Defending our culture

The Mystery of Martí and Cuba

Julio Antonio Mella, since the decade of the 20’s in the past century, was calling us to discover the mystery of the ultra-democratic program of José Martí. Today, after 80 years, we are better prepared to promote the study, investigate and reach conclusions about that great mystery which is, all in all, Cuba.
Martí’s mystery is basically, that of Cuba. As Lezama Lima used to say from his religious sensibility, Martí is a mystery that accompanied us. Today we, Marxists, have to discover the political, social and cultural reasons, and even those of geographical kind, that is the place occupied by Cuba in geography, that have determined the existence of that mystery we have to investigate, describe and promote its lesson.
In our days, you can try from Cuba’s reality to investigate the relation between the most diverse thinkers, on the political, social and academic level, based on the richness of ideas. When in 1959 I assumed the direction of the Ministry for Education we agreed that there was no better slogan to preside the work of the Minister that the though of the Apostle: To be cultured is the only way to be free.
We were deeply influenced by the ideas of Martí who taught us that Fatherland is Humanity and also when he postulated. The world can graft in our republics, but the stem has to belong to our republics. Those ideas, learned in the Cuban school, encouraged in us a deep-rooted feeling and a vocation for universality. We have never had a feeling of narrow frontiers. Those feelings were in our hearts and in the hearts of many young people in Cuba. Before we were socialists, before we were Marxists, we felt internationalism due to Martí. Before we knew Marx was a giant, as he is, or Engels, or Lenin, many young people in Cuba admired the struggle of the people of Argelia for their freedom, we admired the struggles of the people of Puerto Rico, we admired the struggles against Somoza’s dictatorship, against Pérez Jimenez’ dictatorship, and generally the struggles against all the Latin American dictatorships.
Then we became communists, we became Marxists and we reaffirmed those principles. It wasn’t Marxism what made us internationalists, it were precisely those solidarity and internationalist feelings that led us to Marx and Engels’ thinking. That is why we have affirmed that the intellectual Cuban tradition coordinates the best part of the universal thinking of the history of more than two millenniums and have Karl Marx and Frederick Engels as their high points in Europe and José Martí as the high point in the western hemisphere from Alaska to the Tierra del Fuego.
To extol this identity is in the heart of the Fidel’s revolution in a way that makes it impossible to follow Fidel in its higher manner without understanding the meaning of this relationship between the ideas of Marx and Martí. In a practical order, that constitutes a necessity to secure a fluid relation between politics and the intellectuals in the country.
The bonds of our people with Latin America and the world can only be culturally guaranteed based on the foundations of José Martí. And it is precisely on the foundations of the ideas and the culture forged over two centuries of history in which Martí is its highest example, that the best Cuban politic in the XX century and it will also be in the XXI century has been structured.
Martí is presented today as an essential key of the new thinking that needs not just Cuba, but also America and the world. Those who try to do politics, if they can’t understand this relation, will do bad politic, the same as those who want to do social sciences and do not understand the bond of culture with politics, will be limited in their aspirations.
Fidel, at the 50th anniversary of July 26th, on the monument to Antonio Maceo in Santiago de Cuba, was asking himself, “how will Cuba be in 50 years time, which means, at the 100th anniversary of the Moncada?” And he made some reflections about this. Our generation had always worked to see the work of the Revolution fulfilled, or to see its fruits on a long term, after twenty, or thirty years. Today, many of us have had the privilege to see their realizations in more than four decades, even though it is clear that because of the law of biology, we will not be able to say the same things in twenty, thirty years from now. Nonetheless, we want to influence on their future course and work so that our boys and girls, our children, the young people, the children of our children and our grandchildren and our great grandchildren can give continuity to it and make the enormous advances reached by our people irreversible, so that Cuba can continue to play that key role in Latin America and the world.
We are faced with a crisis that men of great knowledge consider the deepest since the fall of the Roman Empire. That crisis covers all the three pillars of the so called western culture:
- Christianism, which independent of all theological conception, represents the ethic roots of our culture, symbolized in Love one another, in the work in community and which has been broken by the action of man.
- The philosophical thinking of the XVIII century, mainly European, to which Fidel constantly refers, that we identify with personalities such as Rousseau, Diderot, D. Alambert, Montesquieu and all the great thinkers of the XVIII century that nurtured the French Revolution in 1789. that thinking represents what has been called “modernity” arousing rational thoughts and the ability of men to know and transform reality and is symbolized in that slogan “Freedom, Equity, Fraternity”. We, in that part of the world, assume it with a universal character, which means for all the men without exceptions. That has also been broken.
- And socialism, which represents the ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and their followers, as the highest expression reached up to date by European thinking. Socialism also broke down in Europe when the Soviet Union and the so called counties of “true socialism” from Eastern Europe disappeared.
The breaking of these three pillars, as we have mentioned, represents the deepest crisis in the history of the West. In truth, it reveals us, in all its seriousness the tragedy of our world today, that as has Fidel pointed out and underlined the drama can only be overcome with culture and thus with education.
The philosophical and the political thinking, the social and cultural thinking in general of our country forged the best achieved synthesis of the ideas of the so called west that reminds us the famous image of one of the greatest wise-men in America, Don Fernando Ortiz, when he characterized Cuban culture as an ajiaco, a typical Cuban dish where different products are mixed and mixed again to obtain a unique and different taste. It is an ajiaco with a taste of justice in its most universal reach. And the fundamental of that ajiaco lies in José Martí.
Starting from our philosophical and political traditions, I have proposed leaving to a side exclusive isms and schemas brought from Europe, to select the best out of these three currents: Christianity, European modernity and the philosophy it promoted, and the socialists’ ideal, to reach a correct conception to confront the crisis of the western civilization. For those who still keep some prejudices against socialism I recommend they make their selection with justice.
In this way we can relate the thought that represents José Martí and the socialism from Marx, Engels and Lenin and their followers. In that way we can relate everything and we can find the way that the XX century needs. There is potential here for that because it is precisely what is related to the mystery we have been referring to. And that is not by chance, but a product of economical and social laws and from historical and even geographical circumstances that have given rise to the originality of the Cuban case.

posted by Lilith @ 8:12 AM