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Cuba’s Most Universal Man

The small museum on Calle Paula in Havana seems inauspicious, yet it is the birthplace of a man whose impact on history, politics, letters, the arts, academe, and popular culture continues to be felt more than a century and a half after his birth in 1853. A revolutionary who died in battle, a warrior with words, transnational in outreach and yet fiercely Cuban, Martí became his homeland’s national hero. He was a pivotal figure in the history of the Americas, initiated a literary movement in Spanish letters, introduced U.S. authors to Latin America, created a literary bridge with his newspaper chronicles, produced unforgettable children’s literature in Spanish, translated a popular American novel, and came to claim a defining role in United States–Cuban relations. Brought to a dramatic end by Spanish gunfire in 1895, Martí’s life today means many things to many people. The measure of his days goes far beyond a brief biographic sketch, yet introductory comments that provide a framework for this study are essential. Starting on Calle Paula provides a context linking past and present.

My first visit to the Casa Natal in the early 1990s—an especially bleak time in the Special Period—was marked by urgency. My time in Cuba was short, and the taxi driver who took me to the site was reluctant to wait. My only camera was a cheap Instamatic, and I had brought only a small booklet for notations. There were no chairs, and so all note-taking was done standing up. I started downstairs, where a modest display case held the shackle that the sixteen-year-old Martí had worn while in jail in Havana after he was arrested by Spanish authorities. Although that first visit was wearying—I stood for hours taking notes in a small notebook—it fascinated me and left lasting impressions. It also provided tangible connections with my subject. While the birthplace is not a biography and its displays are not strictly arranged in chronological order, its objects and documents reflect Martí’s prodigious life and prolific writing. Today one can take a virtual tour via the Internet and experience a rich visual context to accompany a print account of his life.1

The heavy shackle that I saw at the Casa Natal testifies to the sacrifices that Martí made both in Cuba and in exile. Missing from the museum, however, are any clearly explanatory references to María Mantilla de Romero, the girl presumed to be his daughter, who was born in the United States, and who brought those items to Cuba when she came for the centennial of his birth in 1953.² The nation’s flag at the entryway, the small Cuban flag he kept at hand, and the Cuban flag badge that he was wearing when he died confirm his essential and intrinsic ties to Cuba. The objects of his personal life—pictures of family members, an early letter to his mother, his wedding album, photos with his son José Francisco, and the book of poems dedicated to his son—are testaments to the importance of family to him. A gift from his students in Guatemala, where he was acclaimed as a master teacher, and an original copy of his magazine for children are examples of his success in imparting knowledge. Copies of editions and letters, writing desks, and the ink and blotter sets he used give the dimensions of Martí the writer. The Casa Natal also has the only oil painting of Martí done during his lifetime, a portrait done in New York in 1891 that shows Martí seated at his office desk at 120 Front Street, with a feather pen in hand. The museum’s slide displays conclude by identifying Martí’s ideas with the Cuban Revolution launched by Fidel Castro, an assessment with which many would disagree but which nonetheless links him to his homeland’s politics and government in the twenty-first century.

A photo taken January 28, 1899, shows the façade of the Calle Paula house as the setting for a tribute to Martí organized by Cuban émigrés, and this photo became one of the proofs that the house was Martí’s birthplace. It shows Carmen Zayas Bazán and José Francisco Martí on the left balcony and Martí’s mother and one of his sisters on the right balcony.³ Much more than I have described here is in store for the visitor who can access slides of the Casa Natal exhibition online, and I encourage those reading these pages to take the tour. But now I turn to a more conventional introduction to Martí with dates and pertinent references to the topic of race.

FIGURE 1. Street scene in Cuba, circa 1855. El Casero, the Parish Hawker in Cuba. By permission of Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations (1240239).

Mid-nineteenth-century Cuba was a slave-holding society and was one of Spain’s last overseas colonies. The island’s proximity to the United States—only ninety miles from Key West to the northern shores of Cuba—and its resources, including slaves, made it a tempting target for acquisition by its northern neighbor. As early as the time of Thomas Jefferson, the United States sought to buy Cuba, and the year José Martí was born, 1853, coincided with renewed efforts by the United States to purchase the island from Spain. Although Martí was the son of immigrants from Spain and briefly spent time in Spain with his parents as a young boy, his schooling in Cuba under the tutelage of a progressive educator, Rafael María de Mendive, led him to espouse the cause of Cuban independence. Martí’s short life (he died at forty-two) was framed by an interconnected triangle of interests: the desire by Cuban patriots for freedom from Spain, Cuban fear of U.S. expansionist designs on the island, and the institution of slavery in both Cuba and the United States. All of these factors informed his writing about race.

Martí was the first child and only son of Mariano Martí, a Valencian, and Leonor Pérez, from the Canary Islands. The family was of modest means, and Martí’s father, an honest but sometimes stubborn man, held a series of jobs in various neighborhoods of Havana and elsewhere. As a nine-year-old, Martí accompanied his father to the countryside in what is today the province of Matanzas and witnessed scenes of slavery that he later described in his notes and in his poetry. Don Mariano had been charged with keeping slave ships from unloading slaves in Cuba, an unrealistic assignment, but one that he sought, nonetheless, to fulfill. Ostensibly, Spain and her colony no longer trafficked in slaves.

Among Martí’s notes, written in New York and entrusted to his disciple, Gonzalo de Quesada y Aróstegui, are descriptions under the title of “Mis negros” (My blacks) of childhood memories of Matanzas, including his fascination with a black man named Tomás: “Tomás was everything for me, Mr. Tomás, the Mister Tomás, His Excellency Mr. Don Tomás, His Majesty Tomás. He was everything for me. He was my friend. He was good and had a new and artistic spirit. He delighted me with his singing and whistling.”4 Under the same heading, Martí gives a list of topics that appear to refer to scenes or individuals he remembers. His categories indicate a dual vision: he saw blacks who were imbued with noble characteristics, and he recognized that enslaved Africans endured dreadful punishments.⁵

Martí excelled in school from an early age, and his studies in Cuba introduced him to events in the United States and to literature in English. Jorge Mañach’s biography describes Martí’s friendship with Fermín Valdés Domínguez, a boy from a well-to-do family, and how the two followed the events of the U.S. Civil War, Fermín sympathetic to the Confederacy and José (Pepe), influenced by Uncle Tom’s Cabin, pulling for the North (27). Martí joined schoolmates in Havana in 1865 wearing a black armband for a week to express mourning for the death of Lincoln, who had issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

His mentor at the Escuela Superior Municipal de Varones, a city high school for boys, was Rafael María de Mendive, who excelled as poet, playwright, magazine publisher, and translator. Mendive instilled in his students, especially Martí, a deep political yearning for Cuban independence. The 1868 start of the Ten Years’ War, an armed uprising by Cuban guerrillas against colonial forces, elicited Martí’s sympathy with the rebels and confirmed his political commitment to complete freedom for the island.

In January 1869, taking advantage of a brief period of press freedom, the young rebel sympathizer published two pieces that have a connection to race. In the short poetic drama Abdala, which serves as an allegory for Cuban independence struggles, the title character is a young warrior, and the setting is Nubia, the ancient African kingdom. In Martí’s play, Abdala stirs others to join his patriotic efforts to turn back invaders and returns wounded but defiant in the last scene. In the Ten Years’ War, since much of the uprising was in a heavily black part of Cuba with ample black participation, opponents sought to cast it in racial terms and fan fears of a slave rebellion. Since Nubia transparently represents Cuba, Martí’s play makes an African connection, but one where his black hero, Abdala, represents the entire nation, of both blacks and whites. Martí clearly identifies himself with the hero. A second anticolonial subversive text, El Diablo Cojuelo (The Lame Devil), lighter in tone than Abdala, largely makes its points with ironies. It denounces plantation owners unwilling to accept abolition and unwilling to support the insurrection, and it sets forth the choice that Cubans had to make: either Yara (independence) or Madrid (colonial status).

As an adolescent, Martí put his beliefs into practice. He and his friend and schoolmate Fermín Valdés Domínguez composed a letter that accused a fellow student of supporting Spain. The letter was discovered by Spanish authorities, upon which Martí claimed authorship of the letter and received a harsh punishment. The initial decree of death was commuted to six years at hard labor, and when he was only seventeen, Martí began his sentence, toiling with a leg iron joined to a chain around his waist at the San Lázaro rock quarries. A reprieve after six months sent him in deportation to Spain, an action that no doubt spared his life but left him with a groin injury and a bitter taste of Spanish justice.

During his exile in Spain from 1871 to 1874, Martí earned university degrees in law and in philosophy and letters. He took active part in Cuban political circles, and he supported himself through private classes and translations from English. In the province of Aragón, he lived in relative tranquility, formed friendships, learned to appreciate the valor and integrity of the common man in Spain—as opposed to the government and politicians—and fell in love. He later recalled those days as one of the happiest times in his life.

In 1874, Martí left Spain and traveled through France to England. In Paris he met Victor Hugo and received a copy of Hugo’s pamphlet Mes fils (My Sons, 1874), a work he translated into Spanish and published the next year, and one that reinforced the Cuban author’s interest in both the theory and practice of translation. From England, he booked passage on a steamer to Mexico, where his family had relocated.

Mexico was influential in Martí’s life. He met Manuel Mercado, a young Mexican lawyer, who became a lifelong and trusted friend, and he began a successful writing career. He wrote about Cuba for Mexican journals and began to access U.S. sources for his articles. Most importantly for the topic of race, Mexico awakened the young Cuban’s consciousness of the American Indian. In Mexico, and later in Guatemala, he realized the importance of indigenous populations to the continent’s future, and he recognized how they, like the slaves in Cuba, had suffered under colonial abuse. In Mexico Martí was also introduced to and became engaged to an elegant young Cuban woman from a wealthy family, Carmen Zayas Bazán. After a brief trip to Cuba, using a Mexican passport, Martí accepted a teaching position in Guatemala, where he taught courses in language and literature and gained fame as a teacher. With his teaching post secure, Martí returned to Mexico to keep his promise of marriage to Carmen Zayas Bazán, and in January 1878 he and his bride arrived in Guatemala. The shadow over their arrival was the death of María García Granados, a young girl who had fallen in love with Martí and was heartbroken when he came back a married man. References in Martí’s later poetry to the death of María García Granados remain an enduring aspect of his life in popular memory.6

Travels in Central America brought the Cuban into contact with racial and cultural contexts that were new to him. On his way to Guatemala from Cuba, Martí had stopped in Yucatan, where he became acquainted with the iconic Chac Mool figure and likely visited the Mayan sites of Uxmal and Chichén Itzá. He traveled rustically through Belize, and in Livingston, a Guatemalan port city, he recorded his impressions of the Garifuna population. He praised what he considered to be their pure blackness, unmixed with other races, as a joy to the eyes and marveled at their loquacious speech and manner. Martí did not use the term Garifuna and describes the people he saw as non-racially mixed, although Garifuna origins include both African and indigenous influences. He also included some words, at least as he perceived the sounds, from the Garifuna language. The traveler lauded the community for its industry and hospitality worthy of admiration for “vivacity, generosity, brotherhood and cleanliness” and called the town “moral, pure, hard-working” (EC 5: 48–49). Martí’s depiction of Livingston contrasts greatly with the unflattering commentary about blacks in Curaçao that he made in 1880 on his way to Venezuela (19: 127–36).

In Guatemala, at the request of the government, Martí produced a play to honor the nation’s independence, and called the work Patria and Liberty (Indian Drama). In it the playwright gave clear evidence of his identification with indigenous suffering. He unleashed a fierce attack on the twofold abuse of the native population by Spanish colonial rule and by the church.

In 1878, the Pact of Zanjón ended the Ten Years’ War and offered pardons for insurrectionists, which allowed Martí and his wife to return to Cuba. While working in law offices in Havana, Martí met Juan Gualberto Gómez, a well-educated mulatto with whom he maintained contact through the years and with whom he concurred on most issues dealing with blacks and whites in Cuba. Martí’s fiery rhetoric soon got him into trouble, and he was arrested for political activity and again exiled to Spain. In September 1879, he sailed from Cuba, leaving behind his wife and baby son, José.

The exile spent little time in Spain, realizing that Europe provided scant opportunity for either political work or ways to provide for his family. He decided to go to the United States and undertook fervent study of English, aiming to work with Cuban émigrés who lived in the United States but maintained loyalty to Cuba. With these plans in mind, Martí arrived in New York City in January of 1880.

Far from the palms of his native Cuba and alone in what he was to call an “Iron City,” Martí keenly felt the absence of his wife and son. He wrote to a friend in Cuba and got help in securing their passage to New York, but their arrival in March 1880 did little to ease Martí’s burdens. Carmen Zayas Bazán did not share her husband’s commitment to Cuban independence from Spain and criticized him for devoting less attention to the family’s future than to political considerations. In October 1880, she chose to return to Cuba, taking their son with her. It was a breach in the marriage that never truly healed, and Martí alluded, at least obliquely, to his sense of betrayal in his poetry.7 He turned for solace to Carmen Miyares de Mantilla, a Venezuelan who ran a boarding house in New York, and in “Carmita” found a true companion who shared his political ideals. He is by all accounts the father of her daughter María Mantilla, who was in turn the mother of actor Cesar Romero, who proudly claimed Martí as his grandfather.

In 1881 Martí headed to Venezuela, where he spent five months teaching and writing and where tender memories of his son produced a book of poems called Ismaelillo (Little Ishmael), which was published in 1882. In Venezuela Martí stirred minds and emotions with his oratory and writing, and before he left, the director of a major newspaper in Caracas arranged for him to send articles from New York. It was the start of a defining aspect of his career.

When Martí returned to New York in 1881, he began writing articles for the Venezuelan periodical La Opinión Nacional. Before long he was writing for La Nación of Buenos Aires and other newspapers in Latin America, and over the next fourteen years in the United States, from 1881 to 1895, Martí became an “epic chronicler” of North American life. Martí used a variety of New York newspapers and national magazines as primary sources for many of his chronicles. He wrote not as a researcher but as a literary portraitist of U.S. life, absorbing, translating, and adding commentary to what he gleaned from press accounts combined with his own observations. His essays about the United States in the 1880s and 1890s represent a detailed description of the social, economic, political, literary, and cultural milieu of an increasingly aggressive and expansionist nation, one whose eagle came to symbolize, for Martí, imperialist design and deceitful intent. Martí’s legitimate fear of U.S. imperialism in regard to Cuba is clearly alluded to in many of his works, including the prologue to Versos sencillos, his most intensely personal poetry.⁸

In New York, the exiled Cuban made contact with other Cubans and Latin Americans, was active in Spanish American literary circles, and took on many tasks. He lectured, did contract translation work from English to Spanish, taught Spanish at Central Evening School, and helped found a school, La Liga, where black Cubans could study. In addition, he held diplomatic posts for Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, reported on the 1889–90 Pan American Conference hosted by U.S. Secretary of State James G. Blaine, and represented Spanish American interests at the Inter-American Monetary Commission held in Washington, D.C., in 1891.

Also in New York Martí met for the first time with Antonio Maceo, Cuba’s “Bronze Titan,” and Máximo Gómez of the Dominican Republic, the two main leaders of the independence movement, both of them veterans of the Ten Years’ War. Gómez initially sought to relegate the writer to a secondary role in the planning of a new war against Spain, but Martí countered in a famous statement in his 1884 letter to the general, “A nation is not founded … the way a military camp is run” (EC 17: 384).

As a writer Martí covered a range of genres. In addition to producing newspaper articles and keeping up an extensive correspondence, he wrote a serialized novel, composed poetry, translated extensively, and published four issues of a children’s magazine, La Edad de Oro (The Golden Age). A brief sojourn in August 1890 in the Catskill Mountains produced the book of poems for which he is best known around the world, Versos sencillos. The intensely personal unity of Versos sencillos begins with the line, “I am a sincere man.” The poems in this work include many references to his life and thoughts and have made this work a source for biographers as well as for literary studies.

Martí’s style is difficult to categorize. He was a master of aphorisms and of long and complex sentences. Through the surprising images he created in Ismaelillo, he became a principal initiator of Spanish American modernismo, the renewal of Spanish letters that sprang from the American continent. With his ringside seat at the emerging scenes of expansion and industry in North America, he composed chronicles that linked him to Latin American consciousness of the Modern Age and Modernity. In these chronicles he combined elements of literary portraiture, dramatic narration, and dioramic scope. His poetry offered fresh and astonishing visual concepts along with deceptively simple sentiments. As an orator, Martí exhorted with cascading structure, powerful aphorisms, intense descriptive scenes, and compelling cadences. Throughout his writing Martí made reference to historical figures and events; alluded to authors, titles, and examples from literature; and noted items of current news and cultural matters. For all these reasons Martí can be difficult to read and presents enormous challenges to his translators. Many of his allusions are subject to conjecture.

Because Martí wrote so much—twenty-seven volumes’ worth of essays, drama, poetry, novels, notebook entries, and translations—reached so many, and has become such a popular subject, information about his life and works has suffered distortion and misrepresentation on a large scale. Internet sites have vastly compounded the errors. One example of the numerous mistakes concerns the use of lines of verse from Versos sencillos in renditions of music called Guantanamera or under the heading Guajira Guantanamera. A common misperception, one that even appears in some academic books, is that Martí wrote a song or has a poem called “Guantanamera.”9

From 1891 on, Martí dedicated himself primarily to organizing and raising funds for the Cuban Revolutionary Party. He became a figure of inspiration and legendary influence in the Cuban communities in the United States, and his success among these groups, especially cigar workers in Florida, was extraordinary. Martí sought a political future for Cuba that would fulfill the aims of the Cuban Revolutionary Party—independence from Spain and freedom from interference by the United States. He also hoped to create a revolution in Cuba that would not accede to military control—and he argued forcefully in Patria, the journal of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, for a spirit of brotherhood between the races in Cuba.

No portrait of Martí’s life would be complete without an accounting of the extraordinary impact he had as a person on those who knew him. His personal correspondence is replete with warm and respectful language and messages of encouragement and compassion. He radiated energy. Blanca Z. de Baralt, who knew him for many years in New York, described him as a loyal friend, good listener, true gentleman, and one thoughtful of others and generous to a fault. She wrote of his concern over taking an appropriate gift to a five-year-old girl in Tampa, the daughter of a tobacco worker, at a time when he was immersed in a sea of projects and worries. She quoted the comment of a poet who affirmed that “someone who has not spoken intimately with Martí cannot know the fascinating power that human speech can hold” (58). Horatio Rubens, a lawyer who assisted with labor issues confronting Key West tobacco workers, recalled the time he first met the Cuban patriot: “I had never met a more magnetic man, never perhaps even imagined a man of so extraordinary a personality” (30). He also described Martí’s genius for drawing together forces for the war: “He attracted new followers by his magical sincerity and selflessness. Once touched by these qualities in him, disappointed hearts responded to his words” (28).

Néstor Carbonell, in a letter to Havana’s historian, Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, demonstrated how Martí’s impact was felt even many years later. Having been responsible for inviting the orator-organizer to Tampa in 1891, Carbonell wrote in 1932: “Let’s forge ahead with Martí we who cherish his memory…. Not a single day goes by that I don’t think about Martí, work on Martí. And perhaps it’s because of this that I believe that although the night is dark it can be filled with stars” (Epistolario 32). Cintio Vitier, a master interpreter of Martí, believed that it requires both intellectual and affective forces to appreciate José Martí’s legacy. According to Vitier, Martí the person, as experienced by those who knew him, and how that person shines through and is perpetuated in the written word, is “definitely the most profound work that he left us” (Vida y Obra 9).

On May 19, 1895, Martí was felled by Spanish bullets near Dos Ríos in eastern Cuba. He was killed just weeks after he had landed in Cuba to join the new armed insurrection against Spain. In death he became a martyr of the island’s independence struggle, the national hero of his beloved fatherland, and Cuba’s most universal man.