A Lost Leader

Yet Martí himself was killed in 1895 during one of the rebellion’s first actions, leaving the rebels without their principal organizer and their most skilled and popular political leader. The rest, as they say, is history: a unilateral US military intervention appropriated the Cuban independence struggle in 1898, turning it into the “Spanish-American War” (the Cubans unmentioned). A defeated Spain then handed control of Cuba to the United States.

After nearly four years of direct military occupation, Washington granted Cuba a conditional form of independence in 1902. The so-called Platt Amendment, forcibly incorporated into the 1901 Constitution, enabled US control over key areas of Cuba’s economy, society, and political system. Simply, Cuba became a legally and constitutionally established US neo-colony for at least thirty-two years.

One of the oddities of Martí’s life was that, of his forty-two years, he actually spent more than half (almost twenty-four years in total) outside Cuba than on the island itself. Those years abroad were when he wrote almost all his works and increasingly dedicated himself entirely to the independence cause, especially in the United States, among emigrant Cuban tobacco workers in Tampa, many of whom were socialists or anarchists, and other exiles in the northeast.

It was contact with those workers that probably shaped Martí’s own radicalism. He became increasingly aware that only the dream of equality would bring ordinary Cubans (black and white) and such internationalist-minded workers into the struggle for national freedom. However, he was also driven by his commitment to the doctrine of Krausism, which curiously is not mentioned in this volume, although it was fundamental to his ideas.

Inspired by the work of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, a German philosopher active in the early nineteenth century, Krausism promoted an ideal of social and political harmony in equality. This brought Martí to appreciate the goals of egalitarianism and unity cherished by those workers. He rejected Karl Marx’s commitment to class struggle, while admiring his commitment to the downtrodden.

Cuba Libre

Most crucially, that goal of unity brought Martí to seek the unification of the different pro-independence factions in Cuba and in the diaspora. This was a goal reflected in the Cuban Revolutionary Party, which he created and led in 1892, and which organized the final rebellion.

Unity was also his watchword for any authentic Cuba Libre that emerged after victory — a unity that had been denied by the characteristic divide-and-rule mechanisms of Spanish colonialism and would in time be denied by US neocolonial domination. This goal would eventually become an especially powerful rallying cry for discontented Cubans as the post-1902 “pseudo-Republic” deteriorated.

The adoption of a radical constitution in 1940 to supplant the 1901 charter promised much, with the hated Platt Amendment replaced by wording that sought to promote nation-building for a sovereign and more equal Cuba. However, those hopes signally failed to materialize in practice.

By the 1950s, the contrast between Martí’s ideas and example and the grim reality of the Cuba that followed his death made him a powerful symbol for socialists and radicalized nationalists alike. Patriotic conservatives and liberals at the other end of the spectrum would also refer to his memory.

Interestingly, Martí’s earlier nationalism was actually closer to the Left than the Right. He was critical of Spanish imperialism, but never really of Spain or the Spanish — like many criollos (Cuban-born whites) of the time, he had Spanish parents, he was deported twice to Spain for his activities, and he studied there for years. His years in the United States made him increasingly aware of what he saw as that nation’s emerging imperialist aims and mindset.

Most famously, his last letter (to Manuel Mercado), included in the collection, warned everyone that he had lived inside “the monster” and knew “its entrails,” proclaiming that his “sling” was that of David directed against the US Goliath. In a number of other writings included here, he also warned other Latin Americans about the eventual ambitions and designs of that new imperialism.

A Neglected Figure

Despite his protagonism, Martí curiously remained a somewhat neglected figure for years after his death. He was more often known inside and outside Cuba for his poetry, significant examples of which the collection includes.

That neglect came about partly because his radical ideas about a future Cuba Libre jarred with the ideas of other leaders and certainly differed substantially from the realities of post-independence Cuba. It was only in the 1920s and ’30s, when the costs of increased US domination became clearer, that Cuban radicals and nationalists became more aware of Martí. In the end, he became the popular symbol of the Cuba that could have been.

In 1953, the centenary of Martí’s birth, Fidel Castro led a spectacular attack on Santiago de Cuba’s Moncada garrison on July 26. Under interrogation after the bloody failure of his endeavor, Castro was asked who was behind the plot. His interrogators assumed that he was acting at the behest of ambitious ex-politicians or (even worse) communists, yet he repeatedly described Martí as “the intellectual author” of the Moncada attack.

Cuban American exile circles have accused Castro of wrapping himself in the mantle of Martí through such gestures. Yet he was actually reflecting the widespread admiration for Martí as well as the very evident martiano roots of the curious fusion of socialism and nationalism that would find its way into so many of the plans for a new Cuba after the victory of Castro and his fellow “rebels.”

Colonial Mentalities

In one way, his imprint was especially evident in the revolution that followed the events of 1959, and remains evident in today’s besieged revolutionary system, for all the changes and compromises it has undergone since the Soviet collapse in the early 1990s. Martí became remarkably perceptive, as his ideas developed, about the need for what we would now call a decolonization of mentalities, which was certainly pertinent in the Cuba of his time.

Nearly four centuries of Spanish colonialism, with increased Spanish immigration following the failure of the first rebellion in 1878, had created all the characteristic divisions of any colonialism. This included the essential component of a sufficiently large body of Cubans who were willing to buy into the implicit orthodoxy of the colonizers.

In the terms of that orthodoxy, they — the Cubans — were “the problem” (through their inadequacies and racial composition) that had to be solved from the outside by the more civilized (and whiter) Europeans. Such acceptance, and the ambivalence that it implied, then led a significant number of criollos in the 1840s and ’50s to advocate annexation by the United States rather than Cuban independence. They feared that independence, by leaving them vulnerable to British designs, might end the slavery on which they depended.

The same ambivalence ensured the prolongation and then surrender of the first rebellion and continued to plague separatists thereafter. This was especially true as the material benefits stemming from US-based modernization of Cuba’s booming sugar economy persuaded some Cubans of the inherent superiority of the emerging “American dream.”

“Our America”

Martí’s response was to advocate greater pride in the attributes of Cubans themselves, in their ideas and identity. In his most radical essay, “Nuestra América” (“Our America” — in other words, as opposed to the other one), Martí argued that Cubans should not look outside for their solution, since the outside was the problem, in the form of a suffocating, identity-denying colonialism (as well as his growing fear of the US threat to Latin America’s fragile independence). Ultimately, it was that perception, rather than specific ideas or plans, that left the deepest imprint on what followed after 1953.

It remained ingrained in Cuban approaches after 1962, when Cuba’s version of socialism became stubbornly more radical than the more dogmatic readings of Marxism-Leninism that the Soviet Union advocated for a “backward” Cuba. It came to the fore again after 1991, when, as Fidel reputedly put it, “at least Cubans could now make their own mistakes.” In that sense, the Cuban system remains shaped partly by martianismo.

Martí, of course, is equally admired, feted, and commemorated in Miami as in Havana, albeit with less emphasis on the radical aspect of his thinking than in Cuba. We should remember that the admiring epithet he received as the Apóstol (of independence) was not the coinage of the 1959 leaders, as one might imagine.

In fact, it had already been bestowed on him by others in 1889, before his death, and the Florida emigrant workers took it up again after his death, reflecting their memory of his morality and even sanctity, rather than simply his record of advocating independence. Likewise, the “national hero” epithet long predated 1959, allowing both Miami and Havana to claim allegiance to Martí, albeit in different ways.

With All, for the Good of All

How does this collection shape up as an insight into his ideas? The book’s subtitle is a little misleading, as only one (admittedly long) section covers “the Americas,” sometimes rather obliquely (i.e., when addressing Cuban independence from Spain). Most of the letters and all the poems have no real association with that focus.

However, the selection of essays or speeches does include all of Martí’s key (and much-quoted) writings, especially those inspired by his long sojourn in the United States, and those focused on the coming rebellion, the new united party, and the vision of a future free Cuba.

These selections range from Martí’s comments on the Statue of Liberty and the Haymarket Martyrs to his reflections on the Spanish Republic of 1873 and the 1891 manifesto With All, for the Good of All, Our Ideas (1892). Readers will also find his letters to Máximo Gómez, the rebel leader with whom he had disagreed but with whom he was attempting to build bridges, while insisting eloquently on his vision for a democratic and equal Cuba of the future.

The remaining texts, mostly family letters and selected poetry, give us further insights into the essential Martí, testifying to his emotional intelligence and the poetic and imaginative basis to much of what he believed — although the translations of the more famous Versos Sencillos (“Simple Verses”) are generally much more sensitive and imaginative than those of the Ismaelillo poems.

Overall, the editors have given us a valuable introduction to Martí the political thinker, thereby making more people aware of the enduring power and influence of one of Latin America’s most influential and forward-looking intellectuals and activists.