Selected Writings

And did the Herald correspondent, Eugene Bryson, tell me about anything else? About a Yankee syndicate, backed by the Customs Office, in which rapacious white Spaniards have a deep hand, and that may become a toehold in Cuba for those from the North, whose complex and entrammeled political constitution fortunately leaves them unable to undertake or support this plan as the project of their government. And Bryson told me something else, though the truth of the conversation he reported to me can only be understood by one who has seen at close hand the vigor with which we have launched the revolution, and the disorder, reluctance, and poor pay of the raw Spanish army—and the inability of Spain to muster, either in or out of Cuba, the resources with which to fight this war, resources that, during the last war, it extracted from Cuba alone. Bryson told me about a conversation he had with Martinez Campos ¹ at the end of which he was given to understand that no doubt, when the time came, Spain would prefer to reach an agreement with the United States than to hand the Island over to the Cuban people. And Bryson told me still more: about an acquaintance of ours who is being groomed in the North as the United States’ candidate for the presidency of Mexico, once the current President has disappeared. I am doing my duty here. The Cuban war—a reality that is superior to the vague and disparate desires of the annexationist Cubans and Spaniards whose alliance with the government of Spain would give them only relative power—has come at the right hour in America to prevent, even against the open deployment of all these forces, the annexation of Cuba to the United States, which would never accept the annexation of a country that is at war, and which, since the revolution will not accept annexation, cannot enter into a hateful and absurd commitment to crush, for its own benefit and with its own weapons, an American war of independence.

—And Mexico? Will it not find a wise, effective, and immediate way of supplying aid, in time, to those who are defending it? Yes, it will, or I will find one on Mexico’s behalf. This is life or death; there is no room for error. Discretion is the only option. I would have found and proposed a way already, but I must have more authority myself, or know who does have it, before acting or advising. I have just arrived. The constitution of a simple, practical government may take two more months, if it is to be real and stable. Our soul is one, I know that, and so is the will of the country: but these things are always a labor of connections, timeliness, and compromise. I represent a certain constituency, and I do not want to do anything that might appear to be a capricious expansion of it.

I arrived in a boat with General Máximo Gómez and four other men, taking the lead oar through a storm to land on an unknown, rocky stretch of one of our beaches. For fourteen days I carried my rucksack and rifle on foot across brambles and high places—rousing the people to take up arms as we passed through. I feel, in the benevolence of these souls, the root of my attachment to the pain of mankind and to the justice that will alleviate it. The countryside is undisputedly ours, to such a degree that in a month I’ve heard gunfire only once; at the gates of the cities we either win a victory or pass three thousand armed men in review, to an enthusiasm akin to religious fervor. We are going on now to the center of the Island where, in the presence of the revolution that I have given rise to, I will lay aside the authority given me by the Cubans off the island, which has been respected on the island, and which an assembly of delegates of the visible Cuban people, the revolutionaries now in arms, must renew in accordance with their new state. The revolution desires full liberty for the army, without the trammels once imposed on it by a Chamber of Deputies with no real authorization, or by the suspicions of a younger generation that is zealous in its republicanism, or by jealousy and fear of the excessive future prominence of some painstaking and farsighted caudillo. However, at the same time, the revolution wants concise and respectable republican representation—the same spirit of humanity and decency, full of yearning for individual dignity, in the republic’s representatives as is driving the revolutionaries on and keeping them at war. For myself, I understand that a nation cannot be made to go against the spirit that moves it, or to do without that spirit, and I know how to set hearts on fire and how to use the ardent and gratified state of those hearts for incessant agitation and attack. But where forms are concerned, there is room for many ideas, and the things of men are made by men. You know me. For myself, I will defend only that which I believe will guarantee or serve the revolution. I know how to disappear. But my ideas would not disappear, nor would my own obscurity embitter me. —And as long as we have a form, we will work, whether the fulfilment of it falls to me or to others.

And now that matters of the public interest have gone first, I’ll tell you about myself. Only the emotion of this duty was able to raise from coveted death the man who knows you best—now that Nájera² no longer lives where he can be seen—and who cherishes the friendship with which you distinguish him like a treasure in his heart. I know how you have been scolding me, silently, since my journey began : We give him all our soul, and he is silent! What a disappointment! How callused his soul must be if the tribute and honor of our affection has not been enough to make him write one letter more, among all the pages of letters and newspaper articles he writes each day!

LETTER TO HIS MOTHER

LETTER TO MANUEL MERCADO