‘José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas’ review

José Martí (1853-95) is a singular figure in Latin American history. A writer and a revolutionary, Martí was the prophet and architect of Cuba’s independence, even though he died early in its military campaign. A political hero and a canonical presence in literature, no other Latin American has Martí’s multifaceted influence. Such enduring appeal, together with increasing US-Cuba tension, explains the publication of a new edition of the José Martí Reader, first published in 1999. The book includes Martí’s most important works, such as his seminal essay ‘Our America’, and extracts from the poetry collection Simple Verses.

Martí was born in Havana in 1853. Cuba was then one of Spain’s few remaining colonies and, due to slave labour, the world’s biggest producer of sugar. The first major challenge to Spanish rule came in 1868 when Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a creole planter, freed his slaves and organised a guerrilla army. Three months into the conflict (now known as the Ten Years’ War) the 15-year-old Martí wrote a pro-independence play, Abdala, and published it in a newspaper, La Patria Libre, he had set up in Havana. A year later, the precocious teenager was sentenced to hard labour after the Spanish discovered a letter in which he described a classmate’s decision to join the royalist army ‘apostasy’.

Martí spent five months breaking rocks in a quarry outside Havana, during which he contracted multiple chronic conditions – including a hernia in the groin – that afflicted him for the rest of his life. Martí’s parents – who were both from distinguished military families – interceded with the authorities, who commuted his sentence to forced labour in a cigar factory, then exile.

Martí was sent to Spain, where he earned degrees in philosophy and law in Zaragoza, and wrote essays about Cuba. When the first Spanish Republic was proclaimed in February 1873, he wrote: ‘I salute the triumphant Republic – salute it now, as I will curse it in the future if it strangles another.’ Upon completing his studies, he moved to France, then Mexico, then Guatemala – working as a translator, a literature professor, a playwright, and a journalist. These nomadic years helped foment Marti’s aspiration for greater solidarity between the Americas’ Spanish-speaking nations.

In 1878 the Cuban rebels signed a truce with the Spanish. Exiles were allowed to return and, back in Havana, Martí joined the conspiratorial clubs trying anew to liberate Cuba. A year later, after many islanders felt Spain had broken the terms of the pact, fighting broke out again – a 14-month conflict known as the ‘Little War’. Martí was arrested and re-exiled to Spain. The authorities there, perhaps bemused that this infirm intellectual should be considered a threat, allowed him to flee to New York.

Aside from six months in Venezuela (where he was expelled for criticising the dictator Antonio Guzmán Blanco) New York was where Martí was based for the second half of his adult life. It was there that he wrote his best poetry, his most influential political tracts, and planned the Cuban War of Independence. Martí was amazed by New York’s tolerance of free speech, and its openness to immigration: ‘Here they smile at someone who flees; out there, they make him flee.’ However, he also realised that the US’ desire to expand its borders would threaten the sovereignty of an independent Cuba. At a time when many Cuban creoles sought annexation by the US, Martí wrote: ‘Cuba must be free of the United States, as well as Spain.’

Martí made two great contributions to the Cuban cause. The first was his role as an organiser and a coalition-builder, mostly from New York. Beginning in the early 1880s, Martí courted experienced generals from the Ten Years’ War and, despite several disagreements, eventually convinced them to lead another revolt. The second was his political vision, which he described most firmly in ‘Our America’ (1891). Martí stressed that an independent Cuba must be a race-blind republic, based on homegrown experience rather than the fashionable and foreign ideas of ‘the imported book’. Through his writing and campaigning, Martí overcame the interests of wealthy creoles, and achieved consensus for a democracy with universal suffrage: ‘a republic for all’.

The war of independence began in early 1895, and Martí sailed to Cuba. He died a month later, shot dead on 19 May during the Battle of Dos Ríos. In his final letter, which he did not finish, he wrote: ‘I have lived inside the monster [the US] and I know its entrails.’ It was a prophetic line. In 1898, in the context of the Spanish–American War, the US intervened in Cuba. The Spanish were ejected, and the island was turned into a de facto US protectorate, a status that prevailed until 1934.

Martí may not have liberated Cuba, but he was recognised as the ‘Apostle of Independence’ – the start of a busy and contested afterlife. Fidel Castro made him Cuba’s pre-eminent hero and, emphasising their shared anti-imperialism, tried to present himself as Martí’s heir. Anti-Castro Cuban exiles vehemently insisted that Martí was a democrat who would have opposed one-party rule. Yet Marti’s legacy is more than just political. His writing was a major influence on Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan poet who transformed Spanish-language literature, and who called Martí the ‘richest writer in the language’. In the 1920s, lines from Simple Verses were set to music in ‘Guantanamera’, the quintessential Cuban song.

Martí’s poetry is elegiac, and yet points towards the future. It is therefore a shame that translations in the José Martí Reader prioritise rhyming structure over tone. The result is some awkward phrasing that gives the impression that, rather than being modern, Martí’s language is archaic: ‘A sincere man am I/ From the land where palm trees grow/ And I want before I die/ My soul’s verses to bestow.’ But that aside, the book is a good introduction to his oeuvre and biography. What it does convey – in Martí’s own words – are the many sides of a man who was simultaneously a political radical, an influential writer, and the organiser-in-chief of the Cuban War of Independence.
 

• José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas
  José Martí, edited by Deborah Shnookal and Mirta Muñiz
  Seven Stories Press, 336pp, £15.99
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Daniel Rey is a writer based in New York.