Selected Writings

AGAINST THE ADVICE of General Máximo Gómez, military leader of the Cuban insurgent army, José Martí mounted his horse and rushed in to do battle with the Spanish troops. It was May 19, 1895, and the men had been in the Cuban countryside for a little more than a month. They had landed at La Playita, on Cuba’s easternmost southern coast, having sailed there from nearby Haiti, where they had gathered after crossing over from the Dominican Republic. The war against Spanish rule had been launched on February 24 with an uprising that had not been as successful as expected. At Fernandina Beach, on Florida’s east coast, the American authorities had confiscated three small steamships loaded with weapons and supplies that Martí, through his tireless fund-raising efforts, had managed to purchase. Undaunted, Martí had forged ahead with plans for what he had hoped would be Cuba’s definitive war of independence. The skirmish into which Marti rode had flared up near the confluence of two rivers, the Contramaestre and the Cauto, the island’s largest fluvial system. The area is known, laconically, as Dos Ríos (“Two Rivers”). Martí was felled by bullets to the head, chest, and thigh, which killed him instantly. His body was seized by the enemy and hastily buried in a common grave. But when the Spanish authorities realized who the dead man was, the corpse was dis interred, embalmed, and sent to Santiago de Cuba for proper entombment. Almost four months earlier, on January 28, Martí had turned forty-two.

Martí’s death sealed his fate as a political and literary figure in Cuba and Latin America. His was the martyrdom of which religious creeds are made and the culminating event of a life that was Marti’s greatest poetic creation. Marti’s life and death are so intertwined with his literary pursuits that it is impossible to separate the political man from the poet—one does not make sense without the other. In the poetic realm, this radical symbiosis of life and work is his greatest claim to originality. Other nineteenth-century poets had found in early death an often desired and meaningful end to their lives. John Keats died of tuberculosis at twenty-six; Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in an apparent accident at thirty; Gérard de Nerval hanged himself at forty-seven; Aleksandr Pushkin died in a duel at thirty-eight; Mariano José de Larra shot himself at twenty-eight; and Martí’s fellow Cuban poets José Maria de Heredia and Julián del Casal died at thirty-six and thirty respectively. Some poets had even met their demise while engaged in political struggles. Lord Byron died of a fever at thirty-six, shortly after joining Greek insurgents. Yet Martí’s immolation was in the name not just of freedom but of his country’s independence and birth as a nation in a war that he had himself feverishly planned. He set an unsurpassable standard for future poets, who would work rebelliousness into their verse but were not quite ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. In Latin America, Marti represents an idealized fusion of politics and poetry.

Because of this, and because Marti’s premature death did not allow him to test his political programs in practice, he became the object of a cult, and his writings a gospel with multiple interpreters claiming to know what he would have wanted Cuba and Latin America to become. Martí’s martyrdom also put him beyond the reach of rigorous literary criticism; work on him by Cubans and Latin Americans verges on hagiography. The task seems to be not who can best interpret and evaluate Martí’s work, but who is capable of praising him most extravagantly. Scholars and other writers, ashamed by their sedentary militancy, find comfort in exalting Marti, while those working under the aegis or sway of the current Cuban regime distort facts and texts to turn him into the unlikely herald of their doctrines. In Cuba, Havana’s airport is named after Marti, as are the national library and countless other buildings and institutions, and his face appears on bills and on coins. Some of this is slowly beginning to give way, and a more sober reappraisal of Martí as poet and thinker has started in some quarters, particularly among young Cuban intellectuals and writers.

Simon Bolívar, José de San Martin, Miguel Hidalgo, and more-recent Latin American revolutionaries have all been writers of one sort or another, but Marti is the only bona fide poet among them. He figures securely in the canon of Latin American literature on his own merits as poet, orator, essayist, and chronicler. Martí was one of the greatest journalists ever, and he had no peer as an orator in an age when oratory was a highly respected literary genre. As a political organizer, Marti had no equal, either. His political and philosophic thought, though responding to the specific needs of his revolutionary plans, was charged with idealism, sympathy for the downtrodden, and a pan-Americanism that has found many followers. Martí’s thought was not systematic enough to be a philosophy, and his political program was more hortative than practical—fit to encourage Cubans to battle yet not detailed enough to run a country in peacetime. Still, one must remember Martí’s interest in education and his production of children’s literature with a view to the development of better citizens for his imagined Cuban republic. A heady mixture of spiritualism, mystical nationalism, and compassion for the poor and abused, Martí’s credo envisioned a free Cuba ruled by love and justice, free of prejudice and oppression, exempt from arbitrary rule by military leaders, in harmonious commerce with the rest of the world, and enjoying absolute self-determination. It is a poetic ideal whose reality he struggled to bring about through selfless work. But Martí was a man of the nineteenth century; he did not live to see the twentieth, which did not really “begin” until the First World War. A projection of his social and political programs beyond his time can be based only on the blind faith in his qualities as a seer, which he may have been, but only as a poet.

Martí’s death brought unity and closure to all of his endeavors by eliminating the frail physical vessel that contained them and by giving them transcendental meaning on an ideal literary plane. In one of his more memorable poems, he says that he has two motherlands—Cuba and the night—and he wonders if they are not really the same. When he fell at Dos Ríos he did make them one. Love of country and love of death drove him inexorably to that place and moment where all would acquire a meaning too transcendental to express with mere words. Death sealed life and poetry as a unit. Martí’s moving War Diaries (Diarios de campaña) is, of course, unfinished, as if to dramatize this point. Its end is death itself.

Cuba is a very large island. At the latitude of New York, if its eastern tip were placed on Sandy Hook, its western end would reach the environs of Chicago. It is half the size of the British Isles and larger than Ireland. Cuba’s advantageous geographical location has given it a political and cultural relevance that larger Latin American countries have not had. From the beginning of Spanish settlement in the sixteenth century, the island played a critical role in the organization of the Spanish Empire in America. Havana was the port where the two annual fleets connecting the metropolis to its overseas possessions met. Products, peoples, and ideas from the Philippines, Mexico, and Peru reached Havana, as did Spanish immigrants, government officials, troops, officers, and priests. This gave Cubans a sense of centeredness and worldwide significance that they have not lost. Cuba’s wars of independence and Martí’s role in them reflect this feature of early Cuban life. The Spanish-American War, with which these processes culminated, was a war of world historical importance in a way that the more massive and protracted wars of Latin American independence fought in the first half of the nineteenth century were not.

But it is the modern Cuba that is relevant to Martí. Its history begins in the early nineteenth century and is closely related to the development of the United States as a world power. The transformation of Cuba into a modern country resulted from an event beyond its shores: the Haitian Revolution in the waning years of the eighteenth century. Haiti had been the principal provider of sugar in the world, but this ended with the revolution. Cuba, led by native intellectuals like Francisco de Arango y Parreño, entered the “sugar race” to fill the void. The cultivation of sugar brought about drastic and lasting changes in the island’s ecology, demography, and politics. The sugar barons began to import modern machinery from England and the United States, and thousands of slaves from Africa. By the 1830s, there were more blacks than whites in Cuba, and a class of powerful, forward-looking sugar barons was doing business principally with the United States and Europe instead of with Spain. Explosive ethical, social, and political contradictions were contained in this situation. The broadest had to do with the clash between modern industrial practices—represented by the machines and ideas imported from the United States and England—and the most archaic form of exploitation, slavery. Moreover, the new class of “sacharocrats,” as Manuel Moreno Fraginals called them in his classic work The Sugarmill, had little access to political power. Spain still clung to its policy of forbidding Cubans to hold high political office—only the Spanish-born had access to government positions. The rich were disenfranchised, a situation that sooner or later leads to strife.

On October 10, 1868, after careful preparations, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the owner of a sugar plantation and mill at La Demajagua, in the easternmost province of Oriente, proclaimed Cuba’s indepen dence, freed his slaves, and took to arms. He was followed by other leaders of his class, like Ignacio Agramonte, from the neighboring province of Camagüey, and by many who would rise through the ranks, like Calixto García, the mulatto Antonio Maceo, and the Dominican-born Máximo Gómez. The war was fought mainly on the eastern part of the island, far from Havana, the seat of political and military power (this trend would continue through Cuban history). It was a bitter struggle, to which Spain committed thousands of troops, added to the many it had already deployed before the outbreak of war to suppress the ominous unrest. One of the men sent to Cuba, a first sergeant in the Royal Artillery Corps from Valencia, was Mariano Martí y Navarro, who would become Martí’s father in 1853. In October 1869, a year after Cespedes’s proclamation, the sixteen-year-old Martí was arrested and accused of activities disloyal to Spain. The war lasted a full ten years and in fact came to be known as the Ten Years War (also la Guerra Grande, or “the Big War”). It brought great devastation to Cuba, for the revolutionaries tried to inflict economic damage on Spain by destroying the sugar industry, whose revenues were crucial to the metropolis. Persecution, imprisonment, and deportation of those suspected of collaborating with the rebels increased as the movement gained momentum in the cities. Martí was sentenced to forced labor in 1870 and, granted clemency, deported to Spain the next year. He was lucky. On November 27, 1871, after a hasty trial, the Spanish sent eight medical students to the firing squad in Havana. They were accused of desecrating the tomb of a loyal Spanish journalist. Many Cubans left for the United States, where they settled in Key West, Tampa, Jacksonville, and New York; others sent their children to American academies and universities to protect them from the fate suffered by the medical students. From the United States, those Cubans contributed money, supplies, and men to the war.

But the Ten Years War ended in 1878 with the Cubans’ capitulation at El Zanjón. To lay down arms was a painful decision on the part of the Cuban leaders. It exacerbated dissensions among them that had contributed in no small measure to their defeat in the first place. Antonio Maceo, for instance, refused to surrender and left Cuba only when there was no other recourse. The divisions in the Cuban camp were deep and older than the war itself. In a broad sense, there were three groups among those dissatisfied with Spanish rule: The autonomistas favored making Cuba an autonomous region of Spain. This movement echoed the yearnings and struggles of various regions in the Iberian Peninsula that have often wanted to be freed from the central government (some still do). The anexionistas wished to have Cuba annexed to the United States in some way, seeing that the country already had significant commercial and cultural ties with the Union. One could argue that by the second half of the nineteenth century, Cuba was an economic colony of the United States while still a political one of Spain, an issue that was settled with the Spanish-American War. The third group, the independentistas, wanted Cuba to become a sovereign nation. The arguments of the first two groups were persuasive on pragmatic grounds, and the anexionistas had found attentive listeners among American politicians, in an age when the United States was flexing its muscles and in the process grabbed a large chunk of Mexico’s territory.

But those favoring independence, whose undisputed leader Marti would become after 1878, wielded the force of nationalist emotion, long-term resentment, and ideals of freedom to which they clung with religious fervor. Founding a nation was the romantic ideal of nineteenth-century intellectuals, poets, and politicians, and many territories struggled to nationhood both in Europe and in the Americas. Germany, Italy, and even the United States in the wake of the Civil War were new nations, as were the Latin American republics that emerged after the Spanish Empire was dismantled in the first half of the nineteenth century. White Cubans felt alienated from Spain, which they saw as backward and crassly exploitative. For Cuba’s black population, who had no mother country in which to find refuge (or be deported to), and many of whom knew of the dismal conditions under which their brethren lived in the United States, there was no option but total independence. Poor whites faced a similar predicament, and whether peasants in the countryside or workers in the tobacco industry in Cuba, Key West, or Tampa, they actively supported the war against Spain. But the Big War had been lost, some leaders like Céspedes and Agramonte were dead, and others, like Maceo and Gómez, were in exile and unhappy with one another. This is where Marti came in.

Martí’s greatest political achievement was to bring together the disillusioned and fractious veterans of the Ten Years War by convincing them of his own and the new revolutionaries’ commitment. The men who had fought the Big War were battle-hardened and suspicious of upstarts like Marti, who lacked combat experience. (Many suspect that it was to prove himself to them that he rode rashly into the skirmish at Dos Ríos.) But Marti had managed to persuade the veterans to join in a new venture and launch another war. In his fifteen years in New York, during which he traveled tirelessly up and down the east coast of the United States all the way to Key West, Marti accomplished this goal by the sheer force of his charisma, clarity of purpose, mesmerizing oratory, and unflagging spirit of sacrifice. He wrote voluminously for Latin American newspapers, such as La Nación in faraway Buenos Aires, for Spanish-language publications in the United States, and even in English for the New York Sun and others. He was founder, editor, and chief contributor of Patria, his main organ of propaganda among Cubans in the United States. Martí’s crowning effort was the foundation in 1892 of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Cuban Revolutionary Party), the civil organization that would lead the revolutionaries to war.

Martí spoke to all sorts of groups but most memorably to Cuban cigar workers in Tampa and Key West, cities where he was idolized. In these speeches, Marti outlined his vision of a free Cuba, “with all and for the good of all,” democratic, pluralistic, and capable of learning from the mistakes made by the recently established Latin American nations. The worst of these errors was militarism, or caudillismo, which had already created rifts among the Cuban leaders of the Ten Years War like Céspedes and Agramonte and would continue to haunt the Cuban independence movement. Martí had to rein in military-minded leaders like Gómez and Maceo, potential caudillos, and insist, without alienating them, on the civilian cast of the movement. It was not easy to hail civilian virtues during all-out war. Of Martí’s fears about the future of Cuba, militarism was the most justified and the one that unfortunately became a nightmarish reality in postindependence Cuba. There was no place in the Cuba Marti envisioned for arbitrary rule in the hands of soldiers. His disagreement with the military leaders Maceo and Gómez continued until the very last days before that fateful May 19 at Dos Rios. A page torn from Martí’s Diaries by an unknown hand is purported to have contained the record of a violent confrontation with Gómez and Maceo.

After Martí’s fall, the rest of the war was fought ferociously, with Maceo achieving the difficult task of spreading the fighting west to Havana’s environs and beyond to Pinar del Rio. He and other leaders followed a scorched-earth policy, leaving behind a trail of devastation. This time the Spanish seemed on the verge of losing and sent to the island thousands of ill-prepared soldiers, many mere boys in their teens, and engaged in brutal policies like relocating all the peasants to cities to keep them from aiding the rebels. This reconcentración, ordered by cruel Spanish governor Valeriano Weyler, caused widespread famine and disease, and people died by the thousands. Spanish atrocities were lavishly depicted in the American press, which urged the government to intervene on the side of the rebels. Eventually, another of Martí’s fears was realized when the Americans intervened in the war after the battleship Maine was blown up in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898. Spain’s defeat by the United States in 1898 deprived the Cuban insurgents of a hard-fought victory that was within their grasp, and installed yet a new colonial power in Havana. The condescending way that the American authorities dealt with the Cuban troops, and the Platt Amendment, which was attached to the Cuban constitution when the country was declared free in 1902, fueled anti-American feelings in Cuba. The amendment gave the United States the “right” to intervene in case of political unrest. These developments left open the question of how Marti would have conducted the war had he lived and, more urgently, how he would have led the new nation that emerged from it. We will never know, but there is no shortage of opinions and politically inspired would-be programs presumably derived from Martí’s ideas.

In organizing the war and as a result of his numerous writings for Latin American newspapers and literary magazines, Martí became one of the leading prose writers of the Spanish language and a recognized poet in a new literary movement called Modernismo. The first literary trend to originate in Latin America, Modernismo was led by the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, who in 1888 published Azul, a slim volume of poetic prose and poems that revolutionized literature written in Spanish. In 1896 his Prosas profanas, a book of poems, set the standard for the new poetry. Darío was a poet with continent-wide fame whose influence on Latin American and Spanish literatures can hardly be exaggerated. (Other important poets of the movement were the Colombian José Asunción Silva and the Cuban Julián del Casal.) Modernismo was a break from the Spanish tradition, seen as too local and wallowing in maudlin local color, and a reaction to Latin America’s entrance into the world economy. As Cathy L. Jrade has proposed, Modernismo was made up of contradictory impulses. Modernity was the product of the rationalist forces that, through their effect in science and industry, made social life materialistic and crass, particularly in the growing cities of Europe, the United States, and increasingly Latin America. Modernismo countered these trends with refinement, spiritual and artistic elitism, and a rejection of the bourgeois life that the world economy engendered. Jrade writes in her authoritative Modernism, Modernity, and the Development of Spanish American Literature: “The modernistas, like the romantics before them, favored an alternative that was primarily ‘spiritualist,’ predicated on changes in consciousness and values. They proposed a worldview that imagined the universe as a system of correspondences, in which language is the universe’s double capable of revealing profound truths regarding the order of the cosmos.” Their critique of bourgeois values was grounded, she says, in the modernistas’ belief “in the transformative capacity of art” (p. 4). This gave Modernismo a political edge, particularly in Martí’s works.

Martí’s verse and prose, particularly the prose, matched Darío’s and the others’ in their cosmopolitanism, decadent spirit, and uncompromising cultivation of beauty for its own sake. Beauty, the result of highly formal techniques, was contemplated in a slightly detached, un-sentimental way, which is what separated modernista poets from their romantic predecessors. No gushing of emotions in modernista writing : the principal emotion sought was the sublime contemplation of the beautiful, of the “shape” that Darío famously stated he pursued. Not since the Baroque had Spanish been subjected to such craft, to such unnatural, untraditional artifice. Literary discourse had no pretense of reflecting common speech; it reveled in its literariness. The new models were French and American poets like Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, all of whom, particularly the Americans, Marti read and admired in the original. Conservative Spanish writer and critic Juan Valera complained of Darío’s “mental Gallicism.” To the modernistas this was praise. They did not want Spanish works to be limited by regionalism but to enter the world literary economy as well and to reflect the Spanish-speaking world, not just Spain or any one Latin American country. Like Darío, Marti was a traveler, whose continent-wide conception of Latin American literature he expressed in his publications throughout the New World, from the United States and Mexico to Argentina. In one of his essays he referred memorably to Latin America as “Our America.” Unlike Darío and the other modernistas, Marti imbued his poetry with an assertive ethical, sometimes (but not often) overtly political message and occasionally with a sentimental charge that still hearkened back to romanticism.

Martí did not have the time, because of his early death and his frenzied political activities, to publish a vast and influential corpus of poetry. Only two slim volumes of poems were printed in his life—Ismaelillo (1882) and Versos sencillos (1891)—but he did attain renown as a poet because his works appeared in periodicals in New York and throughout Latin America and were read and admired by the likes of Darió. Ismaelillo, a tender book about the son Martí’s estranged wife had taken with her to Cuba, contains some striking poems revealing the poet’s turbulent feelings and longings. Versos sencillos, made up of quatrains of deceptive simplicity and sounding very much like popular poetry, became Maní’s most acclaimed book. Martí was known to all as a poet, in the broadest sense of the term. Not only Darío but other modernista poets recognized him as one of their own, and older writers like the Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento admired him, though sometimes grudgingly because of his threatening originality. Martí’s posthumous Versos libres is the most daring of his collections and the one that contains his best mature poetry. Some poems in this book, like “Amor de ciudad grande” (“Love in the City”), uncannily announce the work of avant-garde poets like Pablo Neruda. Martí was exposed in New York to a modern metropolis, hence to the atmosphere to which the poets of the 1920s were going to react. Versos libres, however, was not published until 1913, in a Cuban edition that included Ismaelillo and Versos sencillos, which probably had a limited circulation.

Martí’s chronicles were his greatest literary success. These texts, as Susana Rotker has carefully shown, are a combination of the French sketches of life and manners and the Spanish and Latin American costumbrista tradition. They are a blend of reportage, tableau, and essay that Marti took to its highest form through his powerful imagination. He often wrote them not as an eye-witness report, but from a collection of press releases that he took from the wire or from American newspapers. The chronicles found an eager audience because they dealt with—indeed were written from within—the United States, a country whose rapid transformation into a major power inspired awe, admiration, fear, and in some cases resentment among many Latin Americans. The United States was becoming more powerful and important than the European nations from which the American republics had devolved and on which they had been modeled. The Venezuelan Andrés Bello had been to England in the late eighteenth century, and Simon Bolivar had been an officer in the Spanish army. France and Germany, like Great Britain, had far-flung, modern empires, and Paris was deemed the intellectual capital of the nineteenth century. Latin American poets, politicians, and intellectuals had been meeting in the French capital since the 1830s and forging a continental solidarity; indeed, they were founding Latin American literature. But Marti was now writing from a country that dwarfed Europe in everything, particularly material progress and sheer physical size. It was the quintessentially modern nation, in which the gadgets and advances of industry were being produced in great volume, something that captivated not just Latin America but the rest of the world. The United States also possessed a compelling culture, with writers as original as Whitman, Poe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Marti introduced to Latin American audiences. It was a country that had just emerged from a bloody civil war and in which the Enlightenment ideas of democracy were being dramatically tested. Moreover, it was a country where thousands of immigrants from Europe struggled to adapt themselves and to become part of a nation in which the old class divisions of their mother countries could be abolished. Everyone could begin anew in America, a yearning Latin Americans also felt. All of this social, industrial, and political effervescence Marti was able to capture in his chronicles from the perspective of a Latin American that was both admiring and critical—detached from the events themselves, but not totally, for Marti was living in the United States and profiting from the opportunities and freedoms that the country offered to launch the liberation of his own. The mix, together with Martí’s captivating style, was irresistible to his public, and the volume of Martí’s publication attests to the recognition he enjoyed among newspaper editors in Latin America.

The literary value of those chronicles lies not just in Martí’s journalistic eye for the unusual and for significant details, but in his uncanny ability to seize the collective dynamics of a situation and the drama of the individuals caught in it. Scenes of this kind evoke the likes of Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo. For instance, here is his description of the tumult surrounding the execution of four anarchists in Chicago and the scene of their death:

Spies’s face is a prayer; Fischer’s is steadfastness itself; Parsons’s radiant pride; Engel ducks his head and makes his deputy laugh with a joke. Each one in turn has his legs bound with a strap. Then hoods are flung over the four heads like candlesnuffers putting out four flames: first Spies, then Fischer, then Engel, then Parsons. And while his companions’ heads are being covered, Spies’s voice rings out in a tone that strikes deep into the flesh of all who hear it: “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.” “This is the happiest moment of my life,” Fischer says, while the deputy is attending to Engel. “Hurray for anarchy!” says Engel, who, beneath the grave-clothes, was moving his bound hands toward the sheriff. “Will I be allowed to speak, O men of America ...” Parsons begins. A signal, a sound, the trapdoor gives way, the four bodies drop simultaneously, circling and knocking against each other. Parsons has died in the fall; one quick turn, and he stops. Fischer swings, shuddering, tries to work his neck free of the knot, extends his legs, draws them in, and dies. Engel rocks in his floating hangman’s robes, his chest rising and falling like the swell of the sea, and strangles. Spies dangles, twisting in a horrible dance like a sackful of grimaces, doubles up and heaves himself to one side, banging his knees against his forehead, lifts one leg, kicks out with both, shakes his arms, beating against the air, and finally expires, his broken neck bent forward, his head saluting the spectators.

As Aníbal González has demonstrated, Martí’s prose also gained by contamination with his oratory, a mixture that one would expect to lead to bombast and excessive rhetoric. But in his prose the oratorical creates a sense of immediacy and urgency, and the customary repetitions of speeches gives his prose a very compelling cadence and rhythm. González writes:

It is important to remember that Marti was one of the most charismatic and powerful orators of his time and that part of the effectiveness of his chronicles resides in their evocation of the spoken word. The rhetorical tricks of oratory gave Martí’s chronicles an air of immediacy and coherence, with the disparate events narrated being “centered” and organized by the author’s disembodied voice. As the title “Escenas norteamericanas” suggests, events in Martí’s chronicles are usually described as a sequence of tableaux or scenes, not unlike the dioramas that were so popular in the Parisian arcades of the mid-nineteenth century—in which each immobile scene was brought to life by the voice and presence of an orator—or like a museum, in which disparate exhibits are linked together by the organizing discourse of the guide. [p. 92]

But above all, oratory gives Martí’s prose, as González also points out, its aphoristic quality. Aphorisms, like maxims, are statements that express an idea concisely and with a rhetorical and even poetic flair that lifts them from ordinary prose to become independent of the texts in which they appear. They are like maxims and proverbs. Aphorisms are used in speeches to wind up a thought in a way that makes the idea memorable—that is to say, literally easy to remember. They are like slogans. For instance, “La patria es ara, no pedestal” (“The motherland is an altar, not a platform”) means, of course, that one should sacrifice for one’s country, not use it to elevate oneself. Such was Martí’s aphoristic proficiency that volumes of his pensamientos, his thoughts, have been collected and made standard fare in schools, particularly in Cuba, where they are memorized by children. The relative independence of these utterances exempts them from having to cohere as a philosophical system, which is why a philosopher like Friedrich Nietzsche, wary of systems and a contemporary of Marti, also cultivated this subgenre. These aphorisms are the bridge between Martí’s prose and his poetry.

The most compelling Marti as poet emerges sporadically in images of astounding freshness and daring, generally overlooked by readers and admirers distracted by the ethical imperatives of his verse. For instance, there is the arresting quatrain in Versos sencillos that begins “Si ves un monte de espumas” (“If you see a mountain of foam”) and winds up with an agile enjambement punctuated by two lines stressed in the last syllable, unusual in Spanish:

Si ves un monte de espumas,
es mi verso lo que ves,
mi verso es un monte, y es
un abanico de plumas.

If you see a mountain of foam,
it is my verse you see,
my verse is a mountain, and
is a fan of feathers.

“Ves,” “ves,” and “es,” plus the reiteration of “verso,” make up a staccato rhythm softened by the last sentence, wrapped around the end of the third line to wind up in the last. This final line is accentuated in the next to the last syllable, the most common pattern in Spanish, and hence sounds normal—a downbeat that inspires reflection. The suppleness of the line reflects its meaning, “un abanico de plumas. ” To call one’s poetry a feather fan is a beautiful metaphor to evoke lightness, luxuriance, color, and an explosion of meanings emerging from a center and spreading in various directions. But what is a “mountain of foam,” and who has ever seen one? “Mountain of foam” also conjures feelings of lightness, a lightness that contrasts with the volume of the mountain, a lurking oxymoron linking the opposing bulk and levity of the mountain. There is also a feeling of fleetingness; foam does not last, it melts, again in opposition to the mountain’s solidity. “Monte de espumas,” “mountain of foam,” is a nearly surreal image that one is at a loss to equate to any reality.

Did Marti ever see a mountain of foam, or is it a figment of his imagination? Such images are among the most modern, forward-looking elements of his verse and show his kinship with contemporary decadent poets like Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud who, as did Martí on occasion, indulged in mild hallucinogenic substances. It was a practice that he shared with modernista poets in Spain and Latin America, such as Rubén Darío, his compatriot Julián del Casal, and Ramón del Valle Inclán. Martí’s dreams were not only those of living in a just and greatly run community of humans, joined by spiritual values. He shared with other late-nineteenth-century poets a more daring and dark visionary quality. To wit, his “Copa con alas” (“Winged Cup”) in Versos libres, another image that seems to emerge from a nightmare and brings to mind Salvador Dalí.

The foregoing about the quatrain in Versos sencillos is striking without noting the elegant self-deprecation implicit in Martí describing his poetry as “foam” or “feathers,” both of which usually signify something trifling. In other quatrains in Versos sencillos, Marti’s characterization of his poetry is more dramatic, as in the color coding (reminiscent of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles”) of “Mi verso es de un verde claro / y de un carmín encendido” (“My verse is light green / and burning crimson”) another contrasting pair, which leads to the biblical-sounding “Mi verso es un ciervo herido / que busca en el monte amparo” (“My verse is a wounded fawn / seeking shelter in the mountain”). The mountain, the “monte, ” is now the refuge for the wounded fawn. Why is Martí’s poetry “hurt”? The fawn evokes innocence, guiltlessness, purity, and being wounded suggests that the animal has been shot by a hunter or attacked by a predator. There is a prophetic quality to these simple lines if one recalls Martí’s death, of course. His verse is wounded, one assumes, by the violence and corruption of the world outside the poetic realm, which is why the fawn seeks shelter in a mountain that now stands for Martí’s poetry. Wounded by the world, the poem seeks protection by running back into poetry itself. “Monte,” in fact, can also be Martí’s own self, as he proclaims in another quatrain with pantheistic as well as, again, biblical resonances:

Yo vengo de todas partes,
y hacia todas partes voy,
arte soy entre las artes,
y en los montes, monte soy.

I come from all places,
and to all places go,
I am art among the arts,
and mountain among mountains.

“Monte” has a more solid connotation here than “mountain of foam,” but the remarkable thing is Martí’s conception of the poetic self as a spirit with no place or time, yet of all places and times. He is part of the real, not about it, but is free from the normal constraints of the material. This penchant for the mysterious is very much a part of Versos sencillos, the best part, not present consistently throughout the book. Some of the better-known verses, like the one popularized by the awfully monotonous song “Guántanamera,” which begins “Yo soy un hombre sincero” (“I am an honest man”), lack originality, and the rhythm is dull. The only good line is the circumlocution that refers to Cuba as “de donde crece la palma,” flattened in the common English translation “from the land of the palm tree” (improved here by Esther Allen as “from where the palm tree grows”). In the better verses, the mysterious quality gives the quatrain a haiku-like conciseness and a compelling vagueness:

Yo pienso, cuando me alegro,
como un escolar sencillo,
en el canario amarillo,
que tiene el ojo tan negro.

When I am happy, I wonder,
like a simple schoolboy,
about the yellow canary
whose eye is so black.

Here the contrast between the presumably studious “schoolboy” and his mirthful musing on the canary’s black eye in the midst of all that yellow lends the poem a delicious yet profound irony that is missing in the more declarative quatrains. There is more pleasure in the detached meditation on the unfathomable than in the contemplation of the obvious.

An often overlooked feature of Martí’s poetry is the near absence of two of the most powerful drives in his life: politics and love. He wrote little openly political poetry. Even a poem about a Spanish dancer in New York, in which he refuses to enter the theater because the Spanish flag hangs there, is measured and even reticent in its critique of his father’s motherland, the one whose citizenship he carried. There is nothing like Darío’s “Oda a Roosevelt, ” which pits Latin America, Catholic and Spanish-speaking, against the impetuous Protestant nation led by an impudent leader. Martí saved his political writing for his prose and his oratory. Nor is there any significant love poetry in his corpus, though Marti was a notorious lover, apparently irresistible to women and equally unable to resist them. The smallest evidence of this was his illegitimate daughter, Maria, with Carmen Miyares de Mantilla, his New York landlady, who had a crippled husband. (That daughter went on to become the mother of American actor César Romero.) Testimony from not an insignificant number of women attests to Martí’s powers of seduction and to the ease with which he fell in love. There are few traces of this in his poetry. The exception is the well-known “La niña de Guatemala,” a tender yet boastful poem about a young woman who dies of lovesickness when Marti returns married to another woman. But there is no memorable love poem to a specific or idealized woman—a curious absence.

Much of Martí’s poetry is elevated by his death, which gives a prophetic quality even to lines that are not, in themselves, great poetry, like the quatrain that winds up with “moriré de cara al sol” (“I will die with my face to the sun”). But he earned that at Dos Ríos by fulfilling poetic and political prophecies. Martí must have sensed that he had a historic date with death. Self-immolation for the cause of freedom was in the air in the Cuban camp. A minor exiled poet, Miguel Teurbe Tolón, had written a sonnet, popular among revolutionaries, that finishes: “primero mi verdugo sea mi mano /—que merecer de un déspota insolente-—/ el perdón de ser libre y ser cubano” (“I would rather die by my own hand / than to be granted by an insolent tyrant / the reprieve of being free and a Cuban). Earlier in the century, the major Cuban poet José María Heredia, a rebel and an exile himself, had written:

Al poder el aliento se oponga,
y la muerte contraste la muerte:
la constancia encadena la suerte;
siempre vence el que sabe morir.

Fervor should oppose dominance,
and death countered with death:
perseverance heralds good fortune;
he who triumphs is prepared to die.

These feelings were encapsulated in a line of Perucho Figueredo’s “Himno de Bayamo,” which became Cuba’s national anthem, in the line: “Que morir por la patria es vivir” (“To die for the motherland is to live”). The heroes of the Ten Years War took this feeling to heart and lived up to it by dying or attempting to. On March 11, 1873, as Agramonte was inspecting battle lines in the Jimaguayú prairie, he was felled by an enemy bullet. And on February 27, 1874, Céspedes, who had already been deposed, was discovered by Spanish troops on a farm. They killed him as he bravely fought back with a mere revolver. In that same year, Calixto Garcia miraculously survived his attempt at suicide when surrounded by the enemy. The bullet he shot into his mouth perforated the palate and came out through the middle of his forehead, where it left a starlike scar for the rest of his life. It was that star, perhaps, that Marti followed to Dos Ríos.