POLITICAL CORRESPONDENCE
LETTER TO EMILIO NÚÑEZ
On May 7, 1880, General Calixto García1 disembarked in Cuba to mount a new armed insurgency against Spain. As interim president of the New York Cuban Revolutionary Committee in García’s absence, Marti issued a fervent proclamation announcing the general’s presence on the island to all Cubans. But over the course of the summer the rebellion fizzled. No one knew what had become of Garcia, and the committee had no funds to send the isolated pockets of revolutionaries who sporadically sent back increasingly dismal news. On August 1, after months of wandering barefoot through the wild with only six companions, Calixto Garcia surrendered to Spanish troops. Before being deported to Spain, be wrote to the remaining generals in the field, urging them to lay down their arms. All but one did as he recommended. Emilio Núñez,
2 who disagreed strongly with the terms of the peace agreement, refused to cease fighting without the authorization of the Revolutionary Committee in New York. Marti sent him an official authorization and accompanied it with this letter.
Cuba’s second war of independence, known as the Guerra Chiquita, or “Little War,” had failed, and the Cuban Revolutionary Committee of New York was, for the moment, disbanded.
New York, October 13, 1880
Señor Emilio Núñez
My brave and noble friend:
I have your letter of September 20. What more repose could you seek for your soul—and what greater right to the esteem of even the severest critic—than to have written such a letter at such a time, from the encampment of Los Egidos?
You ask me for my advice—and I will not shirk the responsibility of giving it to you. I believe it would be futite—for you and for our land—were you and your companions to remain on the field of battle. Even if you had not asked me, I was already preparing—moved by wrath at the criminal solitude in which the country leaves its defenders, and by love and respect for your generous sacrifice—to beg all of you to spare your own lives, which today are absolutely unnecessary to the patria in whose honor they are offered up.
I do not tell you—despite the respect that your conduct in that letter has earned from me—all that is in my mind regarding our country’s situation, because indiscreet and avid eyes might take advantage of it. But notwithstanding the resources we revolutionaries may still have at our disposal, and the importance of the excitement that still surrounds us, and the possibility of maintaining the Island in a state of permanent war, to the grave detriment of its current government, I do not think for my part that such a tenacious campaign would be legitimate, useful, or honorable.
Men such as you and I must seek for our land a radical and solemn redemption, imposed, if necessary and if possible, today, tomorrow, and always, by force, but inspired by magnificent purposes that will be sufficient to rebuild the country we are preparing to destroy. When, in the last two years, all the Revolution’s leaders could not find a way of working vigorously together, nor was any such agreement achieved during a full-blown revolutionary movement and over the course of a year of war, it is unreasonable to suppose that it might now be achieved, with the war overcome once more and its finest leaders imprisoned or dead, and all of them isolated and impoverished. And so we would be bringing a new caudillo to the Island, and we would come to wage a petty, personal war, powerful enough to resist, but not to vanquish, and in all likelihood tainted by impure desires, encumbered by jealousies and, in short, unworthy of those who think and act as honest men.
What General Vicente Garcia may be able to do today could have been done before now: and if out of jealousy, or lack of will, or remorse, or lack of means it was not done at that time, then it would be unreasonable for him to attempt to do it today. The war thus renewed would not answer to the urgent needs and the grave general problems that afflict Cuba. And that is why I do not refer to those problems, or advise you, as I could advise you, to wait until I have read your response.
Our honor itself, and our very cause, demand that we abandon the field of armed warfare. We do not deserve to be and must not be taken for professional revolutionaries, blind and turbulent spirits, obdurate, vulgar men, capable of sacrificing noble lives to uphold a goal—the only honorable one in Cuba—whose triumph is now improbable.
A handful of men, driven on by their people, can achieve what Bolivar achieved; what, with fortune on our sides, we ourselves will achieve against Spain. But a small band of heroes, abandoned by their people, can, to ignoble and indifferent eyes, appear to be no more than a gang of bandits. Others advise you, out of a disgraceful vanity, to detain on the field of battle men to whom, at the moment, we have neither the will nor the way of sending resources; they seek to spare themselves the criticism that might be levied if they were to advise you to withdraw. I, who have no apology to make to the Spanish government; who will look on serenely as my wife and son leave me, bound for Cuba;
3 who will venture forth into new lands or remain in this one, my chest sheltered by the last tattered shred of the flag of honor—I, who will never make it a merit, before the enemies of our patria, to have sent the last soldier away from combat, I advise you, as a revolutionary, as a man who admires and envies your energy, and as a loving friend, not to remain fruitlessly on a field of battle where those you are defending are powerless to send you their aid.
Having said this, what can I tell you now about how you should carry it out? If you alone were combating, I would tell you to find a way of leaving the Island—but you have not wanted to abandon those who fight with you so bravely. It is hard to say it, and all the ice in my soul rises to my lips as I say it, but so sterile is the struggle—unworthy today because the country is unworthy of its last soldiers—that it must be said: Lay down your arms.
Do not lay them down before Spain, but before the hazards of fortune. Do not surrender to the enemy government, but to the luck that was against you. Do not cease to be honorable: last among the vanquished, you will be first among men of honor.
José Marti
LETTER TO GENERAL MÁXIMO GÓMEZ
Antonio Maceo and Maximo Gomez were the two most distinguished military leaders of the Ten Years War; their participation in any future insurgency was key. In the summer of 1884, both generals arrived in New York to lay the groundwork for another war of independence. Marti met with them extensively throughout the summer and fall, and was beginning to be concerned by Gomez’s growing authoritarianism; one of his greatest fears had always been that Cuba would achieve its freedom only to succumb to the military tyranny that plagued many Latin American countries. One day in October, during a meeting with the two, Marti was speaking of his plans and Gomez interrupted him curtly: “Look, Marti: You limit yourself to what you’re instructed to do; for the rest, General Maceo will do what he must.” Maceo attempted to soothe Marti after Gómez left the room, but Martí, fearing the worst, went home and wrote Gómez the following letter. He then withdrew from the Cuban revolutionary movement. Gómez and Maceo continued to pursue their plans, but by August of the following year, both men acknowledged that the independence movement had failed once more.
New York, October 20, 1884
General Máximo Gómez
New York
Distinguished General and friend:
I left your house early Saturday morning with an impression so painful that I have let it rest for two days, so that the decision that it, along with other, previous impressions, has moved me to make would not be the result of some passing agitation or excessive zeal in the defense of things I would never wish to see attacked, but the work of mature meditation. What sorrow it gives me to have to say these things to a man whom I believe to be sincere and good and in whom there exist qualities outstanding enough to make him truly great!
1 However, there is one thing that lies beyond all the personal sytripa thy you may inspire in me, and beyond all argument, however opportune it may seem, and that is my determination not to contribute by one iota, out of blind love for the idea that is consuming my life, to bringing a regime of personal despotism to my land, a regime that would be even more shameful and calamitous than the political despotism it now endures, and more serious and difficult to eradicate, because it would be excused by certain virtues, and established upon an idea which it embodied, and legitimized by triumph.
A nation is not founded, General, as a military camp is commanded. When, in the preparations for a revolution more delicate and complex than any other, no sincere desire is manifested to know and reconcile all the various tasks, wills, and elements that make possible the armed struggle—which is merely one of the forms that the spirit of independence takes—but instead, at each step, a brusquely expressed or poorly concealed intention is evinced to make all the resources of faith and war raised by that spirit serve the furtive personal aims of the justly famous leaders who present themselves to captain the war, then what guarantee can there be that the civil liberties which are the only object worth plunging a country into battle over will be more fully respected tomorrow? What are we, General? Are we the heroic, modest servants of an idea that fires our hearts, the loyal friends of a nation in distress? Or are we bold and fortune-favored caudillos who with whip in hand and spurs on our heels prepare to bring war to a nation in order to take possession of it for ourselves? Both of you earned a reputation for valor, loyalty, and prudence in one undertaking: will you now lose that reputation in another? If the war, along with all the noble and legitimate prestige that arises from it, is possible, that is because of the prior existence of the spirit, tried by great suffering, that clamors for it and makes it necessary. This spirit must be heard, and the most profound respect must be demonstrated for it in every public and private act, because just as he who gives his life to serve a great idea is admirable, he who takes advantage of a great idea to serve his own personal hopes for glory or power is abominable, even if he risks his life for them. One has the right to give one’s life only when one gives it without self-interest.
I can already see you in distress, for I understand that you are acting in good faith in all that you undertake, and that, feeling yourself to be inspired by pure motives, you truly believe that what you are doing is the only proper way of proceeding open to you. But the greatest mistakes can be committed with the greatest sincerity, and notwithstanding any secondary consideration, the austere truth, which knows no friend, must go out to confront all that it considers a danger, and set serious matters to right before they have progressed so far that there is no remedy. Control your distress, General, as on Saturday I controlled the amazement and disgust with which I listened to an unfortunate outburst from you, and the curious conversation General Maceo began with respect to it, in which he sought—oh utmost madness!—to make me understand that we should consider the war in Cuba as your exclusive property, and that no one else can put any thought or work into it without committing a profanation, and that anyone who wishes to assist it must do so by leaving it blindly and obediently in your hands. No, no, by God!—to seek to suffocate thought even before seeing yourselves, as you both will very soon, in front of an enthused and grateful people, wearing all the raiment of victory. The patria belongs to no one, and if it does it will belong-and then only in spirit—to he who serves it with the greatest selflessness and intelligence.
A war undertaken in compliance with the nation’s mandate, in consultation with the representatives of its interests, in harmony with the largest number of friendly elements that can be achieved—it was such a war that I had believed—because I had depicted it to you in a letter three years ago, to which you sent me a beautiful response—you were now offering to lead, and to such a war I have given my whole soul because that war will save my people. But our conversation gave me to understand that this war was a personal adventure, cleverly undertaken at an opportune moment in which the particular aims of the caudillos could be merged with the glorious ideas that make them possible. And to a campaign such as that, waged as a private enterprise, without showing more respect for the patriotic spirit that makes it possible than that which cunning dictates as indispensable in order to attract the people and elements that can be useful in one way or another; to an armed struggle (however brilliant and magnificent it must be, and however much he who leads it shall be crowned with success and personally honored) that does not, from its first deed and earliest preparations, demonstrate that it is being attempted as a service to the country and not as a despotic invasion; to a military undertaking that is not publicly, openly, sincerely, and solely moved by the aim of placing, at its conclusion, civil liberties in the hands of the country, grateful in advance to its servants; to such a war of ignoble root and fearsome ends, whatever its magnitude and possibility of success might be—and I am aware that the possibility is now great—I would never lend my support—whatever it might be worth, and I know that because it arises from an invincible resolve to be absolutely honorable it is worth pure gold—I will never lend it.
How, General, could I undertake missions, attract affections, take advantage of the affections I already have, convince eminent men and set wills in motion, with such fears and doubts in my soul? I am desisting, therefore, from all the active labors that I had begun to take upon myself.
And do not take my having written you these reasons badly, General. I believe you to be a noble man, and you deserve to be made to think. You may become very great, and you may not. To respect a country that loves us and places its hopes in us is the utmost greatness. To use its sorrows and enthusiasms to our own advantage would be the greatest ignominy. In truth, General, ever since Honduras I had been told that intrigues were perhaps forming around you which were poisoning your simple heart without your feeling it, and taking advantage of your goodness, your impressions, and your habits to separate you from anyone you found along your way who would affectionately accompany you in your labors and help you free yourself from the obstacles that were presenting themselves on the path to an exaltation that is your natural right. But I confess that I have neither the will nor the patience to go about sniffing out intrigues or disentangling them. I am above all that. I serve nothing but duty, and that will always be power enough for me.
Has anyone approached you, General, with an affection warmer than that with which I held you in my arms on the first day I saw you? Have you felt in many men the fatal abundance of heart that would do me such harm if I needed to keep my aims hidden in order to promote today’s womanish little ambitions or tomorrow’s hopes?
Yet, after all I have written, and have carefully reread, and confirm, I still believe you are full of merit and I love you: but as for the war which right now it seems to me, perhaps by some misunderstanding, you represent,—no:—
Esteeming you, serving you, I remain
José Marti
A VINDICATION OF CUBA
In the late 1880s, the newly elected administration of Benjamin Harrison was bandying about the old idea of purchasing Cuba from Spain. At that point, the purchase was seen as a way of disposing of the surplus in the Treasury and postponing the looming and highly controversial issue of import tariff reduction, since Cuban sugar could be admitted free of tax if Cuba were part of the Union. On Tbursday, March 21, 1889, the New York Evening Post published a short article titled “A Protectionist View of Cuban Annexation,” wbicb noted the surprisingly anti-annexationist stance of the Philadelphia Manufacturer, which the Post called “the only professedly bigh-tariff organ in the country that is conducted with decent ability.” The Post cited the following paragraph from an article recently published by the Manufacturer:
The people of Cuba are divided into three classes, Spaniards, native Cubans of Spanish descent, and negroes. The men of Spanish birth are probably less fitted than men of any other white race to become American citizens. They have ruled Cuba for centuries. They rule it now upon almost precisely the same methods that they have always employed, methods which combine bigotry with tyranny, and silly pride with fathomless corruption. The less we have of them the better. The native Cubans are not much more desirable: To the faults of the men of the parent race they add effeminacy and a distaste for exertion which amounts really to disease. They are helpless, idle, of defective morals, and unfitted by nature and experience for discharging the obligations of citizenship in a great and free republic. Their lack of manly force and of self-respect is demonstrated by the supineness with which they have so long submitted to Spanish oppression, and even their attempts at rebellion have been so pitifully ineffective that they have risen little above the dignity of farce. To clothe such men with the responsibilities of directing this government, and to give them the same measure of power that is wielded by the freemen of our Northern States, would be to summon them to the performance of functions for which they have not the smallest capacity.
The anonymous writer for the New York Evening Post then con
curred: All of this we emphatically endorse, and it may be added that if we have now a Southern question which disturbs us more or less, we should have it in a more aggravated form if Cuba were added to the Union, with near a million blacks, much inferior to our own in point of civilization, who must, of course, be armed with the ballot and put on the same level politically with their former masters. If Mr. Chandler and Gov. Foraker1 can scarcely endure the spectacle which they daily behold in the Southern States, of negroes deprived of the elective franchise, what must their sufferings be when the responsibility of Cuba is put upon them also? Imagine a special Committee of the Senate going to Cuba to take testimony on the disfranchisement of the freedmen. In the first place, the difficulties of language would be insurmountable, for the Spanish tongue as spoken on the plantations would be rather harder to learn than that of the Basque provinces. The report of such a committee would either become a laughing-stock, or would plunge Congress into dire confusion.
Probably we shall be spared any such infliction as the annexation of Cuba by the refusal of Spain to sell the island. A Madrid despatch says that Minister Moret, in reply to a question in the Senate yesterday, declared that Spain would not entertain any offer from the United States for the purchase of the island, and, as if this statement were not sufficiently emphatic, he added that there was not money enough in the whole world to buy the smallest portion of Spanish territory.
In response, Marti wrote the following letter, which the Evening Post published on March 25, 1889. It appears here exactly as it did there. Marti subsequently published a pamphlet titled “Cuba y los Estados Unidos,” which contained Spanish translations of the articles from the Manufacturer and the Post, and of his response.
To the editor of The Evening Post:
Sir: I beg to be allowed the privilege of referring in your columns to the injurious criticism of the Cubans printed in the Manufacturer of Philadelphia, and reproduced in your issue of yesterday.
This is not the occasion to discuss the question of the annexation of Cuba. It is probable that no self-respecting Cuban would like to see his country annexed to a nation where the leaders of opinion share towards him the prejudices excusable only to vulgar jingoism or rampant ignorance. No honest Cuban will stoop to be received as a moral pest for the sake of the usefulness of his land in a community where his ability is denied, his morality insulted, and his character despised. There are some Cubans who, from honorable motives, from an ardent admiration for progress and liberty, from a prescience of their own powers under better political conditions, from an unhappy ignorance of the history and tendency of annexation, would like to see the island annexed to the United States. But those who have fought in war and learned in exile, who have built, by the work of hands and mind, a virtuous home in the heart of an unfriendly community; who, by their successful efforts as scientists and merchants, as railroad builders and engineers, as teachers, artists, lawyers, journalists, orators and poets, as men of alert intelligence and uncommon activity, are honored wherever their powers have been called into action and the people are just enough to understand them; those who have raised, with their less prepared elements, a town of workingmen where the United States had previously a few huts in a barren cliff; those, more numerous than the others, do not desire the annexation of Cuba to the United States. They do not need it. They admire this nation, the greatest ever built by liberty, but they dislike the evil conditions that, like worms in the heart, have begun in this mighty republic their work of destruction. They have made of the heroes of this country their own heroes, and look to the success of the American commonwealth as the crowning glory of mankind; but they cannot honestly believe that excessive individualism, reverence for wealth, and the protracted exultation of a terrible victory are preparing the United States to be the typical nation of liberty, where no opinion is to be based in greed, and no triumph or acquisition reached against charity and justice. We love the country of Lincoln as much as we fear the country of Cutting.
2We are not the people of destitute vagrants or immoral pigmies that the Manufacturer is pleased to picture; nor the country of petty talkers, incapable of action, hostile to hard work, that, in a mass with the other countries of Spanish America, we are by arrogant travellers and writers represented to be. We have suffered impatiently under tyranny; we have fought like men, sometimes like giants, to be freemen; we are passing that period of stormy repose, full of germs of revolt, that naturally follows a period of excessive and unsuccessful action; we have to fight like conquered men against an oppressor who denies us the means of living, and fosters—In the beautiful capital visited by the tourists, in the interior of the country, where the prey escapes his grasp—a reign of such corruption as may poison in our veins the strength to secure freedom; we deserve in our misfortune the respect of those who did not help us in our need.
But because our Government has systematically allowed after the war the triumph of criminals, the occupation of the cities by the scum of the people, the ostentation of ill-gotten riches by a myriad of Spanish office-holders and their Cuban accomplices, the conversion of the capital into a gambling-den, where the hero and the philosopher walk hungry by the lordly thief of the metropolis; because the healthier farmer, ruined by a war seemingly useless, turns in silence to the plough that he knew well how to exchange for the machete; because thousands of exiles, profiting by a period of calm that no human power can quicken until it is naturally exhausted, are practising in the battle of life in the free countries the art of governing themselves and of building a nation; because our half-breeds and city-bred young men are generally of delicate physique, of suave courtesy and ready words, hiding under the glove that polishes the poem the hand that fells the foe—are we to be considered, as the Manufacturer does consider us, an “effeminate” people? These city-bred young men and poorly built half-breeds knew in one day how to rise against a cruel government, to pay their passages to the seat of war with the product of their watches and trinkets, to work their way in exile while their vessels were being kept from them by the country of the free in the interest of the foes of freedom, to obey as soldiers, sleep in the mud, eat roots, fight ten years without salary, conquer foes with the branch of a tree, die—these men of eighteen, these heirs to wealthy estates, these dusky striplings—a death not to be spoken of without uncovering the head. They died like those other men of ours who, with a stroke of the machete, can send a head flying, or by a turn of the hands bring a bull to their feet. These “effeminate” Cubans had once courage enough, in the face of a hostile government, to carry on their left arms for a week the mourning for Lincoln.
The Cubans have, according to the
Manufacturer, “a distaste for exertion”; they are “helpless,” “idle.” These “helpless,” “idle” men came here twenty years ago empty-handed, with very few exceptions; fought against the climate; mastered the language; lived by their honest labor, some in affluence, a few in wealth, rarely in misery; they bought or built homes; they raised families and fortunes; they loved luxury and worked for it; they were not frequently seen in the dark roads of life; proud and self-sustaining, they never feared competition as to intelligence or diligence. Thousands have returned to die in their homes; thousands have remained where, during the hardships of life, they have triumphed, unaided by any help of kindred language, sympathy of race, or community of religion. A handful of Cuban toilers built Key West. The Cubans have made their mark in Panama by their ability as mechanics of the higher trades, as clerks, physicians, and contractors. A Cuban, Cisneros, has greatly advanced the development of railways and river navigation in Colombia. Marquez, another Cuban, gained, with many of his countrymen, the respect of the Peruvians as a merchant of eminent capacity. Cubans are found everywhere, working as farmers, surveyors, engineers, mechanics, teachers, journalists. In Philadelphia, the
Manufacturer has a daily opportunity to see a hundred Cubans, some of them of heroic history and powerful build, who live by their work in easy comfort. In New York, the Cubans are directors of prominent banks, substantial merchants, popular brokers, clerks of recognized ability, physicians with a large practice, engineers of world-wide repute, electricians, journalists, tradesmen, cigarmakers. The poet of Niagara is a Cuban, our Heredia;
3 a Cuban, Menocal, is the projector of the canal of Nicaragua. In Philadelphia itself, as in New York, the college prizes have been more than once awarded to Cubans. The women of these “helpless,” “idle” people, with “a distaste for exertion,” arrived here from a life of luxury in the heart of the winter; their husbands were in the war, ruined, dead, imprisoned in Spain; the “Señora” went to work; from a slave-owner she became a slave, took a seat behind the counter, sang in the churches, worked button-holes by the hundred, sewed for a living, curled feathers, gave her soul to duty, withered in work her body. This is the people of “defective morals.”
We are “unfitted by nature and experience to discharge the obligations of citizenship in a great and free country.” This cannot be justly said of a people who possess, besides the energy that built the first railroad in Spanish dominions and established against the opposition of the Government all the agencies of civilization, a truly remarkable knowledge of the body politic, a tried readiness to adapt itself to its higher forms, and the power rare in tropical countries of nerving their thought and pruning their language. Their passion for liberty, the conscientious study of its best teachings, the nursing of individual character in exile and at home, the lessons of ten years of war and its manifold consequences, and the practical exercise of the duties of citizenship in the free countries of the world, have combined, in spite of all antecedents, to develop in the Cuban a capacity for free government so natural to him that he established it, even to the excess of its practices, in the midst of the war, vied with his elders in the effort to respect the laws of liberty, and snatched the sabre, without fear or consideration, from the hands of every military pretender, however glorious. There seems to be in the Cuban mind a happy faculty of uniting sense with earnestness and moderation with exuberance. Noble teachers have devoted themselves since the beginning of the century to explain by their words and exemplify by their lives the self-restraint and tolerance inseparable from liberty. Those who won the first seats ten years ago at the European universities by singular merit have been proclaimed, at their appearance in the Spanish Parliament, men of subtle thought and powerful speech. The political knowledge of the average Cuban compares well with that of the average American citizen. Absolute freedom from religious intolerance, the love of man for the work he creates by his industry, and theoretical and practical familiarity with the laws and processes of liberty, will enable the Cuban to rebuild his country from the ruins in which he will receive it from its oppressors. It is not to be expected, for the honor of mankind, that the nation that was rocked in freedom, and received for three centuries the best blood of liberty-loving men, will employ the power thus acquired in depriving a less fortunate neighbor of his liberty.
It is, finally, said that “our lack of manly force and of self-respect is demonstrated by the supineness with which we have so long submitted to Spanish oppression, and even our attempts at rebellion have been so pitifully ineffective that they have risen little above the dignity of farce.” Never was ignorance of history and character more pitifully displayed than in this wanton assertion. We need to recollect, in order to answer without bitterness, that more than one American bled by our side,
4 in a war that another American was to call a farce. A farce! the war that has been by foreign observers compared to an epic, the upheaval of a whole country, the voluntary abandonment of wealth, the abolition of slavery in our first moment of freedom, the burning of our cities by our own hands, the erection of villages and factories in the wild forests, the dressing of our ladies of rank in the textures of the woods, the keeping at bay, in ten years of such a life, a powerful enemy, with a loss to him of 200,000 men, at the hands of a small army of patriots, with no help but nature! We had no Hessians and no Frenchmen, no Lafayette or Steuben, no monarchical rivals to help us; we had but one neighbor who confessedly “stretched the limits of his power, and acted against the will of the people” to help the foes of those who were fighting for the same Chart of Liberties on which he built his independence. We fell a victim to the very passions which could have caused the downfall of the thirteen States, had they not been cemented by success, while we were enfeebled by procrastination; a procrastination brought about, not from cowardice, but from an abhorrence of blood, which allowed the enemy in the first months of the war to acquire unconquerable advantage, and from a childlike confidence in the certain help of the United States: “They cannot see us dying for liberty at their own doors without raising a hand or saying a word to give to the world a new free country!” They “stretched the limits of their powers in deference to Spain.” They did not raise the hand. They did not say the word.
The struggle has not ceased. The exiles do not want to return. The new generation is worthy of its sires. Hundreds of men have died in darkness since the war in the misery of prisons. With life only will this fight for liberty cease among us. And it is the melancholy truth that our efforts would have been, in all probability, successfully renewed, were it not, in some of us, for the unmanly hope of the annexationists of securing liberty without paying its price; and the just fears of others that our dead, our sacred memories, our ruins drenched in blood, would be but the fertilizers of the soil for the benefit of a foreign plant, or the occasion for a sneer from the Manufacturer of Philadelphia.
With sincere thanks for the space you have kindly allowed me, I am, sir, yours very respectfully,
José Marti
120 Front Street, New York, March 23