Simón Bolívar

This speech was delivered on October 28, 1893, to the Latin American Literary Society of New York, at a gathering held as a tribute to that outstanding Latin American hero. It was published on November 4, 1893, in Patria, New York.

Ladies and gentlemen:

With the contrite brow of the Americans who have yet to enter America, serenely aware of the true place and worth of the great son of Caracas in the spontaneous and manifold work of American freedom; with the reverence and awe of one who still sees before him, demanding his due share, that man whose majesty and magnanimity were like the raintree of the savannahs, like the rivers plunging in turmoil from the mountain tops, and like the large burning rocks that come thundering from the bowels of the earth, I bring the meager homage of my words, less profound and eloquent than my silence, to him who tore Pizarro’s flag from the skies of Cuzco. Above the carping criticism, above the outbursts of praise and abuse, above even the shortcomings of that prince of freedom — black flecks on the condor’s breast — the real man emerges radiant. He sears and enthralls. To think about him, peer into his life, read one of his speeches, catch a glimpse of one of his ardent and breathless love letters, is like feeling one’s thoughts turn to gold. He burned with our own desire for freedom, he spoke with the voice of our own natures, his zenith was our continent’s finest hour, his fall strikes at the heart. Pronounce the name of Bolívar and one sees in the mind’s eye the mountain crowned less by snow than by the caped horseman, or the flooded Apure valley through which the liberators swirl forward, three republics in their knapsacks, to complete the redemption of a continent. Oh no! that man who never lived in repose cannot be discussed in calm. One must speak of Bolívar from the tribune of a mountain, or in thunder and lightning, or with a fistful of free nations in one’s grasp, and tyranny beheaded at one’s feet! No one need shrink from just admiration because it is perennially fashionable among certain kinds of persons to belittle the extra ordinary; nor should a low desire for applause ever allow the bombastic phrase to silence the voice of sober judgment. Words can never express the mystery and brilliance of that mind at the disaster of Casacoima when, wracked with fever and deserted by his scattered army, he clearly saw the roads across the Andes over which he would carry freedom into the valleys of Peru and Bolivia. But whatever we say tonight, even if exaggerated, will enhance the occasion, for all of us gathered here are children of his sword.

Nor need the fear of offending the ladies keep us from voicing tribute, for one can speak freely of freedom in the presence of American women. The courageous daughter of the Paraguayan Juan de Mena who, when she learned that her fellow countryman Antequera was being hanged for a patriot, took off her widow’s weeds and put on her festive clothes because “the day a just man dies gloriously for his country is a day of celebration”; the Colombian girl in her calico and home spun, who anticipated the patriots when she tore down the insolent edict on taxation in El Socorro, and set 20,000 men fighting; the wife of Arismendi, pure as the finest pearl of La Margarita, who, when led out on the battlements in full view of her husband shelling the fort, told her captors: “You will never force a word past my lips to make him shirk his duty”; the noble Pola, who sent her sweetheart into battle and died beside him on the gallows; or Mercedes Abrego of the handsome braids, who was decapitated for embroidering the Liberator’s uniform with her finest golden thread; and those loyal companions of Bolívar’s soldiers, who rode with their men as they breasted the raging streams that plunge from the Andean peaks, milestones of Nature, on freedom’s march to Boyacá¹ — all these were women.

That man was truly extraordinary. He lived as if among flames, and he was a flame. He loved, and spoke flowers of fire. He revered friend ship, and the death of a loyal companion silenced all activity around him. He was sickly, yet with the speed of the fastest post his untried army swept everything before it from Tenerife to Cúcuta. He was a fighter, and at the height of the struggle, with all eyes turned to him in supplication, he ordered his horse unsaddled. He wrote, and it was the brewing of a mountain storm that bursts suddenly over the mist-filled valley, and then the sun breaks through and clouds drift around the peaks, while the valley below sparkles with fresh colors. Like the mountains, he was broad at the base, his roots deep in the ground, yet rising to a lofty crest, as if to better pierce a stubborn sky. One can see him knocking on the gates of glory with the golden hilt of his saber. He believed in heaven, in the gods, in the immortals, in the god of Colombia, in the genius of America, in his destiny. He was surrounded by a glory that inflamed him and stirred him to action. Is it not a sign of divinity to have conquered? He conquered men, swollen rivers, volcanoes, centuries, Nature! Would he have undone the work of centuries if he had not been able to build anew? Did he not unshackle races, disenthrall a continent, bring nations into being? Has he not covered more peoples with the banners of freedom than has any other conqueror with the banners of tyranny? Did he not address eternity from Mount Chimborazo, with Potosí,² one of history’s most barbarous and tenacious creations, at his feet beneath the condor-studded flag of Colombia? Did not cities open their gates to him, and the powers of this life pay him homage? Did not his rivals, and all the gifted sons and beauties of the New World, bow to him in fear or adoration? He was as the thawing and life-giving sun, burning and shedding light. If there is a senate in heaven, he is surely there. He saw that world, golden with sunlight, and the seat of the rock of creation, the floor of clouds, and the roof of stars reminded him, in their sparkling movements across the sky, of his lances at Apure as they reflected the noonday sun; from those heights happiness and order descend upon men as if by paternal dispensation. But such is not the case in this world where the sum of divinity rises from the bloody and painful sacrifice and ideal of all mankind! He died in Santa Marta from the horror and frustration of seeing that star of his, which he considered immortal, dashed to pieces. He made the mistake of con fusing the glory of having served, which grows and is a crown that no hands can take from his brow, with the mere accident of power that was his to wield. For human power — which is nearly always the corrupt employment and pursuit of those who seek it for themselves, although they do not deserve it and are lacking in courage, or the sterile triumph of one faction over another, or the pawn of interests and passions — only falls to virtue or genius in moments of crisis or transient righteousness when nations, moved by danger, acclaim the idea or unselfish motive in which they seek their redemption. But there sits Bolívar on the rock of creation in the American heaven, stern and vigilant, with the Inca beside him and flags clustered at his feet. There he is, still wearing his campaign boots, for what he failed to achieve has not been achieved to this day. Bolívar still has work to do in America!

At the turn of the century America was seething, and he was its crucible. The America of those days still stirs and rears its head, a huge larval creature like worms under the bark of old roots. From France and North America, under priests’ cassocks and in the minds of worthy travelers, the revolutionary message has been coming to revive the discontent of the educated and well-bred Creole, governed from across the seas by the law of tribute and the gallows. In the measure that the rebellion grew in high places, leavened by the rebellious, and in a certain sense democratic, unrest of the second-born disinherited Spaniard, the Argentine gaucho, the Chilean roto, the Peruvian cholo, and the Venezuelan llanero — all were touched where their common affections lay. In the muffled upheaval, their defenseless faces furrowed by tears, bands of Indians wandered through the forests, taking comfort in pillage, like tongues of flames licking at some colossal funeral pyre. American independence came bleeding from the past century; Our America springs neither from Rousseau nor Washington, but from itself! Thus, in the sultry and fragrant nights of his manorial garden at San Jacinto, or along the banks of the mirrored waters of the Arauco where he may have guided the tiny feet of his wife who died in her prime, Bolívar would see, with fist clenched against his bosom, the specters come and go through the air, and they can find no rest until their task is finished! In the dusk at Mount Avila, he surely must have seen the bloody retinue.

The Paraguayan Antequera passes by, the first of many, raising his severed head; there goes the entire family of a poor Inca, quartered before the eyes of their shackled father, gathering up their sundered limbs. Tupac Amaru³ crosses his vision; then comes the king of the Venezuelan half-breeds, vanishing in the air like a ghost; then Salinas asleep in his blood, Quiroga⁴ dead over his dish of food, and Morales⁵ like a living carnage, because in Quito’s prison the love of country never faltered. León, having no house to call his own because his lands were sown with salt, lay dying in his cave. There on hooks go the limbs of José España, who died smiling on the gallows, and there the still smoking torso of Galán, burned at the stake. Berbeo passes, more dead than anyone, although the hangman spared his life for fear of the patriots, because for one who has known the joy of fighting for the honor of his country, there is no greater death than to be alive while the shame of one’s native land endures. The hero wrapped himself in this Indian, half-breed and white soul merged into a single flame, and found it constant and inextinguishable. In the brotherhood of a common cause he fused the disparate components in the flame of glory; he removed or curbed his rivals; he crossed the desert and challenged mountains; he sowed the Andean watershed with republics. And when he halted the march of his armies, because the Argentine revolution opposed its collective and democratic endeavor to his thrust, 14 Spanish generals, huddled on the slopes of Ayacucho,⁶ laid down their Spanish swords!

From the coastal palms, put there as if to intone a perennial song of praise to the hero, the land climbs in terraces of silver and gold to the fertile plains that this American revolution slashed until the blood ran. Heaven has seldom seen more beautiful scenes, for the determination to be free never before stirred so many hearts, heroism never knew a setting of such natural grandeur, and the soul of an continent never entered so fully into that of one man. Heaven itself seems to have played a role, for those were battles worthy of it. It was as if all the heroes of freedom, and all the martyrs on earth, gathered in that beautiful firmament and hovered like a giant shield over the straits in which our souls were struggling, or fled in terror through the unjust heavens when the battle went against us! Heaven must have paused, in fact, to have seen such beauty — breathtaking waterfalls break loose from the eternal snows like runaway horses; age-old trees cling to the dark ravines like down or curly fleece; the ruins of Indian temples keep watch over the wilderness of lakes; the rugged towers of Spanish cathedrals pierce the valley mists; the craters smoke, and erupting volcanoes reveal the bowels of the earth. All the while, in every corner of the land, Americans are fighting for their freedom! Some of them gallop over the plains and are snuffed out in the clash with the enemy like candles in a gust of wind; others, the reins held between their teeth, swim the swollen rivers trailing their army pennants on the water; others, like a forest on the march, come in close order, their lances above their heads; others scale a volcano, and plant the flag of freedom on the rim of its fiery crater. But none so handsome as that man of lofty forehead above eyes that have devoured the face, whose cape billows behind him on his flying horse, whose breast is impervious to storm or rain of fire, whose sword sheds the light of freedom upon five nations! He reins in his black stallion, hair limp from the storm of victory, and reviews the ranks of those who helped him crush oppression: the Phrygian cap of Ribas,⁷ the gentle horse of Sucre,⁸ Piar’s⁹ curly head, Páez’s¹⁰ red cloak, Córdoba’s¹¹ slashing whip, and the flag-wrapped body of the colonel carried by his soldiers. He stands breathless in the stirrups as Nature watches Páez and his handful of lancers charge and scatter the enemy anthill in the dust and shadows of Las Queseras. Eyes wet with tears, he watches as his army in gala attire makes merry on the eve of the battle of Carabobo,¹² pennants and ensigns flying, masses of men a living wall around the tattered battle flags, martial music playing everywhere, the play of sun on steel, and all through the camp the mysterious joy of a house in which a child is to be born! But he was handsomer than ever at Junín,¹³ developed in the darkest night, while the last of the Spanish lances splintered in pale silence against the triumphant might of America.

And then a little later, his thoughts disconnected, his hair clinging to his sunken temples, his withered hand gesturing as if rejecting a world, the hero said on his death bed: “José, José! Let us go, for we are not wanted here. Where shall we go?” Only his government had fallen, but he may have thought that the Republic was collapsing; local jealousies and fears had been largely overcome in the enthusiasm of independence, and he may have discounted those forces for reality that reappeared after the triumph. He may have been fearful that rival ambitions would wreck the newly formed nations, and by hateful subjection he sought that political balance which is stable only when based on freedom, and infallible in a regime of justice, with the fewer restraints the better. Perhaps, in his dream of glory for America and for himself, he failed to realize that the unity of spirit, indispensable to the salvation and happiness of our American nations, suffered rather than benefited from his union based on theoretical and artificial forms that had no roots in reality. Perhaps the prophetic genius who proclaimed that the salvation of Our America lies in the unified action of our republics with respect to the rest of the world and the course of our own future, was unaware, because it was foreign to his temperament, class and education, of the moderating force of the popular will, of the open struggle between people of varying shades of opinion requiring nothing but the law of true freedom to be the safeguard of republics. The anxious father may have erred at the crucial moment for all political architects, when the voice of prudence counseled him to yield the command to new leaders, so that the title of usurper would not discredit or endanger his creation; while another voice, perhaps from the mystery of the greater creative idea, urged him to endure for its sake even the dishonor of being considered a usurper.

And they were his heart’s desire, those whose blood was spilled without him in the long and bitter conflict; those who found their own lives in his magnanimity and perseverance, and who took from him, because he determined their struggles and their future, the power to govern themselves according to the needs of their peoples! And the union of Bolívar and America in order to achieve independence — firmer than the attraction among the stars — disappeared, and one could see the disagreement between Bolívar — resolved to unite the countries of the revolution under a distant, central government — and the multi headed American revolution born of the desire for local self-government. “José, José! Let us go, for we are not wanted here. Where shall we go?”

Where will Bolívar go? To the respect of the world and the affection of America! To this loving home where every man is indebted to him for that ardent satisfaction of feeling himself embraced by his own people whenever he is among Americans, and where every woman adoringly remembers that man who always dismounted from his horse of glory to give thanks for a wreath of a flower offered him by the hands of beauty! To the justice of nations able to see, beyond the possible error of rash or personal measures, the impetus Bolívar gave, through these very measures, to the basic ideas of America, like a powerful hand shaping molten lava. Where will Bolívar go? Arm in arm with men to defend from new greed and old prejudices the land where human existence will be happier and more beautiful! To peaceful nations like a father’s kiss! To men of narrow viewpoints and fleeting opinions, to well-fed burghers and prosperous Harpagons, so that by the light of the blaze that was his existence they may see the brotherhood so essential to the continent, and the greatness and dangers in America’s future! Where will Bolívar go? The last of the Spanish viceroys lay bedridden with his five wounds, three centuries were dragging from the tail of the plainsman’s horse, and the Liberator, wearing his finest clothes under the cassock of victory, rode with his army as if bound for a ball. Crowds looked down from the hills, and standing out along the ridges were clusters of flags like flowers in a vase. Finally Potosí appears, scarred and bloody. The five flags of the new nations blaze with real flames atop a resurrected America. Cannons announce the hero’s approach, and above heads bared out of respect and awe the crackle of gunfire echoes from peak to peak as each mountain repeats the salute. And so, as long as America lives, the echo of his name will pass from father to son in all that is best and manliest in our natures!