Rafael Trejo

Rafael Trejo was a law student shot by police at a demonstration in Havana, and his death gave the opposition to Gerardo Machado the martyr it had been short of. He was born in Havana, studied law at the university, and belonged to the Directorio Estudiantil Universitario, the student organisation that had become the most active opposition to the government after Machado extended his own term in 1928 and the collapse of the sugar price destroyed the economy. On 30 September 1930 the students called a march to protest against the closure of the university and the suspension of constitutional guarantees. Police broke it up in the streets around the Calle San Lazaro; Trejo was shot in the abdomen and died the following day, aged twenty. His funeral drew crowds that the government could not disperse. The date became a fixed point in the Cuban political calendar, marked annually as the Day of the Student, and the Directorio moved from protest to armed action afterwards, forming the ABC and other cells that answered the regime with bombings. Machado fell in August 1933. Trejo's name was given to a boxing gymnasium in Old Havana, to schools and to streets, and both the governments that followed him and the revolution of 1959 claimed him, which is the ordinary fate of a young man killed by a state that everybody afterwards wants to have opposed. He was buried in the Colon cemetery in Havana. The university remained closed for three years after his death. The Directorio's manifesto of the following week is the first Cuban document to call openly for Machado's removal by any means, and its signatories included men who governed the country in the 1940s.

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