9

Conclusions

To virtually every topic, Martí brought to bear his “mixture of vast information and constant originality,” as Fernández Retamar notes in World Literature Today (23). Race is no exception. Considering the Cuban writer with a comprehensive view lets us understand his thinking much more than a single snapshot, no matter how carefully studied, and allows one to appreciate the vast range of information and experiences that inform his work. That is why this book studies his works in their entirety. To comprehend race in Martí is to see combined the poet and the master of prose, the speaker and the writer, the orator reaching hundreds, and the intimate conversationalist reaching one at a time. It is to understand that the man of words was also a man whose actions confirmed his words. He appealed with one voice to Cubans and Spaniards, blacks and whites, to U.S. audiences and the nationalist cause, and he wrote seeking justice for all ethnic groups and races—that is to say, on behalf of mankind.

A consistent characteristic of Martí’s approach to race and race relations was an intense focus on abuses against racial groups and especially the injustice of slavery—whether in Cuba, as imposed on indigenous communities in Spanish America, or in the United States. His warm and genuine personal interest in advancing the status of Cuban blacks, both in the United States and on the island, and a politically astute, strategic approach to projecting how blacks and whites should interact both in the United States and in his homeland are also hallmarks. Understanding racism as “a kind of inner exile, a corrosive evil that destroyed both the hater and the hated,” is one way that Oscar Montero concisely conveys an essential Martí concept about race (64).

Writings on racial and ethnic topics permeate Martí’s work; their varied formats include original poetry and prose, as well as translations. Some pieces are adaptations from press articles; some are travelogue observations; some are in essays with a persuasive purpose; some are in letters; and some spring from searing personal experiences. From youthful compositions like Abdala and El Diablo Cojuelo to political messages delivered in Spain, and from a focus on Native Americans that began in Mexico and Guatemala to the campaign-mode essays and speeches of the 1890s, two themes are paramount: compassion for the races that had suffered under colonization and exploitation and an abiding concern for a future of positive race relations. In the mix are hundreds of accounts of racial experiences in the United States, encompassing African Americans, Afro-Cubans, Native Americans, Irish and Italian immigrants, German, Eastern European, and Jewish arrivals, Chinese laborers, and the disdainful attitude of many in the United States toward non-Anglo peoples, including those in the neighboring countries of Cuba and Mexico.

I originally thought Martí was more ambivalent about race than the research and close reading I have done for this book have shown him to be. Many years ago I even gave a paper pointing to what I perceived to be the inconsistencies and contradictions in his statements about race. But now looking carefully at the timeline and the contexts for his comments on race, and taking into account the progression of his thinking, I believe that his perspective is more evolutionary than ambivalent. To give a quick parallel: Martí’s essays about the Haymarket riots of 1886 also reveal an evolving perspective. At first he was not sympathetic to the workers, but later he was a fervent defender of the condemned men.

As this book has shown, Martí’s comments on race are not uniform. Where, when, and with what purpose the comments about race appear are all important factors. In his “Vindication of Cuba” letter, Martí was writing to persuade a U.S. audience. He did not point out Uncle Sam’s hypocrisy in first wanting Cuba for its slaves and then not wanting Cuba because of its ex-slaves, because that would not have suited his purpose. Descriptions of black panic in the Charleston earthquake report, a cursory traveler’s account in Curaçao, and the early depictions of Indians as lethargic or as savages play to stereotypes and present derogatory images, but these are all portrayals best understood in their specific contexts. Cast against the whole of Martí’s writings and the example of his life, they by no means detract from his standing as a champion for racial justice.

In reporting on Charleston’s reaction to the earthquake, Martí was essentially translating fast from newspaper accounts in English and absorbing much of what he read in the New York press, which gave front page coverage to the story for days.1 We know that Martí’s work pattern was to peruse U.S. newspapers and journals, usually taking material from frontpage articles and often from Sunday editions, and then translating much of what he read, including descriptions. Julio Ramos relates that in the Martí article about the Brooklyn Bridge, which was based on an article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, “The sequence of descriptive segments in both texts is almost equal” (175). The chronicler’s comments, often given at the end of a paragraph or segment, are the parts most indicative of his personal perspective.

In the case of Curaçao, which Martí visited in 1880, an understanding of the island’s history helps to explain why the traveler saw what he saw and said what he said (19: 127–36). The people of African origin profiled in Martí’s notes about Curaçao do not fare well in his account. He portrays a population barefoot and poorly clothed: languid old men, anemic mulatas, unkempt old women at work smoking dry sardines, and women with sagging and unattractive bodies. He seems disgusted by the sight of a carelessly uncovered breast and a skirt pulled up high at the front. He calls the unhappy former slaves a sick and degenerate race and critiques their use of Papiamento, a Creole language of the Caribbean, screeching and unpleasant to the ear. But what the Cuban in exile truly describes is not blacks per se but the misery of an underclass. Slaves in Curaçao suffered abuses like those of other Afro-Caribbean populations, and they carried out two slave rebellions in the 1700s. After emancipation, however, ex-slaves had scant resources to maintain themselves and had to eke out a living as best they could, with some owners having previously manumitted the old and the sick to avoid having to care for them (Benjamin 75). Slaves were freed in Curaçao in 1863 but had little recourse to an improvement in their lives. As those who have studied the island’s history have noted: “after the abolition of slavery in 1863, the Afro-Curaçaoan former slaves continued to live in difficult conditions until the labor shortages of the early twentieth century …” (Benjamin 74).

As for descriptions of the continent’s first inhabitants, chapter 6 has shown how Martí’s assessment and characterization of them evolved and was affected by his life in the United States. There he saw in sharp relief how government policies affected Indians culturally as well as physically, and he described the cultural dislocations experienced by indigenous communities forced to enter a modern age. He learned of pre-Columbian accomplishments chiefly from books, journals, and resources available to him in New York. He connected North American Indians with those of Latin America through their shared suffering. With his translation of Ramona, he linked Anglo treatment of Indians and Hispanics in California to Mexico’s relationship with the country across the border. Most importantly, as he developed a hemispheric consciousness, he emphasized that the Indian lethargy observed in Mexico and Guatemala, and the “sluggish blood” that he described in “Nuestra América,” was a consequence of the harsh and dispiriting treatment of the Spanish conquest and colonization, not a natural condition.

Education, Race, and Social Equality

Education in Martí’s eyes was the great leveler. It entered his writing about virtually every ethnic group. Thus he called for the Indian of the Americas to advance (andar) and praised schools for Indians in the United States. He offered remedies for what he perceived as inadequate instruction for immigrant children in North America, and he stated that to be educated was the only way to be free. He wrote about educational strides made by blacks in the U.S. South and the achievements of their counterparts in the North. Realizing the importance of advancement in social as well as educational realms, he looked with disfavor on activities like the New York Cakewalk that called for black couples to strut before a white audience. He felt the same about an amusement on Coney Island where visitors tried to hit the nose of a black man with a ball. He deplored any event where blacks could be subject to ridicule. He praised efforts by Cuba’s freedmen to school their families but understood the challenges they faced. Freedmen in the U.S. South had an advantage that the emancipated slaves of Cuba did not enjoy: an army of education-minded volunteers, guided by religious principles, who headed south to found schools for blacks and to promote literacy (Goldfield 412). Martí’s devotion to the educational Ligas in New York and Florida provide a parallel of sorts, a response on a Cuban scale, to the campaigns for literacy that gave hope and that broadened options for blacks in the American South.

Martí’s belief in education as a beacon for disadvantaged groups, racially identified or otherwise, was a long-held credo but was influenced by the U.S. years, as he became increasingly aware of scientific and agricultural advances taking place in North America. As Kirk notes in “Jose Martí and the United States: A Further Interpretation,” Martí placed high value on the no-nonsense approach of schools that taught practical skills and encouraged students to work with their hands, and he promoted modernizing techniques for Latin American agriculture (279). Martí realized that former slaves who had been deprived of education could not be expected to suddenly make a quantum leap in cultural progress. As he explained in Patria, for a slave-holding society, whatever the color of the slaves, the cultural gap between master and servant would make it hard to achieve cultural equality, the only circumstance in which people are truly equal (3: 238). Then he stated: “And there can be no social equality without cultural equality” (3: 28).2 For Martí, cultural—that is to say, educational—attainment was the equalizer that led to social integration, and the basis for such integration was culture, not race. Later in the same article he asserted that the insurgent rebellion of 1868 and the constitution of Guáimaro were paths to social equity (“equidad social”) (3: 30).

The Cuban’s belief in the visible equity of nature underlies his comments about social equality and social equity with regard to race. Alan West has written of Martí: “[his] quest for sovereignty at every level was inclusive” and “His generosity of spirit viewed the human subject as a crossroads engaged in an Emersonian cosmic dialogue” (3). Throughout his work, and especially after he felt the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Martí championed the universality of creation, nature’s unity in variety, and the fact that elements of nature did not have to be the same to be of equal value. Two poems that appear in La Edad de Oro, both with a basis in American literature, illustrate this point. Emerson’s “Fable,” translated by Martí as “Cada uno a su oficio” (To each his own), shows that a majestic mountain and a humble squirrel are both part of nature’s plan. One is large and magnificent and the other small and agile, yet each has a purpose and place in nature.3 The Martí adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s “The Prince Is Dead,” which he titled “Los dos príncipes” (The two princes), has a similar message. In Jackson’s poem, as well as Martí’s version, the death of a king’s son is compared with the death of a peasant boy, and rich and poor are seen to be alike in facing the death of a son. The poor lad is no less a prince than the royal one. As Martí explained in “Mi raza,” a shared sacrifice is the ultimate equalizer—the souls of black men and white men rise equally from the battlefield (2: 299).

Finally Martí addresses the question of social equality in a very personal way in an unedited piece called “Para las escenas” (For the Scenes) that was published in the Anuario (annual volume) of the Center for Martí Studies in 1978. The editors suggest that the document seems to be a natural continuation of lines near the close of the essay “Mi raza,” which, after refuting racial prejudice on a historical scale, states: “And in all the rest, each person will be free in the sacred space of his home” (2: 300). Here is how the piece begins: “And now comes the main question—the question of marriage. The eternal question. Would you let your daughter marry a black man?” (33). Martí’s answer is that if he had a daughter with all the qualities he would want in a daughter, and if he found a black man able to correspond to those qualities, he would be willing to confront the social isolation they would likely face and would accept his daughter’s choice. Martí states that the daughter would have to love the black man and that the man would have to be of exceptional character. He poses the question: should races mix? And then says that they already have (33–34).

After the late 1880s Martí’s tone intensified in regard to race. Sandwiched between the childhood memories of slavery in Cuba and the “no hay razas” language of the independence campaign of the 1890s were the U.S. chronicles and the history of the abolition campaign, the saga of the Civil War, the vivid accounts of the post-Reconstruction South, and the horrifying images of terror tactics against blacks. Martí took in these scenes with alarm, especially as he thought about Cuba. Unfortunately the very attitudes and prejudices he had challenged in “Vindication of Cuba” were carried by the occupying forces that helped Cuban patriots bring an end to the island’s colonial status, and many of Martí’s worst fears were realized. The racial tensions that simmered in Cuba after the war with Spain were largely a product of Anglo condescension and a failure of Cuban leadership and not the result of a martyred hero’s pleas for a raceless society.

Martí’s emphasis on unity and his statement that there was no race but the human race was a necessary strategy to implement the war effort and is not at odds with his acceptance of organizations and associations for Afro-Cubans. He fully supported La Liga in New York and in Tampa and gave favorable accounts of African American associations in the United States, like the Wendell Phillips Labor Club workers marching in a parade on Sixth Avenue, black seminaries and colleges in the South, and mainline Protestant churches composed of black members. The idea that in Martí’s eyes only western white culture was intellectually valid is also not borne out by a careful reading of his works. His U.S. accounts showing appreciation of Chinese culture and traditions and his acknowledgment of the high achievements of pre-Columbian civilizations reveal admiration and respect for non-white and non-Western cultures.

Martí’s Strategic Illusion

In his Steck Hall address of 1880 Martí decried a process of gradual abolition promoted by Spain, thus acknowledging that abolition was not complete, and in Patria in 1892 (2: 109) he described the life of a liberto (freedman), an oblique allusion to recently acquired freedom. These were images not quite in harmony with the claim that slaves had been freed in 1868. By the 1890s he had redefined emancipation to link it to the Grito de Yara, and he did so consistently in his writing during that decade. With this strategy Martí was being practical and seeking to persuade Cubans in the United States as well as Cubans on the island to support his aims. Although dissension had rocked the rebels of the 1868–78 conflict over the question of slavery, the planner of the Cuban Revolution clung tenaciously to the ideal that the Ten Years’ War had brought emancipation and that it had established a pact of brotherhood between blacks and whites engaged in the insurrection. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes’s act freeing his slaves and the 1869 constitution’s declaration of rights for all were the bases for this assertion. But slavery had not ended in Cuba in 1868, and in fact the numbers were transposed. The last slaves were freed in 1886. As stated in chapter 4, the truth is that except for the thirty-eight days just prior to his death in 1895, Martí never lived in a non-slave-holding Cuba.

The Importance of the United States

As this book asserts, it is impossible to understand race and race relations in Martí without dealing with the nearly one-third of his life spent in the United States. That was where he got his major sources for descriptions of slavery: a slave sale, testimonies of former slaves, accounts of cruelty, antislavery poetry, the antislavery novel, runaway slaves, slave catchers, and abolitionist oratory. These served as safe and distant depictions. They also provided contrasts with what he said about slavery in Cuba. The young boy remembered a slave swaying from a ceibo tree but never saw anyone lynched in Cuba, and in Cuba he never saw a mob take pleasure in seeing a black man burned to death. The United States offered many graphic images of racial violence as recorded over and over again in the U.S. press. This is not to say that horrific acts of violence against slaves were not carried out in Cuba, but such descriptions were not a burdensome presence in Martí’s narrative.

Writings about the United States provided ideas. For example, the proverb quoted in a February 1892 article about U.S. blacks headed for Liberia, “cutting the ears off a mule doesn’t make him a horse” (“el cortarle las orejas a un mulo, no lo hace caballo”) (En los Estados Unidos 1506), is repeated in Patria: “Coarse as it sounds, the proverb of Louisiana slaves is a lesson for Statehood and could be the slogan for a revolution: ‘By cutting off a mule’s ears you don’t turn him into a horse’” (1: 332). This same example is also found in his notes. Former slave and militant abolitionist Henry Garnet’s precepts on forgiveness between blacks and whites, as given in chapter 5, also find an echo in Patria.

Access to information and contacts with many different ethnic groups in the United States informed and enriched Martí’s writing about race. His reading about indigenous languages and cultures of the Americas precedes his mention of learning Indian languages and praise for pre-Columbian achievements in “Nuestra América.” As mentioned above, his only connection with the Chinese came as a result of reading newspapers and magazines during the time in exile. Exile also provided sustained interaction with many Afro-Cubans on a basis of equality, something he seldom knew in Cuba, and allowed him to see blacks and whites in a common work setting in the cigar factories of Florida and to appreciate the role of the lector. Writing about the American crucible of ethnic groups who did not always blend harmoniously motivated him to promote racial harmony at home and to question the wisdom of promoting “white” immigration in Latin America.

Ironically, when Cubans today read Martí’s articles about the Chinese in the United States, they are learning about traditions that became part of Chinese life in Cuba. This is because Martí’s descriptions were of the ethnic group that laid the foundations of Havana’s Chinatown. Between 1860 and 1875, some five thousand Chinese fleeing the United States, the so-called Californians, set up shops and commerce in Cuba’s capital and hired Chinese laborers, whom they helped to free from indentured service. These arrivals from the United States were instrumental in creating a Chinese presence in Cuba (García Triana xiv).

The measure of race in connection with Martí and the United States cannot be fully grasped by looking only at his writing. He was able to persuade and bring together factions with divergent perspectives about the role of races because of his example and his actions. Thus who he was and not just how his words have been interpreted was important. His warm personal interactions with numerous black Cubans, principally in New York and Florida, revealed the man behind the message. As Cintio Vitier confirmed, “the person of José Martí, exceptionally endowed with the ability to impact and better [mankind], enters the soul long before we have been able to fully understand the transcendence of his work” (Vida y Obra 9).

Mexican historian Enrique Krause highlights the personal dimension of the Cuban national hero’s life in stating that the myth surrounding his life can also “obscure the luminous side of his personality: as a masterful poet; a bold, original, and surefooted writer of prose; a man of limitless energy and curiosity and a heart overflowing with creative delight and love, above all love” (4). This is an essential facet of Martí often overlooked by those seeking to tie him to a theory or movement or to focus on what he wrote to the exclusion of who he was. Krause’s use of the word love is significant and is a reminder of the boldness of Martí’s declarations about Indians and blacks. In writing to urge education for Guatemalan Indians, Martí stated: “I love them” (EC 5: 286). In the November 1891 speech in Tampa, he said of the black Cuban: “I bear this man only love” (4: 276–77).

Race and Religion

Critics have noted there is little in the poet-patriot’s writing about Afro-Cuban religions, and what little there is is not very sympathetic to the African-based mutual-aid societies that served as quasi-religious associations.4 This is largely because Martí did not want Spain to be able to exploit racial fears in Cuba. But religion in black churches and among black communities in the United States was a different matter, sometimes with a distinct North/South divide. In the Charleston earthquake chronicle, Martí recorded Bible-quoting blacks even as he connected their frenzy to Africa. His reporting told of bizarre religious cases in the South, but he did not disparage the black participants as accounts in the national press did. In writing of the North, he praised black pastors like Henry Garnet and made frequent references to churches with African American congregations.

Translating Race

To fully comprehend Martí’s writing about the United States and the works that reflect that experience, one must appreciate his literary mastery and understand the importance of his allusions and references. It is also critical to assess how his meaning, often expressed through images, is conveyed through translation. All of this pertains to his writing about race. The Steck Hall speech mentioned in chapter 3 is one example of his use of images. His elaborate metaphor in the report on the Charleston earthquake is another and is described in chapter 4. In his comments on the problematic aspects of the very diverse immigrant groups who were arriving in the United States, he closed by suggesting metaphorically how they might harmoniously coexist. And “Nuestra América,” as discussed in chapters 2 and 6, offers many examples of allusions and references that are critical to an informed reading of the essay. These chapters also highlight the difficulties in translating Martí’s meaning effectively.

Because many who read Martí today are reading his works in English, the way translators convey his work in English can impact the messages that people take away about race. Chapter 2 gave examples of translation questions that arise in “Nuestra América’s” depiction of blacks and Indians. See footnote 7 in chapter 2 for comparative translations. Are the Indians and blacks backward and ignorant as Lillian Guerra’s translation suggests, or is the Indian mute or silent from oppression, and the son of Africa surveiled and under constant watch because he longs to escape? Another example from this essay is the line where Martí speaks of an America (his America) that “must save itself with its Indians.” The text in Spanish is “ha de salvarse con sus indios.” See chapter 6, footnote 12: Should the translation be “along with her Indians,” “by its Indians,” or “through her Indians”? All three are from highly competent translators, and yet they diverge in meaning. These are but a few examples, but they indicate the challenges.

Cuban vocabulary about race gave way to new descriptors in the United States. Indians were designated by discrete names rather than under a collective heading as indios. Sometimes the names were translated, sometimes not. As noted in chapter 6, he introduced new North American Indian words like squaw and pow-wow. The Chinese were called the yellow race (la raza amarilla), and a host of nationalities from Europe were named and characterized. He introduced his readers to the derogatory term dago for Italians. Writing extensively as he did about black and white relations in the United States, Martí was challenged to convey in translation condescending terms for African Americans, such as darkie and nigger, which he invariably gave in Spanish as negro, a much more neutral word. In his description of a slave sale in South Carolina, Martí translated “stalwart ‘likely nigger’” in a more respectful fashion as “este buen negrazo” (this sturdy black man).

Race and Sex

Martí’s avoidance of the sexual dimensions of master and slave and white and black relations conforms to his strategic idealism about race relations in Cuba. It is one of the most striking ways in which his writing differs from that of other nineteenth-century Cuban authors. He continually claimed that the 1868 uprising, with its “declaration” of independence, meant freedom for slaves, and he insisted in his articles for Patria that races would be united in the Cuban republic. References to his own racially linked experiences as a child in Cuba are minimal: comments about prison and the San Lázaro quarries, a brief comment in his notes, and poem XXX of Versos sencillos. Nothing in Martí’s writing about race in Cuba deals with the sexually abusive nature of slavery or the racial tensions that followed emancipation. Although Martí used the word mulato, he only obliquely conceded to the realities that created a mulatto population: white men having intercourse with black women. Neither does he touch the topic of the African male’s supposed sexual prowess and appetite and the hysterical outcries that arose in both Cuba and the United States around the fear of black men raping white women.5

In recording events from U.S. life for his chronicles, Martí consistently avoided explicit mention of the sexually charged contexts. In the 1887 reference to blacks shot or hanged in Oak Ridge, Louisiana, he indicated that the attack was sparked by the case of a black man living with a white woman—his wording was that they lived “in love”—but does not invoke the rage over race mixing that led to the lynching party (11: 237). The New York Times reported it as a riot that ensued over “a negro charged with criminal assault on a white woman.” In conveying in Spanish a description of a South Carolina slave sale, he suggested that the comeliness of an eighteen-year-old slave will be the chief motive for her purchase, with no reference to the direct sexual overtones of the newspaper account in English. In an 1887 piece he wrote of black men dying at the hands of whites because of “friendship or consorting with white women” (11: 264). In his intense look at racial hatred, the 1892 burning to death of a black man in Texarkana, he alludes only indirectly to the cause for the murder, the claim of the black man: “I offered Mrs. Jewell no offense.”⁶ U.S. press reporting of the event was graphic; the Fort Worth Gazette reported that Mrs. Jewell, a farmer’s wife with a five-month-old baby, had been set upon by a black man when she went to lock the barn. The report continued, “the negro, who was in hiding, sprang from his place of concealment, seized her by the throat and after a desperate struggle succeeded in accomplishing his diabolical purpose. He then dragged the fainting creature into the barn where he kept her for about an hour, assaulting her repeatedly” (“Burn Him”). Finally, Martí did not note and quite likely was unaware when he wrote of Frederick Douglass’s voyage to Haiti that when Douglass was refused the privilege of sitting at the Captain’s table, he was traveling with his second wife, who was white. It should be noted that in a brief segment called “Para las escenas,” which was not published in his lifetime, Martí acknowledged that race mixing had a long tradition and that white men produced mulatto children with their slaves and concubines (34).

Martí’s Message Today

This book does not suggest that Martí was perfect or deny the fact that in writing and speaking of race, he sometimes assumed the stereotypical attitudes of his age. Looking across the many volumes of Martí’s writing, one finds not only evolving perspectives with regard to race but also some inconsistencies. Perhaps these are the inherent contradictions of one who wrote so much and who wrote for so many. In one piece he claimed that the Civil War was mainly over states’ rights, and yet he also declared that Southerners went to war to keep slavery and that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had helped to end it. He described Native Americans and people of African descent as closer to nature than other ethnicities, and at times he employed the words savage and primitive when writing of these groups. Yet he also wrote that they were intrinsically equal and fully capable of advancement through education. He assailed savagery in the Spanish conquest and in U.S. massacres of Indians, as well as in the groups they suppressed. And he challenged Darwin’s failure to fully grasp the humanity of supposedly inferior human societies.

An important question to answer is: How do those who read Martí today absorb the racial views influenced by his North American experience? The response is clear. The late 1880s and the 1890s, when Martí’s focus on Cuban independence intensified, coincided with his evolving and increasingly harsh views of the United States. The racial panoramas he saw in exile affected what he planned in exile and were reflected in the speeches given in Florida and the entries for Patria. The specter of racial hatred in the U.S South was a call to tamp down seeds of discord and to champion brotherhood. The uneasy confluence of diverse nationalities and ethnic groups in the United States signaled a need to promote a unifying national identity, Cubanidad.

To illustrate in a specific example how Martí’s time in the United States impacts how he is understood today, I have emphasized “Nuestra América” in chapters 2 and 6, because it reaches an ever-expanding group of readers and has a great deal to say about race. When people read “Nuestra América” today, they are reading a work whose racial profiles were profoundly influenced by the time in the United States, and when they read in translation, they do so through a filter that can magnify or diminish the author’s legacy in race relations.⁷

The word raza (race) has many applications in the work of José Martí. He uses it as a distinctive color-based descriptor: black, white, mulatto, yellow. He calls Indians by their tribal names in North America and writes of Maya, Inca, and Aztec civilizations as well as using a generic term, indios, for Native Americans. He refers to immigrants arriving from Europe as races, as peoples, and by nationality, and he classified the Chinese as a racial and a cultural community. Martí also used raza to mean a type or kind of person, as he did in Havana in 1879, when he declared himself unwilling to bow to Spanish authority: “Martí is not of the race who can be bought” (Mañach 131). This idea reappears in his praise for a colleague in Santo Domingo when he insisted that the world had two races: those who are selfish and those who are generous (7: 308) and in “Mi raza” with slightly different wording (2: 299). All these ways to talk about race belong to the same person who summed up all races as belonging to a single category: mankind (2: 298).

From an initial racial perspective that saw the world in black and white, José Martí’s viewpoint evolved significantly in a North American panorama of great ethnic diversity that expanded his notion of race, amplified the dangers of racial intolerance, and exemplified “nature’s unity in variety.” Today Cuba’s most universal man reaches across borders, across a huge Cuban political divide, and across languages, and challenges new audiences with his message of racial inclusiveness, a message that owes much to his experiences in the United States.