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With Spain in the Vitality of José Martí
Last May 30th , I had the honor to be invited by the Madrid Athenaeum to take part in its headquarters in a panel about José Martí. The panel was coordinated by the first vice-president of that institution, Mr. Francisco Javier García Núñez. Its president, José Luís Abellán, Paulino García Partida, who was its president some years ago, and the author of this article participated.
The Athenaeum —the library of which keeps an untold number of books read by Martí himself—favored premises of that time in the education of this patriot when he was sent into exile in Spain in 1871, being only eighteen years old and having already suffered the torments of a political prison. On May 30th, the Athenaeum paid tribute —once again— to he who came to it to get information and, above all, to strengthen his thoughts and his conduct in the service of justice.
“Knowing is resolving” and “thinking is serving”, guiding concepts in his life, mark his programmatic essay “Nuestra América” (Our America), published in January, 1891. Put into practice, they united in Martí the arduous advantage that the best children of colonized peoples enjoy: apart from metropolitan absorption, they are able to know their mother countries and, against their thirst for oppression, the peoples they represent and defend. Thus they know more and serve better.
The athenaeum had the good sense of taking for the recent panel —held eleven days after the one hundred eleventh anniversary of the hero’s death— the title “The permanent vitality of José Martí”. It was a commemoration consistent with the significance of someone who Gabriela Mistral described as an inexhaustible mine and who fulfills more than enough the necessary requirement to deserve being called a classic: the capacity to continue passing on fundamental values, included the enjoyment of aesthetics, going against the nap of the passing of time. With Martí it also happens that between his time and ours there are more similarities and coincidences than people usually seem to take for granted.
His infinite topicality rests on strong pillars. The Cuban speaker dealt with some of them in the Madrid Athenaeum, where both the location and the audience encouraged him to devote a lot of his words to one of those pillars: Martí’s bond with Spain, nourished and refined in the universal effort —far from limiting himself to his piece of the world—, the fighter patriot observed human evolution.
The maneuvers of the mounting American imperialism were the object of clarified concern of those efforts. The time which Martí called in the portico of Versos sencillos (Single verses) "that desperate winter” —the winter of 1889-1890—, an International Congress conceived by the host country to join the Continent by mean s of a false commercial reciprocity agreement was held in Washington. To Martí, it was a warning that our peoples must absolutely avoid such a serious danger: “Why be their allies, in the flower of our youth, in the battle the United States is getting ready for, to liberate the rest of the world? Why should they fight their battles against Europe in the republics of America, and test their system of colonization on free people?”
With his systemic coverage of reality, he unraveled the purpose of the United States: “It can be noticed, then, in the press, when one takes a deep look within, a kind of prevailing tactical idea, clear in the very care the most fair take in not to hurt openly, since nobody would call immoral, or the work of a bandit, though it would be, the rash attempt to bring the railroad civilization across America in modern times, like Pizarro brought the Christian faith.” For the Americas, which had escaped “the Spanish tyranny”, it was “the time to proclaim their second independence”, essential to guarantee a balance in the world.
Martí gave as much importance to the increasing contradictions between the dominant Europe and the power preparing to displace it in world hegemony from North America, as to the very nature of these contradictions. Years before he had showed he considered it appropriate to balance American and European investments in Latin America or, in any case, favor the second with “an apparent, accidental preponderance”, in order to counteract the influence of a neighbor who was growing in power and voracity. Nevertheless, he forecast at the same time that in the future “the nations which are rivals, but similar”, would get together against us, and he gave us a concentrated example of these two poles in brackets: “(England, the United States)”.
Regarding Europe, his interest was not just limited to the British Empire. On May 18th , 1895, the day before he died in action, he expressed to Mercado his concern as a result of an interview he had had some days before, in the middle of the campaign, with the New York Herald correspondent. The correspondent told him General Arsenio Martínez Campos admitted his government would prefer to come to an agreement with the United States rather than accept a Cuban victory.
There were only three years left for the rising imperial power to take part in the war and then, between representatives of its government and the Spanish government, and without any Cuban representation, sign the Treaty of Paris. But do not think Martí was surprised by the correspondent’s words about the soldier who would ask to be replaced by his colleague Valeriano Weyler and his criminal concentration of civilian population in Cuba, in order to keep his own image of peacemaker. In 1879 he had shown interest in making peace —in vain— with Martí himself, then in exile for the second time in Spain.
The words said by the Spanish politician and military man to the Yankee journalist are in line with Martí’s prediction of an alliance of “nations which are rivals, but similar” against our peoples: this time, Spain and the United States. In his posthumous letter to Mercado, he expresses the need for stop Cuba from opening “to the annexation [complicity] of the imperialists there [the United States] and the Spanish, that route should be closed —and we are closing with our own blood, to annexation [subjugation] of the peoples of Latin America to the revolting, brutal North which despise them”.Although those who governed Spain had confused and held back a great deal of their country, Martí was not talking about the Spanish people, represented by numerous sons in the ranks of the Cuban Liberation Army, as well as there were Cuban traitors to their country in the ranks of the colonial troops. In November 1891, in a speech essential to his organizational campaign, Con todos, y para el bien de todos (With the people and for the sake of the people) —perhaps the text where he most clearly pointed out those who excluded themselves or deserted from the fight for the common good— he denied, among others, those who spread fear among honest, avenging Spaniards. For him, they were “just like any other Cubans”.
In 1892, in an article published in Patria (Homeland), the newspaper of the revolution, he maintained: “Any person trying to put a fatal wall between Cubans and Spaniards would be nothing less than an enemy of Cuba; their responsibility or senselessness would be greater today, when equally oppressed by the Spanish tradition, with its retinue of contractors, beneficiaries and military men, the children of Cuba and Spain find both deprived of a legitimate future and human entity, while the Cuban and the Spaniard should get together for the sake of the common land and a decorous rebellion, against the incurable, insolent system of a government that drowns their personalities, cancels out their work efforts, raises their children aimlessly in a restless home and pollutes the air they breathe.”
His work in pursuit of the brotherhood of Spanish and Cuban lovers of justice was constant. He was guided by his knowledge of Spain, by its decadent, corrupt government, by its oppressive classes and its people, honest and hard-working. Due to his trust in the Spanish people, he wrote in 1881 an article in which he discussed the climate of war Europe was immerse in and that would break out in the 20th century: “The problem, embittered and more difficult in other nations due to colossal hatreds, has in Spain —thanks to the noble nature and disdain of material fortune her children are renowned for—, less violent and threatening characteristics.
The truth gets there later, but since it has shed less blood, also gets there safer. This is because the love for earthly possessions —which definitively resolves, or speeds up the resolution of all problems—, is distinctly less in the sober and spiritual people of Spain than in other peoples.”
The homesickness can cause idealization, but Martí based his ideas on the stoic, justice-seeking spirit of the popular sectors in Spain. He was not ignorant of the history of the nation whose colonial system was oppressing Cuba. In another article published in Patria, in which he urged the efficient preparation for the war for Cuban independence, he set the story in a world context and quoted several examples which provided the evidence that, on such a scale, “only justice survives” and “it is useless dodging the duties of equity and foundation”. Thus he said: “In this world, all of us, nations and men, must pay the ticket.” With regard to Spain, he specified: “Spain itself, if it still has any vague hope of renewal, it is thanks to the different peoples that make up the Spanish nation, and which have been at a standstill for three centuries.”
Martí was not among those Latin Americans who called Spain “our mother country”. Thinking about what the Spanish colonial regime had represented to our peoples and to most of its own children, he called it once “filicide”. He knew he was a child of what he called our mother America, which came from within itself and, regarding other countries, had roots not only in Europe, but also in Africa.
Together with his fraternal love for the Spanish people, he kept an eye on the history of Spain, the government which he was fighting against. On October 31st and on November 28th, 1893, respectively, he published in Patria “The Moor in Spain” and “Spain in Melilla”. A consistent fighter against colonialism, he made reference in these articles to the complicated relationship between the Iberian country and Muslim peoples, and in the first of these texts he said there was in Melilla “a race which defends its land with the same determination Pelayo defended his own land against other Moors”. Eight years before, he had written that Spain was trying to «mend the royal mantle with pieces of burnoose».
Also with regard to Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Africa, he thought as a fighter against colonialism and demanded: “Let Spain lose all its possessions dishonorably, and do its own work, without appealing to the army for useless second-raters, its idle gentry, and the fifth sin, wrath: it is this way, and by means of a decentralized government for the stubborn people that make up the Spanish nation, that Spain will be able to live up to the world.”
He was categorical in his opinion: “Let us be Moors: just as we —who will probably die at the hands of Spain— would be Spaniards if justice were on the Spaniards side. But let us be Moors!” Thus spoke the revolutionary who in February 1873 welcomed the proclamation of the first Spanish republic.
As if he knew that very soon the Republic would show its debility before Cuba’s wish to be independent —which it was proving with its sacrifices—, he put this challenge to the Spanish liberals: “The republican ideal is the universe.”
He sustained principles the validity of which grow before evils like the violation of peoples’ sovereignty, the increase of inequality, the unfair treatment of migrations —inseparable from the history of plundering suffered by impoverished countries—, warmongering and the rest of the acts associated with the power of the empire which strives to subjugate some countries and turn others into its accomplices. “I neither judge in advance the actions of the Spanish Republic, nor do I think” —wrote the antimonarchic Martí in February of 1873—, “that the Republic should be timid or cowardly. But I do warn it that actions are always prone to injustice; I do remind it that injustice is the death of the respect to others; I do let it know that being unjust is the need for being damned, I do exhort it to never to slander the universal conscience of honor, which does not exclude, certainly, honoring the homeland, but demands that the honor to the homeland lives within universal honor.”

posted by Lilith @ 7:37 AM