Rubén Martínez Villena, the depth of his humanity

February 5, 2021

He lived in the first half of the twentieth century in Cuba, a young man who did not reach thirty-five years of age.

"Of medium height, fragile body, tempestuous hair (…), paleness with a slight rosy tint (…). But what stood out most and impressed about his physical appearance were his transparent and piercing green eyes, bluish-green at times, sometimes reddish-green, depending on whether enthusiasm or indignation dazzled him", thus his friend Raúl Roa described him in the prologue of El fuego de la semilla en el surco, a text he dedicated to him.

Rubén Martínez Villena (1899-1924) was —Roa continues— "An extraordinary conversationalist (…). A terrible polemicist: he would convince or hammer away. His power of persuasion was usually irresistible. And, as if born from a hidden vein, always more concerned for others than for himself".

The young Villena was, above all, a poet and revolutionary, graduate in Civil and Public Law. A man bearing, like few others, the artistic and political avant-gardes, two streams that became intertwined to form one of the most complete fighters of that century in the Greater Antilles.

He was a journalist whose work was always supported by denunciations of marginality, political-administrative corruption, the economic situation, and the evils that plagued Cuban society of his time. Editorials, chronicles, manifestos, art criticism, occupied his narrative, especially in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a period in which he also immersed himself in the problems of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Panama, Ecuador, and many other nations.

However, his greatest value as a writer and artist rests in poetry, where he has been framed as one of the most recognized Cuban modernists. Cubanness, familiarity with death, everyday life, pain, suffering, are treated with elegance through refined language, an insinuating lyricism. Villena carried a provocative word, which occasionally managed to immerse itself in irony.

See also: Una luz plena, una melodía que nos acompaña
I have the perverse impulse and the sacred yearning / to glimpse in life my dreams of the dead. / Oh, the sleepless pupil and the closed eyelid!... / (Tomorrow I will sleep with my eyelid open!)…

His love poetry is sensual, suggestive; impetuous without ceasing to flatter; innocent and youthful. A hint of melancholy also marks his verses, where nostalgia merges in such a way with eroticism that it creates landscapes of various colors, passionate scenes that set the senses in motion.

I saw you standing, naked and proud / and drinking in your lips the breath, / I wished to disturb with childish attempt / your inexorable majesty of a goddess. / (…) and from pleasure to the tremendous hurricane, / your body bent like a lily / and your majesty succumbed moaning.

Rubén Martínez Villena was a professor at the Universidad Popular José Martí, belonged to the Falange de Acción Cubana, to the Grupo Minorista. He was a member of the Communist Party and the Liga Antiimperialista.

This intellectual of mature and committed work, whose nature of character made him fight for just causes, is remembered in the national history for two facts that laid bare the depth of his humanity. His opposition to the sale of the Convento de Santa Clara, an irrevocable example of the surrender and immorality of Cuban rulers, was collected as the Protesta de los Trece (1923) and demonstrates that he was already a civic leader of the Cuban labor and communist movement.

But he was never as accurate as when he threw the truth in the face of General Gerardo Machado. 1925, Mella had been on hunger strike for several days and Villena went to meet with the then Secretary of Justice Jesús María Barraqué. Machado then arrived, accusing Mella of being a communist. After putting the magistrate in his place, Villena recounted the events to Pablo de la Torriente Brau, where he told him: "That one is a savage… an animal… a beast… He is an ass with claws!".