If New York City provided Felipe Larrazábal with the possibility of putting into print his liberal, classical vision of Bolívar, it continued to play a role for Venezuelans in the decades ahead. During the Antonio Guzmán Blanco period of the 1870s and 1880s, political and military leaders who challenged the great modernizer found refuge in New York City, following in this way not only the path of Larrazábal, but also that of the ex-president of Venezuela and liberator José Antonio Páez who returned to New York City after the Guerra Federal (Federal War) and died there in 1873. In the end, many stayed, never returning. Among those who did return, some would do so in the 1890s when, after the end of Guzmán Blanco’s rule, the federal states gained more authority, the legislature of the state of Zulia, for instance, even re-swearing the 1864 constitution which Guzmán Blanco had replaced with two successive constitutions reducing presidential term limits to two years, with the debate over the constitutions the initial cause of the 1892 Revolución Legalista (Legalist Revolution). They would also return in the moment of the Revolución Libertadora of 1901–1903 (The Liberating Revolution). In this, Venezuela’s last civil war and bloodiest after the Guerra Federal, they would join Cipriano Castro who in 1899 successfully marched on Caracas in order to centralize the state, as he avowed. Or, they would join Manuel Antonio Matos. One of the wealthiest men in Latin America at the time, Matos had established an economic dynasty over the decades with strong connections to Guzmán Blanco through marriage and in the late 1890s was at the peak of his economic and political dominance. He allied with the multinational companies with which the Venezuelan state had been doing business to try to topple Castro and restore the banking system he presided over. He failed.
The 1880s and early 1890s is the time period that interests us in this chapter. In New York City, Venezuelans also associated themselves with republicans from other Latin American countries. One was José Martí, the writer and journalist who would be at the forefront of the Cuban liberation movement and who lived in exile in New York City from 1880 to 1895. That association made for a new and definitive moment in the story of Bolívar’s afterlife in the Americas.
Martí had constant contact with the Venezuelan exilic community from the time of his arrival. Inspired by its members, including Venezuelan politician and newspaper owner Nicanor Bolet Peraza, and desirous of seeing the new Venezuela, with its incipient railroad and new public buildings, he visited the country in 1881, where he founded the Revista Venezolana (Venezuelan Review). During this time, Martí learned much about Venezuelan history and about Bolívar. Through his literary magazine, he collaborated with intellectuals and artists and published articles of his own. We mentioned in Chap. 1 his article on Venezuelan humanist Cecilio Acosta, which resulted in his being expelled from the country after he refused Guzmán Blanco’s request that he write a laudatory article about him as well. In New York City, just a few years later, in 1887, Martí founded the Sociedad Literaria Hispano-Americana de Nueva York (the Literary Hispanic American Society of New York) with Bolet Peraza. Bolet Peraza, who was married to a daughter of José Gregorio Monagas, had sought to unseat the successor of Guzmán Blanco in the 1870s by bringing back to the country Venezuelan exiles. But Guzmán Blanco returned from Paris and prevailed, driving the owner of the Tribuna Liberal (Liberal Tribune) out of the country in 1880. Through his associations with Bolet Peraza and others, Martí became a Venezuelan cultural insider. In 1890, he penned a portrait of José Antonio Páez on the occasion of the procession celebrating the repatriation of his remains, two years after the end of Guzmán Blanco’s 20-year rule and 17 years after Páez had passed.
Subsequent to the Battle of Ayacucho, Bolívar made statements indicating his desire to direct his Colombian Liberation Army to the Caribbean, particularly to Cuba. Had the interests of the metropolitan powers, the status of the territories liberated by Bolívar, and the finances of the Gran Colombia been different between 1825 and 1827, he may well have carried out that mission. Instead, lacking funds and warned by the United States not to take the independence movement north, Bolívar made the decision not to do so, his concern that the islands could be used by the Holy Alliance—French troops had invaded Spain in 1823 to restore absolute monarchy, leaving 40,000 forces in place—to mount a reconquest not great enough for him to go forward. He was also in communication with Mexico, which made statements to the same effect but which, according to the Venezuelan historian José Gil Fortoul , of whom we will speak in the next chapter, let the initiative die in its legislative system. Bolívar’s statements, however, were not forgotten. Martí, as he worked with Bolívar’s political texts and letters after his experience in Venezuela, came upon them.
The Caribbean narrative appeared later in Martí’s intellectual production. We see it in his 1890 portrait of Páez, where he eulogizes him as a supporter of the expedition, placing his commitment among the military and political acts and events that defined his career. He explains that had it not been for the mutiny of the Granadan military man José Bustamente on January 26, 1827 that Páez’s battalion, Junín, had to put down, as well as statements from Washington, D.C. that it would not allow Cuba’s status to change, the liberation of Cuba would have been added to the great heroic acts of independence.1 We also see it at the time of the celebration of Bolívar’s 110th birthday on October 28, 1893, held at the Hispanic American Literary Society of New York of which Martí had not only been a founder, but also a president and inspired by the Venezuelan community. Martí gave a major speech on Bolívar at the event, a speech that will be at the center of our reflection, addressing Latin American diplomats, businessmen, and their wives. Reporting on the celebration, he wrote in the October issue of the new political weekly he directed, Patria (Fatherland): “Cubans will always think of [Bolívar] arranging with Sucre the expedition, which never arrived, to free Cuba.”2 In these, his final years in New York City, Martí thus added the Hispanophone Caribbean, which in the mid-1820s was momentarily on the map of hemispheric liberation, to the major sites of reflection about Bolívar’s legacy, including that of the Gran Colombia and that of the Federation of the Andes, the latter a pipedream, perhaps, that nevertheless acquired mythic proportions not unlike the Gran Colombia.
Through his travels and readings, Martí became something of an expert on the different sites of Latin American independence. His writings are full of portraits of leaders from that period, some full-fledged treatments in three to four pages, others snapshots inserted strategically in reflections on other figures or topics. We are introduced to Father Miguel Hidalgo who in 1810 marched with indigenous and mestizo masses on Mexico City to rid New Spain of Spanish rule and bring about a social revolution, and who shortly after was executed; and to José de San Martín, the general who led the independence movement in Río de la Plata, Chile, and Peru and who at his famous meeting with Bolívar at Guayaqul in 1822 ceded to him authority over the independence movement in South America. We should not be surprised by Martí’s intense interest in the leaders of independence. It stands to reason that an intellectual of his talents, committed to bringing about the liberation of his country and to promoting models of modernization compatible with a Latin America he conceived as having a spirit different from that of the United States, would want to learn as much as he could about the figures and processes that gave birth to the republican states, this at a time when Latin American states were themselves going to these actors to establish cultural foundations upon which to solidify and legitimize themselves. Martí saw this firsthand in Venezuela and in Mexico, which he also visited. For Martí, Father Hidalgo will be the most exemplary of the leaders, fighting for the popular classes and executed for that reason—a figure he contrasted with Mexico’s Agustín de Iturbide.
Martí had plenty of sources to draw on for his cultural work involving Bolívar. One was Felipe Larrazábal’s 1865 La vida y correspondencia general del libertador Simón Bolívar (The Life and General Correspondence of the Liberator Simón Bolívar)—with its multiple printings in the US city.3 Larrazábal had sought to build a Venezuelan national identity by opposing Venezuelans to Spaniards and underlining Spanish cruelty on the part of the monarchy’s generals while disassociating Bolívar from the War to the Death, all this through classicism and in the romantic key of sentimentality. Martí sent the epic organized by Larrazábal and that was a Bible for the Venezuelan exilic community in New York City in a new direction. He used the materials gathered in his history to produce narratives about division within Latin America. In some instances, Martí spoke of the importance of rising above that division by finding ways to accept conflicts and differences without going to war or expelling leaders.
For Martí, the conduct of Spaniards was not the issue, then, but rather, with his interest in establishing and fortifying the building blocks of the Latin American republics, that of Latin Americans themselves, including Bolívar. Inspired by the ending Larrazábal constructed for Bolívar’s life, Martí would also say in an important essay that the Liberator died of a broken heart.
In 1883, recently back from Caracas, Martí threw himself into the Venezuelan political arena. It was the year of the centenary of Bolívar’s birth, celebrated with great fanfare in Venezuela and other countries in the Americas with ceremonies in Caracas held to distribute Bolívar medallions to actors across the different spaces of society and with participation of the Bolivarian republics, including Bolivia, which also held its own festivities in La Paz.4 The exact occasion for his intervention was the state’s erection of a statue of Bolívar at the then Central University of Venezuela that had once been the San Francisco Convent, sculpted by the Venezuelan Rafael de la Cova, who would go on to produce the first Bolívar statue to sit in New York City’s Central Park. Capitalizing on the moment, Martí in an article for a Spanish-language newspaper in New York City presented the form of it, that of a statesman standing rather than the general on horseback, as reflecting the political values communicated by Bolívar in the January 2, 1814, address he delivered at a popular assembly at the convent.5
As Martí carefully explains, not all iterations of Bolívar’s figure are equal. Contrasting the Bolívar of this address with the one from which he indicates he is distancing himself, that of the military leader who was dictator, he submits that this Bolívar of January 2, 1814, was something other than what he might appear to be. Bolívar, recently appointed dictator by the assembly he convened, expresses his profound anguish at not being able to hand over the reins of government to the “citizens,” the Spanish continuing to threaten his recently established Second Republic. He vows to conduct himself not like Pisistratus or like Sulla, but like, he insinuates, Cincinnatus, exemplary not for his acts in power but for the utter detachment with which he relinquishes his authority, returning to private life and remaining there.6 Here was the Bolívar to recover and emulate, Martí communicates to his readers, the leader who considered himself to be responsible to the people, bound by a contract after he was appointed, a Bolívar, in other words, who could be instructive to Guzmán Blanco who took Caracas by force in 1870 and in 1877 had the Congress vote him president.
New York City also saw a centenary celebration in 1883. It was held at the elegant Delmónico restaurant and attended by Latin American diplomatic, professional, and artistic elites. In reporting on it in August of that year, the ever-versatile Martí who was already making a career with literary pieces such as “Coney Island” in December of 1881 and “El puente de Brooklyn” (“The Brooklyn Bridge”) in June of 1883, out of the symbolism of place, now focused on a NYC restaurant that dated back to the beginnings of the century with multiple locations in the 1880s. He speaks less of Bolívar than of the warm and convivial assembly of individuals from different Latin American countries gathered at the restaurant. Martí meticulously describes them as he tells his readers how they delight in one another’s company. The culmination is the final toasts to the distinguished father of Latin American independence, the words of tribute quoted and paraphrased by Martí, including those of members of the New York City elites also in attendance, who, as Martí informs his readers, properly compared Bolívar to Washington.7
Martí, after the 1883 hemispheric celebration of Bolívar’s figure, knew that he could not allow Bolívar to escape his rhetorical clutches—his symbolism alive in the Americas. Martí was generally consistent in his view of Bolívar. But Bolívar for him was also a highly adaptable symbol, one that he placed side by side now, as we see here, with Washington; now with the British academic Herbert Spencer, as he does in his famous 1889 piece “Madre America” (“Mother America”) with Bolívar representing the power of arms and Spencer the power of education; now with the Argentine liberator San Martín , who appears in different ways, praised for his decision in 1822 in Guayaquil to cede his military command to Bolívar and also criticized as a monarchical figure with an ideology that was inflexible; and, as we have also seen above, now with Sucre. Most notable among Martí’s interventions in which he engages with Bolívar, though, is the Simón Bolívar address of which we have spoken. Martí was right in the midst of his military planning to liberate Cuba, having already appointed Máximo Gómez Báez as commander of the military movement, and having traveled throughout the Caribbean and to Mexico for organizational purposes. A year and a half later he, Gómez, and other members of the expeditionary forces would land on Cuban shores.
In his war of words with both Cuban and US American annexationists, Martí had held the position that Cuba should free itself without US assistance, identifying US intervention with the cause of his annexationist enemies. He was also mindful that in the previous context of the War of Ten Years (1868–1878), which saw the Spanish send him to hard labor in a rock quarry for publishing a piece in favor of independence, then exile him to Spain, the United States had failed to come to the aid of Cuba’s independence fighters.8
In the address, Martí remains true to the principle that Cuba must free itself, making no pleas for assistance from the United States, as one would expect he would not, and making no formal pleas to Latin American republics either, skirting reference, for instance, to Bolívar’s and Sucre’s expedition plans, including the subsequent joint effort that the Gran Colombia and Mexico briefly considered. He also avoids a theme that is a constant in other writings of his—US designs on Latin America. Instead, going back in time to the period of independence and there laying out before his audience the vast region in the moment of its transition from colonies to republics, Martí takes Cuba temporarily out of the North-South binary to place it at the center of a Latin American historical narrative unadulterated by contact with the United States.
This, let us underline, is unusual, since the Cuban exile repeatedly warned of the danger of US-North America cultural and economic influence in Latin America, and did so particularly strongly after the United States convened the first Pan American Conference in Washington, D.C. in 1889. Diplomats from the Latin American republics were asked by their hosts to consider material and institutional ways to connect “north” and “south,” including the possibility of a common currency. In his famous 1891 essay, “Nuestra America” (“Our America”), Martí, responding in part to that conference, used the rhetorical trope of what is natural and original in opposition to what is artificial and foreign to urge Latin Americans to create governmental forms that meet the needs of their peoples and to establish strong academic traditions to develop their countries and protect themselves against foreign influence. He had sharp words of criticism for those among them who benefited from the global order of the times, those able to travel outside Latin America without a thought for the well-being of their own people or those who immigrated to the United States to assimilate. At the same time, he declared that the people of a country have a right to remove leaders who, not understanding the moderating force of the popular soul, create forms of government that do not meet the needs of the people. The proper form of government cannot come from Europe or the United States, but must be the product of a nation’s own evolutionary process. “Government must be born of the country.”9
In his essays, Martí often speaks of the colossus of the north. But from his earliest moments in New York, he was concerned with another colossus as well, Bolívar’s Latin American state—in the first instance, the Gran Colombia. As we saw in the previous chapter, Bolívar’s Gran Colombia continued to operate discursively in Venezuela’s nineteenth century. It was at the center of Larrazábal’s narrative.
Martí reflected on this pan-national entity in an 1881 biographical sketch of the jurist, public administrator, and leader Miguel Peña that he produced during his visit to Venezuela and published in the first of the two issues of the Revista Venezolana (Venezuelan Review). The sketch is typical of the numerous narrative portraits he penned during his life. Martí praises the Venezuelan precisely for speaking “truth to power,” whether that power was Francisco de Paula Santander, the Granadan elite of which Santander formed part, Bolívar, or Páez, or for outsmarting the Spanish Commander Juan Domingo de Monteverde and the royalist leader José Tomás Boves. Producing the sketch in the moment that the long-deceased Venezuelan was being honored with a special monument at his gravesite in his hometown of Valencia—the center of the movement of Venezuelan independence from the Gran Colombia that began in 1826 —Martí reflects upon the “multinational” union that was the Gran Colombia. He provides five facets of Peña’s fascinating life: the colonial world (rapporteur on the Royal Court); independence (political leader, administrator, delegate); the Gran Colombia (jurist on the High Court of Justice of the Gran Colombia); the break from the Gran Colombia known as the Cosiata (advisor to Páez); and the new republic of Venezuela (legislator).10 Martí explains that the polity of the Gran Colombia made it inevitable that the Granadans and Venezuelans would find themselves in a power struggle. How could they not, after all, if the capital was located in Bogotá and the decision for that location had been made, as he said it was (contrary to what the US historian John Lynch tells us) at the Congress of Cúcuta, Cúcuta a Granadan city? Martí writes: “At that time, neither Venezuelans enjoyed being ordered by Granadans, nor the latter seeing the former in their own territory; Colombia’s vice president cared less about being the lieutenant of an expanded people than about being the capitan of his own. Santander complained about Caracas, and about Peña; Peña about Bogotá and about Santander.”11
He goes on to illustrate the “national” conflict at the center of the Gran Colombia by retelling the story of a Venezuelan liberator—a plainsman who was a war hero, credited with saving Bolívar’s life on one occasion, and who crossed the Andes into Boyacá in 1819. His name was Leonardo Infante. Infante was a pardo whose nickname was el Negro Infante (the Black Infante). Retired as a colonel, he resided in the white neighborhood of San Victorino. Living large, according to Martí, he was known to all. His outsized personality, as Martí recounts the story, humiliated a community that could not abide the presence of a black man, never mind a black man who had not internalized the racial hierarchy of Bogotá. When the body of a lieutenant by the name of Francisco Perdomo was found in a river in Bogotá on July 24, 1824, Santander and the Granadan elites sprang into action, accusing Infante. Forget the juridical process. As Martí recounts in dramatic detail, Infante was condemned by public opinion first and then, despite the lack of any eyewitness accounts, found guilty by the judges who sat on the High Court of Justice of which Peña was president. To no avail was the energetic defense made up to the last minute by Peña, who went so far as to refuse to certify the death sentence reached by the majority of the judges. Two had found Infante guilty, ordering the death penalty; one guilty, ordering prison; two others not guilty; and a sixth judge, afforced to break the tie, guilty, finding in favor of the death penalty. Santander executed Infante without delay, on March 26, 1825.12 A public statement from Santander followed as he expressed his great satisfaction that military men could now know that they had to act in accordance with the rules of civil society.
Peña , too, was to suffer, though not with his life. His refusal to approve the majority verdict resulted in a charge before the Senate of the Gran Colombia. The Senate voted to suspend him from his position for a year without pay. Angry and frustrated, Peña concluded that justice cannot be had in Bogotá and returned to Venezuela. Martí agreed.
But if Martí was calling into question the “law” of Santander by pointing to his machinations behind the scenes and for his inability to see himself as leader of the entire territory of the Gran Colombia, his objective is not only to target Santander. Indeed, the issue is the possibility itself of the Gran Colombia. With its three departments corresponding to New Granada, Venezuela, and Ecuador, as Martí emphasizes with his discussion of the first two, the state was too big for its own good. The proof was the Infante case, which demonstrated, as far as Martí was concerned, how the state apparatus of the Gran Colombia, located as it was in Bogotá where one geo-political constituency dominated, could not be trusted to protect the rights of individuals from another region, in this case a black hero of independence from Venezuela. As for the reaction of Venezuelan leaders, what they saw in Leonardo Infante was a fellow citizen persecuted in a state apparatus from which they themselves wanted to secede and whom they were quick, then, to make, as they did, into a cause celèbre.13
Peña was now advisor to Páez, who was supposed to go to Bogotá to appear before the Senate for the reason that he had disobeyed orders to send 50,000 soldiers to the region. Peña recommended he not, lest he be jailed. Three months after the execution, Páez, acting at least in part on that advice, declared he would no longer take orders from Bogotá. Martí was nimble on his feet, seizing upon the occasion of a tribute to return to an important moment that fueled the beginnings of the separatist movement in Caracas to sing the praises of one such as Peña who had the courage to stand up to the governmental institutions of the Gran Colombia in which he was a key player to defend a fellow citizen.
But there was more, as Peña, we are told, is not without fault either. Through the transition from the Gran Colombia to the Republic of Venezuela, Martí continues to praise Peña, pointing to the counsel he gave Páez during the years of the separation. That counsel was for Páez to keep his focus on the matter of Granadans’ violation of the republic’s laws and to resist attacking Bolívar and others. Ultimately, though, Peña, after the formation of the new republic, with himself a member of the new legislature, committed his own error of judgment, signing to his future disrepute, Martí states, the decree that Bolívar be exiled from Venezuela, just as he had signed the order in 1812 in his capacity as administrator of the Port of La Guaira for Francisco de Miranda to be turned into the Spanish.14
Peña , as we are seeing, was an important figure in the period of change from the empire to the Gran Colombia and then to the Republic of Venezuela—he is everywhere, it would seem. Yet, he had violated a major principle for Martí—that Latin Americans, in the heated contests of war and political battle, express understanding for one another. Miranda had received no such consideration—an older man at the time who did not deserve to be treated in the way that he was, judged so harshly, whether by Peña or others. Nor had Bolívar, cast out by the legislature, with all his properties in Venezuela taken from him.
If Martí’s biography of Peña is little known, the fate of his October 28, 1893 address entitled “Bolívar” has been treated quite differently, appearing as it has in anthologies. Visibility is one thing, engagement another, though. For to the degree the text has been commented on, the tendency has been to smooth over the “rough edges,” downplaying if not suppressing entirely Martí’s own critical relationship to Bolívar. The reason for this is as simple or complex as is the stark fact of geo-politics. In the twentieth century, Latin American critics, historians, and politicians, including Cuban, constructed their conception of the continent or hemisphere by representing Martí and Bolívar as a complementary pair. In turn, US actors mimicked them, presenting the two as coterminous, as Leo Rowe, general secretary of the Pan American Union (1910–1948), did in a piece on the two in relation to the indigenous in the mid-1930s.
Imagined and reimagined across US and Latin American divides, the pair spiraled forward and have come down to us as almost identical, their doctrines inextricably linked to the point that concepts promoted by the one are confused with those advocated by the other. Of this, an important example is the patria grande (great fatherland), a term that Martí takes from Bolívar and uses, but by which he means to designate a common cultural legacy that belongs to all Latin Americans, not a term that refers to a large state.
In the Simón Bolívar address of October 28, 1893, Martí, ever the performer, is subtle, bold and brilliant. He applies the paradigm of radical self-critique that he lays out two years earlier in “Nuestra América” (“Our America”) to his object that is Bolívar. The critique does not come immediately. We see Martí biding his time until he arrives at the controversial final years of Bolívar’s life, which he relates to his audience, as if communicating an unfamiliar and perhaps unwelcome “truth” concerning a beloved and much-admired family member, a truth he pronounces ever so meticulously yet forcefully, weaving together, as only he could, the two extremes of praise and critique. Martí carefully selects the subjects about which he writes, using the act of portraiture as a space in which to carry out his political goals.
The address is all about revision and change, about redressing in the senses of both reattiring and setting right. Bolívar, Martí insists, will always remain a hero for Latin Americans, but the Liberator should be thought of as having not one legacy but two, the military and the political. The first is unblemished and heroic, a model of never-seen-before leadership. The second, which concerned his leadership of the Gran Colombia and his promotion of the Federation of the Andes, was stained with intrigue and scandal.
Martí was skilled as a biographer, as we have seen above. But what in particular explains his adeptness in this genre? He had ability to manipulate the rhetorical trope of the encomium, praising his subjects, but also slyly revealing their other side, as we have just seen in his portrait of Peña. Other examples of this range from his hagiographic treatment of the Spanish sixteenth-century priest and historian Bartolomé de Las Casas which culminates with commentary on his infamous “lapse” in judgment—that of advocating for importing peoples of Africa to take the place of the indigenous in the mines and in the fields, a lapse for which Las Casas himself asked for forgiveness—to his portrayals of the Brooklyn Bridge, with workers in the moment of its construction dying of the bends when scaling ladders from the depths of the caissons; and Coney Island, with single mothers leaving children behind in hotel rooms to pursue their pleasure.
Perhaps, in his dream of glory, for América and for himself, he did not see that the unity of spirit, indispensable to the salvation and happiness of our American peoples, suffered, more than it was helped, with his union in theoretical and artificial forms that did not adjust to the solid ground of reality.15
But there is a reason for this. Bolívar came from the white upper classes, the mantuanos . Martí tell us that “not having it [the inclination or the guts] in his own marrow, and his own particular ways and elevated racial position (casta) not transmitting it to him, he did not have the capacity to understand that the soul of the people is what saves republics for their only law is the true liberty.”16
Martí is revising how we should regard Bolívar. In his narrative, laden with the tropes of romanticism, he characterizes Bolívar as failing in the political phase of his career (1825–1830) on account of the top-down Enlightenment view of which we have just spoken with its origins in his class-based sentiment. Martí provides a different vision of his long military career. How he does so is interesting. Bolívar overcame dissent and division among the leaders who vied with him for authority. Actors and groups are all mentioned, but the tensions among them are downplayed, if not suppressed, in order to emphasize the “common project” over which Bolívar presided. Finessing in this way Bolívar’s complex relationship to leaders whose intention and deeds were not always consonant with his own, at times running at cross-purposes, Martí presents them as occupying one and the same stage as Bolívar; the plains, valleys, and mountains of Latin America in which their military lives transpired having the power to transcend by sending Bolívar forth as the expression of a common will and a common direction.
In Martí’s story of Bolívar and independence, there is no allusion, then, to the rivalry of caudillo leaders, to centralists and federalists, Colombians and Peruvians, creoles who were independentists, and creoles who were royalists. They are all part of the same process, although that process is one that has its roots, as Martí tells his audience, in the populist, anti-Spanish movements of the eighteenth century. As US historian David Bushnell explains, nationalist accounts frequently portray these rebellions as a prelude to independence rather than as discrete reactions to an overzealous Bourbon regime that sought to impose a new order on colonial society through the intendancies and the taxes on tobacco and alcohol.17
What Martí does with the rebellions of the previous century and other acts of popular resistance is important. For in this, his revised, ahistorical version of Bolívar, leader of the creole, liberal revolution, he uses these rebellions as ethical and political standards for his recreation of independence as a mestizo, popular process. The scene is dramatic. Caracas’s 9000-foot mountain, the Ávila, watching over Bolívar as if to signal his elevated status as a descendant of the Caracas white elite, Bolívar sees parade before him the mestizo corpses of figures from the eighteenth-century Comuneros Revolt and Tupac Amaru Rebellion as well as from other colonial moments of resistance and from the post-1810 independence process, all “martyred” by the Spanish. Led by José de Antequera, leader of the comunero movement, the group includes men and women who fought together, wives who witnessed the brutal torture and killing of their husbands at the hands of the Spanish and those of the Granadan resistance of 1814–1818 seized by the Spanish counter-revolution forces and executed, in particular the lone and valiant Policarpa Salavarrieta, whose statue today occupies pride of place in Bogotá.18 Martí, in constructing his bottom-up vision of independence, prominently includes in this way heroic female figures, whether as companions or as rebels who suffered in the independence process. Martí is clothing Bolívar in the names of the martyred, names that he wants to live on rather than those of the patrician figures of independence.
But Martí, in reconstructing independence, does not include all figures or communities that fall outside the creole sector. The pardo community, which was in fact an integral force in the independence movement in Venezuela and New Granada (1810–1825), is a case in point. Martí says nothing of it, never mind, then, of its history from the years prior to independence through the beginning of the new republics, or of Bolívar’s adamant stance that pardos be held back. Píar, the important pardo general who helped secure Angostura and whose execution by Bolívar for insubordination has been at the center of debate, as we have seen, is indicated once by his last name and a reference to his “cabeza rizada” (“curly head”).19 Neither is there any indication of Bolívar’s meeting with Alexandre Pétion or his turn to champion of abolition of slavery subsequent to that meeting. What an extraordinary omission, we could think. But, in neither case—be it the elision of Bolívar’s negative relationships to race (his alleged execution of Píar for racial reasons, particularly to prevent the formation of a pardo polity), or of the positive (the emancipation of black slaves)—should we be surprised. Martí, liberal white creole that he was, sought, as the Cuban-American historian Louis Pérez explains, to eliminate the critical category of non-whiteness from the future creole-managed Cuba he imagined in a country in which slavery was only finally abolished by the Spanish Cortes in 1886 and in which conservative elites had for decades warned of the possibility of another Haiti to control a racially mixed society with continuing enslavement of blacks, but also free blacks and mulattoes who in the 1830s and early 1840s were gaining economic power and together with white abolitionists were ultimately violently repressed.20 To speak of Píar or pardo leaders, or for that matter of Pétion would have meant evoking the possibility of a polity for non-whites, something Martí would not do. But is Martí, who years earlier spoke of race with regard to Leonardo Infante, doing an about-face? Not necessarily, as we can think that in that case as well he is suppressing the subject positions of pardos, only telling of Infante’s relationship to white-managed state formation, his racial identity neatly contained in the trial and execution that were so important for Venezuelan secession from the Gran Colombia.
The pardo community excluded, Martí provides us with a vision of pure becoming, and affirmation with Latin America and Spain clearly defined as antagonists and with the conflicts within the former subsumed by the larger historical context he grafts onto the present. As for the rest of Europe, France and England continue to represent the Enlightenment culture that was Bolívar’s but now are also presented as symbolizing the paradigm of high culture in and against which, as in so many of his writings, Latin American identity is imagined. The importance of both his heavenly military Bolívar, still in his boots, and the parade of corpses to which Bolívar is made to bear witness cannot be overstated. Martí is celebrating in a new but similar way the heroic values of war of which the Puerto Rican intellectual Arcadio Díaz Quiñones speaks in relation to Martí’s 1885 reflection on the then recently deceased US American Civil War general, Ulysses S. Grant.
Díaz Quiñones shows how Martí positions Grant from above, in what he calls Martí’s war from the clouds.21 But Martí, in continuing to promote those values, the war from the clouds now symbolically represented by his war-ready celestial Bolívar, is not only seeking to re-define independence as a popular moment. Through his portrayal of the different moments of independence, which now includes the rebellions of the eighteenth century, Martí projects a vision in which “American popular heroism” has a wide and deep foundation, with the examples of the mestizo movements of the eighteenth century also demonstrating that Latin America is anything but a single totality. Instead, what he shows in graphic detail is a hemisphere broken into “its regions,” each one aggrieved, having suffered at the hands of the Spanish and deserving for this reason, as Cuba then was at this late date, of possessing political autonomy and sovereignty. The Latin American independent countries have a right to be sovereign not because of the creole leaders of the 1810s and 1820s who founded them as exclusionary republics but because of those who in the struggle to defend their communities over the decades and in the struggle for independence die at the hands of the Spanish.
Martí has reached a pinnacle of sorts in his address, arriving at a principle that has long been sacred to him, namely that suffering is precisely what confers the rights of nationhood. The armed-conflict that was independence needed to be continental in scope in order to be successful, he states without hesitation. This formulation is not dissimilar to that of the British historian John Lynch, who speaks of the Gran Colombia as a necessity of war. Once that process is completed, the territories in which resistance has its roots have the ethical right to regain their sovereignty under the new democratic conditions.
The symbolism of the fallen heroes from throughout the continent who parade before Bolívar—figures who are distinctly not members of the elites—could not be clearer. Their acts of sacrifice impose a moral obligation on Bolívar: to shape his politics to reflect the fact of the regional, popular “martyrs” whose acts of resistance either preceded or coincided with the years of independence, inasmuch as their suffering and deaths confer upon their territories inalienable rights. As for the Cuban independence movement over which Martí presided, there would be new martyrs, including, of course, Martí himself, who was killed in Dos Ríos in 1895, soon after reaching Cuba. What would become of Martí’s corpse? Could we not imagine it also filing before the war-ready Bolívar to compel him to see with new eyes, right behind that of Antequera and Tupac Amaru and other fallen or executed regional heroes?
At the end of the address, Martí speaks of Bolívar’s expulsion, milking for his own ends a phrase that, according to the historical record, Bolívar uttered on his deathbed to José Palacios, a former, though still not formally emancipated, slave of Bolívar’s family who was his servant and companion, “José, José, vámonos, que de aquí nos echan; ¿adónde iremos?” (“José, José, let’s get going, they are throwing us out of here; where will we go?”)22 But the critical terms with which he is looking at Bolívar’s exile have changed radically since 1881. In his article on the letrado Miguel Peña, to use Ángel Rama’s term that aptly captures the diverse functions undertaken by Peña in the world of law, writing, and politics, Martí both underlines that the Gran Colombia was not a viable political organization and laments Bolívar’s expulsion. Now without mincing words, he tells the audience that Bolívar committed an error, betraying the children he helped to bring into existence. He declares that Bolívar deserved to be expelled, having violated the contract of governor and governed presented in “Our America.” Bolívar and America, joined in the period of independence, are now disjoined, he pronounces. “And so disappears the conjunction of Bolívar and America for the project of independence, the distance between them now greater than that of the heaven’s stars….”23 Why? Bolívar refuses to step down, confusing his government that has collapsed with the republic itself, which must be allowed to establish a new government. He has imposed an idea on the people of America that is unworkable and unrealistic, “determined to unite under one distant central government… the countries of the revolution, born with multiple heads.…”24
What of the regional creole elites? What of the Venezuelan Domingo Monagas (son of José Gregorio Monagas, and Nicanor Bolet Peraza’s brother-in-law) who was one of the speakers at the 1893 birthday celebration inspired by the Venezuelan members of the society and who addressed the matter of social cohesion? They have been removed from the story. Martí constructs the expulsion as resulting not from Bolívar’s conflict with local elites but from the disregard of a mantuano for popular regional sentiment. Bolívar, the mantuano, has failed to reflect adequately on what a political system should be in Latin America. His facile idea of a large state imported from Enlightenment models undermines the liberal principle of autonomous government rooted in the wider political community. There is no mention of the Bogotá elites’ decision to demand that he leave New Granada nor of the Venezuelan order. The elites do not expel Bolívar. In Martí’s story, the masses do. These are the masses that the mantuano does not know and with whom his education prevents him from sympathizing. Was Martí calling for the Latin American elites to know the worlds they live in, to understand the perspectives of others, so that they can be sensitive to injustice and act accordingly, furthermore, to understand the fact that property produces inequality? Was he pointing them to Rousseau’s Emile?
Finally, what is the answer that Martí provides to the question he poses, after having stripped Bolívar of many of his credentials as a political thinker and statesman, and therefore undercutting the value of his writings as an unmediated form of political doctrine for the present? Where will Bolívar go? Having spoken the truth about the father of independence, having placed at the center of the story of his life his great error, Martí tells his readers that the place Bolívar will go to is to the hearts and minds of the generations to come, of his children, who, also grateful for all that he made possible, will shed a sentimental tear for the heroic father. Martí, who has bathed himself in the glow of the Liberator’s sword, can now embrace all of Bolívar by way of nostalgia and sentiment, in a sense, then, righting the wrong committed by Peña by providing the expelled figure that he himself has expelled again with a spiritual homecoming. This was not Larrazábal’s statesman or the Gran Colombia. Nicanor Bolet Peraza and the Monagas clan could not have been pleased.
As for Cubans, they are to remember Bolívar’s words vowing to liberate their country, words that Martí supplies to them and the rest of his audience in his report on the celebration in his weekly, Patria , on November 4, appearing along with the address itself. Cubans know they were never fulfilled but can feel through Martí’s words that they form part of Latin America’s great epic. They will have no such nostalgia for the United States which could have assisted in their war of liberation that was the War of Ten Years, 1868–1878, but did not, as Martí states in his 1889 piece, “A Vindication of Cuba,” first written in English, then translated into Spanish.25
Martí, concerned in this article about plans by US and Cuban actors to annex Cuba during these years, dramatizes the fact of Cubans fighting for themselves; and the suffering, the disappointment, and betrayal they felt when in the throes of their struggle for independence—over 200,000 lives were lost on both sides—the nation of Lincoln, as he puts it, does nothing. Cubans, having fought their own battles with great honor and died—the message Martí is sending to his English- and Spanish-speaking readers—are proud, heroic, and capable. They will liberate themselves. Now, four years later, Martí in this crucial speech about Bolívar—Bolívar’s boots still on and his own soon to be hoisted over his feet for the first time—articulates anew his political vision of a republicanism rooted in the people—with Bolívar as the military instrument of that vision but not the guide.
Martí, in New York, both embraced the Venezuelan narrative of Bolívar’s life and changed it. The idea of the Gran Colombia that was so important in the Venezuelan Liberal tradition was not to be recuperated. In fact, it was shattered. Nor was any other aspect of Bolívar the statesman to be retained. Martí was calling for a new science of government, making Bolívar into the example of the leader who produces a bad model of governance and who is for that reason removed from his position by the people. Bolívar is perhaps the first and only Latin American leader to be evaluated by the critical standard set forth in “Our America.” Had Martí lived past his 42 years, there would have been more. As we will see in the next chapter, in the new twentieth century, Venezuelans will call for a science of government rooted in the idea of a national reality. It will be a vision quite different from that of Martí, though they will find much to take from Martí’s “Our America” in regard to his idea of government as a national evolution. What they will not do is invest the masses with the ethical duty to overthrow governments that do not serve their interests.