Trejo’s mother, turned into a symbol for propaganda, suffered in her own flesh the repression of the Castro regime that said she was honoring her son.
Havana, Cuba.- 95 years ago, on September 30, 1930, during a demonstration against the government of Gerardo Machado en San Lázaro Street, a few hundred meters from the staircase of the University of Havana, the 22 -year -old law student Rafael Trejo was mortally injured.
Once the nearby emergency hospital, Trejo died a few hours later, on October 1, as a result of an uncontrollable internal hemorrhage.
Trejo and the other protesters, convened by the University Student Federation (FEU), intended to march to the house of Professor Enrique José Varona to support his rejection of the extension of powers that, violating the Constitution, made the government of Machado a dictatorship.
It is usually said that Rafael Trejo was the first victim of the Machado regime, but it is not. Before him, in 1928, two union leaders whose bodies appeared at sea were killed. And Julio Antonio Mella, in 1929, in Mexico, if he believes in the version that ensures that those who killed the youth leader were sugar machado and not of the Mexican Communist Party by orders of the Kremlin, in punishment for their links with the Trotskyists.
Trejo died when he struggled with a policeman, trying to take off his revolver. The police escaped a shot that mortally wounded the student. If Trejo had managed to take away the weapon from the police, perhaps the dead would not have been him, but the repressor, and Trejo would have been an armed revolutionary more of the groups that so much violence would waste in the next three decades and that they would end up giving the transte with the Republic in 1959.
The Castroists have always described the dead as “martyrs” in the revolutionary struggles that, according to official history, has been one, from the shout of the demand to the revolution of Fidel Castro.
Invariably they say that those “martyrs” were killed, even if they have died fighting with the weapons in their hands, or as Urselia Díaz Báez and Enrique Hart, torn apart by bombs that were going to place and exploded in their hands. However, they ignore the dead of the terrorism of the July 26 movement and the victims of their repression, such as Diurvis Laurencio, the young man who was shot by a policeman in the güineraduring the protests of July 11 and 12, 2021 (11j).
Trejo has also been included by official historiography in his long list of martyrs. However, Adela González, her parent, who died in 1964, although they wanted to use her as “mother of a martyr” for propaganda purposes, it went very badly with the Castro regime.
I know what I talk about, I know. Adela and Rafael, Felo’s parents (as in my house they called the deceased) were very friends with my paternal grandparents, Antonio and Margot, and his daughter Graziella, my aunt. It was a forged friendship during the fight against the Machado regime, between proclamations, shots, firecrackers, hiding places and persecutions, and resisted all the onslaught of life for more than 40 years.
Felo had been a teammate in Graziella in the Law Faculty. He remembered him as “a very nice trigger”, who did not physically resemble his younger brother, Mayito, Cegato and less athletic, and with which he followed friendship for decades, until both died in exile in the United States.
Before moving to Old Havana, the Trejo lived in a three -story house on the ten of October, between Luz and Altarriba streets, in the viper, about 400 meters from the house of my grandparents.
When we passed by, they told me: “Look, Rafael Trejo was born in that house.” And I looked and what I saw was a quarter store that shouted a general repair, paint and water in the pipes so that the neighbors did not have to load it into cubes.
To the father of Trejo, who was councilor for the authentic party, I did not meet him. He died before I was born. But Adela, the mother, I remember her as a kind old woman who visited my house – and we of her – often. Adela Trejo and María Luisa Laffita, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, were like sisters of my grandmother Margot, and my brothers and cousins called them aunts.
For their friendship with Polita Grau, Adela became suspicious to G-2 and registered her home. For hours, everything turned it upside down. Adela became very nervous and had diarrhea. When he asked for permission to go to the bathroom, they warned him that he had to leave the door that could be monitored. Finally, nothing found and left, after apologizing “because of the discomfort caused.” I remember my grandmother’s outrage when he knew about the registration. He exclaimed: “Children of whore! Abusers who are these communists! Pussy, Felo did not die for this shit!”
On each anniversary of the death of Felo Trejo those memories of my childhood come to mind. Especially these days, regarding the concert set as a trap in every waycrowded with safe and with the presence of Díaz-Canel that Silvio Rodríguez gave, with Kufiya Palestina on the shoulders, on the staircase of the University of Havana.
The singer -songwriter was supposed to dedicate the concert to the students who protested against the Etecsa tariff, but ended up flattering the FEU lindrillos who already capitulated the slugs of nostalgia for “the old government of deceased and flowers” that seek in vain the way to connect with the young people of today and domesticate their rebellions.
How disappointed they would feel trejo, Mella and Echeverría with this submissive and submissive feu today!
