José Martí Blog

Review of "Translating Empire" Part 2

2011-10-17T15:19:00.008-04:00

[See below for Part 1 of this review]

At the onset of Translating Empire (yes, the very first sentence) Laura Lomas defines (or redefines) Martí as a "stateless, non-assimilating migrant, a colonized and linguistically marginalized translator." Not one word of this description is true: Martí was not stateless, although he did reject the state which claimed his allegiance and punished him for withholding it, faithful instead to another that had existed in opposition to the Spanish state and would exist again thanks to him; he was not a "non-assimilating migrant" since he adopted as his own whatever was worthy of respect and emulation in all the countries he inhabited and could not have become a cultural interlocutor between Anglo and Hispanic America if he had only been a detached observer living in a vacuum, afraid of assimilation as of contagion; he was not "colonized" except in his youth and that's not what Lomas means, but, rather, that he was a "colonial subject in the ostensible cradle of democracy" who exchanged in effect one colonial subjugation for another; and, finally, Martí was not a "linguistically marginalized translator."

What could be more contemptuous than to refer to a translator as "linguistically marginalized?" It's like saying that a composer is tone deaf or a painter colorblind. If a translator lives on the margins of a language, he has never actually come into full possession of it; he is, in fact, something less than a squatter and little more than a marauder. Yet, it is as a "linguistically marginalized translator" that Martí supposedly realized Lomas' highest expectations of him. Asks Lomas, somewhat incredulous herself: "How does translation, rather than autonomy and originality in the tradition of U.S. American renaissance writers, become the means by which a migrant Latino writer (i.e. Martí) elaborates an alternative modernity?" The short answer is that it doesn't and didn't. Lomas denies autonomy and originality to Martí, both hallmarks of his work, because she believes that these are an exclusive "tradition" of North American writers which Martí either rejected or could not measure up to. It is only through translation, the straitjacket of autonomy and originality, that Martí, the putative "migrant Latino writer," is able to "elucidate an alternative to the modernity that serves imperial expansion." Martí's translations, which Lomas laments have been largely overlooked (as translations generally are), she asserts, a paragraph later, "stake a claim to define another American modernity beside that of the United States." All this may sound like repetition but it is not. Lomas begins by reducing Martí to a "linguistically marginalized translator," lacking "autonomy and originality," but nonetheless capable of "elaborat[ing]" or "elucidat[ing]" (pick your verb) an "alternative to the modernity that serves imperial expansion," but, then, immediately (that is, within a paragraph) reconsiders her initial evaluation and credits Martí only with "stak[ing] a claim to defining another American modernity." Given Lomas' degradation of Martí's talents as a translator or anything else, it is perhaps logical to reduce his title to an "alternative modernity" to a mere stake, presumably one of many, perhaps not even the most important. But since it is the thesis of her book that Martí did indeed create such an "alternative modernity," it belies Lomas' case to grant him just an ancillary stake in that endeavor. She realizes this contradiction and just as abruptly recognizes Martí's stake as the sole legitimate one, for the moment at least (she later introduces other claimants, including one Rafael de Castro Palomino, a really marginal writer borrowed from Ripoll's José Martí, the United States, and the Marxist Interpretation of Cuban History and promoted by Lomas as a rival to Martí).

In referring to Martí's creation of (or stake in) an "alternative modernity," Lomas consistently credits Martí's "translations" in the plural, though she only analyzes his translation of Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona. Why? Because no other translation of his has anything to do with the United States or can even remotely be said to have posed or even reported a challenge to its "imperial modernity." How did Martí's translation of English novelist Hugh Conway's ghost story Called Back create an "alternative modernity" except perhaps a spectral one? What of his translations of J.P. Mahaffy's Greek Antiquities or A.S. Wilkins' Roman Antiquities? Do these constitute the basis for positing a spurious "alternative antiquity" to complement the spurious "alternative modernity?" Or is Martí's translation of W. Stanley Jevon's Notions of Logic the missing link in the chain of unreason which leads to this "alternative modernity?" These are all the translations that Martí published while residing in the United States. I suppose that Lomas could argue that all of Martí's translations except Ramona were commissioned works, most of which were not to his liking, and this is, of course, true; but not too much emphasis should be placed on the fact that Martí himself chose to translate Jackson's novel. After Ramona, as Martí enthusiastically informed Manuel Mercado, he intended to "translate, from the English of England, a most beautiful book: John Halifax, Gentleman."

It may perhaps sound more convincing that such a monumental undertaking as creating an "alternative modernity" was accomplished systematically over a series of carefully chosen and analogous translations; but Lomas' argument does not and cannot rest on Martí's translations, but must rise or fall on only one -- Ramona. Helen Hunt Jackson intended Ramona to do for the cause of Indian rights what Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin had accomplished for the cause of abolition. The social content of Ramona, however, was conceived by Helen Hunt Jackson, not Martí, and can by no stretch of the imagination (and Lomas' is quite ductile) be credited to anyone else but Jackson. Translating another author's work can be regarded as an endorsement of it, and surely Martí's translation of Ramona was such an endorsement. But that is all. It did not co-opt the original work, as Lomas pretends, nor did it further its impact to any perceptible degree.

Martí's Spanish translation of Ramona, underwritten by the Argentine Enrique de Estrázulas, was published in 1888 in a first (and only) edition of 2000 which circulated primarily in Mexico and Argentina. How exactly did Martí's translation create an "alternative modernity" from the United States and in challenge to it when that book did not even circulate here except for the copies Martí gifted to friends or sold in Cuban emigré enclaves? Is it a question of the tree falling in the forest making a sound even if no one heard it fall (except Lomas 120 years later)? Then, at least, was the creation of an alternative to U.S. modernity Martí's intention in translating Ramona? There is no indication that it was in Martí's references to it, not in his letters to Mercado or to Estrázulas, not even in his "Preface" to the translation, which he sent as a circular to all the newspapers and bookstores in Mexico. If Martí had intended to create an "alternative modernity" on the basis of the works of Helen Hunt Jackson (a curious endeavor in itself), he would have translated A Century of Dishonor (1881) alongside Ramona. In A Century of Dishonor nothing has to be intuited and nothing is romanticized about the mistreatment of American Indians. That alternative modernity, fair and humane to the disenfranchised, could have been endorsed by Martí and was in his own writings. But Jackson's alternative modernity has nothing to do with Lomas'. Jackson's is based on compassion and Lomas' on antagonism. Martí did not need to propound an alternative to Jackson's compassion (always the vanguard of modernity). That modernity, regardless of whether it was forged in the United States, he would and did embrace, and its adoption in Latin America he championed, not repudiated.

When Ramona was published, in 1889, Martí had already resided nearly a decade in the United States and had written 90% of his crónicas for La Nación and El Partido Liberal. It is there, not elsewhere and certainly not in novels, that Lomas should document, if she can, the emergence of this "alternative modernity." However, since these newspapers circulated outside the United States, they do not fall within Lomas' purview: the "alternative modernity" must have been forged in the "terrifying center of imperial modernity" and circulated here by this "translator inside the empire's belly." But, as we have seen, Ramona did not circulate nor was it intended to circulate in the United States. If Thomas Paine's Common Sense had been published and distributed only in Australia it is doubtful that it would have created an "alternative modernity" (the original "alternative modernity") in the United States. Of course, following Lomas' curious reasoning, it is Tobias Smollett's translation of Voltaire's Candide that really deserves the credit for forging the "alternative modernity" of 1776.

It is and will always be a mystery to me how anyone can read Martí's essays on Emerson and Whitman and come away with even a single doubt about his admiration, indeed, reverence for them not only as artists but as men. Lomas has managed to do it, however, and her doubts rebound chiefly to Martí's discredit. She contends that beneath the top layer of praise for America's greatest thinker and America's greatest poet in these essays is a substrata of censure which she proposes to uncover (or "untranslate," as she puts it) for the first time since their publication more than 125 years ago. Lomas' pretentiousness would be entertaining if she were not herself so unmercifully dull (pesada). There is rich irony in her attempt to "untranslate" Martí when she can hardly parse her own sentences. Here is an example that is only slightly more turgid than her usual: "In its literary form, Martí's prose observed and commented on the nonuniversality of the bourgeois individual's self-mastery as it criticized the protection of the interests of a class of such individuals at the head of a national government of the Americas." Here's another that surpasses it: "This rereading of Martí's relationship to a North American tradition raises the question of the contestatory potential of defining another American modernity rather than preserving a now heterogeneous European modernity in opposition to a non-European nonmodernity." One feels the urge to tell the author: "Untranslator untranslate thyself!" I will not say that Lomas is always this inscrutable but she is prone to frequent bouts of chronic academese that read like parodies of the genre, though her much-praised style -- go to amazon.com for examples of her friends' panegyrics -- is undoubtedly a worthy vehicle for her ideas and complements them, or at least does them no harm.

Lomas method of "untranslation" consists of mutilating (Lomas calls it "modifying") Esther Allen's translations in the Penguin Edition of Martí's Selected Works, for which outrage she compensates Allen by calling her translations "eloquent," a backhanded compliment since she apparently does not consider them accurate. With Lomas, however, both eloquence and accuracy are sacrificed to tendentiousness. If she can somehow twist or recast Martí's praise of Whitman or Emerson into something less than praise, or deconstruct it so that what is plain becomes obscure (or, as she prefers, "occult") by dubious readings and pointless comparisons -- passing Martí's words through Edward Said's sieve usually does the trick -- then Lomas is satisfied that she has extracted the nut from the shell, and nutty enough are her conclusions. Here's a typical example of her "untranslation:" Martí compares Whitman's poetry to a wild steed that must be driven "con puño de domador" (with a tamer's wrist). Lomas incorrectly translates domador as "dominator," which allows her to assert that "the celebrated poet of democracy shores up a semblance of freedom but only partially veils its threat to crush potential resistance with a dominating fist." According to Lomas channeling Martí, "[Whitman's] rhetoric proclaims beautiful ideas that distract the horses (i.e people) with the carrot of future equality, sovereignty, and freedom." But Martí is not distracted. Lomas assures her readers that Martí "translates and analyzes [Whitman's words] so as to expose the occult artistry that redefines imperial modernity in the guise of liberty." In short, there is no freedom in the United States; Whitman knows it and tries to hide it; Martí sees through him; exposes and distances himself from him. And all this on the basis of Lomas' mistranslation of one word. There are numerous such "untranslations" in her book, which is not surprising since Lomas' knowledge of Spanish is tenuous, as she herself often admits and as this sample confirms: "... sólo les digo que la próxima estrofa del poema será construido [sic] y completado [sic]." What that next "stanza in the [her] poem" could be gives us all reason to pause and cringe.

According to Lomas, Martí was almost as good a dissimulator of meaning as she is, except that he did intentionally what she does naturally: "In chapter 4 ... I describe [how] the Cuban's eating and regurgitation of the 'angelic' poet of democracy responds to Whitman's naturalizing of imperial expansion with artfully duplicitous rhetoric." Martí, in turn, answers Whitman's "artfully duplicitous rhetoric" with "tactics of camouflage [that] convey [his] semi-clandestine reaction." Well, one can see what an awful task Lomas has set for herself in "untranslating" this once uncomplicated meeting of minds. Uncomplicated, that is, before she interposed her 2 cans and string. The theory posited by Lomas that Martí imposed on himself a superfluous self-censorship when writing about Whitman and Emerson, implying cryptically in a code that she alone understands -- as Delia Bacon alone understood her Shakespearean cipher -- precisely the opposite of what Martí actually wrote, is the critical equivalent of medical quackery, worthless or worse when applied to its subject, but useful in defining the limits of human credulity and the farther limits of academic self-delusion. Such a "reinterpretation" of Martí, whether with Lomas' philosopher's stone or a ouija board, or by the light of "heterodox Marxist criticism," could produce an infinite number of "new Martís" which would all have one thing in common -- the negation of the real Martí, the Martí who thought and wrote for himself and meant what he said and nothing else.

Lomas is not unaware of the consensus opinion that Martí's identification with Emerson was as absolute as ever existed between two writers, and, I might add, closer than existed between Emerson and Carlyle. I remember that once in the middle of reading Newton Dillaways' Gospel of Emerson, which is, indeed, a sort of Emersonian "Bible," I reflexively turned to the title page as if to ascertain whether Martí had any part in this précis of his [Martí's] ideas. This mental synthesis, of course, is unacceptable to Lomas: "The conclusion that Martí totally identified with Emerson occludes the subtle and shifting reactions of a less powerful, Spanish-speaking migrant translator [Martí] towards one of the United States' most prominent writers." How could Martí accept much less disseminate what Lomas characterizes as "Emerson's Anglo-Saxonist poison?" Lomas denies that he did, or, more exactly, she claims that Martí mixed an antidote with the poison (his "alternative modernity"). Emerson's "offense," according to Lomas, is his supposed "investment in the racial system that afforded a youthful Anglo culture a privileged status in the United States and in the New World, notwithstanding his courageous support for John Brown and his outspoken abolitionism." Of course, all white men of Emerson's generation were necessarily so invested, but not all -- indeed, very few -- were supporters of John Brown or outspoken abolitionists; and fewer still opposed the invasion of Mexico, as Emerson did. Nevertheless, Lomas rejects "studies of Martí and Emerson [that] draw on celebratory cold war-era interpretations of Emerson to establish some of the qualities to which Martí may in fact have been initially attracted." It is the Cold War, then, that is responsible for manufacturing a democratic Emerson that a democratic Martí could embrace without reservations. Lomas' task, therefore, is to manufacture an anti-democratic Emerson that the democratic Martí could and did reject (as she maintains). Whatever affinities may remain between Emerson and Martí are psychoanalyzed away using "Tunisian theorist Albert Memmi's" contention that "the colonized subject is indelibly marked by colonization and desires to change his or her status [to] the first and most readily available [which is] that of colonizer." Of course, this explanation is more than a little disrespectful to Martí, but still Lomas persists: "Although it is difficult [though obviously not impossible, at least for Lomas] to imagine the father of Cuban independence and of Latin American anti-imperialism in the grip of coloniality," she proceeds to do precisely that by considering "possible psychic parallels to the scars on [Martí's] back." Lomas' Martí, crippled physically and psychologically by colonialism, "'eats" Emerson while grunting about his [Martí's] belatedness, secondariness, and nonoriginality," and in so doing assimilates and becomes Emerson, and as "Emerson" Martí praises Emerson. Hence, Martí's praise of Emerson is really Emerson praising Emerson. By this logic, Martí's Emerson essay should be attributed to Emerson as a really "posthumous" work. However, if Martí could write an essay on Emerson that was indistinguishable from Emerson, does that not argue the synthesis which Lomas denies? In fact, it is Martí who first acknowledged this "melding of minds" and gave it a name -- the "Evening of Emerson."

For Lomas, the "Evening of Emerson" -- listed by Martí as one of the "supreme moments" of his life -- does not represent, as it does for every other critic, the moment when Martí glimpsed the future with Emerson's eyes, but, rather, the moment when he ceased to see the future with Emerson's eyes. "In reading through Emerson's eyes, Martí's own group appears vain, lazy, and dependent [to Martí]." It was when Martí realized, on that "Evening of Emerson," that "he was becoming accustomed to looking at his own people through the eyes of a procurer" that he "turned David's slingshot to Emerson's Goliath," which, according to Lomas, marked "the end of the day in which New England could imagine itself as the transcendent center of American modernity." (Somebody should have bothered to tell New England that. It would find out, by the bye, anyway. It stopped "flowering," you know; not that Martí had anything to do with that).
If Martí intended to cause such a seismic shift, how, then, to account for the elegiacal tone of Martí's essay on Emerson? Why does Martí shower flowers on him (or palm fronds, anyway) instead of rocks? Lomas' explanation is that Martí's praise was not entirely sincere but only "camouflaged" his real "clandestine" or "semi-clandestine" reaction, which he was not free to give because his Venezuelan editor objected to his criticisms of the United States. It is true, as Lomas relates, that Fausto Teodoro de Aldrey, editor of La Opinión Nacional, advised Martí, in a letter dated 3 May 1882, that he wanted (or, as he put it, that his "readers wanted") "less news about literary matters and more about politics" and recommended that Martí avoid discussion of "U.S. vices and customs because it pleases no one here and could cause problems for me." As a consequence of this letter, Martí resigned as U.S. correspondent for the Venezuelan newspaper immediately. Unfortunately, we do not have Martí's response to Aldrey; but we do have Aldrey's final note to Martí, dated 31 July 1882, where he omits his customary salutation of "Mi amigo," and curtly informs Martí that he is forwarding to him by carrier the monies due him for the articles published in May, "which closes your accounts as correspondent for La Opinión Nacional." And, indeed, no article by Martí appeared in the newspaper after May 1882.

Lomas conceals Martí's resignation from Aldrey's newspaper, and, worse, she suggests that Martí capitulated or made an accommodation with censorship by adopting "subterfuge and clandestinity" (i.e. hypocrisy) in order to "respond critically to the United States' preeminent poet and philosopher." Here the dates refute Lomas: Martí's Emerson essay was published in La Opinión Nacional on 3 May 1882, that is, on the same day that Aldrey wrote his letter of admonition to Martí. The airtight timeline does not prevent Lomas from conjecturing, however, that "[a]s Martí grappled with the monstrosity of North American expansionism and made final revisions to his essay on 'Emerson,' he received explicit editorial pressure not to criticize the United States." How could Martí have caved in to this pressure and filled his "Emerson" essay with the doublespeak that Lomas pretends to have discovered in it when it was written and published before he received Aldrey's letter?

An all-important question still unanswered: What would induce Martí to adopt "tactics of camouflage" to convey his semi-clandestine reaction" to Whitman and Emerson? Lomas offers no explanation in the text of her book, but does address the question in a footnote: "Because of his dependence on freelance journalism as a principle [sic] source of income, [Martí] would have no choice but to mask his criticism or divergence from U.S. authors accordingly." First of all, Martí was not a "freelance journalist;" he was the U.S. correspondent and agent for La Nación of Argentina and Mexico's El Partido Liberal, where most of his crónicas norteamericanas appeared. But let us suppose that he were only a freelance journalist, would his principles, accordingly, be more flexible, as Lomas implies? The clash with Aldrey shows that they were in fact quite inflexible whatever his situation. Did Martí's other Latin American editors who allowed him routinely to blast in print the policies, the motives and even the honesty of such all-powerful politicians as James G. Blaine and Roscoe Conkling demand that he be deferential and non-critical towards "U.S. authors?" It is acknowledged by everybody since Rubén Darío that Martí introduced Walt Whitman to Latin Americans. Lomas is suggesting that Whitman needed no introduction, that he was, in fact, already a sacred cow in Hispanic America while he was still the butt of ridicule in the English-speaking world. As for Emerson, who was well-known in Latin America and praised there as everywhere else, he was dead when Martí wrote about him. Why, then, did Martí need to "mask his criticism and divergence from" [him]?" Were dead North American authors also held to be sacrosanct in Latin America and above criticism? Finally, did Martí really "have no choice" but to buckle to censorship for the sake of "his income" (i.e. money)? Did he ever buckle to censorship before or after? When publisher Da Costa Gomes demanded that Martí include religious content in La Edad de Oro, what did Martí do? He walked away. When Blaine tried to buy Martí's good opinion with $5000, what did Martí do? He sent Blaine's representative away with this message for his boss: "Martí does not belong to a race of men that can be bought." Yet Lomas, while positing that Martí abhorred the materialism of "U.S. imperial modernity," portrays him as willing to acquiesce to any humiliation, betray any conviction, and accept any and all restraints on his conscience in order not to have his income as a "hack writer" diminished!

Why does Lomas feel that she must drive a wedge between Martí, Emerson and Whitman even at the cost of making Martí appear dishonest, and why does she go to such tortuous lengths to do it? Why is she compelled to argue in Whitman's case that "Martí's critique of this giant's searing rhetoric outweighs his admiration" when Martí's essay is filled with nothing but unalloyed admiration? Because it is inconceivable to her that Martí could have reacted favorably to Whitman or Emerson because both condoned Manifest Destiny (Emerson with reservations and Whitman wholeheartedly). And yet he did. Lomas cannot accept that fact because her thesis will not allow it. How could Martí -- Lomas' Martí, that is -- have failed to see that "Whitman's occult artistry cloaked an expansionist agenda of a white America in meretricious images of freedom and democracy" or that Emerson's "moral narrative shores up the imperial dominant's innocence and blames the peripheral postcolonial culture for its oppressed condition?" In short, how could Martí have created an "alternative modernity" if he did not first reject "imperial modernity" as articulated by Whitman and Emerson? Lomas' solution is to reinvent Martí as the first deconstructionist and practitioner of political correctness. There really is a simpler explanation.

Whitman's espousal of "Manifest Destiny" and his undeniable disdain for the peoples who inhabited the lands he coveted for the American Union were unknown to Martí when he wrote his famous homage to him in 1887. Whitman's poetry does not reflect these views, and his adoption of certain Spanish words such as "camarada" and "Libertad" convey the opposite impression. His jingoistic fulminations were published in the brief period when he was the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle (1846-48), which coincided with the Mexican-American War. These editorials would not be collected until 1920 in The Gathering of Forces; editorials, essays, literary and dramatic reviews and other material written by Walt Whitman as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1846 and 1847 [Cleveland Rogers, editor]. Martí had no knowledge of these anonymous editorials written several years before he was born, indeed, no commentator on Whitman quotes or mentions them in Martí's lifetime (nor, curiously, does Lomas cite this book either in her text or bibliography). If Martí had been acquainted with "The Young Bad Gazetteer" rather "The Good Gray Poet," it would most assuredly have influenced his opinion of Whitman the man if not Whitman the poet. His knowledge of George Bancroft's conduct during the Mexican-American War certainly colored his opinion of the Bancroft; but Bancroft was Polk's Secretary of War during that conflict, and, of course, Martí would have been acquainted with his actions. If Martí had been aware of the then unknown Brooklyn editor's feeding of the expansionist hysteria that gripped the country in 1847, Martí would have alluded to it. That he did not allude to it is sufficient proof that he did not know. But Lomas cannot and will not accept this. She needs Martí to attack Whitman as she needed him to disavow Emerson; otherwise, she cannot sustain her pet theory that, having rejected Emerson and Whitman's supposed espousal of "imperial modernity," Martí created an "alternative modernity" to challenge it. It is not enough for her that Martí always rejected imperialism regardless of the imperialist, and tyranny regardless of the tyrant (more than Lomas herself is capable of doing). She is determined to prove that Martí rejected imperialism in the persons of Emerson and Whitman, his North American "spiritual fathers." It is Lomas' version of the Oedipus Complex with "Nuestra América" as the object of mutual desire. If a writer's position on imperialism were Martí's litmus test in judging him, Mark Twain would have ranked much higher with him than either Emerson and Whitman; and Wendell Phillips, whom Lomas represents as one of only two North Americans (the other is Peter Cooper) that Martí admired without qualification, would have to be demoted and "untranslated" because he, like Emerson, supported the Chinese Exclusion Act. [Martí himself was no friend of unregulated immigration, either].

One last observation on Lomas' take on Martí, Emerson and Whitman: the critic who complained that Lomas' book didn't have sufficient "homosocial" content doesn't know how to read between the lines (or "in between spaces," as Lomas puts it). Ideologically, Lomas tears the trio apart; but spatially, she brings them closer than ever before. Lomas contends that "in one of Martí's fragments, [he] undergoes a branding at the hands of two imposing [but unnamed] human figures," who, of course, Lomas identifies as "Emerson" and "Whitman." This branding, Lomas asserts, is a "recurring image" [she cites two examples, which does qualify, barely, as "recurring"] in Martí's poetry, essays, notebooks and correspondence [and] refers to the experience of teaching or learning as an act of bodily penetration." Lomas assures the reader that "this penetration can be pleasurable -- a penetrating iron that damages not." Elsewhere Lomas alludes to Martí's "eating of Emerson" and "cannibalistic ingestion of Whitman." She claims that "Martí positioned himself inside a widening fissure between American modernities" in order to "reveal Whitman's artfully concealed, sometimes antiegalitarian, dilating [of] the rhetoric of camaraderie and libertad." After paragraphs filled with such vulgarity, Lomas finally asserts that"[m]ost twentieth-century interpretations of the Martí-Whitman encounter emphasize the North American's real [!] or supposed seduction of the Cuban." Now this, at long last, is news; or at least news to me. We will suppose, for the sake of peace, that here she also means a metaphorical seduction since their "encounter" was on paper. In any case, Martí was not "seduced," after all, for, according to Lomas, he "wrote about [Whitman] with a certain self-repressive homophobic blush." Lomas does not specify whether this blush was caused by Martí's "self-repression" or his "homophobia," or, perhaps, as she suggests in a footnote, by his "homoeroticism." To her credit, at least, Lomas does not attempt to deconstruct Mark Twain's famous quip on the blush. But if she isn't blushing with shame about writing this book, she should be.

At the beginning of this review, I called Translating Empire a worthless but important book. A book can be important both for the light it sheds on its subject as for the darkness in which it envelops it. Lomas' book has cast a pall on Martí that reminds us of Rufus W. Griswold's benighting of Poe, though its effects will not be as difficult to dispel. For the present, Lomas' character assassination of Emerson and Whitman has had an unfortunate but not unpredictable result: it has evoked the ire of their admirers, who have focused it, not only on Lomas, but on Martí. John Patrick Leary, writing in Criticism, can see no point to her evisceration of Emerson and Whitman "other than to further lionize an author already practically encased in marble." He is perturbed by Lomas' obsessive demarcation of what she considers "the 'metropolitan debt' in American cultural studies to Martí's ideas," which "leads her to find consistently in Martí's works 'anticipations' of later thinkers also based in the United States." And he is right: in Lomas' book all writers that followed Martí are indebted to him, but Martí is indebted to no contemporary or predecessor. By staking claims to Martí right and left -- well, left, anyway -- she diminishes the real value of his contributions and "aggrandizes" him to the point of insignificance by signalling him as the inspiration of every progressive fad, and, as Caroline Levander observes in Hispanic Review, "the sole 'smart' arbiter of U.S. empire, with Whitman, Jackson, Herbert Bolton, and Emerson, among others, reduced to mindlessly mouthing imperial sound bites." Nevertheless, both Leary and Lavander agree that Lomas has written an "important book," as I do (though not for the same reasons). Her impenetrable prose at least guarantees that the nonsense it contains will never enter popular culture, but rot on the shelves of the academy.

In the third and last part of this review we will list Lomas' errors of fact, especially those that highlight her unfamiliarity with Martí's biography.

Carlos Ripoll (1922-2011)

2011-10-05T19:05:00.004-04:00

One day it will seem the most absurd thing in the world that anyone should claim that José Martí had any affiliation with Karl Marx, and those who bothered to refute such folly will appear just as absurd. But it was not so in our time, when Fidel Castro and his cohorts kidnapped Martí and held him hostage in a web of lies and falsifications; then it was a battle for the soul of our country and its future, and the conqueror in that contest, almost in single combat, was Carlos Ripoll.

It was Carlos Ripoll, with his zeal and his modest means, who vanquished the Centro de Estudios Martianos, with its cadres of pseudo-intellectuals and its foreign camp followers; it was Ripoll, with his IBM Selectric typewriter and later his computer, who outproduced all the stolen presses in Cuba at the service of the state; and it was Ripoll, whose genius and honesty would have shone in a republic of honest men, who was a beacon of truth in our own Dark Ages.

The imminent resurrection of Cuba will owe much to him, for he preserved, against wind and storm, the historic foundations of our nation, upon which will rise a new republic true to Martí's ideals and worthy of them.

I knew him for 25 years; for 15 saw him on a weekly basis; and exchanged hundreds of letters with him. I translated many articles for him and was honored to co-author a book on Martí with him. It was to him that I first showed my translation of the Versos sencillos and to him that I turned when I had any questions about Martí. I can write about what he meant to our country, but I cannot write yet about what he meant to me as a friend and teacher.

Before Ripoll retired to Miami, he gave me his black IBM Selectric 2. I don't use it much anymore, but I still keep it on my desk.

Review of Laura Lomas' "Translating Empire"

2011-10-05T12:41:00.000-04:00

Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities. By Laura Lomas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 379 pages. $89.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper).

Dedicated to the memory of my friend Carlos Ripoll (1922-2011).

A worthless book can also be an important book (or, more precisely, book event) and Laura Lomas' Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities is a case in point. Its importance has not been earned through scholarship but bestowed on it by academics whom we suspect have done themselves the favor of not reading it. It sufficed for them that its subject was José Martí, that it was over 300 pages and that it had been published by Duke University as part of its "New Americanists" Series. The title and the blurb at the back of the book were assurance enough that it was eminently "modernitarian" and a robust attack on "Unitedstatian phallogocentrism." No more had to be said. In due course Lomas received the "Modern Languages Association's Prize for United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies," regarded as the most prestigious award of its kind for U.S. Hispanicists despite its prolix and redundant title. The one absent note, hardly missed in the chorus of praise, is that no prominent expert on José Martí, not even those whom Lomas herself courted in the book, has had one word to say about Translating Empire on record. I am not an academic, however, and I can actually afford not to be silent. I have read Lomas' book from cover to cover, and I say that with some pride because it was an ordeal, and not of the kind that leaves one refreshed and renewed. My conclusion (literally from the first sentence) was that Translating Empire is the most ludicrous (disparatado) and offensive book that has ever been written about José Martí; that it is worthy only of opprobrium, and that those who have praised and honored it deserve to share in the opprobrium as they already partake of the ignorance that engendered it.

I confess that I had great difficulty understanding the book's title and was loathe to read it for that reason. When a title makes no sense, I hold very little hope for the book. The "Translating Empire" part I initially construed as "Presaging Empire," which Martí certainly did in respect to the United States. But this is not what the author meant, though I do not blame myself for failing to guess at her meaning. The rest of the title vexed me even more: What does "Translating Empire" have to do with "Migrant Latino Subjects" or "American Modernities?" It is usually the title that defines a book's subject; here, however, it is the text that defines the book's title. To write a whole book in order to justify a title is certainly a novel approach to literary criticism. If I had not read the book I would not know and could never have guessed that Martí himself is one of Lomas' "Migrant Latino Subjects." Lomas refers to Martí and all other "nineteenth century Cubans as migrants, not as immigrants, exiles or even émigrés" because she wants to underscore thereby that the "United States did not offer an unbiased refuge or a society with only benevolent concern in the struggle over Cuba's future." As to which other country did to a greater degree than has the United States, Lomas is silent. Her absurd conceit that one can only be an exile in Shangri-La -- that is, among a people perfectly unbiased and benevolent -- means that there are no exiles in the world, only (wronged) migrants. Of course, Martí never referred to himself as a "migrant" (nor as a "Latino," for that matter). He was always a Cuban and an exile, which is not enough for Lomas because neither as a Cuban nor as an exile does Martí conform to her conception of him as an advocate -- even an organizer -- for Latino social, economic and political enpowerment in the United States, a kind of 19th-century César Chávez incognito whose cover Lomas, at long last, has blown. This new and now paramount role that she assigns Martí is chiefly based on his translations of U.S. literary works and on her own iconoclastic readings of his unqualified paeans to Emerson and Whitman. As for the "American Modernities" subtitle, I still haven't figured out what this has to do with Martí except as something he praised and wanted Hispanic America to emulate. This could not, however, be Lomas' intended meaning since she is vent on diluting Martí's admiration for the United States and its institutions, for Whitman and Emerson, but, above all, for its economic prosperity derived from, and an expression of, its modernity, which Lomas' claims that Martí challenged and proposed an alternative to. I have since learned that the title of Lomas' book has a purpose to its inscrutable variety. It is intended to be an interdisciplinary flycatcher, attracting textbook orders from several college departments, including and not limited to comparative, trans- and inter-American studies; translation studies; anti-imperialist studies; migrant studies; Latino studies and modernities studies; not to mention the more prosaic literature and history. One otherwise approving reviewer, E. Horan, writing in American Quarterly, faulted Lomas for "giv[ing] relatively little consideration to questions regarding Martí's sexuality or to the homosocial aspects of his relations with other emigrants." That was surely a missed opportunity; however, a future edition can add that to the olla podrida.

The underlying assumption of Lomas' book -- that "aesthetic and social processes are interrelated and mutually illuminating" -- Lomas admits that she adopted from "a heterodox Marxist, poststructuralist, and postcolonialist tradition." If I had adopted that assumption I would have cited classical and neo-classical sources for it. But being part of the "heterodox Marxist, poststucturalist, and postcolonial tradition" holds an especial fascination for Lomas and many (if not most) in academia. Marx (elsewhere) may have been cast into the ashcan of history as a political or economic thinker, but he has been recycled as a sociologist and literary theorist by those who still see some value in the label of "Marxist," which Lomas herself obviously does. Lomas is free to be guided or misguided by whomever she pleases (even if it's only a pretense). But when she credits Martí with "breaking a path for postcolonial deconstructive and Marxist tradition" -- a path which, presumably, she followed -- then she departs from reality in seven league boots and falls into the well-trodden rut of Martí as trailblazer of Marx, which is the scholastic grave of the Castro regime's most slavish propagandists. It is not, however, as a Marxist theoretician that Lomas comes off in this book, but as a Marxist sympathizer. Since we know nothing of her, we must rely on what she tells us about herself. Nothing could be more damning. That she herself is, apparently, oblivious to the import of her own revelations shows that she inhabits a milieu where truth is debased without regret or discredit in the service of ideology.

In her "Preface," the author presents her "credentials" for writing about Martí, which, despite a respectable academic background, are largely autobiographical and hence irrelevant in her case and all cases except as an indicator of a belief in predestination and parallel lives. The most striking parallelism between her life and Martí's, however, is that Lomas is not a reliable expositor or interpreter of either. The emphasis that she gives to the facts of her own life does serve to explain in part her failure to understand her subject's. Lomas describes herself as an involuntary migrant in the United States and as a "Yuma" in Cuba whose "forebears have willfully forgotten in the course of several generations the dilemmas and traumas of immigration and assimilation -- that [sic] exile and migration have not cut my life nor my parents' lives in two, as has happened for so many Cubans since the 19th century." (Well, to 7000 Cubans in the 19th century and to 2 million Cubans since 1959). By "forebears" she presumably means her parents and grandparents; and by "several generations," she means three (her own generation included). That is as many "forebears" and as many generations as have been accrued by the great majority of Cuban-Americans from whom Lomas strives to distance herself and her family. Still, if exile has "not cut [her] own and her parents' lives in two," then we must wonder why it was necessary for them to "willfully forget" (that is, suppress) "the dilemmas and traumas of immigration and assimilation" brought about by exile. Her claim that she herself and her "forebears" were unaffected by exile, and do not carry, or have "willfully forgotten" its scars, is intended both to set her apart from other Cuban exiles who are apparently compromised by their unforgotten and continuing suffering, but also to explain why she feels no personal animus towards those responsible for inflicting that suffering on the people of Cuba. "For this reason" (i.e. her avowed indifference which she supposes is the same thing as objectivity), Lomas declares that "this book does not pretend to marshal Martí's texts to address concerns about Cuba's struggling government." Note that it's "Cuba's struggling government" that concerns her, not its struggling people. In that sense, at least, Lomas does differ from other Cuban exiles (or "migrants," as she would have it), and the distinction, which she makes herself, does her no credit.

Lest the reader should somehow overlook or not sufficiently appreciate her unstinting commitment to not criticizing any aspect of the Castro regime, Lomas admonishes him/her: "I will have failed if the reader takes this book as a new weapon in the now dusty and yet still overstocked arsenal aimed at Cuba's current government." Interestingly, it is not what Lomas accomplishes with her book that she regards as the measure of its success or failure, but, rather, how others interpret and use her book, something over which she has no control, though apparently she wishes she did (in Communist Cuba she would, or, rather, the State acting as her proxy would). But let us put Lomas at ease: her fear of failure, at least in this respect, is entirely unjustified. The reader (and I speak for myself) understands perfectly what she means: Lomas doesn't want her book to be used as a new rhetorical weapon in the arsenal of free speech aimed at the Castro dictatorship ("Cuba's current government"). That arsenal she condemns as "dusty and yet still overstocked" as if truth were less valid because it is old or injustice more acceptable because its critics have a surplus of arguments against it. "Cuba's current government" (as current as 1959) also understands her perfectly, as she intends it should, and knows that it need never fear that this accidental Cuban, who in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a protege of Salvadoran Marxist terrorists (officially their "translator-interpreter," though she admits she spoke no Spanish then) and served her stint as an "internationalist" on the island (ostensibly picking yams), would ever betray the cherished comrades of her youth or forget the lessons that she was taught in Communist Cuba when she wasn't picking yams.

Although Translating Empire relies considerably on Carlos Ripoll's research for its facts -- Chapter 2, in particular, is an inverted re-write of Ripoll's José Martí and the Marxist Interpretation of Cuban History [1984] -- Lomas, far from being grateful to her source, endeavors to falsify Ripoll's positions in order to create an intransigent straw man that she can lance and eviscerate at will; but, instead, with every thrust, she betrays her own motives by the sheer absurdity of her willful misrepresentations. Lomas writes that "[i]n Ripoll's view ... it is a 'misconception' that Martí struggled against racial and economic inequality." Moreover, she claims that Ripoll's refusal to equate Martí's Revolution to Marx's revolution "invites the reader to infer that Martí went so far as to promote racial inequality and that he envisioned an anti-Marxist revolution avant la lettre." Ripoll, of course, never said anything of the kind. Lomas has the habit, amounting almost to a mania, of claiming that a source "implies" what in fact she alone infers. No Martí historian or critic, whether on the right or left, in Cuba or abroad, has ever suggested that Martí promoted "racial or economic inequality" -- until now. Lomas may "invite the reader to infer" that Ripoll did, but the suggestion comes from her, not Ripoll, as does the premise that "Martí envisioned an anti-Marxist revolution avant la lettre," which, in any case, is more defensible than the premise that he envisioned a Marxist revolution (avant la lettre" or no). Since Lomas does not quote Ripoll directly but only paraphrases him after her own self-serving fashion, this is what he actually said on the subject: "Martí showed a great aversion to talk of 'class,' and nothing was so alien to him as the exploitation of the class struggle to achieve social justice." As Ripoll notes, Martí's opinion of social classes was identical to his opinion of races: "It is annoying to hear talk of classes. To recognize their existence is to contribute to them. To deny them that recognition is to help destroy them" [5:53]. Martí, in his social relations as well as in his writings, made no distinction between classes or between races. If there was ever an anti-Marxist position, absolutely irreconcilable with Marxism, it is that. For Martí, social justice was a personal responsibility, first and foremost, and he exercised that responsibility in obedience to his conscience and as an example to others. He did not share Marx's or Lomas' aversion to charity on the grounds that it ameliorated the effects of poverty and thus postponed revolution or made it unnecessary. Martí would have regarded that as a positive outcome. Lomas, unlike Martí, cannot conceive of charity as a good in itself and supposes that only "the arrog[ant] engaged in mere charity for the poor." Those who have actually practiced charity, like Martí, know that it teaches humility, not arrogance, and fosters human sympathy and solidarity across all economic and racial lines in contraposition to class warfare or race wars.

Were I to pick the most offensive reference to Martí in Translating Empire, it would be a toss up between Lomas' intuition that Martí felt "a scarcely dissimulated envy and frustration" towards more financially successful North American writers, and this: "Had Martí lived anywhere besides the racially terrifying center of imperial modernity, Martí may not have assumed the explicitly anti-racist stance that Afro-Antilleans such as Rafael Serra, Sotero Figueroa, Antonio Maceo, and Juan Gualberto Gómez included at the heart of their pro-independence organizing." Lomas is speculating that Serra, Figueroa, Maceo and Juan Gualberto Gómez, Martí's colleagues but also his subordinates in the organization of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, were more advanced than was Martí on racial matters (presumably because of their race) and had to win Martí over to the "explicitly anti-racist stance" that "was at the heart of their [not Martí's] pro-independence organizing;" and that, even then, if Martí had "lived anywhere besides the racially terrifying center of imperial modernity" [the United States] he might not have "assumed the explicitly anti-racist stance [of the] Afro-Antilleans." What position, then, would he have assumed? Would he have been implicitly anti-racist, covertly anti-racist, mildly anti-racist, or not anti-racist at all? To admit the possibility that under certain circumstances Martí might not have assumed an explicitly anti-racist position or to suggest that he adopted that position situationally or opportunistically is as great a defamation as to assert that he was in fact a closeted racist. Martí is not Lincoln. The "Great Emancipator" may have needed Frederick Douglass to move his heart and conscience, but Martí had no need of anyone to inculcate in him the evident fact of the brotherhood of man. This is so much a part of the essential Martí that it would be impossible to conceive of him in any other sense; impossible, that is, for anyone but Lomas, whose attitudes towards race and color are decidedly her own and very strange.

Lomas writes with pride that her "mother ... taught [her] at a young age that we are all mongrels." Yes, that is a precious legacy though from the photograph on the back cover we deduce that the "mongrel" strains in her ancestry are Basque, Celtic and Goth. For Lomas, there is no such thing as a white Cuban, and she certainly will not be the exception. (The exception -- there is one -- is Tomás Estrada Palma, but he's referred to as "white" not so much anthropologically as to show Lomas' great disdain for him). Cubans to her are either black or "light-skinned Creoles" (who are almost always also "light-skinned elites"). She even refers to José Martí and Gonzalo de Quesada as "light-skinned Cubans" and compares Martí's physiognomy to that of a "a light-skinned man of color." Color is light and virtue to her and the absence of pigmentation a curse. If this sounds a bit familiar, it should: it is the photo-negative of the Legend of Ham. Irene A. Wright, who cannot be compared to Lomas in any other regard, also believed that there were no white Cubans ["Natives -- that is, Cubans,-- are Negroid. Some 'pass for white,' as the illuminative colloquial expression has it. Some, possibly, are white; few, however, would care to produce their lineage to scrutiny close enough to prove it. Only Americans think any the less of the Cuban because he is, if not colored, at least tinted"]. Wright's excuse is that she wrote in 1911, and Lomas' excuse, I suppose, is that she writes in 2011.

It is not that Lomas is unaware of Martí's ideals, but that she is incapable of applying those ideals or applies them incorrectly that is at the heart of her failure. It is ultimately an ideological disconnect that separates Lomas from Martí and her fellow exiles. This is also the origin of her one-sided verbal tag game with Ripoll, where she frames the questions and answers for both yet manages somehow always to lose the argument. She writes, for example, that "Martí admonished the celebrated general [Máximo Gómez] for his antidemocratic suppression of the dynamic, participatory political process that Martí fervently advocated." Yet she faults Ripoll for "implying, anachronistically, that Martí stood against the kind of revolution propounded by Fidel Castro." She does not, however, fault Castro or his apologists for asserting (not implying), also anachronistically, that Martí stood for the kind of revolution propounded by Fidel Castro. It would be a calumny to suppose that Martí would ever sanction a 52-year dictatorship which deprived the Cuban people of all civic and human rights and returned the island to the dynastic rule of one family. If the Bourbons were unacceptable to Martí, then the Castros, who do not practice their despotism at a distance and do not merely reign but rule, would have been even more objectionable if only because they were Cubans. Every wrong imputed to the Spanish Crown in the 19th century finds its parallel in the Castro regime, and, in every instance, its culmination as well. Why would it be wrong, then, for Ripoll or anyone else to use Martí's authority to attack tyranny, in whatever guise or in whatever age it appears, is a question that Lomas leaves unanswered because it does not admit of an answer: it is easier to accuse Ripoll of "implying anachronistically" what she herself has not the intellectual honesty to admit even when the failure to recognize that Martí stood against tyranny makes her unfit to comment on Martí's life or to expound on the meaning of his writings, exercises which she does not seem to realize are just as necessarily anachronistic. (My apologies to Prof. Lomas if, unbeknown to me, she has developed a time machine or communicated with Martí through a Ouija board).

It is interesting to contrast the disrespectful manner in which Lomas treats Ripoll with the hagiographical praise that she heaps on Ivan Schulman. This is especially ironic since, as we've already noted, whatever is credible in her book is derived from Ripoll's research and almost nothing from Schulman's. Lomas says that she greatly "benefited from meeting the greatest living Martianos," but she names only one, Ivan Schulman, "whose vigor, energy, and generosity evoke that of Martí himself." One would think that comparing Schulman to Martí would be enough, but she continues in a footnote: "Ivan Schulman's life's work sets the United States on the course of acknowledging its debts [to Latino/a migrant creativity]." I do not mean to suggest, of course, that Ivan Schulman is unworthy of Lomas' admiration. His Color and Symbolism was certainly at least 20 years ahead of its time; not until the invention of the personal computer did it become possible to do in minutes what it took Schulman years to accomplish without one, namely, hunting selected nouns and adjectives through the entire Martí corpus without the aid of a concordance. However, I do wonder if Lomas knows that, in the very same year she was born, "míster Schulman," as Angel Augier repeatedly called him in a devastating critique of his scholarship, was denounced publicly as a CIA agent by none other than Raúl Castro, which made the American persona non grata in Cuba for 20 years. If Schulman had not succeeded later in rehabilitating himself by becoming the unpaid English spokesman for "Martianos Against the Blockade," it is doubtful that Lomas, the self-appointed guardian of "Cuba's struggling government," would have vouched for his "greatness" much less compared him to Martí, since for her the enemy of her friend is her enemy (see her denunciation of the CIA on page ix of her book).

Lomas objects to the activity of U.S.-based independent (and free) researchers like Ripoll whom she claims "make Martí a spokesman of [she means for] today's liberal, capitalist democracy, a free-trade area of the Americas, and against the current government [of Cuba] and scholarship on Martí in Cuba"; but she has no objection to the work done by the Castro regime's official researchers who are neither independent nor free. On the contrary, she defends the scholarship of her "colleagues" (that's what she calls them) at the Centro de Estudios Martianos (CEM), and singles out Roberto González Echevarría in a footnote (yes, singling out in a footnote is intended to be ironic) for "unfairly accusing scholarship emerging from Cuba's research institutions of 'distort[ing] facts and texts to turn Martí into the unlikely herald of their doctrines.'"

There are no autonomous or even quasi-autonomous research institutions in Cuba: all are state-controlled, and, indeed, agencies of the government [sic]. The "cultural workers" at these institutions are all salaried-employees of the State who serve at its durance and without other alternatives. All the books that are published in Cuba are printed on state-owned presses (the only presses in the country); are reviewed in state-owned periodicals (the only periodicals in the country); and are sold in state-owned bookstores (the only bookstores in the country). Still, Lomas believes that Cuba's research institutions are less susceptible to ideological bias than are their U.S. "counterparts" (in fact they have no counterparts except in North Korea). No U.S. researcher associated with any think tank in this country was ever required to depict Martí as "a spokesman for today's liberal capitalist democracy." But the decree that authorized the Centro de Estudios Martianos (CEM), signed by Fidel Castro in 1977 and printed in its first Anuario (1978), clearly outlined the limits of Martí research on the island: "The Executive Committee of the Council of Ministers degrees the creation of a Center for Martí Studies as an adjunct of the Ministry of Culture, which will promote the study of the life, work, and thought of José Martí, from the perspective of historical and dialectical materialism." At the inaugural ceremony of the Center, the Minister of Education specified its mission as "showing the ties that unite the democratic revolutionary movement of our Mentor ["Maestro"] with the socialist ideology of Marx, Engels and Lenin." Before 1989 -- that is, before the fall of Euro-Communism -- the CEM Anuario was just another Marxist journal. It was not until Castro's 1975 Constitution was altered in 1994 to read that Cuba was a "Martist and Marxist State" rather than just a "Marxist State" that the Anuario was allowed to publish articles that were "not guided by historical and dialectical materialism," though, of course, never has it published an article that challenged it. Lomas, who is a contributor to the Anuario, should know that, but either does not or pretends that she does not. In her case, as well as that of other foreign contributors, self-censorship precludes censorship.

Part 2 of this review will be published next week.

The Myth of José Martí's Natural Daughter

2011-04-14T00:50:00.011-04:00

It used to be that historians who believed that José Martí sired an illegitimate daughter would only insinuate it in their writings; a wise policy, all things considered, since they could produce no proof to sustain their imputations except "the frailty all flesh is heir to," from which Martí, they decided, could not be exempt; but, according to which supposition, any man, not just Martí, could fall under suspicion. Contemporary upholders of this myth, however, dispense with the qualifiers and state outright that Martí was his goddaughter's father. They still have no evidence, of course, to support their certitude on this score but are emboldened by generations of the same salacious speculation: a lie, with a rich patina, passes with them for the truth, not because they desire the truth but because this is the "truth" that they desire.

Martí was his goddaughter's father in every sense of the word except the one that they mean: he was not María Mantilla's biological father. There is no doubt that he loved Carmén Miyares' youngest daughter more than he loved anyone else on earth and few men have had as great a capacity for love as he did. Those who claim he was María's progenitor can charge him with no fault in her respect except not proclaiming to the world that she was a bastard, his bastard.

However much Martí's detractors assert that they are non-judgmental and morally neutral, they are, in fact, anything but fair arbiters precisely because their proudly professed indifference to "moral conventions" (i.e. morality) renders them incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong; and, therefore, they can neither acquit Martí nor condemn his supposed conduct. The accusation of aberrant behavior (aberrant, that is, to other people) is not softened because the accuser approves of such behavior or at least does not censure it; the accusation, if it is to any purpose, is intended to malign the accused even when every excuse is allowed him.

We have already discussed here the harm done by those who pretend to "humanize" Martí by dehumanizing him. We live in a peculiar time when noble acts mean nothing in judging a man's character and common frailties everything; when the sordid, the mean and the bestial are regarded as the best confirmation of a man's humanity. Fortunately, in Martí's life there is nothing that would reduce him to the level of his detractors, which, obviously, is an inducement to them to continue doing their worst. If Martí stood where they stand their exertions would be superfluous and Martí would be far less interesting to them. But as long as he is held up by some he is sure to be put down by others.

Here are the facts as we know them, which we owe largely to the investigations of Carlos Ripoll: José Martí arrived in New York as a political exile on January 3, 1880. He came alone. His wife and newborn son, then in Cuba, would join him within two months. He took lodgings at a boarding house owned and run by Carmen Miyares, who resided there with her husband Manuel Mantilla, a tobacco merchant, and their three young children. Martí lived with the Mantillas for exactly a year. There were other paying guests at the boarding house, including two Pinkerton detectives hired by the Spanish Consulate to document all of Martí's movements (these logs have survived). Martí used his rooms as both his living quarters and office. There he planned with Calixto García and other patriots a new insurrection in Cuba, and when General García embarked on an ill-fated expedition to the island, replaced him as president of the revolucionary council. The abrupt collapse of the uprising on García's capture by the Spanish left Martí with no compelling reason to remain in New York. At this time Martí supported himself by writing occasional articles in French for the New York Sun and The Hour; it was a precarious existence which gave little scope to his abilities and Martí decided to relocate to Venezuela against the wishes of both his wife and mother, who wanted him to return to Cuba. He carried with him, as practically his only stake, letters of recommendation from the Mantillas, who had family living there, including Carmen's first cousin Victoria Smith de Hamilton.

On January 6, 1881, two days before embarking for the "cradle of Latin American independence," Martí stood as godfather at the baptism of María Mantilla, born on November 28th, the fourth and last child of Carmen and Manuel. At the time of María's birth, no one questioned her paternity: the fact that Martí was chosen to be her godfather attests to his friendship with both father and mother and to the high esteem in which he was held by both. The logs of the Pinkerton agents who boarded in the Mantilla house do not record any irregularities in Martí's private conduct. On the contrary, the year he spent there was one of the few regular periods in Martí's life as he was able to reunite his family and resume his married life after the disruption caused by his deportation to Spain. What would have been highly irregular, and, indeed, self-destructive, would have been for Martí to embark on an affair with a married woman, under the very roof where her husband and his own wife lived, which, at the same time, was the focal point of the revolutionary movement, visited daily by conspirators and journalists, and, on top of everything else, under permanent surveillance by Pinkerton agents, whom Martí knew were trailing him though he was unaware how closely. Could any man have been so reckless, or so lucky? (To make things even more improbable, Martí's wife arrived at the Mantilla house exactly nine months before the birth of Carmen Mantilla's daughter).

Martí's stay in Venezuela was brief and even more disappointing than his previous attempts to settle in Mexico and Guatemala. Simply told, Martí refused to pay court to tyrants and there was no other avenue to success in "Nuestra America." That experience taught him that American freedom was more essential for his life's work than Latin conviviality. His six months in Venezuela also served to establish him as one of South America's most brilliant and honest journalists. From that time his work was sought by the continent's major newspapers and his name, if not so much his fortune, was made.

On his return to New York, in August 1881, Martí resumed residence as a lodger in the house of his now compadres. As soon as possible he sent for his wife and son, who were in Cuba still waiting to join him in Venezuela. The family was reunited in 1882 and established their own household in Brooklyn. When his wife returned to Cuba, for an extended stay that would last till 1890, Martí again boarded with the Mantillas, or, rather, with the widow and orphans, for Manuel Mantilla had died of heart failure on February 18, 1885. It was only after the death of the paterfamilias that Martí and Carmen Miyares' relationship was called into question, specifically, the propriety of a widow and a married man living together under the same roof even as landlady and tenant.

It was Victoria Smith de Hamilton who raised the first objection to this living arrangement in a letter written to her cousin in 1887. Martí took it upon himself to answer for Carmen. A copy of his reply was found among his papers and finally published in 1989. If it had been made known after Carmen Miyares' death in 1925, there would never have been any speculation that María Mantilla was Martí's daughter. Given Martí's unequivocal denials in that letter, it is inconceivable how anyone could assert that he was María Mantilla's father without at the same time branding him a liar, a false friend and a philanderer, not merely the wolf at the door but the wolf-in-residence.

Before the publication of the Martí-Smith letter there was some room for conjecture: Martí's letters to María, first published in Jorge Mañach's 1930 biography, Martí, El Apóstol, were so full of paternal love and solicitude that they left no doubt that Martí's goddaughter was the idol of his last years: Martí wrote to her that he wore her picture next to his heart as a talisman against bullets and even addressed her several times as "daughter."

This seemed sufficient prove of paternity to many and convinced more than a few of Cuba's most eminent martianos; and, it appears, that their authority, in turn, convinced María as well, who up to that time, that is, well into her 50s, had never suspected a thing. Although she never claimed or even hinted publicly that she was Martí's daughter, she was far more open in her correspondence with those Cuban historians; and shortly before her death, in 1962, even seriously considered making the long-postponed announcement. Her son, the actor César Romero, was not as reticent as his mother. He stated that he was Martí's grandson in numerous interviews (even in the lifetime of his mother) and at her death caused "María Martí" to be written on her headstone. In 2004, María's four granddaughters, carrying on the family tradition, now in its third generation, of besmirching Martí's name, visited Havana to obtain recognition from the Castro regime of María Mantilla's illegitimacy (or should that be non-recognition of her legitimacy?). In any case, they did not prevail with Castro any more than their grandmother did with Batista in 1953. One would think that the "Crown of Cuba" were in contention.

Carlos Ripoll, in commenting the following letter, observes that though it may be a disappointment to César Romero not be Martí's grandson, it should afford him some comfort to know that his mother was not a bastard and that his grandmother was an honest woman. And it should likewise be a consolation to all Cubans that Martí, the moral conscience of our nation, was not a moral reprobate.

Victoria: Carmita has shown me the letter you wrote her that makes reference to me. It is difficult to believe, Victoria, that a person of your tact and kindness, could have dispensed with the one and the other. As concerns me, I must tell you, Victoria, that I need hardly answer you. I have such an exalted and uncompromising sense of my own honor, so ingrained a habit of subordinating my interests and pleasure for the benefit of others, such profound adherence to justice and such confidence in myself, that I must beg you to excuse me if I am unnecessarily harsh; and let me assure you that neither my sense of honor, nor that of anyone whose misfortune it is to be associated with me, will ever have anything to fear from a breach of propriety on my part, nor have need of being watched over by anyone but me. I know how to suffer all, Victoria, and I would consider it, in plain Spanish, an act of villainy to deprive a good woman and her poor children of public respect on account of some amorous folly. I can affirm to you, since your perspicacity has not sufficed this time to understand my heart, that, whatever my circumstances and occupations, Carmita does not have a truer friend, nor one more zealous of her good reputation than me. Moreover, you should have no doubt that were it necessary she would know how to curb the unfeeling heart that would satisfy its desire or vanity at the expense of her children's future. Of Carmita, I have nothing to tell you; she knows how to take care of herself. Of myself, I cannot tell you much since I have neither the immodesty necessary to refer you to my life, which I have thus far maintained above the sway of both passions and men, and which for that reason enjoys a repute which I will not lose; nor have I the right to address to a lady such as you the disordered words which rush to the pen when one feels that his highest virtue is unrecognized. One observation I will allow myself to make. When read by a third party, such as myself, your letter to Carmita does not appear to have been written by a loving hand but one weighed down with anger: How is it possible, Victoria, when you are not that way, not in the least? Not only do you have the right but the duty to procure that no misfortune should befall Carmita; and if you suspect that she is in love with a poor married man, ill-prepared to extract great profits from life, you would do a commendable service by urging her to abandon this disadvantageous obsession. Of course, after taking into account her children's honor and her own, she is free to do whatever her heart deems best, and if she insisted on following such a course, it would be a misfortune but a respectable one, since she would not be selling herself to anyone for social position, protection or riches. If, in keeping with her years and benevolent disposition, she were to place no reins on her love but those that the world and her children could not see, and consecrate herself fruitlessly, sadly and in silence, to a love without recompense and to the loss of the happiness that might still await her -- this, from the standpoint of society, would be madness, as I know very well and constantly remind her; and if that were choice, I can assure you, she would always be absolutely free to act for herself and no attempt would ever be made to impede with impetuous appearances the solutions of tomorrow. These unspoken sorrows, Victoria, when they are well-borne, deserve from all lofty hearts the esteem and respect which are wanting in your letter.

And now, in respect to the rumors, what can I tell you? Neither Carmita nor I have taken a single step which she would not herself have taken naturally of her own accord if I had never lived; nor have I done anything else than what a degree of moral responsibility, or, pity, if you will, should inspire every good man to do for one in her situation and especially a close family friend, who is today no more than he was when Carmita's husband lived.

Let me repeat to you that I know how to deal with these matters: if any evil-minded person, resentful of the growing esteem with which she for her part and I for mine are surrounded, should suspect without any justification and against all appearances that she receives from me a favor that would stain her, that imputation, Victoria, would be one of those many acts of wickedness, not so ascribable or widespread as others, which wound mercilessly and for years on end people who are undoubtedly good and must endure them calmly.

Now it is time to say good-bye, Victoria. With all my heart -- and it is not a small heart -- I say this to you: If you suspect that Carmita intends to consecrate her life to me, I applaud you for desiring to dissuade her from a course where she would not reap dishonor, because it is impossible that she should find it at my side, but would, most assuredly, experience all kinds of sorrows and misfortunes. And if there is in this world any possibility of happiness for her, tell me and I will help her to secure it. But you do not have the right to suppose that what love obliges me to do for the wife of a man who esteemed me and for his orphan children is the unseemly payment for a token of love. Here, Victoria, lonely hearts live on a higher plane. Be tender, my friend, which is the only way to be good and to obtain what one seeks. I've written to you at such length because it pains me more that you should be unjust to Carmita than it does that you should be unjust to me, for I would not have presumed to occupy your attention for so long on my own behalf. -- José Martí

Victoria: Carmita me ha dado conocimiento de la carta que le escribe a V., y en que se refiere a mí. Es difícil, Victoria, que una persona de su tacto y bondad, haya sabido prescindir por completo de una [sic] y de otra. De mí, perdóneme que le diga que casi no tengo que responder a V. Tengo un sentido tan exaltado e intransigente de mi propio honor, un hábito tan arraigado de posponer todo interés y goce mío al beneficio ajeno, una costumbre tan profunda de la justicia, y una seguridad tal de mí mismo, que le ruego me perdone si soy necesariamente duro, asegurándole que ni mi decoro, ni el de quien por su desdicha esté relacionado conmigo, tendrá jamás nada que temer de mí, ni requiere más vigilancia que la propia mía . Yo sé padecer por todo, Victoria, y consideraría, en llano español, una vileza, quitar por ofuscaciones amorosas el respeto público a una mujer buena y a unos pobres niños. Puedo afirmar a V., ya que su perspicacia no le ha bastado esta vez a entender mi alma, que Carmita no tiene, sean cualesquiera mis sucesos y aficiones, un amigo más seguro, y más cuidadoso de su bien parecer que yo. Además, debe V. estar cierta de que ella sabría, en caso necesario, reprimir al corazón indelicado que por satisfacer deseos o vanidades tuviese en poco el porvenir de sus hijos. En el mundo, Victoria, hay muchos dolores que merecen respeto, y grandezas calladas, dignas de admiración.

De Carmita, pues, no le digo nada, que ella sabe cuidarse. Y de mí no le puedo decir mucho ya que no tengo ni la inmodestia necesaria para referirle a V. mi vida, que he mantenido hasta ahora por encima de las pasiones y de los hombres, y tiene por esto mismo fama que no he de perder; ni tengo el derecho de escribir a V. que es dama, las palabras alborotadas que como cuando uno se ve desconocido en su mayor virtud, me vienen a la pluma.

Una observación sí me he de permitir hacerle. Leída por un extraño, como yo, la carta de V. a Carmita no parece hecha de mano amorosa, sino muy cargada de encono: ¿cómo, Victoria, si V. no es así, sin duda? No sólo tiene V. el derecho, sino el deber, de procurar que no sea Carmita desventurada; y si sospecha V. que quiere a un hombre pobre, casado y poco preparado para sacar de la vida grandes ganancias, haría V. una obra recomendable urgiéndola a salir de esta afición desventajosa. Por supuesto que si, libre de hacer en su alma, salvo el decoro de sus hijos y el propio, lo que le pareciese bien, si insistiese en esto, sería un dolor, pero un dolor respetable, puesto que no se vendía a nadie por posición social, protección o riqueza, sino que, en la fuerza de su edad y de sus gracias, a la vez que no daba a su cariño más riendas que las que no pueden ver el mundo ni sus hijos, se consagrara sin fruto y en la tristeza y el silencio a un cariño sin recompensa, y a la privación de las alegrías que de otro modo pudieran todavía esperarla. Esto, mundanamente, sería una locura, como sé yo muy bien, y le digo a cada momento, y estoy seguro de que si así fuese el caso, se le dejaría siempre inflexiblemente en la más absoluta libertad de obrar por sí, y no se impediría jamás por apariencias impremeditadas de hoy las soluciones de mañana. Pero esas penas calladas, Victoria, merecen de toda alma levantada, cuando se lleven bien, una estimación y respeto que en su carta faltan.

Ahora, de murmuraciones, ¿qué le he de decir? Ni Carmita ni yo hemos dado un solo paso que no hubiera dado ella por su parte naturalmente, a no haber vivido yo, o que en el grado de responsabilidad moral, de piedad, si V. quiere, que su situación debe inspirar a todo hombre bueno, no hubiese debido hacer un amigo íntimo de la casa, que no es hoy más que lo que fue cuando vivía el esposo de Carmita.

Yo le repito que de esto sé cuidar yo: si alguna mala persona, que a juzgar por la estimación creciente de que ella por su parte y yo por la mía vivimos rodeados, sospecha sin justificación posible y contra toda apariencia que ella recibe de mí un favor que manche, ésa, Victoria, será una de tantas maldades, mucho menos imputables y propaladas que otras, que hieren sin compasión años enteros a personas indudablemente buenas, que las soportan en calma.

Ya es tiempo de decirle adiós, Victoria. Con toda el alma, y no la tengo pequeña, aplaudo que si sospecha que Carmita intenta consagrarme su vida, desee V. apartarla de un camino donde no recogerá deshonor, porque a mi lado no es posible que lo haya, pero sí todo género de angustias y desdichas. Y si en el mundo hay para ella una salida de felicidad, dígamela y yo la ayudaré en ella. Pero V. no tiene el derecho de suponer que lo que mi cariño me obligue a hacer por la mujer de un hombre que me estimó y sus hijos huérfanos es la paga indecorosa de un favor de amor. Por acá, Victoria, en estas almas solas, vivimos a otra altura. Sea tierna, amiga mía, que es la única manera de ser bueno y de lograr lo que se quiere.

He escrito a V. tanto, más porque me apena que sea injusta con Carmita, que por mí mismo, que no me hubiera yo atrevido a molestar en mí propio su atención por tanto tiempo. -- José Martí

Conclusion

The Myth of María Mantilla is our version of the Da Vinci Code: she is the "Cuban Holy Grail," the human vessel that carries the sacred blood of "him who should not have died." But just as the Da Vinci Code is a fantastical farce which appeals only to those who can dismiss all history in order to believe it, the Myth of María Mantilla is a patchwork of slander and innuendo which demands that its adherents unaquaint themselves with everything that is known about Martí so that they can embrace a dead woman's sentimental illusion and her heirs' neo-dynastic pretensions. That María and her descendants should wish to be related to Martí is not as culpable, however, as the propensity of certain martianos to accept and promote these spurious claims in spite of Martí's denials and the absurdity of the allegations.

New "General Index" to RCAB

2010-07-26T10:53:00.004-04:00

Many of my readers are acquainted with the Review of Cuban-American Blogs, which succeeded and preempted JBM for a long time. I have compiled a new "General Index" to the nearly 1000 posts about Cuba and related subjects which I wrote there. Those of you who contributed to this labor with your comments will, I think, be especially interested in revisiting RCAB, and all 978 articles there are entirely new to those who have never visited.

José Martí and Arizona's Immigration Law

2010-05-23T19:56:00.004-04:00

I try to avoid writing in the "What would José Martí have done or said vein" not because such conjectures are impossible or unfruitful -- we are not so removed in time that what concerns us today did not also matter to him -- but because Martí didn't appoint anyone his spokesman with the right to use his name as he pleases. Such license is rarely given. I know of only one instance in our history: when Betances deputized Martí to speak for him on all matters pertaining to the Revolution ("use and abuse my name as you see fit"). What is more remarkable still is that Betances and Martí never met, the one exiled in Paris and the other in New York. Such implicit faith must be both given and earned; it should not be assumed unilaterally or under the pretense that death authorizes the misappropriation of another's name. If the names and images of movie actors cannot be commercially exploited after death, then surely the legacy of our prohombres should be at least as morally inviolate. Loathe as I am to insert Martí's name into a controversy where it has already been abused, at least I will not be the first to do so; and it is not his name that I invoke but his words because these alone carry his sanction, or at least the closest approximation to it.

The assumption that José Martí was an immigrant -- in fact, he never referred to himself as one or identified in any way with immigrants as a group -- has led many to suppose, incorrectly, that he was an advocate of immigration. The National Association of Hispanic Publications (NAHP) even instituted this year a "José Martí Award for Outstanding Immigration Article" (we suppose that this award will not be granted to an opponent of illegal immigration). And, according to celebrity blogger PérezHilton, the Cuban-American rapper Pitbull, standing before Martí's statue (which statue was not specified), condemned Arizona's new immigration law as racist, cancelling one of three scheduled concerts there (well, it is remarkable today when anyone stands even 33% behind his principles, much less against his interests). The truth is that Martí himself could never have been awarded NAHP's "José Martí Award" for his writings on immigration because his opinions on the subject were as "politically incorrect" as you can get, and though he would have been pleased with the success of any young Cuban in this country, Pitbull's announcement should have been made in front of a statue of César Chávez. Martí, as was explained in the previous post, is not an "all-purpose hero."

In Martí's famous article on the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty, in 1886, he envisioned it as not only a representation of the friendship between France and the United States, personified by Washington and Lafayette, but as a beacon for the oppressed of all nations and the emblem of a new epoch in the history of mankind. This interpretation, which prevails today, was not the most popular when the statue was inaugurated. In fact, none of the speakers on that occasion alluded to the U.S. as a "nation of immigrants," nor does any contemporary newspaper account make that connection. The statue's complete name, "Liberty Enlightening the World," describes its intended symbolism. The U.S., by its example, would awaken the world to a new dawn of liberty and other nations would then kindle their own torches of freedom from its flame. The statue proclaimed that freedom was the universal birthright of all men. No one then, except Martí and Emma Lazarus, imagined that this birthright was to be claimed by all the world's oppressed on America's very shores.

In contrast to Lazarus, however, Martí did not mean nor did he want the "wretched refuse of Europe's teeming shores" to settle here, especially anarchists ("who don't want laws nor know what they want except to spread fire and death among the living and everything else standing") and socialists ("who use the agonies of the poor as an excuse to vent their own need for destruction"). Martí regarded their "revolutionary theories" as antithetical to American democracy and the greatest danger facing it. These radical immigrants, "who did not know how to win without bloodshed," Martí believed to be an insidious element that would introduce to this country the class hatreds and divisions that had been the bane of Europe for generations. Despotism had largely suffocated these violent passions in Europe; American liberty, however, would fan them till the inevitable conflagration. Then the United States would have to decide whether to adopt the methods of Germany and Russia to meet this challenge to its social order, becoming, in effect, the thing it abhorred; or else hold fast to its democratic ideals even at the cost of stability and progress, and, eventually, its freedom, too.

The anarchists and socialists, by equal parts violence and vehemence, had already seized effective control of much of the nascent American labor movement, and Martí feared that they could precipitate, indeed, that they intended to precipitate a social war between American workers and capitalists from which they alone would profit. Martí did not regard the robber barons favorably, either: in fact, their penchant for using the police and hired goons in confrontations with striking workers complemented the anarcho-socialists own incitements to violence. The common prey of both was the American worker, whom Martí considered democratic, hardworking and law-abiding, but woefully ill-equipped by virtue of his own guilelessness to confront the forces gathering against him from all sides. Martí warned: "No immigration is good which brings strong hands but cold and hostile hearts" [No hay inmigración buena, cuando, aunque traiga mano briosa, trae corazón hostil y frío].

Martí had no sympathy whatever, but, rather, a profound disdain, unparalleled in his writings, for criminals and evildoers who, under the guise of immigrants, invaded the country in order to sow terror among its population and "avenge" here ancient grudges, real or imagined, transplanted from other lands and cultures, philosophies and ideologies explicitly hostile to America's democratic society and vent on its ultimate destruction: "There is no more plentiful a fodder for the jails, nor more lethal a poison for the nation, than these hordes of vicious and bestial people. Yes, not brutish but bestial." [No hay alimento más abundante para las cárceles, ni veneno más activo para la nación, que estas hordas de gente viciosa y abrutada. No embrutecida, no: abrutada]. In a time not so very long ago, this statement might have been compared to and dismissed as "nativism," even xenophobia; but the events of September 2001 have a relevance not only for our time but Martí's: then as now, the U.S. was beset by external (but imported) forces conspiring against it which remained mostly unnoticed and certainly unperceived in their real dimensions until one barbaric act brought them to national prominence. For the 19th century this act was the Haymarket Explosion (1886), which convinced most Americans (and Martí) that foreign radicals -- who had settled here through a policy of unregulated immigration -- were undermining the state by introducing dynamite as an instrument of national polity.

In an unintentionally ironic article entitled "A Warning to Mexico" (1888), Martí cautioned that country also against emulating the open-door immigration policy of the United States. He didn't have to admonish it against welcoming American immigrants because the loss of California and Texas had already done that four decades ago. Instead, Martí warned of a plan -- or plot -- to turn Mexico into a "vertidero" (dumping grounds) for America's unwanted newcomers, by diverting the flow of Southern European immigrants from the U.S. to Mexico, because, as newspaper editorials alleged, Mexicans and Italians were "analogous races," or, to phrase it less elegantly, both were "greasers." Martí warned Mexicans not to fall for this trap that could introduce the Black Hand into Mexico: "We must be very vigilant, and quickly, because they [the Americans] want to people this country with criminals." [Urge vigilar mucho, y en seguida, porque nos van a querer poblar con criminales].

Martí was not against immigration, but he was opposed to unrestricted and unsupervised immigration. Nor did he view all immigrants alike: Martí preferred the political over the economic immigrant; the assimilable over the unassimilable; the tradesman over the laborer; the skilled worker over the unskilled; and the farmer above all ("better the apple grower than the apple peddler"). Some nationalities, he believed, made better immigrants than did others, not because one was superior to another, but because some adapted better than others to a new country and were no encumbrance upon it. Open borders were to him the greatest danger that a nation could face short of war (and not very short of it, at that), and more culpable even than war because war cannot not always be avoided but unrestrained immigration was never forced on any country. Martí asked:

"Should respect for the rights of man be taken so far as to allow the base company of some men to ruin the lives of the rest? Should a nation that once admitted good immigrants continue to admit immigrants even if they are bad? Should a nation that recoursed to immigration when it needed it continue to foment it when it no longer needs it, or should it curtail it?"

[¿El respeto al derecho del hombre ha de llegar hasta permitirle podrir con su compañia impura a los demás hombres? ¿El pueblo que admitió a inmigrantes buenos, debe continuar admitiendo a inmigrantes malos? ¿El pueblo que aceptó a la inmigración cuando la necesitaba, debe continuar fomentándola, o debe contenerla, cuando no la necesita?]

The answer to all these rhetorical questions, Martí's answer and the obvious answer, is no. Of course, today it would be considered politically incorrect to suggest that there could be such a thing as a "bad" or undesirable immigrant (unless we are speaking of a 100-year-old Nazi), and one would risk being labelled a Nazi for supporting immigration restrictions of any kind, let alone ending immigration (even the illegal kind).

What would Martí's reaction have been, then, to the Arizona law requiring that aliens produce documentation certifying their identity and immigration status when so requested by state authorities (mirroring the unenforced federal law which already requires this)? I will leave out the final proviso of that law -- that such information will be solicited only when an individual is apprehended in the commission of a crime -- because then the question becomes, frankly, ridiculous, since it is inconceivable that Martí or any rational person would object to criminals being required to reveal their real identity, anonymity being useful to the lawbreaker but not to society. But we don't need to leave this question up to commonsense: Martí explicitly stated, discussing this very subject, that "immigrants have no more right to be lazy than they do to be criminals; nor should society, even indirectly, support those who are" (Como no se tiene derecho para ser criminal, no se tiene derecho para ser perezoso. Ni indirectamente debe la sociedad humana alimentar a quien no trabaja directamente en ella).

Martí could certainly never have imagined that one day there could be those who would claim that immigrants have the right not only to be here illegally but to engage in criminal activity while here . Yet the city of San Francisco recently informed the Justice Department that it would not provide it with the fingerprints of criminals who also happen to be illegal immigrants lest they be deported after completing their sentences (as the law requires). Always in the vanguard of the nonsensical, San Francisco also has a proposal on the November ballot, supported by its mayor, that would allow illegal immigrants to vote in city elections. Arizona has been excoriated and boycotted for attempting to enforce federal law and treating illegal immigrants as, well, illegal immigrants, whereas San Francisco has received no criticism and precious little coverage for its repeated efforts to nullify federal law and to accord the most fundamental right of citizenship to those who are not citizens, the Constitution be damned. (What is next for the city on the bay? Will it mail absentee ballots to all residents of Mexico and parts south?)

Opponents claim the Arizona law seeks to create a new criminal class based on race and nationality -- something Martí would certainly have objected to -- when, in fact, it criminalizes no one, fines no one and punishes no one for being an undocumented alien per se. In the United States it is not illegal to be an illegal immigrant. No one is sent to jail for crashing the U.S. border because there is no punitive law against it. In this case, trespassers will not be prosecuted. Illegal aliens are subject to deportation, as in any other country, but with rights and guarantees (including due process) which are not available, say, across the border. More importantly, here they are spared the murders, beatings, rapes and disappearances which characterize Mexico's official interactions with its illegal immigrants from Central America. Even the illegal immigrant who is deported to Mexico can enter the U.S. illegally again (and again and again), as almost all do, without incurring any further punishment than to be re-deported. Not so in Mexico, where a repeat offender faces a 10-year sentence in a Mexican jail.

The Mexican government and the Castro regime recently signed a treaty which authorizes the automatic deportation, without exception or appeal, of all Cuban nationals who desert in Mexico or seek asylum there -- the kind of agreement which Communist Cuba should like to conclude with the U.S. (and nearly did under Bill Clinton) but which the Mexican government would never consent to in a million years for $53 billion reasons. President Felipe Calderón, who, like all his predecessors, refuses to criticize Cuba for its human rights record because he regards that as interfering in its internal affairs, had no scruples about castigating the Arizona law in his public remarks at the White House and his speech to Congress as "discriminatory." No matter, of course, that the Mexican government discriminates against the rights of all Mexicans in exactly the same way: In Mexico, as in most countries, citizens (not just foreigners) are required by law to carry identity papers on their persons at all times and produce them upon demand. In Cuba, whose one-party legislature blasted the Arizona law as "racist and xenophobic" and a "brutal violation of human rights," citizens are also required to carry official identification and are subject to internal deportation if they relocate to Havana from the provinces without official authorization exactly as black South Africans who once left their "homelands" or townships for Pretoria were "repatriated" under apartheid.

If Martí's name means anything anymore -- and it has been so abused in the last 50 years that in many regards the anti-Martí now trumps the real Martí in the consciousness of his countrymen -- it surely should be invoked in defense of justice and not as a prop of demagogic politics. With his country in ruins and his people in chains, José Martí has other work to do than be a poster-boy for illegal immigration.

José Martí Was Not "All Things to All Men"

2010-02-24T17:48:00.005-05:00

There is a prevailing misconception, no less wrong for being popular, that José Martí can be "all things to all men," which is simply another way of saying that he stands for nothing because he stands for everything. This conclusion is formed through the tendentious means of supposing that because men of all political persuasions avail themselves of his words to lay claim to his legacy, it must then follow that Martí's opinions are too malleable to form the foundation of any philosophy or creed, and exist only as a kind of silly putty with which to fill the cracks and crannies of questionable political schemes or justify their failure by laying them at his feet of clay.

This supposed inconsistency (or inconstancy) in Martí's thought is sometimes attributed to a wariness on his part to alienate any potential ally in the struggle to secure Cuba's independence from Spain; and his ability to champion simultaneously -- and charter a middle course between -- the interests of rich and poor, white and black, liberal and conservative, often hailed as his greatest achievement, is regarded by his critics as a mere coup de thèâtre admirable only inasmuch as it has eluded everybody before and since because, supposedly, no one else has been able to temporize his opinions to the extent that he did and with his success. By sacrificing consistency, it is argued, that his thought became transcendent like an exploding star that shoots its rays in all directions. Whether this was a purposeful compromise or simply a function of a highly-impressionable mind is also a subject of contention among those who believe that Martí's "universality" trumps his individuality and that the aggregate of his thought (as interpreted by them) belies its constituent parts.

None of this is true, of course. If Martí was a shooting star, he was one of the most fixed in its trajectory. There are not two Martís, three Martí, or Martís ad infinitum: there is only one Martí, identifiable, and, indeed, unmistakable, in word and action, at 15 as at 42. It is the opportunism of his enemies, not Martí's, which isolates his words from his thought, which distorts his words to deny the essence of his life and which misquotes or misapplies his words to justify conduct which was unacceptable to him but which forms the basis of their own wretched existence. They co-opt Martí as a symbol of the ideals that they have betrayed but must still pretend to uphold. They discredit him by crediting him with their actions, taking shelter behind his pedestal while assailing those who remain true to his teachings and example.

Those who fail to see or do not care to see this imposture accept as valid all claims to Martí, even those proffered by tyrants or their agents, and then wonder bemused that Martí could be so paradoxical as to easily accommodate such contrary opinions. To hold such a position honestly (if that were even possible) one must necessarily be in the same relation to Martí as the biblical Adam to Adam Smith. No one who is acquainted with Martí's works or familiar with his life would entertain the notion that he would abet a criminal enterprise or accept his inclusion in a pantheon of serial killers. Even someone who knew only of his reputation would find it difficult to believe that it was purchased so cheaply and discounted by his heirs at such a rate.

Consistency and transparency are the hallmarks of Martí's life and thought. A man who was false to no man could not have been false to himself. Since Rafael Argilagos compiled the first collection of Martí's aphorisms in 1918, there have been a dozen published, each larger and more comprehensive than the previous. The latest ones, Jerez Mariño's Biblia Martiana, published in exile, and Valdés Galarraga's Diccionario del Pensamiento Martiano, published in Cuba, contain more than 10,000 quotations culled from thousands of sources. Because Martí's writings are so diffused does not mean that his thought is not systematic. If it were true that his opinions were variable, cut to order, as it were, and subject to constant revision, for whatever motives, then nothing would prove it more convincingly than these extracts of his thought arranged by subject and year.

Yet what strikes one immediately in reading these is the consistency of his thought at all stages of his life. There is not one single contradiction to be found in the whole ensemble. He was always the lover of liberty, the defender of the downtrodden and the enemy of all schemes to redeem some men in theory by dehumanizing all men in fact. He was that and a thousand other things, without contradiction or equivocation, his thought evolving along logical and well-defined lines, never stagnant but always avoiding the whirlpools of irresolution that shook and even defined other great men. Unlike Thomas Jefferson, who was both a defender of freedom and an apologist for slavery, or Abraham Lincoln, who became an abolitionist to win a war but didn't fight a war for the sake of abolition, José Martí had no principles of expediency nor did his thought ever evolve in opposite and irreconcilable directions.

It is well to note that this spurious notion that "Martí is all things to all men" did not originate in our country, but was first advanced by foreigners who could not otherwise explain the phenomenon of his appeal to all sectors of the Cuban people. Richard Butler Gray, the first to study the reception of Martí in our country, was perplexed that his name was a byword for every party and cause, and used to justify or condemn just about anything; but rather than recognize Martí's role as an authorizing figure whose approval was claimed by all pro forma and without appeal to anything more concrete than a nebulous patriotism, Gray chose to characterize Martí's ideas as "disorganized and contradictory," mistaking cause for effect: it was his adherents who were disorganized and contradictory, not Martí. Martí's ideas did not need to be reconciled to his followers' variegated notions of him, rather, their notions should have been tested to see if they were consistent with Martí's. It was not that Martí was "all things to all men," but, rather, that all men saw what they cared to see in him, and formed their conception of him from a mirror that they held up to themselves rather than to him, which accounts for so many multiple and spurious "Martís" without any relation one to the other.

As Shakespeare notes, the Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose, but only a fool would think that he does so in earnest or to further the divine plan.

El Grito de Baire

The Return of the Best José Martí Website

2010-01-31T09:20:00.005-05:00

From Penúltimos Días:

Hoy todos los martianos — que es decir, todos los cubanos buenos — estamos de plácemes porque ha reaparecido en el Internet, después de una lamentable ausencia de 8 años, el sitio web dedicado a las Obras de Carlos Ripoll sobre José Martí y otros temas de la historia cubana. Como investigador, crítico y exponente de la vida y obra de Martí, Ripoll ocupa un lugar privilegiado, porque le tocó a él — principal y casi exclusivamente a él — la tarea de no sólo difundir pero defender el legado martiano ante las falsificaciones de los meretrices oficiales del régimen, que por 50 años han pretendido ver en su amo la imagen de Martí y en Martí el rostro de Marx. No creo que ningún cubano desde el exilio haya hecho obra más útil o de mayor trascendencia para el futuro de la patria.

For more comments by me in Penúltimos Días and other blogs:

http://www.backtype.com/url/josemartiblog.blogspot.com

Another Unknown José Martí Poem (and Why)

2009-08-04T21:15:00.008-04:00

It is not every day that I can offer my readers a new poem by José Martí. There are, of course, hundreds of "new poems" by Martí -- every poem that one has not read by him, which, in the case of most people, means all his poems except four or five from Versos sencillos -- is, in effect, a "new poem" and discovery. But I don't mean "new" in that sense. By "new" I mean a poem which no one has laid eyes upon since Martí first wrote or published it, a fruit left unpicked in the well-travelled selva (forest) from which Martí admonished Gonzalo de Quesada not to bear away any branch that was not pendulous with fruit.

I was fortunate to discover and I am more fortunate still to own just such a treasure, an hitherto unknown poem dedicated by Martí to his mother on her birthday or Saint's Day, which I presented to my readers as a Mother's Day gift in 2007. Little did I imagine then that I would subsequently locate another new poem by José Martí:

INVERNAL

Triste y árido, el invierno
embozado en nubes vuelve
y la luz entre las sombras
va moriéndose, moriéndose.

Como yertos esqueletos
troncos y ramas se yerguen,
y sin rumores y helada
detiene el curso la fuente.

¡Adiós, juguetones trinos!
¡Adiós, cantares alegres!
Caen los nidos desiertos
del techo que les guarece.

Como un enjambre de blancos
insectos, puros, solemnes,
caen á inundar la tierra,
caen los copos de nieve.

Y entre el profundo silencio
y el misterio que entristece,
se agita por todas partes
el aliento de la muerte.

¿Dónde van esos ancianos
con paso trémulo y breve,
fija en tierra la mirada
tristemente, tristemente?

Se apoya el uno en el otro
y así apenas se sostienen,
que la vejez les abate
con el peso de su nieve.

¡Nieve¡ ¡Nieve en todas partes!
El frío les entumece
y hasta a correr por sus miembros
la sangre apenas se atreve;

Como entre los rudos témpanos
con lentitud deteniéndose,
apenas el agua corre
por el cauce de la fuente.

¿Pero adónde van? ¿Adónde
con paso trémulo y breve?
Van al eterno silencio,
al misterio de la muerte.

¡Oh, madre naturaleza,
cómo tu invierno se aviene
con el tristísimo invierno
que la vida nos ofrece!

En ambos, ¡adiós, cantares!
¡adiós, risas y placeres!
¡adiós, rica exuberancia
de la juventud ardiente!

Pero, ¡qué fin tan distinto
el tuyo y el nuestro tienen!
¡Dos inviernos tan iguales
y después tan diferentes!

¡Oh, madre naturaleza,
tú, tras el frío y la nieve,
a lá pompa y a la gala
de la primavera vuelves!

Pero nosotros, ¡oh, tristes!
tras la vejez que nos hiere,
tras el invierno encontramos
el silencio de la muerte.

We must admit that Shakespeare did his comparison of the seasons in Nature to the seasons of man's life rather more memorably; but this is by no means a discreditable performance. The tone is lofty and suitable to its subject. Great care has been taken in the choice of language, and if the thought is not quite on a par with the mechanics of the poem, the armature sustains and exhibits it to the best advantage. This poem is undoubtedly by José Martí and its attribution cannot be challenged. However, the José Martí who wrote it was not our José Martí. The author is another 19th century poet named José Martí. In Our Martí's lifetime, this other Martí was the more famous poet. In the 20th century, however, Our Martí quite overshadowed the other Martí, and today when one says "José Martí" there is no confusion: there is only one José Martí and he belongs not only to us but to humanity.

The proof that José Martí Folguera (1850-1929), the Catalan poet, dramatist and translator, was more famous at the time than his Cuban counterpart is borne out by the fact that it is Our Martí who alludes to him and was acquainted with his work, not the other way around.

When the 22-year old Martí lived in Mexico, enjoying his first and only success as a playwright, a rumor circulated around the city that he was going to take to the stage himself. Martí ended such speculation in a humorous article in the Revista Universal (October 30, 1875). Humor, of course, was not Martí's forte: we can count on one hand how many times he even attempted it in his writings. Gravitas is a prerequisite for great men and only Lincoln dared to be his own jester. But this note shows that the young Martí could laugh at himself and did when the occasion presented itself. Later in life, there would be few such occasions. Savor, then, the rarest vintage in Martí's well-appointed rhetorical cellar:

PROTESTO

De ninguna manera: aunque no es necesario advertirlo, el José Martí que va a trabajar en el teatro de la zarzuela no es nuestro compañero de redacción.

Ya había un José Martí poeta, catalán, más medidor de versos que inspirado, y muy amigo de Ramón [de] Campoamor. Hay otro pintor [José Martí y Monsó], valleisoletano a quien en la Exposición de 1871 le premiaron un hermoso cuadro sobre el derecho de pernada. Otro hay alpargatero, orador de club en Valencia que perdió un brazo en una asonada republicana, y que es, según cuentan, la mismísima piel del demonio. Y todavía hay otro, loco en el Manicomio de Zaragoza, con quien el de aquí se está encontrando alguna que otra afinidad. Pero aún no había un José Martí actor.

Ventajas de tener nombres ilustres, derivados en línea recta de muy plebeyos escuderos.

[I PROTEST

Although it is hardly necessary to point this out, under no circumstances is the José Martí who is going to be working at the zarzuela theatre our fellow editorial writer of the same name.

There is already a José Martí who is a poet, a Catalan, more a scanner of verse than one inspired, who is a follower of Ramón de Campoamor. There is another, from Valladolid, an artist [José Martí Mansó] whose beautiful painting "Droit du Seigneur" was awarded a prize at the 1871 Exposition. And still another, a sandal-maker and orator at a club in Valencia, who lost an arm in a republican uprising, whom they say is the Devil's own. And finally there is a lunatic at the Zaragoza Madhouse, also named José Martí, with whom the José Martí here is beginning to find one or two affinities. (Was this the same "madman of Zaragoza," elsewhere mentioned by Martí, who thought that his own nose was a sausage with attendant complications?)

Such are the advantages of having an illustrious name derived in a strict line of descent from very plebeian custrels (pages who carry a knight's armor and shield when not in battle)].

Whether he deserves his fate or not, Martí Folguera is not completely forgotten. We were able to locate him even if the editors of the Critical Edition of Martí's Obras Completas could not. There is a street named for him in his native Reus, Catalonia, and his portrait hangs in the Town Hall, alongside other illustrious sons of that municipality, including the general and politician Juan Prim y Prats, the painter Mariano Fortuny and the architect Antonio Gaudí. José Martí Folguera's fame, unlike that of the others, however, is pretty much confined to the petite patrie because he does not own his name.

Recently, Martí Folguera's reputation got an unexpected boost from, of all places, India; and, unbeknownst to me, I had a small part in the revival (so to speak). My English translation of the Versos sencillos, issued in 1997, was pirated by an Indian publisher and used to create a Hindi version. Apparently the Simple Verses was popular there and the publisher decided to reprint other books by Martí. One of the books selected was Versos Castellanos (1893), which had been out of print for 100 years. I don't have to say who is the real author. By now, I suppose the Indian publisher knows too.

In one of five quotes on the internet, Martí Folguera advises: "No te fijes de lo que pasa, fíjate de lo que permanece, lo eterno. La vida pasa, la muerte permanece. Lo uno es lo accidental lo otro es lo esencial." [Don't pay attention to what passes, heed what remains -- the eternal. Life passes, death remains. One is accidental and the other essential.] Well, not always. Sometimes life persists after death and sometimes a mere accident can bring new life.

From Red to Pink: The "Outing" of José Martí (Who Was Not Gay)

2009-07-24T12:01:00.035-04:00

I will not pretend that I did not expect it to happen because I did. It had to happen eventually (even inevitably) because José Martí could not be the exception, or, rather, could not be exempted from the fate that has befallen every other historical figure in recent times from Jesus Christ to Abraham Lincoln. Martí, too, has now been conscripted and enrolled in the legions of the great gay dead. Posthumously outing historical figures, on the flimsiest of evidence or no evidence at all, is somewhat akin to the Mormon practice of baptizing dead heathens by proxy on the presumption that they would have wanted to be saved. In both cases the numbers of the "faithful" are increased at the expense of free will and free association. A religion or a sexual orientation is not something that should be bestowed on those who never embraced it and do not have the choice of rejecting it.

We knew also that if Martí fell prey to this new historiographical mania it would not be the Communists who targeted him. Cuba's official historians, vetted and licensed by the regime, do not engage in this kind of revisionism. Except for their fetish about Martí as a proto-Marxist and the "Intellectual Author of Moncada," communist martianos (a tautology if there ever was one) have never endorsed unorthodox interpretations of his life, especially his private life. The paternity of María Mantilla, ascribed to Martí by others in contravention of his own testimony, has always been rejected by them. Other salacious rumors, such as Carlos Márquez Sterling's unsourced allegation in his 1941 biography that Martí regularly patronized prostitutes while living in New York, have not even elicited the attention that a refutation would bring to them. The iconic Martí is still the obligatory image promoted in Cuba; but although the regime has left Martí on his pedestal it has undermined its foundations by crediting him with all its actions, which, in effect, amounts to nothing less than ascribing to him all its crimes and blunders. It would have been better if rather than co-opting Martí the Castro regime had denounced him. Instead, Martí has been become the "National Scapegoat" for the regime, the first cause, as many see it, of our continuing national nightmare. I long refused to believe that this was so and I still refuse to believe that it is generally true; but, sad to say, I have met enough indoctrinated Cubans to convince me that many do now regard Martí exactly as they have been taught for 50 years to regard him (i.e. as Fidel Castro's John the Baptist), which, of course, is a greater offense to his memory than even deconstructing him as an homosexual.

This is, of course, first and foremost, faddishness. It wouldn't be happening to Martí if it had not already happened to everybody else of any historical importance. But beyond this propensity on the part of many Cuban intellectuals to keep apace with whatever is fashionable in their milieu, howsoever absurd, there may be another reason for raising doubts about Martí's sexual preference: the misguided belief that to wrest Martí from the Communists it is necessary to shatter the icon and invent a new Martí for the post-"Nuevo Hombre," when, in fact, all that is required is to clear away the cobwebs of deceit and calumny that have enveloped him for the last half-century and allow him to speak for himself without interpreters. Instead, they add their own cobwebs no less misleading for being novel and contribute also to the general work of desolation.

In an interview given to Radio Martí and broadcast to Cuba on June 23rd, the well-known Paris-based Cuban exile author Zoé Valdés, who was introduced on the show as an "impassioned, heretical, erotic, critical and frontal personality who is not afraid of polemics or of championing politically incorrect positions," declared (as if to prove just that): "De Martí siempre me gustó esa manera tan ardua, apasionada, y urgente que tenía de escribir. Y su poesía amorosa, erótica, y aquel poema homosexual de Martí, titulado Alfredo, que han querido tanto esconder" (I've always liked Martí's manner of writing, so arduous, impassioned and urgent. And his erotic love poetry, and that homosexual poem of Martí's, entitled "Alfredo," which they have wanted so much to suppress).

She had already cited this canard on her blog "Zoe Valdés" on January 28, 2009 and May 19th 2009 as an homage to Martí on the anniversaries of his birth and death. On his birthday she confined herself to the observation, which she said no one could deny, that the poem "tiene su detalle" [a specialness about it] and her readers were not slow to pick up on her hint. She was more explicit on May 19, calling "Alfredo" a poem "con claras connotaciones homosexuales" [a poem with clear homosexual connotations]. In fact, Zoé Valdés has made it a point to cite this poem every time she has written about Martí since 2006. On her previous blog "Zoé Valdés en Skyrock" she mentioned it three more times, averring that in her opinion "este poema posee una carga homosexual muy fuerte" [this poem has a very strong homosexual current] and that she has been studying it for years because "me ha dado una dimensión de Martí muy especial. La de un ser sumamente libre y valiente" [it has given me a new dimension of Martí as a supremely free and brave human being]. This is a "new [emphasis mine] dimension" for her and it was revealed to her through what she considers a "homosexual poem?" The first time she cited "Alfredo" on her blog [Sept. 30, 2006], flushed with the excitement of her "discovery," she went so far as to imagine Martí prostrate before his male lover: "Cae extenuado de amor, de rodillas cede ante el cuerpo amigo, la cabellera rubia roza y dibuja siluetas en los músculos suaves" [Exhausted by love he falls on his knees before his friend's body, brushes against his blonde hair and draws silhouettes on his soft muscles].

If Martí had written such a poem rather than Zoé, it might indeed have been suppressed by either the author or by "pious hands" (as so much else was in fact suppressed). But there has never been any attempt to conceal the poem Alfredo. Martí himself did not conceal it: the poem survives because he caused it to be inserted in the Revisa Universal (April 1, 1875). He did not disown "Alfredo" in his Literary Testament and Gonzalo de Quesada did not exclude it from the first edition of his Obras Completas. It has appeared in every subsequent edition as well as in collections of his Complete Poetry. If it is true that "they have wanted so much to suppress" this poem, they (whoever "they" are) have not done a very credible job. The poem, it is true, is not widely known and has not been widely commented, a fate it shares with Martí's other early poems published in Mexico, which are more conventional than exceptional and do not exhibit the brazen originality of the Versos libres or Versos sencillos. As poetry "Alfredo" must be judged, and if judged as poetry, it deserves the inconspicuous place in the canon which it has always occupied. To rescue it from obscurity on its poetic merits would require a critical re-evaluation of Martí's poetry which, hopefully, will never come to past. The only way for this poem to become relevant, and transcend, as it were, its limitations as poetry, is to read it as something other than just a poem. Zoé Valdés chooses to read it as a "homosexual poem." To be sure, if it were such a thing it would indeed be relevant for more than poetical reasons. But would it have escaped everybody's attention except hers? This is not to deny her powers of perception, elsewhere amply demonstrated; but merely to assert, with all due respect, that she does not alone possess them; and that were this poem indeed what she imagines it to be, she would not have been the first to notice it or comment upon it, Cubans being Cubans.

The 7-page poem (too long to reproduce here) is about a youth named "Alfredo" who rejects carnal for spiritual love -- a commonplace of Romantic poetry. "Era raro, en verdad, aquel Alfredo," as Martí puts it; but not so "queer" as Valdés would have him: "Todo, oh mujer, porque en la herida frente/Amor me digas y me des un beso." [Everything, oh woman, I would give/If you spoke of love and kissed my wounded forehead]. Alfredo wants the impure woman to become virtuous and worthy (of him). Alas, he is not very lucky in love: "Buscó mujeres, y lo hallado aterra" [He looked for women and what he found is horrifying]. Still, Alfredo keeps looking for the ideal woman and he excludes none: "No ha derecho al amor la mujer fea!" [Ugly women, too, have the right to be loved]. Because, of course, Alfredo's love is spiritual and can see beyond ugly, beyond any exterior factor except gender. His search, fruitless as it is, is confined to women and only women. What then was it that caused Zoé Valdés to interpret this poem as "gay?" I am myself horrified to think that it might be this line describing the tortured state of Alfredo's soul : "Loca en la playa, pájaro en el tronco." Of course, Martí never used "loca" or "pájaro" in any other sense than "madwoman" or "bird." Even if these slang words for homosexual (equivalent to the English "fruit" or "fairy") had existed then, it is inconceivable that Martí would have sunk to such a level of vulgarity as to employ them in a poem, no less.

I know what Zoé Valdés means to do. By asserting that Martí wrote a "homosexual poem," she seeks to alienate Martí from the regime by suggesting that he was the one thing above others that the regime finds most alien. Of course, it is not necessary thus to distance Martí from the regime, as the regime and Martí are polar opposites; nor is misrepresenting Martí an acceptable means of countering the regime's own misrepresentations. I cannot begin to imagine the reaction of Radio Martí's listeners in Cuba to her assertion that Martí wrote a "homosexual poem." Perhaps some did mutter, "Well, this is certainly a different Martí than we have been taught." I suspect that a great many more remarked : "So he's that, too."

For me, at least, Zoé Valdés' observation proved useful because it caused me to search for others that might have intuited what she did. Little did I suppose that I would find a 53-minute movie dedicated to the subject (Martí and I). Written, directed and starring Juan Carlos Zaldívar, it goes far beyond attributing a "gay poem" to Martí. On the basis of his monumental ignorance of Martí's life, he has fashioned some curious conjectures of his own (here refuted en passant):

"Marti and I" is a feature film that reclaims Marti from a mythical, patriarchal grave [what does this mean?] by hinting at the less publicized associations and facts about Marti's life [that is, his putative homosexuality]: his "brotherly" love for his best friend, with whom he lived for five years in exile [why quotation marks around 'brotherly?' Does that prove that the relationship between Fermín Valdés Domínguez and Martí was not brotherly (or was more than brotherly)? And they did not live for 5 years together, although they did live for nearly 5 years in Spain as exiles, in different cities, attending different universities ]; the letters to his mother confessing that women were 'like stone' to him [Martí's lifelong pursuit of women belie his metaphorical assurances to his mother while a youth in prison]; his friendship with Walt Whitman, which led to the first translation to the Spanish of 'Leaves of Grass' in 1887, a text now considered by homosexual historians the earliest 'gay' manifesto [Martí never met Walt Whitman; he did not translate Leaves of Grass (alas!); and in his famous essay on Walt Whitman he does his best to acquit him of any gay associations]; his little known essay defending Oscar Wilde [written before Wildes's troubles, it does not defend his lifestyle but his poetry, which Martí again acquits of the charge of being 'effete']; his own bouts with alcoholism [there were no such "bouts," and is the author implying that alcoholism leads to homosexuality (or vise versa)?] and the interpretation of his death as a suicide in order to protect his life's work in martyrdom [in other words, Martí committed "suicide" so that his life's work would not be ruined by his life].

It is interesting to note that neither Zoé Valdés (whom I admire) nor the ignoramus who produced the 53-minute documentary (whom I do not) make any mention whatever of Martí's opinion of homosexuality, for he had one. They parse his life and poems for hints but ignore what he actually wrote about it. We shall devote "Part 2" to this subject. Then it will be obvious why citing those opinions would have demolished their theories. While Martí never discriminated against anyone based on his sexual orientation, and chose his friends without reference to it, his opinion of homosexuality was far from progressive: for him it was a "culpable vice" and the greatest weakness that could beset a man's character. But more about that next time.

Part 2
A term like progressive is time sensitive. What is regarded as progress today would have been inconceivable 100 years ago, and what progress was then would be insufficient today, as today's progress will seem insignificant tomorrow. It is best, therefore, to judge every era by its own means and standards, and the conduct of men by that of their peers not their descendants. To view the 19th century by the norms of the 21st is like peering through the wrong end of a looking glass. We may not be able to discover the prism which allows us to see our ancestors exactly as they saw themselves and the world around them, but, however imperfectly, it is still better to study them in their time and place than it is to transport them to ours for vivisection.

When I observed that Martí's view of homosexuality would not be considered "progressive" today, I do not mean to suggest that that it was not progressive for his time. What is considered progressive today -- homosexual marriage, adoption, or the creation in laboratories of "made to order" babies a la Michael Jackson's -- is something that no one in the 19th century advocated or imagined. On the other hand, Victorians did not hang homosexuals as their grandfathers had done in the 18th century. So if a respect for life is the ultimate test of tolerance, homosexuals were better off in the 19th century than babies are today. With the exception of Oscar Wilde -- who sued in court to prove that he wasn't a "sodomite" and ended up in jail for perjury -- most homosexuals lived their lives then without fear of persecution and with all the tolerance that the the Victorian habit of cloaking the physical in the sentimental afforded them. Martí himself never detected homosexual themes in other authors when these could be attributed to romantic (i.e. platonic) friendship.

Like most writers of his time (including those who were gay) when Martí alluded to homosexuality it was always in classical terms. In his famous essay on Walt Whitman, Martí defended him from the charge that his poetry echoed the homoeroticism of the Ancients: "Ese lenguaje ha parecido lascivo a los que son incapaces de entender su grandeza; imbéciles ha habido que cuando celebra en "Calamus", con las imágenes más ardientes de la lengua humana, al amor de los amigos, creyeron ver, con remilgos de colegial impúdico, el retorno a aquella viles ansias de Virgilio por Cebetes, y de Horacio por Giges y Licisco." [To those incapable of understanding its greatness Whitman's language seems lewd; fools, with the affected innocence of impudent schoolboys, have imagined they saw in his celebration of the love between friends in "Calamus," with images the most ardent of the human tongue, a return to the vile desires of Virgil for Cebes and of Horace for Gyges and Lysiscus.] Well, let's hear it for the impudent schoolboys: they obviously knew more about Whitman's "vile desires" than did Martí and were in this case more incisive readers than the greatest critic of the age.

Martí's most recent translator, Esther Allen, who renders viles ansias as "low desires," suggests in her "Notes" that Martí may not actually be condemning homosexuality here but pedophilia since all the examples he gives from Classical times involve a mesalliance between an older man and a youth. Of course, that was the only kind of same-sex relationship which was condoned by the Greeks and Romans, and even if Martí were specifically defending Whitman against the charge of pedophilia (he would be wrong there, too), it would not mean that he found homosexuality unobjectionable, as Allen seems to imply. In fact, she implies much worse: that it is only the exploitative side (are there any others?) of pedophilia that Martí condemns, specifically the fact Virgil's younger lover was also his slave. In order that Martí should not appear politically incorrect, Allen ends up by making him an apologist for the "vile desires" he condemns. This Martí never was. If he condemns homosexuality in its classical form, it is not because he was unfamiliar with or condoned its modern variant; but because it would have been impossible for Martí to refer to it in any other way in the general circulation periodicals for which he wrote [in The New York Times, for example, "homosexual" did not appear until 1914, when George Bernard Shaw used it]. Martí knew that a classical reference was the most acceptable and comprehensible way to convey his meaning to his readers in Latin America because the term "homosexual" was unknown to laymen at the time. It was not, however, unknown to Martí. One of the most voracious and eclectic of readers (great writers are always great readers), Martí was well-versed in the scientific or pseudo-scientific theories on the origins of homosexuality. He had certainly read Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) which first introduced the clinical terms "homosexual" and "heterosexual." We know this for a fact because Martí was the first Hispanic writer to use the word "homosexual" (in referring to a female slave, Elisea Diago, in an unpublished synopsis of a projected book to be entitled "Mis Negros"). Martí knew what he was condemning even if commentators today would have preferred him not to know.

If Zaldívar (of Martí and I) had bothered to read Martí's essay on Walt Whitman rather than presume that its existence meant an endorsement of Whitman's homosexuality and tacit admission of his own, he would have discovered that Martí was a champion of the "Good Grey Poet" against those who contended (rightly) that his poems of masculine friendship were actually love poems to other men. If Zoe Valdés understood his inability to detect and quickness to reject all suggestions of homosexuality in Whitman's poetry, she would perhaps have been more reluctant herself to attribute a "gay poem" to Martí.

For gay poets and artists Whitman's Leaves of Grass was a great awakening, revealing or confirming to them their own sexuality, or at least assuring them that they were not alone. They did not fail to grasp immediately the real significance of Whitman's poem. For Martí, what mattered was to defend Whitman, whom he admired as a poet and a man, from the charge that he was neither. Whitman would have been ever so grateful. He didn't like to be thought of as the "Good Gay Poet" and recoiled in horror when anyone suggested that his poems had a homosexual content, even inventing a tribe of illegitimate children to refute aspersions on his manhood. The "Father of Gay Liberation," as Whitman is now known, never succeeded in liberating himself. Now those who know nothing about Martí and not much more about Whitman than that he was gay are trying to "liberate Martí" by turning him into one of Whitman's gay proselytes when Martí in fact belonged to another fan club, composed of heterosexual knights-errant (very errant) who sincerely denied what Whitman himself always denied but not so sincerely.

Martí again touches upon homosexuality, with the same classical allusions, in his "Introduction" to Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde's El Poema de Niágara (1882): "Hembras, hembras débiles parecerían los hombres, si se dieran a apurar, coronados de guirnaldas de rosas, en brazos de Alejandro y de Cebetes, el falerno meloso que sazonó los festines de Horacio." [Men would be as women, weak women, if crowned with garlands of roses, they fell into the arms of Alexander or Cebes while pressing to their lips the honeyed falerno wine that graced Horace's feasts.] Martí's attitude towards homosexuality has nothing to do with morality or religion. He sees it as a character flaw that makes men weak as the weakest women. The most famous example of Martí's polemical writing, "A Vindication of Cuba," was occasioned by an editorial which asserted that Cuban men were "effeminate" and would not fight for their freedom. The charge of effeminacy was not something that Martí took lightly or would have levelled lightly. Yet the weakness that he imputed to gay men was not a pretext to exclude them from anything. It was merely his observation: Martí does not prescribe a cure for this "weakness" whether punitive or therapeutic. He implicitly accepts the right of homosexuals to be themselves, though he can never approve of what they choose to be. Tolerance does not require one to approve of something he finds objectionable, but merely to let it be. In today's society, this is not enough: the true liberal must not only be tolerant but celebratory of "diversity." At least that must be his public face. If anyone asserts to you, however, that there is no difference between criticism (constructive or otherwise) and persecution (always destructive) point out that very few people if any were ever wagged to death with a finger.

Martí never treated humans except as human: there were no gradations of humanity for him, and he never excluded anyone from his friendship because he disapproved of his conduct in a personal sphere.

Part 3 will focus on Martí's gay friends.

Part 3
"No amaba la crueldad en los decires; ni la hablaba ni la escribía; ante la que brotaba de los labios de los otros, sonreía tristemente, cual si extendiese su sonrisa, como un escudo, sobre aquellos que eran heridos por los dardos." [He had no love for cruelty and neither spoke nor wrote it. When it flowed from the lips of others, he smiled sadly, as if to extend his smile, like a shield, over those wounded by the darts.]

So wrote the Colombian José M. Vargas Vila about his friend José Martí in a memorial tract where the famed freethinker compared Martí to Christ and other religious figures and symbols at least 100 times, describing him as the "Nazarene of Our Democracies," the "Eucharist of Ideas," the "Good Samaritan of Liberty" and the "God of a New Genesis." Many, of course, have made the same or similar comparisons over the years. Vargas Vila, however, was merely repeating what he had written while Martí still lived, eliciting from him an heartfelt letter of gratitude as well as the tears that started in his eyes when a little girl read Vargas Vila's tribute at a reception in his honor shortly before his death.

Vargas Vila was both the most popular Hispanic novelist of his day and the first Latin American to support himself exclusively by his pen (something that neither Martí nor Rubén Darío were able to do). He still holds the distinction of having more of his books translated into French than any other Spanish writer. Despite his success or more likely because of it, Vargas Vila was a pariah for all of his adult life, accused (falsely) by his detractors of being a satyr and a satanist, not only because he was an enemy of organized religion and quasi-theocratic states such as flourished in Latin America at the time, but because he was gay. (Vargas Vila lived for 43 years with his companion and adopted son, Ramón Palacio Piso, who also knew Martí and praises his kindness and generosity in the preface to Vargas Vila's posthumously published, Martí, Apóstol y Libertador.)

Martí the "Christlike figure," who never spoke a word of derision and shielded him when others did, befriended Vargas Vila during the time that both were exiles in New York. Besides their mutual interest in literature and admiration for each other's work, they shared the same contempt for imperialism and both foresaw (when practically nobody else did) the crucible that the "American Century" would represent for Nuestra América. So greatly did he respect and trust Vargas Vila that Martí, the most secretive of men when it came to his revolutionary activity, confided to the Colombian his plans for the invasion of Cuba. From Martí's death in 1895 until his own in 1933, Vargas Vila was the leading critic of U.S. intervention in Latin America, honoring Martí's injunction, in his Political Testament, to combat it. This is more than Martí's closest Cuban allies, who acquiesced to the imposition of the Platt Amendment, did.

Martí's friendship with Vargas Vila may seem a contradiction of his published references to homosexuality and perhaps it is. The Mexican critic Alfonso Reyes described Vargas Vila as "a little man, none too masculine" and Carlos Ripoll in his "Martí y el Sexo" mentions that Vargas Vila was a transvestite. His effeminacy, more even that his homosexuality, should have been objectionable to Martí, but it wasn't. Nor did he consider Vargas Vila "weak" because of it. His explicit trust in him proves it. Martí was dogmatic in theory but accommodating in practice, which is certainly preferable to being open-minded on paper but close-minded in person. Ripoll may have found the key to understanding this seeming dichotomy in a quotation by Martí: "Duro con el pecado y blando con el pecador." [Be hard on the sin but soft on the sinner.]

Martí, of course, did not have many friends like Vargas Vila, who was very much sui generis for his place if not his time. Others there must have been less well-known and more circumspect who were treated with no less respect by Martí than was Vargas Vila. It is possible to make a long list of historic and contemporary figures whose genius Martí acknowledged without ignoring their flaunting of societal conventions. Rimbaud, for example, of whom Martí said in his Notebooks: "Ange en exil", qui eut sur l'esprit, le coeur et les sens du malheureux un si funeste empire, si complétement diabolique. [An "angel in exile," over whom held sway the spirit, heart and sense of an unfortunate, if not completely diabolic, being.] Or Julián del Casal, second only to Martí as Cuba's greatest poet: "Aquel fino espíritu ... ya no [es] hoy más que un puñado de versos, impresos en papel infeliz, como dicen que fue la vida del poeta. Murió el pobre poeta, y no lo llegamos a conocer. ¡Así vamos todos, en esa pobre tierra nuestra, partidos en dos, con nuestras energías regadas por el mundo, viviendo sin persona en los pueblos ajenos, y con la persona extraña sentada en los sillones de nuestro pueblo propio!" [This pure spirit ... is now nothing but a handful of poems printed upon wretched paper, as wretched as the poet's life is said to have been. The poor poet died before we were able to know him. It is the way all of us go in this poor land of ours, divided in two, with our energies strewn all over the world, living without individuality in foreign countries while strangers occupy the seats that belong to us in our own.]

Conclusion
Martí was not a homosexual nor were his writings infused with homoeroticism. He did not approve of homosexuality, which, of course, does not make him a homophobe; and he did not discriminate against homosexuals, which, of course, does not make him a homophile. His attitude towards homosexuality, in brief, was that of most people.

I am aware that this study, which seeks to correct distortions of Martí's life and of his views on homosexuality, has the unintended consequence of magnifying the importance of this subject to him. In fact, there are a scant 4 or 5 references to it, totalling less than 100 words, among the more than 4 million which Martí wrote. The expert on this subject, Professor Emilio Bejel, author of Gay Cuban Nation, managed to miss in his readings of Martí's works all of his references to homosexuality, which shows how easy this is to do. Now, however, those words cannot be ignored in justice to Martí and the truth.

http://www.martinoticias.com/FullStory.aspx?ID=8B08EC90-2F34-4C52-8EF17246D905EB61

http://mojo.helen-marie.com/engage/project/marti-and-i

Martí Answers the "Cuestión Toral:" Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Black Man?

2009-06-27T11:45:00.005-04:00

José Martí called it the "cuestión toral," which any Spanish-English dictionary defines as the "main or principal question," but, actually, I think that as used by Martí it means much more than that. The root of the word "toral" is "toro" (bull) which connotes in Spanish not just the centrality of the question but also its force. In English answering such a question would require one to "take the bull by the horns," which is never an easy or safe thing to do. Whether it was ever posed to him or not, Martí felt compelled to answer this question for everybody else that might be confronted with it. If not a pattern he wished to offer an example that might prove useful to others, and his authority, which always would. Martí believed that "man was naturally good" but required the "salutary influence of example" to widen the scope of his interests and direct his actions. It was necessary, therefore, to build a consensus for decency as for anything else in the world. This is Martí's attempt to do precisely that in the realm of social relations at their most intimate and revolutionary.

The question which Martí thought so formidable now sounds more sheepish than "toral," though it was certainly not regarded lightly in Martí's day when it was used to test the limits of an individual's racial tolerance: a negative answer marking the reformer as a hypocrite and a positive one as a degenerate. The question, still occasionally heard today but no longer an acceptable litmus test of one's racial attitudes, is: "Would you allow your daughter to marry a black man?" This question was usually posed to those who professed a belief in the equality of the races by those who did not. Today it is the question, not the answer, which is politically incorrect; yet, though clichèd and tendentious, it is not without value. It helped Martí, for instance, to plumb the depths of racism and its causes more deeply than in any other analysis with the exception of his classic rejection of racial divisions ["There is no basis for racial hatred because there are no races"]. It is in that light that we must view his assertion that intermarriage is a "question devoid of meaning" for him. Of course, if there are no races (as Martí contends) then one cannot speak of their mingling as either desirable or objectionable. As Martí puts it, "What already is, is."

It is still possible, however, to consider this question from an economics perspective, since those who belong to the emancipated class would necessary be in a disadvantageous position in respect to those who have always been compensated for their labor and benefitted from their own and their ancestors' exertions. To view the racial divide as an economic divide is to envision a solution to the "race problem." Economic differences are subject to amelioration, at least in a capitalist society, and Martí recognizes that it is desirable and even possible to transcend them. He considers this transformation more cultural than political, requiring a revolution in human relations rather than in human affairs. It will begin from the bottom up because it is there that all classes of men associate regularly on the closest terms. In fact, Martí believes that this transformation is already underway despite legal prohibitions and social barriers. More farsighted still is Martí's interpretation of strictures against intermarriage as societal controls intended to bolster the patriarchal order by limiting the autonomy of women as well as that of the youth of both races who rejected these prejudices. This analysis, more than just a novel conception, is a certain antecedent, if not the model, for modern thought on this and analogous subjects. If Martí's private ruminations on intermarriage had been publicized in his time, rather than wilfully suppressed till our own, Martí would indeed have become an obligatory reference on this subject.

Instead, these pages were interred in Martí's archives for 20 years by Gonzalo de Quesada, his "chosen disciple" and literary executor; and for an additional 60 years, the last 30 years of the Republic and the first 30 years of the Castroite tyranny, by Quesada's son and Martí's hereditary archivist and editor, Quesada y Miranda. It was not until the latter's death in 1975, followed, in short order, by that of his son and last keeper of the Martí archive, Quesada y Michelson, that Martí's papers came under the control of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, in whose vaults they are now stored (the remnants, that is, which were not appropriated as "souvenirs" by party leaders at the time of Quesada's passing). This particular document, uncollected for nearly 90 years, was finally published by the regime in the first volume of its Anuario del Centro de Estudios Martianos (1978), a scholarly journal with a very limited circulation whose stated goal is to synchronize José Martí's writings with Karl Marx's, studying Martí in the context of Marx (since the fall of the Soviet Union, the hierarchy has been reversed). It would indeed have been difficult to reconcile Martí's thought on this subject with Marx's. Ironically, Marx's favorite daughter did indeed marry a man of color, the Cuban Pablo Lafargue, whom Marx dubbed in his letters "the gorilla."

The "newly-discovered" document did have some obvious uses for Castro's propagandists, but these were hardly exploited by the editors. In a brief and superficial "Note" accompanying the text, the directors of the Center credited the Revolution with the abolition of racial discrimination in Cuba, as might be expected; but refrained from explaining how the rights of one group were increased while the rights of all Cubans were eliminated. The document itself was edited in a hasty manner, with many errata and supposedly undecipherable words, as well as not a few questionable conjectures and substitutions. Fortunately, CEM reproduced the original manuscript as well, which has allowed us to correct some of the misreadings; we suspect there are others, but we have incorporated only what we could decipher with confidence. Translating the text into English was also of much help in parsing what Martí had meant in the original Spanish, since whatever did not make any sense in English was likely not to stand too careful a scrutiny in Spanish either. For example, in the Center's faulty transcription, Martí sanctions the marriage of "el blanco y la negra, la negra y el blanco," when, obviously, he meant "el blanco y la negra, el negro y la blanca." (Such misreadings may interest some readers, but we shall not vex the patience of the rest by multiplying these examples).

Martí's answer to the "cuestión toral" was part of his "Escenas," a series of outlines for dramatic works which were never completed but which Martí believed of sufficient interest to recommend their publication in his Literary Testament. This is in fact the longest of his surviving"Escenas." It bears some relation to another draft, for a book called Mis Negros, which he intended to write about blacks that had most influenced his life and moved his heart, from the slave whom he had seen flogged as a boy to the enigmatic "Isabel, homosexual" (which Carlos Ripoll identifies as possibly the first use of the word in Spanish).

There is a stream of consciousness quality about Martí's writing here, which is not uncharacteristic of him but which here appears especially pronounced. His style, consequently, is highly suggestive because elliptical. Ideas are touched upon without much elaboration, or when there is an attempt to expand on them, the result is often cursory, as when he lists the three reasons for marriage, something that would certainly admit of many more than three. This is not to imply that Martí's thinking on the subject is evasive or unfocused: he declares forthrightly that races should mix and that their fusion is desirable for society. As for himself, Martí makes it clear that it would take nothing short of a Second Coming for him to find a man (of whatsoever race) worthy of marrying his ideal of a daughter, but if there should be such a man it would not matter to him what his race was so long as his daughter loved him and he was in a position to make her happy. In that case Martí was even disposed to move with his daughter to some unnamed foreign country where black men lived as brothers and welcomed all men to the common table. Such a relocation would, perhaps, be necessary to protect his hypothetical daughter from social ostracism and his prospective son-in-law from lynching. At the same time, Martí trusted in the advent of more progressive times because he genuinely believed in man's capacity to grow and society's ultimate incapacity to stop him.

PARA LAS ESCENAS. --

Y ahora viene la cuestión toral -- la cuestión del matrimonio. La eterna pregunta. Y ¿tú casarías tu hija con un negro? Para mí no tiene esta pregunta ninguna significación. Es difícil que yo encontrase marido digno de mi hija, si yo tuviera por ejemplo la hija que yo quisiera tener, fina e ideal, con mucha mente y mucho corazón, y tan sensible, que no me la pudiesen rozar sin lastimarla el [casco], de su cabello. Si yo encontrase en un negro las altas condiciones apetecibles para darle esta gloria y consuelo de mi vida, frágil como la espuma y limpia como un rayo de sol, yo sé que tendría la sensatez y el valor de afrontar el aislamiento social, y de consentir por mi parte en acceder a la voluntad de mi hija. O la llevaría a tierra, donde se sientan en haz los negros y dan el brazo a todos los señores los negros cultos y honrados.

Pero para eso sería previo que mi hija se enamorara del negro, y que el negro demostrase, no sólo condiciones de generosidad en bruto, ni su simplicidad, que es hoy con justicia y seguirá siendo para los hombres honrados, su mayor poder, porque es la prueba patente de su mayor derecho, sino las condiciones excepcionales de carácter y de cultura necesarias para enamorar a mi hija, a despecho de la oposición y repulsa general, y los prejuicios sociales, odios a la juventud y a la mujer, que el problema negro implica.

El matrimonio no es un derecho de cada hombre sobre cada mujer, sino la unión voluntaria de dos seres de diverso sexo. Para los fines de la vida (que [van] más allá, quién es el atrevido que se arroga el derecho de declarar inseparables a dos seres, cuando los separa [p.i.] ante nuestros ojos la muerte:) La unión voluntaria. De modo que cuando exista la mutua adhesión, la voluntad libre a la vez, del blanco y de la negra, de la negra y del blanco, existirá la condición esencial del matrimonio, y se hará en la ley, porque ya está hecho en el [orden] del espiritú y en el [tribunal] de la naturaleza. Eso en cuanto a la ética de la ley. Ahora en cuanto a la práctica. Cómo se resuelve el problema? Iremos a negro? El negro vendrá a blanco? Deben mezclarse las razas. Y la otra pregunta: Puede impedirse que se mezclen? Lo que es, es.

¿Por qué tiemblan ante la unión legal de las dos razas los que han venido haciendo sin miedo hasta ahora la fusión legal? ¿Por qué no desean un marido blanco, estos, un marido favorecido por las tradiciones sociales, para la pobre hija mulata que se tuvo con la esclava o con la concubina? ¿Por qué no corregir con la energía del carácter el defecto social creado por el frenesí de la pasión o el hábito del vicio? La fusión de las dos razas se ha hecho, y se continuará haciendo. Veamos cómo se hará de modo que no degrade al que está arriba, sino levante al que está abajo.--

Veamos si hay un peligro tan grande en los matrimonios. -- Los matrimonios tienen tres maneras de hacerse, la atracción físico-espiritual, la ocasión y la semejanza de cultura. -- La atracción corpórea es la [línea] más baja, y menos deseable, y por fortuna nuestros hombres negros están ya tan cultivados por lo menos como nosotros en este punto, y no son bestias feroces, sino que ven en la mujer a más de la hermosura las condiciones ideales. La ocasión, conspira. Y cuando sean muchas, [garantizarán] precisamente que se han acabado los horrores, y no habrá anatema. Y la cultura. Ahí está. Hay que levantarle al negro la altivez, para su propio bien, para que no [olvide] cuando vivía entre montes; y adquirirá pronto el influjo y la riqueza, que son condiciones del matrimonio. Y es necesario que tenga orgullo, sin lo cual el matrimonio no es posible.

¿Por dónde empezará la fusion? Por donde empieza todo lo justo y lo difícil, por la gente humilde. Los matrimonios comenzarán entre las dos razas entre aquellos a quienes el trabajo mantiene juntos. Los que se sientan todos los días a la misma mesa, están más cerca de elegir en la mesa su compañera, que [los] que no se sientan nunca en ella. De abajo irán viniendo de esa manera.

FOR THE DRAMATIC "SCENES" --

And now comes the principal question -- the question of marriage. The eternal question. "Would you marry your daughter to a negro?" For me that question is devoid of meaning. It would be difficult for me to find a husband worthy of my daughter, supposing I had the fine and ideal daughter which I should wish to have, with much mind and much heart, and so sensible that no one could brush against her or touch a hair on her head without wounding her to the quick. If I found in a black man the desirable attributes that would convince me to give him this glory and consolation of my life, delicate as sea foam and pure as the sun's rays, I know that she would have the sense and the courage to confront the social ostracism, and I, for my part, to accede to my daughter's wishes, even if I had to take her to a land where cultured and honest black men, living in unity, extend the hand of friendship to all men.

For that to happen my daughter would first have to be in love with the black man, and the black man would have to demonstrate, not just his capacity for generosity, nor his simplicity, which is justly regarded by honest men now, as it will be in the future by all men, as his greatest power and the palpable proof of his greater right; but, also, he must show those exceptional attributes of character and culture which will be necessary to win the love of my daughter, despite the general opposition and condemnation, the social prejudices, and the hatred for youth and women, which are also a part of the black problem.

Marriage is not a right which every man has over every woman but the voluntary union of two beings of the opposite sex. It exists to promote the ends of life [which go much farther than life itself, although who would be so insolent as to claim the right to declare two beings inseparable when death separates them before our very eyes?]: A voluntary union. So when there exists a mutual attachment and the free will to formalize it, between white men and black women, and black men and white women, the essential conditions for marriage will also exist, and such unions will be recognized by the law as they are already sanctioned by the laws of the spirit and by natural law. So much as pertains to the ethics of the law. And now as regards the practice. How will this problem be solved? Will we be treated as blacks? Or will blacks achieve the status of whites? The races should mix. And another question: Could they be prevented from mixing? That which already is, is.

Why do they tremble at the legal union of two races who have without fear consented to their illegal fusion for so long? Why wouldn't a white husband, favored by social conventions, be preferred for the poor mulatto daughter born of a slave or concubine? Why not correct with energetic character the social defect created by the frenzy of passion or the habit of vice? The fusion of the two races is already a fact, and it will continue a fact. Let us consider, then, how it should be accomplished in a way that will not degrade those at the top but elevate those at the bottom. --

Let's examine if there really is such a great danger in [inter]marriage? -- There are three ways of forming a marriage -- physical-spiritual attraction; opportunity; and cultural affinity. -- Physical attraction is the lowest and least desirable reason to marry; fortunately, our men of color are not ferocious beasts but at least as cultivated as we are and value in women ideal qualities above physical beauty. The occasion also conspires for change. And precisely when these opportunities to associate freely increase the horror occasioned by such marriages will end as will the anathema. And culture. It too will play its part. We must encourage pride in black men for their own good, that they may always remember when they were their own masters in the mountains; and they will soon acquire the influence and prosperity that makes marriage possible.

And where shall this fusion begin? Where all that is just and difficult always begins -- with the humble people. Marriages between the races will commence among those brought into close contact by their work. Those who sit at the same table every day are that much closer to choosing their mate from that table than those who have never sat there. They shall climb from below by that means.

Martí and the Need for a "Catholic Reformation," or "Padre Gasolina" and Father Cutié

2009-05-21T12:03:00.009-04:00

One of the most controversial of José Martí's writings is his "Carta al hombre del campo," in which he advised the common man not to pay the local priest to baptize his son but to do it himself for no one loved him more or was better qualified to open the door to eternal life than he who had giving life to him. Martí felt the duty to protect the poor from exploitation by dishonest priests no less than by venal rulers, not because he was anti-clerical but because he valued humanity above dogma and could not conceive of "men of God" who were not also devoted to mankind. Socially-conscious priests, who put man's needs before the temporal interests (real or imagined) of the Church, commanded his respect and were defended strenuously by him. The anti-clericalism of the Enlightenment, which was still then and long would remain a dominant theme of continental politics, was always rejected by Martí, who was never an enemy of established religion, but, on the contrary, believed in the essential truth and value of all religions. His censure was reserved for those who violated that truth for their own gain, the real enemies of religion.

Clerical misconduct in Martí's day consisted chiefly in violations of the confessional seal. Many priests then believed in the divine right of kings as many still do in the divine right of dictators, and they regarded it as both their religious and patriotic duty to denounce confessions or even suspicions of disloyalty to the Crown. It didn't hurt, either, that this was also the most efficacious means of obtaining preferment in the Church. In effect every neighborhood church was a CDR, except that the "D" then represented "Destrucción." Other priests, less "high-minded" and more venal, would blackmail penitents for money or sexual favors. The rural clergy were the worst because they were largely unregulated and their victims the most vulnerable.

Priestly celibacy, as such, was the least concern of the communicants and not much of a concern for the clergy. Priests made no effort to live double lives because concubinage was the norm and concealment was neither expected nor necessary. The more scrupulous among them were not impeded from becoming husbands and fathers, nor did they have to exercise those roles by stealth. It should be noted that from time to time there were ecclesiastical efforts at "reform." One bishop, Antonio María de Claret, was actually canonized for his success at convincing priests to abandon their wives and children. The people, however, erected a statue to a priest from Jesús del Monte nicknamed "Padre Gasolina"who fathered 12 children and did not abandon them.

Today hypocrisy is more institutionalized within the Church than it ever was in Martí's day. Then what was normal was regarded as "aberrant." In the 20th century what was aberrant came to be regarded as normal. Ironically, abnormality sometimes makes it safer to practice normality. Witness the case of Father Alberto Cutié. Most Catholics (and especially his own predominantly-Cuban parishioners) were actually relieved to know that his indiscretions, however public and notorious, were not predatory or directed at children, and, accordingly, they were disposed not only to forgive but even to justify his conduct. Not that his conduct, of course, needs any justification. If he had fathered a child and abandoned him, as Paraguay's bishop-turned-president did, twice, then his failure as a man would be far more execrable than his failure as a priest. But what Father Cutié did is not censurable in a man or in a priest. Even the Church seems reluctant to condemn with severity Fr. Cutié's departure from the abnormal and inhuman practice of celibacy, almost as if it regarded the story of a sexually active heterosexual priest as good publicity.

The idea of priests as "eunuchs for Christ" (as John Paul II called them) or nuns as "brides of Christ" seems now rather antiquated, not to say ridiculous. Who is this "Christ" who needs "brides" and "eunuchs?" Certainly not the Christ of the New Testament. It sounds more like some Eastern potentate, perhaps Herod himself. Even the Apostle Paul, the most misanthropic of Christ's disciples, though expressing his personal preference for the single life, yet enjoined those who could not sublimate their sexuality to marry and be spared hell thereby.

Celibacy in the Catholic Church is not a dogma but an administrative rule adopted 700 years ago to ensure its temporal power. That is, its wealth. Married priests tended to be as fond of their children as other men are and as desirous of providing for their earthly needs. Had they been content to deny them their protection, letting them wander the streets as so many "waifs of Christ," priests might never have been forced to embrace the rule of celibacy; but when they started to endow dowries for their daughters and bequeath the "Church's property" to their sons, the pope dictated that henceforth no priest would be allowed to marry, which meant that all priests would have to be celibate because extramarital sex was also forbidden. Whereas Paul had prescribed marriage as a "cure" for fornication, the medieval popes substituted celibacy, except that a hair from the dog that bit you is not a good cure for rabies.

While celibacy turns many priests into hypocrites, it does not turn them into pedophiles. But it is undoubtedly true that it discourages vocations among normal men, creating a void that pedophiles are only too happy to fill. What better cover can there be for the most sexually aberrant of men than to appear as sexless before the world? In fact, these priests were not above sex as much as beneath it. The scandals of pedophile priests and the bishops who abetted and even facilitated their predations did more harm to the Church than all the fictions of the Da Vinci Code.

When isolated cases of abuse, concealed and unaddressed by the Church, suddenly exploded with all the accumulated force of decades, the exceptions came to define the conduct of the entire priesthood, when, actually, the incidence of pedophilia among priests is no higher than among the general population. Here, however, is one instance when the media are not be faulted. If the Church had not so zealously collected its skeletons for all these years, the closet would not have been so full when it finally burst open. The house-cleaning that had so long been deferred, which the Church hoped might not even be necessary, required now the levelling of walls and uprooting of foundations, literally, to compensate the victims of abuse with billions of dollars in settlements. And there is the final irony: the Church does not allow priests to marry because then it might have to pay them a living wage to support their families. Instead, it has been obliged to spend billions to make a tardy amends for the natural consequences of its unnatural policies. The closure and sale of churches and schools, and the general erosion of the Church's temporal and spiritual authority, is the price which it has had to pay to maintain the rule of celibacy which was initially instituted to preserve intact its patrimony and power.

Father Alberto Cutié is in a privileged position in respect to other priests because he is an attraction and rainmaker, and this may have caused him to assume (correctly) that the Church would accommodate his particular lifestyle, as it has always done for a small clique of powerful hierarchs. When compromising photographs of Cutié with a woman were published in a Spanish-language gossip magazine, the Church had no choice but to publicly lament what it had privately sanctioned for years, and still its response could not have been more equivocal, leaving all decisions concerning his future in his own hands.

Father Cutié, who does not seem quite grateful for this special dispensation, has raised the possibility that he may have been set up by the Castro regime (the Cuban equivalent of "the devil made me do it."). It reminded me of Reynaldo Arenas' assertion in his political testament that Fidel Castro was responsible for his AIDS. That may well be the only thing for which Castro was not responsible in that writer's tormented life. A man controls little in this world and less in the nether world that is Castro's Cuba. Of one thing, at least, he is still master, here or in Cuba; and Castro, unless corporeally present, has nothing to do with that. Fidel Castro has robbed all Cubans of much of their autonomy. I see no reason to surrender to him control of aspects of our lives which are not in his control. Personal responsibility for one's acts and the adverse consequences which sometimes attend those acts demands a level of maturity which the Church is unwilling to grant its servants. Celibacy, ultimately, is enforced infantilization, which sacrifices real morality to superficial morality. What is merely superficial is always most vulnerable. It is time for the Church to abandon its revival of the Cult of Hymen and demand of its priests at least the same level of responsibility for their sexuality as it reposes in laymen. Responsibility, however, is impossible without choice. The Greek Orthodox tradition, which runs parallel to the Roman, has always allowed priests to choose between marriage and celibacy. Unless the Roman Catholic Church follows suit, Byzantium may yet again conquer Rome.

When Martí said that "Christianity died at the hands of Catholicism," I think this is what he meant: the extraneous elements which the Church adopted from paganism for less than Christian reasons are subverting the message of Christ and should be discarded before Christianity itself is the casualty.

José Martí and His Judges

2009-03-04T12:20:00.002-05:00

It would be difficult to list all of Martí's professions and occupations, areas of expertise or interest, not only because they were so numerous and varied, but because there is an unfortunate tendency to do too much justice to Martí when he, of all men, does not need to have his résumé padded. Such a phenomenon is by no means peculiar to him; all great men are, to some extent, susceptible to it; and those that were the most fecund and extended themselves over more realms of human knowledge, sometimes as masters but also as apprentices, men such as Jefferson and Martí himself, pose too great a temptation for historians to view their lives under a microscope, isolating and enlarging aspects that appeal to them while ignoring the integral man. To exalt great men for talents which they share in common with all or most men, unlike sycophancy, is an honorable impulse since no one profits from superfluous lapidary inscriptions but the stone-cutter. But flattering the great dead, however sincerely, doesn't constitute a service to them. Expanding the insignificant will always dilute the essential. Sometimes it may do even worse: Jefferson was the father of the domestic nail industry in America and was quite proud of it. For someone who was not Jefferson, such an achievement might be worth remembering. In his case, however, it is best forgotten, since it would add no more to his glory that he employed his slaves (including his own sons) in making nails to defy British tariffs than it would if he had pioneered the cultivation of tax-free domestic tea.

Of course, in Martí we will never encounter such dissonance between the private and public man. Still, the tendency to praise out of measure is just as evident and perhaps even more pervasive because Martí is less liable to criticism. Because Martí liked to doodle (as he did), does that make him a great caricaturist worthy of having his foolscap sold with the best of Goya? Does the fact that Martí had a doctorate in civil and canonical law, and was even, briefly, a law professor in Central America, make him a "great lawyer," as Maceo once referred to him, though Martí never pled a case, or, indeed, worked as an attorney? In fact, Spanish authorities denied him a license to practice law; but though it is a fair conjecture, given his forensic and analytical skills, that he might have been a great lawyer, it is quite another thing to declare him one based on his potential or the few months that he spent as a law clerk. Does the fact that all of Martí's writings are infused with seeds of his philosophy make him a philosopher even though he left no systematic work or schema, requiring that his disciples do for him what Plato did for Socrates, or the authors of the Gospels for Jesus: gather his sayings, expound and extrapolate from them? Martí, like Socrates and Jesus, was a philosopher by example, who lives because of his death not inspite of it. But doesn't that kind of philosopher differ from the theoretical philosopher, the Kants and Spinozas; and is not martyr to truth a better description for them? Martyrdom, of course, does not always attest to the rightness of a man's beliefs, just their depth; but when heroic virtue is conjoined with a righteous cause and sealed by death, it is not necessary to seek for miracles. Yet there are those who do.

Placing Martí on a pedestal so high that we can barely recognize him is not the best way to study him, but still not as ineffective as smashing his statue to pieces and then picking among the fragments for clues as to his real self. Again, Martí is not the first historical figure to be subjected to this treatment; in fact, he is among the last. We are not referring to the wilful falsification of his teachings for political purposes, which has been the case in Cuba ever since his death (1895) and never more so than in the last 50 years; but, rather, to the no less tendentious misrepresentation of his private life as well as public acts. In recent years, writers more apt to credit rumor than fact, who specialize in speculation rather than investigation, and seek to create an effect rather than make a noteworthy contribution to our knowledge of him, have endeavored to "humanize" Martí by turning him into some kind of inhuman monster. One, a psychologist, wrote about the "14 Sins of Martí" (we may all hope to sin so little); another expounded on the "Myths of Martí" (these, of course, have nothing to do with Martí but with the myth-makers) and yet a third revived the rumor that Martí's goddaughter was actually his daughter (since he raised and loved her as a daughter, does this even matter?). What all these works have in common is the suspension of historical rigor in favor of a pet theory, which would, if accepted, supposedly render his serious biographies obsolete. It is, in short, an attempt to replace the permanent with the ephemeral. The antidote to hagiography is not demonology; nor an artificial balance between the good and the bad, as if there were a formula for striking such a balance after death that never existed in life. The best approach is to let the life speak for itself rather than to speak for or against the life. Men like Martí don't need advocates or detractors. Their own words and acts, faithfully represented, are the only brief that they require.

El Grito de Baire

2009-02-24T11:06:00.008-05:00

What better day can there be to relaunch the José Martí Blog than February 24th, the anniversary of the "Grito de Baire," when Martí renewed the epic struggle begun in 1868 to win our country's independence?

114 years removed from that day, which was as redolent with hope for our country as the present is bereft of it, Cuba finds herself in a more deplorable state than she did in 1895: then Cuba was a colony of Spain, now she is the fiefdom of one transplanted Spanish family whose patriarch fought with Weyler's forces against our independence. His sons, who head the criminal enterprise which has despoiled our country and enslaved her people for half a century, have attempted to co-opt Martí's legacy, proclaiming him the "Architect" of their anti-Cuban Revolution though it is the negation of everything Martí lived and died for.

It would, perhaps, have been better if Castro's revolution had proclaimed its enmity for him from the first; but, of course, if it had done that it would never have triumphed in the end. More vital to its success than concealing its Communist origins was to feign a devotion to the Apostle which was inconsistent and, indeed, irreconcilable with its Marxist orientation. For decades the party ideologues asserted that Martí would have been a Marxist if only he had been able to understand Marx. In fact, Martí understood him all too well, which was the reason that he was not a Communist.

After the fall of Communism (everywhere in the Western world but Cuba), the island's political commissars, fearful that Marx was no longer emblematic of anything but catastrophic failure, instructed the official historians to diminish Marx's role in the construction of their tropical Stalinism and credit Martí instead for their so-called "achievements."

The hatred which the Cuban people feel for Castro and his henchmen has in some measure been "grandfathered" to include Martí. I had heard reports of this development but always refused to believe it, as it would mean that the Castroites had succeeded in dislodging the very cornerstone of our nationality. But the testimony of defectors, the regime's own point men, as it were, in this massive effort to repoint every brick in that edifice, has convinced me that it is now necessary not only to expose the horrors of the present but to uncover the historical truths that have been buried in order to falsify our history. The ruins of our country are no less valuable than those of any other land. The only difference is that in Cuba the ruins are buried to conceal the past whereas elsewhere they are excavated to reveal it.

JMB will do whatever lies in its power to rescue and preserve our history. Its focus will be on José Martí because by saving him much else that matters will be saved too. But we shall also attempt to clarify other elements of our history which are imperilled and vital to our future.

From 2008:

Today marks the 113th anniversary of the "Grito de Baire" (Battle Cry of Baire), the start of Martí's Revolution which culminated, after nearly a half-century of armed struggle, in Cuba's independence. Those 50 years (1850-1898) were the most heroic in our country's history, with 300,000 of our countrymen perishing on the battlefield and another 300,000 (mostly women and children) in Spanish concentration camps. This out of a population which struggled to rise above 3 million in the 19th century. The population of the Thirteen Colonies at the time of the American Revolution was also approximately 3 million. Washington's soldiers sustained a total of 4000 casualties in the whole course of the American Revolution. Something to remember when the "pressure-cooker" theorists cast aspersions on Cuban heroism or contrast what we have sacrificed to obtain our freedom to the price which Americans have paid to maintain theirs.

The difference between that glorious epoch and today is that Cuba was not then an impermeable island fortress; for Spanish oppression, although terrible, was not systematic and even Cuban slaves enjoyed more rights then than do Cuban citizens today. U.S. Neutrality laws, which exist to preserve tyrannic but stable regimes in power, were an impediment then as now to Cuban freedom, but the U.S. had not entered yet into an international agreement to become the guarantor of tyranny on the island as it would in 1962. Even if U.S. presidents betrayed the rebels' plans to the Spanish, seized their expeditions, confiscated their weapons and imprisoned their leaders while they waited for the ripe apple to fall into America's lap, the people of the United States, whose sympathies were always with the Cubans, refused to assist their government in prosecuting those earlier freedom fighters. Thousands of indictments were obtained against the Cuban patriots but not one single conviction was ever secured from an American jury.

With the unremitting enmity of successive U.S. administrations, but with the good-will of the American people and the so-called "yellow press," Cubans had already won the war on the ground and were in effective control of 90 percent of the island's territory when the U.S., using the fortuitous explosion of the U.S.S. Maine as a pretext, invaded Cuba to seize the ripe apple at the last moment from Spain and to deny the rebels their just victory. For 50 years the U.S. refused to throw a lifeline to the Cuban rebels as France and even Spain had done for them in 1776, and when Cubans finally obtained alone what they might have won 50 or 30 years earlier with U.S. assistance, the Americans swooped down to secure "peace and order" on the island. This insignificant if calamitous episode within Cuba's War of Independence is known as the "Spanish-American War" (American arrogance going so far as to ignore the participation of the main actors). Americans also once called it the "Splendid Little War" because it cost them less than 400 casualties (most of these from chronic diarrhea). Then came the Treaty of Paris, the U.S. occupation of the island, the Platt Amendment and the seizure of Guantánamo Bay. (Do the French still have their naval base at Chesapeake Bay?).

Even after Cuba became a republic under American tutelage in 1902, Cubans never ceased their struggle to realize completely the dream of José Marti, Antonio Maceo and all Cuban patriots who preceded and followed them: a free, independent, sovereign and democratic republic. In 1933, Cubans finally secured through another revolution the abrogation of the Platt Amendment and the nightmare of 1898 (except for Guantánamo) seemed finally to have been overcome.

Or so it seemed. But some nightmares have a tendency to reassert themselves, with different demons and horrors. We can never really put history behind us.

February 24, 2008

140th Anniversary of "El Grito de Yara"

2008-10-10T14:08:00.001-04:00

Today marks the 140th anniversary of the Grito de Yara, the start of Cuba's first War of Independence (1868-1878). This epic struggle claimed more lives than 30 American Revolutions but did not culminate in our independence because, then as now, our countrymen stood alone against the indifference and even hostility of the world. There was no France to provide reinforcements nor His Christian Majesty's Treasury to finance our revolution. Spain, which by then had already been ousted from all its other possessions in the New World except Cuba and Puerto Rico, clung tenaciously to the "Pearl of the Antilles," the revenues from which sustained it more than all its own exertions did. Spain was ready to sink all the gold of the Indies, acquired over 400 years, into the endeavor of retaining the last and most precious remnant of its colonial empire. The European powers, and principally Britain, sided with Spain, though they had condemned for 50 years the slave trade which Spain abetted and which the Cuban rebels ended by abolishing slavery as the first act of their revolution. Pope Pius IX, no doubt influenced by the fact that the Catholic Church was the largest landowner in Cuba, blessed Spanish troops before they sailed to subjugate Cubans and even called the war of genocide against them "a holy crusade."

Then there was the United States. The Cuban Revolution of 1868 was inspired by the ideals of the American Revolution of 1776, although the Cubans did not only proclaim in their Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal before God but before the law. Among the American people, the Cuban cause was wildly popular; for they rightly saw it as a continuation of their grandsires' own struggle. This did not, however, convince their leaders -- who had only 3 years earlier considered acquiring Cuba as a "dumping grounds" (in Lincoln's phrase) for America's recently emancipated slaves -- to extend recognition or belligerency rights to the Cuban rebels, most of whom were men of color. Instead, the U.S. used its Neutrality Laws to thwart the rebellion while a the same time allowing its arms merchants to sell Spain all the surplus from the Civil War. The U.S. State Department even hatched a scheme that would have compelled Cubans to purchase their independence from Spain with a loan contracted from U.S. banks with the island itself as collateral. "Independence," if you will, on the installment plan.

Despite the fact that 140 years ago Cubans were fighting against not just Spain but the combined malice of all the world, they managed to extend their struggle for 10 glory-filled years, till the island was decimated from one end to the other and the enemy defeated over and over again, only to have Spain buoyed and raised up by its allies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Céspedes and Aguilera did not survive the war to return to their Mount Vernons and Monticellos; they died penniless in the struggle, having financed the revolution with their own patrimony and finally consecrated their lives to it, but our prohombres bequeathed freedom to their slaves and to all of us the example of the purest and most disinterested patriotism.

The Cuban Revolution's One Undeniable Success

2008-08-29T18:26:00.000-04:00

No, not infant mortality: Cuba's before 1959 was the 13th lowest in the world; it now ranks 34th. Nor literacy, which increased by 400% from 1900 to 1958 and only by 25% after 1959. The Cuban Revolution has had one undeniable success, however: it has suffocated the revolutionary spirit of Cuban youth. It was that spirit which made both the 1933 and 1959 revolutions possible. That spirit flourished because Cubans were free to rebel against authority: no revolution can succeed without freedom of action and the Rule of Law to abet it.

The generation of 1953, the last to exhibit that revolutionary spirit, was not a creation of Fidel Castro, though it would eventually be co-opted and corrupted by him. When the government raised bus fares by one penny in 1951, students hijacked a bus, carried it up the monumental stairs of Havana University (which are like a one-sided pyramid) and sent it crashing down. Then they went to celebrate in the University itself, which then enjoyed autonomy (the police could not enter its precincts). Besides, no one would have thought to charge them with disorderly conduct or destroying public property (bus and stairs). The public was on their side and their conduct was thought brave and public-spirited. To excuse their worst excesses as the natural province of youth was the general reaction. The authorities concurred.

It was in such a climate of absolute freedom bordering on anarchy that such monsters as Fidel Castro were incubated. Still, whether confronting anarchy or the reaction to it, Cubans then were a fully-integrated, self-realized, prosperous and happy people (everything which they are not today). Our national tragedy stems from the fact that too many Cubans expended their energies not in defending freedom but in abusing it.

It was the Generation of the Centenary, under such favorable auspices, which successfully waged the 1959 Revolution and whose leaders, once in power, obliterated systematically every vestige of freedom for all subsequent generations of Cubans. That is, for their children, their grandchildren and now their great-grandchildren.

The horrific spectacle which transpired last night in Havana before a crowd of thousands of Castro's young victims at the "Anti-Imperialist Forum" concert affirmed, if anyone doubted it, that civilization on our island has descended even lower than on William Golding's fictional one. Our "Lord of the Flies" has destroyed what was noblest and most aspiring in our people: that almost childlike belief in justice and in the possibility of obtaining it, which was the compass that guided us for most of our history as a nation. It did not always guide us right. The last 50 years attest to that. The absence of such a compass, however, can only guide us wrong. The last 50 years also attest to that.

There are still those, however, who uphold at great personal cost what survives of that spirit and tradition in our country. Real revolutionaries as opposed to mock revolutionaries. True, there are very few of them. They are a beacon which burns without oxygen and can be seen better from afar than up close. Still, they are the only hope of our country. Their fragile bodies are the strands which connect us to our past and the girders that will construct the bridge to our future. They are men like Gorki and women like Yoani and others who do not have their renown but share their courage and will reveal themselves as Emilio Marill did yesterday.

While Yoani and Gorki's colleagues from the band "Porno Para Ricardo" were being viciously beaten by Castro's goons at the Milanés concert for protesting Gorki's arrest, the onlookers looked away: even two syllables worth of protest was more than any of them were willing to risk. The performers on stage continued to play and the revellers to revel. Revelling is still possible in Cuba even if rebelling is not. Only one spectator, Emilio, raised his voice in protest.

But, really, what should we expect? Martyrdom is not a duty. It is, at best, a vocation and very few are called to it. We cannot demand, from the safety of this side of the Florida Straits, that Cubans act against the well-honed survival instincts which 50 years of tyranny have perfected. Just as we hope to see Cuba free again, they hope to live in a free country someday. The one requisite for the realization of either hope is to remain alive. That, too, is a form of resistance: to deny the tyrant the corpses he craves and would not hesitate to claim at the first opportunity.

Without the arms to defend themselves, confronting an enemy that threatens to "sink the island into the ocean" and very nearly did so once when its brand of socio-lismo was threatened, and with more countries in the world that have a vested interest in Cubans remaining slaves than in their liberation, what is it that we expect our countrymen on the island to do? If the onus were on us, what would we answer? Because the onus is as much on us as on them. Whatever excuses we can offer theirs are more compelling. Whatever constraints restrain us theirs are more restraining. The only difference is that they are doing the suffering. To judge them we must either share their suffering or end it.

Father's Day Tribute to Mariano Martí y Navarro

2008-06-15T13:51:00.003-04:00

Last year, on Father's Day, we posted a tribute to José Martí's father, whose place in his son's life has often been diminished by historians. Some have even perpetrated the myth of an unsympathetic or indifferent father whose allegiance to his native Spain put him and kept him at odds with his son. There have even been those who have suggested that Mariano Martí was an abusive father. Nothing could be a greater injustice. The devotion of this simple man to his son was a source of strength and pride for Martí all his life:

Martí's Father

Si quieren que de este mundo
Lleve una memoria grata,
Llevaré, padre profundo,
Tu cabellera de plata.

If I a pleasant keepsake
On leaving this world may bear,
Father profound, I would take
A lock of your silver hair.

Martí's mother knew that she had given birth to one of the elect, and it upset her terribly that lesser men were more conspicuous successes in the eyes of the world and she never tired of berating her son for refusing to make the necessary compromises that would have allowed him and his nearly destitute family to live a more comfortable life. As the wife of an old man and the mother of five daughters, Leonor Pérez looked to him to be the family's support; but Martí's dream of national redemption, which carried then no special stipends or emoluments, consumed his life and his health and left only remnants of his efforts for his family. She had even told him in one of her reproachful letters (all her letters to him were reproachful): "Those who set themselves up as redeemers usually end up nailed to a cross."

Leonor Pérez loved her son madly, make no mistake about it, which made her disappointment in him especially painful to both. She was the kind of mother who believes that her son belongs to her and her only, and that only she knows what is best for him because only she really loves him. Ironically, it was Martí's death — the thing she feared most and presaged frequently — which allowed her to live out her last days in security and even comfort. The Association of Patriotic Emigres purchased for her the house on Paula Street (now Leonor Pérez Street) that was Martí's boyhood home and the occupation government appointed her to a clerkship worth $1200 annually which was later ratified by the Republic. She survived her son by 12 years and always wore black from the time of his death. In Versos sencillos Martí remembered her as the "matrona fuerte" who risked her life in a hail of bullets as she scoured the deserted streets of Havana, strewn with corpses, looking for her teenage son.

Unlike Martí's mother his father never reproached him for not becoming the successful notorio of his dreams. In fact, it was Mariano who best understood his son and gave him the greatest freedom to be true to himself even if that went against everything that he himself believed. A simple and even rough man who was as proud of being a Spaniard as his son was to be a Cuban, Mariano at first was perplexed by his son's seditious ideas as well as his artistic temperament, which led Martí to seek the support and nurture his spirit needed from the poet Rafael de Mendive, Martí's teacher and surrogate father. Many historians have unwittingly offended José Martí's memory by portraying his father as an abusive unfeeling monster, which he never was. Mariano Martí was stubborn and implacable, but, like his son, he was a vortex of emotions and irreproachably honest to others and himself.

It was when his only son was jailed at age 15 by Spanish authorities that the old soldier of Spain realized that his love for him was the central fact of his life which trumped all else, even his allegiance to his native country. Martí recounts that when his father first visited him in his jail cell Don Mariano fell to his knees in uncontrollable sobbing, kissing the wounds which the leg irons that Martí was forced to wear 24-hours a day had imprinted in his flesh. And the old soldier of Spain told his son that if his love for Cuba merited such sacrifices from him then he should do his duty as he saw it. Reflect on that those who question the nobility of the Spanish character or the expansiveness of the Spanish heart.

When his father died, Martí confided to his best friend, Fermín Valdés Domínguez, that he was now postrate with grief, for not until life had put his own integrity to the test, had he realized the greatness of his father: "I felt a pride in my father that grew every time I thought about him, because no one lived in viler times than him, nor, despite his apparent simplicity, did anyone more completely transcend those times, for no one was purer in thought or deed than him."

Martí evoked his father many times in his poetry, always with ineffable love, as mentor and guide. In his father's voice Marti retells the lessons that he learned from him: his love of truth and justice; his detestation of violence; the dignity and self-possession of manhood. In his poetry Martí transforms his father from "simple man" to "father profound." Or perhaps this indicates not the father's growth but the son's, in his understanding of life's trials and the real wells of courage.

It is now acknowledged that Martí wrote the greatest book of poetry that has ever been dedicated to paternal love: Ismaelillo. But in the poetry that he dedicates to his father he is just as eloquent and loving, touching chords of human sentiment that only the greatest masters discern or can reproduce:

Mi padre era español: ¡era su gloria
Los Domingos, vestir sus hijos,
Pelear, bueno: no tienes que pelear, mejor:
Aun por el derecho, es un pecado
Verter sangre, y se ha de
Hallar al fin el modo de evitarlo. Pero, sino
Santo sencillo de la barba blanca.
Ni a sangre inútil llama a tu hijo,
Ni servirá en su patria al extranjero:
Mi padre fue español: era su gloria,
Rendida la semana, irse el Domingo,
Conmigo de la mano.

***

Viejo de la barba blanca
Que contemplándome estás
Desde tu marco de bronce
En mi mesa de pensar:
Ya te escucho, ya te escucho:
Hijo, más, un poco más
Piensa en mi barba de plata,
Fue del mucho trabajar.
Piensa en mis ojos serenos,
Fue de no ver nunca atrás:
Piensa en el bien de mi muerte
Que lo gané con luchar.
Piensa en el bien de
Que lo gané con penar.
Yo no fui de esos ruines
Viejos turbios que verás
Hartos de logros impuros [...]
Cual el monte aquel he sido
Que ya no veré jamás
Azul en lo junto a tierra,
No: yo pasé por la vida
Mansamente ...
Como los montes he sido.

Vamos, pues, yo voy contigo —
Ya sé que muriendo vas:
Pero el pensar en la muerte
Ya es ser cobarde! ¡A pensar,
Hijo, en el bien de los hombres,
Que así no te cansarás
El llanto a la espalda: el llanto
Donde no te vean llorar [...]

***

Cuando me vino el honor
De la tierra generosa,
No pensé en Blanca ni en Rosa
Ni en lo grande del favor.

Pensé en el pobre artillero
Que está en la tumba, callado:
Pensé en mi padre, el soldado:
Pensé en mi padre, el obrero.

Cuando llegó la pomposa
Carta, en su noble cubierta,
Pensé en la tumba desierta,
No pensé en Blanca ni en Rosa.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Will Cuba Ever Be Free Again? (Part II)

2008-05-20T15:49:00.001-04:00

Part II

I have already dedicated an essay to explaining why I believe there has been no internal insurrection in Cuba in the last 49 years. Fortunately for us, there doesn't have to be one for our country to regain her freedom because the Castro regime is not and has never been sustained by internal forces.

It is not the Cuban people who are the bulwark of Castro's anti-Cuban Revolution. On the contrary, it is their willingness to sabotage it at any and all moments that has kept it in a state of near collapse for almost 50 years, not just the monumental incompetence of Fidel Castro or the irredeemable insanity of Marxist economics. The Cuban people's spontaneous and near-unanimous resolve to do everything in their power to abet the failure of the revolutionary project would have toppled the regime long ago if the Revolution had ever relied on domestic sources for its survival. In fact, it never has. The Cuban Revolution is not nationalistic in origin or trajectory. It is and has always been an international enterprise sponsored and sustained by foreigners.

Left to its own resources, it would not have survived under any guise but crumbled under the weight of the collective incompetence of it leaders and the resistance of the people. But it was never alone. The U.S., which installed Castro in power, has maintained him there for 49 and counting. If its nominal opposition favored the regime, the U.S. was there to provide it. If it did not, the U.S. was ready to dispense with any opposition. When Castro said the embargo was meaningless and proclaimed loudly to the world that Cuba did not need the U.S. for anything, the U.S. obliged by maintaining the embargo. When Soviet subsidies stopped and Castro blamed all of Cuba's problems on the embargo, the U.S. relaxed and eventually gutted the embargo to oblige him.

At the most crucial moment in Cuban history, with Castro posed to obliterate the island in what amounted to the first recorded case of "suicide by cop," the U.S., again, blinked. Rather than undertake the removal of the cause of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Americans were content merely to barter for the withdrawal of the instrumentalities. The Kennedy-Khrushchev pact was purchased at the price of our country's perpetual oppression, for JFK, after betraying us at the Bay of Pigs, agreed to make the U.S. the guarantor of Communism in Cuba, in effect ceding our country to the Soviet Union much as Great Britain had ceded Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany in 1938. Yet the same act of betrayal, which is a source of shame for Britain today, has long been held to be the finest moment in U.S. statecraft. Some nations, it would appear, are more expendable than others.

The Soviet Union underwrote the Cuban Revolution for nearly 30 years, which no doubt contributed to its own economic collapse and hastened the end of Communism in Eastern Europe. It did not, however, bring freedom to the Cuban people. Others were ready and even anxious to take Russia's place. China and all the Western nations, in fact, did their bit to perpetuate Castro's rule. Canada and Spain, which with Mexico have always endeavored to undermine the interests of the U.S. by their support of Castro, resurrected Cuba's tourism industry as the panacea that would save the Cuban Revolution. Despite defaulting on all its foreign obligations and a more than 20-year hiatus on servicing its foreign debt, Communist Cuba was never cut off but continued to be the beneficiary of what amounted to subsidies from countries that periodically purported to deplore its human rights abuses but still underwrote Castro's rule. Even Third World countries have subsidized Castro by contracting for the services of his slaves. This would not have sufficed to sustain the regime if a historical anomaly called Hugo Chávez had not come to Castro's rescue in the hope of some day replacing him.

If Barack Obama is elected president, the Cuban Revolution shall have a new lease on life. The unnecessary sacrifices it has inflicted on the Cuban people will be rewarded in a measure that shall surpass Castro's fondest expectations. The wait has been long, but not a difficult one for the Cuban hierarchy, which always placed their creature comforts before the necessities of the Cuban people. Now they are to be confirmed in all their prerogatives by the United States and accorded not only recognition but vindication. The surrender of the U.S., without prior conditions, has always been Castro's goal and the only terms acceptable to him. Obama has announced that he will negotiate with Castro unconditionally. I am sure that this promise is the only thing that is keeping Fidel alive.

If instead of abetting Castro for nearly 50 years, the U.S. and the rest of the world had opposed his rule, the efforts of the Cuban people to undermine his regime by what amounts to the longest sustained period of passive resistance in history -- the only resistance open to Cubans -- would have liberated them without firing one shot. But that kind of worldwide effort was reserved for another pariah state, South Africa, which, incidentally, is now engaged in the systematic slaughter, almost amounting to genocide, of all foreigners in their country (no, not the whites, but 3 million blacks refugees from Zimbabwe and other African countries).

For Cuba to be free again, the world must not engage Cuba; it must quit Cuba. It is that simple. If in the last half-century the Cuban Revolution has proved anything other than its depravity, it has shown, beyond a doubt, that it is completely unequipped to survive on its own. The Cuban people have done everything in their power to contribute to their own liberation by undermining the system that oppresses them. But that will never be enough while the rest of the world, including the U.S., is complicit in their enslavement.

May 20, 1902: Cuban Independence Day

2008-05-20T09:30:00.000-04:00

Today marks the 105th [now 109th] anniversary of the birth of the Republic of Cuba. It was not born under happy auspices though amid much happiness. The imposition of the Platt Amendment and the lease "in perpetuity" of Guantánamo Naval Base were unavoidable limitations on our sovereignty which the dignity and resolve of the Cuban people eventually overcame in the case of the first and would surely already have overcome in the case of the second except for Fidel Castro.

What the Cuban people won in 1898 and finally received in 1902 was not "nominal independence" nor was Cuba a "pseudo-republic" or a "neocolonial" republic. The independence achieved on May 20, 1902 was real and irrevocable, not a "legal fiction" but an incontrovertible fact. That Fidel Castro remains in power to this day perversely proves the very fact that Communists deny. If Cuba had not been granted independence on May 20, 1902, there would have been no Fidel Castro, just as there has never been a Puerto Rican Fidel Castro. Yes, the U.S. could and did intervene practically at will in Cuba before the abrogation of the Platt Amendment in 1934, but it couldn't and didn't stay precisely because Cuba was an independent state, which meant that it could be raped and ravaged but never wedded to the United States.

Even the greatest U.S. intervention of all, which did not involve a single U.S. Marine or larcenous provisional governor, but the imposition of Fidel Castro on the Cuban people through U.S. meddling and his perpetuation through U.S. treachery, did not rob our country of its independence, which is an inherent condition under international law which it would be impossible to usurp or renounce and which will insure that whatever Cuba is in the future, it will not be a colony or province of any other country. No less than Switzerland, no less than Spain, no less than the U.S., or any other sovereign nation, Cuba is and will always be an independent state. That was the legacy to us of the men of 1868 and 1895 and the reason that Máximo Gómez, the only one of the triad of epic liberators who lived to see that day, proclaimed with no hint of doubt or irony: "I think we have arrived" as the U.S. flag was lowered and the Cuban flag raised over the Palacio del Cabo.

The Cuban Republic lives though not in the farce of the Castro regime. It lives in our flag, our coat-of-arms, our national anthem and the Constitution of 1940; it lives in our heroes and martyrs past and present, and it lives in our people, who are the heirs of that legacy and who shall some day re-claim it when Cubans shall not only be independent but free as well.

May we all live to see the day when we can repeat the Generalissimo's words: "Creo que hemos llegado."

¡Viva Cuba libre!

¡Patria y Libertad!

May 20, 2007

Veinte de Mayo

When the U.S. decided 30 years ago that having three-day weekends was preferable to honoring the actual anniversaries of their historic holidays, it made an exception of the Fourth of July. It would not be celebrated on any other day but July 4th.

It is good to see that one politician at least honors our country on the actual anniversary of her independence. It is May 20th, not the 21st or 23rd that marks the birth of the Cuban Republic in 1902. I am always suspicious of anyone that seems to want to avoid that day. This year [2008] everybody except Senator McCain has moved the date to accommodate his schedule or his prejudices, including President Bush, the organizers of the May 21st "Cuban Solidarity Day," and Senator Barack Obama, who specifically requested that the Cuban-American National Foundation change the day of his speech to that organization to May 23rd. In his case, we are sure, it was no scheduling conflict.

Castro replaced May 20th with July 26th as the Cuban National Holiday. Instead of celebrating the culmination of nearly a century of struggles to obtain Cuba's independence, the Cuban people are obliged to mark the start of Castro anti-Cuban Revolution, which allowed every foreign country so disposed to recolonize our country, selling our hard-won independence to the highest bidder. Its 30-year vassalage to the Soviet Union, which ended only when the Soviet Union did, involved Cuba in dozens of mercenary wars throughout the world and cost the lives of more than 100,000 of our countrymen.

Still, the architects of our country's ruin purport that the Republic that was inaugurated on May 20th was imperfect -- a "pseudo-republic" or "neo-colonialist republic" -- because its sovereignty was compromised by the Platt Amendment which gave the U.S. the right to intervene in Cuba whenever it believed that Cubans were compromising their independence. This was indeed a monstrous imposition: no occupying power under international law has the right to limit much less conspire against the sovereignty of an occupied nation. But the Republic established on May 20th was not static as is Castro's anti-Cuban Revolution; it evolved politically over three decades and by 1934 had shaken off the Platt Amendmnent and achieved absolute sovereignty.

Why not, then, commemorate the abrogation of the Platt Amendment as the real anniversary of Cuban independence? Because that day would never have come unless May 20th had come first. The declaration of Cuban Independence in 1902 made it impossible for the U.S. or any other country to annex Cuba except through a war of conquest. The U.S. could meddle in Cuban affairs and did; it could even intervene militarily, as it also did. But it could not recolonize Cuba, that is, it could not abolish its independence and declare it a U.S. territory or state. After 1902 annexation became impossible, and annexation, of course, had been the goal of American foreign policy towards Cuba since the time of Jefferson. The U.S. waited for 75 years for the "ripe apple" to fall into its lap, but the prevision of Martí and the weight of his legacy, prevented it. The sacrifice of May 19th insured the victory of May 20th.

So, yes, May 20th deserves to be commemorated by all Cubans as the birth of our nation. Any Cuban who repudiates it is in fact repudiating our independence.

May 20, 2008

On the 113th Anniversary of the Apostle's Death

2008-05-19T13:29:00.000-04:00

Today, May 19th, marks the 113th anniversary of José Martí's death but never has he been more alive than today or more indispensable for our country's future. He is the reliquary of our country's aspirations for freedom and the agent of its regeneration now as then. Men live only a finite time on earth; but the greatest men transcend the days of man and become immortal because they embody in themselves and in their work timeless ideals which are forever relevant and vital. Such was Martí to our people and all the peoples of the Americas, indeed, to everyone anywhere who has ever bothered to acquaint himself with his life and writings. As Martí said, "I believe that man has a duty to do good even after death. Therefore, I write." If we had heeded his words and followed his example, we would have been spared the great calamity that befell us as a people. The last 50 years have only reinforced his central place in our national cosmology and the necessity of rebuilding our country along the lines that he laid out.

A popular song of the 1940s lamented that Martí should never have died because he alone could have returned dignity and probity to our national life. There is precisely where we erred as a people: the fatalism of believing that only a resurrected Martí, and not his teachings alive in all of us, could save us. Maybe these last 50 years were an unavoidable expiation for ever thinking that we had found a substitute for Martí in the vilest man that was ever born in our country. There is no substitute for Martí and we will forever err if we expect there to be one. Martí does not need a subtitute because he has never left us. It is our duty as individuals and as a nation to honor his memory by showing ourselves to be worthy of his legacy. The only way to do so is to assimilate and apply his teachings. Therein we will find also the way to our country's redemption.

Will Cuba Ever Be Free Again? (Part I)

2008-05-17T15:44:00.002-04:00

Part I

Will Cuba ever be free again?

Of course.

There is no doubt that she will be free someday.

Those for whom this assurance is enough, whose vision and faith is Mosaic, should stop reading here.

We have wandered in the desert somewhat longer than Moses did; or, rather, we have wandered away from the desert that has become our homeland in the hope of being able to return there in the fullness of time. That is the remarkable thing about time which we didn't need Einstein to explain to us: it is always expanding. Yet we ourselves are not. Those of us who have already expanded (and expended) fifty years in the hope of catching up with our country's destiny, returning to that desert and making it blossom again, as it once did, cannot cherish the hope of being gardeners there or even of witnessing its blossoming beyond the days of man. Time for us is definitely finite. The nearer we come to the horizon the less time there is left for us to meet it.

So the original question must be rephrased:

Will we live to see a free Cuba?

Is that hope still tenable?

Not for all of us, not even for most of us. Perhaps not even for any of us.

It really does depend on one's individual expectations, that is, how one chooses to define "free." The more you define freedom down, the closer your definition is to the present system (i.e. the negation of freedom), the closer you are to seeing that day. If consumer freedom suffices, then Cubans have already set out on the road to "freedom" with the Chinese model as their ultimate though unreachable goal. If new faces are all that is required, then there will be many new faces in the immediate future, and more importantly, the old familiar detestable faces of communism will all be gone soon if not the thing itself. If that is enough to meet your definition of freedom, then you are that much closer to the "freedom" you desire. If a re-built Cuba, with skyscrapers as high as Shanghai's and state-corporatism (also known as fascism) in full-throttle thanks to a sympathetic U.S. president that will do for Cuba what Nixon did for China (except without prior conditions), then your dream of a "free" Cuba may be here as soon as November. If you believe that tyranny can evolve into something other and preferable to tyranny without guns and against the wishes of a regional hagemon which considers stability preferable to freedom in Cuba, then what are you doing here when the best perspective from which to witness that evolution is there?

If, however, you belong to the majority of Cuban exiles unwilling to make any accommodation with the evil that destroyed our country, or to tolerate a thriving tyranny more than an impoverished one, if progress means to you the fulfillment of man's thriving to be free rather the State's striving to be omnipotent, if you want the best for Cuba and not merely what others would settle for as good enough for our country, our wait has just begun.

[In Part II, we will discuss what is required now for Cuba to regain her freedom and for us to be able to see her free before we end our days].

Part II

I have already dedicated an essay to explaining why I believe there has been no internal insurrection in Cuba in the last 49 years. Fortunately for us, there doesn't have to be one for our country to regain her freedom because the Castro regime is not and has never been sustained by internal forces.

It is not the Cuban people who are the bulwark of Castro's anti-Cuban Revolution. On the contrary, it is their willingness to sabotage it at any and all moments that has kept it in a state of near collapse for almost 50 years, not just the monumental incompetence of Fidel Castro or the irredeemable insanity of Marxist economics. The Cuban people's spontaneous and near-unanimous resolve to do everything in their power to abet the failure of the revolutionary project would have toppled the regime long ago if the Revolution had ever relied on domestic sources for its survival. In fact, it never has. The Cuban Revolution is not nationalistic in origin or trajectory. It is and has always been an international enterprise sponsored and sustained by foreigners.

Left to its own resources, it would not have survived under any guise but crumbled under the weight of the collective incompetence of it leaders and the resistance of the people. But it was never alone. The U.S., which installed Castro in power, has maintained him there for 49 and counting. If its nominal opposition favored the regime, the U.S. was there to provide it. If it did not, the U.S. was ready to dispense with any opposition. When Castro said the embargo was meaningless and proclaimed loudly to the world that Cuba did not need the U.S. for anything, the U.S. obliged by maintaining the embargo. When Soviet subsidies stopped and Castro blamed all of Cuba's problems on the embargo, the U.S. relaxed and eventually gutted the embargo to oblige him.

At the most crucial moment in Cuban history, with Castro posed to obliterate the island in what amounted to the first recorded case of "suicide by cop," the U.S., again, blinked. Rather than undertake the removal of the cause of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Americans were content merely to barter for the withdrawal of the instrumentalities. The Kennedy-Khrushchev pact was purchased at the price of our country's perpetual oppression, for JFK, after betraying us at the Bay of Pigs, agreed to make the U.S. the guarantor of Communism in Cuba, in effect ceding our country to the Soviet Union much as Great Britain had ceded Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany in 1938. Yet the same act of betrayal, which is a source of shame for Britain today, has long been held to be the finest moment in U.S. statecraft. Some nations, it would appear, are more expendable than others.

The Soviet Union underwrote the Cuban Revolution for nearly 30 years, which no doubt contributed to its own economic collapse and hastened the end of Communism in Eastern Europe. It did not, however, bring freedom to the Cuban people. Others were ready and even anxious to take Russia's place. China and all the Western nations, in fact, did their bit to perpetuate Castro's rule. Canada and Spain, which with Mexico have always endeavored to undermine the interests of the U.S. by their support of Castro, resurrected Cuba's tourism industry as the panacea that would save the Cuban Revolution. Despite defaulting on all its foreign obligations and a more than 20-year hiatus on servicing its foreign debt, Communist Cuba was never cut off but continued to be the beneficiary of what amounted to subsidies from countries that periodically purported to deplore its human rights abuses but still underwrote Castro's rule. Even Third World countries have subsidized Castro by contracting for the services of his slaves. This would not have sufficed to sustain the regime if a historical anomaly called Hugo Chávez had not come to Castro's rescue in the hope of some day replacing him.

If Barack Obama is elected president, the Cuban Revolution shall have a new lease on life. The unnecessary sacrifices it has inflicted on the Cuban people will be rewarded in a measure that shall surpass Castro's fondest expectations. The wait has been long, but not a difficult one for the Cuban hierarchy, which always placed their creature comforts before the necessities of the Cuban people. Now they are to be confirmed in all their prerogatives by the United States and accorded not only recognition but vindication. The surrender of the U.S., without prior conditions, has always been Castro's goal and the only terms acceptable to him. Obama has announced that he will negotiate with Castro unconditionally. I am sure that this promise is the only thing that is keeping Fidel alive.

If instead of abetting Castro for nearly 50 years, the U.S. and the rest of the world had opposed his rule, the efforts of the Cuban people to undermine his regime by what amounts to the longest sustained period of passive resistance in history -- the only resistance open to Cubans -- would have liberated them without firing one shot. But that kind of worldwide effort was reserved for another pariah state, South Africa, which, incidentally, is now engaged in the systematic slaughter, almost amounting to genocide, of all foreigners in their country (no, not the whites, but 3 million blacks refugees from Zimbabwe and other African countries).

For Cuba to be free again, the world must not engage Cuba; it must quit Cuba. It is that simple. If in the last half-century the Cuban Revolution has proved anything other than its depravity, it has shown, beyond a doubt, that it is completely unequipped to survive on its own. The Cuban people have done everything in their power to contribute to their own liberation by undermining the system that oppresses them. But that will never be enough while the rest of the world, including the U.S., is complicit in their enslavement.

A "New" Poem by José Martí

2008-05-11T13:45:00.000-04:00

Written for His Sister to Present to Their Mother "On Her Day"

A mi querida Madre en su día

¿Qué frases había que demostrarle pueda
La intensa emoción del alma mía
Hoy que ilumina de tu aurora el día
El llano tropical y la arboleda?

No pueda haber quien en ternura exceda
A la dulce expresión de mi alegria,
Y ruego a Dios que nunca ¡oh madre mía!
La nube del dolor hiera tu frente.
Que siempre pueda yo con alma ardiente
Apurar en tu alma inmaculada
Albas de luz y aromas del Oriente.

Tu hija: Ana Martí

To My Dear Mother on Her Day

What words are there that ever could convey
The deep emotion I feel in my heart
To see your halo illuminate the day,
And dawn, from tropic plain to woodland, start?

No joy more tender is there to exceed
The sweet expression of my happiness,
And I beseech God my prayer to heed
That sorrow's cloud your brow should never press
And I may always with a heart as ardent
Awaken in your own immaculate soul
The light of dawn and aromas of the Orient.

Your Daughter: Ana Martí
[Translated by Manuel A. Tellechea]

On this Mother's Day I am pleased to share with my readers this hitherto unknown poem whose authorship I have ascribed to José Martí, though it is signed by his sister Ana (Mariana Salustiana). The poem is dedicated to their mother Leonor Pérez on "su día," which was certainly her santo (Saint's Day) since neither birthdays nor Mother's Day were celebrated at the time. The poem dates from around 1866, when Martí would have been 13 and Ana 10. Since none of Martí's five sisters ever exhibited any literary inclinations or left any other poems or writings, it is not a farfetched conjecture that Martí wrote this poem for his sister to copy and present to their mother. The original, in my collection of martiana, is clearly in her handwriting, not Marti's. It also contains several neatly made corrections and additions from another hand, which we believe to be Martí's. Certainly the sophisticated style leaves no doubt as to Martí's authorship. The last line "Albas de luz y aromas del Oriente" is as characteristic of him as any line of poetry found in his writings. The precociousness of this composition, moreover, which not merely anticipates but suddenly explodes with the full bloom of Martí's genius, can leave no doubt as to our attribution.

In Seis Crónicas Inéditas de José Martí (Editorial Dos Ríos, 1997), which I had the honor to co-author with the eminent Cuban historian Carlos Ripoll, six unsigned articles by Martí were identified and translated (they had appeared originally in English in The New York Sun). These articles were later incorporated without our knowledge or consent, but, unexpectedly, with full acknowledgment to us, in volume 7 of the new "Edición Crítica" of Martí's Complete Works being currently published in Havana by the Centro de Estudios Martianos.

I consider this poem an even more important discovery than the six anonymous articles in The Sun, which, after all, were published 128 years ago in a well-known newspaper and would surely have been attributed to Martí by someone else some day, and, in any case, would never have been lost.

This poem, written on fragile tissue paper with embossed lacework borders, could have disappeared long ago and denied us this priceless example of Martí's juvenilia, of which there are very few surviving specimens. Among those is another adolescent poem dedicated to his mother as well as his earliest surviving letter, written at age 9, also written to her.

Why There Has Been No Successful Revolution to Overthrow Castro in 49 Years

2008-05-03T15:39:00.001-04:00

Why hasn't there been a revolution in Cuba to topple Fidel Castro? That question is often posed in defense of the Cuban dictator as if the absence of such a revolution argued against the need for one or represented a silent — very silent — referendum on Castro's continuation in power. Of course, there have been many foiled revolutions against the Castro regime over the last 49 years, more, in fact, than we know or will know until the mass graves are excavated and the witnesses can at last break their silence.

In the early years of the regime it was more difficult to conceal popular uprisings: the anti-Castro rebels in the Escambray Mountains, who waged a real revolution as opposed to Castro's operetta revolution in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, were too numerous and successful over too protracted a time to be ignored, and were not, ultimately, defeated by Castro but abandoned by the the Americans, as the freedom fighters of the Brigade 2506 had been abandoned before them. The fact remains, however, that all these attempts to topple Castro, known and unknown, great and small, have failed. Putting aside for the moment U.S. duplicity as a factor, why has no revolution succeeded in toppling a regime which only the greatest disdain for the Cuban people could suppose is acceptable to them or worthy of them?

Perhaps if we examine the history of other revolutions the answer will become clearer.

The American Revolution was possible because Britain's colonial subjects enjoyed all the rights of Englishmen, and, therefore, were the freest people on earth, so free, in fact, that they regarded a penny tax on tea as "tyranny."

The American Republic itself, which replicated British liberties in its Constitution and Bill of Rights, nearly succumbed to a domestic revolution shortly after it was founded known as the "Whiskey Rebellion," when Americans, taught to regard taxation as tyranny, rose against their government because it levied a tax on distilled spirits. Washington himself marched at the head of the army against the "rebellers" (i.e. revolutionists). It was the Whiskey Rebellion that was the real "Second American Revolution," not the War of 1812. If this country's Founding Fathers had created a police state rather than a democracy (flawed, but still a democracy), there would have been no Whiskey Rebellion or even the Great Rebellion (i.e. Civil War), for that matter, because it is freedom not the absence of freedom that provides the necessary conditions for revolutions, rebellions and civil wars.

At the time of the French Revolution, the peasantry of France was Europe's wealthiest and could well afford to eat cake, the popular myth notwithstanding. The Bourbons, though autocratic, were not despotic. When the Bastille was stormed, no political prisoners were found inside and the revolutionaries had to content themselves with freeing a pedophile (the prison's sole inmate). The guillotine was introduced by the Revolution and thousands of political dissidents or just "people in the way" fell prey to it. Under Louis XVI, there were no executions of the opposition. The Reign of Terror began with the Revolution, not the King.

The outcomes of the American Revolution and French Revolution were quite different, but both were made possible because neither George III nor Louis XVI was a despot. Revolutions require a certain amount of freedom to succeed. There has never been a successful revolution against a police state; nor was a revolution ever waged by people with empty bellies. It is the day-to-day struggle to avoid starvation that keeps the people too busy to rebel. A man who is too hungry to rise in the morning will never be able to rise in arms in the evening.

The Cuban Revolution was no exception to this rule, and the fact that the Castro regime is still in power also conforms to it. Before 1959, Cubans enjoyed the highest standard of living in Latin America and were constrained by none of the restrictions of a police state. Most importantly, the Rule of Law prevailed and there was no capital punishment. Castro, when he surrendered in the wake of the terrorist attack on the Moncada barracks, did so because he knew his life was inviolate and that he would live to fight (or run) another day.

Cubans have no such assurances today. Castro's Cuba is a police state which uses food (rationed in Cuba for 47 years) as an instrument of social control and requires internal passports to move from province to province, or city to city. Official permission is even necessary to move to another house across the street and the authorities must be notified when guests (even family) are staying in one's home. On every street, of course, there is an official neighborhood vigilante committee charged with spying upon and denouncing all "unusual activity."

Before Fidel Castro confiscated anything else, he took all firearms from the Cuban people. There was no "gun control" in the Thirteen Colonies, Bourbon France or Batista's Cuba. Without food, without freedom of action and without guns no revolution can succeed. Or, rather, every revolution which is attempted will fail.

The fact that there has been no successful effort to overthrow Fidel Castro in the last 49 years does not argue that the Cuban people have not wanted to overthrow him but that it is impossible for them to do so under prevailing circumstances. They can, certainly, shed rivers of blood; the regime will surely oblige them in that respect and has. They can fill the prisons and the regime will build more prisons; the only "housing stock," incidentally, that has increased in Cuba over the last half century. The Cuban people can choose to die on their feet rather than live on their knees, which means, of course, that they can commit collective suicide and end up that much closer to the ground.

The path that they have taken may not be more heroic but it is certainly more practical than walking off a cliff, which is what Gandhi advised Jews to do in the face of the Holocaust to give the rest of mankind a lesson in "moral greatness." Of course, there can be no morality where there are no mortals, nor humanity without humans. The greatest resistance to tyranny is not to die but to survive. Cubans have had enough martyrs to last us 1000 years, indeed, to share with all mankind. We do not need more martyrs. We needs more survivors, or else the future will not belong to men who love liberty but to men who are content with tyranny.

George Will's Bigoted Attack on Cubans

2008-03-09T22:57:00.002-04:00

George Will's latest column in The Washington Post is arguably the most insulting to Cubans ever penned by a reputable conservative. The title ("Think Twice About Ending the Embargo") gives no hint of its bias, or, rather, it leads us to suppose that there is no bias except the justifiable one against the Castro regime. Indeed, Will is biased against Castro, but not because he is a tyrant but because he is a Cuban. Friends and foes of Castro alike, even Cubans who lived before Castro -- hundreds of years before -- are condemned by Will for Cuba's fate.

Will makes one trite but true observation in his column: economic liberalization in Communist China did not lead to greater political freedom. But from that premise he concludes not that it wouldn't work in Cuba, but that nothing could work or has ever worked in Cuba because of the flawed character of its people and their unfitness for self-government.

Will's conclusions are flawed because his knowledge of Cuban history is flawed. He contends, for example, that Cuban-Americans "demanded the imposition" of the trade embargo in 1961. The few Cubans who were in the U.S. at that time were not in a position to "demand" anything of Kennedy, not even to hold him to his commitments in respect to the Bay of Pigs. It was U.S. corporations whose property had been seized by the Castro regime without compensation that demanded it; the same companies, which, having long ago written off those losses or passed them on to the American consumer, aspire now to underwrite the very regime that had cheated them. If you are against the embargo, however, it is convenient to have Cuban-Americans as the bogeymen since you can attack them as revanchists without the necessity of explaining what benefit would accrue to the U.S. or the Cuban people by wiping the slate clean and allowing the Castros to sell back to Americans the properties stolen from them as well as those stolen from Cuban citizens (the latter outnumbering the former by a factor of 100).

For one who supposedly supports the embargo, there is very little about it that George Will seems to like. He thinks it is outdated and irrelevant: "The embargo was imposed when Cuba was a salient of Soviet values and interests in this hemisphere. Today, Cuba is a sad, threadbare geopolitical irrelevancy." He thinks it is counterproductive and has benefited Castro: "Far from threatening Castro's regime, the embargo has enabled Castro to exploit Cubans' debilitating mentality of taking comfort from victimhood -- the habit, more than a century old, of blaming problems on others, first on Spain and then on the United States."

It is Will who knows nothing about geopolitics or Cuban history. To say that Communist Cuba is a "threadbare geopolitical irrelevancy" at a time when its Venezuelan surrogate and patron has already co-opted most of South America and now threatens the peace of the region -- there has been no internecine war there in 70 years -- shows that Will, like President Bush, regards Latin America itself as "a geopolitical irrelevancy," not just Cuba. The truth is that a conflict in South America would be the greatest geopolitical challenge that this country would ever have to face, the equal of ten thousand Iraqs; and if disengaging from the Iraq War seems almost impossible for the U.S. without forfeiting its "victory" and condemning Iraqis to slavery then extricating itself from a trans-continental war in this hemisphere, which it would be oblige to join under all existing treaties and covenants, won't even be an option without forfeiting not just American prestige but American freedom.

As for the embargo benefiting Castro, it must be a very peculiar "benefit" that the recipient so greatly resents and is obsessed with overthrowing. Since the Cuban people have no participation in the Cuban economy except as beasts of burden, the effects of lifting the embargo would benefit only Cuba's capitalists, that is, the Castro brothers and their henchmen in the military who control all aspects (and assets) of Cuba's closed economy.

Now we come to the most offensive part of Will's column, his contention that Cubans are beset by a "debilitating mentality" and "take comfort from victimhood," specifically, "the habit, more than a century old, of blaming problems on others, first on Spain and then on the United States." Apparently, George Will believes that Cubans should have accepted Spanish tyranny with good grace and American tutelage with gratitude. What right do we have to be free or independent? We are, after all, not Anglo-Saxons. Our history and political culture, Will believes, should reconcile us to slavery. Instead, Cubans insist on regarding foreign domination and its attendant calamities as "problems" and on blaming those who inflicted them upon us.

At the same time, Cubans are also to blame, according to Will, for "Cuba [having] negligible democratic traditions, and no living experience with a culture of pluralism and persuasion." First, this is not true. The Cuban Republic (1902-1958) in 56 years elected 10 constitutional presidents and no Cuban was ever executed or imprisoned for his political beliefs before 1959. Yes, Cuban democratic traditions were fragile (thanks to the Platt Amendment and other usurpations) but they would certainly have become more robust if Eisenhower's State Department and The New York Times had not installed Fidel Castro in power and Kennedy and his "best and brightest" agreed to make the U.S. the guarantor of Communism on the island. But, there I go, again, acting like a typical Cuban and blaming others for fucking up my country.

The Catholic Church vs. Christianity

2008-02-26T14:25:00.001-05:00

"Christianity died at the hands of Catholicism." — José Martí

Martí meant, of course, that prelates like Cardinal Bertone and "Vicars of Christ" like Benedict XVI, more bureaucrats than soldiers of Christ, with Machiavelli's Prince for a Bible and Ovid's Satyricon as a moral guide, had turned their backs on the teachings of Christ and embraced Mammon as God, endangering by their example the very creed that they professed but did not practice. And Marti was right. The leadership of the Catholic Church are warped and stunted men, detached from humanity and contemptuous of it, clinging like courtesans to any tyrant in exchange for an atom of influence, exerted always on behalf of their own parochial interests and never in defense of the tyrant's victims.

Nowhere in the world has the Catholic Church been a greater force for evil than in Cuba. In the 19th century, Pope Pius IX declared Spain's war against the Cuban rebels to be a "holy crusade" and blessed his Catholic Majesty's soldiers as standard bearers of civilization. During U.S. occupation, the Church readily switched allegiance from Spain to the United States, and more interested in preserving her properties in Cuba — she was the island's biggest landowner and landlord — than whether the island became a colony of a Protestant nation, beseeched the Americans never to recognize Cuban independence but to remain there forever as guarantor of her traditional fueros. In the Republican era, the Church allied herself with every dictator of right or left, and at Belén produced the greatest dictator of all, Fidel Castro, and extended her protection to him as he waged a terrorist war on the Cuban people in order to enslave it; and for 50 years, even when the Church herself became an object of persecution in Cuba, she did nothing to oppose Castro but preached resignation and submission to him, becoming Castro's accomplice as she has always been his handmaiden.

But let me not imply that Cuba is the exception. It is generally agreed that the Catholic Church was the most militant in Poland during the time of Communist domination. And yet only last year it was revealed that the hierarchy of the Polish Church, from top to bottom, had been compromised by Communist agents, including the Archbishop of Krakow, John Paul's chosen successor, who resigned after it was revealed that he also had been an informant for the Communists.

Can we expect more of our prelates in Cuba? No, I don't think we can.

Cuba and Venezuela Melding But Not Under Martí's Aegis

2007-10-15T14:22:00.000-04:00

"Carlos Lage said once that Cuba had two presidents, and then I just said in Cuba that Venezuela has two presidents too, but we are one single government. We are headed for the [José] Martí-style, Caribbean, South American Confederation of Bolivarian Republics." — Hugo Chávez, on his weekly television show, Alo, Presidente, aired from Santa Clara, Cuba, October 14, 2007

Poor Martí! Surely it was not this that he envisioned as he stood weeping in front of Bolívar's statue in Caracas, where he headed immediately on arriving in that city in 1880. Yes, Martí's dream, Bolívar's dream — the dream of every progressive 19th century Hispanic-American statesman — was to unite all the countries of "Our America" into a grand confederation of states. Thank God, that dream was deferred.

Each of our republics has enough problems without taking on the problems of all the other republics. Our political evolution is compatible but only in those points where compatibility is hardly desirable. Our histories coincide in the period of Spanish despotism and then break off abruptly at the time of independence never to converge in any meaningful way again. Many of the peoples of Central and South America cordially or not so cordially despise one another and harbor old resentments and feuds that hark back to the time of independence, indeed, to the time of the Conquest. The only times in history that they have managed to unite briefly was when they did so to attack a neighbor. Yes, it is true that Europe with its festering immemorial hatreds and rivalries has managed an economic and political consolidation of sorts. Perhaps all their hatreds and resentments were played out in World War II. This is far from the case in Latin America today and it was even more unlikely in Martí's day, when some of the Latin republics actually had hopes of a bright future.

I can prove that Martí wasn't a Communist because he wasn't, but I can't prove that he wasn't a Pan-Americanist: "When speaking of Latin America, we speak of a people and not of "peoples" intentionally because it does not seem to me that there is more than one from the Rio Grande to Patagonia." He left hundreds of invocations in his writings urging the union of all Hispanic countries. He could be poetic about it: "My fondest wish is to see the people of Latin America, which now live side by side, living soul by soul and hand in hand." Or speak idealistically of a new kind of empire: "a great Latin nation, not a conqueror like Rome." And a new kind of "warfare:" wanting to "equip peaceful armies to march under one banner from the Rio Grande to the Arauco."

Martí believed, of course, that such a union would seal Latin America's independence and frustrate the designs which the U.S. and European powers had on the region in general and Cuba in particular. He never imagined, because his great love for us caused him to idealize and misjudge us, that such a union, far from providing for our mutual defense, might condemn us all to share the same despotic fate; he never saw that we were a greater danger to each other than all the imperialist powers that coveted our lands but disdained our peoples. He never realized that such a union would multiply our vices without multiplying our virtues. Like all who love greatly, he loved us blindly.

Now, as Hugo Chávez said, Martí's dream seems on the verge of being realized, but I do not think that he would approve. Martí has been killed a thousand times since his death by the errors committed both by his own countrymen and the inhabitants of his "greater Hispanic homeland." His legacy has been distorted, his opinions have been falsified and he has been used as a tool by the most ruthless regime ever to exist in the history of the hemisphere modern or ancient. But the union of two tyrannies under the auspices of Pan-Americanism, and, supposedly, in obedience to his teachings, would be more than he could endure. If it were possible for him to charge the line of artillery one more time on his white steed, he would. This is not what Martí wanted. Or Bolívar. Or any of our prohombres.

Martí would argue that this type of Pan-Americanism is the negation of his dream, and it is. But it is also the only type of Pan-Americanism that was ever likely in the first place: despotic nation with despotic nation; mendicant nation with rich nation; insular nation with continental nation (so that the "union" doesn't have to be that tight). Martí should have intuited this. Did he not say that "Countries that do not share common means, though they may have identical ends, cannot pursue together the same object." It follows, then, that nations with common means and identical ends can pursue the same object. Such as Castro's Cuba and Chávez's Venezuela.

Ironically, the only country that could save us from this mutual suicide pact is the United States, which Martí always regarded (not without justification) as "the other," not to say the enemy. "Two condors may live together or two lambs," he observed apropos of the two Americas, "but never a condor and a lamb." Well, now the condor may have to save the lambs, but the condor has no interest whatever in the lambs. It has eyes only for Araby as a continental alliance between the insane and the opportunistic takes shape which promises to destroy every vestige of freedom and democracy in the Americas for the next 100 years.

Quotations by José Martí (in English)

2007-10-10T14:01:00.000-04:00

[Today marks the 139th anniversary of the Grito de Yara (Battle Cry of Yara), the start of Cuba's Ten Years' War of Independence (1868-1878), which began with the symbolic act of freeing Cuba's slaves. José Martí was 15 at the outbreak of hostilities and was sentenced for his separatist ideas to two years at hard labor in a stone quarry. The banner raised by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes at Yara, on October 10, 1868, would pass to José Martí, who initiated Cuba's second and definitive War of Independence in 1895. Céspedes, Martí and a half-million other Cubans (out of a population of 3 million) died in the struggle to make Cuba a free and sovereign nation. Their legacy was repudiated in 1959 by their antithesis, who banished freedom and the Rule of Law from our country, reintroduced slavery and even transformed Cuba for a time into a Soviet colony, which it ceased to be in 1991 against the tyrant's most fervent wishes.

To honor the founders of our nationality whose work once seemed finished, but now, we realize, has only begun, we offer these translations from the thoughts of José Martí, the universal Cuban. Both Albert Schweitzer and Emil Ludwig observed, independently, that Martí's aphorisms, when collected and translated, would constitute an infallible guide to life for all the world's peoples.

It has been estimated that there are more than 30,000 aphorisms scattered in the 74 volumes of José Martí's Complete Works. I have endeavored to make this selection representative of his ideas and ideals while avoiding the well-know commonplaces so that even those acquainted with Martí's writings will find much here that is unfamiliar to them. Throughout the day, I will be adding hundreds of other aphorisms. — MAT].

***
The most beautiful and vehement expression of love of man is love of country.

God abides in patriotic martyrdom as in all good deeds and in every universal idea of spontaneous generosity.

Our country is something more than the oppression that besets it, something more than patches of land without life or liberty, something more than the right of possession by force. Our country is a community of interests, shared traditions and common ends, the sweet and consoling fusion of all our loves and all our hopes.

A nation is not a collection of active or indifferent men born by accident in a common land, or residing there for a period in order to accumulate in the shortest time the largest sum. It is that closest communion of souls, bound in far-extending ties through the kinship of peoples, through the penetrating anointing of common sorrows, through the exceedingly delicious wine of national glories, bound as the flesh to the bone through all the delicate and formidable ties of history, and through a national soul that is dispersed in the atmosphere, which we breath and is deposited in our entrails.

Our country is the altar on which we intend to leave our lives, not where we hope to find a living.

Every man who dies for his country is a hymn and every living being should be the temple where it is played.

No land feels more solid under a man's feet than that where he was born.

The only thing a man ever owns outright is a place in his country.

He has no roots in this world who has no country over which to extend them.

No man can long exist without a country, nor can any country exist for long without liberty.

We rise for our country, but not above her. To rise above her is to rise against her.

Our country is everyone's joy, everyone's sorrow and everyone's paradise. It is no man's fief or benefice.

Our country belongs to no one, but if it did, it would belong in spirit only, to the man who serves her with the greatest disinterest and intelligence.

Our country is not a heroic toy for epic redeemers to play with, but our very own entrails, which should not be tied to anyone's wagon or wrapped at the feet of anyone's statue. Our country should be bound to what is tenderest in our breasts and warmed to life there.

Some men go blindfolded through life without ever realizing, because they are so entertained by their own egoism, that their country is a stranger.

Our country is not a cabinet to be opened and closed as we see fit; nor is a republic a new means to provide for the proud and lazy who think that a coat-of-arms entitles them to good bed and board at their countrymen's expense, because they see themselves, by the light their own depraved egoism, as the rightful lords and natural burden of an inferior people.

By himself a man is nothing, and what he is, his people have made him.

In vain does Nature grant extraordinary gifts to certain of her sons who will not become one flesh with their people, but choose to be the dust in their eyes and the whips on their backs, when they might have been the voice and arms of their people, and through them seen themselves exalted, as those rare flowers that a mountain will allow to grow at its zenith.

Obscurity is good if in its shadow we can save our country. The best proof of heroism is to curb it. One can be a hero any day of the week: the true hero sacrifices for the good of his country even his heroic impulse.

The truly brave await to be in the right to conquer by the force of right.

A people which has had heroes in the past will have them again.

A people that honors its heroes affirms itself.

Several generations of slaves conclude in a generation of martyrs.

The man of reason must yield his place in times of action to the man of action. He will be spurned or despised, and at best used as an instrument or helper, unless when the time comes to ride, he mounts.

Suffering for one's country does not exempt a man from the worldwide duty of honoring it through the constant exercise of virtue.

In the service of his country a man will go forth naked that the winds may tear the flesh from his bones and wild beasts suck the marrow, until nothing remains of his voluntary sacrifice but a light to guide and embolden his assassins on the path to virtue.

Let no one say of us that because of vainglory, or any other interest, we contributed to our country's affliction precisely when we had an opportunity to save her.

We should love our country with an attachment that can only be compared to the roots of trees, because of how it holds when it takes root and what it overturns when it is uprooted.

The duty of a patriot who sees the truth is to help his countrymen, without pride or anger, to see it.

He is an apostle who, amid the general decay of moral and intellectual forces, finds within himself the wisdom that illuminates and expands, and raises it on high, reverently, for all to see, as the priest does the host.

He that raises his country raises himself.

The vain man looks after his own name while the patriot guards his country's.

To a man who has arrived through no merit of his own but by sheer luck to where ambition, not patriotism, has taken him, it is more important to be first than to save his country.

There are no men more vile than those who see in the needs of their country a means to satisfy their vanity or found a fortune.

When our country is honored, we are all honored; and when she is dishonored, so are we all.

To honor our country is one way to fight for her, just as to dishonor her is to make war on her.

Every man is obligated to honor his country with his private conduct no less than with his public.

Many there are who oppose virtue and triumph; but generally, in order for vice to prosper, it must masquerade as virtue.

Man so loves himself that he makes the very shortcomings of the land where he was born objects of pride and veneration.

It seems that the ordered and constant habit of liberty gives man a certain confidence in his own power which makes violence unnecessary.

A man who is allowed to exercise his will is not be as impatient or blind as one who has never tested his own strength.

A people that is well-formed and vigorous will regard with contempt, and as an imposition even, those whom history places in their way who are misshapen and hardship-prone. We must remain among the well-formed people and teach it to behave more humanely.

Sleepy peoples have backs that beckon to be sat upon and tempting flanks for spur and whip.

With all its shortcomings, there is something divine and moving, and even impalpably beautiful, in the silence of the voting booth.

In a foot soldier pillaging is to be expected, but every attempt against the public order, in one's country or abroad, is a crime in a thinking man.

In the eyes of fanatics, prudence is a crime.

Revolution is the violent product of ill-advised reason.

As the man who promotes a war that can be avoided is a criminal, so too is the man who opposes an inevitable war.

War is the most beautiful and respectable form of human sacrifice.

As a means of evolving and unifying the character of a nation and revealing its strengths and weaknesses, war may benefit a new and heterogeneous people more than the partial and repairable disasters of war, the loss of wealth and position, can be said to harm it.

Suffering is the salt of glory.

As great as heroism in war is tolerance in peace.

When he opens a newspaper, the patriot who truly cares for his country will not turn first to the editorials, which show what men are thinking, but to the classifieds, which show what men are doing.

The time will come when the harshness of language will not express well the delicacy of the spirit.

Language is to thought what the brow is to health.

To do for others is the best way to speak to them.

War should never be craved for because of its horror and desolation. But the attentive observer cannot deny that war foments rather than preempts charity and justice among men, who, in the daily and sublime tasks of combat, acquire a knowledge of Nature and of how they may best be served by her, and are taught the practice of unity and the power of improvisation.

To win for the cause a single soul even in the shadows — a soul that cleanses and conquers itself, which has sinned and is determined not to sin again — is more pleasing and valuable to our country than practicing the goosestep or wasting powder in mock simulations of war.

If to have social equality it were necessary to consent, under a democratic system of laws, to the separation, unjust by any measure, of one race from another, and to renounce the beneficial usages of sympathy and convenience, then social justice would be unjust to those who endure it and shameful for those who impose it.

As a good horseman would never let go of his reins, so a freeman should never disdain his vote. For though it is true that it's easier to be guided than to guide, it is also more dangerous.

We live in a world where every man has to be his own father, where there are no certain inheritances, no houses built to last for centuries, and no means of being safe from social upheavals and financial catastrophes.

Since the world is not a university but a place full of hatreds and trials, should not a university teach men how to survive in the world rather than how to succeed at university?

In Latin America, some pursue as a science, and as the principal science even, the minute study of peoples with whom we differ in origins and customs, while remaining in blameworthy and systematic ignorance of the peculiar elements of their own country.

Tyrannies have purged republics of their ignorance of the true elements of their country.

Erudition, when it exceeds talent, diminishes rather than exalts.

Nations are not made with men who are what they ought to be, but with men such as they are.

No revolution would succeed or the lot of any people improve if men waited for human nature to change. We must work in concert with human nature but fight alongside or against men such as we find them.

The tree that grows the best fruit is that which grows on holy ground.

The longest years are those spent far from one's native land.

I have been an exile in my own country and found a country in my exile.

By removing all landmarks, exile affords the expatriate with an opportunity to test his own mettle. In exile men lose their moorings and find their bearings.

There is poetry forged in the mind that when flung at the soul wounds but does not penetrate it. The other kind is made in the heart. It goes from it and returns to it.

One season of piety often suffices to excuse an epoch of crime.

To suffer is more than to savor life: it is truly to live.

The brotherhood of the misfortunate binds men quickly.

Despots are not aware that the people, the long-suffering people, are the true leaders of their revolutions.

It is the demagogue's business to accuse and the patriot's to forewarn.

Liberty is very dear, and we must decide whether we are to live without her in resignation or resign everything in order to have her.

A revolution is just another means of evolution, indispensable in the hour of necessary hostility, for the purification and accommodation of the opposing elements that must coalesce into definitive conditions of life.

Repentance is the back door of virtue.

In the practical world of ideas, authority signifies simply a respect for all manifestations of justice, and a firm resolve against all counsels of cruelty or pride.

If the license of tyranny is monstrous, the tyranny of license is more frightening and disgusting.

He is a coward whom fear would deter from satisfying the cravings of his conscience.

He need have no fear of rulers who teaches them to rule well.

The spectacle of wealth is a stimulus to human effort.

Whenever a profound thought takes root in man, a firm initiative or a noble and legitimate aspiration, even the contours of his body are lost in the vast confines of the idea.

Rights are to be wrested, not requested; seized, not beseeched.

Christianity is beautiful because it allowed man to define in human terms the ideal of god, and for creating, from perhaps the least imposing of deities, the greatest of men.

What is the arrogant man but a herald of the unknown, an echo of the supernatural, a mirror of the eternal, and a copy more or less complete of the world he inhabits?

The first work of man is to reconquer himself.

The inability of human language to express adequately the opinions, affections and designs of man is perfect and absolute proof of the necessity of an afterlife.

The grave is a way and not an end.

Human existence would be a repugnant and barbarous invention were it limited to life on earth.

The mind would not conceive of something it was unable to create.

He that would triumph on earth should not live too close to the stars.

No one ultimately triumphs by inspiring fear because nothing can prevail against the instinct of self-preservation.

To view a crime calmly is to commit it.

Everything that can be said has already been said, but things always sound new when sincerely expressed.

The history of a people is not to be found in eons of barren submission, but in its hour of rebellion.

A despot will yield to anyone who faces him down, and in the only way he knows how to — by disappearing. But to those on bended knee, never.

Tell the truth that you feel with as much art as you can.

The very selfishness that extols a people brings it down.

Let him first mould men who would a nation make.

When one hasn't a country, money in the end becomes one's country.

To know a people you must study both its apostles and its bandits.

All religions were born of the same roots, have adored the same idols, prospered by the same virtues and succumbed to the same vices.

Religion, which by the light of reason is always false as dogma, is eternally true as poetry.

Men are the pencils God writes with.

Those who don't believe in immortality believe in history.

The people, quick to anger, undiscerning in their appetites and credulous in their moments of want, are infallible in the long run.

Men do not make nations, but nations, in their hour of genesis, may place themselves, vibrant and triumphant, in one man. Sometimes the man is ready but not the nation. Sometimes the nation is ready but the man does not appear.

We should only point out those defects that can be corrected.

Men never forgive those who are recognizably their betters.

Institutions are the bylaws of Nature.

When all noble qualities are obscured in man, he still remains capable of loyalty to a friend. As if to prove that he is not entirely vile his humanity becomes incarnate in this particular virtue.

Fear of a future reckoning will never prevent men from yielding to a current appetite.

Every man is born a king; the problem lies in finding within himself the implements with which a throne is made.

For a man to be preoccupied constantly with himself, even in his greatest acts of daring and self-denial, for him to think of reconciling his personal interests with the public good, serving the former in a way that will favor the latter or not damage it too excessively, is both natural and human.

Once they've begun to decay, social bodies rarely heal completely.

Evil can triumph only when good men are indifferent. [There is no proof that Burke ever said this; but it is documented that Martí did].

Justice first and art later. He is not a man who in these indecorous times entertains himself with the fineries of the imagination and the luxuries of the mind. When one does not enjoy the exercise of liberty, the only case for art, its only reason for being, is at the service of liberty. Everything into the fire, even art, to feed the blaze!

Liberty must be a constant practice or else it will degenerate into a banal formula.

Every man has a little of the lion in him and wants for himself the lion's share in life.

At certain times and among certain people there is nothing like being minor to be considered great.

A nation that is not careful to ennoble its masses is reared for the jackals.

No one is more repulsive than the rich man who becomes obsessed with his wealth. He is undoubtedly a criminal: a criminal by omission. There is only one being as repulsive: the systematic denouncer of all who possess wealth.

Even when they deserve our unrestrained commendation, the powerful should be praised with great discretion, lest simple justice seem solicitation.

Even when the bones of a nation's dead lie exposed on the ground, and its bronze and marble monuments are sheathed in earthen mantles, a nation may yet be saved from obscurity by its arts and sciences.

Isn't it a pity that a newspaper's quest for news often frustrates a government's quest for peace?

National holidays should not go unobserved, for they contain the spirit of a nation, forebode its victories, and are occasions to display its arts and sciences.

All free countries share a common destiny.

Genius is simply anticipation: the ability to see clearly in outline what others do not perceive even in full lineaments.

Kings bestow titles, but when it comes to ennobling the soul, there is no peerage like that conferred on us by books.

To read one good magazine is like reading dozens of good books.

Poetry can be improvised but not prose; it must come with age.

The bold forget. But those who were least heroic in war, or fought without justice and in fear of victory, never forget.

There is nothing in a nation more real than its government.

A nation may be accounted rich which has many small property owners.

To know how to read is to know your way. To know how to write is to know how to ascend.

Philantrophy is a narcotic, not an effective medicine. It dries the tears on the countenance but does not cure the source of pain.

A man without a country is as a tree in the sea.

There is something of a boat in every exile's house.

The greater the agony in a foreign land, the more we will work to re-claim, quickly, our own.

Fame is a useful myth.

He who suffers has the greatest right to silence.

The state should not propagate the Catholic religion in public schools, nor anti-Catholic religion.

Humanity cannot redeem itself except by a predetermined quantity of suffering, and since some men evade their share, it is necessary that others should accumulate more than their due that we may all be saved.

Only soldiers commit crimes without the loss of honor.

A man capable of doing something worthwhile who dies before his hour, may died contentedly, because in some other place his hour will come. And even if it does not, it is just as well: he is sufficiently great who has the potential to be so.
Unless one is an aristocrat of the intellect, it is impossible to be a perfect democrat.

If the future of nations is to depend on the education of men, then the education of women will guarantee and announce the kind of man we can expect.

When a people divide in two, they die as one.

The archeologist who unearths a lost city is worthier of praise than he who buried it.

There is in sin a certain spirit of independence which makes it ingratiating when not excessive.

One almost always has to crawl one's way to power. But those who get there on their feet — not on their kneees — have the best claim to it.

Books should always be read with pen in hand.

An honest man can render an account of his acts at any moment and should always be ready to do so.

When one writes with the point of a sword on history's page, there is no time or desire to write with pen on paper.

Every generation creates a national holiday that represents and reflects its ideas.

In tyranny men learn the worth of liberty from the want of it.

Men love dangerous truths in secret. Their reluctance to champion these truths before they have been accepted is equalled only by the tenacity and verve with which they will support them when there is no risk involved in their defense.

To waste one's time in barren pursuits when one might do something useful, to opt for the easy task when one has the spirit to attempt the difficult, is to rob talent of its dignity.

The surest way to win the love of your troops is not to risk their lives unnecessarily and always to fight at their head.

He is a coward who fears to satisfy the cravings of his own conscience.

Property should be tended at its roots, which is the security and prestige of the nation where it is found.

Apostles of new ideas in time become slaves to them.

What honor is there in reviling as criminals those we would have acclaimed as heroes but for their defeat?

I am not sufficiently versed in all the world's religions to be able to say that I belong to any of them.

Americans place utility before sentiment. Latins sentiment before utility.

There are many things that one could do in this life! But we have a stomach and that other stomach that hangs, which is wont to have terrible appetites.

Like benevolent angels, sorrows lift the veils of life.

Love has not, to my recollection, given me any supreme moment. Friendship has.

The noise of my words awakens my thoughts.

There is no dessert richer than a slice of bread made with good flour and toasted just right.

We live in feudal times, when a bandit in rebellion against an unjust and odious ruler, can be hailed by a stupid people as a champion of liberty.

There is no such thing as providence. Providence is no more than the logical and precise result of our actions, helped or hindered by the actions of others.

If our tormented homeland could see the care with which her absent children make ready to serve her, if she could see the work which they are doing to redeem her, if she could see the tenderness with which she is loved by them, or could know of their joyous faith in her, she would draw from pride the strength to break once and for all her chains.

Publish, publish. Thread the theme of Cuba through each and every needle. Wars proceed over roads of paper.

ஹொசே மார்த்தியின் எளிய கவிதைகள் - முன்னுரை

2007-07-07T14:44:00.000-04:00

Great was my surprise and delight last year when I discovered that an Indian newspaper [Thinnai] had translated into Hindi and published the biographical sketch of José Martí which I wrote as the "Introduction" to my translation of his Versos sencillos/Simple Verses. India had issued a postage stamp in 2003 to honor the 150th anniversary of Martí's birth, which awakened interest in him there. Although I do not ordinarily approve of having my writings pirated, it seemed to me that such a development would have pleased Martí greatly and so it also pleased me. It became a habit with me to leave a link to this article on the blogs where I commented, usually with the label: "The Wisdom of Manuel A. Tellechea distilled to its purest essence." Sometimes I would add "in the ancient Aryan language." My little joke amused and annoyed about equals numbers. Some actually asked for a translation of my wisdom in a "modern language." I became inspired to reproduce it here in toto when I read an announcement that it was now possible to use Hindi on Blogger. And so it is. If you click on the blue Hindi link at the bottom of this post you will be transported to the original article.

Thursday December 7, 2006
ஹொசே மார்த்தியின் எளிய கவிதைகள் - முன்னுரை .MANUEL A. TELLECHEA
தமிழாக்கம்: புதுவை ஞானம்

நான் முதன் முதலாக VERSOS SENCILLOS எனப்படும் எளிய கவிதைகளப் படித்தது நனைவுக்கு வருகிறது.அப்போது எனக்கு ஐந்து அல்லது ஆறு வயதிருக்கும் ஆனால் அந்தக் காலத்திலேயே உயர்ந்தவர்களுடன் தொடர்பு கொள்ள வேண்டுமானால் ஒருவர் உயரத்தில் ஏறியாக வேண்டும் என்பது எனக்குத் தெரியும். எனவே சிரமப்பட்டு வண்டிக் கொட்டகையில் இருந்த ஏணியில் ஏறினேன். அதன் உச்சியில் உட்கார்ந்து கொண்டு எனக்கு அரிச்சுவடி போலிருந்த மார்த்தியின் கவிதைகளை வாய்விட்டு உரக்கப் படித்தேன்.
எனது பதின் மூன்றாவது வயதில் மார்த்தியை மொழி பெயர்ப்பதில் ஈடுபட்டேன். தொடர்ந்து கிட்டத்தட்ட இருபது ஆண்டுகள் இந்த முயற்சியில் உழைத்தேன். இறுதியாக நான் மொழி பெயர்ப்பினை முடித்த போது சற்றேறக்குறைய அவர் இந்தக் கவிதைகளை இயற்றிய வயதினை எட்டிவிட்டேன். ஆனால், நான் அது வரை இருந்ததை விட அவரை விட்டு மேலும் விலகியிருந்தேன். ஏனெனில் எந்த ஒரு ஏணியும் அவரை எட்டும் அளவுக்கு உயரம் வாய்ந்ததாக இல்லை-- அவரது எல்லையற்ற புகழை எட்டும் அளவு இல்லை.இருந்த போதிலும் இந்த மொழி பெயர்ப்பு உலகின் முக்கியமானவர்களில் ஒருவராய் விளங்கும் ஹொசே மார்த்தியிடம், பலரை நெருக்கமாகக் கொண்டு செல்லும் ஏணியின் முதற்படியாக இருக்கும் என நம்புகிறேன்.
ஹொசே ஜுலியன் மார்த்தி பெரஸ் ( JOSE JULIAN MARTI PEREZ ) கியூபாவின் ஹவானா நகரில் ஜனவரி, 28, 1853ல் பிறந்தார். பின் ஒரு காலத்தில் கியூப தேசிய இனத்தின் வரலாற்று நாயகனாகவும், கலாச்சாரச் சின்னமாகவும் வரப்போகின்ற அவர் MARIANA MARTI NAVARO என்னும் இஸ்பானிய சிப்பாய்க்கு மகனாகப் பிறந்தார். ( எளிய கவிதைகள் : XLI ). கேனாரி தீவினைச் சேர்ந்த Leonar Perez Cabra ( கவிதை XXVII ) அத்தீவின் குடியேற்ற அலையின் கடைசித் தருணத்தில் அங்கு வந்தடைந்தார். எந்தவொரு மனிதரும் தனது சொந்த நாட்டோடு, பிறந்ததிலிருந்தே இந்த அளவு பிடிப்போடு இருந்ததில்லை ; அல்லது, தன்களது இலட்சியம் விடுவித்துக்கொள்ள இயலாத படிக்கு அந்நாட்டுடன் பிணைக்கப் பட்டிருக்கிறது என்பது பற்றி உறுதியாக இருந்ததில்லை. தனக்கென கியூப வேர்கள் இல்லாத போதிலும், இன ரீதியாகவும் கலாச்சார ரீதியாகவும்தனது நாட்டவர்களிடையே துலாம்பரமாகத் தெரிந்த மார்த்தி, கியூபர்களுக்கென பொது அடையாளம் ஒன்றினை வடித்து உருவாக்கினார். இரட்டிப்பு அடிமைத் தளை பூண்டிருந்த இனத்தின் முன்னணி வீரரானார். ( கவிதை (XXX) .
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கியூபாவில் இஸ்பானிய ஆட்சியை முடிவுக்குக் கொண்டு வருவதற்கு உறுதியான போராட்டங்களை நடத்தி வந்த் முற்றிலும் வேறுபட்ட போராட்டங்களை ஒரணியில் திரட்டும் முயற்சிகளை மேற்கொண்டார். கியூபா சுதந்திரம் பெறுவதற்கான அடித்தளத்தை அமைத்ததன் மூலம், கொலம்பசால் தொடங்கி வைக்கப்பட்ட காலனியாதிக்கத்தையும் - அதற்கு எதிராக பொலிவரால் தொடங்கி வைக்கப்பட்ட அரைக்கண்ட விடுதலைக்கான போராட்டத்தையும் முடிவுக்குக் கொண்டு வந்தார். 19, மே,1895 அன்று தனது 42 ஆவது வயதில் விடுதலைப் போரில் அவருக்கு ஏற்பட்ட வீர மரணமானது இலத்தீன் அமெரிக்கவின் புதுயுகத் தொடக்கம் என மதிக்கப்படுகிறது. மிகவும் மதிக்கப்பட்ட அரசியல் சிந்தனையாளரும், இலத்தீன் அமெரிக்க வரலாற்றில் ஜனநாயகத்தை எட்த்தியம்பினவருமான மார்த்தி உண்மையில் அந்நாட்டின் மகத்தான கவிஞரும் எழுத்தாளரும் ஆவார்.
மார்த்தியின் நாட்டுப்பற்றும் இலக்கியப்பணியும் இரட்டைப் பிறவிகள். தனது பதினைந்தாவது வயதில், 1868 இல் கியூப சுதந்திரத்துக்கான பத்தாண்டுப்போருக்கு சற்று பின்னர், இஸ்பானிய கொடுங்கோன்மையினை முதன் முதலில் எதிர் கொண்டார்.
Volunteer என அழைக்கப்பட்ட உள்ளூர்க் காவலர்கள், Villanuea Theatre இல் சுதந்திர கோஷங்களுக்கு எதிராக, நிராயுதபானியான பொதுமக்கள் மீது துப்பாக்கி சூடு நடத்தி பதிலடி கொடுத்தார்கள் ( கவிதை XXXVII ) இந்த நிகழ்ச்சியின் பின் விளைவாக மார்த்தியின் ஆசிரியரும் வழிகாட்டியுமான கவிஞர் Rafael Maria de mendive புரட்சிகர லட்சியங்களுக்கு ஆதரவாளர் என அறியப்பட்ட இவர் கைது செய்யப்பட்டு இஸ்பெயினுக்கு நாடு கடத்தப் பட்டார். அந்தப் படுகொலைக்கு அடுத்த நாள் La patria libre என்ற தலைமறைவு ரகசியப் பத்திரிக்கையில், ஒரு விடலைக் கதாநாயகன் அந்நியப் படையெடுப்பை எதிர்த்து உயிர் துறப்பதான தனது Abdala
என்ற நாடகத்தைப் பதிப்பித்தார். பின்னர் ஒரு மாதத்திற்குள்ளேயே“10 de octubre!” அவரது பாடல் El Siboney என்ற மாணவர் பத்திரிக்கையில் வெளியாகியது. கியூப சுதந்திரத்துக்கு போராடியதாலும், தனது பள்ளியில் படித்த சக மாணவர் ஒருவர் கொலைகாரப் படையில் தொண்டராகச் சேர்ந்ததைக் கண்டித்து கடிதம் எழுதியதாலும் , தேசத்துரோகக் குற்றம் சாட்டப்பட்டு San Lazaro Quarry யில் கடும் உழைப்பில் ஈடுபட வேண்டும் என இராணுவ நீதி மன்றம் அவருக்குத் தண்டணை வழங்கியது. இடுப்பிலும், கால்களிலும் பூட்டப்பட்ட இரும்புச்சங்கிலித் தளையானது அவரது சிறைக்காலம் முழுமைக்கும் அகற்றப்படவில்லை. அந்த இரும்புத்தளை சதையில் பதிந்த இரத்தக் காயத்தினை அவர் வாழ்நாள் முழுவதும் சகித்துக்கொள்ள நேரிட்டது.
செல்வாக்குள்ள ஒரு நண்பர் மூலமாக மார்த்தியின் பெற்றோர்கள் நோய்வாய்ப்பட்டிருந்த தங்களது மகனை பைன்ஸ் தீவுக்கு இடமாற்றம் செய்வித்து இறுதியாக 1871 _ ல் அவரது தண்டனையை ஸ்பெயின் நாட்டுக்கு நாடு கடத்துவதாகக் குறைத்து விட்டனர். அங்கு மார்த்தி சரகோசா மற்றும் மாட் ரிட் பல்கலைக் கழகங்களில் படித்துக்கொண்டே El precidio politico en Cuba (1871) என்ற ,கியூபச் சிறைகளில் அரசியல் கைதிகளுக்கு இழைக்கப் படும் கொடுமைகளைக் கண்டித்து எழுதப்பட்ட நூலினையும், La Republica espanala ante la revolucion cubana (1873) என்ற, இஸ்பானியர்கள் புதிதாக உருவாக்கிய குடியரசில் உள்ளது போன்ற அதே சுய நிர்ணய உரிமை கியூபர்களுக்கும் வழங்கப்பட வேண்டும் என வீணே வற்புறுத்திய நூலையும் பதிப்பித்தார். இஸ்பானிய காலனிய ஆதிக்கத்தின் எடுபிடிகளால் அவருக்கு இழைக்கப்பட்ட கொடுமைகளையும் மீறி, இச்பெயினில் தான் கழித்த காலத்தை தன்னை உருவாக்கிய காலம் அது என அன்புடன் நினைவு கூர்ந்தார். அத்தோடு மட்டுமின்றி இஸ்பானியர்களின் பாரம்பரியக் கொள்கையான மூடநம்பிக்கை மற்றும் சகிப்பின்மையை முடிவுக்குக் கொண்டு வருவதற்காக போராடி உயிர் துறந்த தியாகிகளின் நினைவையும் போற்றினார்.
சட்டம், தத்துவம், மற்றும் இலக்கியத்துறையில் பட்டம் பெறுவதற்காக பரீட்சிக்கப்பட்டு தேர்ச்சி பெற்ற பின்னரும், இன்னமும் நாடு கடத்தல் தண்டணைக் காலத்தில் இருந்த மார்த்தி இஸ்பானியக் கண்காணிப்பை மீறி ஏமாற்றி சிறிது காலம் பாரீசில் இருந்தார். அங்கு விக்டர் ஹ்யூகோவைச் சந்தித்ததுடன் அவரது Mes fils என்ற நூலினை மொழி பெயர்த்தார். பாரீசிலிருந்து சவுத் ஆம்ப்டன் மற்றும் நியூயார்க் வழியாக மெக்சிகோவுக்கு கடற்பயணம் மேற்கொண்ட அவர், இறுதியாக, 1875 இல் அதறவற்ற தனது குடும்பத்தினருடன் இணைந்தார். Revisita universal பணியாளராக சேர்ந்தார். அவரது Amor con amor se paga (1875) என்ற நாடகம் Teottro principal என்ற அரங்கில் நடத்தப் பட்டது. மெகிகோவில் தனது ஏழு சகோதரிகளில் மிகவும் பிரியமான Mariana Matilde வைப் பறிகொடுத்தார். (கவிதை VI) தனக்கு எதிர் காலத்தில் மனைவியாய் அமைந்த ஒரு பணக்காரக் குடியேற்றக்காரரின் மகளான Carmen zayar Bazan உடன் அவருக்கு நிச்சயதார்த்தம் நடந்தது. (கவிதை XVIII, XX, XXXV, மற்றும் XXXVII). அங்கு அவர் வழக்கறிஞரான Manuel Mercado வைச் சந்தித்தார். அவரது நெருங்கிய நண்பராகவும் வாழ்நாள் முழுவதும் நம்பிக்கைக்குரியவராகவும் இருந்த அவருக்கும் சேர்த்து 'எளிய கவிதைகள்' சமர்ப்பனம் செய்யப்பட்டது.
“ எனது தாய் நாட்டுக்கு அடுத்த படியாக நான் மிகவும் நேசித்தது இந்த நாடுதான்” என்று மெக்சிகோ பற்றிப் பேசுகையில் மார்த்தி குறிப்பிட்டார். அங்கும் கூட தொடர்ந்து வசிக்க அவர் அனுமதிக்கப்படவில்லை. Porfrio Diaz இன் திடீர் எழுச்சி அவரது வெளியேற்றத்தைக் கட்டாயமாக்கியது. கண்டு பிடிக்கப்பட்டால் நிச்சயம் சிறைவாசம் தான் என்ற ஆபத்து இருந்த போதிலும் கூட, 1877 இல் திருட்டுத்தனமாகவும் திடீரெனவும் Julian Prez என்ற பொய்ப் பெயரில் அவர் ஹவானா வந்து சேர்ந்தார். வந்த இரண்டு மாதத்துக்குள்ளேயே அவர் கவுதமாலா சென்று Jose Maria Izaguirre என்ற கியூபர் நடத்திய பொதுப்பள்ளியில் ஆசிரியரானார். பின்னர் பல்கலைக்கழக ஆசிரியர் குழுவில் இடம் பெற்றார். கவுதமாலாவில் அவர் இருந்த அந்த ஆண்டில் அரசின் வேண்டுகோளினை ஏற்று கவுதமாலாவின் பண்டைய வரலாற்றை எழுதிப் பதிப்பித்தார். ஆனால் அது பயனற்றதாக ஆகிவிட்டது. ஏனெனில் அவரது நண்பர் Iza Guirre பதவியிலிருந்து நீக்கப்பட்ட போது தானும் தனது பதவியை விட்டு தன்னிச்சையாக விலகி அந்த நாட்டை விட்டு வெளியேறினார்.
தான் கவுதமாலாவில் தங்கியிருந்தபோது Maria Garcia Granodos உடைய வெகுளித்தனமான காதலை உதறித் தள்ளியது பற்றி எப்போதுமே நினைந்து நினைந்து வாடினார். அவளது இறப்பிற்குப் பின்னர்தான் அவளும் தன்னை உண்மையாக நேசித்தது அவருக்குப் புரிய வந்தது. (கவிதை IX)
இஸ்பெயின் நாட்டில் 1878 இல் பத்தாண்டுப் போரின் முடிவில் வழங்கப்பட்ட பொது மன்னிப்பைப் பயன் படுத்திக்கொண்டு மார்த்தி ஹவானாவுக்குத் திரும்பினார். அவரது மனைவி கார்மெனும் உடன் வந்து நவம்பர், 22 அன்று அவரது ஒரே மகனான Jose Francisco Marti Zyaz Bazan ஐ ஈன்றெடுத்தார். (கவிதை 1:10 மற்றும்XXI )
வழக்கறிஞராகப் பணியாற்றுவதற்கான உரிமம் மறுக்கப்பட்ட நிலையில் நியூயார்க்கினைத் தளமாகன் கொண்டு செயல்பட்ட Comitee Revolucionario cuba என்ற அமைப்பின் வழிகாட்டுதலுக்கேற்ப ஒரு புதிய கிளர்ச்சியை உருவாக்குவதில் உதவிக்கொண்டே ஒரு வக்கீல் குமாஸ்தாவாகப் பணியாற்றினார். அந்தத் தீவில் மீண்டும் பகைமைகள் உருவானபோது தனக்கு எதிராக எந்த ஒரு குற்றமும் சாட்டப் படாத நிலையிலேயே மீண்டும் ஒரு முறை இஸ்பெயினுக்கு நாடு கடத்தப் பட்டார். ஆனால் அவர் மீண்டும் தப்பித்து Pyreness ஐக் கடந்து, தான் மிகவும் நேசித்த மகனையும் ,குடும்பத்துக்கும் அப்பால் வியாபித்திதிருந்ததும் ஆனால் குடும்பத்தை விலக்காததுமான அவரது பரிவுணர்வை, சில சமயங்களில் குடும்பத்தைத் தாண்டியது மட்டுமல்ல அதனை விலக்குவது எனத் தவறாகப் புரிந்து கொண்டு வீணே பிணங்கிய மனவியையும் பிரிந்து ஜனவரி 1880 இல் நியூயார்க் வந்தடைந்தார்.
நிச்சயமான வாழ்வாதாரம் ஏதுமில்லாத அன்னிய பூமியில் Manuel Mantilla, Carmen என்கிற கியூபாவிலிருந்து புலம் பெயர்ந்த தம்பதிகள் நடத்திய உணவு விடுதியில் தங்கினார். முதலில் போதுமான வேலை கிடைக்காததாலும், இஸ்பானிய தூதரகத்தால் கூலிக்கு அமர்த்தப்பட்ட Pinkerton Agents நாள் முழுவதும் பின் தொடரப்பட்ட போதிலும்; உடனடியாகத் தனது புரட்சிகரப் பணிகளைத் தொடங்கி Comite Revolucionario cubana வின் இடைக்காலத் தலைவராகவும் ,செய்தித் தொடர்பாளராகவும் பொறுப்பேற்றுக் கொண்டார். மார்த்தி, தான் “மனிதர் குல மாணிக்கம்” என மதித்த புகழ் மிகு பத்திரிக்கை ஆசிரியரான Charles A.Dana நடத்தி வந்த THE HOUR AND THE SUN பத்திரிக்கையில் கலை விமர்சகராக வேலையேற்று இறுதியாக கியூபாவிலிருந்த தனது குடும்பத்தை வரவழைத்தார். இருந்த போதிலும் புதிய குடியேற்றக்காரர்களுக்கு விதிக்கப்பட்ட கடுமையான நிபந்தனைகளை அவரது மனைவியால் தாங்க முடியவில்லை. தீவில் எழுச்சி ஏற்பட்ட ஒரு வாரத்துக்குள்ளேயே மார்த்தியை தன்னுடன் கியூபாவுக்கு திரும்ப ஒப்புக்கொள்ளவைக்க இயலும் என்ற நம்பிக்கை இல்லாமல், அப்படி அவர் ஒப்புக்கொண்டிருந்தாலும் நிச்சயமான எதிகாலம் இல்லாத நிலையில் நவம்பர்,1880 இல் தங்களது மகனுடன் புறப்பட்டு விட்டார் . பின்னர் கணவருடன் ஒன்று சேரச் சம்மதித்தார். எனினும், நியூயார்க்கிலிருந்த இஸ்பானிய தூதரகத்தின் சதியால் மீண்டும் குடும்பத்தை விட்டு வெளியேறினார்.
ஜனவரி 1881 இல் இன்னமும் நியூயார்க்கில் அவரை ஈர்த்துவைக்க ஏதுமில்லாத நிலையில் அவர் வெனிசுவேலாவுக்குப் பயணமானார்.அங்கு ஆறு மாதம் தங்கி இருந்தார்.Revisita Venezolana என்ற நவீனமானதொரு கலை மற்றும் இலத்தீன் Ismaelillo அமெரிக்கக் கருத்துக்களைத் தாங்கி வரும் பத்திரிக்கையைத் தொடங்குமளவும் Ismaelillo Ismaelillo என்ற, ஒரு தந்தை மகனுக்கென சர்ப்பிக்கப் பட்டவற்றுள் எல்லாம் மிக அழகிய கவிதை நூலினை எழுதவும் அவகாசம் இருந்தது.
வெனிசுவேலாவில் இருந்தபோது, Cecilio Acousta அவர்களைச் சந்தித்து அவர் காலமாகு முன்னரே நண்பராக்கிக் கொண்டார். “பெரும் புகழ் வாய்ந்த புத்துணர்வாளர்” என அறியப்பட்ட GENERAL BLANCO வினால் அந்த நண்பர் வீட்டுக்காவல் கைதியாக வைக்கப்பட்டிருந்தார். Acosta வுக்கு மார்த்தி எழுதிய அஞ்சலியில் அன்னாரது வாழ்வினைப் போற்றியும், அவர் எந்த ஜனநாயக மதிப்பீடுகளுக்காக வாழ்ந்தாரோ அவற்றை நியாயப்படுத்தியும் எழுதியிருந்தார். அத்தகையதொரு புகழாரத்தை Gusman Blanco வுக்கு சூட்ட மறுத்ததால் மார்த்திக்கு எதிராக நாடு கடத்தல் உத்தரவு பிறப்பிக்கப்பட்டது.
வெனிசுவேலாவில் நிரந்தரமாகத் தங்குவதற்கு, தான் ஏற்கனவே மெக்சிகோவிலும் கவுதமாலாவிலு முயற்சித்ததைப் போன்று முயற்சித்தார். ஆனால் எதேச்சாதிகாரத்துக்கு எதிராக ஆட்சியின் அக்கிரமங்களை எதிர்த அவரது சமரசமற்ற போக்கு ,அவரது பாராட்டினை விலைக்கு வாங்கவோ , அவரது வாயை அடைக்கவோ முடியாத அந்த நாட்டுத் தலைவர்களுடன் மோதலை ஏற்படுத்தியது. இருந்த போதிலும் அநீதிக்குத் தலை வணங்காத அவரது வெளிப்படையான பேச்சு , எந்தெந்த நாடுகளில் அவர் வசித்தாலும் அந்நாடுகளின் மிகவும் முன் மாதிரியானவர்களின் பாராட்டினை அவருக்குப் பெற்றுத் தந்தது.
ஆகஸ்ட் 1881 இல் மார்த்தி நியூயார்க்குக்குத் திரும்பி வந்தார். அவர் வாழ்வில் எஞ்சியிருந்த பதிநான்கு ஆண்டுகளை அவர் அங்கே கழிக்க நேர்ந்தது. இங்குதான், தன்னை விட்டு விலகி விலகிச் சென்றதும், தான் மிகவும் ஆவலோடு நேசித்ததுமான சுதந்திரத்தையும் குடும்ப வாழ்வினையும் அவரால் அடைய முடிந்தது. மார்ட்டில்லாவின் இறப்பிற்குப் பிறகு Carman Miyares அவர்களின் நான்கு குழந்தைகளுக்கு மாற்றுத்தந்தை ஆனார். Carman Miyares இடம் தான் கியூபா மீது மார்த்தி கொண்டிருந்த நேசத்தை மறுதலிக்காத நிலைத்த துணையைக் காண முடிந்தது. (கவிதை IV ).
அமெரிக்காவில் மார்த்தி இரு புரட்சிகளைத் தொடங்க வேண்டி இருந்தது.ஒன்று எழுத்துலம் சார்ந்தது, மற்றது மானுட விவகாரங்கள் பற்றியது. எழுத்துலகப் புரட்சி 1882 இல் Isamallillo வைப் பதிப்பித்ததில் தொடங்கியது. பெரும்பாலான விமர்சகர்கள் அதனை இஸ்பானிய கவிதைத் தளத்தில் நவீனத்துவம் உதயமாகக் காரணமாக இருந்தது என மதித்தனர். 1885 இல் தொடராக வந்த அவரது புதினமான AMISTAD FUNESTA தான் முதன் முதலாக நற்பண்புகள் (Manners) பற்றிய கருத்துகளை அறிமுகப் படுத்தியதாகும். La Edad de Oro (1889) நூல் தான் குழந்தை இலக்கிய மரபினை முன்னெடுத்துச் சென்றது என்பதுடன் இன்றும் அவ்வகையில் சிறந்த எடுத்துக் காட்டாகத் திகழ்கிறது. இருந்த போதிலும் மார்த்தியின் அதிக பட்ச செல்வாக்கு இதழியல் துறையில்தான் செலுத்தப்பட்டது என்பதோடு, அவர் இதழியலை இலக்கியத்தரத்துக்கு உயர்த்தி மானுடச் சேவையில் அதனை ஈடுபடுத்தினார்.
வேறு எந்த ஒரு மனிதரையும் விட மேலை அரைக்கோளத்தின் மூன்றில் இரண்டு பதியை மீதியிருந்த ஒரு பகதிக்கு அறிமுகப்படுத்தியதில் மார்த்திக்குப் பெரும் பங்கு உண்டு. இதனை அவர் மெக்சிகோவின் El Patrido Liberal மற்றும் Buenos Aires இல் இருந்து வெளிவந்த La Nacion இதழ்களில் இருவாரங்களுக்கு ஒரு முறையாக தொடர்ந்து பத்தாண்டுகளுக்கு, தான் எழுதியவற்றின் மூலம் சாதித்தார்.அவை இலத்தீன் அமெரிக்காவின் எல்லா நாளிதழ்களிலும் மறுபதிப்பு செய்யப்பட்டன என்பதோடு முதன் முதலாக சர்வதேச அளவில் மார்த்தியை அரசியல் விமரிசகர் என ஏற்றுக் கொள்ள வைத்தன. மார்த்திக்கு மச்ற்றொரு பிரதான எழுது பொருளும் இருந்தது. அது அமெரிக்க ஐக்கிய குடிஅரசுகள் பற்றியதாகும்.Obras Completas என்ற தனது 28 தொகுதிகள் கொண்ட தொகுப்பில் 5 தொகுதிகள் இதற்கெனவே கவனம் செலுத்தின. எமர்சனையும் விட்மனையும் மார்த்தி இஸ்பானிய உலகுக்கு அறிமுகப்படுத்துனார் என்பதோடு, அரைக்கோள கலாச்சாரப் பரவலில் மிகவும் செல்வாக்கு வாய்ந்த விளக்க உரையாளராகவும் இருந்தார். உண்மையில், De Tocquille ஐரோப்பாவுக்கு செய்ததைப் போலவே,இலத்தீன் அமெரிக்காவுக்கு அமெரிக்க ஐக்கிய குடியரசுகள் பற்றிய கருத்து உருவாகக் காரணமாக இருந்தார்.ஜிங்கோயிசத்தின் வெறித்தனமான உச்சகட்ட நாட்களில் அமெரிக்காவின் அரசியலை அக்கு வேறு ஆணி வேறாக அலசிப் பகுத்தாய்ந்து, இலத்தீன் அமெரிக்காவுக்கு அதனால் நேர இருக்கும் ஆபத்துகள்/ நாசம் பற்றி எச்சரித்தார். அமெரிக்க அரசாட்சி முறையில் பொதிந்திருந்த தவறுகளை அவர் மூடி மறைக்கவில்லை. ஒரு அனுதாபியுடைய முழு சக்தியடனும் அதனை எதிர்த்துச் சாடினார். ஆனால் குற்றங்குறைகளைக் கண்டித்தாரேயழிய அமைப்பை குறை கூறவில்லை.அந்த அமைப்பு 'சமூக மிருகம்' என்ற அளவில் மனிதன் சாதித்ததில் உச்சகட்டமானது என மதித்தார்.
இலத்தீன் அமெரிக்காவில் அவரது புகழும் செல்வாக்கும் பரவிய போது மார்த்தி அர்ஜெந்தினா மற்றும் பராகுவே நாடுகளால் அமெரிக்காவில் இருந்த தங்கள் தூதரகத்துக்கு தலைமை தாங்க நியமிக்கப் பட்டார்.அதே ஆண்டில் உருகுவே நாட்டால் வாஷிங்டனில்செயல் பட்ட International American Monetary conference என்ற அமைப்பின் பிரதிநிதியாக நியமிக்கப்பட்டார். அங்கு அவர் இலத்தீன் அமெரிக்கப் பொருளாதாரத்தை தங்களது கட்டுப்பாட்டிற்குள் கொண்டு வரும் நோக்கில் பிராந்திய செலாவணி உடகமாக தங்கத்துக்குப் பதில் வெள்ளியைப் புகுத்த முயன்ற அமெரிக்க சதியை முறியடிக்கக் காரணகர்த்தாவாக செயல் பட்டார். மேற்கே ஏராளமான வெள்ளிப் படிவங்கள் இருப்பது கண்டு பிடிக்கப் பட்டதால் இப்படி ஒரு திட்டத்தை அமெரிக்கா முன் மொழிந்தது.
'மோசமான பனிக்காலம்' என வர்ணிக்கப்பட்ட அந்தப் பருவத்தில் பணிச்சுமையால் சோர்ந்து போன - மார்பக நோயால் பாதிக்கப்பட்ட( - அது எலும்புருக்கி நோயாய் இருந்திருக்கலாம் - ) மார்த்தியை, நியூயார்க்கின் மேட்டுப் பகுதியில் இருந்த Catskill என்ற இடத்தில் காற்றாடத் தங்கி ஓய்வெடுக்குமாறு மருத்துவர் ஆலோசனை வழங்கினார்.
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தன்னால் சோம்பி இருக்க முடியாது என்பதைக் கண்ட மார்த்தி , தனது நோயாறுதல் காலத்தில் Versos sensillos கவிதைத் தொகுதியின் பெரும்பகுதியை எழுதி முடித்தார். அது இஸ்பானிய- அமெரிக்கக் கலாச்சாரத்தின் ஒப்புயர்வற்ற சிகரமாக அமைந்தது அவரது மற்றெல்லாப் படைப்புகளும் மறைந்து போனாலும் கூட, அந்த ஒன்றே கூட இலக்கியப் படைப்புலகில், அவருக்கு இருக்கும் அதே உயர்ந்த இடத்தை நிச்சயம் பெற்றுத் தரும்.
Versos Sensillos (Simple verses - எளிய கவிதைகள் ) மார்த்தியின் ஆன்மாவை வெளிப்படுத்தும் சுயசரிதை ஆகும். ஒவ்வொரு கவிதையும் ஒரு உணர்வு நிலையை அல்லது; ஒரு கவிஞனையும் மனிதனையும் உருவாக்கிய கணத்தைப் படம் பிடித்துக் காட்டுகின்றன. நூறு ஆண்டுகளுக்கு மேலாக ஒரு தீவினுக்கும், ஒரு கண்டத்திற்கும் வாழ்வின் ஒரு பகுதியாக இருந்து வந்துள்ளன. மார்த்தி மறு வார்ப்பு செய்ததான Golden Rule “La rosa blanca” VERSE XXXIX என்ற கவிதைதான் இலத்தீன் அமெரிக்காவின் மிக உயர்ந்த கவிதை எனலாம். {மொழி பெயர்ப்பாளரின் குறிப்பு : “மற்றவர் உன்னை எப்படி நடத்த வேண்டும் என விரும்புகிறாயோ அவ்வாறே பிறரை நடத்துவாயாக!” “ Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them; for this is the law and the prophets” Matt.vii,12 } அவரது இந்தக் கவிதையைத்தான் பள்ளியில் குழந்தைகளுக்கு முதன் முதலாகக் கற்றுக் கொடுக்கிறார்கள். “La nina de Gautamala” கவிதை (IX) ,இஸ்பானிய இலக்கியத்திலேயே மிகவும் புகழ் வாய்ந்த காதல் கவிதை ஆகும். “La bailarina Espanola ( கவிதை X ) நடனத்தின் தாள லயமான அடவுகளை முதன் முதலில் மனதில் பதிய வைத்த இஸ்பானியக் கவிதை ஆகும். “Yo tengo un amigo muerto”(கவிதைVIII) அந்த மொழியில்முதல் முதலில் வெளியான உள்மன வெளிப்பாட்டியல் கவிதை ஆகும். தேச பக்த கவிதைகளான ( கவிதை எண் :XXIII, XXV, XLV )ஆகியவை , அவரது காலத்தில் தனது நாட்டின் மீதான நேசத்தை எந்தப் படாடோபமும் வெறியும் இல்லாமல் இயல்பாக வெளிப்பட்ட கவிதைகள் ஆகும்.ஆனால் எவ்வளவுதான் திகைக்க வைத்த போதிலும் ' எளிய கவிதைகள்' தனித்தனிக் கவிதைகள் என்பதற்கும் மேலானவை. அந்தக் கவிஞன், அந்தப் போராளி, அந்தப் பாடலாசிரியன், அந்தத் தத்துவ ஞானி, அந்த சட்ட மேதை, அந்த உண்மை தேடுபவன், உவகை ஊட்டவல்ல அதே சமயம் மதிமயக்கம் ஊட்டாத காதல் மன்னன், கவிதைக்காக களம் இறங்கியவன் ஆனால் கவிதையை மேம்படுத்தியவன். அறிஞன் ஆனாலும் பரிசுத்தமானவன். எளிய கவிதைகள், வாழ்க்கையில் பிரதிபலிக்கும் எதிரும் புதிருமான அனைத்தும் அடங்கிய - சிறந்த இசை மேதையால் வடிவமைக்கப்பட்ட கூட்டு இசையாகும் ( Sympony ). மார்த்தி உலக முழுமைக்குமான மனிதர்.அவரது தியாகம் புரிவதற்கான சாத்தியம் வரம்பற்றது. அவரது கொள்கைகள் அசைக்க முடியாதவை.
டிசம்பர் 13, 1890 - ல் 'எளிய கவிதைகள்' கையெழுத்துப் பிரதியிலிருந்து சில பகுதிகளை, 361 மேற்கு 58 ஆவது தெரு, நியூயார்க் என்ற முகவரியில், கார்மென் மியாரஸ் இல்லத்தில் Francisco chacon caldron அவர்களைக் கவுரவிக்கும் மாலை விருந்து ஒன்றில் வாசித்தார். 'எளிய கவிதைகள்' அக்டோபர்,1890-ல் LOUIS WEISS & CO of Newyork என்ற பதிப்பகத்தால் வெளியிடப்படவிருந்தது. அவரது வாழ்நாளிலேயே வெளியிடப்பட்ட கடைசி நூலாகும் அது. எளிய கவிதையின் முடிவுரையாக அவர் பேசிய “hirsute versos libres” அவரது மறைவுக்குப் பின் வெளியிடப்பட்டது. அவரது வாழ்வில் மிஞ்சி இருந்த ஒரெ செல்வமான எளிய கவிதைகளின் பிரதிகளை தான் சென்ற இடங்களுக்கெல்லாம் எடுத்துச் சென்று , பழைய புதிய நண்பர்களுக்கு வழங்கினார். தனது ஆன்மாவின் ஒரு பகுதியான அத்தொகுப்பை, தான் சந்தித்த ஒவ்வொரு ஆண், பெண், குழந்தையிடமும் விட்டுச் சென்றார்.
ஒரு கவிஞன் என்ற முறையில் இன்னும் கூட ஒரு விஷயம் மார்த்தியைப் பற்றி சொல்லப்பட வேண்டி இருக்கிறது. வால்ட் விட்மன் அவர்கள் காலமான 1892 ஆம் ஆண்டிலிருந்து மார்த்தி மறைந்த 1895 வரை; ஆங்கிலமொழியின் கவிதை ஆயினும் சரி - இஸ்பானிய மொழியின் கவிதை ஆயினும் சரி ,அந்த கால கட்டத்தில் அமெரிக்காவின் கவிஞர்களில் மார்த்தி தான் தலை சிறந்த கவிஞராக இருந்தார் என்பது அன்றும் சரி இன்றும் சரி பலருக்கும் தெரியாத உண்மையாகும். அந்த நாட்டிலிருந்துதான் தனது பெரும்பாலான நூல்களை எழுதினார், பதிப்பித்தார் என்பதனாலும்; அவை அமெரிக்க கலாச்சார மற்றும் இலக்கிய வளர்ச்சிக்கு ஏற்பவும்,பல சமயங்களில் அவற்றை விஞ்சியும் இருந்ததனால் அமெரிக்க இலக்கியப் பாரம்பரையின் ஒரு அங்கம் என்பதனையும், நிச்சயமாக அதற்கு பங்களித்தவர்களுள் மகத்தான இஸ்பானியர் என்பதையும் யாராலும் மறுக்க இயலாது.
இலகியப் படைப்பும் சீர்திருத்தமும் ஆன அவரது காலகட்டம் முழுவதுமே ,கியூப விடுதலை மீதான அக்கறையைக் கைவிட்டதில்லை அது எப்போதுமே அவரது வாழ்வின் தலையாய நோக்கமாக இருந்தது .அவரது அனைத்து நடவடிக்கைகளும்
அதற்கெனவே ஆகவும் அதற்கு கீழ்ப்படிந்ததாகவுமே இருந்தன. “ ஒரு மனிதன் உயிர் வாழ்வதற்கு காற்றும் வெளிச்சமும் தேவையாய் இருப்பது போலவே கவிதையும் தேவைப்படுகிறது” என்று மார்த்தி எழுதினார். மற்றெந்த மனிதர்களையும் விட கவிஞனுக்கு அது தேவைப் படுகிறது என்பதனை எளிய கவிதைகள் உறுதிப்படுத்தின(கவிதை XLVI ) .ஆனால் கலை கலைக்காகவே என்று நம்பிய அழகியல்வாதி அல்ல அவர். இலத்தீன் அமெரிக்க வரலாற்றில் மகத்தான கலைஞரான அவர், “புரட்சிகர கால கட்டத்தில் எல்லாமும் புரட்சித்தீயில் ஆகுதி ஆக வேண்டும் கலை ஆயினும் கூட!” என்றும் எழுதினார்.
1884- ல் பத்தாண்டுப் போரின் இரு முக்கிய ராணுவ தளபதிகளான ஜெனரல் மாக்சிமோ கோமஸ் மற்றும் அந்தானியோ மேசியோ ஆகியவர்களால் கியூபத்தீவின் புதிய கிளர்ச்சிக்கென நிதி திரட்டும் பணியின் பிரச்சாரத்தில் முன் கையெடுத்து செயல்படும்படி கேட்டுக் கொள்ளப்பட்டார். ஆனால், குடிமை விவகாரங்களில் இராணுவத்தின் பாத்திரம் என்னவாக இருக்க வேண்டும் என்பது பற்றிய கருத்து வேறுபாடு காரணமாகவும், அந்த ஜெனரல்கள் ஒரு ராணுவ சர்வாதிகாரத்தை நிறுவ விரும்புகிறார்கள் என்ற அச்சத்தின் காரணமாகவும், அந்த ஜெனரல்களின் திட்டத்தை விட அவர்கள் நல்லவர்கள் என்பதனை உணர்ந்து அவர்களின் முதிர்ச்சியற்ற திட்டத்திலிருந்து ஒதுங்கிக் கொண்டார்.( கடந்த யுத்ததின் தோல்விக்கு ஆயுதம் தாங்கியகுடியரசு ஆட்சிதான் காரணம் என அவர்கள் பழி சுமத்தினர்). கோமஸ் - மேசியோ திட்டம் தோல்வியுற்றதும்,கடந்த யுத்தத்தின் தோல்வியால் ஏற்பட்ட, தோல்வி மனப்பான்மையிலிருந்தும் தனிப்பட்ட குரோதங்களிலிருந்தும் விடுபட்டு ஆறுதல் அடைய நாட்டுக்கு அவகாசம் தேவைப் படுகிறது என்று மார்த்தியை நம்ப வைத்தன.
1891 ஆம் ஆண்டு வாக்கில் கியூப விடுதலைப் போருக்கு 'அவசியமான' சரியான நிலைமை கனிந்து வந்திருப்பதாகப் புரிந்து கொண்டார். சுதந்திரம் பெறுவதற்கு அவசியமானது மட்டுமல்ல; தனது வரலாற்று ரீதியான பலத்தால், விலை கொடுத்தோ அல்லது நிர்ப்பந்தம் செய்தோ கியூபாவைத் தன்னுடன் இணைத்துக் கொள்ளும் அமெரிக்க ஆசையை தடுத்து நிறுத்துவதற்கும் அவசியமான நேரம் வந்து விட்டதாகக் கருதினார். ஒரு பத்திரிக்கையாளர் என்ற முறையிலும் , ஒரு தூதுவர் என்ற முறையிலும் அமெரிக்க ஏகாதிபத்தியத்தின் பொங்கி வரும் பேரலையைத் தடுக்கப் போராடியிருக்கிறார். இப்போது ஒரு படை வீரனாகவும் போராட முடிவு செய்தார்.
ஏப்ரல் 5, 1892 -ல் KEYWEST என்ற இடத்திலிருந்த பல்வேறு கியூப மன்றங்களின் கூட்டத்தில் “ ஒரு நோக்கத்துக்காக ஒன்று படவும், தேவையான அனைத்து சக்திகளையும் தூண்டி துரிதப்படுத்தவும், உணவிலும் செயலிலும் ஜனநாயக முறையில் செயல்படும் ஒரு புரட்சிகர அமைப்பை உருவாக்கி , எங்கு ஒவ்வொரு குடிமகனும் பணியிலும் அமைதியிலும் ஒரு மனிதனுக்கான அனைத்து உரிமைகளையும் அடைவானோ அத்தகையதொரு குடியரசினை நிறுவுவதற்காகவும் , ஒரு கியூபப் புரட்சிகரக் கட்சியை” உருவாக்கும் யோசனையை முன் வைத்தார். மார்த்தி வரைவு செய்த Bases and Estatutos பொது வாக்கெடுப்புக்கு விடப்பட்டு ஒரு மனதாக ஏற்கப்பட்டது. எதிர்ப்பு ஏதுமின்றி கியாபப் புரட்சிக் கட்சியின் பிரதிநிதியாக அல்லது தலைவராக தேர்ந்தெடுக்கப்பட்டார். தனது ஆளுமையின் சக்தியையும் தனது பேச்சாற்றலையும் மட்டுமே துணைக்கொண்டு, புலம் பெயர்ந்தும் பிளவு பட்டும் கிடந்த ஒரு சமுதாயத்தினை ஒன்று படுத்தி ,தொலைந்து போன இலட்சியம் என்பதாக மனம் சோர்ந்து கிடந்தவர்களுக்கு புது வாழ்வு கொடுத்தார்.
அடிக்கடி கடுமையாக நோய்வாய்ப்பட்டும் ,இஸ்பானிய ஏஜண்டுகளால் ஒரு முறை நஞ்சூட்டப்பட்டும், மற்றொரு முறை கிட்டத்தட்ட படுகொலைத் தாகுதலுக்கு உள்ளாகி, Pinkerton உளவாளிகளாலும், அமெரிக்க காவல் துறையினராலும் கண்காணிக்கப்பட்டு வந்த போதும், அடுத்த மூன்று ஆண்டுகளில் மார்த்தி அமெரிக்கா முழுவதிலும் இலத்தீன் அமெரிக்காவிலும் பல பயணங்களை மேற்கொண்டு , தனது சக புலம் பெயர்ந்தவர்களிடையேயான பிணக்குகளைத் தீர்க்கவும் ஆயுதங்கள் கப்பல் வாங்கத் தேவையான நிதி திரட்டவும் செய்தார். ' Patritia' என்ற கட்சிப் பத்திரிக்கைக்கு நிறையவே எழுதியதுடன் அதன் ஆசிரியராகவும் இருந்தார்.
அவரது புரட்சிகரப் பணிகளின் உச்சகட்டமான “ FERNANDINA” கடற்பயணம் 1895 - இல் அமெரிக்க அரசாங்கத்தால் சூழ்ச்சியாக முறியடிக்கப்பட்டு கப்பல்களும் ஆயுதங்களும் பறிமுதல் செய்யப்பட்ட போது, சில வாரங்களேயான வெகு குறுகியகால இடைவெளியில் ஆண்டுக்கணக்காக செலுத்தப்பட வேண்டிய உழைப்பைக் குறுக்கி மற்றொரு கடற்பயணத்தை ஏற்பாடு செய்தார் .அது கண்டு பிடிக்கப்பட வில்லை. ஜனவரி 29 அன்று போர் தொடுக்கும் ஆணையில் கையெழுத்திட்டு விட்டு இரண்டு நாள் கழித்து, தனது கடந்தகாலப் பிணக்குகளைப் புறமொதுக்கி ,யுத்த்தின் தலைமைத் தளபதியாக இருக்க ஒப்புக்கொண்ட ஜெனரல் மேக்சிமோ கோமசைச் சந்திக்க டொமினிகன் குடியரசுக்குப் பயணமானார். மார்ச் ,25 அன்று,மார்த்தியால் வரைவு செய்யப்பட்டதும், புரட்சியின் ஜனநாயக துவக்கத்தையும் புரட்சியின் கொள்கைகளையும் உறுதி செய்ததுமான “ MANIFESTO DE MONTICRISTI” பிரகடனத்தில் இருவரும் கையெழுத்திட்டனர்.
கோமசின் விருப்பத்துக்கு எதிராக ; புரட்சிக்கும் கியூபாவின் எதிர்காலத்துக்கும் மார்த்தியின் உயிர் மிகமிக இன்றியமையாத மதிப்பு மிக்கது - அதனைப் பணயம் வைக்கக்கூடாது என எச்சரித்திருந்த போதிலும்,ஏப்ரல் ,11 அன்று அவரும் மார்த்தியும் மேலும் ஐவருடன் இணைந்து இரவு நேரத்தில் ஒரு துடுப்புப் படகி ஏறி ,ஓரியந்தே மாநிலத்தின் Playitas என்ற இடத்தை அடைந்தனர். ஏற்கனவே திட்டமிட்டபடி ,மே ஆறாம் தேதி மார்த்தியும், கோமசும் புரட்சிக்கு தனது முக்கியமான ஆதரவைத் தெரிவித்திருந்த ஜெனரல் அந்தானியோ மேசியோவும் மக்கள் மத்தியில் “La Majorana”
வெளியிட்டனர்.
1895,மே,19 அன்று புரட்சியின் முதல் போர் சம்பவத்தில் ஓரியந்தே மாநிலத்தின் Dos Rios எண்ரைடத்தில் தனது கன்னிப்போரில், தான் தனது எளியகவிதைகள் XXIII இல் வரும் பொருள் உரைக்கும் அமைச்சாக முன் கூட்டியே எழுதியது போலவே கொல்லப்பட்டு வீரமரணம் அடைந்தார்.
அடுத்து வந்த நூற்றாண்டு வாக்கில், வாக்குப் பலிதமாகும் அவரது அருள் வாக்கு :
“எனது கவிதை வளரும்
நானும் வளருவேன்
புற்களுக்கு அடியில்!.”

BY: .MANUEL A.TELLECHEA

தமிழாக்கம்: புதுவை ஞானம் - 6 December 2006
திண்ணையில் தமிழாக்கம்: புதுவை ஞானம்
Copyright: thinnai.com

A subsequent investigation of the Thinnai archives -- no easy task for one unacquainted with Hindi -- revealed that the author (as yet unidentified) of the foregoing translation has actually rendered the entire Versos sencillos into his native language and published extensive selections in other issues of that newspaper. Since the translations in Thinnai are referenced with pagination that does not correspond to my translation of the Versos sencillos/Simple Verses (Houston, 1997), I presume that it must derive from an Indian edition of Martí's work which not only borrowed my "Introduction" but used my English as a basis for its Hindi translations. I don't know how Martí fared through this double-sieve; no worse, I should think, than Cervantes whose first English translations were actually re-translations from the French.

I should like, of course, to obtain a copy of this partially pirated Indian edition, not as evidence of copyright infringement (Martí's works should be diffused by any and all means), but as a literary curiosity attesting to the truth of Martí's prophecy: "My poetry will grow, and I too will grow under the grass."

http://www.thinnai.com/?module=displaystory&story_id=60612075&format=html

A Brief History of the Cuban Republic, Part II (1940-1952)

2007-06-22T13:28:00.002-04:00

1940 was Cuban democracy's culminating year. As Europe's own democracies collapsed one by one at the approach of the twin evils of Fascism and Communism, then in an alliance of raptors, a circumspect Caribbean nation, which Robert Frost compared in a poem to Switzerland, taught the Old World a lesson in representative government by adopting the most socially-advanced constitution of its time, which was to be a model for the states of a resurrected Europe.

Batista, 1940-1944

The first president elected under the aegis of the 1940 Constitution, and, at age 39, the youngest in Cuban history, was Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar, who defeated his longtime rival Ramón Grau San Martín. As constitutional president, Batista surprised even his critics who expected him to govern as the sergeant-turned-colonel he was; but Batista was not cast in the traditional presidential mold. He was in every way a man of the people and took pride in being one. He had a genuine concern for the working man which was not acquired from political tracts or social gospels but from having been a laborer himself all his life, in the canefields, the railroads and the army, and he translated the solidarity that he felt for others like himself into something more substantial than hand-outs and sinecures to his followers. His administration fostered both progress and stability in Cuba. The prosperity was fueled by Cuba's powerful economy, which grew every year regardless of whom happened to govern or other external circumstances; the stability without violence, however, was a precious commodity, which future democratic presidents without Batista's antecedents would find it impossible to maintain.

The first challenge that confronted Batista on assuming the presidency was a coup planned by the Chiefs of the Army and Police, who liked Batista the strongman better than Batista the democrat. Batista, the master of the bloodless coup, was also the first Cuban president to put down a coup, without shedding a drop of blood, of course. Instead, he rounded-up the plotters and put them on a plane bound for the U.S. with all their relatives and possessions.

The U.S. was happy to oblige because it also needed a stable Cuba, more then than ever. Cuba was the most reliable Latin American ally of the United States in World War II. The Cuban Congress passed and Batista signed a Declaration of War against Japan and Germany immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Although Batista sent no Cuban contingent to fight in the war, following the example of President García Menocal in World War I, 2000 Cubans did volunteer for service in the U.S. Armed Forces. Cuba supplied the U.S. with 90% of the nickel it needed for war production, 80% of the manganese, 60% of the chromium and 40% of the copper. Incredible as it may seem today, Cuba was then one of the world's great mineral producers and the closest source for these essential elements in the production of armaments. Cuba also contributed to the war effort by holding down the price of sugar to pre-war levels, which in World War I had climbed several times above the price of gold. Cuba's price controls on sugar cost it billions of dollars and may be viewed as one of the largest monetary contributions to the war effort of any of the Allies.

Cuba also accepted more than 30,000 refugees from Naziism and nearly 500,000 from the Spanish Civil War, more than did the United States (not proportionally, but in raw numbers). The Cuban Navy sunk a German submarine and Cuban Intelligence captured a German spy who was transmitting by shortwave radio information on U.S. maritime traffic to the U-boats. His name was Heinz August Luning and he was the first and only individual sentenced to death and executed under martial law in Cuban republican history. [The Constitution of 1940 had abolished capital punishment in civil courts].

In a broadcast from Nazi Germany to Latin America, the announcer warned: "We know of your activities, Batista. Do not think that Havana is outside our reach." For the duration of the war, there was in fact a total blackout along the Havana coastline, which was patrolled by hundreds of German and American U-boats.

Batista's greatest achievement as constitutional president did not come at the beginning or middle of his tenure, but at the very end. Prohibited by the Constitution of 1940 from running for re-election, Batista threw his support behind his former prime minister Carlos Saladrigas, who lost in a landslide to the populist Grau San Martín in an election that made front page news around the world even in the midst of World War II.

The world and especially Latin America hailed Batista's defeat as the birth of democracy in the Americas. Not the fact, of course, that Batista's surrogate lost, but the fact that Batista acknowledged the defeat and turned power over to his enemy Grau. But not only that: Batista even exiled himself from Cuba to guarantee that Grau would not govern under a shadow.

In the then 130-year history of the Hispanic republics nothing like this had ever been seen before. In a sense it was like a second war of hemispheric liberation: the first, led by Bolívar, had freed the continent from colonial misrule; this latest one promised to usher the end of authoritarianism in Latin America, effectively freeing it from the arbitrary rule of its homegrown tinpot dictators. Even The New York Times hailed the triumph of democracy in Cuba: "Let no one ever say again that democracy doesn't exist in Latin America; it does, in the youngest [sic] of her republics."

After leaving office Batista embarked on a tour of South America, where he was hailed everywhere as the artifex of democracy in the Americas. In Chile, Batista was welcomed at the University of Santiago by Pablo Neruda in words which remind one of the poet's praise for another Cuban. If Batista had retired from politics for good, he would be remembered today as the greatest Cuban president and the first to raise the standard of real democracy in the Hispanic world.

Grau, 1944-1948

On October 10, 1944, Ramón Grau San Martin was sworn-in as Cuba's second constitutional president under the Constitution of 1940. This was the second time that Grau had occupied the presidency, although previously he had done so provisionally in the aftermath of the 1933 Revolution. Grau has the distinction of being the first college professor ever raised to the presidency by a students' revolution. As a nationalist and social reformer, Grau's credentials were impeccable. He was known for his hostility towards the United States, which he learned to sublimate for his own and his country's good, though occasionally he would give vent to it, as in 1933 when he actually challenged the Marines to land (they didn't), or when he decreed a series of social laws, authored by Antonio Guiteras, to extend workers' rights and limit U.S. influence in Cuba, including the stipulation that Cubans must account for the majority of all employees in any business or sector of the economy.

Although the oldest man since Estrada Palma to be elected president of Cuba, Grau embodied the aspirations of the 1933 Generation, which believed that it had a champion in the old bachelor. And, in a sense, they did. He allowed even the most politically active (read fanatical) of his followers absolute freedom of action and immunity from prosecution. Their enemies having long passed from the political scene, the erstwhile students, many now in their mid 30s to early 40s but still nominally enrolled at university, engaged in internecine turf wars while competing for the favor of President Grau. These troublemakers were known as "gangsters" in Cuba, not the mafiosi that Communist folklore claims ran the island. Among these homegrown "gangsters," brave and reckless men for the most part, was one that would later come to national prominence and was as reckless as any but definitely not brave, having acquired a reputation for shooting his enemies in the back — Fidel Castro.

Grau's cynical reaction towards the "gangsters" was to let them alone, believing that so long as they were "only" killing one another they posed no threat to him or the Republic. He held their allegiance through no-show government jobs (botellas) and by conferring on them the honorary title of comandante (Grau never bestowed it on Castro, who adopted it anyway). These superannuated student comandantes were Grau's paper tigers, but he at least knew how to ride them.

Grau's term coincided with the end of World War II and the establishment of the United Nations. Cuba was one of 52 original signers of the U.N. Charter. Grau, despite his indifference to lawlessness at home, was a champion of the Rule of Law in the international arena. Cuba's voting record at the U.N. reflected this duality. Cuba voted against the United States on three of the most important issues to confront the U.N. after the end of World War II: it voted against the Nuremberg trials as a contravention of the longstanding legal proscription against ex post facto laws; it also voted against the establishment of autonomous U.N. organizations (which were all slated to become redoubts of anti-Americanism); and, finally, against the creation of the State of Israel. Whatever the probity of these votes, they do demonstrate that Cuba had ceased to be an instrument of the U.S. in international affairs. [Suffice it to say that as an ally of the Soviet Union Communist Cuba never once opposed it at the United Nations, defending even the invasion of Czechoslovakia].

Grau's administration also brought, or leastwise did not stop, unparalleled prosperity and economic growth to the country, which was even able to withstand without adverse consequences the hitherto unprecedented predations of his followers on the National Treasury.

Prío, 1948-1952

Grau's handpicked successor, Carlos Prío Socarrás, himself a former student but not one of the gangsters, was not as adept at controlling them as was Grau. His solution, like Grau's, was to give them more not less freedom and to literally throw open the doors of the National Bank which he created. In this, as in all things, he continued his predecessor's policies, while blaming the gangsterism and rampant graft on Grau, who did not fail to take notice. This led to a schism in their ranks which diluted the power of both Grau and Prío and no doubt contributed to the reemergence of Batista.

On March 10, 1952, former president Fulgencio Batista, who had recently returned to Cuba from self-imposed exile and was a candidate for president again, fearful that his opponents would not deal as fairly with him as he had with them, drove to the Columbia Army Barracks and took power without firing a shot, to save the nation, as he said, from the rule of gangsters and communists. Most Cubans, even those who opposed Batista, approved of the bloodless coup. Even Prío approved to the extent of not even bothering to oppose the coup and fleeing the country on the first U.S.-bound flight.

In Part III: Batista consolidates power; the gangsters rally behind Fidel Castro and civil war erupts in Cuba under the patronage of the United States.

A Brief History of the Cuban Republic (1902-1958)

2007-05-25T13:19:00.000-04:00

Part I (1902-1940)

The Cuban Republic came into being after a War of Independence that resulted in the death of nearly a quarter of Cuba's population and the destruction of most of the island's infrastructure and economy. In addition to such internal problems, Cuba also had to deal with the intervention and occupation of the island by the U.S. after the conclusion of the Spanish-American War (1898), a minor but calamitous episode within the context of the greater Cuban War of Independence begun by José Martí (1895-1898).

The Cuban Republic succeeded despite the great obstacles placed in its way by U.S. imperialism at its birth. These obstacles Cubans never ceased to fight and eventually defeated long before Castro came on the stage to renew a conflict that had already been resolved largely in Cuba's favor.

Cuba's first democratically-elected president (1902-1906), Tomás Estrada Palma, defeated an American attempt to acquire not one but ten military bases on the island as well as the Isle of Pines (Cuban ownership of which was confirmed in the Hay-Quesada Treaty). He also insisted that the one base that was granted to the Americans be leased rather than ceded, which meant that Cuba still retained sovereignty over Guantánamo thereby setting the stage for its return some day to Cuban jurisdiction. In fact, Guantánamo Naval Base would have been returned decades ago if it had not been for Castro, as the Panama Canal was returned to Panamanian jurisdiction. President Estrada Palma was known as the "Honest President" because he broke with the tradition of graft and corruption introduced to Cuban political life by the Americans.

Estrada Palma was succeeded in the presidency, after an armed uprising quelled by the U.S. at his request and another brief U.S. occupation (1906-1909), by his democratically-elected rival José Gómez, whose administration (1909-1913) was characterized by both its corruption and the full recovery of Cuba's economy from the ravages of the recent war.

Gómez was succeeded in turn, also as a result of democratic elections, by Mario García Menocal, the first and only Cuban president to serve two consecutive terms (1913-1921). The major event of his administration was the First World War, which brought unprecedented prosperity to Cuba as the price of sugar climbed to astronomical levels never to be seen again. Although Menocal joined the Allied side in the War and even instituted a draft, he refused repeatedly U.S. requests to send Cuba's sons overseas to fight in Europe under the American flag. The war ended without a single Cuban casualty. Cuba also joined the League of Nations, which the U.S. did not. A Cuban, in fact, served as its president, which proved that the world as a whole accepted Cuba's sovereignty despite American intrusions on it.

Menocal was succeeded in democratic elections by Alfredo Zayas (1921-1925), a nationalist who also defied U.S. interests in Cuba. Zayas' administration was corrupt; but when the even more corrupt administration of Warren G. Harding sought to impose on him an "honest cabinet" of its own choosing, Zayas at first assented (to get the U.S. war ships threatening intervention to go home) and then immediately fired the U.S. puppets and appointed his own men. This was the first time that the U.S. had been openly defied in Cuba and the U.S. did nothing. This lesson would not be lost on the Cuban people.

Zayas was succeeded, yet again in democratic elections, by Geraldo Machado (1925-1933), the most popular Cuban president as well as the most unpopular. His public works programme transformed Cuba into a modern nation. He built the Capitol as well as the Central Highway, which ran the whole length of the island, among hundreds of other civil works projects. He was so popular that at one time all the Cuban political parties supported him. Machado had made a pledge when he was elected not to seek re-election. He kept this pledge by convincing Congress to prolong his presidential term, which it did gladly. The Cuban people did not receive this violation of Cuban democracy as gladly, however. This "prolongation of powers" led to Cuba's first popular revolution, which succeeded in ousting the democrat turned dictator. Machado believed that this revolution was abetted by the U.S. and before resigning made anti-American declarations for the first time in Cuban political history. The Machado opposition was even more nationalistic and anti-American in its rhetoric.

The Revolution of 1933, with its succession of provisional presidents, juntas and even a counter-revolution, nevertheless succeeded in abrogating in 1934 the Platt Amendment, which had been imposed in 1902 and gave Americans the right to intervene at will in Cuba to protect "our" (read their) interests. With the scrapping of the Platt Amendment Cubans exercised for the first time full national sovereignty. There would be no more American interventions in Cuba. Martí's dream and the dream of all Cuban patriots was finally realized thanks to Cuban resolve and another Roosevelt's "Good Neighbor" policy, which was itself the product of American experiences in Cuba.

If there is a revolution that Cubans should celebrate it is the Revolution of 1933, which was everything that a future revolution was not — nationalistic, progressive and brief. The 1933 Revolution endowed the Cuban people with social rights that no other people on earth enjoyed or would enjoy for decades, including paid maternity leave and a 35-hour work week (for which the employee was entitled to 40 hours compensation). It avoided, moreover, the fashionable extremes of the age, shifting neither to the right and fascism, nor to the left and communism.

Although the Generation of 1933 hated Machado and his cohorts no less than the Generation of 1953 despised Batista and his, the death penalty was not imposed on any of the collaborators of the regime: capital punishment for political crimes was then unknown in Cuba and the firing squad had not been used on the island since colonial times.

The greatest virtue of the 1933 Revolution — the reason for its success, if you will — was its exemplary brevity. In just three years (1933-1936) it had run its course and normality was restored to the island. The final act of the 1933 Revolution was the Amnesty Law of 1936 which freed all Machado officials held in detention (very few) and restored to them their full civil rights. In the elections also held that year many of them were returned to office, one even became Speaker of the House of Representatives.

In the 1936 presidential elections Josê Mariano Gómez, son of Cuba's second president, was elected its sixth constitutional president. In a further test of Cuba's reborn democracy Gómez was impeached for supposedly obstructing the functions of Congress and replaced with his vice-president Col. Fedérico Laredu Bru, the last veteran of Cuba's wars of independence to occupy the presidency. It was during this period that Cuba received nearly a half-million refugees from fascism and communism in Europe, the largest number per capita of any country in the world.

The Revolution of 1933 saw the rise to power of two men who would dominate Cuban politics for the next quarter century — Ramón Grau San Martín and Fulgencio Batista. The first was a professor at the University of Havana and the latter an army sergeant. On the same side in the wake of the 1933 Revolution both men would become bitter political rivals in its aftermath.

All parties and ideologies would coalesce, however, in 1939-1940 to create the greatest monument of the Cuban Republic, the Constitution of 1940, which became the model of France's Fundamental Law (1958) and other progressive constitutions.

Cuba was then about to embark on the most glorious period in its history, which saw it become the most democratic and prosperous country in Latin American with a standard of living which was comparable to Europe's.

In Part II we will discuss the the rise and fall of the Cuban Republic, which is all the more remarkable because Cuba reached its zenith and nadir at the same time.

The Russians Admit It: Martí Has Defeated Marx, Lenin, Mao and Deng Xiaoping, and Will Defeat Castro

2007-05-20T14:00:00.001-04:00

In an article published by RIA Navosti (the Russian News and Information Agency), political columnist Pyotr Romanov (nice name), having returned from an assignment in Cuba in January [2007], gives his not-altogether-on-target impressions of Cuba and Fidel Castro, but discerns one very great truth that compensates for his many errors:"In Cuba José Martí has consistently defeated Marx, Lenin, Mao and Deng Xiaoping. I am sure that in the future he will "usurp" Castro as well because the 1959 revolution has failed to reach its other goal — bring genuine democracy to the Freedom Island."

http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20070116/59156079.html

Martí the Blogger

2007-05-19T18:25:00.000-04:00

The idea of a blog is one that would certainly have resonated deeply with José Martí. In fact, he might well be regarded as one of the pioneers of this genré. Of course, he didn't conceptualize it, although he did believe that poets inspired inventors, and that it was possible to find the antecedents of all great scientific theories and inventions in the imaginations of poets before they materialized in the laboratories of scientists. As Martí saw it, poets not only celebrated the great inventions of the age but actually had a part in bringing them about. This is is a decidedly romantic concept and one that would have found many adherents in that age. The earliest Romantic, the great German poet Goethe (1749-1832), had been the first to observe this: "Life is always fumbling towards the very thing that the great poets and artists create."

No doubt the literature of the last 100 years (especially the pulpish kind that is not taught in schools) would reveal many anticipations of the computer and of its potentialities. Whether blogging also has been presaged in the literature of the last 100 or 200 years, I do not know. I suppose I could google examples readily enough but I would only lose my train of thought for something that can well be taken as a given.

Blogging, as I see it, is the desire to share your truth with the world, the belief that your truth matters, and the conviction that your truth can better the world by adding to the sum of human knowledge or lessening the quantity of human suffering. There are more frivolous reasons for blogging, of course, but those would not resonate with Marti. The rationale for blogging, if not the mechanics, is amply evident in all of Marti's writings. Among them one group in particular features many modalities we have come to associate with blogging: brief and succinct tableaux of the news of the world, especially those items that would appeal to a general audience, presented on a daily or almost daily basis, sometimes embellished with observations or not, depending on content, and generally gleamed from newspapers and journals, for, except on very rare occasions, Marti was not a reporter as we would understand the word today (neither, for that, are most bloggers). Although these casual paragraphs are not the crónicas of the Gilded Age for which he is best known, they contain, in "concentrated form, as Martí says, the pulse of the world as measured by Martí, and are, like everything Martí ever wrote, highly personal and engaging. Marti received much favorable feedback for his "blogging" through the snail-mail that was the only means then to transmit it. In his own letters, the normally reticent Martí marvels that something that caused him so little trouble to write had acquired such a mass following as his Venezuelan editor (or "webmaster") Juan Luis de Aldrey assured him (there is perhaps a note of sadness here, too, because Marti's literary ambition was to be a famous playwright like the swashbuckling Echegaray ["Eche," who?], whom he emulated to perfection, alas, a case of a poor model destroying a great artist).

Marti began his "blog" — actually called the Sección Constante — during his brief and failed residence in Venezuela in 1881. He was contracted by the newspaper El Nacional to write a continuing series of small digests (we would call them "posts") on a variety of subjects of topical interest, including current affairs, literature and the arts, scientific discoveries and industrial advances, celebrity news and something which Marti called "singularidades" (an anticipation of "Ripley's Belief It Or Not").

Martí averred that the public literally "ate them up" ["se la bebía"], and such was the popularity of the "Sección Constante" that he was contracted by the newspaper to continue editing it after he had relocated to the U.S. because of his refusal to write panegyrics on the country's dictator Guzmán Blanco.

What strikes one most forcibly about the "Sección Constante" today is precisely its eclectic nature. Martí's knowledge really was universal and encompassed all fields of human learning or endeavor; nothing was alien to him or insignificant in his cosmology. So what we find here is a thick slice of the world as it was 125 years ago pickled in Martí's essence. What is most remarkable is that the world then was pretty much as the world is today, with a little less useful knowledge and a great deal more learning.

There was the story, which Martí reported on January 24, 1882, concerning the construction of a new transoceanic Nicaraguan Canal under the supervision of Cuban engineer Menocal (a cousin of the future president of Cuba). Martí, incidentally, was always giving hat tips to fellow Cubans, though only one or two of his "posts" were devoted to Cuba. Well, the plan to build such a canal has been lately resurrected due to the fact that they say the Panama Canal is obsolete. Since the Nicaraguan Canal was three-quarters built by the French in the 19th century before being abandoned for lack of funding it might be possible to follow the old route. The U.S. itself nearly finished the Nicaraguan Canal a century ago before abandoning it and switching over to Panama because a postage stamp depicting an active volcano led American officials to suppose that the volcano might erupt and fill up the canal again!

This "post" is followed immediately by another on the use of the residue from sugar cane production (bagazo) to make excellent paper. Martí writes that the glowers in Louisiana can only extract 60% of the sugarcane juice from the bagasse which makes it unsuitable for papermaking. Although he doesn't say so directly the only inference is that such paper could be made to perfection in Cuba, where they know how to get the juice out of the sugar cane. Indeed, Cuba in the 1970s perfected this process out of necessity because Castro's criminal deforestation had made it impossible to manufacture paper from wood pulp. The bagasse paper, by the way, is everything that Martí says it is and is also edible. When Ricardo Alarcón told the Cuban people at a press conference during the "Special Period" of the 1990s about the nutritional value of grass (and was asked by a reporter whether he eats it too), he could also have advised Cubans to literally (or not literally) consume their books and newspapers.

Returning to the subject of poets presaging inventions, on January 18, 1882, Martí "posted" a story about a San Francisco photographer name Muybridge who had been able to reproduce in successive frames and with perfect definition a trotting horse. Yes, this was the birth of what 15 years later would become motion pictures. Martí, incidentally, missed being filmed (although the Spanish-American War was the first to be), but a speech of Martí's in Tampa was recorded on a wax disk, which is tragically lost. What a boon it would be to the spirit to hear Martí's voice restored to pristineness by today's technology? Perhaps it is not hopeless to expect that some day we might. Only five years ago a long-lost and -searched for recording of Walt Whitman reading one of his minor poems was found, and what a great revelation it was! Whitman had the Long Island accent of his birth with some assumed English inflections and sounded very soulful, exactly what one would expect the "Good Grey Poet" to sound like. But I am digressing, and, given the subject matter and my affinity to the subject, it can hardly me avoided.

What Martí would most have appreciated about blogging, what Whitman himself would also have hailed about it, is its democratic nature. Thanks to it anyone and everyone can have a voice at the common table. Come to think of it, Martí would probably have thought this the greatest invention of the 20th century, and he presaged it, too.

Victor Hugo and José Martí: Ultima Verba

2007-05-18T23:08:00.000-04:00

There was no literary-political figure whom Martí admired more than Victor Hugo. Indeed, Hugo may have been the model for Martí's life, though the Cuban was to surpass him in becoming not only the inspiration but the architect of his country's redemption. As a student and political proscript in Europe, Martí met Hugo on a brief visit to France and was presented with a copy of his book Mes Fils (My Sons), a symbolic gesture if there ever was one (Martí reciprocated by translating the book). Like Martí, Hugo endured exile for 20 years because he would not accept the betrayal of the Republic and reimposition of a Bonapartist monarchy under Napoleon III, the emperor's nephew, whom Hugo dubbed "Napoléon le petit."

Unlike Martí, Hugo lived to see the fruits of his labors in a resurrected republic as well as to reap the tributes and honors that a grateful nation heaped on him. Perhaps it was Martí's hope, then, that his life might conclude like Hugo's with vindication and victory. But his fate was another, for just as Hugo had been the conscience of the world in life, Martí was destined to become the conscience of his people, of all Latin America, and, finally, of the world only after his martyrdom at Dos Ríos, Oriente province, on May 19, 1895.

We honor the anniversary of the passage into immortality of the "Universal Cuban" with the final stanzas of Victor Hugo's poem "Ultima Verba" (My Last Word), which can also be read as tribute to all who, like Hugo and Marti, refused to consort with or capitulate to a tyrant.

Ultima Verba (Ultima Palabra)

Acepto el duro exilio
aun siendo hasta la muerte
sin ponerme a pensar, si alguien
claudicó ante, quien creyó más fuerte
o si otros desertaron debiendo resistir.

Si sólo mil recogen tu negro desafío
Entre esos bravos nombres ,
también estará el mío.

Si estos se reducen
y sólo quedan cien,
para seguir luchando,
allí estaré también.

Si sólo diez se yerguen
para enfrentarse al mal,
proseguiré con ellos
luchando hasta el final.

Y si quiere el destino,
que todo lo forjó,
que sólo quede uno,
erguido y soberano:
¡Apréndelo tirano!
ese uno, soy yo.

Ultima Verba (My Last Word)

I accept this harsh exile unto the grave,
Without stopping to think or bothering to learn
Who deserted his post and should have stood firm,
Who gave up his country his own life to save.

If a thousand are left to meet that black challenge,
Among those brave names will also be mine;
And if to one hundred their number decline,
I will be with them all wrongs to avenge.

And if the hundred should dwindle to ten
Who are willing their country still to defend,
And would their lives give her misery to end,
I will be found among those ten men.

And should fate this honor to one man decree,
That he should alone remain to fulfill
His duty with faith and a sovereign will,
Know it now, tyrant, the last I will be.

By Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
Translated by Manuel A. Tellechea

The complete version of this poem, in both French and English translation, can be found at:

http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/55289-Victor-Marie-Hugo-Ultima-Verba--My-Last-Word

Welcome

2006-09-15T20:29:00.000-04:00