Rizal Day celebration: Free MRT/LRT rides; The Marinduque youth who smuggled Rizal's "Noli" and "Fili"

For tomorrow's Rizal Day celebration Metro Manila's mass rail systems will offer free rides to the public during peak hours. This year’s Rizal Day likewise marks the centennial of the Rizal Monument, built as the tomb and memorial to Dr. Rizal and which has since then served as the symbol of our nationhood.

The free rides on trains of the Metro Rail Transit Corporation and the Light Rail Transit Authority will be from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., and 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.

The MRT runs from North Ave. in Quezon City up to Pasay Rotonda in Pasay City, while LRT Line 1 operates from Roosevelt Ave. in QC to Baclaran. LRT Line 2 covers Santolan station in Pasig City up to Recto station in Manila.

A Marinduqueno smuggled Rizal's books for distribution into the Philippines 

There's a little known fact about Rizal's clandestine work and that of a young Marinduque native who figured in that episode.

Dr. Augusto V. de Viana’s book, "The I Stories", is a compilation of eyewitness accounts of people who actually participated in important historical events, including little known accounts on Rizal. Those interviews were originally published in The Manila Times and the Philippines Free Press in the 1920s up to the 1950s.


One of those stories was about Rizal’s efforts to protect his books “Noli Me Tangere” and “El Filibusterismo” through the accounts of a relative of the hero’s family, Dr. Jose Francisco, and a former cabin boy, Perfecto Rufino Riego.

Perfecto Rufino Riego was a native of Sta. Cruz, Marinduque. Details of Riego's first meeting with the national hero based on the former’s account was shared by de Viana during the Marinduque historical conference held in the town of Mogpog in 2008.

According to de Viana, it was in the house of Francisco's father, Don Higino, where Rizal and other leaders of the independence movement held their secret meetings and kept their political propaganda, including the original manuscript of the Noli.

It was then Riego, working as a cabin boy, who took the task of smuggling copies of the Noli and Fili into the Philippines from Hong Kong. Copies of the books were shipped on the boat “Don Juan” from Germany where they were published. Upon return, Riego also had a hand in the distribution of the books in Manila's old towns using a caleza.

Perfecto Rufino Riego was from the town of Sta. Cruz, Marinduque.

It was also the young Riego who helped another Filipino hero, Graciano Lopez Jaena, escape from the Spanish authorities during an aborted visit to the Philippines by disguising himself as an "apprentice" to Riego in taking him to Hong Kong on his way back to Spain. 

In his twilight years Riego gave De Viana an account of his part of the story with interesting details that provide a more human side of his encounter with the national hero.

In Revolutionary Spirit: Jose Rizal in Southeast Asia by John Nery (Iseas Publishing, Singapore 2011), we also find the following note:

"A feature in the Philippines Free Press of 25 December 1948 tells the story of how Rizal recruited Perfecto Rufino Riego, a cabin boy on a ship that plied the Manila-Hong Kong run, to help smuggle in buri sacks full of copies of the Noli. Augusto de Viana's The I-Stories, a helpful compendium of "alternative" eyewitness accounts of the Revolution and the Philippine-American War, recounts the interesting details. There are some inconsistencies in Riego's account (by the time the story came out he was already in his eighties), but the basic facts seem authentic".