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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 3 will focus on Martí's gay friends.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


PARA LAS ESCENAS. --

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

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

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

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

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

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


FOR THE DRAMATIC "SCENES" --

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

José Martí and His Judges

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

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

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

El Grito de Baire

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

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

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

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

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

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


From 2008:

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

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

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

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

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

February 24, 2008

140th Anniversary of "El Grito de Yara"

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

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

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

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

The Cuban Revolution's One Undeniable Success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Father's Day Tribute to Mariano Martí y Navarro

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

Martí's Father

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

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

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Will Cuba Ever Be Free Again? (Part II)

Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 20, 1902: Cuban Independence Day

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

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

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

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

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

¡Viva Cuba libre!

¡Patria y Libertad!

May 20, 2007

Veinte de Mayo

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 20, 2008

On the 113th Anniversary of the Apostle's Death

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

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

Will Cuba Ever Be Free Again? (Part I)

Part I


Will Cuba ever be free again?

Of course.

There is no doubt that she will be free someday.

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

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

So the original question must be rephrased:

Will we live to see a free Cuba?

Is that hope still tenable?

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

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

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

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


Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A "New" Poem by José Martí

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

A mi querida Madre en su día

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

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

Tu hija: Ana Martí


To My Dear Mother on Her Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.