José Martí: Apostle of Cuban Independence
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by Jerry A. Sierra
RETURN TO CUBA - 1878
After the Ten-Year War ended, Martí and his wife were allowed to return to Cuba, and they came to Havana on September 3 1878. Their son José "Pepito" Martí Zayas Bazán was born on November 12 of the same year. Martí was now 25 years old.
The Spanish government, afraid of Martí's support for Cuban independence, did not allow him to practice law, so he worked as a teacher in a private school.
Carmen, who came from a wealthy family of hacendados and did not fully agree with Martí's ideology of separation from Spain, would have preferred for her husband to be just a good father and not Cuba's apostle of independence.
In 1879, as Marti's son celebrated his first birthday, Cuban rebels started what is now known as the Little War. Martí was accused of conspiring with the rebels (even though he did not support this war) and deported to Spain. He immediately left for New York and took residence in a boardinghouse owned and operated by Carmen (Carmita) Miyares de Mantilla at 51 East 29th Street, in Manhattan. The house was generally only open to known friends and Cuban exiles known to the revolutionists and independistas. Its speculated that Martí had met the Mantillas on his two previous trips to New York in October 1874 and January 1875.
1880S - PUBLIC LIFE
Aside from being one of the major figures in the struggle for Cuban independence, Martí is considered one of the great writers of the Hispanic world. "It would require a composite of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, supplemented by the best of Henry James, Emerson, and Twain to suggest a comparable figure," says Ramón Eduardo Ruíz in Cuba: the Making of a Revolution. In the chapter devoted to Martí, he examines the many parallels to Castro.
On a snowy January night in 1880, Martí addressed a crowd of Cubans at New York's Steck Hall. He noticed that blacks tended to congregate at the back of the hall. In Martí: Apostle of Freedom, Jorge Mañach describes how Martí walked and stage and began to speak slowly, "from sententious argument to telling detail and lighting-like metaphor. That clear voice exploded in the air an electric effluvium that dazzled his listeners and took their breath… In revolutionary meetings no language like this had ever been heard." Martí soon became the unofficial leader of the Cuban independence movement.
During the 1880's Martí served as consul for Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina, and he wrote for papers such as The Hour and The Sun as well as a number of other South American newspapers. He wrote a novel, Amistad Funesta, and a number of well-received poetry books, such as Versos Sencillos (Simple Verses) with the famous I Cultivate A White Rose (featured at the end of this article).
Martí's creative output also included Ismaelillo, a book of poems about his son that expressed the deep anguish he felt over their separation. The poems describe a symbolic reunion, which would have meant that Cuba was finally free. Ideas, for Martí, were weapons in the struggle for a better world.
In the nearly twenty years he lived in the U.S., Martí grew very distrustful of Americans, warning that "the white man's fear of the Negro would impede Cuba's independence." In his introduction to Martí's collection of essays titled "Our America," Philip S. Foner writes:
"Martí was uncompromising in his defense of black-white unity and equal rights for all. At a time when racist ideas were held by many who moved within the independence movement, Martí showed no hesitation in directly confronting the issue. Of the black man, he wrote: 'others may fear him; I love him. Anyone who speaks ill of him I disown, and I say to him openly: You lie!'"
The Spanish government frequently predicted that a Cuban revolution would end in a bloody race war, but Martí argued repeatedly against that point. "A Cuban is more than white," said Martí, "more than mulatto, more than black… in the daily life of defense, loyalty, brotherhood and attack, at the side of every white man there has always been a Negro."
The time spent in the slums of New York made Martí increasingly disenchanted with the country's "casual indifference to human suffering." "The Gilded Age," he wrote, "alienates the Cuban, a man who lives from hand to mouth and feels injustice deeply." His writings of this period alerted Latin Americans to the reality of life in the U.S., and ended the debate of annexation in the minds of most Cuban rebels.