Design: Rogelio Carmenate/Cubadebate.

On March 18, 1923, a surprising event occurred in Havana for the time: a group of young intellectuals starred in a civic act, condemning the corruption that had taken over the political scene in the young republic.

The trigger for this event was the fraudulent purchase of the Santa Clara convent by the government headed by Alfredo Zayas, and the occasion was the intervention of the person who had signed this fraud, the Secretary of Justice Erasmo Regüeiferos, in a tribute act organized by the Women's Club of Cuba to the Uruguayan writer Paulina Luisi at the headquarters of the Cuban Academy of Sciences.

Who were the young people who carried out this action?

The one who spoke that day at the academic campus was Rubén Martínez Villena, who was accompanied by a group that used to meet to discuss intellectual work, its importance, the link with society, avant-garde trends, in short, what They then embodied the updating, the renewal of the Cuban intellectual production of the moment.

Among these young people were José Z. Tallet, Juan Marinello, Jorge Mañach, Luis Gómez Wanguemert, José A. Fernández de Castro, many of whom would be part of the most prominent Cuban intelligentsia in the following years, while also lining up in different positions in the ideological political field, which would be the cause of some important controversies in which, beyond some personal publication, the role of intellectuals in society, their commitment to their time and their people, was debated.

The young people of the so-called "Protest of the Thirteen" would soon be the creators of the Retail Group, well known in those years, which upheld a new attitude in an organized manner, although without a specific structure, but which incorporated other young people such as Alejo Carpentier who expressed after they tried to assume the elements of the avant-garde at that time in their field, while assuming the national.

The civic statement that made them known focused on denouncing corruption.

When Regüeiferos began to speak, Rubén Martínez Villena interrupted him to express that this Secretary of Government did not have the moral authority to address that audience.

Once the position was expressed, the group made up of fifteen young people withdrew from the room.

Rubén immediately wrote the manifesto that became known as the “Protest of the Thirteen”.

The document that was released on the 19th was signed by thirteen of those attending the event at the Academy of Science.

The two who did not do so stated, in one case, that he was a Freemason just like Regüeiferos, and the other that by not being Cuban, his stay in the country was in danger.

The text explained the reasons for the attitude that had been assumed and the satisfaction of having started a movement "that demonstrates a reaction against those rulers who violate, plunder, and immoral" whose acts tended to debase the homeland.

She apologized to the Women's Club of Cuba for having interrupted the act, but she also explained why it had been carried out at that time and place.

Next, she exposed a commitment:

That conscious youth, without a disturbing spirit or any program other than what they deem as the fulfillment of a duty, is henceforth willing to adopt the same attitude of protest in any act in which a personality blameworthy for lack of patriotism takes part directly or indirectly or civic decorum.

This event was the public beginning of the struggle of that vanguard of young intellectuals who, in such significant cases as Rubén Martínez Villena, would develop a radicalization that would lead them to frankly revolutionary positions.

From that moment of civic expression against corruption, the young Villena would already exhibit an attitude of struggle, of combat, that exceeded the lament that had taken over the collective conscience.

From the feeling of frustration, pessimism, and passive suffering that seemed to dominate the collective psychology of the early republican years, there was now a call to fight, to fight, as expressed in the "Civil Lyrical Message" that Rubén himself wrote that year. , where he narrates what happened and describes the situation in Cuba, which he considers was living between the concerns of Charybdis and Scila, / and ignoring the danger of the North that he watches over.

And he asks: Where are we all going in brutal misguidance, / If not to the Platt Amendment and Uncle's boot?

But it did not remain in the description and the question, but he called to action:

It takes a charge to kill rascals,

to finish the work of revolutions;

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so that the Republic can maintain itself,

to fulfill Martí's marble dream;

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I swear by the blood that flowed from so many wounds,

I yearn for the salvation of the beloved land,

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I pull my soul, as if it were a sword,

And I swear, on my knees, before Mother America.

After that moment, the group of "the Thirteen" became organized in the

Falange of Cuban Action whose motto was "Get together: this is the word of the

world."

The Protest of the Thirteen took place in a complex context, when the

system was showing its first signs of crisis and, in that circumstance,

new forces and groups began to emerge in the political space that

would question that system, although from different tendencies and perspectives.

The university students had already begun their great movement for university reform and in the previous month of December they had founded the FEU.

On the same day of the protest, in addition, the Communist Association of Havana was founded

as part of a process that would advance in the following months, incorporating new groups and sectors.

It was, therefore, a moment of change in Cuba that reached the first twenty years of the republic and the twenty-five years of the 20th century, with the evaluative balance that this promoted.

In this context, those youth that appeared in the intellectual environment had concerns that reached the whole of society.

The Protest of the Thirteen marked a path of insertion into society and its

It was the assumption of the social duty of intellectuals, which would exceed the limitations of elitist views of some or commitments to spaces of power in others.

A Rubén Martínez Villena would dedicate his life to fighting for a better, socialist Cuba, from the assumption of Marxism and Leninism as a base and compass.

The Protest of the Thirteen was the moment of irruption, from a