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
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Friday, October 10, 2008
140th Anniversary of "El Grito de Yara"
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.
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.
Friday, August 29, 2008
The Cuban Revolution's One Undeniable Success
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.
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.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Father's Day Tribute to Mariano Martí y Navarro
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
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
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Will Cuba Ever Be Free Again? (Part II)
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.
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
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
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
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
Monday, May 19, 2008
On the 113th Anniversary of the Apostle's Death
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.
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.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Will Cuba Ever Be Free Again? (Part I)
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.
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.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
A "New" Poem by José Martí
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.
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.
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Why There Has Been No Successful Revolution to Overthrow Castro in 49 Years
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.
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.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
George Will's Bigoted Attack on Cubans
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
The Catholic Church vs. Christianity
"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.
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.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Cuba and Venezuela Melding But Not Under Martí's Aegis
"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.
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.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Quotations by José Martí (in English)
[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 exalts 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.
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 exalts 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.
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