To the Editor of the New York Evening Post: A Vindication of Cuba

March 23, 1889

To the Editor of the New York Evening Post¹

Sir,

I beg to be allowed the privilege of referring in your columns to the injurious criticism of the Cubans printed in The Manufacturer of Philadelphia, and reproduced in your issue of yesterday.

This is not the occasion to discuss the question of the annexation of Cuba. It is probable that no self-respecting Cuban would like to see his country annexed to a nation where the leaders of opinion share towards him the prejudices excusable only to vulgar jingoism or rampant ignorance. No honest Cuban will stoop to be received as a moral pest for the sake of the usefulness of his land in a community where his ability is denied, his morality insulted and his character despised. There are some Cubans who, from honorable motives, from an ardent admiration for progress and liberty, from a prescience of their own powers under better political conditions, from an unhappy ignorance of the history and tendency of annexation, would like to see the island annexed to the United States. But those who have fought in war and learned in exile, who have built, by the work of hands and mind, a virtuous home in the heart of an unfriendly community; who by their successful efforts as scientists and merchants, as railroad builders and engineers, as teachers, artists, lawyers, journalists, orators and poets, as men of alert intelligence and uncommon activity are honored wherever their powers have been called into action and the people are just enough to understand them; those who have raised, with their less prepared elements, a town of working men where the United States had previously a few huts in a barren cliff; those, more numerous than the others, do not desire the annexation of Cuba to the United States. They do not need it. They admire this nation, the greatest ever built by liberty, but they dislike the evil conditions that, like worms in the heart, have begun in this mighty republic their work of destruction. They have made of the heroes of this country their own heroes, and look to the success of the American commonwealth as the crowning glory of mankind; but they cannot honestly believe that excessive individualism, reverence for wealth, and the protracted exultation of a terrible victory are preparing the United States to be the typical nation of liberty, where no opinion is to be based in greed, and no triumph or acquisition reached against charity and justice. We love the country of Lincoln as much as we fear the country of Cutting.

We are not the people of destitute vagrants or immoral pigmies that The Manufacturer is pleased to picture; nor the country of petty talkers, incapable of action, hostile to hard work, that, in a mass with the other countries of Spanish America, we are represented to be by arrogant travelers and writers. We have suffered impatiently under tyranny; we have fought like men, sometimes like giants, to be free men; we are passing that period of stormy repose, full of germs of revolt, that naturally follows a period of excessive and unsuccessful action; we have to fight like conquered men against an oppressor who denies us the means of living, and fosters — in the beautiful capital visited by the tourist and in the interior of the country, where the prey escaped his grasp — a reign of such corruption as may poison in our veins the strength to secure freedom; we deserve in our misfortune the respect of those who did not help us in our need.

But because, after the war, our government has systematically allowed the triumph of criminals, the occupation of the cities by the scum of the people, the ostentation of ill-gotten riches by the myriad Spanish officeholders and their Cuban accomplices, the conversion of the capital into a gambling den, where the hero and the philosopher walk hungry by the lordly thief of the metropolis; because the healthier farmer, ruined by a war seemingly useless, turns in silence to the plow that he knew well how to exchange for the machete; because thousands of exiles, profiting by a period of calm that no human power can quicken until it is naturally exhausted, are practicing in the battle of life in the free countries the art of governing themselves and of building a nation; because our half-breeds and city-bred young men are generally of delicate physique, of suave courtesy and ready words, hiding under the glove that polishes the poem the hand that fells the foe — are we to be considered, as The Manufacturer does consider us, an “effeminate” people. These city-bred young men and poorly built half breeds knew in one day how to rise against a cruel government, to pay their passages to the seat of war with the pawning of their watches and trinkets, to work their way in exile while the vessels were being kept from them by the country of the free in the interest of the foes of freedom, to obey as soldiers, sleep in the mud, eat roots, fight 10 years without salary, conquer foes with the branch of a tree, die — these men of 18, these heirs of wealthy estates, these dusky striplings — a death not to be spoken of without uncovering the head. They died like those other men of ours who, with a stroke of the machete, can send a head flying, or by a turn of the hands bring a bull to their feet. These “effeminate” Cubans had once courage enough, in the face of a hostile government, to carry on their left arms for a week the mourning-band for Lincoln.

The Cubans have, according to The Manufacturer, “a distaste for exertion”; they are “helpless,” “idle.” These “helpless,” “idle” men came here 20 years ago empty-handed, with very few exceptions; fought against the climate; mastered the language; lived by their honest labor, some in affluence, a few in wealth, rarely in misery; they bought or built homes; they raised families and fortunes; they loved luxury and worked for it; they were not frequently seen in the dark roads of life; proud and self-sustaining, they never feared competition as to intelligence or diligence. Thousands have returned to die in their homes; thousands have remained where, during the hardships of life, they have triumphed, unaided by any help of kindred language, sympathy of race or community of religion. A handful of Cuban toilers built Key West. The Cubans have made their mark in Panama by their ability as mechanics in the higher trades, as clerks, physicians and contractors. A Cuban, Cisneros, has greatly advanced the development of railways and river navigation in Colombia. Márquez, another Cuban, with many of his countrymen, gained the respect of the Peruvians as a merchant of eminent capacity. Cubans are found everywhere, working as farmers, surveyors, engineers, mechanics, teachers, journalists. In Philadelphia The Manufacturer has a daily opportunity to see a hundred Cubans, some of them of heroic history and powerful build, who live by their work in easy comfort. In New York, the Cubans are directors in prominent banks, substantial merchants, popular brokers, clerks of recognized ability, physicians with large practices, engineers of worldwide repute, electricians, journalists, tradesmen, cigar makers. The poet of Niagara is a Cuban, our Heredia; a Cuban, Monocal, is the projector of the canal of Nicaragua. In Philadelphia itself, as in New York, the college prizes have been more than once awarded to Cubans. The women of these “helpless,” “idle” people, with “a distaste for exertion,” arrived here from a life of luxury in the heart of the winter; their husbands were in the war, ruined, dead, imprisoned in Spain; the “Señora” went to work; from a slave-owner she became a slave, took a seat behind the counter, sang in the churches, worked buttonholes by the hundred, sewed for a living, curled feathers, gave her soul to duty, withered in work her body. This is the people of “defective morals.”

We are “unfitted by nature and experience to discharge the obligations of citizenship in a great and free country.” This cannot be justly said of a people who possess, besides the energy that built the first railroad in Spanish dominions and established against the opposition of the government all the agencies of civilization, a truly remark able knowledge of the body politic, a tried readiness to adapt itself to its higher forms, and the power rare in tropical countries of nerving their thought and pruning their language. Their passion for liberty, the conscientious study of its best teachings, the nursing of individual character in exile and at home, the lessons of 10 years of war and its manifold consequences, and the practical exercise of the duties of citizenship in the free countries of the world, have combined, in spite of all antecedents, to develop in the Cuban a capacity for free government so natural to him that he established it, even to the excess of its practices, in the midst of the war, vied with his elders in the effort to respect the laws of liberty, and snatched the saber, without fear or consideration, from the hands of every military pretender, however glorious. There seems to be in the Cuban mind a happy faculty of uniting sense with earnestness and moderation with exuberance. Noble teachers have devoted themselves since the beginning of the century to explain by their words and exemplify by their lives the self-restraint and tolerance inseparable from liberty. Those who won the first seats 10 years ago at the European universities by singular merit have been proclaimed, at their appearance in the Spanish parliament, men of subtle thought and powerful speech. The political knowledge of the average Cuban compares well with that of the average American citizen. Absolute freedom from religious intolerance, the love of man for the work he creates by his industry, and theoretical and practical familiarity with the laws and processes of liberty, will enable the Cuban to rebuild his country from the ruins in which he will receive it from its oppressors. It is not to be expected, for the honor of mankind, that the nation that was rocked in freedom, and received for three centuries the best blood of liberty-loving men, will employ the power thus acquired in depriving a less fortunate neighbor of its liberty.

Finally, it is said that “our lack of manly force and of self-respect is demonstrated by the supineness with which we have so long submitted to Spanish oppression, and even our attempts at rebellion have been so pitifully ineffective that they have risen little above the dignity of farce.” Never was ignorance of history and character more pitifully displayed than in this wanton assertion. We need to recollect, in order to answer without bitterness, that more than one American bled by our side, in a war that another American was to call a farce. A farce! The war that has been compared to an epic by foreign observers, the upheaval of a whole country, the voluntary abandonment of wealth, the abolition of slavery in our first moment of freedom, the burning of our cities by our own hands, the erection of villages and factories in the wild forests, the dressing of our ladies of rank in the textures of the woods, the keeping at bay, in 10 years of such a life, a powerful enemy, with a loss to him of 200,000 men, at the hands of a small army of patriots, with no help but Nature! We had no Hessians and no French men, no Lafayette or Steuben, no monarchical rivals to help us; we had but one neighbor who confessedly “stretched the limits of his power, and acted against the will of the people” to help the foes of those who were fighting for the same Charter of Liberties on which he built his independence. We fell a victim to the very passions which could have caused the downfall of the 13 States, had they not been cemented by success, while we were enfeebled by procrastination; a procrastination brought about, not from cowardice, but from an abhorrence of blood, which allowed the enemy in the first months of the war to acquire unconquerable advantage, and from a childlike confidence in the certain help of the United States: “They cannot see us dying for liberty at their own doors without raising a hand or saying a word to give to the world a new free country!” They “stretched the limits of their powers in deference to Spain.” They did not raise the hand. They did not say the word.

The struggle has not ceased. The exiles do not want to return. The new generation is worthy of its sires. Hundreds of men have died in darkness since the war in the misery of prisons. With life only will this fight for liberty cease among us. And it is the melancholy truth that our efforts would have been, in all probability, successfully renewed, were it not, in some of us, for the unmanly hopes of the annexationists of securing liberty without paying its price; and the just fears of others that our dead, our sacred memories, our ruins drenched in blood would be but the fertilizers of the soil for the benefit of a foreign plant, or the occasion for a sneer from The Manufacturer of Philadelphia.

With sincere thanks for the space you have kindly allowed me, I am, sir, yours very respectfully,

José Martí

120 Frost Street, New York

March 23, 1889

Published March 25, 1889