This letter was handed to New York Herald correspondent Eugene Bryson when he visited the Cuban revolutionaries in their camp in early May 1895. It is not clear whether this letter was ever published.
Guantánamo, May 2, 1895
To the Editor,
The New York Herald is nobly offering the publicity of its daily newspaper to the Cuban revolution on behalf of the island’s independence and the creation of a durable Republic. As representatives-elect of the revolution, empowered until such time as this revolution chooses authorities befitting its new form, it is our duty to express in concise terms to the people of the United States and to the world the reasons, composition and purposes of the revolution initiated by Cuba at the beginning of the century. It has been maintained in arms with recognized heroism from 1868 to 1878, and is being resumed today through the organized efforts of the country’s sons both within the island and abroad. With the Cuban’s expert bravery and mature character, we will establish an independent nation worthy and capable of the government which can release the stagnant wealth of the Cuban island (in the peace which can assure nothing less than man’s satisfied respect) to the unobstructed labors of its inhabitants and to free access by the entire world.
With the joy of sacrifice and the solemn determination to die, Cuba has risen in arms not to interrupt — with a fanatical patriotism the inadequate ideal of political independence from Spain — the development of a people who might have reached maturity peacefully, without hindering the accelerated course of the world which, in these closing years of the century, is widening and renewing itself. Rather we seek the emancipation from Spain of an intelligent and generous nation of international outlook and specific duties in America. Spain is inferior to Cuba in her aptitude for modern work and free government, and finds it necessary to shut off the island (so exuberant with native strength and the creative character) from the productivity of great nations. Spain wishes to maintain, by violently oppressing a useful American nation, the only market for Spanish industries and the revenue with which Cuba is paying Spain’s debts upon the continent and maintaining in leisure and power the favored and unproductive classes who seek — not through their own manly efforts — the rapidly gained and plentiful fortunes which they continue to expect from Spain’s conquests in America, fortunes obtained from the colony’s venal occupations and iniquitous taxes.
Superficial thinking, or a certain kind of brutal disdain — dishonorable because of the ignorance it reveals of those who are shown to be incapable of respecting heroic virtue — can claim (with an incredible forgetfulness of Cuba’s armed intellectual struggle for her freedom throughout this century) that the Cuban revolution is the insignificant longing of an exclusive class of poverty-stricken Cubans living abroad, or an uprising of the preponderance of Negroes in Cuba, or the country’s sacrifice to an unsustainable dream of independence. The son of Cuba, who has been raised in war and emigration for a quarter of a century to such moral, industrial and political abundance, takes second place to the finest human product of any other nation. But that son suffers unspeakable bitterness to see his productive soil — and upon it his strangled human dignity — chained to the obligation of paying, with his free American hands, almost the entire proceeds of his productivity, and the daily and most painful proceeds of his honor, to the needs and vices of the monarchy. The Spanish government’s bureaucratic composition and its continued protection of the worthless and perverse elements of society, through the gifts and land grants of America, prevent it from ever allowing the tormented island of Cuba (at the historic time when her land is being thrown open and the seas are embracing at her feet) to spread wide her ports and her gold-bearing entrails to a world that is surfeited with unused capital and idle masses. In the warmth of a firm republic, that world would find in the island the serenity of ownership and a friendly crossroads.
Cubans recognize the urgent duty imposed upon them by their geographical position in the world at the present time of universal gestation; and although childish observers or the vanity of the proud are unaware of it, they are fully capable, through the power of their intelligence and the impetus of their strength, to fulfill that duty. And they are the ones to fulfill it.
At the mouth of the ocean currents where three continents come together, at the instant when the active advance of humanity is about to stumble against the useless Spanish colony in Cuba, and at the gates of a nation dismayed by the plethora of products it might be able to buy but that it now has to buy from its oppressors, Cuba wants to be free. Cuba wants to be free so that man can achieve his full purpose there, so the world can go to work there, and so Cuba’s hidden riches can be sold in the native markets of America where the interests of the Spanish master now prevent Cuba from buying. Cubans ask nothing from the world but a knowledge of and a respect for their sacrifices, and they are giving their blood to the universe. A superficial study of the national composition of Spain and of Cuba is enough to convince an honest mind of the need and justice of revolution, and of their incompatibility as nations because of their diverse origins and different degrees of development. An honest mind is convinced of the two nations’ objectives which cause them to clash due to the violent subjection of the contemporary industrious American island to the backward European fatherland. It is evident in the modern loss of energy involved in the dependency of an agile and upright people in the world’s most fraternal and hardworking age. It is evident in a throne that is obliged, because of the vice-ridden individual formation of its decadent majorities, to deny the natural marvel of Cuba and the energy in the Cuban character for working together in an effort to resolve Cuba’s own superficial conflicts and those of every nationality in the world.
The harsh and jealous Spanish possessions allied 400 years ago against the harsh but effeminate Moor; unfortunately for Spain, like all conquests fatal to the conqueror, the monarchy became solidified and unified in the conquest of America’s barren lands. The crown grew rich on their products, and with permanent possession of the Indies it quieted down, and under the kings employed the soldierly and adventurous population that composed Spain’s nationality. Laborious work on the land and in industries was handed over to the more learned, as a minor occupation, because the temptation of America attracted the most daring and capable men in the country, even from the lower and uncultured classes, and created — at first hope fully and then with satisfaction — a kind of vast and vagabond order of knighthood. The Spaniard, until recently a sober man, always found fighting and letters sufficient nourishment for his extravagant and exuberant life. America became so wide a haven of solid wealth or temporary gain that Spanish national life and personal character molded themselves to its productivity. There, Cuban riches were rediscovered (riches increased by means of commerce, Creole slavery and industriousness), the sources of which, with the loss of the continental colonies, seemed shut off to them. In the Spain of recent times, a tenacious imitation of luxurious modern life — lacking the industry and enterprise which in Europe’s brilliant nations create and excuse it — has given the Spanish people more of the necessities of life, without a corresponding increase in the sources of production which in personal affairs continue (in very large part) to be the revenue from Cuba. This is Spain in relation to Cuba.
Meanwhile, what is Cuba?
Ever since the liberal turn of the century, under the guidance of her illustrious men in love with the New World’s ideas and practices, Cuba — its insular mind endowed with a singular power of analysis — has been searching among the thoughtful nations and extracting from them an ideal superior to the bitter sweatshop conditions of slavery that so rapidly debased the natives. And when these yearnings for freedom bore fruit in the 1868 revolution, that nation of real men in their first act as a nation liberated the Negro slave who previously gave his master simultaneously an excessive pride and the joys of opulence. Women went off to the mountains dressed in bark cloth to accompany their husbands who were fighting for freedom. And the nation’s illustrious men smiled as they burned down the buildings that housed the parchments and imperiousness. The pampered counselors roamed the woods for 10 long years with the Republic at their heels, at times with nothing to eat but wild roots and wild animals. The elegant youths, their rifles slung over their shoulders, sought a rostrum under the trees. The love-prone dandy, in a soul-felt burst of strength, learned to lop off the heads of tyranny with a single stroke of the machete. In the silence of the forest, the barefoot marquis buried with his own hands the body of the friend he carried upon his back to the grave. Imperfect as a giant child, the Republic was born out of the old nobility and the smooth-chinned democrats; battles were won where 300 men left 507 enemy dead; planted fields, factories and mills sprang up in the mountains made fertile by the revolution. And when the trend toward localization — brought about to please those inexperienced heroes — isolated and corrupted the war, and unsettled it to the point at which the Spaniard was able to gain ground, the courageous and intelligent Cuban people continued to scatter themselves over the capable countries of the world in the most diverse kinds of work. They came in the persons of many of their supporters to seek comfort in the joys of freedom as practiced by the nations of America, to the eclipse of their own. And in their wearisome life, the Cuban people replaced with the power and substance of work the timidity and distrust which is still noted as a detracting and depressing factor, and a result of slavery, in the elements of Cuban society that have been reared closer to the scaffold and to official vice. Those living in Cuba, the veterans and their children or imitators, were accumulating in painful and useless industriousness, under continuous and scurrilous criticism, the indignation now bursting forth with strength of character at the behest of the patricians of our freedom. From the traditions of her characteristically brilliant and successful men; from a reverence for the martyrs of independence; from long practice in war and exile; from the human power of self-denial and creation, and from the knowledge and exercise of a free and industrious life in the exemplary nations — the true Cuban, white or colored, is appearing in political life. He has a variety of learning and professions, an out-of-date sprightliness and inventiveness, the habit of tolerance and the ability to live with his fellow man, going beyond or at least equaling the sources of discord; for indeed the war and a united effort might have been strangled by a Republic constituted suddenly through artificial political relations between masters and slaves, without the sanction and slow testing of a gradual reality. Tempered in the fires of present-day life, this is what the Cuban people are like. They recognize their natural strength and are eager to share it. They speak the world’s living languages and think with facility in the principal ones. They excel because of their superior culture as second to none in the population centers where there is more opportunity for brilliance, and they have formed a firm, reasonable and enterprising character in their modest children. They have lifted themselves by their own bootstraps — in the face of a submissive and faithless colonial society — as a serene people offering themselves fearlessly to the scrutiny of fair-minded men, sure of their sympathy and approval. And will this Cuban national character, through the culpable acquiescence of free nations, live in bondage to the Spanish need for tribute in order to support the leisured classes in Spain who are escaping from the human community in wealth and idleness — leisured classes who in the 10 years of war were stained to the hilt, and can now be stained once more, with consent or aid from the mother republics, in the purest blood of the Cuban nation?
This character structure of the son of Cuba explains both his capacity for independence, which every honest country that knows him will respect, and such a fondness for his emancipation that it would be unjust to disdain or offend him. The Cuban character also explains the vague tendency of the weak or arrogant Cubans, or those unmindful of their country’s energy, to support the island’s emerging society and the social dominion with which they had wanted to rule over it, in a foreign power that might unwisely lend itself to intrude in the island’s natural domestic struggles, a power favoring Cuba’s oligarchic and useless class against its main productive population, the way the French empire favored Maximilian in Mexico. A sensible American republic will never contribute to thus perpetuate, under the false pretext of Cuba’s incapacity, the spirit of mastery which political wisdom and humaneness advise uprooting in a people placed by Nature at the peaceful and prosperous crossroads of nations.
The United States, for example, would prefer to contribute to the stability of Cuba’s freedom with sincere friendship for its independent people who love the States, and Cuba would make available to the States all its licentiousness, to be an accomplice of a worthless and pretentious oligarchy which had sought there nothing but a way to rapidly acquire local class power — truly infamous in the island — over the superior class, that of its productive fellow citizens. The United States is certainly not where men will dare to seek breeding grounds for oppression. The Cuban’s unqualified talent for his calling and his government, and for the performing of duties assigned by his country in humanity’s upward climb, took on new life and was to end in the definitive outbreak of war. The Cuban nation was bursting with discontent, bound to a master of incorrigible national composition, and is paying (with almost the entire proceeds from its scorned productivity in the endless struggle between Spanish interests — powerless to shut off the only market for Spain in the island — and the reprisals of the American Union) not only the current opprobrious obligations of the American Union’s rapacious occupation because of the greed which is stagnating that union, but is also paying the debt contracted by Spain to drown it in blood during the ten years of the 1868 independence war. And Cuba is paying the debts of every one of the wars undertaken by Spain in America after the independence of Spain’s own colonies and the United States, so that Spain may reestablish its European monarchic dominion in the free American republics. Even the expenses of the African colony must be met by Cuba. And to that confessed tax, much more bitter than the tax upon tea which caused Boston to rise in rebellion, is added the island’s silent tax which its inhabitants — Cubans and Spaniards alike — are paying to those commissioned by law to mock them or make them comply. In Cuba not even the law is recognized without a tax, nor does blame fall upon the delinquent who is able to buy his redemption; and public immorality is so common that an intimate friendship with the thief, and daily connivance with him, come to resemble stainless acts to those who boast of being honest. Spanish vice is making the island decay. And the taxes from which the Spanish political class derives its main support weigh upon Cuba like the double hardship of expenditure and dishonor.
It is lawful to desire that Cuba employ in its own development, to the obvious advantage of the nations around it, the money it pays to maintain over itself the government that corrupts it. Cuba welcomes upon its own soil, with the forcible exclusion of its sons, the needy Spaniard who is fleeing his miserable nation by the boatload to dislodge the Cuban in Cuba from his workbench and from ownership of his land. When the Cuban war broke off in 1878 because of its own fatigue, the farsighted revolutionaries understood that the irremediable fabric of the Spanish nation, based upon its possession of the colonies, would prevent Spain from granting any political reforms foreign to its nature or hostile to its interests — reforms which a party of Cuban pacifists have been demanding for 17 years with no more success than the gaining of changes brought about by one of the island’s advisory bodies which has neither authority nor sanction. Because this advisory body is composed principally of privileged Spanish authorities and an intimidated minority of Cuban nobility, it will never propose for the island any relief at all that is counter to Spanish interests or a threat to its own special privileges. The revolution had come with an elected, republican-based party, preparing in an orderly manner all the vital elements of Cuban independence, for the purpose of holding them at the point of action for the instant when, hopeless of any Spanish reforms, the definitive and immortal revolution would burst forth with a single voice, without reservation or retreat. Two generations: the veterans and their sons; two forces for independence: the combatants of the island and those from abroad to help them fight, joined forces for three years of organization in the enthusiasm of wisdom and the power of discipline. The entire island of Cuba, radically convinced of Spain’s unwillingness to deprive itself of the colonial exploitation supporting it, and its reluctance to give the Cubans a better life, political and otherwise, rose in arms on February 24, 1895, not to lay its guns aside until the triumph of the Republic.
What obstacle could be encountered by this revolution born of the Cuban’s conviction of his aptitude for work and government; born of the bloody payment of his finest sweat to the vice-ridden politicians and indolent nationals of the country which expels the sons of the soil in order to settle the privileged Spaniard upon their small piece of land? The revolution springs from the perennial memory, aroused by daily reasons for anger, of those extraordinary men who rescued their slaves from leg irons and arose from their rich man’s armchairs to break the Spanish scepter with their bare hands. It came into being because of the Cuban’s devout and ineffable yearning for the spiritual integration of the uncultured Creole whose natural luster perishes when not put to use, or whose disheveled family runs away to the hills out of fear of not having paid the tyrant his taxes. What obstacles could such a revolution encounter? The present composition of Cuba’s forces demonstrates that the high-minded revolution — which will regard the timidity of the sluggish Cubans indulgently, and watch over the dignity of all the social forces — will easily defeat an enemy whose discontented and partially formed army fights unwillingly in war against freedom, and whose treasury can no longer bind the island as it did 25 years ago. For it cannot even shoulder its regular burdens, or approach the well-to-do Spaniard who denies to the war the fortune he put into safekeeping in the mother country, or, as in 1868, seized the property of Cubans who were wealthy then but are poor now. Cuba has both Spanish and Cuban populations. Out of the Spanish population, that element which, caught by its wealth in the sudden revolution of Yara, profited (for the now fewer masses of voluntaries) from the rancor of the more abject Spaniards against the Creole who considered them master, is already dead due to the indifference of its liberal and Creole-minded compatriots to the system of hatred and punishment.
And in those same masses that social anger, secret base of political ferocity, has diminished if not disappeared with the general suffering under the tyranny of Cubans and Spaniards alike. Out of that same class much has been drawn together in the heart of Cuba, with wife and children and a certain well-being. And if out of an unjust fear, those Cubans by adoption are still turning their eyes to the North, as if looking for protection from the reprisals of the Cuban Republic which will never occur, they will turn them, no longer ashamed and repentant, to the guns which they would have to hold against the breasts of their sons. In the presence of war, Cubans bow to the general law of human nature which leads generous men, cultured or un cultured, to the side of sacrifice — humanity’s purest joy — and keeps the egoists — the world’s obstacles — from the side of those who make the sacrifices. Political titles are new garments for this condition where men draw apart; and the success of religions and republics, carrying much religious fervor in their humane piety, points out that the stubborn driving force of the disconsolate, and the farsighted wisdom that makes use of this strength which might otherwise drift away, can always accomplish more than a shamefaced loathing for the sores of the poor, and the fondness of sedentary men for their house slippers and the sinecures of life. And the Cuban Negro — who finds relief from social separation in his own culture and in his friendship for the fair-minded white man, and who does not divide white men and Negroes any more than the ancient nations of the world divided nobles and peasants — will rebel only against the one who supposes him capable of attempting a crime, because of the anger which would reveal his true inferiority, against the peace of his country.
On soil enriched by the sister death of servants and masters, the sublime emancipation of slaves by their Cuban masters erased all hatred for slavery. It is a singular honor for the Cuban nation, of which one must respectfully ask recognition, that without demagogic flattery or a hasty mixture of the different degrees of culture, she now shows the observer a freed man more cultured and devoid of rancor than that of any other nation on earth. Closer to freedom, the Negro peasant flies to his rifle, which in the 10 years of war he has never used in defiance of the law, and is known purely for the joyful love with which he greets — and the tenderness with which he regards — the man with the complexion of a master who walks at his side, or behind him, in defense of freedom. The only nations having anything to fear from justice are those refusing to practice it. The crime of slavery must be purged with at least the sufficiently mild penance of some social mortification. From the free Cuban countryside, at the edge of the grave where we bury white and Negro heroes together, we proclaim that among humankind one can hardly breathe fresher or more blameless air than that which in a spirit of reverence surrounds both Negroes and white men alike upon the road that leads from common worth to affection and peace.
With the power of this justice; with the force of indignation felt by the son of Cuba under the oppression and hardships with which Spain punished it in the war of independence and denied the most insignificant reforms in 17 years of a useless policy of waiting; with the responsibility of Cuba’s duty in the work of alliance and action for which, at the meeting-point of oceans the nations of the globe, are preparing — from one end of their land to the other the Cubans, bearing no hatred for their oppressor and by the strict methods of an enlightened war, have again demanded of the ultimate fairness of guns the status of a Republic, one which will permit the son of Cuba to use his character and aptitudes and give him the right to open his sealed-off land to full commerce with those nations which Nature has placed at its doorstep, a right that is attracting the Cuban’s general ability; for the Cuban stands second to none in the pride and order of liberty.
Fully aware of their obligations to America and to the world, the Cuban people today are bleeding from the Spanish bullet because of their task of opening to three continents the independent Republic which in a land of men will offer to mankind a friendly home and free trade.
We ask for no assistance here from Spanish America, because whatever nation refuses it to us will be endorsing its own dishonor. We silently show to the people of the United States, so they may do what they should, these legions of men who are fighting for what they fought for yesterday — legions marching unaided to the conquest of the freedom which is to open to the United States the island which Spanish interests are closing to it. Certain of the answer, we yet ask the world if it considers indifferent or impious the human spirit by which a generous nation is sacrificing itself to become accessible to that world.
In proof of the high purposes and cultured methods of Cuba’s War for Independence, and in testimony of their singular gratitude to the New York Herald, the Delegate of the Cuban Revolutionary Party and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Liberation, duly empowered until the present date as representatives-elect of the revolution, do hereby affix their signatures.
The Delegate
José Martí
The Commander-in-Chief
Máximo Gómez