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José Martí, |
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JOSÉ MARTÍ AND THE MARXIST INTERPRETATION OF CUBAN HISTORY The Apocryphal Martí In his struggle against the Spanish rule of his native Cuba and of Puerto Rico, José Martí epitomized Latin American nationalism of the nineteenth century. For fifteen years Martí resided in the United States, where he organized the Cuban war for independence and where, as a correspondent for various newspapers of Central and South America, he presented to his readers a comprehensive and objective view of the life and customs of this country. On one hand, he praised its achievements in securing personal liberty; on the other, he denounced the expansionist forces that threatened the Spanish-speaking territories of the continent. For this reason, and because of his stature as a patriot and an apostle of freedom, Martí is revered throughout Latin America and, of course, particularly in Cuba, where the present regime cultivates his image as forerunner of all anti-imperialist movements against the United States. Martí's commitment to individual rights and liberties is incompatible with the Marxist-Leninist design for the Cuban state. It is virtually impossible to reconcile his concepts of pluralistic democracy and national sovereignty with Soviet-style dictatorship and proletarian internationalism. Nevertheless, in order to implant communism in Cuba, Fidel Castro has had to appeal to traditional patriotic fervor centered on Martí. Even in the socialist Constitution of 1976, while effectively conforming Cuba's institutions to Soviet models, he has endeavored to lend authenticity to the regime by fabricating for it indigenous origins. In fact, the preamble of the Constitution concludes with words of Martí which, in the abstract, could be claimed to serve as a directive for any type of government: "I want the first law of our republic to be the reverence of Cubans for the total dignity of man." The current attempt to amalgamate nationalism and socialism can only be accomplished by continuous distortions and selective historiography. Before communism came to power in Cuba, the party disclaimed Martí. His beliefs and goals were treated as having little, if any, relation to socialist or Marxist principles. That was the position disseminated by Juan Marinello,(1) the most distinguished Communist intellectual in Cuba from the foundation of the party on the island through his death in 1973. In 1934 Marinello, who was also a prominent authority on Martí, urged the Cuban people to "turn [their] backs once and for all" on his doctrines. The forger of Cuban independence, he wrote, was to be respected and admired but not followed, for he had been a "great failure." Moreover, since Martí had "unknowing and unwillingly been an advocate of the rich," to keep his ideas alive "could serve no purpose other than to promote opportunism."(2) In subsequent years, Marinello amplified his repudiation of Martí as an ideological leader for Cuba, since he considered the latter "a poet drawn into politics by his imagination, not a thorough investigator who made continued use of reason." The principles of such a man were antiquated, Marinello contended, and could not serve to guide Cuba: "Only in our time, with Lenin, has the political leader who is at once a scientific man come into existence," and only that Leninist mold was capable of shaping the island's future.(3) With the centennial of Martí's birth, in 1953, followers of almost every religious persuasion and political ideology pronounced their adherence to Martí's doctrines. Batista(4) had planned a lavish national celebration and was foremost in the wholesale demagoguery. After having initially formed part of a coalition government with Batista, the Communists had moved into the opposition, which tried to unite in a massive boycott of the government-sponsored festivities. But some of the party's members and sympathizers found the ingrained habit of manipulating Martí too strong to resist. The moment was ripe for a decisive statement of the breach between the party and Martí, and Juan Marinello was the chosen spokesman. In a sweeping attack calculated to bring all into line, he placed the misguided left-wing intellectuals in the same class with the clergy, and bitterly criticized both alike for misquoting and misinterpreting Martí to make his beliefs appear compatible with their dogma: "In order to destroy such falsifications," asserted Marinello, "it would suffice to bring together everything he [Martí] said -and he said a lot- against education controlled by religious institutions, and everything he said -and he said a lot- that disagrees, directly or indirectly, with the basic principles of Karl Marx."(5) There was no room for doubt -Martí and Marxism were irreconcilable. Soon a new opposition force made itself heard and gained popularity by proclaiming a revolution based on Martí's thought. Fidel Castro announced in the manifesto of the 26th of July Movement(6) that Martí was the source of its ideology, which rested on democracy, condemnation of all forms of dictatorship, guarantees for individual freedom and inviolability of human rights, respect for the Constitution and the laws, and unimpaired national independence.(7) Commitment to the avowed ideals did not last. Once the revolution had triumphed, it found itself at odds with its original credo. Castro transformed the Martí-inspired revolution into a Marxist-Leninist state, but he dared not erase Martí's name in the process. So began the current era of falsifications and distortions. Two Cuban dictators had preceded Castro in the art of refashioning Martí to serve their purposes.(8) Machado,(9) first, and later Batista were adept at quoting Martí to the Cuban people to justify their arbitrary and ruthless governments. When Machado began to feel the sting of American disapproval, he published for mass consumption Martí's 1889 criticism of the United States.(10) Batista used the centenary to his advantage in every conceivable way. Following their example, Castro too purported to justify his actions by invoking words of Martí, and he lost no time in preparing a new edition of Martí's complete works and in publishing a government-sponsored journal about Martí, just as Batista had done before him.(11) It was urgently necessary to link Martí and Castro in the public mind. The memory of Martí is deeply rooted in every Cuban, and a Martiano flavor had to be given to the Marxist-Leninist dictatorship. The problem remained: Would the ghost of party disavowal of Martí's ideology haunt the new government? How would the Cuban Communists revise their earlier assessment of Martí and retreat from the stance Marinello had so strongly advocated? The answer came in 1963 when, disregarding his previous statements, Marinello himself declared that "Martí's positions are in accord with every egalitarian transformation of society and are a strong and legitimate precedent for our socialist stage.... The nation created by Fidel Castro's revolution brings to all Cubans the promises made by the liberator of 1895."(12)Shortly afterward he reiterated: "The present revolution was heralded and shaped by Martí's preaching. . . . The liberation movement headed by Fidel Castro is the most exact projection of Martí's objectives into the time of socialist victory."(13) There have been numerous official efforts to persuade the Cuban people that Castro is virtually following a course charted by Martí to create a communist society. But the simplest and preferred way to show Martí as a forerunner of the current regime has been to take out of context and overemphasize chosen strains of his thought. The American public is now exposed to a similarly oblique presentation of Martí in a volume of his writings entitled Inside the Monster. Its editor, Philip S. Foner, states in the preface: "What makes Martí's words especially significant is that his life fulfilled the promise in them, and that, as the recent revolutionary history of Cuba fully demonstrates, he stood on much more than 'columns of smoke. '"(14) Philip Foner is the author of two other books about Cuba,(15) both of which are closely patterned after the standard Marxist version of Cuban history that was established by the Cuban Communist Party in 1944(16) and is followed exclusively on the island today. Although Foner had access to Cuban libraries and received the help and advice of some of the best known Communist historians of Cuba in writing those two books,(17) they are full of inexcusable errors that reveal, at best, haste in their preparation and an inadequate grasp of the subject. Some deal with Martí and shed light on the deficient knowledge about him possessed by Foner before undertaking to publish Inside the Monster .(18) But factual mistakes are of small import compared to the baseless assertions and the fictionalizing about Martí's handling of the relations between black and white, rich and poor, capital and labor within the revolutionary movement he organized. For example, Foner says of Martí's first speech in the United States, in 1880: "To the discomfort of the wealthy aristocratic émigrés, but to the delight of the Negro and white tobacco workers who filled the rear of the hall, Martí dealt with the Negro question as it affected the revolution in Cuba."(19) This impression of the effect of the famous lecture is indeed surprising. It suggests that Martí failed to communicate his meaning to the audience in Steck Hall, or that he unwisely wrote a text that defeated the very purpose of the gathering: to raise funds among the wealthy Cuban émigrés in New York and to encourage harmony between the black and white elements of the exile community. It would certainly have been foolish and counterproductive to address the racial issue in a manner that would only divide blacks and whites along class lines. The lecture itself explicitly scorns the Spanish campaign to do precisely that, to undermine revolutionary unity by alienating the blacks and by instilling in the well-to-do whites fear of a black uprising against them. The lecture sought to dispel such fears and to unify rich and poor by praising both equally for their past contributions to the revolutionary cause -the former for their disinterested sacrifice of fortune, the latter for their unshakable faith: "You, the rich," Martí said, "who have had the energy and courage to disdain your riches and to build new wealth beneath an honest roof, where the whip [of Spain] cannot reach you; you, the poor, who, with the sacred joy of the faithful and with serene intuition for goodness unblemished by vanity or hope of gain, cherished the holy ideal [of the revolution] when it was sick and agonizing, . . . you yourselves form the community that is arising."(20) The lecture clearly contradicts Foner's supposition. In fact, Martí was so carried away by his purpose of allaying white fears that he made the following insensitive comment, which surely would have led wealthy whites to leave Steck Hall rather more pleased with themselves than uncomfortable: "They [the blacks) know that we have suffered as much as and more than they; that under political servitude the educated man is hurt more deeply than is the ignorant under the servitude of slavery; that pain is proportionate to the sensitivity of the one who must endure it; and that they did not make a revolution for our freedom, and we have made such a revolution, and we continue bravely to sustain it now, for our freedom and for theirs."(21) Another of Foner's misstatements further illustrates how mere conjecture substitutes for history in the author's portrayal of Martí's work: "In organizing the Cuban Revolutionary Party," Foner asserts, "Martí had brought together 'as many elements of all kinds as could be recruited.' . . . He accomplished this without yielding to the prejudices of certain elements in the alliance. He refused to yield to those who insisted that he place the Negro in a subordinate position in the revolutionary movement. He likewise rejected the demand of wealthy exiles that the Socialist working class leaders be eliminated from the movement.(22) Historical facts belie this undocumented assertion. The wealthy founders of the party, Ramón L. Miranda and Gonzalo de Quesada,(23) among others, gave it their support with full knowledge that among the closest collaborators of Martí, men with whom they would be working hand in hand, were Sotero Figueroa and Rafael Serra-both black, one a Puerto Rican printer, the other a Cuban teacher and cigar maker. Moreover, neither the wealthy nor any Cuban in his right mind would have made such a demand; a revolt against Spain would have been inconceivable without the joint military command of the white general Máximo Gómez and the black general Antonio Maceo,(24) not to mention the leadership of José Maceo, Guillermo Moncada, and Flor Crombet,(25) each a key figure in the past revolutionary movements. It is similarly difficult to lend credence to the alleged fears of socialism within the Revolutionary Party. It is absurd to picture any Cuban asking Martí to eliminate a handful of virtually unknown and harmless socialists and anarchists among the exiles when Martí himself was regarded by the Cuban reactionaries, the autonomists and annexationists as the really dangerous element in the revolution. Martí himself had his doubts about certain kinds of socialist and anarchist demonstrations at the time when he was seeking to unite Cuban exiles to organize a war of independence, but he always sought to bring fringe elements into the fold, not try to isolate them. (See ch. 6 in this volume.) To superimpose the impressions of a twentieth-century mind on the audience of a speech delivered in 1880 and in a manner manifestly at odds with the text of the speech, to embellish the past with fictional details and nameless people in order to fit the development of the revolutionary movement of 1895 conveniently into a preconceived mold, is to write sloppy history. Beyond this, not even the most generous reader can lightly dismiss the misrepresentation of well-documented events in which Foner engages. His handling of the 1893 tobacco workers' strike in Key West is a case in point. Not content to portray all Cubans save the poor and black as selfish and indifferent to the future of their country, he presents the Cuban cigar factory owners as traitors. By his falsified account, they connived with the Spanish government in breaking the strike to protect their economic interests and, in so doing, cared nothing about subverting the revolutionary cause. Foner writes:
According to Foner, this incident had a profound effect on Martí who, through it, came to realize that he had misplaced his trust in the factory owners and that the revolution could count only on the masses for support:
Were all this true, the picture would be an almost too perfect illustration of the forces of materialism at work shaping the course of history; it would, indeed, outdo Marx and Engels, who acknowledged "elements of the superstructure" that do not fit into such a simplistic interpretation. But Foner has wrongly identified the characters in the plot and has distorted the facts. There are numerous reliable sources that deal with the strike.(28) Had he consulted or treated them with integrity he might have resisted the temptation to revise history at the expense of the reputation of the Cuban factory owners whom he so carelessly maligns. To begin with, there never was an alliance of Cuban employers with the Spanish authorities, and Martí knew this well. The 800 strikers mentioned by Foner were employees of La Rosa Española, a cigar factory owned by William Seidenberg, a German, who had two minor Spanish partners. Seidenberg threatened to move his factory to Tampa if the Cubans did not return to work. The move would have been ruinous for Key West, and, to prevent it, American businessmen and city authorities arranged with Spanish agents to import strikebreakers from Cuba. Contrary to Foner's narrative, the committee that went to Havana was not one of Cuban employers; it was a 7-member delegation including George W. Allen, Judge L. W. Bethel, William H. Williams, John F. Horr, W. R. Kerr, Judge A. J. Kemp, and the Reverend Charles M. Fraser, all Americans, none of whom was directly involved in the tobacco industry. These prominent local citizens, politicians, and government servants acted, not only with indifference for the prosperity of the Cuban cigar workers in exile, but with disregard for American immigration laws. It was their conduct that led Martí to state, as Foner quotes, that "since Cubans had no security in the land of liberty, they ought more than ever to create a free land for themselves." Martí's ire is clearly expressed in an article he wrote shortly after the events and had printed in English in the revolutionary weekly Patria.(29)
A complaint was registered with the federal authorities in Washington, D.C., by a lawyer Martí appointed, and the incident was brought to a close by an order of deportation against the strikebreakers, but the relations between the Cubans and the "Conchs," or natives of Key West, were permanently damaged. Hundreds of tobacco workers joined their Cuban employers, who were as fervently patriotic as they, in moving to Tampa and Ocala, Florida, where they sought a place to pursue in safety both their livelihoods and their cause. "Writings on the United States" The serious deficiencies in Foner's knowledge about Martí were not erased before he undertook to devote an entire volume to the life and writings of the great Cuban. The biographical introduction itself proved to be an endeavor beyond Foner's reach and is full of inaccuracies that could have been avoided through the most elementary research.(31) And if the introduction to the anthology is not a reliable source of information, neither are some of the annotations to the texts a useful tool to further our understanding of Martí's views on the United States. For instance, Martí had occasion to write about the growth of the abolitionist movement, from the foundation of the Liberty Party through Lincoln's election. His description extolled the movement: "Where has man seen a higher form of nobility, such generous enthusiasm, such a flaming message, such unselfish leadership, such fruitful and militant courage?" The comment is annotated by Foner as follows: "It should be borne in mind that the Republican Party was not an Abolitionist party, and stood solely for opposition to the further extension of slavery in the territories and not for interference with the institution where it already existed."(32) When Martí again waxes lyrical about Lincoln, saying that he "set four million slaves free in a promise to God to 'give them their freedom if the Confederates were thrown out of Maryland,"' Foner demonstrates an acuity for detail that is notably absent from his biographical sketch of Martí: "This is not," he writes, "accurate. Lincoln never actually set four million slaves free. The Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln on January 1, 1863, as a military measure, gave freedom only to slaves in those states which were in rebellion against the Union.... The abolition of slavery for all held in bondage did not occur until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment later, in 1865, by which time Lincoln was dead."(33) Martí often commented on the travel memoirs of North Americans who visited Latin America and was keen to detect in their impressions anti-Hispanic prejudices and stereotypes as well as airs of Yankee superiority. But in his review of an article by William Eleroy Curtis that appeared in Harper's, he reported that Curtis, in dealing with what he had seen in Argentina, "praises, admires, and treats everything with great respect, although at the pace of a traveler; . . . he puts aside the presumption which makes the man from North America stand out as unique among people." Martí was pleased by Curtis's belated acknowledgment of such advances as Argentine industry, wealth, schools, and electrical and railroad networks. Foner read the article in Harper's, and his annotation says that "Curtis called for American economic penetration of Latin America."(34) The observation is irrelevant to Martí's treatment of the Curtis article. Had Martí perceived such an attitude underlying the comments about Argentina, he would have denounced Curtis's intentions. His position on this issue was one of equanimity: He advocated the development of Latin Americas potential and resources by foreign enterprise when national capital and efforts were insufficient, so long as the purpose of the foreign investment was not predatory. Mutually beneficial commerce is what Martí understood Curtis to beckon, not "economic penetration in Latin America." Martí's ideas on the subject are clearly conveyed in an article he wrote months before his death on "Honduras and the Foreigners." He ends it by telling his readers that "every producer is like a root, and ample ground must be opened [in Latin America], as though for a new tree, to whoever brings it useful work, whether he comes from a cold or a warm land."(35) His thoughts were the same with respect to Cuba, as is manifest in his declarations, only days before his death, to the New York Herald: "The freedom of Cuba will open to the United States the Island closed to it today by the [commercial] interests of Spain."(36) Two valuable anthologies of Martí's works in English translation preceded Inside the Monster , one edited by Juan de Onís,(37) the other by Luis A. Baralt.(38) The texts in both are well chosen to represent a cross-section of Martí's writings about the United States. But according to Foner, neither collection "includes Martí's articles on capital and labor in the United States nor those in which he dealt with the rising menace of U.S. imperialism."(39) This is false: Foner himself took from Baralt's anthology, inter alia, "The Labor Problem in the United States" as well as "The Chinese in the United States," and the Onís volume contains one of Martí's most important essays, "Our America," with its famous and explicit warning about the impending danger of U.S. expansionism, as well as Martí's "political testament," his letter of March 25, 1895, to Federico Henríquez y Carvajal,(40) in which the subject of U.S. imperialism is given clear perspective within the body of Martí's thought. The volume by Foner is, however, decidedly different from the anthologies by Baralt and Onís, since the latter two both gather in fair proportions Martí's praise and criticism of the United States.(41) The editorial techniques used by Foner sometimes serve to avoid such a balanced approach and are contrary to the sound practices of responsible anthologists. For example, he excerpts fragments that present only one aspect of the extensive articles in which they originally appeared; taken out of context, the fragments are deceiving-their meaning within the whole is lost to the reader. Since many of Martí's chronicles are structured so that each part draws sense from its relation to the others, the disfigurement of a fragment excised by Foner's method is bound to be substantial. For example, what Foner presents under the title "The Negro Race in the U.S." is but the last part of an article that also deals with "Veterans in the White House," "A Marvelous Scene on the Gettysburg Battlefield. "The Blue and the Gray," "The Widow of a Confederate General," "The Fourth of July," and "A Somber Procession in the South." The title and dominant theme of the whole is "The Incident of the Two Flags," a symbolic Independence Day celebration in Gettysburg at which soldiers of the Confederacy and the Union met to shake hands in the battlefield. Martí praised President Cleveland for risking his popularity by publicly encouraging the nation to bury the past. Rejoicing at the spirit of reconciliation in which Cleveland spoke and in which the act in Gettysburg was organized and carried out, Martí reminded his Spanish American readers: "Only here [in the United States] have such things happened until now, because until now this is where reason has shone with greatest freedom."(42) It is in purposeful contrast with this applause that Martí condemns, in the section offered by Foner, the disgraceful treatment of blacks in the South. Martí described the good and the bad side by side and with equal frankness, but through the editing of the article, Inside the Monster silences Martí's words of approval and augments the volume of those of censure. The same procedure is followed in "Indians and Negroes," which is only part of a longer article the first half of which celebrates the ideals and practices of religious and political freedom brought to these shores by the Pilgrims.(43) In the part rejected by Foner, Martí extols the tolerance and harmony with which Catholic, Protestant, and Freemason join, guided by reason and under a free government that wisely separates Church and state, to sing the hymn "America." Martí was just as concerned to convey this message to his readers as to inform them of the plight of the Indian and the black. He treated the racial problem in the same chronicle with the inauguration of a monument to the Pilgrims to show that the injustices suffered by those minorities were the product of deviations from fundamental American principles of freedom and equality. Foner mutilates the integrity of the chronicle and thus deprives the American reader of the perspective from which Martí examined the racial problem in the United States. In "Mexico and the United States" Martí declared that "in order to know a country one has to study it in all its aspects and expressions: in its elements and its tendencies, in its apostles, its poets, its bandits." Foner, contrary to the spirit of Martí's policy, abridges that very article by excising all of its enthusiasm for the enhanced commercial relations between the two countries that would surely follow their new mail treaty, the warm reception given to the daughter of Benito Juárez(44) at the White House, and a generously pro-Mexican article by Arthur Howard Noll published in the American Magazine. Martí's article also deals with the imperialist philosophy of a group of Americans who had been advocating the annexation of Canada, Mexico, and countries in Central America and the Caribbean. That was the "disagreeable part" that Martí said should be discussed and "got out of the way first." But it is the only part that Inside the Monster offers. When Martí ceases to write of the "bandits" and begins to address favorably the postal treaty and to express his appreciation for the Noll article and the White House reception, the selection in the anthology is abruptly cut short. In "The Chinese in the United States" Foner again presents only those paragraphs of an extensive article that recount a shameful moment in American history -a murderous raid on the Chinese section of a Wyoming town by white miners belonging to the Knights of Labor who were incensed by the Chinese immigrants' willingness to work for cheap wages. The translation is taken from the Baralt anthology, where it is identified as only an excerpt. But Foner gives the reader no such warning: the fragment, which, out of context, deceptively seems to support Foner's prejudice (revealed elsewhere in the book) against that labor organization which rejected the more radical doctrines and tactics of socialists and anarchists, appears as if it were a complete article. But in the original it is followed by a general apologia of the Knights of Labor. Martí reproved that incident in Wyoming but generally agreed with the organization's moderate answers to the labor question in the United States: "They are powerful because they respond to their own [American] problems. It [the Knights of Labor] is not transplanted European socialism. It is not even nascent American socialism. Here there is no caste system to defeat, there are no family crests tied to large land holdings, there are no privileged classes that legislate or influence national legislation. . . . Here the worker knows that today's monopolist was a worker yesterday." He rejected as foreign and inappropriate to America the tactics of those who promoted class struggle and violence, and he enthusiastically reported that the ranks of the Knights of Labor were growing, and that they marched in the Labor Day parades "not dressed in the garb of war, but in the suit one wears on election day."(45) In an interview in Havana on the occasion of his sixth trip to Cuba and commenting on Inside the Monster , Foner said:
But the "basic questions covered by Cuba's hero" are by no means those mentioned by Foner, those he highlights in his anthology. This may be proved by a simple thematic comparison of the contents of Martí's complete works with the contents of Inside the Monster . Martí was concerned with social problems in this country, but he wrote only two pages about Marx, and those were not in praise. Martí scrutinized the myriad aspects of American life. Foreign policy was only one of them, albeit an important one for him, because he knew that proannexation forces in this country and among Cubans who blindly admired it could jeopardize Cuba's future as an independent nation. No matter how embarrassing it may be for totalitarian regimes, especially Castro's, the fact is that Martí fervently defended freedom and the democratic process, and this defense is far from "the least important" aspect of his work. Martí's fear of U.S. expansionism and his sharp and well-taken criticism of the injustices and flaws in the way the American system functioned cannot obscure his denunciation of all imperialisms, not only that of the United States, and all abuse of human rights, nor his open admiration of American institutions when they fostered and protected human dignity and the free development and expression of individual potential. By underplaying these facts, in line with the Marxist interpretation of Cuban history, this volume does a disservice to Martí and to the American reader. |
