8

Challenging the Colossus

Responses to U.S. Racism

In a New York Sun front-page article (Sunday edition) on August 7, 1892, Martí was quoted about false rumors of an imminent uprising in Cuba.1 Martí’s words explained the functioning of the Cuban Revolutionary Party and stated that its plans were for a republic “based on the frank acceptance of foreign capital and industry, on the undaunted respect to the rights of man, without attention to caste, ancestry, or color, and with immediate and equitable exploitation of the vast resources of the island.” Further down, the article quoted Martí as saying: “We do not recognize birth in Cuba as essential to the right to work for the dignity of man in down-trodden Cuba. We do not deny to the Spaniard of good will a seat in our councils. We proclaim the colored Cuban one of us without special rights on account of his color nor special deprivations because of it.”²

In the 1890s, as Martí was crafting plans for a revolution that would oust the Spanish and establish Cuban sovereignty, he boldly stated the racial ideals of the republic, and he sought to reach North Americans, who were intensely interested in the island’s affairs. He faced a great challenge, however, in confronting entrenched ideas about Cuba and her inhabitants. Throughout the nineteenth century, political and commercial interests, coupled with geographic proximity, had created a long and concerted U.S. gaze toward the island. First, the common experience of slavery had fostered a mutual annexation interest. Then, incidents such as the ill-fated Narciso López expeditions of mid-century, which attempted to liberate Cuba from Spain with an aim of annexation to the United States,³ and the Virginius episode of 1873, in which a steamer flying the Stars and Stripes was seized by Cuba and the fifty-three on board summarily executed, stirred public indignation against Spain.4

The Amistad slave revolt, made famous by a 1998 Steven Spielberg film of the same name, conveys the degree to which U.S. sentiment against Spain and her dealings with Cuba were infused with racial considerations. Nineteenth-century Americans were obsessed with the Amistad saga of fifty-three Africans who staged a revolt aboard a Cuban slave ship in 1839 and ended up landing off the coast of New York. Abolitionists took up the cause of the Africans, and William Cullen Bryant even wrote a poem mentioning the leader of the mutiny, Cinque. Despite the pervasiveness of racist sentiments in both North and South, however, and pressure from Southerners for President Van Buren to support the Spanish claim and return the slaves to Cuba, the rebels were freed by an 1841 Supreme Court decision. John Quincy Adams, who argued the case of the Africans before the Supreme Court, mentioned their unjust enslavement by the Spaniards and suggested that a return to Spanish hands might mean their being burned at the stake. Previous trial arguments on behalf of the Africans had shown that the Spanish documents attesting to their being Cuban were fraudulent and that they were indeed African and thus free. All in all, the incident cast Spain and its treatments of Africans in an unfavorable light, a perspective conveyed in the twentieth-century Spielberg film as well.⁵

Travel literature, much of it by North Americans, added a wealth of detail about everyday life in Cuba. Esther Allen has documented almost two hundred travel accounts by U.S. visitors to Latin America in the nineteenth century,⁶ and Louis A. Pérez Jr., in his edited book Slaves, Sugar, and Colonial Society: Travel Accounts of Cuba, 1801–1899, gives many examples of these travelogues. Although the quality is uneven, as Pérez notes, many writers were indeed “shrewd observers and faithful chroniclers of the time and the place” (xxv). Faithful or not, the travelers conveyed impressions about Cuba and Cubans to their readers and helped to build interest in its history and its races. José Martí seemed to acknowledge the role of travel literature in forming opinions of Spanish Americans and Cubans when he said in an editorial to a New York newspaper in 1889: “We are not the people of destitute vagrants or immoral pigmies … nor the country of petty talkers, incapable of action, hostile to hard work, that in a mass with the other countries of Spanish America, we are by arrogant travelers and writers represented to be” (Selected Writings 264).7

In the decade of the 1890s, both prior to the 1895 revolution planned by Martí and in the years immediately preceding the war of 1898, the fascination with Cuba and the fever pitch of disgust with Spain reached its peak. By 1898 the American public had been flooded with print and photographic accounts of Cuba, as jingoistic forces and yellow journalism promoted war with Spain.⁸ Most reports gave little credit to the patriots, while heaping abuse on the Spanish. Many of the writers had anti-black and anti-Spanish biases that painted both primary sources of Cuban ethnicity and culture as inferior and that reinforced negative stereotypes.

Frederic Remington, the chronicler of the American West whose reporting was part of a lifetime of creating vivid images in both picture and print for the American public, was one of the correspondents who visited Cuba. Remington’s characterizations of Cuba and its inhabitants in 1898 and 1899 came after Martí’s death but illustrate the tendencies that the Cuban patriot had feared and the racial stereotyping he had challenged. On his fourth visit to Havana, Remington wrote that Cuba was “an old country, time worn, decayed, and debauched by thieving officials and fire and sword. The people are negroes or breeds and they were sired by Spaniards who have never had social virtues since they were overrun by the Moors.” Remington continues: “The Cubans have known no civic rectitude; they have had no examples of honest, plain-dealing, public men; they are, in the aggregate, the most ignorant people on earth, so far as letters go.”⁹

Not all U.S. accounts were as derogatory as Remington’s. Men like newspaper editor Charles A. Dana and lawyer Horatio Rubens, both of whom befriended Martí, appreciated qualities of virtue and courage in Cubans and understood the historical factors that had kept Cuba in Uncle Sam’s sphere of interest and Spain’s grip at the same time. Nonetheless, U.S. popular print material about Cuba tended toward insulting caricatures with racial overtones that complicated Martí’s aims.

Patria, published in the United States primarily for the Cuban and Puerto Rican communities, also found audiences among Cubans in Jamaica and Santo Domingo. Martí’s goals for Patria were to promote harmony between blacks and whites, to deflect annexationist proposals and calls for autonomy, to counter Spanish propaganda about a “race war” in Cuba with allusions to Haiti and Jamaica, to expose Spanish interference and intrigue in the United States, and to point out U.S. attitudes detrimental to his plans. In an article for Patria in January 1894, he drew an analogy between the meager concessions that Spain was offering Cuban blacks and a plate of lentils. In the same article Martí compared the history of race relations in Cuba to that of the United States, pointing out that U.S. abolitionism and the emancipation of slaves in 1863 were models ignored by the Spanish. He noted that Cuba, in ending slavery by decree rather than through a civil conflict that did not, in the end, eliminate racial tensions, had been spared the death toll and animosity that marred the U.S. experience.

In denouncing U.S. racism, the Cuban brought to bear his knowledge of life in the United States and its history of race relations. He had seen Indians reduced to reservation life and former slaves punished by an unrepentant South. At the same time, Martí understood a chapter of U.S. history filled with noble crusades on behalf of African Americans and Native Americans. He applauded the work of Helen Hunt Jackson. He knew of Harriet Beecher Stowe, had praised John Greenleaf Whittier’s antislavery verses, and had written with approval of the work of prominent North American abolitionists, accounts that are detailed in chapter 5. But he lived in an era where virulent racism surfaced in many guises, and he saw the ways that it affected U.S. relations with Cuba and thus his hopes for Cuban independence. For Cubans who favored close ties with the United States, Patria allowed Martí to point out the roiling ethnic turmoil in what had been the land of Washington and Lincoln and the dangers of association with a country that pitted “rich against poor, Christians against Jews, whites against blacks, farmers against merchants, [and] westerners and southerners against those of the East” (2: 379).

Vindication of Cuba

Martí’s responses to articles published in 1889 by the Philadelphia Manufacturer and the New York Evening Post reveal a significant connection between the Cuban writer, the United States, and perceptions about race. The two articles criticized the idea of American acquisition of Cuba by listing reasons why Cubans were unworthy of affiliation with the United States. In commenting on the inhabitants of the island, the Manufacturer said the Spaniards were undesirable, the Cubans even less so, and the blacks thoroughly unacceptable. The Philadelphia paper went so far as to say that the black Cubans were at a level of barbarism so abject that the “most degraded Georgia Negro was better prepared to be President of the United States than the common Negro in Cuba was to be an American citizen.” The Evening Post was no more charitable, reiterating the objections to acquisition raised by the Manufacturer and commenting that the United States had problems enough of its own with the blacks in the South without admitting nearly one million Cuban Negroes who were inferior to their own.10

Martí’s response to the two offending editorials, called “Vindication of Cuba,” was sent to the Evening Post in New York City. Although it was a powerful defense of Cuba and Cubans, Martí’s letter did not directly challenge the offensive statements made about Cuban or U.S. blacks. His only race-related references were to Havana’s mourning of the death of Lincoln and his statement that abolition of slavery was one of the first acts of the Cuban freedom fighters in the 1868–78 campaign. We miss the language of support for blacks that rang so forcefully in his oratory in Tampa and in his writing in Patria. In his letter Martí did not take up the long history of U.S. annexation interests and thus missed the chance to point out Uncle Sam’s hypocrisy in first wanting Cuba for its slaves and then not wanting it because of its ex-slaves. In praising the success of Cubans residing in the United States, he said his countrymen included bankers, merchants, physicians, engineers, journalists, surveyors, high-level mechanics, teachers, electricians, and cigar-makers. He took pride in establishing the industriousness of Cubans in humble occupations, like the tobacco worker in Florida and the seamstress in New York, an implicit contrast with other immigrant groups. In his response Martí upheld the valor and courage of men who fought against Spain under daunting conditions and without pay, and he declared that though Cuba’s “half breeds and city-bred young men” might be of delicate physique, they were certainly not effeminate, as the Manufacturer had charged. His principal purpose in the editorial was to defend the honor of Cuba as a whole and to undermine the idea that Cubans would welcome annexation (1: 236–41).¹¹

I read “Vindication of Cuba” as it appeared in the New York Evening Post (it came via inter-library loan on a microfilm spool from the New York Public Library) and tried to imagine myself as one of the persons Martí was trying to reach. The letter appears on page 9 in long columns. Would it have had a huge impact? Not likely. Would those reading the Evening Post understand all of the allusions? Lines such as: “These ‘effeminate’ Cubans once had courage enough, in the face of a hostile government, to carry on their left arms for a week the mourning for Lincoln,” might not have registered with New Yorkers. Of course the letter-writer was referring to himself and his schoolmates in Havana who wore black armbands after Lincoln was assassinated, but the association would not seem obvious to most Americans. Today the editorial reaches far more people than in Martí’s day; along with “Nuestra América” it is becoming a standard piece in collections of Latino writing about the United States.12 It is already available in English, with no need for translation, and is of relevance to many fields, including history, literature, American studies, and Latino studies.

Martí’s direct contacts with newspapers in the United States are recorded in some of his articles for Patria. As Cuban Revolutionary Party delegate, or spokesman, he visited Cuban clubs, reported for Patria, and served as a liaison with the U.S. press. His August 1893 piece for Patria, called “The Independence of Cuba and the United States Press,” noted the respect that the Cuban Revolutionary Party and its delegate had been accorded by mainline papers such as the Herald, the Sun, and the Times and gave a brief report on the Philadelphia Public Ledger’s support of his overall goals (2: 148–49). As the voice of the party, he responded to false starts and Spanish mischief and had to squash rumors and correct misinformation posted by English-language newspapers.¹³ For the most part the information he provided was tactical and political.

For example, Martí’s interview in English with the New York Herald, May 5, 1893, explained that a current movement in Cuba was not one of his planning, that Cubans were ready for self-government, and that Spain’s oppressions were many (28: 353–54).¹⁴ The delegate also appears to have provided information to the U.S. press that would project his own planning efforts. An April 14, 1893, column in the New York World, “Getting Ready for War,” featured pictures of Martí and Gonzalo de Quesada and quoted Quesada extensively. A New York Times piece a day later, under the headline “Cubans Preparing for War,” led with a paragraph that set forth Martí’s agenda and allowed him to link the abolition of slavery to the anti-Spanish effort: “The revolutionary Cubans in the Southern States and in Mexico had a busy day last Monday. It was the anniversary of the republican declaration of 1868 abolishing slavery and of the election of Céspedes as President. It was also just one year since the new revolutionary party was formed in this country under the leadership of Jose Marti.” In his 1894 article for Patria, “The Truth about the United States,” the Cuban planner signaled his concern over misconceptions about the United States by fellow Spanish Americans. He knew that those of his America needed to understand what kind of a nation the United States had become, to see that it had not been able to overcome its divisions, and to realize that hatred and misery were on full display. He sought to counter yankeemania (yanquimania) with lessons of history and stated that the United States had lost more men in its Civil War than were lost in all the wars of Spanish American independence.15 He concluded that the United States had become less “humane” since its independence, while Spanish America had advanced since independence, a hopeful if not entirely convincing argument.

When addressing issues of race, Martí feared the sweeping characterizations of non-Anglo peoples as inferior and especially how such attitudes might affect Mexico and Cuba. In his articles, he confronted political situations with ethnic and nationalistic overtones, such as the 1886 border incident with Mexico, in which an opportunistic journalist named Augustus K. Cutting provoked tensions between the United States and Mexico.¹⁶ In another instance the Cuban gave his intense reaction to Charles Dudley Warner’s insulting review about the men of Morelia in the state of Michoacán. Martí had read Warner’s 1887 article in Harpers Magazine about a visit to Mexico and reacted vehemently to the condescending tone. The Cuban succinctly captured the American’s ability to extol the countryside while failing to appreciate the population: “He understands changes in nature but he cannot understand people of another color” (7: 55). But nothing raised the ire of the reviewer more, perhaps because his friend Manuel Mercado was from Michoacán, than the depiction of Morelia’s young men as “dandies,” “slender-legged effeminate young milksops, the fag-end of a decayed civilization, without virility or purpose.”¹⁷ In the articles he sent to Mexico and Argentina, Martí challenged the offending tone and corrected the American writer, citing lessons on Latin American history, holding up Bolívar and Hidalgo, men of slight build, as examples of virility and strength, and declaring that “Legions of Davids have done more than Goliaths” (7: 57).

Martí and Social Darwinism

Richard Graham’s The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940, succinctly presents the racial theories that were in vogue during José Martí’s lifetime. In his introduction, Graham states: “The spread of European colonialism and the rapid growth of the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century brought … supposedly irrefutable proof of the validity of a scheme that placed the so-called primitive African or Indian at the bottom of the scale and at its top the ‘civilized’ white European” (1). Aline Helg in the same book confirms, “Between 1880 and 1930, Hispanic American intellectuals were strongly influenced by positivism, social Darwinism, geographical determinism, and many racial theories emanating from Europe” (37). But while many of the Cuban national hero’s contemporaries embraced Eurocentric racial categorizations, Martí was not swept up by the prevailing winds. I agree with Helg, who calls Martí “a militant antiracist” (The Idea of Race 47), and with John Lawrence Tone, who in War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895–1898, states that Martí was suspicious of social Darwinist ideas about biological decline (39).

Martí’s writing gives no evidence that he accepted Herbert Spencer’s broad application of Darwin’s theories to the social realm. References to Darwin in Martí’s Complete Works are mostly ephemeral, and many simply allude to connections with Emerson or briefly comment about religion and science. The 1882 essay following Darwin’s death is the only extended piece. It discusses evolution and the human capacity for adaptation and improvement but criticizes the naturalist for superficial observation of physical traits and for failing to read human character deeply. One example Martí cited was Darwin’s reaction to seeing slaves being whipped in Brazil. The Englishman wielded a branding iron against the abusers but regarded the slaves themselves as miserable creatures. In Martí’s judgment this showed Darwin to be a strong man but one who lacked empathy for those who were weaker than he was (15: 375). In a similar critique Martí wrote: “He remembered, more with the disdain of an Englishman than with the insight of a deep thinker, the barbarous Tierra del Fuego native, the rudimentary African, the agile Zealander, and the new man of the Pacific islands” (15: 379). Darwin’s failure to see all the components that contributed to a human being and the failure to consider the sources for that human being’s sentiments and judgments, along with a tally of his physical characteristics, allowed the naturalist to make faulty comparisons and wrongly disparage certain racial groups, according to Martí (15: 379–80).

In his one extended focus on Herbert Spencer, the primary proponent of social Darwinism and the concept of “survival of the fittest,” Martí also found points of disagreement. He took the Englishman to task for ignoring some of the root causes of poverty while suggesting that government assistance to the poor would only make it worse. Here as well as elsewhere, the Cuban writer endorsed the idea of helping the poor obtain clean and salubrious housing, insisting that the human spirit improves when living conditions improve. He closed the article by contrasting England’s desperately poor, those who gnawed at their knuckles from hunger, with gruff and unsociable landholders who could cover the country in guineas with just a year of their rental income. Martí’s solution for such an inhuman disparity, a more equitable division of wealth, was completely at odds with Spencer’s principles (15: 390–92).

What Martí proclaimed in the 1884 sketch on Spencer was his consistent message. While workers had an obligation to be diligent and families to follow prudent practices, governments also had a role to play in social welfare. Completely abandoning the weak and those who were most in need was never the answer for Martí. Hebert Pérez in “Martí, Race, and Cuban Identity” also sheds light on Martí’s reactions to the ideas of social Darwinism, noting that Martí understood how racist ideologues used such thinking to justify mistreatment and oppression of the supposedly backward and less capable people. Pérez also shows that while the Antillean author took great interest in acquiring new scientific knowledge, especially in fields like anthropology and studies about the origins of man, he reviewed such findings critically, and saw more wisdom in the writings of Louis Henry Morgan, E. B. Taylor, and others, who held that the stages of development of societies were the important determinant—not immutable race.

Whitening

Another current of thought pertaining to race in Martí’s time was the concept of “whitening,” the idea that racial mixing and especially European immigration would bring Latin America progress and help create national populations that were less dark-skinned. As Gomariz notes, “a discourse promoting whitening was prevalent in the nineteenth-century throughout Spanish America, from Argentina to Cuba, with the noteworthy exception of Mexico under the administration of Benito Juárez” (189). In Argentina whitening was unfurled under the banner of immigration with the words of President Alberdi: “Gobernar es poblar” (“to govern is to populate”) along with military campaigns to suppress Indians and blacks. But José Martí suggested no such thing. On the contrary, he proclaimed in “Nuestra América” that Latin America should shed European and North American models and find autochthonous guideposts, and he warned against welcoming immigrants who could not successfully adapt to a new country. In his observations of the problems created by European immigrants to the United States, Martí was clearly skeptical that these white populations were an automatic solution.

The Diplomat as a Voice of Conscience and Confrontation

Martí reported on two inter-American conferences, serving as a voice for Latin Americans against a powerful U.S. agenda orchestrated by Secretary of State James G. Blaine. In the winter of 1889 Blaine initiated a Pan American Conference, ostensibly to address issues of inter-American understanding, such as a customs union, an arbitration agreement, and banking, but with the sub rosa intent to purchase Cuba from the Spanish. For José Martí, the conference, held under the aegis of the American eagle and with his homeland endangered, was pure anguish and produced deep anxiety that he described in the prologue to Versos sencillos, his most intensely personal poetry. He commented extensively about the conference in a series of articles for La Nación of Buenos Aires and detailed his fears about Yankee aggression, especially in the Caribbean and Central America. It is in these letters that he stated that just as Narciso López went to Cuba for the United States, now Frederick Douglass, the mulatto envoy and icon of abolitionism, has been sent by the United States to acquire Haiti and Santo Domingo (6: 62). He also expressed alarm that Douglass was charged with securing rights for a naval base on the Saint Nicolas Peninsula in Haiti, approximately fifty miles from Cuba (6: 58). While Martí overstated U.S. designs on its southern neighbors, he correctly assessed the presumption of Anglo superiority underlying the conference.18

In 1891 Martí represented Uruguay at the International Monetary Conference in Washington, D.C., where he effectively opposed the U.S. plan to establish bimetallism throughout the hemisphere, a proposition beneficial to the host country but not to Spanish America. Martí issued a report to the delegates and published his findings and observations in La Revista Ilustrada of New York in May of the same year. In them he showed the self-interests at the heart of the North American meeting and warned of their race-based characterizations: “They believe in the incontrovertible superiority of ‘the Anglo-Saxon race over the Latin race.’ They believe in the inferiority of the Negro race, which they enslaved yesterday and torment today, and of the Indian, whom they are exterminating. They believe that the nations of Hispanoamerica are primarily made up of Indians and Negroes” (Selected Writings 306).¹⁹

After 1898

American prejudices and disdain carried over into Cuba and tainted the racial climate that Martí had endeavored to create. In the Spanish-Cuban-American War, U.S. troops new to the struggle took the ragged condition of Cuban freedom fighters to be a lack of valor. American author Stephen Crane referred to Cubans as “half starving ragamuffins” and “tropic savages.”²⁰ Cubans were denied meaningful participation in America’s “splendid little war,” and the invading forces then complained that the Cuban people had offered little help. In the campaign to conquer yellow fever, Cuba’s Carlos Finlay was not acknowledged as having discovered that the disease was mosquito-borne, and North Americans stubbornly refused to give Cubans credit for an important scientific finding. It was everything that the martyred patriot had feared.

As mentioned in chapter 2, some who study Martí’s views on race claim that his “raceless” ideals and promotion of Cubanidad as a unifying factor made it more difficult for Cuban blacks to gather politically as Afro-Cubans, a distinct group, after the foundation of the Republic. But why blame Martí for racial problems he tried to avoid? As many historians have asserted, Yankee domination after 1898 was responsible for much of the destructive racial climate that ushered in the new nation. Cuban leaders who took over her early years as a nation could not match José Martí’s charisma, compelling rhetoric, and unifying presence. Frank Gerome notes that U.S. press reports about the Cuban rebels changed from largely positive to largely negative after U.S. troops entered Cuba in 1898 and states that while the occupation brought reforms and reconstruction, the dissolution of the Cuban Liberation Army eliminated the one institution in which Afro-Cubans and those of modest social background had managed to achieve a degree of status and power (6).

Conclusions

The exile planning a revolution, one that he hoped would create a Cuba free of Spain and free of foreign intervention, challenged North American racism on many fronts and in many ways. He was a defender of his America against pretexts for conflict, like the Augustus K. Cutting case, and a reporter-diplomat protecting Spanish American interests in the inter-American conferences of 1889 and 1891. In chronicles sent to the Latin American press, he described and analyzed many race-related problems in the United States: Southerners hunting down and lynching blacks; settlers and troops hunting down Indians and pushing them onto undesirable reservations; anti-immigrant voices demeaning impoverished, uneducated arrivals from Europe and calling for revenge for the Haymarket explosion; white miners engaging in a wholesale massacre of Chinese laborers; and angry Anglo voices denigrating the citizens of “Nuestra América.” When he wrote of campaigns against Native Americans, he labeled them as extermination and annihilation, and in “Nuestra América” he accused the United States of drowning its Indians in blood (6: 16). Similar language exposed white vengeance against blacks in the South. In articles for Patria he reprised conflicts over slavery and the unfortunate aftermath of the war between North and South. His private correspondence reflects many of these sentiments.

His condemnation of racism in the United States was much stronger in publications written in Spanish than in his writing directed to U.S. readers, because he understood the public he needed to reach in the United States and what lines of argument would be persuasive and helpful to his cause. For Americans he did not catalogue race-based abuses in the United States but instead kept the focus on Cuba. The majority of his communication with the U.S. press in the 1890s was about the Cuban Revolutionary Party, its overarching aims, and the possibilities of an uprising on the island.

Some of Martí’s messages to English-speaking readers dealt with race, but the vast majority reached his Spanish-speaking audiences. His banner of respect for Cubans of all races and his hope for a raceless society in Cuba did not alter the mindset of the American public and did not register with Yankee soldiers of 1898 or the reporters and occupiers who followed them. Move forward more than a century after Martí’s death, and the picture is very different. Martí’s works are now a part of the American canon, translated into English and widely read. He is seen as an observer and reporter who helped to frame the racial landscape of nineteenth-century U.S. history. “Vindication of Cuba” can be seen as a counterpoint to the Remington brand of reporting on Cuba, and Ramona and “Nuestra América” offer a masterful challenge to the precepts of manifest destiny. John L. O’Sullivan’s call in 1845 for the right to push west and south and impose Anglo dominance meets a defining response in José Martí. Ramona in 1888 sounded a warning to Mexico, and “Nuestra América” is a vigorous claim for cultural unity in the face of disdain from the formidable neighbor to the north (6: 22).21 In the twenty-first century, writings by the Cuban national hero are available in English translations with extensive distribution, on Internet sites, and in blogs, and today, José Martí is far more successful and reaches far more people in confronting U.S. racism than at the end of the nineteenth century. It is one of his most important legacies.