About October 20, 1868, José Martí said in the Patria newspaper, the organ of the Cuban Revolutionary Party: "So that all lips may sing it and all homes keep it, so that the tears of those who heard it in the sublime combat for the first time, so that the blood spurs in the youthful veins, the hymn to whose chords, in the most beautiful and solemn hour of our country, the decorum asleep in the bosom of men rose.”
Las Tunas, Cuba.- On Tuesday, October 20, 1868, the Mambisa troops commanded by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes occupied the city of Bayamo, 10 days after this patrician took up arms and gave freedom to his slaves in his La Demajagua sugar mill. What a great encouragement that for the Cuban cause, determined to shake off the colonial yoke forever! How dignified the men who promoted him were!
They say that the people of Bayamo, elated by the event, began to hum a certain revolutionary march made up of a local lawyer. They did not settle for that but asked the lawyer himself - Perucho Figueredo - for the lyrics to sing it. "And he, mounted on his horse, wrote it to pass from hand to hand," says a scholar.
That march, named La Bayamesa, with a frankly revolutionary lyric, became the original hymn on such a glorious day. Three decades later, after the Spanish-Cuban-North American war, the so-called Bayamo Hymn was recognized as our National Anthem. The significance of the event made the Revolutionary Government institute October 20 as the Cuban Culture Day.
Historians consider that the hymn of 1868, as "a full song to the liberating insurrection and the abolition of slavery (...), as well as the highest and most genuine expression and symbol of our national culture," starred in one of the first great cultural and national events of our history in the broadest sense.
Martí inserted his fiery handwriting in the pages of Patria, on June 25, 1892. He said that he did it "so that all lips may sing it and all homes may keep it; so that the tears of the that they heard it in the sublime combat for the first time; so that it spurns the blood in the youthful veins, the hymn to whose chords, in the most beautiful and solemn hour of our Country, the decorum asleep in the chest of men rose.”
The fundamental ingredients of our Culture were melted that October 20, 1868, in the thousand times heroic city of Bayamo. In this sense, it is a historical and cultural event at the same time because, as has already been said, "On Cuban Culture Day we commemorate the occasion when our National Anthem was sung for the first time, it fed the patriotism of the people. It ignited the fighters for independence and made our revolutionary thought grow more advanced and radical. "A better date could not be chosen as stipulated in Decree 74 of 1980, signed by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, that day of combat and art would represent the National Culture Day.
In these times, in which the ideological war that we have with the most powerful empire in history compels us to strengthen our culture, it is worth remembering the lyrics of the Bayamo Hymn, composed on a day like today in 1868.
