Speech delivered by Martí on the evening of November 26, 1891, at the Cuban Lyceum in Tampa, Florida, during the gathering organized by Cuban émigrés in that city. By that time, Martí had abandoned all his journalistic, diplomatic and literary activities to devote himself entirely to revolutionary tasks. This speech provoked a famous controversy that fortunately ended with the rapprochement of former combatants of the so-called Ten Years War (1868–78) and the new generation (the so-called New Pines) represented by Martí.
Cubans:
For suffering Cuba, the first word. Cuba must be considered an altar for the offering of our lives, not a pedestal for lifting us above it. And now, after calling forth its most cherished name, I shall lavish the tenderness of my soul upon these generous hands that come to give me strength — surely not inopportunely — for the agonizing task of building. Now, with our eyes placed higher than our heads, and my own heart torn out of my body, I shall not egoistically thank those who think they see in me the virtues they desire both from me and from every Cuban. Nor will I merely thank the genial Carbonell or the fearless Rivero for the magnificent hospitality of their words and the fervor of their generous affections. But I shall give all the gratitude in my soul to them, and through them to all those loving people who have stood up in the face of the ambitious landowner who spies upon us and divides us; to these virtuous people in whom the free strength of our industrious country is being tried; to these cultured people whose writing desks stand beside their work benches, and for whom the thunderings of Mirabeau stand beside the arts of Roland — answer enough for the contemptuous of this world; to this temple bedecked with heroes and built upon men’s hearts. I embrace all those who know how to love. And I have within my heart the star and the dove.
Periodic respect for an idea that one cannot abjure without disgrace is not bringing us together here, reluctantly and through sheer effort. Nor is it the ever ready and at times too ready response of patriotic hearts to fame or a position of power, or to some hero who fails to crown his untimely longing for death with the higher heroism of repressing that longing, or to a beggar who under the cloak of the mother country goes about with his hand held out. The one who comes here will never be disfigured by flattery, nor is this noble people receiving him a servile and easily led people. My breast swells with pride, and at this moment I love my country even more than before, and I now have an even greater faith in its serene and well-ordered future — a future rescued from the serious danger of following blindly, in the name of freedom, those who make use of their yearning for it to bend it to their own purposes. Still more firmly do I believe in a Republic of open eyes, neither foolish nor timid, neither haughty nor professorial, neither over-cultured nor uncultured, for I can see — by the sacred affirmations of the heart when we are together on this night of brain and brawn, together for now and for later, together for as long as patriotism prevails — I can see those Cubans who put their free and frank opinions above all things, and one Cuban who respects them.
For if in my country’s affairs I were permitted to offer one benefit to everyone — one fundamental benefit to be a basic principle of all my country men, and without which the other benefits would be faulty and insecure — this is the one I would choose: I want the first law of our Republic to be the Cuban cult of full dignity for man. Every true man must feel upon his own cheek the slap upon any other man’s cheek. Nations are vilified from the cradle by the habit of resorting to personal cliques, fomented by notorious or fraudulent interests, in defense of freedoms. Set your souls afire and let them shine and crackle like lightning for the sake of truth, and follow it in freedom, you honest men. Put this tender consideration above all things, this manly tribute of each Cuban to the other. Neither mysteries, nor calumnies, nor willful injuring of reputations, nor long and crafty preparations for the baneful day of ambitions. Either the Republic is founded upon the integral character of every one of its sons — the habit of working with his hands and thinking for himself, the putting of his whole self into what he does, and respect, like family honor, for everyone’s whole hearted effort; enthusiasm, in short, for a man’s honor — or the Republic is not worth one of our mothers’ tears or a single drop of our heroes’ blood. We are striving for truth and not for dreams. We are striving to liberate Cubans and not to intimidate them. We are striving to peacefully and equitably adjust the rights and interests of Cuba’s loyal inhabitants and not to establish, at the gateway of the continent, of the Republic, the frightful administration of Veintimilla, or the bloody possessions of Rosas, or the lamentable Paraguay of France! Better to fall under the excesses of our fellow countrymen’s imperfect characters than to profit from the credit acquired with the guns of war or the words that defame character! This is my sole claim to these affections that have come in time to strengthen these hands of mine that never tire in the service of true freedom. Cut them off, those of you whom I passionately desired to lift higher, and — I do not lie! — I will cherish that violence because it comes to me out of the fury of my own land, and because for its sake I will see a Cuban heart show courage and rebellion! Above all, let us band together in this faith. Let us join hands, in avowal of this decision, where all may see them, and where there is no forgetting without punishment. Let us bar the way to a republic which fails to come through methods worthy of a man’s integrity, for the benefit and prosperity of all Cubans!
Of all Cubans! I wonder what tender mystery there is in this sweetest of words, or what purest of pleasures in this very word of man. It is so beautiful already that if pronounced as it should be, the air would seem to be a golden halo and Nature a throne or a mountaintop! One says “Cuban” and a sweetness like a gentle brotherhood suffuses the heart, and the strongbox of our savings opens by itself, and we hasten to set another place at the table, and the enamored heart stretches its wings to give shelter to anyone born in the same land as ourselves, even if misdeeds confuse him, or ignorance misleads him, or anger infuriates him, or he is bloodied by crime! It is as if some divine arms we cannot see were gathering all of us onto a breast in which the blood still flows and the heart still sobs! You must create, there in our country, in order to give us dedicated work later on. You must create, there where the corrupt proprietor rots whatever he looks upon, a new Cuban soul, hostile and bristling — a proud soul, different from that magnanimous and home-loving soul of our ancestors and illegitimate daughter of the misery that sees vice go unpunished, and of the useless culture that finds employment only in the dull contemplation of itself! Here where we keep watch for the absent ones, where we rebuild the house that topples upon our heads down there, where we create what must replace the things destroyed for us there — here, no word so closely resembles the light of dawn, no consolation enters our hearts with greater joy, than this ardent and ineffable word: Cuban!
For that is what this city is; it is the entire Cuban emigration; that is what we are accomplishing in these years of work without savings, families without pleasure, life without zest and a furtive death! To our fatherland crumbling to pieces down there, and blinded by corruption, we must take the devout and farseeing country being built here! To what is left of the country down there — everywhere being eaten away by gangrene beginning to gnaw at the heart — we must unite the friendly country to which we have come, here in our loneliness, accommodating our souls to all the realities with the firm hand that affection demands from within and without — realities so well concealed down there (in some because of despair and in others because of Babylonian pleasure) that although there are great certainties and great hopes and great risks, they are little less than unknown, even by experts! So what do they know down there about this glorious night of resurrection, about the methodical and resolute faith of our spirits? What do they know down there about the continuous and growing rapport of us Cubans away from the island whom the 10 years of mistakes and Cuba’s natural fickleness and other malevolent causes have not succeeded in at last dividing? Indeed they have succeeded in becoming so intimate and affectionate a unifying force that all one can see is an eagle taking flight, a sun rising and an army advancing. What do they know down there about these subtle treaties, that nobody draws up or can terminate, between the despairing country and the waiting émigrés? What do they know about this character of ours, strengthened cautiously and by daily effort and cruel testing? What do they know about the brave and industrious and free people we are going to take to them? What does the man dying in the night know about the one awaiting him at dawn? Any stevedore can load a ship, and any artillery man can light a cannon fuse; but it has not been that lesser task, of mere opportunity and result, which is our duty; it has been the task of avoiding the harmful consequences, and hastening the happy ones, of the next and inevitable war, and of cleansing it of the naturally human neglect and indifference and envy that might needlessly and inexcusably put this war where they put the last one. It has been a task of disciplining our free souls in the knowledge and order of our country’s genuine elements, and in this work which is the sun and air of freedom, so that, with the creative forces of a new situation, they may comprise without danger those inevitable remains of the difficult crises needed to produce those forces. And in this sublime task our hands will ache more than once. But the dead are commanding and counseling and keeping watch, and the living are listening to them and obeying; and in the wind there are sounds of adjutants passing by carrying orders, and the sound of flags unfurling! Let us band together, Cubans, in this other faith: with all, and for all: the inevitable war, so our country may respect and desire and support it, and the enemy not kill it for us at its height, because of location or staff or lack of men: the revolution of justice and reality for the recognition and unrestricted practice of the true freedoms.
Not even the brave men of war who are listening to me now agree with these scrupulous analyses of public affairs, because the enthusiast considers criminal even the delay of good sense in putting his enthusiasm to work. Nor do our wives, so attentively listening to us here, dream of anything but returning to tread their own land where their comrades will not be living bitterly and sullenly as they are living here. And the child, brother or son of heroes and martyrs, nourished by their legends, thinks of nothing but the beauty of dying in the saddle, fighting for his country, beside a palm tree!
This is my dream, the dream of us all. Palm trees are waiting brides, and we must establish justice as tall as the palms! This is what we wanted to say. The war of impulse, which collapsed in disorder, must at the insistence of national wrongs be followed by the war of necessity, feeble at first and with little chance of success without the encouragement of that strong and intelligent love of right whereby the souls most eager for it pick up from the grave the flag dropped upon it by those least in need of justice and weary of the first effort. Cubans in their independence are seeking their rights as men, and independence must be sought with man’s entire soul. Let disconsolate Cuba turn her eyes to us! For with the logs in the road the children are testing the strength of their newfound arms! Wars break out, when there are reasons, because of the impatience of a brave man or a kernel of corn! For the Cuban spirit is forming ranks, and the confused masses are like the dawn! For the enemy, less surprised today and less concerned, does not have the wealth which he had to defend the last time. And we must not entertain ourselves with bickering about locality, or with vying for posts of command, or with national envies or insane hopes as much as we did then! Because outside of Cuba we have love in our hearts, our eyes upon the coast, our hands upon America, and a gun in our holsters! Then who can fail to read all this in the air in letters of light? And in letters of light it must be read that in this new sacrifice we are not seeking mere forms, or the perpetuation of the colonial spirit in our lives, with the latest in Yankee regimentals. What we are seeking is the essence and reality of a republican country of our own, without some people’s sickly fear of a wholesome expression of all ideas and the honest use of all energies, and on the part of others the fear of that robbery of man which consists in the attempt to prevail in the name of freedom by means of ruthless actions in which the rights of others to freedom’s methods and guarantees are set aside. Of course, the coxcomb politicians will be thrown out, for they forget how necessary it is to come to grips with what cannot be suppressed, and face-powder patriotism will start grumbling on the pretext that people, in the sweat of creating, do not always smell like garden pinks. And what are we to do about it? Without the worms that enrich the soil, no sumptuous palaces would be built! We have to enter truth with our shirt sleeves rolled up, the way a butcher enters a carcass of beef. All truth is sacred, even without the scent of garden pinks. Everything has ugly, bloody entrails. When the artist makes his wonderful jewelry, at first the gold in his crucible is muddy. It is from life’s foulness that fruits derive their nectar and flowers their color. Man is born out of the pain and darkness of the maternal womb, out of the scream and the sublime rending, and from a distance and to human eyes, those magnificent forces and streams of fire leaping and fusing in the furnace of the sun only look like sunspots! Progress to those who do not fear the light; charity to those who tremble at its rays!
I would not regard that flag so fondly (resolved, as I am, to know that what is most sacred is taken as an instrument of interest by the world’s bold victors) if I did not believe that out of its folds must come total freedom when the cordial recognition of every Cuban’s integrity, and of a just means of resolving the conflicts in his affairs, robs of all reason those counselors of confused methods who deem terrible only that stubborn passion which refuses to recognize all there is in his just and equitable demands. Drive a nail through the tongue of the popular flatterer, and hang it in the breeze like an ignominious flag where it may be a warning to those who further their own ambitions by vainly aggravating the pain of the sufferers, or hiding from them the essential truths of their problems, or kindling their anger. And beside the tongue of the flatterer, nail the tongue of the one who withholds justice!
Let the flatterer’s tongue be nailed there for all to see, as well as that of those who use as a pretext the exaggerations to which ignorance is entitled and whoever does not use every means to put a stop to ignorance, refusing to respect whatever of man’s pain and sacred agony exists in the exaggerations: it is more comfortable to curse in judicial robes than to study, sympathetically, wholly immersed in human sorrow! Life’s judges must be put into life’s prisons if they wish to learn justice. Let the one who judges everything know everything. Let the one at the top judge neither hastily nor with bias. Let the one at the bottom judge neither with bias nor hastily. The jealous man must not censure the well-being which he secretly envies. The powerful must not disregard the moving poem and the bloody sacrifice of the man who has to dig the bread he eats, or the sacrifice of his long-suffering companion wearing her crown which the unjust cannot see, or the sacrifice of their children who do not have what belongs to other men’s children around the world! Better never to have unfurled that flag from its staff if it were not to shelter all heads equally!
Little does he know of our country, little does he know of it — the man who is unaware of what it holds as spirit of the present and guarantee of the future, a powerful aggregate of that original freedom which man by himself creates out of the land’s substance and the pain he sees and his own ideas and proud nature. Flesh-and-blood politicians must rely more upon this genuine and vigorous freedom, which can sin only through lack of the culture it is easy to place in it, than can paper politicians rely upon that freedom of dilettantes schooled in the catechisms of France or England. We are men, and we are not going to want paper-doll governments but intellectual effort cast in the mold of our country. A man knows little about our nation if he fails to observe that, together with this natural impulse that rouses it for war and will not allow it to sleep during peace, it has been reared by study and experience and a certain explicit knowledge that our lovely land affords. He knows little about it if he does not see the accumulation of human and cultivated forces of order — a phalanx of broad intelligence enriched by love for man without which intelligence is no more than scourge and crime. He is not well acquainted with our country if he overlooks the intimate harmony (a result of common sorrow) among Cubans of natural law, without history or books, and among Cubans who have put into their studies the passion they were unable to put into building their new country — so fervent a brotherhood among the abject slaves of life and those of an annihilating tyranny — that because of this unanimous and burning love of justice in those of one occupation and those of another; that due to this equally sincere human ardor of men who hold their necks erect because their heads are held high by nature, and men whose necks are bent because fashion demands the display of a handsome back; because of this vehement country where those whom various states of culture might drive apart are drawn together by the same dreams and honesty — due to all this our Cuba, free in the harmony of equality, will tie down the colonial hand which in its own time will not fail to fall upon us, disguised in the glove of the Republic. And beware, Cubans, for some gloves are so like the human hand that they cannot be distinguished from it! Of all who come demanding power, Cubans, you must ask them in broad daylight, where the hand can be clearly seen, “Hand or glove?” But there is really no reason to be afraid or to quarrel. The very thing we must combat, we need. What holds peoples in subjection is as necessary to them as what urges them ahead; in the family household the father, always active, is as necessary as the mother, always timid. There is a male policy and a female policy. A locomotive with a boiler to make it run and without brakes to stop it in time? In the affairs of nations it is necessary to man the brakes with one hand and stoke the boiler with the other. And from too much steam, and from too much braking, nations hereabouts are suffering.
Then what is there for us to fear? A lessening of our enthusiasm, the illusory quality of our faith, the small number of us with untiring spirits, our disorganized hopes? Well, I look around this hall and can feel the firmness and stability of the earth under my feet, and I say: “You lie.” I look into my heart, which is only a Cuban heart, and I say: “You lie.”
Are we to fear the habits of authority practiced in war and, in a certain sense, salved by a daily disdain for death? Well, then, I do not know the valiant Cuban soul, or the wisdom and experience in Cuban judgment, or to what extent the old authorities would have to rely upon the untried authorities, or the admirable agreement between republican thinking and the heroic action which honors, almost without exception, those Cubans who bear arms. But since I do recognize all this, to anyone who says we must expect from our veterans this criminal self-love, this disregard of homeland for their own interests, this iniquitous treason against their country, I tell him: “You lie!”
Or will we have to discard our fear of the trials and tribulations of war stirred up by corrupt people in the pay of the Spanish government, or our fear of walking barefoot, a common thing in Cuba because, amidst thieves and their accomplices, nobody in Cuba has shoes any more except those very thieves and their accomplices? Well, since I know that the very one who writes a book to stir up the fear of war has said in verse — very good verse, to be sure — that the jutías1 supply every need of the Cuban countryside, and I know that Cuba is full of jutías again, I return to those who want to frighten us with the very sacrifice we desire so much, and I tell them: “You lie!”
Must we be afraid of the Cuban who has suffered most from being deprived of his freedom in the country where the blood he shed for it has made him love it too much to be a threat to it? Will we fear the Negro — the noble black man, our black brother — who for the sake of the Cubans who died for him has granted eternal pardon to the Cubans who are still mistreating him? Well, I know of black hands that are plunged further into virtue than those of any white man I have ever met. From the Negro’s love for a reasonable freedom, I know that only in a greater natural and useful intensity does his differ from the white Cuban’s love of freedom. I know that the black man has drawn his noble body to its full height and is becoming a solid column for his native liberties. Others may fear him; I love him. Anyone who speaks ill of him I disown, and I say to him openly: “You lie!”
Must we fear the Spaniard in Cuba? The armed Spaniard who could not defeat us by his bravery, only by our envy — for no other reason but our envy? Are we to be afraid of the Spaniard whose fortune is in El Sardinero or La Rambla and who will slip away with his fortune because it is the only country he has? Or shall we fear the Spaniard whose property is in Cuba because he is fond of the land and his children have roots there, and due to them and the fear and punishment will offer little resistance? Are we to fear the simple Spaniard who is as fond of freedom as are we ourselves, and who, together with us, is seeking a just country which is better than an incapable and unjust one? Or the Spaniard who with his Cuban wife suffers from irremediable desertion and the wretched future of the children born to them with the stigma of hunger and persecution, with the decree of exile within their own country, with the death sentence in life which is the Cuban’s heritage? Should we be afraid of the good liberal Spaniard — my Valencian father, my bonds man from the North, the man from Cadiz who watched over my feverish sleep, the Catalonian who swore and cursed because he did not want the Creole to escape with his clothes, the man from Málaga who carried the feeble Cuban out of the hospital upon his back, the Galician who dies in alien snows returning from delivering the monthly bread ration to the home of the general acting as commander-in-chief of the Cuban war? In Cuba a man fights for his freedom, and there are many Spaniards who love freedom! Those Spaniards will be attacked by others, and I will help the former as long as I live! To the one who does not realize that those Spaniards are merely so many other Cubans, we say: “You lie!”
And must we fear the alien snows? Those who do not know how to fight with their fists in this life, or who measure other people’s hearts by their own timid ones, or who believe that nations are merely chessboards, or who are so steeped in slavery that they need someone to hold their stirrup for them to extricate their foot — those people will seek in a nation of hostile and alien components the Republic which assures them of well-being only when it is administered for them in accord with their own character, and when it is bright and shining. To those who believe that Cubans lack the spirit and capacity to live for themselves in a land created by their own valor, I say: “You lie!”
And to the elegant young dandies who today sneer at this holy revolution whose foremost leaders and martyrs were men born to the marble and silk of fortune, this holy revolution which, in the shortest time and by the redemptive virtue of just wars, made brothers of the heroic first-born and the landless peasant, the master of men and his slaves. To those paperweight Olympians who step down from their slanderous tripods to ask, terrified and willing to submit, if this or that fighter has set foot upon the ground for the purpose of mollifying the soul with whom he can divide the power tomorrow; to the presumptuous who knowingly foment the deception of those who believe that this magnificent movement of souls, this burning idea of justified redemption, this sad but firm desire for the inevitable war, is only the stubbornness of an unruly tramp, or the escapade of an unemployed general, or the noisy chatter of persons who enjoy the wealth that can be kept only by collaborating with dishonor, or the threat of a mob of laborers with hate for a heart and waste paper for brains — a mob that can be led, as with a bridle, wherever the first ambitious man who flatters it, or the first despot who waves a flag before its eyes, cares to take it; to all the elegant dandies or Olympians, and to the presumptuous, I say: “You lie!” This is the mob of laborers, the coffer of our alliance, the baldric embroidered by a woman’s hand where the sword of Cuba has been kept, the redemptive desert where one builds, for gives, foretells, and loves!
Enough, enough of mere words! We are not here for flattery, but to feel our hearts and see that they are sound and able; we are here to teach the despairing, the disbanded, the melancholic, the force of our idea and action, to teach them the proven virtue which assures them of happiness to come, to teach them our true stature, a stature having nothing of the presumptuous or the theorizer or the singsong chanter or the music fanatic or the chaser of clouds or the beggar. We are one, and we are able to march on to the end because we recognize the wrongs and will make certain that there is no backsliding. We have gathered together the scattered with absolute love and patience, and we have enthusiastically restored order to what was, after the catastrophe, distrustful confusion. We have brought about good faith, and we think we have succeeded in suppressing or repressing the wrongs that caused our defeat, and in gathering sincerely and for a lasting purpose the known or proposed elements whose unity will aid in carrying the imminent war to a successful conclusion. Now to form ranks! Nations are not founded upon mere hopes in the depths of a man’s soul! Again I see those flags before me, giving orders. And the sea seems to be coming to us from Cuba, surging with hopes and sorrows and tearing down the barrier of this alien land where we are living, its turbulent waves crashing against these gates. Down there is our Cuba, smothered in the arms that crush and corrupt it! There it is, wounded in heart and mind, tied to the torture chair, presiding over the banquet where gold-trimmed cuffs lift poisoned wine to the lips of sons who have forgotten their fathers! And the father died fighting the second lieutenant, and the son, arm in arm with the second lieutenant, goes to the orgy to rot! Enough of mere words! Out of torn entrails let us build an unquenchable love of country without which no man, good or bad, can live happily. There she is, calling to us. We can hear her moan; she is being raped and mocked and turned gangrenous before our eyes. Our dearest mother is being corrupted and torn into pieces! So let us rise up at once with a final burst of heartfelt energy. Let us rise up so that freedom will not be endangered in triumph, by con fusion or clumsiness, or impatience in preparing it. Let us rise up for the true Republic, those of us who, with our passion for right and our habit of hard work, will know how to preserve it. Let us rise up to give graves to the heroes whose spirit roams the world, alone and ashamed. Let us rise up so that some day our children will have graves! And let us place around the star of our new flag this formula of love triumphant: “With all, and for the good of all.”