Politician, poet, and short story writer, born December 20 in Alquizar, Havana province. He became a doctor of civil law of the University of Havana in 1913. He wrote his best-known poem, “Canción del sainete póstumo” in 1922 and began to emerge as a poet of quality with anti-American inclinations. He was for a while secretary to the great intellectual Fernando Ortiz y Fernández and became associated with the Liga Anticlerical. In 1923 he gave an early indication of his interest in political and social issues when he led the anti-corruption Protesta de los Trece and shortly afterward co-founded the Grupo Minorista.
Involvement in the 1924 revolt of the Asociación de los Veteranos y Patriotas led to his imprisonment. He was also an active opponent of President Machado whom he personally insulted. In 1927 he joined the Unión Revolucionaria Comunista (the Cuban Communists), and by 1929 was its main leader. His charisma attracted the party’s intellectuals and the young; his closest associates were drawn into the party by his qualities and idealism, only to be purged under Comintern orders immediately after his death. Following the one-day protest strike against Machado of May 20, 1930, he was given a death sentence suspended on condition he left Cuba. He settled in New York, but a few months later sought a cure for his tuberculosis in a Soviet sanatorium in the Caucasus. A dying man, he returned secretly to Cuba on May 19, 1933. When the Communists weakened their image by a deal with President Machado, Martínez relinquished his position in the party to Blas Roca. Despite this, and his continuing illness, he remained politically active until his death in a Havana sanatorium, January 1934. His militancy made him repudiate poetry, and even a proposal of José Antonio Fernández de Castro for a public subscription to publish his own poems.
