Rubén Martínez Villena, revolutionary and poet of all times.

«It takes a charge to kill rascals,/ to finish the work of revolutions,/ to avenge the dead who suffer outrage,/ to cleanse the tenacious crust of colonialism/ so as not to make useless, in humiliating fate,/ the effort and hunger, and wound and death…»
Rubén Martínez Villena had a very important participation in the political activity against the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. Among his acts of courage and dedication to the cause of Cuba is his participation in La Protesta de los Trece, which highlighted his figure as a committed revolutionary against the prevailing corruption.
He was one of the best authors of his time, however, he gave up writing poetry to devote himself completely to the revolutionary struggle. «…my duties as a Cuban are above all. I believe that man owes himself primarily to his homeland and his mother.»
From a very young age Villena demonstrated literary skills. He wrote his first verses at the age of eleven. The decade of the 1920’s was the time when, according to his friend and biographer Raúl Roa García, he crystallized «his fiery patriotism» in his sonnets, for example in Jimaguayú, Máximo Gómez and El rescate de Sanguily.
Marchaba lento el escuadrón riflero:
ciento veinte soldados de la España
que llevaban, cual prueba de su saña,
a Sanguily, baldado y prisionero.
Y en un grupo forjado por Hornero,
treinta y cinco elegidos de la hazaña,
alumbraron el valle y la montaña
al resplandor fulmíneo del acero.
Alzóse un yaguarama reluciente,
se oyó un grito de mando prepotente
y un semidios, formado en el combate,
ordenando una carga de locura,
marchó con sus leones al rescate
iy se llevó al cautivo en la montura!
His work includes several manifestations of prose, although his greatest contributions are appreciated in the poetic universe, in which he had a brief but fruitful life.
The first is limited to journalistic articles that criticize, in essence, the reality of the time and attack, with irony and an appropriate use of literary resources, the evils that affected the Plattista Republic in which he had lived since his childhood and the situation of the Latin American and world working class.
His journalistic articles, written between 1917 and 1933, show a mature and iron conscience, a fine and excellent culture, an unequaled and amazing will to fight for a man who knew he would die due to the advanced state of his illness. In his essay Cuba, yankee factory, he left poetry aside and far from all ornamentation he deployed a burning denunciation.
Another part of Villena’s work reached the public after his death, in personal letters full of lyricism, sorrow, joy or frustration, courage or fear; poems that humanize him, from the fine humor and deep love they contain, his aspirations and hopes.
Before becoming a lawyer in 1922, he had already been writing verses for a long time; at the age of 21 he had a recognized work in which love themes are intermingled: Declaración, Celos eternos, El rizo rebelde and Soneto; philosophical: Peñas arriba, the sonnets of Sinfonía urbana; and patriotic: El rescate de Sanguily, May 19th, Máximo Gómez.
Te vi de pie, desnuda y orgullosa,
y bebiendo en tus labios el aliento,
quise turbar con infantil intento
tu inexorable majestad de diosa.
Me prosternó a tus plantas el desvío,
y entre tus muslos de marmórea piedra,
entretejí con besos una hiedra
que fue subiendo al capitel sombrío.
Suspiró tu mutismo brevemente
cuando la sed del vértigo ascendente
precipitó el final de mi delirio;
y del placer al huracán temiendo,
se doblegó tu cuerpo como un lirio
y sucumbió tu majestad gimiendo.
He suffered the ravings of all kinds inherited from the first twenty years of an asphyxiated Republic and the postwar upheavals and perceived the need for a qualitative leap that the government of Alfredo Zayas, nor that of Machado later, would provide.
The stage that extends between 1923 and 1928 was the most fertile from the lyrical point of view, also associated with the political awareness and the adoption in both aspects of an active and transforming position of his reality, in the same stage he becomes decisively a militant poet, but this contributes to fertilize his poetics in this sense; the creative and political work constitute a symbiotic binomial that increases his potentialities in both spheres.
Written in 1922, but with a breath already corresponding to this stage due to the selection of the topic and the desacralization of the event of death itself, Canción del Sainete Póstumo is inscribed in the dawn of the avant-garde due to its substance, although it is not based on the versal and typographic experimentation typical of this artistic movement.
Yo moriré prosaicamente, de cualquier cosa
(¿el estómago, el hígado, la garganta, ¡el pulmón!?),
y como buen cadáver descenderé a la fosa
envuelto en un sudario santo de compasión.
Aunque la muerte es algo que diariamente pasa,
un muerto inspira siempre cierta curiosidad;
así, llena de extraños, abejeará la casa
y estudiará mi rostro toda la vecindad.
Luego será el velorio: desconocida gente,
ante mis familiares inertes de llorar,
con el recelo propio del que sabe que miente
recitará las frases del pésame vulgar.
Tal vez una beata, neblinosa de sueño,
mascullará el rosario mirándose los pies;
y acaso los más viejos me fruncirán el ceño
al calcular su turno más próximo después.
Brotará la hilarante virtud del disparate
o la ingeniosa anécdota llena de perversión,
y las apetecidas tazas de chocolate
serán sabrosas pautas en la conversación.
Los amigos de ahora —para entonces dispersos—
reunidos junto al resto de lo que fue mi «yo»,
constatarán la escena que prevén estos versos
y dirán en voz baja: —¡Todo lo presintió!
Y ya en la madrugada, sobre la concurrencia
gravitará el concepto solemne del «jamás»;
vendrá luego el consuelo de seguir la existencia…
Y vendrá la mañana… pero tú, ¡no vendrás!…
Allá donde vegete felizmente tu olvido
—felicidad bien lejos de la que pudo ser—,
bajo tres letras fúnebres mi nombre y mi apellido,
dentro de un marco negro, te harán palidecer.
Y te dirán: —¿Qué tienes?… Y tú dirás que nada;
mas, te irás a la alcoba para disimular,
me llorarás a solas, con la cara en la almohada,
¡y esa noche tu esposo no te podrá besar!…
The poem represents the new vital attitude that Villena would adopt, where sentimentalism has given way to a worldview marked by irony, the sublimation through humor of a certain disenchantment.
All these texts simultaneously highlight the naked man and the intransigent revolutionary, as they range from the satirical mockery of something as fearsome as death, to the wise criticism of social reality.
Cuban critics have not done justice to the man of whom Cintio Vitier valued that as a poet, «he was one of the most penetrating temperaments of his period», and pointed out among his characteristics, «sentimental irony, a languid and morbid pessimism, a certain lyrical and metaphysical sharpness and the inflection and fire of José Martí’s Versos libres».
As a poet, he is defined by that caustic line, that attempt of formal innovation that transits from a romantic intimacy to the conscience of the daily life and the disengagement of the poet in his environment that modernism expresses, and from this to the strength and expressiveness of avant-gardism. And it was of his death on January 16th, 1934, sarcastic and crude foresight.
Literary and warrior. Lawyer and communist. In love and lucid. A man of his time, and of mine. Rubén Martínez Villena only needed 34 years to reach immortality.
Hace falta una carga para matar bribones,
para acabar la obra de las revoluciones,
para vengar los muertos que padecen ultraje,
para limpiar la costra tenaz del coloniaje,
para no hacer inútil, en humillante suerte,
el esfuerzo y el hambre, y la herida y la muerte;
para que la República se mantenga de sí,
para cumplir el sueño de mármol de Martí;
para que nuestros hijos no mendiguen de hinojos,
la patria que los padres le ganaron de pie…
Written by Jessica Mesa.