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The Cuban José Martí (1853-1895), whose
father and mother had been born in the
Spanish Valencia and Canary Islands, is
regarded as one of the most important
thinkers of the American continent. His
revolutionary social ideas, the depth of
his anti-colonialist conceptions and his
uninterrupted struggle to attain, not
only the most absolute political
independence, but also the economic and
cultural non-dependence for the totality
of Iberoamerica, grant his thoughts a
surprisingly permanent value, even for
the analysis and search of solutions to
many of the problems faced by humanity
still today, on the very eve of the 21st
century.
On the other hand, his extremely
valuable and vast literary production
has made him one of the major
representatives of Spanish literature in
the second half of the past century,
earning him the qualification of the
<<most relevant cultural event in Latin
America during the 19th century>>.
José Martí’s ideas follow and develop
those of Simon Bolivar and other
patriots of the struggles for
independence in the Spanish America. His
political action is marked by an
ever-present sense of ethics and social
justice. In Martí these characteristics
are definitely and inseparably united to
the defense and replevin of those
classes most dispossessed and humble of
the countries south of the American
continent, and also serve as a very firm
basis for a sustained defense without
relinquishment of their peoples’
national and cultural independence.
Since his adolescent years, José Martí
started in the Cuban colony a long
struggle for independence that led him
immediately to political imprisonment,
forced work in jail and an exile of more
than two decades which began when he was
17 years of age and extended in fact to
the very end of his brief but intense
life.
Initially deported to Spain (where he
remained from 1871 until 1874), Martí
was able to study at the Faculty of Law
of the Central University of Madrid, at
the Institute in Zaragoza and the
University in that city, where he
obtained the degrees of Bachelor and
Lawyer in both civil and canonical law,
as well as Bachelor in Philosophy and
Literature.
His vital experience facilitated the
direct knowledge of the reality of the
American continent. In Mexico (where he
lived during 1 875 and 1876) he
became outstanding as a journalist and
profound analyst of the Mexican society
and characteristics of the former
Spanish America. During 1877 and 1878 he
resided in Guatemala: there he worked as
a university professor and secondary
school teacher. Later -and only once
after his deportation- he established
himself in Havana for a few months,
until in 1879 he was again deported to
Spain for conspiring in the organization
of a new stage in the war fought by Cuba
for its national liberation. In 1880 he
lived for some months in New York and
during the first half of 1881 he
established himself in Caracas. That
same year he settled down definitively
in the United States, where he continued
working in the reorganization of the
Cuban independentist forces. Because of
his intense political and educational
work among the widest sectors of both
Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants
-particularly the Afro Cubans who were
part of the revolutionary immigration
established in New York - his fellow
citizens granted him the honorable
titles of Apostle and Maestro which
continued to be used by his people to
name him in Cuba, the Antilles and Latin
America after his death and even up to
our days.
A few weeks after February 1895, when
the revolutionary war was restarted to
achieve the independence of Cuba and
support Puerto Rico in its struggle,
José Martí landed at the eastern end of
the country with a small expedition
coming from another ever-solidary
Antillean country: the neighboring
Dominican Republic. Weeks later, on May
19, he fell at the combat of Dos Ríos,
culminating a life in which his
well-defined standing at the side of the
humble and dispossessed had played a
determinant role in his Caribbean
fatherland and remaining countries of
Latin America.
When he died at 42, José Martí, a true
forerunner with a surprisingly
anticipated vision, had penetrated the
economic and social realities of the
American continent and become aware of
the dangers that already threatened its
southern part. He had also been able to
warn his contemporaries about:
1: The need for Latin American and
Caribbean countries to achieve their own
development by autoctonous means
resulting from their own social,
political and economic realities,
without imitating or copying foreign
formulas nor following roads such as the
one historically achieved by the society
of the United States, which had made
José Martí declare as early as December
1 870, even before his first deportation
to Spain: <<The American laws have
granted the North a high degree of
prosperity, and have also raised it to
the highest degree of corruption. They
have metallized it to make it
prosperous. Cursed be prosperity at such
high cost!>>
2:The urgency of developing a firm
resistance to the economic penetration
of Latin America by the United States,
and with this purpose he timely
denounced the different mechanisms of
penetration and economic dominion that
began to appear and were being used by
the United States expansionists in form
of agreements and treaties of
reciprocity signed in those days, which
he systematically detected. He had
defined that in Latin America, in spite
of the alleged political independence
and of having attained the republican
condition, <<the colony continued to
live in the republic>>, and in order to
stop that penetration, the Latin
American republics should eliminate
those productive structures they had
been dragging since the years of
colonial dependency: they were not only
at the basis of the most difficult
social problems of those countries, but
also generated constant dependency. And
therefore it is urgent to say, because
it is the truth, that the time has come
for the Spanish America to declare its
second independence.
3:The need of a strategic union of the
Iberoamerican and Caribbean peoples:
<<it is necessary to bring together what
in the end will come together>>. This
claim became an urgent and dramatic call
for unity and joint action when in 1889
the strong expansionist offensive of the
newlyborn United States imperialism
appeared with an open, truly uncovered
nature, having been called by its name
by José Martí and whose chief aspects he
was able to determine and describe quite
early within the international context
at that time.
As a result of it, José Martí elaborated
(and proposed in his vast and still not
well known written works) a continental
strategy for the most authentic,
democratic and autoctonous revolutionary
transformation of Latin America and of
the relations between the two opposite
sections - <<north and south <<- of the
continent.
The first case or moment in carrying out
this strategy would be the establishment
in Cuba and Puerto Rico - the last
Spanish colonies in America - of two
republics with absolute independence,
conceived for peace and work. Both one
and the other would be organized -
according to José Martí’s conceptions -
upon the search and discovery of their
own solutions to the problems born of
their specific national realities, and
they would be adjusted to the particular
characteristics of their society. In
turn, both republics - in addition to
serving as a proposal (and not as a
model) for the group of Latin American
countries - should, if possible, attain
the continental strategic goal that
ruled Jose Martí’s life and political
action: <<to prevent in time, with the
independence of Cuba, that the United
States expand in the Antilles and fall
with that force more upon our lands of
America. Everything I did until today
and everything I will do is with that
purpose. It had to be done in silence,
and as indirectly...>>
According to that purpose, Martí, after
more than one decade of working in favor
of it, had achieved to organize and
found in 1892 the Cuban Revolutionary
Party among the revolutionary emigration
from the Antilles established in the
United States, the Dominican Republic,
Jamaica, Costa Rica, Mexico and other
countries of America and Europe: the
first political party born without
electoral purposes, conceived to
organize and conduct an independence
war, make a popular revolution and
attempt to reach, as major strategical
objective, the economic, political and
cultural non-dependency for the peoples
of Latin America.
In Jose Martí, his whole action of
social transformation and national and
continental liberation had a firm and
sustained ethical basis (in addition to
an economic and social one) that allowed
him to convoke the war for the
independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico,
foster the integral transformation of
the grave situation contemporary to him
in the continent, and do so without
hatred but with great respect toward the
peoples of those powers whose
subordinating presence in Latin American
and Caribbean lands Martí sought to
prevent or at least hinder.
In the specific case of the peoples of
Spain - as recorded in the programmatic
documents of the revolution for
independence - it was clear
<<that there is no hatred in the
Antillean chest; and the Cuban greets in
death the Spaniard rooted out of his
home and his land by the cruelty of
compulsory service to come to
assassinate in men’s chests the liberty
he himself longs for. Rather than
greeting him in death, the revolution
would like to welcome him in life; and
the (Cuban) republic will be a tranquil
home for as many working and honorable
Spaniards enjoy in it the liberty and
goods they still will not find for a
long time in the slowness, indolence and
political vices of their own country.
This is the heart of Cuba, and so will
the war be>>.
For Martí -who in expressing it
evidenced the feelings of both Cubans
and Puerto Ricans for whose independence
he fought - it is not the birth in
Spanish soil that the oppressed
Antillean despises in the Spaniard; but
the aggressive and insolent occupation
of the country where it makes bitter and
atrophies the lives of its own children.
War is intended against the bad father,
not against the good father (...);
against the arrogant and ungrateful
passer-by, not against the liberal and
grateful worker. The war is not against
the Spaniard but against the greed and
incompetence of Spain.
José Martí’s ideas are contained in a
vast written work that comprises 27
volumes up to the present. Political
essays such as the transcendent
programmatic article entitled Our
America, newspaper chronicles for
relevant publications from Buenos Aires,
Montevideo, Mexico City, Caracas, New
York or Madrid; articles containing
analyses of quite diverse aspects of the
political, social, economic and cultural
reality of Latin American countries and
the United States (i.e., his famous
North American Scenes biographical
essays and portraits of thinkers..
political figures, creators and heroes
of both parts of the American continent,
Europe and the remotest latitudes - such
as India and ancient Vietnam - articles
of literary, artistic and scientifical
critique and the few speeches whose
texts have reached our days, make up a
very rich and fruitful work of creation
that is inseparable of his revolutionary
action and of his political and social
ideas.
Outstanding in his relevant literary
work, which makes him a major figure of
the Spanish language in the second half
of the 19th century, are the poem books
Ismaelillo and Versos sencillos, and a
monthly magazine totally written by him
and addressed to the children in Latin
America: La Edad de Oro. (The Gilded
Age)
Always in search of his goal of finding
in each country’s national reality the
solutions to the social, political and
economic problems originated by that
reality, José Martí, according to his
own words from 1889, sought with that
magazine written for the children of the
formerly Spanish America to give an
impulse to <<that which I want to
contribute to,
which is to fill up our lands with new
men, raised to be happy in the land they
live in, and to live in accordance with
it, neither divorcing it nor living
unfruitfully in it, as rhetorical
citizens or disdainful foreigners born
as a penalty in this other part of the
world. Manure may be brought from other
places, but cultures have to be raised
according to the soil. We must raise our
children to be men of their times, and
men of America>>.
Martí had understood the particular
nature of the American reality, and he
knew that <<our America comes neither
from Rousseau nor from Washington but
from itself>>: hence he could also
denounce the incompetence and impotence
of those who wish to <<rule new peoples,
of a unique and violent composition,
with laws inherited from four centuries
of free practice in the United States,
of nineteen centuries of monarchy in
France. A decree from Hamilton does not
stop the blow of the farmer’s colt. A
phrase by Sieyes does not remove the
coagulated blood of the Indian race>>.
According to Martí, <<a good governor in
America is not one who knows how to rule
over the German or the French. but one
who knows which elements make up his
country, and how he may guide them all
together to achieve, with methods and
institutions born in the country itself,
that desirable state where each man
knows himself and exercises himself, and
where all enjoy the plenty that Nature
provided for all in the land they
fertilize with their work and defend
with their lives. The government must be
born from the country. The spirit of the
government must be that of the country.
The government is nothing more than the
equilibrium of the natural elements of
the country>>.
And without ignoring, disdaining, or
underestimating the historical
experience accumulated by Humanity, the
Cuban revolutioner proposed: <<Graft the
world in our republics, but the stem
must be that of our republics. And may
the powerful defeated remain silent,
that there is no fatherland in which man
may be prouder than in our afflicted
American republics>>..
It is the same claim for autoctony that
had distinguished his years of
journalism in Mexico, when just arrived
from his first deportation to Spain he
demanded:
<<A history of one’s own demands one’s
own solutions. Our life demands our
laws. Do not tie the Mexican economist
servilely to a rule that is dubious even
in the country that inspired it. A life
is being created here: create an economy
here. Conflicts produced by our own very
peculiar situation arise here: let
original and concrete laws be discussed
here, laws that are studied, apply and
are made for our own exclusive and
particular needs.
Such ideas have been at the base of the
revolutionary strategy conceived by José
Martí for the whole of the American
continent, and of the national
liberation war that he organized and
prepared for his Cuban fatherland and
its Antillean sister, Puerto Rico.
He did it knowing that, in that war,
<<we will die for true liberty, not for
the liberty that serves as a pretext to
maintain some men in excessive delight
and others in unnecessary grief>>.
And he did it knowing also that
<<republics are not made in one day, nor
will Cuba achieve with the simple
battles for independence the victory
which the human race, in its continual
renovation and perpetual struggle
between disinterestness and greed and
between liberty and excessive pride, has
still not achieved in the whole world>>.
Such was the support and base upon which
the decision of the Cubans of that
period was sustained, of going ahead
with the fight for the independence and
the national liberation of their
fatherland, with the purpose <<of
profiting from liberty in favor of the
humble, who are those who have known how
to defend it>>. With it, Cuba took then
and forever one of the most intimate and
cherished decisions of that major
Antillean who was a true forger of his
people.
With the poor of this earth
I would like to share my fate:
The stream in the mountain ridge
Pleases me more than the sea.
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