Martí and Race, an Overview
Ibrahim Hidalgo, a historian at the Center for Martí Studies in Havana, was concluding his remarks to a group of visitors at the site that memorializes Antonio Maceo’s death at the hands of Spanish troops in 1896, when he made a seemingly surprising statement. He began by calling the mother of mulatto general Antonio Maceo, Mariana Grajales, a woman who lost all of her sons in the armed insurrections against Spain, the mother of the nation. He continued by explaining that she and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the father of the nation, symbolically represent both the parentage of independence and the fusion of black and white in forging national identity. Céspedes, the white landowner who issued the Cry for Independence in 1868, the Grito de Yara, and at the same time freed his slaves, and Mariana Grajales, whose son fought and died in the 1895 uprising planned by José Martí, are thus combined as mother and father of Cuba.1 The image is an idealistic one that erases racial alignments, links the two major struggles for independence (1868 and 1895), and summarizes a contemporary Cuban vision of race and nationhood. And in many ways it echoes the optimistic and symbolic language that Martí used in writing about race and independence in the 1890s, as he forged the Cuban Revolutionary Party.
The institution of slavery, linking the United States and Cuba during much of the nineteenth century, has a direct bearing on what Martí thought and wrote about race. Slavery, its supporters, and the efforts to abolish it are all part of the historical context for the thesis of this book. Wealthy planters in Cuba desired annexation to the northern neighbor to escape English attempts, after 1806, to halt the slave trade, and Southerners in the United States looked to Cuba as a potential slave state or states to buttress their numbers. The conditions of slavery, emancipation for those enslaved, and Cuban independence from Spain also form an essential framework for any study of Martí, because he linked freedom for slaves to political liberty for his homeland and justly feared U.S. desires to acquire the island, whether by slave-owners or as part of the post–Civil War reach of manifest destiny.
A third factor, pertinent to the question of slavery and the aspirations of former slaves in Cuba, and thus to Martí, is the example of the Haitian Revolution. At the end of the eighteenth century, slaves who rebelled in Saint Domingue took savage revenge on their white masters, and they ultimately defeated the French. Their victory sent shock waves throughout slave-owning communities in the Caribbean, including the southern United States. The creation of a black republic in 1804 and the ravages and reprisals that had led to its creation became a scare tactic that was used by the Spanish colonial government for nearly a century—that is to say, up until the time that Martí was orchestrating the 1895 war for independence.
Many historians have fully described and documented the centuries of slavery in Cuba. This book by no means attempts to duplicate their efforts. However, the African imprint on Cuban life, on the Cuban struggle for independence, and on José Martí as a citizen of a nineteenth-century Spanish colony requires some contextual grounding. Slavery persisted in Cuba far longer than in the rest of Spanish America. In the nineteenth century slave labor in Cuba helped feed the world demand for sugar, enriched the plantation aristocracy, and engendered corruption on a large scale as officials accepted bribes and engineered schemes to foil British monitoring of treaty obligations. Slaves also symbolized the island’s yearning for freedom, whether from a single master or from a distant motherland.
Slaves were kept in line through savage punishments, and a continuing supply from Africa replaced those who died from a grueling work pace, especially in the cane fields. Rural slaves worked on coffee plantations and in tobacco fields, but the field and factory model of the ingenio, or sugar plantation, was the most brutal system for Africans. To meet the demands of the harvest schedule, cutting gangs on the ingenios were sent to toil in the mill’s production process after their labor in the fields. For some slaves this meant enduring work days of seventeen hours or more. Slaves sought relief from such abysmal conditions through flight (cimarronaje), sabotage, plots to rebel, and suicide. After the Haitian Revolution, when Cuban planters lived in fear of a slave uprising on their home ground, they took fierce reprisals, with no quarter given against any whiff of rebellion. One example is from 1844, called the Year of the Lash. Nine years before Martí was born, a purported uprising, the conspiracy of La Escalera (the Ladder) was mercilessly crushed, and hundreds of blacks and mulattoes were tortured, imprisoned, or killed. In Cuba Libre, Paul Dosal gives a succinct account of what those suspected of plotting endured: “The torturer stripped a suspect and strapped him or her to the ladder by the wrists and ankles. One or two men stood over the victim with a bullwhip and flogged the exposed torso until the alleged conspirator started talking. If the person did not succumb in one session, he or she would be brought back the next day for another” (26). As Dosal also notes, light-skinned mulattoes, even those with education and who were born free or had obtained manumission, were not automatically spared. The Spanish colonial elite showed no mercy and took no chances (26).
FIGURE 2. La Libertad de Cuba, poster circa 1875. Made in New York during the Ten Years’ War. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62-7530).
The persistence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, terrifying conditions for slaves once they were brought ashore, and the intransigence of the Spanish Crown in maintaining the slave system all formed part of the racial climate into which José Martí was born and raised. A Cuban literary circle with abolitionist tendencies fostered by Domingo del Monte in the 1830s and 1840s and the appearance of Cuban antislavery texts (mostly published abroad) provided a modest level of challenge to the colonial system. Nonetheless, not until the Grito de Yara of 1868, when Carlos Manuel de Céspedes called for freedom from Spain and freed his slaves, did a sustained effort to change the status quo for enslaved Africans gain headway.
Some Comparative Notes
In the nineteenth century, the United States and Cuba both claimed societies where human beings were regarded as chattel, although the historical circumstances varied significantly. Cuba held slaves throughout the island, while the United States had both slave-holding and non-slave states. In both cases slaves could be found working in urban zones. In Cuba, however, as Franklin Knight notes, a relatively small number of slaves brought in during the 1800s went to urban areas: “The vast majority of the Africans imported during the nineteenth century—more than 80 percent of those brought in between 1840 and 1860—ended up working on the plantations of the interior” (59–60). In Cuba the slave trade persisted until the 1860s, but in the United States, a British-American treaty ended the traffic from Africa in 1808. Cuba required a preponderance of males brought from Africa to maintain the plantation economy, especially sugar cane, because slave populations did not reproduce sufficiently to supply demand. The United States, however, relied upon those born on American soil to ensure a continuing slave population.
In both Cuba and the United States armed conflict hastened the demise of slavery. In the United States, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, enacted as law on January 1, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, granted freedom to slaves living in states still in rebellion and prompted African Americans to join the Union cause. In the 1868–78 Cuban fight for independence, the prospect of abolition drew slaves to the insurrection forces. Martí, as this book will point out, essentially misrepresented the end of slavery in both instances. He depicted Lincoln’s proclamation as slavery banished by the stroke of a pen and claimed that the Ten Years’ War (1868–78) had given Cuban slaves their freedom. In truth, it took the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution to make abolition complete in the United States, and the last vestiges of slavery lingered in Cuba until 1886.
Some of the iconic representations of the African American experience in Cuba and the United States also show contrasts. In the United States the image of a black man hanged from a tree is associated with post–Civil War lynchings, often viewed by a crowd. In Cuba the slave hanging from a tree, like the one Martí saw as a boy, was typically a runaway slave who chose suicide to end a life of torment. Martí’s writing, as described in chapters 4 and 5, records both of these images.
Scope of This Chapter
This chapter gives salient examples of what is frequently cited or portrayed about Martí and race and also describes perspectives that major scholars have brought to the subject, especially in regard to racial conflicts in the North American context and black/white relations in Cuba.2 The chapters that follow explore the thesis of this book and demonstrate the extent to which Martí’s living in and writing about the United States expanded his ethnic experiences, enhanced his racial vocabulary, significantly increased his writing about race relations, and influenced his thinking about race in Cuba.
Key Martí Works about Race
The essay “Mi raza” (My Race), published in the patriotic journal Patria, is probably the best known of Martí’s extended comments on race relations. Composed in April 1893, while he was planning for the next insurgency against Spain, its aim was to unite all Cubans—blacks, whites, and mulattoes—in the cause of Cuban independence. The tenor of the piece is idealistic, and in it Martí famously proclaims that there is no race but the human race and that for a person to speak of “my race” is redundant. It is here that Martí states: “Everything that divides men, everything that sorts them, separates them and categorizes them, is a sin against humanity” (2: 298). Further, he proclaims: “Affinity of character is stronger among men than affinity of color” (2: 299). He reminds his readers that white-skinned Gauls were enslaved in Roman times and that the souls of white men and black men have risen together from the battlefields of Cuba. He emphatically claims that there is no danger of a race war in Cuba and that there will not be one. He concludes by saying that there is greatness in Cuba in both blacks and whites.
“Mi raza” appears in numerous anthologies and texts, is widely available in English translation, and is increasingly taught in the United States as a part of American Studies and Latino Studies. For many it is an introduction to Martí’s ideas about race, and it is often the piece on which descriptions of his thoughts on black/white relations are based. But, just as Martí is far more than the poetic source for the words to “Guajira Guantanamera” and far more than Cesar Romero’s grandfather, so “Mi raza” provides only a partial understanding of its author’s extensive and multifaceted writing about race and race relations.
An encounter with slavery in the Cuban countryside in 1862 is the basis for the other most-cited references in regard to race. As a nine-year-old, Martí accompanied his father to Hanábana in the province of Matanzas, where don Mariano was charged with keeping slavers from landing with new cargos—a formidable task. There Martí saw firsthand the horrors endured by enslaved Africans. He recounted his reaction, many years later, in notes likely written in New York between 1885 and 1895: “And blacks? Can anyone who has seen a black man whipped not feel himself forever in his debt? I saw it, saw it when I was a boy, and my cheeks still burn with shame at the memory … I saw it and I swore from that time forward to come to their defense” (22: 189). Similar recollections appear in poem XXX of Versos sencillos, where four stanzas of verse succinctly describe horrific experiences suffered by captured Africans: arrival on a slave ship, the unloading of naked and shackled bozales, the crack of a whip, swollen slave barracks, cries of women and children, and finally the spectacle of a black man hanged from a ceibo tree. In the fifth stanza, the child who bore witness to the hanging (Martí) swears at the foot of the dead man to redress the crime (16: 106–7).
Martí’s countryside encounter with the realities of the slave trade was, in fact, part of a heinous practice finally nearing its end. By the mid-1860s, after more than three centuries of slave trafficking to support the island’s agricultural economy, pressure from England along with economic forces had finally exerted sufficient influence on the Spanish colonial government to suppress the importation of slaves. Reports from the British Commissary Judge in Havana in 1866 attest that the last documented unloading of African slaves in Cuba was in 1865 (Thomas 1543–45). But the demise of the African slave trade was not the only change. In the same decade, new forces threatened the very use of slave labor, both in Cuba and in the United States. As Rebecca Scott states in Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery, in the 1860s Cuba and the U.S. South were “rocked and changed forever by two military conflicts that exploded into the north Atlantic world: Civil War in the United States, and anticolonial insurgency in Cuba” (28).3
A third piece critical to understanding Martí’s thinking about race is the widely known essay “Nuestra América” (Our America), published in New York on January 1, 1891, and subsequently in El Partido Liberal of Mexico on January 30. This essay, either in its entirety or in an edited version, has become a cornerstone of Martí’s connection to U.S. literature and history, finding a place in Latino Studies, American Studies, and American History. Several translations into English are available. In this literary gem that is also a historical and cultural manifesto, Martí analyzes the problems in Spanish America following independence, the need for nation builders to understand their nations, and the rising fear of the United States as a dominant force in the hemisphere. Perhaps nowhere else do Martí’s words ring so true against racism in all its manifestations. In “Nuestra América” (6: 15–23) Martí addresses the role of both blacks and Indians in the development of the Spanish American countries and warns against the disdainful attitude of the United States, in a call for change that is full of nuggets of wisdom in regard to race. He lays claim at the beginning of the essay to the power of ideas: “Trenches made of ideas are worth more than trenches made of stone” (15) and “No ship’s prow can cleave a cloud of ideas” (15).
In prescribing remedies for Latin American nations that had looked to France and North America for ideas and culture following their independence from Spain, Martí says to rediscover the roots of the continent, to prefer the “Greece” of the New World (Incas, Aztecs, Mayas, etc.) to the Greece of European antiquity (18), and to learn and teach Indian languages in republics with Indian populations (21). He praises the role of Native Americans in the struggles for independence; champions the lack of pretense by Benito Juárez, Mexico’s reformer president who was a Zapotec Indian from Oaxaca (21); and acknowledges the authenticity of indigenous and African cultural identities even as he critiques the false cultural façade of the ruling classes (20). “Nuestra América” also anticipates “Mi raza” in stating: “There can be no hatred between races because there are no races”(22) and “He who foments and spreads opposition and hatred among races sins against humanity” (22). Martí’s pronouncements in “Nuestra América,” written at the end of the nineteenth century, when racial divisiveness was great, racist rhetoric was often ferocious, and the accomplishments of indigenous America were often misunderstood and underappreciated, seem prophetic as well as wise.
Just two months before he died, Martí again laid out in forceful language the contention that Cubans would not be divided by race. In March 1895, as they prepared to launch the new campaign for independence, Martí and Máximo Gómez issued a statement in Montecristi, Dominican Republic, proclaiming the aims and intentions of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. The manifesto, written by Martí and signed by him as delegate of the party and by Gómez as commander-in-chief, identified the challenges that Cubans would face in a new war of liberation and established precepts for successful nationhood. Their goal was to present constructive plans and to confront potential problems, much as he had done in “Nuestra América.” In the “Montecristi Manifesto,” Martí declared that fear of the black race was unjustified and that only those who hated blacks saw hatred in them. He contended that black adherents to the revolutionary cause would deal with any problem that might arise from a black threat, thus acknowledging the specter of trouble, even as he sought to minimize its likelihood (4: 96–97).
Martí’s worried yet hopeful comments about the prospects for racial harmony in Cuba, as expressed in the Montecristi Manifesto, are in one sense his final word on the topic, but they should be taken in context. They reflect the anxieties of a Cuba not quite ten years past the end of slavery and the reality of a wearied but intransigent colonial government willing to exploit racial fears to damage the rebel cause. In the same breath that Martí championed Afro-Cubans as full partners in the fight against Spain, he argued that his war was not against the Spanish citizen or soldier but against a government that refused to recognize Cuban freedom. The manifesto was thus a call to unity that embraced both blacks and Spaniards, and its message was consistent with earlier statements, such as the opening lines of “Mi raza”: “Say the word man and all rights are defined” (2: 298).
Martí through the Filmmaker’s Lens
Two Cuban films about Martí’s life illustrate differing portraits of his early contact with African Americans and the differing images that Cuban audiences have received from them. La rosa blanca: Momentos en la vida de José Martí (The White Rose: Moments in José Martí’s Life), a 1954 tribute, offers an essentially hagiographic version of Martí’s life and features Martí as a tall young man with broad shoulders. (In fact, Martí was slender and of slight stature.) This film begins with his adolescence. Blacks do not appear until the scenes where Martí is at hard labor in the rock quarries of San Lázaro, when a bare-chested, sweat-glistened black man is beating a drum to mark the rhythm of the prisoners’ work. Blacks are seldom seen on screen afterwards. Martí in Havana in 1879 is shown with mulatto patriot Juan Gualberto Gómez and later with men of color in New York. The political theme of the film, however, is the Cuban desire for freedom from Spain, with virtually no reference to freedom for enslaved Africans.
The 2010 film Martí: El ojo del canario (Martí: The Eye of the Canary), a joint Cuban and Spanish production that depicts Martí from early school days until he is faced with deportation to Spain, ages nine to seventeen, offers a very different view of the racial context for Martí’s life. This Martí lives in a Havana populated with Africans and those of African origin, working as coachmen, porters, and house servants. His boyhood friend, Fermín, is accompanied to school by a black servant; the young Martí passes a black washerwoman in an alleyway; and in another scene a black man who insists that he is free is ordered to kneel by an imperious Spanish soldier. In the Matanzas countryside where he is serving as a scribe for his father, Martí rides in the back of a cart with Tomás, an elderly black man who becomes his daily companion. Tomás introduces the young Martí to the sounds of nature and sends him riding bareback and hands free on a horse, along the beach—a combination of symbols that clearly signals the black man’s longing for liberty. Later the movie shows Martí in a thicket of mangroves as witness to the slave trade that his father is duty-bound to suppress. Naked slaves are dragged and pushed ashore, the enslavers shout that a child has escaped, and the captive Africans are treated roughly and receive brutal insults. Don Mariano arrives and attempts to halt the process, but to no avail. Martí sees his father’s honorable efforts and glimpses the face of an African child (the one who escaped?) behind a tangle of branches. Such vivid scenes of African presence in Cuba during Martí’s early life are certainly an accurate depiction of the colony’s continuing dependence on slavery and on black labor, although Martí’s scant commentary on this part of his life is the only direct evidence of what he may have witnessed.
“El ojo del canario” is the focus of the first stanza of poem XXV of Versos sencillos and as the theme for the film, conceptually unites the idea of freedom for slaves and freedom for Cuba, just as Martí did. The poem begins by harkening back to Martí’s school days and memories of a bright canary. The second stanza says that when he dies “sin patria, pero sin amo,” without a country but without a master, flowers and a flag will suffice for his grave. The word “amo” is telling because it means both owner and master and was a typical descriptor for one who owned slaves. Since Martí was referring to himself in the poem, we can surmise that he conjoined the concept of independence for a Cuban with that of emancipation for a slave. When Tomás tells the young Martí that a canary sings more beautifully when freed from its cage, his statement emphasizes a desire for liberty that both he and Martí share.
El ojo del canario and La rosa blanca are not the only movies to have touched on aspects of Martí’s life, but they are the main feature films that have reached a large Cuban audience. Both have enjoyed an avid following among Cubans on the island and Cubans in the exile community. La rosa blanca resonates principally with generations who remember Cuba in the 1950s, and El ojo del canario garners attention and respect on both sides of the Florida Straits. Numerous reviews and online postings attest to the interest they have generated.
Comment and Criticism on Martí and Race
Among the first to write of Martí and race was Cuba’s most notable ethnographer and anthropologist, Fernando Ortiz, and his is an indispensable voice, one in many regards unsurpassed in interpreting Martí’s thoughts with broad strokes. Ortiz was born in 1881, while Cuba still had slaves, and his lifetime spanned the legacy of colonial prejudice as well as the Republic’s “claim” that all were equal. In his essay “Martí and the Races,” Ortiz connects his own experience to Martí, who, he says, understood “in his long, intense revolutionary life, the immense parable of racism in Cuba, one extreme to the other, from the dark and gloomy reality to the luminosity of an ideal” (4). As Ortiz amply demonstrates, Martí throughout his lifetime confronted racial problems and racism in thought, word, and deed (9).
The Ortiz essay explains that Martí was forced to contend with centuries of theological and supposedly scientific arguments that had been advanced to justify the enslavement of Africans (9), and he shows that Martí’s responses challenged both the hypocrisy of the Spanish clergy and the rhetoric of racial superiority proclaimed by Northern Europeans. Ortiz cites persuasive examples from Martí’s work. For example, in the play Patria y libertad (Drama indio) (Patria and Liberty [Indian Drama]), written in Guatemala in 1877 and 1878, the patriotic character in the piece accuses the priest Father Antonio of blasphemy for keeping slaves and for disfiguring Jesus by exploiting a subjected race. The indictment ends with strong language, when Martí, through this character, declares that such a priest contradicts the very message of Christ and presents to his humble flock “a defiled and criminal face” (18: 129; Ortiz 10). As Ortiz notes, Martí also decried the false science of racial classification by measurements of facial features, craniums, and pigments that sought to promote the transcendence of the “white” races. Martí highlighted the artificiality of such designations by branding them as “bookstore racial categories” (“razas de librería”), superficial characterizations that were far removed from real people (10).
Ortiz’s wide reading of Martí reveals that sometimes Martí used the term raza (race) in a cultural sense to apply to the people of Spanish America—those with a common cultural patrimony (15)—and that Martí’s declaring, “there are no races” did not prevent him from referring to ethnic groups and using terms such as negro, mulato, and indio. Above all, Ortiz found in Martí an unwavering allegiance with the oppressed. The Indian in need of education, the man or woman of the proletariat, whether a person of color or not, the slave or black who had gained freedom—all were part of a greater social question to which Martí did not turn a blind eye (17–22).4 Ortiz also underscores that Martí argued against racial divisiveness in Cuba and in favor of forgiveness for slavery with an express purpose: to counter Spanish propaganda designed to incite racial fears and impede the independence movement (25–31). Ortiz cites the emphatic declarations of a November 1891 speech in Tampa (4: 269), when Martí, in his role as orator, fundraiser, political organizer, and unifier, chastised those raising the specter of black reprisals by calling them liars: “Shall we fear the black man, the generous black man, our black brother, who remembering Cubans who have died for him, has forever pardoned those Cubans who still mistreat him? … Others may harbor fear, but I bear this man only love: I disavow whoever speaks ill of him and say plainly to that person: You lie!” (4: 276–77).
Ortiz, in his 1941 essay “Martí and Race,” did not deny that racial tensions existed in Cuba but proposed Martí as a remedy for the continuing racial divide, proclaiming: “As we face the dangerous problems of racism, may all Cubans be ever inspired by the teachings and sentiments of José Martí” (33). Since the 1940s and especially after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, numerous Cubans have written of Martí and race but few with as comprehensive a reach as Fernando Ortiz, who remains a standard-bearer on the topic and a respected example.5
Recent articles and books in English with chapters or sections on Martí and race illustrate a variety of approaches to this topic by scholars publishing in the United States.6 John Kirk, in José Martí, Mentor of the Cuban Nation, has a chapter titled “Social Structure” that offers an excellent overview of Martí’s thinking about race and ethnicity, both in Cuba and in the United States. Charles Hatfield’s study of “Nuestra América” and his discussion of race in the seminal essay references books on the topic by scholars Aline Helg, Lillian Guerra, and Julio Ramos and proposes a close look at Martí’s connection of race to culture. Hatfield concisely describes Martí’s purpose in insisting that Cuba would not have a race war and in claiming that “there are no races” (194). He states: “Recognizing that Cuba’s independence movement could succeed only with racial unity, and faced with the racial fears which had impeded that unity, Martí explicitly and repeatedly tried to allay fears of a race war” (194). Hatfield further proposes that Martí tried to eliminate the fear of black discontent, “repudiating the very idea of race on which that fear was based” (194), and suggests that a key Martí strategy to resolve racial impediments to independence was to link Cuban identity to ideology rather than to ethnicity (195). He states: “By making Cubanidad the only meaningful identity, and by making the substance of that identity purely a matter of ideology, Martí effectively disempowered the racial fears that had impeded a unified multi-racial Cuban independence movement” (195). There is much more to this articulately argued article, but the purpose here is to provide main points and an overall perspective.
Alejandro de la Fuente, in his book on race in twentieth-century Cuba, describes the coexistence of competing concepts of nationhood in the new Cuban republic that were influenced by Martí. On the one hand, the ideology that the independent egalitarian state would be inclusive was reminiscent of Martí’s famous discourse in Tampa: “With all and for the good of all.” On the other hand, the acknowledged existence of races was a social reality that an encompassing Cubanidad would eventually supplant (12). As de la Fuente observes, “Unity and brotherhood were emphasized because they were politically crucial, but Martí himself recognized that racial unity was more a goal than an accomplished reality. Indeed, such emphasis would have been unnecessary in an environment of true racial fraternity” (27). De la Fuente notes recent scholarship related to his topic: Ada Ferrer’s work on the participation of blacks in wars of insurrection and the role of race in creating national identities and Aline Helg’s research on the racial politics of the early post-independence years, as well as studies by Louis A. Pérez Jr., on the impact of the U.S. occupation of Cuba following the 1898 war with Spain (4–5). De la Fuente’s book confirms that the U.S. occupation brought negative consequences in regard to race: “scientific racism, an open disdain for darker, lower-class Cubans, and support for the traditional colonial elite” (12), all aspects that Martí feared from the Colossus based on his knowledge of and experience in the United States.
Aline Helg’s Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912, has a masterful synthesis of the Cuban particularities that framed the experience of blacks in Cuba from 1886 to 1912. In the period after slavery was officially ended, thousands of Afro-Cubans increasingly exercised their political rights yet eventually were massacred by the Cuban army for protesting against a ban on their race-based political party. Helg’s book also includes a study of race in the Cuban fight for independence and Martí’s role. She writes:
Martí no doubt stands out among late nineteenth-century white Latin American thinkers for his antiracist positions…. Martí acknowledged that the Americas were a new world made up of Europeans, native Indians and Africans. The solution for him lay in integrating the different races and classes into national societies based on solidarity, not in whitening the population through immigration. His view of Latin American integration, however, included some evolutionism, as he thought that blacks would “rise” to the level of whites through modern education for all and intermarriage. Also, people of African descent were to embrace Western culture rather than reassert the value of their African heritage. Nevertheless, in the context of the time, Martí’s views were uniquely progressive. (45)
Helg’s study points to the problems that the independence movement faced as it confronted the Spanish strategy of promoting racial fears. Spanish tactics included arresting supposed conspirators among blacks and mulattoes and suggesting the possibility of another Haitian-style revolution. Both Martí and Afro-Cubans like Juan Gualberto Gómez, the coordinator of the liberation movement in Cuba, recognized that a close black alignment with African traditions and black-only political organizations could put Afro-Cubans at risk and play into the Spanish plans. Thus, rather than offer a spirited defense of Afro-Cuban culture and validate any connection with Haiti’s violent racial past, Martí and Gómez claimed that in Cuba blacks and whites had been united as brothers in the 1868–78 war and that the common struggle created a shared identity as Cubans. Martí’s belief that racial and social prejudice in Cuba had hampered the cause of independence meant that his writing from exile was designed to directly counter long-standing prejudices as well as the threats of race war promulgated by the colonial government and its generals (49–53). Helg makes reference to the Montecristi Manifesto to illustrate Martí’s ambivalence on racial issues, his denying the risk of a race war yet contemplating it as a possibility (54).
Ada Ferrer’s chapter “The Silence of Patriots: Race and Nationalism in Martí’s Cuba” champions Martí’s writing on race as an important topic for Americans and Americanists (228–29) and argues that the Martí tenets abjuring race—the declaration that there is only the human race—made it difficult to promote black-based political movements among Cubans. Ferrer calls this a “silence of race” that was deemed necessary to achieve independence consistent with Martí’s goals of national unity (232–34).
Lillian Guerra’s The Myth of José Martí has two sections in the first chapter that deal with race, class, and Martí’s struggles to promote racial equality and harmony in the independent Cuba he envisioned. Guerra disputes the idea that Martí called for racial equality, stating that the terms “racial equality” and “social equality” never appear in his writing, although the terms were used by black and mulatto intellectuals close to him (28). She echoes the sentiment of writers like Ferrer, who maintain that Martí promoted a “raceless” ideology (26). She states that Martí denied black activists like Rafael Serra a significant role in the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Cuban Revolutionary Party) and characterizes Martí’s approach to racial equality as “pragmatic” (27–28).
This line of thinking continues as she takes the following lines from “Nuestra América” and interprets them as being critical of Indians and blacks in Latin America: “El indio, mudo, nos daba vueltas alrededor, y se iba al monte a la cumbre del monte a bautizar sus hijos. El negro, oteado, cantaba en la noche la música de su corazón, solo y desconocido, entre las olas y las fieras” (6: 20). Guerra translates these lines as: “The Indian, mute, would make circles around us and would run off to the hills to baptize his children. The black, always surveiled, sung in the night the music of his heart, alone and unknown, among the birds and the beasts” (31). This version includes one minor mistranslation, “olas” as birds rather than waves, and it differs markedly from other translations by experienced scholar-translators. These lines have many essential questions for a translator. Is the Indian “mute,” “silent,” or “silenced,” as Enrique Sacerio-Garí suggests, a concept echoed by Martí’s insistence in other parts of the same essay that the Indian has wrongfully been held back. Is the Indian heading to a sacred mountaintop where he can practice his beliefs without the scrutiny of the Church or simply “running off to the hills”?
A parallel context can be found in Martí’s letter to La Opinión Nacional in 1882. There he writes, referring to the Irish who continue pre-Christian traditions, that they are like “the Indians of the Guatemalan Highlands who go to mountaintop to offer the new born child to nature before offering it to the Christian God at the baptismal font, as Rome insists” (9: 294). Is the black, alone and unknown, remembering his roots and thinking back to Africa or regressing to a primitive state? Do the waves (olas) represent rivers or the ocean and a passage to his homeland? Is the black man alone because he is trying to escape? Translations by Esther Allen and Juan de Onís both suggest that the black may be a runaway slave. (See endnote 7 for comparative translations in English.)
Finally, in reference to a short item from Patria (no. 55) that Martí titled “War of the Races,” Guerra offers the example of a meeting in Santiago, where a black man—a non-Cuban—issued a call to form a political party for men of color. The president of the assembly answered by saying: “Aquí todos somos blancos” (“Here all of us are white”) (34). Guerra follows this with the explanation that Martí identified whiteness with culture and proposed that blacks could and should acquire culture, and thus “whiteness.”
While my purpose in presenting this overview is to describe rather than challenge what has been written, several of Guerra’s assertions are open to debate. First, it is overstated to suggest that Martí never promoted the concepts of racial and social equality or that he did not use that exact wording, a question that goes beyond the search for specific terms (racial equality and social equality) that have currency in twentieth- and twenty-first-century vocabulary. In fact, Martí does use the term social equality (igualdad social), saying that its basis lies in cultural equality (igualdad de cultura) (3: 28). More importantly, Martí wrote about and exemplified the importance of equality—on the basis of race and social class—in many ways throughout his life. He realized that the slave who had been brutalized and the freedman denied opportunity had a heritage of misfortune and mistreatment to overcome, and he saw knowledge as their path to equality. He also recognized, however, that white hatred of any black ambition could be toxic. Describing the U.S. South in 1889, Martí cautioned that when people of color showed signs of moving forward, conflicts would continue: “When the white man in the South sees the black man become his equal in the real aspects of life, he lynches the black man” (12: 324). Another theme repeated by Martí was that “social equality is nothing more than the acknowledgement of the equity visible in nature” (1: 321). Speaking of the universal identity of mankind in “Nuestra América,” he proclaimed that “the soul emanates equally and eternally from bodies diverse in form and color” (6: 22).
Second, in discussing “Nuestra América,” Guerra refers to Martí’s “othering” of blacks and Indians as his way of projecting both groups as potential citizens encumbered by cultural impediments (33), and says of key sentences describing blacks and Indians: “Here Martí depicts blacks, Indians, and peasants as obscured by ignorance, darkness, and childlike behavior” (31). Guerra sees the specific statements referring to blacks and Indians as reinforcing negative stereotypes, while I see them as something quite different: the way each group maintained cultural traditions while living under oppression. This reading is consistent with the complete body of Martí’s work and is a sentiment shared by many Martí scholars. Hatfield, for example, states that “‘Nuestra América’ markedly rejects questions of cultural superiority and inferiority” (199). José Gomariz’s review of Guerra’s book points to this specific analysis of “Nuestra América” as problematic (189). Further, a comparative look at translations into English of the lines about Indians and blacks by experienced translators of Martí’s work also casts doubt on Guerra’s interpretation.7 There can be no doubt that Martí is subject to differing perspectives and that “Nuestra América” is difficult to translate, but Guerra’s depiction of a “paternalistic insistence” in the essay is out of place with Martí’s overall message.
Last, in the passage from Patria about the meeting in Santiago where a black man calls for a separate political group for men of color, Guerra has interpreted the meaning of the reply to suggest that blacks must be acculturated. But when the president, Agustín Lafaurie, states: “I am sorry we can’t accommodate you. Here we are all whites,” the response can also be understood to mean that separatism was not the path to follow and that both whites and blacks were to be united in the struggle. It is noteworthy that the person suggesting a black political group is identified as a non-Cuban. Other passages from Martí are illustrative of his use of the word white to go beyond racial and cultural profiles. In notes for a talk about the Dominican Republic (Santo Domingo), the writer declares that the world has two races: those who are selfish and those who are generous. Later in the passage he says that all good-hearted men are white no matter what their skin color and that the only men who are dark are the egotists and fools, even if their skin color is white (7: 308).
In another instance, writing of labor issues in the United States and how the Knights of Labor were bringing disparate ethnic groups together, Martí championed the triumph of love over hate and declared: “The conquest of the future must be won with ‘white hands’ (‘manos blancas’)” (9: 387). Here the word blanco (white) means pure rather than referring to a racial category. White is also a frequent symbol for Martí in contexts not related to race. He described Emerson, the U.S. author he most admired, as a “white eagle” (13: 193) and used the white rose of poem XXXIV in Versos sencillos to represent the friendship and forgiveness of a pure heart.8 I believe that Martí’s main purpose in giving the Lafaurie example was to show common cause and nobility of purpose among Cubans rather than to champion “whiteness” as a racial category linked to a superior culture.
Jorge Camacho’s 2008 Islas article discusses how race is treated in Patria. His essay mentions the work of Helg and Guerra and notes that Martí addressed two race questions looming before Cuba: North American racism that could extend to Cuba and Cubans and fears on the island about how to incorporate blacks in a society that no longer had slaves. Camacho correlates Martí’s concern over fears of Afro-Cubans with Martí’s stubborn insistence that blacks were indebted to the independence war of 1868–78 that had declared slaves to be free. Camacho also skillfully articulates how Martí often assumed the voice of his subjects, in order to be more persuasive. Such is the case of Tomás Surí, profiled in Patria in a piece titled “A Secret Order of Africans.”
Surí was a seventy-year-old black man living in Key West who learned to read, a fact that Martí repeated with emphasis in the closing line of the article. Surí belonged to a secret order of Africans and was motivated to become literate so that he could attain a higher status in the order. As Martí told the story, Surí had done more than learn to read. He had pledged his support for the war effort, promised that his sons would fight in the revolution, and, after his order agreed to donate funds to the cause, stated that slaves were the only ones who had really won in the (1868) revolution because they had been declared free (5: 324–25). Having Surí, an African and veteran of the earlier insurrection, claim that liberty for slaves had been realized because of the white patriots of the Ten Years’ War was useful to Martí, since it validated his assertion of black indebtedness. As the Islas essay notes, over the centuries, many slaves had found freedom on their own through cimarronaje, running away to escaped-slave encampments, and yet Martí made no explicit reference to such self-gained liberty (42).
Tomás Surí belonged to an order of Africans described in the Patria article as “mysterious and dangerous,” a secret order that had, however, put aside the use of drums to focus on schooling. Camacho argues that Martí linked black progress to literacy, with the understanding that those of African origin, through education, could contribute to the new republic and that Martí wanted blacks to adopt a national identity and abandon their race-based organizations. Camacho acknowledges the Eurocentric nature of such a stance (37).
Louis A. Pérez Jr., the dean of Cuban historians in the United States, draws on Martí’s correspondence with Antonio Maceo to highlight the planner-in-exile’s concern over racial considerations in the blueprint for a successful war of independence and its aftermath. As Pérez states: “But independence itself represented only a preliminary phase of a larger process, one in which Cubans would labor to eliminate socio-economic injustice. ‘In my view,’ Martí wrote General Antonio Maceo in 1882, ‘the solution to the Cuban problem is not a political but a social one.’ A decade later, he reiterated his conviction: ‘… And let us never forget that the greater the suffering the greater the right to justice, and the prejudices of men and social inequities cannot prevail over the equality which nature has created’” (109).
“‘Martí y las razas’ (Martí and Race): A Re-Evaluation,” by Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal, in Re-Reading José Martí (1853–1895), discusses in a brief essay Martí’s perspective on race in light of Latin American discourses on race from 1840 to 1910 and his concern about race in Cuba. It concludes with a nod to the apparent inconsistencies of his racial narrative: “Martí’s savviness when dealing politically with the ‘race problem’ is indisputable. For that very same reason, his writings and rhetoric, although tremendously skillful, were plagued with contradictions” (124). The essay suggests that Martí felt compelled to address race issues “by denying them in his public speeches and journalistic writings” because he could foresee the possibility for racial conflict (124). Lastly, it points to a series of questions that have no definitive answers. What would Martí have thought about the creation of a political party for people of color in the Cuban Republic he did not live to see? How would he have assessed the Cuban Race War of 1912? As the essayist suggests, these are topics that continue to make Martí and race a timely focus for research (124).
While historians and critics have amply researched the topic of Martí and race relations in Cuba, much less attention has focused on the same topic in North America. Ivan Schulman, whose work with Manuel Pedro González helped to define Martí as the first voice of modernismo in the hemisphere and as a principal figure in developing Latin American consciousness of modernity, has written with great acumen of Martí and the racial and ethnic minorities he encountered in the United States. First, Schulman points out that Indian and black populations were essentially dispossessed communities without a patria, and that they suffered an internal exile not entirely dissimilar from Martí’s condition as an exile. Martí in his chronicles wrote vigorously and compassionately of their suffering. He rejoiced at signs of acceptance and advancement and despaired at the dispossessing nation’s reluctance to accord them the rights of citizens.
In contrast, Schulman says, European immigrants and even the Chinese had more opportunities. Schulman shows how it is important to read Martí in these chronicles with an eye to the poetic nuances as well as the specific prose content (74–75). Martí saw Swedes, Italians, Irish, and Jews enter the immense social theater of New York, describing the various European immigrant groups alternately as races or peoples (emphasis mine). He wrote with poetic imagination about the Chinese and the exoticism of their customs (for him). He interpreted the panorama of diverse ethnic and cultural minorities in the light of the conflicts and opportunities in a powerful nation on the cusp of the modern age. Schulman speaks of “social development that organizes events in a conflictive flow within a system ordered by moral and rational criteria” and concludes: “The tension between this idealistic ordering that resolves contrasts—that is to say harmony—and the constant metamorphosis of the new world presides over Martí’s observations of the ethnic and cultural minorities” (82).
Oscar Montero’s chapter “Against Race,” in the beautifully written José Martí: An Introduction, is the most complete example, among recent publications, of the impact of racial politics in the United States on Martí. Montero mentions Martí and U.S. abolitionists briefly—essentially one paragraph—and describes essays dealing with the South after the Civil War. Montero describes what African Americans faced as the Emancipation Proclamation’s promise of freedom turned to hatred and persecution and how it figures in Martí’s writing (67). He also analyzes David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) and how that work synchronizes with Martí’s chronicles dealing with race in the era of Reconstruction (67). Montero emphasizes how Martí’s writing brought together seemingly disparate topics and gives an example from an August 16, 1887, article in which Martí combines a July 4th Gettysburg reunion between veterans of the North and South with a brief note on violence between the races in Oak Ridge (67). Montero points out that the U.S. newspapers recorded the events as separate entities, while Martí brought them under the same banner of race relations. In truth, the strategy Montero praises was Martí’s common practice—that of perusing the press and writing his own version of the news, with the various items skillfully blended in a genre for which he is known, the crónica, or chronicle. As Susana Rotker and others have described it, Martí’s crónica rests between journalistic reporting and literary essay and is a hallmark of how he successfully combined the literary renovation of Spanish American modernism with an embrace of modernity.
Montero’s focus on the role of the United States in Martí’s view of race is an excellent starting point for a more comprehensive approach to the topic. In addition to his analysis of black and white relations, in approximately one and a half pages he includes an overview of Martí vis-à-vis Native Americans and immigrants. Montero states at the beginning of the chapter that there is much more still to be written about Martí and race—something this book is addressing.
