of Carlos Contreras.

In the 1937 pro-Republican propaganda film The Spanish Earth, Vidali was shown addressing an assembly of military personnel.

Later Vidali was active in other locations, finally leading the new communist party in the Free Territory of Trieste beginning in 1947 after World War II.

He later represented the community in Parliament after it was annexed by Italy.

He was born in the small coastal town of Muggia, then part of the county of Istria in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and now part of Italy.

As a teenager, he joined the socialist movement in the nearby port city of Trieste.

At the age of twenty, Vidali is said to have been one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party.