New "General Index" to RCAB

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

José Martí and Arizona's Immigration Law

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

José Martí Was Not "All Things to All Men"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

El Grito de Baire

The Return of the Best José Martí Website

From Penúltimos Días:

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

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

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

Another Unknown José Martí Poem (and Why)

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

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


INVERNAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

PROTESTO

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

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

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

[I PROTEST

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.