Marina Ginestà, born on this day in 1919, was a French-born Spanish communist who served in the Spanish Civil War. She became famous due to the photo taken by Juan Guzmán on a Barcelona roof in 1936, when she was just 17 years old (shown).

Ginestà was born in Toulouse, France to a working-class leftist Jewish family that had emigrated to France from Spain. She moved to Barcelona with her parents at the age of 11. Ginestà later joined the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia.

As the war broke out, she served as a reporter and a translator assisting Mikhail Koltsov, a correspondent of the Soviet newspaper Pravda.

The famous photograph by Juan Guzmán was taken on July 21st, 1936. It shows the 17 year old Ginestà wearing an army uniform and posing with a M1916 Spanish Mauser rifle on the top of the original Hotel Colón in Barcelona. Because she was a reporter, it was the only time Ginestà had carried a gun.

Before the end of the war, Ginestà was wounded and evacuated to Montpellier. As France was occupied by the Nazis, she fled to the Dominican Republic and married a former Republican officer. Marina Ginestà died in Paris at the age of 94 in January 2014.

On the iconic photograph, Ginestà stated "It's a good photo. It reflects the feeling we had at that moment. Socialism had arrived, the hotel guests had left. There was euphoria. We retired in Columbus, we ate well, as if bourgeois life belonged to us and we would have changed category quickly."