Martí:
Martí: Democracy and Anti-Imperialism

Carlos Ripoll

I would like to begin by repeating a question that I am often asked about Martí: "Why is Martí so important to Cubans regardless of their ideologies?" To put the same question another way, "How can the same political thinker and leader serve as an inspiration for opposing groups? How can he be quoted to sustain totally different points of view?" I think it's safe to say that among Cubans, and among Cubanologists, there are many kinds of martianos, people who have great admiration for Martí and think of him as a guide for the present and the future. Then there are half martianos, one percent martianos and some wholly indifferent to Martí. But there aren't any anti-martianos, or at least any who would admit to it.

Now we all know that there are Stalinists and anti-Stalinists, fascists and anti-fascists, imperialists and anti-imperialists. But if we took just the last pair for example -the imperialists and the anti-imperialists- we would find martianos in both camps. In one camp we would find those who blind themselves to mistakes and ambitions in United States foreign policy, or who try to justify them, by citing only Martí's ideas on liberty and democracy, and his praise for efforts to preserve them in this country. In the other camp we would find those who dig in Martí's writings looking selectively for his criticism of the United States. Both approaches are wrong, but both are also easy to follow: in either case all one has to do is choose certain opinions of Martí and ignore certain others.

We live in a world that tends to look at things only in black and white. Reality, unfortunately, is never that simple. We never tire of reminding those who differ with us that life is full of gray areas. Honest thinkers like Martí explore the multiple aspects of reality and competing views of life, and then they report their findings to their readers. That is an intellectual's true role: to be open to the world and report to others on the good and the bad, the black and the white... and the gray. And that is precisely what Martí did in writing about democracy and imperialism -and indeed many other things. In large part that is why he is so important to so many Cubans- that and the fact that he summed up the best of Cuban tradition in an exemplary life.

To understand Martí's views on those two subjects -democracy and imperialism- we have to look at his life and works in their historical context. If we hope to learn any lessons for the present from his thought, as we can from that of all great men, we must understand what he was fighting for, and what he was fighting against. And this is particularly important in Martí's case, since his political ideas, as I said before, are repeatedly taken out of context by partisans of all stripes who use Martí to serve their own ends.

I propose, then, first to review with you the various points at which Martí was exposed to different forms of government, the problems attendant upon the lack of freedom, and the advantages of, and flaws in, a democratic system. From there we will go on to see the background for his militant anti-imperialism.

When Martí was 15, the first major revolt against Spanish rule broke out in Cuba. Although both his parents were Spaniards and sympathetic to colonial rule, the young Martí supported the armed rebellion. Indeed he began his career as a revolutionary writer at the time.

Spain had been governing Cuba despotically. It had doggedly denied Cubans the most basic of rights to participate in making policy for themselves and their country, and it had choked the Cuban economy with taxes. The leading insurrectionists in that war (which lasted from 1868 to 1878 and is called the Great War, or the Ten Years' War) were prominent, highly educated members of Cuba's landed class. They knew that many others like them believed that Spain could be persuaded to allow the island a measure of effective autonomy; and they also knew that other, smaller armed uprisings had been brutally squelched. Why then did they decide to risk their lives? Because in the world of Spanish America at the time, Cuba was one of the most advanced places culturally, even though it was a political backwater and its black population lived in slavery.

This was the society into which Martí was born and within which he developed his strong convictions against repression and imperialism. Democracy and anti-imperialism were both fundamental elements of Cuban nationalism through the rest of the nineteenth century, until independence was won, and it is only against that background that we can fully understand Martí on those two subjects. For his pro-independence activities at the outbreak of the Ten Years' War, Martí spent almost a year as a political prisoner at hard labor, and was then deported to Spain, where he witnessed the attempt of that country to install a Republic.

Spain had passed from a traditional monarchy, through parliamentary monarchy to its first democratic experiment, but it had failed to prepare the way by resolving strong conflicts between social classes, between regions, and between military and civilian leaders. The unresolved tensions brought the Republican government down and resulted in the restoration of the monarchy.

So Martí actually experienced the great difficulties involved in achieving the shifting, unsteady balances of democratic government. In Spain he saw that such problems could be insuperable if the special interests of the various groups in the society were more important to them than the benefits they believed would flow from a political system built on compromise. That is why Martí took such pains, while organizing Cuba's final war of independence of 1895, to explain to the people the workings and the benefits of a democracy. That is why he insisted that the nation he hoped would come out of the war could not long survive unless all sectors of the society could participate in its government.

From Spain, where Martí completed his university studies, he went to Mexico. When he arrived in 1875, Mexico still retained vivid memories of its defeat of French imperialist pretensions, and the optimism of the Liberal Reform Movement led by Benito Juarez was still strong. In short, it was a very congenial place for Martí: a progressive country governed by a democratic system, assertive of its national pride; a country that had succeeded in resolving or abating some of the deep social and political rifts that had made it vulnerable to outside ambitions and internal strife. The two decisive gains had been to establish a clear separation of Church from State and to produce a consensus opposed to monarchy and foreign rule.

But Mexico was trying to come to grips with a different kind of problem: the struggle between capital and labor. And Martí threw himself into the debate as a journalist. His articles on the subject insist on the ability, and the duty, of the two camps to find solutions through compromise- the touchstone of democracy. He exhorted the rich and powerful to recognize the legitimate complaints of the workers, and to be generous and just; and he warned the poor against the dangers of demanding justice through provocation and violence.

Martí cut his stay in Mexico short when Porfirio Diaz led the military coup that began his 35 years of dictatorship. Martí would not live under a military regime, so he left for Guatemala, where he hoped to settle. Unfortunately, he found that the government, albeit liberal, was personalistic and abusive in wielding power, Since the Ten Years' War had come to an end in Cuba and a general amnesty had been declared, Martí was able to return to the island.

It did not take the Cubans long to realize that the promises made by Spain to bring the war to an end were going to bring little change. Groups of conspirators quickly began to form, and Martí again joined. He was deported a second time and, after a brief attempt to settle in Caracas, finally decided to live in the United States. His experiences in Venezuela had been similar to the one in Guatemala: the development of the country and the basic freedoms of its citizens were subject to the whims of an autocratic strongman.

That was the road Martí traveled before settling in the United States. From 1881 to 1895 this country was his training ground in the practice of democracy. It was a period of great change and experimentation in a society striving to achieve progress at any cost. At least that was the tone set by most of the industrial entrepreneurs of that Gilded Age, and politics and public opinion generally seemed to follow suit. The rule of the day was exploitation of the worker, bribery of politicians, and use of whatever means were at hand to crush the competition.

Of course, by current standards those predatory practices seem inconceivable. We have labor and antitrust laws, and standards of disclosure for public officials, and we have come to expect the law to make labor and industry and political leaders accountable. But those were not the standards that prevailed in that period when the robber barons were amassing great fortunes and building great industries, and people were flocking to this country from all over the world, drawn by legendary opportunities for poor immigrants to rise from the slums to the heights of wealth and power.

In that period of social Darwinism, people believed that society, like nature, was properly organized on the basis of a struggle in which the fittest survived. The fittest, in this context, frequently meant the most cynical and least scrupulous. There was little concern for the cruelty of the struggle or the suffering of the victims, since they were necessary by-products of natural selection, and natural selection meant progress.

How was this morality reflected in the world of foreign policy at the time? When Martí settled in the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes was in office. He had succeeded Grant in his second presidential administration. Given his great admiration for aggressive capitalism, it was not surprising that Grant was also a staunch defender of expansionism (hence his negotiations to annex the Dominican republic -a very attractive, undeveloped territory that American capitalism could profitably exploit). The Hayes administration had done nothing to distinguish itself from that expansionist bent, so Martí had good reason to fear that the single minded quest for material progress would bring imperialist appetites for other American lands.

And what of the domestic scene? As I have already suggested, Martí tried to understand why this society that, as he had said, "enthroned freedom," also bred social injustice. "Freedom," he wrote, "is the Mother of the Earth," the "definitive religion." "Like bones to the human body, the axle to the wheel, the wing to the bird and the air to the wing, so is liberty the essence of life. Whatever is done without it is imperfect." Martí's writings about this country are a constant hymn to its cult of individual freedom. But so too are they full of moving descriptions of misery, abuse and corruption, which seemed to be perpetuated by the same system.

For a good example of Martí's views on these matters, I think it would be useful to look at a recently discovered essay of his about the American socialist, Henry George, who was a candidate for Mayor of New York at the time. Progress and Poverty, which Henry George had published in 1879, dealt with just that relationship that troubled Martí: the apparent rule that the growth of progress brought increased poverty, and that increased poverty favored further progress, and so on. Unless something was done, the inevitable result seemed to be social revolution.

Martí described the process as follows:

When the refinements and benefits enjoyed by indolent people increased day by day along with the despair, unemployment, deficiency in pay, cruel cold and fearsome hunger endured by the workers; when not one day passes without the celebration of a gilded wedding in a marble temple, or the suicide of a father or mother who takes his or her own life with those of the children to free them all from poverty; when one talks face to face in the parks with the starving unemployed ... then one again foresees as an awful reality the horrible, evocative scenes of the French Revolution, and one comprehends that the dark leaven that flavored the bread of France with blood is rising today in New York, Chicago, Saint Louis, Milwaukee and San Francisco.

Martí went on to observe that freedom had not sufficed to correct society's ills: "Political freedom is not enough to make men happy," he wrote,

And this is an essential flaw in a system that leads those who live in it to a state of constant and growing hatred and mistrust, and that, at the same time, permits the unlimited accumulation of public wealth in the hands of a few, while denying the working majority the health, financial means and calm without which they cannot endure life. That is the national sickness of the United States...

From there, Martí went on to ask, "Is freedom useless? Does freedom produce the same results as despotism? Hasn't a full century of the unfettered exercise of reason given rise to at least some improvement in the development of human nature? Don't the habits of republican life make men less cruel and more intelligent?"

What was his answer? That the strength of the system would allow it to correct the flaws: Martí concluded that freedom and democracy would be the ways to achieve justice, because, even if they alone do not suffice to correct inequities,

They temper the spirit, breed concern and respect for others, inspire revulsion for unnecessary violence, and afford the means required for the peaceful proposal and achievement of experimentation and change.

For Martí there were two fundamental weapons of self-defense for democratic systems: political parties and suffrage. He wrote of the latter:

After seeing it rise, quake, sleep, prostitute itself, make mistakes, be abused, sold and corrupted; after seeing the voters turn into animals, the voting booths besieged, the election boxes overturned, the results falsified, the highest offices stolen, one still must acknowledge, because it is true, that the vote is an awesome, invincible and solemn weapon; the vote is the most effective and merciful instrument that man has devised to manage his affairs. It is the notable invention that the exercise of political freedom seems to have contributed for the solution of the social problems that announced themselves to the world with such formidable proportions at the end of the last century.

Martí now had his experience with the democratic process in the United States to add to his experiences with other, unsuccessful experiments in government in Spain, Mexico, Guatemala and Venezuela. And on this basis he constructed his vision of how the war for Cuban independence should be organized so that, at its end, the new nation would be prepared to rule itself well. Thus, the principles that he wrote for the Cuban Revolutionary Party clarified that the objective was "not to perpetuate in the Cuban republic ... the authoritarian spirit and bureaucratic structure of the colony but rather to forge a new nation of sincere democracy through the frank and cordial exercise by the people of their legitimate faculties."

We can conclude, then, that Martí's experience in the United States was crucial in the development of his belief in a pluralistic democracy, and that the system that he hoped to implant in a free Cuba would be such a democracy, but one with greater emphasis on equality and a fair distribution of wealth -a society in which the profit motive would not be the basic principle of individual and social life.

I think we can also conclude -and this brings us to our second subject- that Martí feared that such a system alone could not protect the island from American expansionism.

Martí belongs to a long line of Spanish American anti-imperialists, or to be more specific, of writers and political leaders who viewed the foreign policy of the United States with suspicion and fear.

History explains why. The complaints date back to the revolutionary era. When Spain's colonies in America claimed the right to govern themselves, the United States declared itself a neutral state. For the revolutionaries to the South, that meant a cutoff of American sources of supply. As would again happen during Cuba's Ten Years' War, expeditionary boats carrying arms to South America were detained in American waters and on the high seas. On the other hand, North American vessels were used to transport material to the Spanish Army. During the revolutionary period, this gave rise to bitter complaints.

After that experience, it is not difficult to understand why Bolivar excluded the United States from the countries invited to participate in the first attempt to discuss Pan American issues including unity: the Panama Congress of 1825. The Colombian government did, however, extend an invitation, and when the United States finally issued instructions to its representatives, they included specific orders to oppose a joint Colombian and Mexican plan to help liberate Cuba.

These were only two instances of United States indifference or opposition to Spanish-American efforts to achieve independence, or to preserve it in the face of European attack. Later examples included the British occupation of the Malvinas and the Spanish occupation of the Chinchas Islands in a show of strength intended to intimidate Peru into paying its foreign debt. Then there was the Napoleonic intervention in Mexico when the United States was in the throes of Civil War.

Leaving aside the different reasons for United States inaction in the various cases, there seemed to Martí, among many others, to be a pattern of invoking the Monroe Doctrine only in the exclusive interest of the United States.

The other side of the problem was a direct threat from the United States. The danger of North American expansion at the expense of its neighbors had been noted as early as 1783, by the Count of Aranda, then Spain's Ambassador in France. He wrote:

This republic was borne... a pigmy [sic] and has needed the help and support of no less than two States as powerful as France and Spain to win its independence. But the day will come when it will be a giant, truly a fearsome colossus ..., and then, forgetting the benefits it has received, it will think only of its own interests and growth.

By the second decade of the nineteenth century, "Colossus" had became a common term for reference to the United States by Spanish American statesmen who had anxiously watched it absorb part of Florida. Later, this country annexed a big part of Mexico. Then there was the filibustering of William Walker, who wanted to set up his own empire in Nicaragua. In 1855, when the United States was pursuing a Central American route between the Atlantic and the Pacific, Walker's expeditions were smiled upon by some in American government. Writing about that incident, Martí said that the United States had acted, "in politics, as in business, by sending out an advance party of scoundrels."

Martí always battled against hate, and he did not harbor that feeling for the United States; his was truly a phobia, a dread of the direction that the nation was taking in its foreign policy. The reasons lay in the events we have briefly reviewed, many of which had special meaning for Martí, since he had lived in Mexico and had traveled through and briefly lived in Central America, and especially since he was Cuban, and United States interests in annexing the island had never been a secret. Again, the motivation for American expansionism was clear. First, the need for new markets for the excess production of American industry, and, second, the continuing desire for a route between the Atlantic and the Pacific and the desire to secure traffic through that route by having a guard post in the Caribbean.

But there is another key factor to understand in studying Martí's analysis of the need for caution against this threat. He expressed it with a metaphor: "If a green, fragrant pasture is opened up to a hungry horse, the horse will run out to the pasture and bury his head in it up to his neck, and he will furiously bite anyone who tries to stop him." In other words, the pasture won't fall prey to the hungry horse without the complicity of the owner of the pasture. Let me try to fill in the characters in the case of Cuba.

As Martí perceived it, there were three groups that supported United States expansion towards Cuba: the ultraaguilistas (ultra-Eagles), as Martí called them, in the United States; their allies in Latin America, and proponents of annexation among Cubans.

From the time of Martí's arrival in New York, the first group seemed to be gaining ground in the rank and file of Republicans and Democrats. Significantly, twice during his stay in the United States (under the administration of Presidents Garfield and Harrison) an avowed expansionist, James G. Blaine, was appointed Secretary of State.

When the International Pan-American Conference was held in Washington, D.C., in 1889, it was under Blaine's direction, and Martí suspected that expansionist ambitions were behind the convocation of the Conference. He lobbied among the Latin American delegates and, to his great dismay, came to realize that the majority favored Cuban annexation to the United States. In a letter that he wrote at the time, he despaired of the "congress of American nations, where" he said, "there are more representatives inclined to help the United States take possession of Cuba than there are those who understand that their peace of mind and their own independence turn on their preventing the key to the other America from falling into these alien hands."

But Martí was even more afraid of the third group of proponents of annexation -the owners of the pasture, that is, his own countrymen. Among the participants in that Pan-American Conference there were at least four Cubans who favored annexation. In Cuba, many sugar barons and other businessmen, and even some who at one time had favored integration with Spain, sought American tutelage to protect their interests. Martí knew that many people in the very ranks of the separatists, among his closest friends, were also vulnerable to American influence.

Still, he believed that the annexation of Cuba could not come to pass without the combined efforts of the three groups, because, given "the complex political system of the United States," he felt sure that the idea of annexation could not be "presented as the government's own." Of course, we will never know whether he was right, because, as Martí predicted and hoped, the war of independence undercut the momentum of the cause of annexation, by disproving its basic premise: that Cubans could not govern themselves. Their ability to organize themselves for the war and their great bravery during it earned them the right to claim their sovereignty. Of course, ultimately the indifference of Latin America, and the complicity of those Martí called "colonial Cubans" left the island open to American penetration during the period following independence in 1898.

Shortly before his death, at the outset of the war, Martí wrote a letter to The New York Herald explaining his attitude towards his countrymen who supported annexation. He described them as

arrogant and weak Cubans who were too ignorant of the vibrant energy of their homeland to support their nascent society... and who would rely on an alien power, which will enter as an outsider, meddling in the natural, domestic struggles of our island to favor its oligarchical and useless class over its productive population.

In the same letter, Martí issued warnings against annexation to both Latin America and the United States. To Latin America he said: "No sane Latin American republic will contribute, under pretext of Cuba's ineptitude, to the perpetuation of a master's mentality in a nation designed to be a peaceful and prosperous beacon for other nations." Addressing the United States, he wrote:

The United States should prefer contributing to the solid foundation of Cuba's liberty, offering the sincere friendship of its independent people, over being an accomplice to a pretentious, ineffective oligarch, seeking only the local power of a class... over the higher class ... of Cuba's productive citizens.

In the same way that Soviet Cuba represents a present danger to Latin America, Martí thought that a Cuba incorporated into the United States would represent a danger to the rest of the hemisphere. But neither this belief nor Martí's statements make him the irreconcilable enemy of the United States that some propagandists would have us believe. One can admire, and even love, a foreign land without imposing its interests and whims upon one's own country. Indeed, Martí was aware of both the good and the bad in the United States, its democratic government and its imperialist ambitions. Expressing this dichotomy at one point, he said: "We love the land of Lincoln just as we fear the land of Cutting" -that was A. K. Cutting, one of the most noted militants in the American Annexationist League.

The relations that Martí sought between Latin America and the United States are well defined in his writings. The last article he published in Patria on politics appeared shortly before his death and dealt with this topic:

On the one side there is our America and all its people, who have a certain character and share a common or a similar ancestry; on the other side, there is the America that is not ours, whose enmity is neither wise nor practical to instigate. But with a firm sense of decorum and independence, it is not impossible and it is useful, to be its friend.

One final comment. I chose these two subjects because I think that Martí's views on democracy and imperialism have validity today and for the future of Latin America. As we all know Martí's hopes for Cuban democracy and preservation of its sovereignty were not fulfilled. We should, however, not forget them, because they may yet be useful one day.