I don't remember if they told me about him before. But what I can affirm is that discovering him at the University with the professors Ana Cairo , Mariana Serra and Denia García Ronda was enough to profess him love for life. Because whoever reads and studies Rubén Martínez Villena never forgets him.

Alquízar saw him born on December 20, 1899. Before training as a lawyer in 1922, he had been writing verse for a long time; At the age of 21, he had a recognized work in which the theme of love was intermingled: "Declaration" (1918), "Eternal Jealousy" (1918), "The Rebel Curl" (1919); philosophical: "Peñas arriba" (1917), the sonnets of "Urban Symphony" (1921); and patriotic: "The rescue of Sanguily" (1919), "May 19" (1919), "Máximo Gómez" (1920). He suffered all sorts of delusions inherited from the first twenty years of a suffocated Republic and from the post-war upheavals in which Juan Marinellohe called the "critical decade" (1923-1933), and perceived the need for a qualitative leap that the government of Alfredo Zayas, nor that of Machado later, would be responsible for providing. Like other young artists and intellectuals, he also searched within himself for the meaning of life, for a still indefinable defining role of man and his poetry:

there is a force
concentrated, angry, expectant
in the serene background
of my body; there is something,
there is something that claims
a dark and formidable performance.
it's a longing
tree imprecise; an impulse
To rise and rise until I can
surrender mountains and amass stars!
Grow, grow to the immeasurable!

("The Giant, 1923")

That's why he was there, where he should. The Protest of the Thirteen was his baptism as a political leader, the first civic action of intellectuals against government corruption; there was not yet a precise political definition or ideology; but the heroic deed and the subsequent repression set the tone for the emergence of the Falange of Cuban Action, and later the Retail Group, the Movement of Veterans and Patriots... under the initial aegis of Martí "Join together: that is the watchword" He proposed to repudiate anything that impeded decency, civility, freedom of thought and action:

It takes a charge to kill rascals,
to finish the work of revolutions;
to avenge the dead, who suffer outrage,
to clean the tenacious crust of colonialism;
to be able one day, with prestige and reason,
remove the Appendix from the Constitution;
so as not to make useless, in humiliating luck,
effort and hunger and injury and death;
so that the Republic can maintain itself,
to fulfill Martí's marble dream;
to guard the earth, glorious of spoils,
to save the temple of Love and Faith,
so that our children do not beg on their knees
the homeland that our parents won for us on our feet.

("Civil lyrical message", 1923)

His political life is a rising whirlpool, a battle against time that can also be traced through his political prose, editorials, manifestos, epistolary. In 1927 she was already a member of the Communist Party, a year later she joined its Central Committee and after the death of Julio Antonio Mellaled the organization. He was a legal adviser and leader of the National Workers' Confederation of Cuba, of which he also became a leader. He was among the founders of the José Martí Popular University; he organized and directed the first political strike in the history of Cuba in 1930, and tuberculosis was not the limit to guide the one that overthrew Gerardo Machado in 1933... by the way, it won't be poetry, but the epithet that Machado gave in defense of Julio Antonio Mella has been impregnated in the History of Cuba as one of the most invocative, strong and exemplary revolutionary and courageous words: "it is (...) a donkey with claws".

As a poet, he is defined by that caustic line, that attempt at formal innovation by «the new ones» ― Tallet , Villar Buceta …― that moves from romantic intimacy to awareness of the everyday and the disengagement of the poet in his environment that modernism expresses. , and from this to the strength and expressiveness of avant-garde. He is, without a doubt, one of the best of his time.

How long he lived, he exposed it. With that same force, she loved:

You can come naked to my love party. I will dress you with caresses.

Music, that of my words; perfume, it is from my verses; crown, my tears on your hair.

What better belt for your waist, what more tender, stronger and fairer belt than the one that my arms will give you?... For your bosom, what better girdle than my loving hands? What better bracelet for your wrists than the one my fingers form when taking them to bring your hands to my mouth?

A single bite, warm and soft, on one side of your chest, will be a unique brooch to hold the tight and wonderful chlamyx of my fingers to your body.

You can come naked to my love party. I will dress you with caresses.

("Pink Hexahedron", 1921)

And it was about his death on January 16, 1934, sarcastic and crude foresight:

I will die prosaically, of anything,
(the stomach, the liver, the throat, the lung!?)
and like a good corpse I will descend into the pit
wrapped in a holy shroud of compassion.

Although death is something that happens daily,
a dead person always inspires a certain curiosity;
so, full of strangers, the house will bee
and the whole neighborhood will study my face.

Then it will be the wake: unknown people,
before my relatives inert to cry,
with the suspicion of those who know they are lying
will recite the phrases of vulgar condolences.

Perhaps a pious, misty with sleep,
he will mumble the rosary while looking at his feet;
and perhaps the older ones will frown on me
by calculating your nearest turn after…

The hilarious virtue of nonsense will sprout
or the witty anecdote full of perversion,
and the coveted cups of chocolate
they will be tasty breaks in the conversation

The friends of now —by then dispersed—
reunited together with the rest of what was my "I"
will see the scene that these verses foresee
and they will say in a low voice: —he had a premonition of everything!

And already in the early morning, about the concurrence
the solemn concept of "never" will gravitate;
then the consolation of continuing existence will come…
and the morning will come... but you, you will not come!...

There where your forgetfulness vegetates happily,
—happiness far from what could be—
under three funereal letters my name and surname,
within a black frame, they will make you blanch.

And they will tell you: - What do you have?... And you will say that nothing;
but you will go to the bedroom to hide,
you will cry to me alone, with your face in the pillow,
And that night your husband will not be able to kiss you!

("Song of the posthumous farce", 1933)

Writer and warrior. Lawyer and communist. In love and lucid. Man of his time, and mine. It took Rubén Martínez Villena 34 years to achieve immortality.