The Bayamesa is a combat anthem, written in 1967, that became popular among the Cuban people with the beginning of the Ten-Year War, Cuba’s first independence war against Spanish colonialism. The anthem calls for defending the homeland in combat and offering one’s own life in search of the longed-for freedom.
Perucho Figueredo was one of the revolutionaries who organized the following armed uprising for Cuba’s independence from Spain. In 1867 Francisco Vicente Aguilera founds in Bayamo the Masonic lodge “Redención”, which grouped the independent leaders, and Perucho joins it. The lodge begins to meet at Perucho’s house. On August 2, 1867, the patriots meet to call for the constitution of the Revolutionary Committee in Bayamo, the center of conspiracy work in the region.
The organization was founded on the night of August 13, 1867 in the house of Francisco Vicente Aguilera, who was appointed its president, Francisco Maceo Osorio as its secretary, and Perucho Figueredo as a member. The organization would be presented to friends at the meeting that would take place the following night of August 14, 1867 at Perucho’s house.
Those present then asked Perucho, for this presentation of the following day, he as a musician, to compose a hymn which, like the French hymn “La Marsellesa”, would ignite the spirits, and which would be “our Marseillaise”. At dawn that same night, on August 13, 1867, the music of the Hymn of Bayamo (La Bayamesa) was composed. The following day 30 visitors at Perucho’s house heard for the first time the melody of the hymn, played by Perucho with his piano, which would be called since then “La Bayamesa”.
On May 3, 1868, Perucho gave a copy of his composition “La Bayamesa” to the musician Manuel Muñoz, conductor of the orchestra of the Iglesia Mayor, to make the instrumentation.
On Thursday, June 11, 1868, the hymn was performed for the first time in public in the Main Church of Bayamo, during a solemn Te Deum on the occasion of the Catholic religious festivities of Corpus Christi, in the presence of the Military Governor of the Square, Colonel Julián Udaeta and other military authorities, and a large number of local faithful, civil and ecclesiastical, with the cream of the local society occupying a preferential place.
There were many who “waited impatiently for the moment when the martial notes of the warrior hymn sounded, which with unsuspected emotion moved the entire audience, without excluding the military governor of Bayamo Square. Thus the notes of this hymn were heard in public for the first time. The march was executed inside the church, under the intense patriotic emotion of the revolutionaries who went out behind the band in procession, listening to those immortal airs.