Writer, Poet, Apostle

In 1997, I joined the IFCO Pastors for Peace Caravan and travelled to Cuba as a way to learn more about the country’s renowned healthcare system. Our caravan comprised of Americans and Canadians, gathered and shipped several tons of humanitarian aid as a gesture of support and friendship with the Cuban people. My visit came at the end of the “Special Period,” the term coined by Fidel Castro to describe the years after the Soviet Union withdrew its economic support, followed by President Clinton’s additional restrictions. As a finale to my stay, our group met Fidel Castro and received his gratitude. There I was, an American being thanked by a man that my country tried to assassinate and overthrow his government countless times.

Through lectures and gatherings I learned more about contemporary heroes like Che Guevara, but little about José Martí. In our free time, we wandered around old Havana and saw hero murals and monuments everywhere, such as this one on the side of the Memorial Plaza building.

The historical importance of the Plaza de la Revolución grew after January 1959, when it became a place where the Cuban people gathered to honor their heroes and to renew their determination to defend the country’s independence. I saw again how world powers, like the U.S., have shown little regard for smaller nations and while the methods have become more sophisticated, the end results are always at the expense of the people.

I didn’t think about José Martí until recently when I read Greg Grandin’s latest book America, América: A New History of the New World. He devotes a chapter to the short life of Martí, giving readers a deeper appreciation of Martí and why many Cuban exiles and Cuban patriots remember Martí as “the apostle of Cuban independence.”

José Martí, born in Havana, Cuba, in 1853 was a man of many talents despite being deported twice to hard labor camps in Spain for his early political writings and activities. (As seen below.)

Although Martí spent much of his life away from his home country, he worked to create change in Cuba through his writings and activism. He published many articles and essays that shaped modern Spanish prose, such as “Our America,” which illustrated his life experience and political critiques. He also wrote Simple Verses – his most influential contribution to Latin American literature and inspired the lyrics of the Cuban song “Guantanamera.”

After his years in Spain, Martí relocated to France, then Mexico, and finally moved to New York City. There, he went to Harvard and later taught in several institutions while establishing a successful network to help Cuban immigrants abroad and in the U.S.

Grandin’s chapter describes the years that Martí was living in New York, serving as a diplomat to the South American nations of Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina. “In 1880, for his Spanish readers, Martí described Jim Crow segregation, the treatment of Native Americans, and violence directed at unions, especially the deadly response to Chicago’s Haymarket protest.”

Several conferences, including the Pan-American conference was a turning point for Marti, according to Grandin. “He knew, though, that the United States was still the United States—powerful, unignorable, its economy exerting an ever-greater gravitational pull, inevitably more appealing than Europe’s. Marti had to fight that attraction every day, even in the ranks of Cuban revolutionaries, some of whom wanted to break with Spain only to follow the example of Texas and annex themselves to the United States.”

Martí’s political activism took a militaristic turn late in his life. In 1894, he joined forces with Cuban military leaders Maximo Gomez and Antonio Maceo, who advised Martí on his plans to invade Cuba by force in 1895. Martí led the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Cuban Revolutionary Party) in organizing a military coup. The coup aimed to overthrow the U.S. controlled Cuban government and establish an egalitarian system in its place. Spanish troops shot and killed Martí on May 19, 1895, at the Battle of Dos Rios. Although the unsuccessful coup led to Martí’s death, he became a symbol of the struggle of the Cuban revolution to secure independence from both Spain and the U.S.

I leave you with the so-true, but often forgotten, wisdom from Martí – “A nation is not a wild horse race; people must be harnessed together by something other than self-interest.” 

You can read Marti’s long poem “Simple Verses’ at https://poets.org/poem/simple-verses.

About the Book:  It captures how the United States’ identity was formed but is almost invariably told by looking east to Europe. But as Greg Grandin vividly demonstrates, the nation’s unique sense of itself was in fact forged facing south toward Latin America. In turn, Latin America developed its own identity in a struggle with the looming colossus to the north. America, América is a significant work of scholarship that fundamentally changes the way we think of Spanish and English colonialism, slavery and racism, and the rise of universal humanism. America, América shows that centuries of bloodshed and diplomacy not only helped shape the political identities of the United States and Latin America but also the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world.