NOTES. Martí Studies and Control of the Cuban Past

NOTES

1. The quoted words appeared in a decree by the Cuban government regarding guidelines for the study of Martí's life and works. "Decreto número 1 del Comité Ejecutivo del Consejo de Ministros," May 19, 1977. Anuario del Centro de Estudios Martianos 1 (1978):13.

2. John M. Kirk, José Martí: Mentor of the Cuban Nation (Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1983). References to this book hereinafter will be followed by parenthetical indication of the pages cited. Quotation from the works of José Martí will be followed by parenthetical volume and page references to José Martí, Obras Completas, 27 vols. (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1963-65).

3. It is referred to as the Platt Amendment because originally it was a rider to a bill sponsored by Senator Orville Platt in 1901.

4. Charles E. Chapman, A History of the Cuban Republic (New York, 1927), p. 136.

5. Robert F. Smith, What Happened in Cuba? (New York, 1963), p. 21.

6. The poet José Manuel Poveda described in 1915 the situation as follows: "We are bound by double chains. We aren' t independent. We are nothing but a colonial factory forced to work, compelled by the whip to give away our harvest, the fruit of our labor. We are disorganized and demeaned, like a sorry lot of menials. We cannot defend ourselves. A wind of dispersion has swept away our consciences and every vestige of dignity, purity, and valor they contained; a wind of dissolution has disconnected the creative energies of the national spirit. We are a shadow of a people, an illusion of democracy, a yearning for freedom. We do not exist." Proemios de cenáculo (Havana, 1948), p. 104.

7. Pasado vigente (Havana, 1930), p. 99.

8. "The Roots of Cuban Nationalism," International Affairs 39 (July 1963):352.

9. Fernando de los Ríos, "Reflexiones en torno al sentido de la vida en Martí," Mensajes de la Institución Hispano Cubana de Cultura 1 (July 1928):91.

10. See chs. 3 and 6 in this volume.

11. Nuestra razón: Manifiesto Programa del Movimiento 26 de julio (Mexico City: 1956), p. 1. After a lengthy introduction about Cuban history, the manifesto sets forth the "Doctrine of the Revolution" in ten parts entitled: "National Sovereignty, " "Economic Independence," "Work," "Social Order," "Education," "Politics," "Civil Authority," "Freedom of Conscience," "Public Morality," and "International Position." Each is preceded by a thought taken from Martí's writings and consists of a gloss on the thought. All are imbued with liberalism. For example: "With respect to democracy, the July 26th Movement believes that Jefferson's philosophy is still valid and subscribes fully to Lincoln's formula for a 'government of the people, by the people, and for the people.' Democracy cannot thus be government by one race, or one class, or one religion, but rather by all the people. The Cuban revolution is democratic." Ibid., p. 16.

12. See ch. 3, n. 4.

13. Cuba Socialista 3 (August 1963):24, 38.

14. Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, "Nota a la tercera edición," Historia de Cuba (Havana, 1971), p.1.

15. Quoted in El caso Padilla: literatura y revolución en Cuba-documentos, ed. Lourdes Casal (Miami, 1971), p. 119.

16. "El diversionismo ideológico: arma sutil que esgrimen los enemigos contra la revolución," Educación (July 1972):34.

17. "La batalla ideológica en torno a José Martí,- Anuaraio Martiano 5 (1974):17.

18. "Presentación," 1 (1978), pp. 4, 5.

19. There are numerous examples of unsupported statements about Martí made by Kirk to fit him into a "radical" mold. See e.g. pp. 35 (to the effect that at seventeen Martí had a "general desire for sweeping reforms in Cuba" -by which Kirk is suggesting something other than Martí's nineteenth-century liberalism) and 45 (to the effect that after Martí's arrival in Mexico, at twenty-four, "the process of radicalization [of Martí] had thus renewed"). Similar undocumented affirmations are repeated in the remainder of the book in Kirk's treatment of Martí's years in New York. See e.g. pp. 53 (to the effect that U.S. materialism and the danger of economic domination over Latin America were "two major conditioning elements in the obvious radicalization of Martí's sociopolitical thought. ... From 1881 until 1889 these two obsessive preoccupations combined to encourage in Martí a steadily increasing process of radicalization"); 58 (fixing Martí's attendance at the International Monetary Conference in Washington, D.C., in 1889, as the beginning of the "last phase in the radicalization of Martí's thought"); 143 and 146 (generally concluding that "Martí gradually departed from the traditional liberal approach adopting an increasingly radical position on many social issues" and that "Martí's economic thought (as with his sociopolitical observations) was clearly becoming increasingly radical").

20. See Martí, Obras Completas, I, 281-84.

21. For example: "Nothing is as autocratic as the Latin race, and nothing is as just as democracy in action. That is why it is not very easy for [us] to convince ourselves of the goodness of an elective democratic system, and so difficult to achieve it in practice without violence" (VII, 347). In a review of Catecismo democrático, by the illustrious Puerto Rican philosopher and educator Eugenio María de Hostos, Martí quoted with praise a passage in which Hostos stated the "democratic principle is destroyed" when "a people is replaced by one man" (VIII, 53), and added: "The will of all, peacefully expressed: that is the generating seed of republics" (VIII, 54).

22. Linda B. Klein, "The Socialist Constitution of Cuba," Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 17 (1978):459.

23. On another occasion Martí wrote in the same vein: "It is natural and human for a man to think constantly of himself, even in his acts of greatest abnegation and self-neglect, to attempt to reconcile his personal advancement with the public interest, and to serve the latter in a way that will benefit the former, or not harm it very much" (XIII, 161).

24. Among them were Céspedes, Francisco Vicente Aguilera, Pedro, Luis and Fé1ix Figueredo, Bartolomé Masó, Donato Mármol, Manuel Calvar, Calixto García, Julio and Belisario Grave de Peralta, and Vicente García.

25. Kirk's ignorance about Martí's life and the Cuba in which he lived is evidenced in numerous instances. For example, when Martí served his sentence in Cuba's political system as a youth, it was not in the "San Lázaro political prison, as Kirk says (33). "San Lázaro" was the name of the quarries where the prisoners did forced labor, not the name of the prison. According to Kirk, Martí "even before his first deportation from Cuba . . . had severed ties with Catholicism in order to join a local Freemason group" (123). But Martí's first contacts with the Masons were in Spain, and he maintained contacts with the Catholic Church long after (e.g. he was married in the church in Mexico in 1877, baptized his son in Cuba in 1879, and became godfather to Maria Mantilla, in Brooklyn, New York, in 1881). Kirk misdates Martí's words upon leaving Guatemala in 1878, thinking that he wrote them upon leaving Mexico (44), and he incorrectly states that in October 1890 Martí had "several years' teaching experience in an institution organized by La Liga, a society of black Cuban workers living in the United States" (127), when in fact La Liga had not even been founded until January of that year. By way of one final example Kirk asserts that in 1890 and 1891 Martí "reacted angrily against the open harassment of the revolutionary groups living in the United States" (58), but that could not be true, because at that time there was no active Cuban revolutionary group in the United States to be harassed.

26. See ch. 6, n. 2.

27. Carlos Baliño (1848-1926), a tobacco worker and writer, met Martí in Tampa in 1892.

28. Glosando los pensamientos de Martí (Havana, 1941), p. 12.