Manifesto of Montecristi: The Cuban Revolutionary Party

This document, published on March 25, 1895, under the title “The Cuban Revolutionary Party in Cuba,” was written and signed by José Martí and Máximo Gómez in Montecristi, Santo Domingo. It expresses the essential ideas of the revolutionary movement and the policies of the war for independence that had begun in Cuba on February 24, 1895. Some days later, Martí and General Antonio Maceo would land in Cuba to join the revolutionary troops.

The revolution for independence, begun at Yara after glorious and bloody preparations, has led Cuba into another period of war, by virtue of the command and agreements of the [Cuban] Revolutionary Party abroad and on the island, and of the exemplary brotherhood in the Party of all the elements dedicated to the country’s emancipation and security, for the good of America and the world. The elected representatives of the revolution, which is today confirmed, recognize and respect their duty to repeat to the country its precise objectives, without usurping the declarations and tone characteristic of the dignity of the established Republic alone. The revolution must not cause un justified bloodshed in Cuba, nor lack a just hope of triumph, for it is born of justice and is alien to vengeance; its objectives compose the un quenchable war which today carries to its struggles, in a wise and stirring democracy, all the elements of Cuban society. Thus it will arrive at its logical victory.

The war is not — in the considered opinion of the men who are still representing it today, and of the general and responsible revolution that elected them — the insane victory of one Cuban party over another; it is not even the humbling of one mistaken group of Cubans. On the contrary, it is the solemn demonstration of the will of a country too sorely tried in a former war to plunge lightly into a conflict terminable only by victory or the grave. The war must not be undertaken without reasons sufficiently profound to overcome human cowardice in all its various disguises, and without a determination so respectable, for being signed by death, that it must impose silence upon those less venture some Cubans who do not feel possessed of equal faith in the abilities of their country, or of the courage to free it from slavery.

The war is not a capricious attempt at an independence more fearful than useful, which would only have a right to delay or condemn those who might demonstrate the virtue and purpose of leading it to another safer and more viable one, and which a nation unable to support it must truly desire. It must be the disciplined product of the resolve of men of integrity who, in the serenity of experience, have once again determined to face the dangers they know. It must be the product of a sincere brotherhood of Cubans of the most diverse origins, convinced that it is in the conquest of freedom rather than in abject despair that they are acquiring the virtues necessary to the maintenance of that war.

The war is not directed against the Spaniard, for he, in the security of his children and out of respect for the country they will acquire, will himself be able to enjoy, respected and even loved, the freedom that will crush only those who improvidently leave the path. Nor will the war be born of disorder, alien to the tried and tested moderation of the Cuban spirit. And it will not be born of oppression. Those who promoted it, and can still make their voices heard, declare in its name and before the country their freedom from all hatred, their brotherly indulgence toward timid or mistaken Cubans, their radical respect for man’s integrity in combat and his energy in supporting the Republic. They declare their certainty that the war can be organized in such a way that it contains the redemption inspiring it, the relationship in which one nation must live with others, and the reality of which it is made. The instigators are determined to respect the neutral and honest Spaniard, and see that he is respected, both during the war and after it is over, as well as to be merciful toward repentance, and inflexible only toward vice, crime and inhumanity. In the resumption of Cuba’s war, the revolution sees no reason for merriment that might impede an impulsive heroism; it does see the responsibilities that should concern the builders of nations.

Let Cuba enter the war with the full assurance, unacceptable only to sedentary and halfhearted Cubans, of its sons’ ability to obtain victory through the energy of the thoughtful and magnanimous revolution. Let it trust the Cubans’ capacity — cultivated in the first 10 years of sublime fusion, and in modern practices of government and work — to save the country as a whole from the inconveniences and ordeals so necessary at the beginning of the century, when there was no communication or preparation, in the feudal or theoretical Republics of Spanish America. It would be culpable ignorance or perfidy to disregard the often glorious, and now generally accepted, causes of American disturbances resulting from the error of adjusting to foreign patterns of uncertain doctrine, or mere relation to their place of origin, the ingenuous reality of countries that know nothing about freedoms except the eagerness that secured them and the sovereignty gained by fighting for them. The concentration in the capitals of a merely literary culture; the Republics’ erroneous attachment to the feudal customs of the colony; the creation of rival leaders resulting from distrustful and imperfect communication among the separated regions; the rudimentary state of the sole industry, be it agriculture or cattle raising; and the abandonment of and disdain for the prolific native race in disputes of belief or locality which these causes of the upheavals in American nations pursue — these factors are by no means the problems of Cuban society. Cuba is returning to the war with a democratic and cultured people, jealously aware of their own rights and the rights of others; aware of a much higher culture in its lowliest elements than in the plainsmen of Indian masses with whom, at the call of the foremost heroes of liberty, America’s silent colonies changed from cattle ranches into nations. And at the crossroads of the world some brilliant sons — magnates or servants — are coming to Cuba from creative and sustaining work in the more capable nations of the world to enlist in the war, and they are bringing their own efforts on behalf of the country’s misery and persecution. These are men who, from the first age of adjustment (now overcome), among the heterogeneous components of the Cuban Nation, went out to prepare, or on the island itself continued to prepare, with their own perfectionism, the nationality to which they are today contributing with the stability of their industrious persons and the security of their republican education. The patriotism of its fighters; the culture and generosity of its craftsmen; the realistic and modern employment of a vast number of its intelligentsia and resources; the peculiar conservatism of the peasant mellowed by war and exile; the intimate daily intercourse among the various sections of the country, and their rapid and inevitable unification; the mutual admiration of common virtues among Cubans who have progressed from the differences of slavery to the brotherhood of sacrifice; and the growing benevolence and aptitude of the freed slave — greater than those rare examples of his ill will or straying from the path — all these factors assure Cuba, and without unfounded hopes, of a future in which the stable conditions and immediate work of a productive people in a just Republic will overcome the dissociation and partiality arising out of the indolence or arrogance sometimes brought about by war. There are other likely causes for this ignorance or arrogance, namely the offensive animosity of a minority of landowners deprived of their rights; the blameworthy haste with which a still invisible minority of discontented freedmen might, with regrettable violation of human nature and free will, aspire to a social respect that must surely come to them from a proved equality in talents and virtues alone; and the sudden dispossession, largely among learned city dwellers, of the luxury and relative abundance now coming to them from the colony’s convenient and immoral taxes, and from the occupations that will have to disappear with freedom. A free people with work available to all, enclaved at the approaches to the wealthy industrial world, will replace advantageously and without hindrance, after a war inspired by the purest self-sacrifice and maintained consistent with it, the abashed nation where well-being is attained only in exchange for overt or tacit collusion with the oppression of the indigent foreigners who bleed and corrupt it. There is no distrust of Cuba, or of its ability to obtain and govern its independence, by those who, in the heroism of death and of the quiet building of the country, can see the gifts of harmony and good judgment shine continuously, in the great and the small. Only those who stand outside the true soul of their country, and judge it according to the arrogant concept of their own selves, with no more power of rebellion and creation than that which timidly appears in the servitude of their colonial tasks, can disregard these gifts.

Today cowardice might have to make use of another fear, on the pretext of prudence: an unreasoning fear of the Negro race, never justified in Cuba. The revolution, with its abundance of martyrs and of generous and obedient fighters, indignantly contradicts — as the long testing period of the communities abroad and the truce on the island is contradicting — the charge that the Negro race is a threat, a charge wickedly made by the beneficiaries of the Spanish regime in order to stir up fear of the revolution. In Cuba there are now Cubans of both colors who have put out of their minds forever, with the emancipatory war and the work in which together they are becoming proficient, the hatred with which slavery was able to divide them. Bitterness and a changed state of social relations, resulting from the sudden transformation of the foreigner into a “native,” are less important than the Cuban white man’s sincere esteem for the kindred spirit, the laborious culture, the free man’s fervor and the amiable character of his Negro compatriot. And if the Negro race were to produce some filthy demagogues or avid souls, whose own impatience were to stir up that of their color, or in whom compassion for their own people might lead to injustice toward others — then with its gratitude and practical wisdom, its love of country, its conviction that it is necessary to deprive of authority the still prevailing opinion that the race is incapable of these qualities, and with the possession of all that is real in human rights, and with the enjoyment of and strong respect for all that is just and generous in the Cuban white man, the Negro race itself would eradicate the Negro danger single-handedly, with no help from the white man needed. The Cuban Negro’s integrity and intelligence have been patently proved. This the revolution knows and proclaims, and so do the Cubans living abroad. The Cuban Negro has no schools of anger there, just as in the war there was not a single case of undue pride or insubordination. The Republic against which the Negro has never rebelled rests safely upon his shoulders. Only those who hate the Negro can see any hate in him, and only those who trafficked in similar unjust fear in order to control, with an undesirable authority, the hands that might rise to the task of expelling the corrupting occupant from Cuban soil.

Instead of the dishonorable rage of the first war, the revolution (which neither fears nor flatters) hopes to find among Cuba’s Spanish inhabitants such affectionate neutrality and such real assistance, that because of them the war will turn out to be shorter, its disasters fewer, and the peace in which parents and their children will live easier and friendlier. We Cubans are starting the war, and we Cubans and Spaniards will end it. Let them not mistreat us, and we will not mistreat them. Let them show respect, and they will be respected. Steel replies with steel, friendship with friendship. There is no hate in Antillean hearts; the Cuban salutes in death the Spaniard whom the cruelty of the necessary army took away from his house and plot of ground to begin killing in men’s hearts the freedom he himself so eagerly desires. Rather than salute him in death, the revolution would like to protect him in life; and the Republic will be a peaceful home for all honest and industrious Spaniards, so they may enjoy the freedom and benefits they will not find for a long time in the sluggishness, indolence, and political evils of their own land. This is the heart of Cuba, and its war will be conducted accordingly. What Spanish enemies will the revolution actually have? Possibly the largely republican army that has learned to respect our courage as we respect its courage, and in addition sometimes feels more like joining us than fighting us? Possibly the conscripts, trained in humanitarian ideals and opposed to shedding the blood of their fellow men for the sake of a useless scepter or an envious country? These conscripts are mowed down at the height of their youth in order to defend, against a nation that would gladly welcome them as free citizens, a throne unjustly controlling the nation betrayed by its leaders with the help of their concessions and profits. Could the Spanish enemies be the now human and cultured masses of artisans and clerks whom the inducement of the wealthy Spaniards dragged into crime and ferocity on the pretext of national duty? These Spaniards, with most of their fortune safe in Spain, are today showing less zeal than that with which they bled the land of its riches when the war surprised them on it with their entire fortune. Or could the revolution’s Spanish enemies be the founders of Cuban families and industries, now weary of Spain’s dishonesty and mismanagement, and like the Cubans vexed and oppressed? Could its enemies be those imprudent ingrates who, with no consideration for their own household peace or for preserving a fortune threatened more by the Spanish regime than by the revolution, may turn against the land that has changed them from sad peasants into happy husbands and fathers whose offspring know how to die without hate for the sake of assuring a free soil to the bloodthirsty father so that he can maintain a permanent state of discord between the Creole and the peninsular Spaniard? It is a free soil where an honest fortune may be kept without bribery and increased without anxiety, and where the son does not see, between his father’s hand and his kiss, the abhorrent shadow of the oppressor. What fate will the Spaniard choose: an endless war, acknowledged or dissembled, that threatens or disturbs the ever uneasy and violent relations of the country, or the definitive peace that can never be achieved in Cuba except with independence? Will the Spaniards entrenched in Cuba provoke and stain with blood a war in which they may be the losers? And by what right can the Spaniards hate us if we Cubans do not hate them? The revolution fearlessly employs this kind of language because the decree to free Cuba at once from the irreparable ineptitude and corruption of the Spanish government — and to give all men of the New World free access to the island — is as peremptory as the will to see how Cubans, without lukewarm feelings or bitter memories, and how Spaniards, who because of their passion for freedom are helping to obtain it in Cuba, and how those who respect the present war, are redeeming the blood that in yesterday’s war they caused to flow from the breasts of their sons.

In the forms that the revolution will take, well aware of its unselfishness, a cautious cowardice will doubtless find no reason for reproach — a cowardice which in the formal errors of the emerging country, or in its apparently slight progress toward republican status, could find some reason to deny it its due quota of blood. True patriotism will have no reason to fear for the dignity and future of the country. The difficulty with wars of independence in America, and those of its first ethnic groups, has not lain in the discord among its heroes and in man’s inherent distrust and jealousy, but in the opportune lack of form contained by the spirit of redemption which, supported by lesser impulses, furthers and promotes war and its necessary practices, and which war must expedite and uphold. In the initial phases of the war the country must find such methods of government as satisfy both the mature and distrustful intelligence of its cultured sons and the conditions required for the aid and respect of other nations — methods that permit rather than hinder the full development and rapid conclusion of the war that is unfortunately necessary to national well-being. From its beginnings, the country must be built with viable forms originating in its own needs and character, so that an unsanctioned and unrealistic government will not lead it to partiality or to tyranny. Without attempting, by means of a disordered concept of its duty, to use the integral constitutional faculties with which the experienced and inexperienced elements are organized and arranged in their peculiar responsibility before the contemporary, liberal and impatient world, it is only just for the Cuban Revolutionary Party to declare its faith that the revolution must find forms assuring it of the unity and strength indispensable to a cultured war — assuring it of the enthusiasm of Cubans, the trust of Spaniards and the friendship of the world. For these experienced and inexperienced elements are moved alike by active impulse and pure idealism, men who, with the same nobility and impregnable title of their blood, are throwing themselves behind the guiding spirit of former heroes to open an industrious Republic to humanity. The duties and intentions of the revolution are these: to recognize and establish reality; to compose in a natural pattern the reality of ideas which produce or destroy the facts, and the reality of facts originating in those ideas; to organize the revolution with integrity, sacrifice and culture so that not one man’s decency is damaged, not one Cuban feels his sacrifice to be futile or the revolution to be inferior to the culture of the country itself (not to the foreign and unauthorized culture that alienates the respect of virile men because of its ineffective results and the pitiful contrast between the genuine stupidity and arrogance of its sterile possessors). The revolution must be directed toward the profound knowledge of man’s labor in the redemption and support of his dignity. It will be directed so that the powerful and capable war may promptly give the new Republic a foundation of stability.

From its inception the sound and vigorous war resumed by Cuba today, with all the advantages of experience, with assured victory for its final resolves, and with the lofty efforts of its deathless heroes — never recalled without the warmest feelings — has not been merely a pious longing to give a full life to the people who, under the growing immorality and occupation of an inept master, are disintegrating or losing their superior strength in the oppressed country or in Cuba’s scattered communities abroad. The war is not an inadequate desire to conquer Cuba with the tempting sacrifice, the political independence, that would wrongfully rob Cubans of their strength if it did not offer them the hope of building a country with freedom of thought, equality of customs and peace through work. The war for the independence of Cuba — a knot in the sheaf of islands that the continental trade routes will cross within a few years — is an event of great human significance, and a timely service which the judicious heroism of the Antilles lends to stability and fair treatment among the American nations, and to the still uncertain balance in the world. It is touching and an honor to think that when a soldier fighting for independence falls upon Cuban soil, perhaps abandoned by the unwary or indifferent nations for which he is sacrificing himself, he falls for the greater good of mankind, for the affirmation of the moral Republic in America, and for the creation of a free archipelago where respectable nations may lavish the wealth which, as it circulates, must fall upon the crossroads of the world. It is hardly credible that with such martyrs and such a future, there were Cubans who bound Cuba to the decaying and uncultured monarchy of Spain, and to its paralyzed and vice-ridden misery! The duty of the revolution tomorrow is to again explain to the country and to the other nations the local reasons — although universal in idea and application — why the freedom-loving people of Yara and Guáimaro are once again embarking on a war worthy of the respect of its enemies and the support of nations, a war for the advancement and benefit of humanity because of its rigid concept of man’s rights, and its abhorrence of useless vengeance and fruit less devastation. Today — while reverently proclaiming from the threshold of the world the spirit and doctrines which caused and are inspiring the total and humanitarian war in which the Cuban people, unconquerable and indivisible, are being united still further — let us, as leaders and guideposts of our nation, lawfully invoke the magnanimous founders whose labors are invigorating the grateful country. And let us invoke the honor which must prevent Cubans from wounding, by word or deed, those who die for them. Upon thus declaring in the name of our country, and attesting before it and before its free power of constitution the identical work of two generations, the Delegate of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, created to organize and aid the present war, and the Commander-in-Chief, elected to it by all the active members of the Army of Liberation, by virtue of the common responsibility of their representation, and as an indication of the unity and solidity of the Cuban revolution, together do endorse this declaration.

Montecristi
March 25, 1895

José Martí

M. Gómez