José Martí,
The United States, and the Marxist...

Carlos Ripoll

JOSÉ MARTÍ AND SOCIALISM

  Notes

When Martí wrote "My poetry will grow,/ I, too, will grow, beneath the grass," he did so, as he so often did, prophetically. He had no reason to believe that he would be remembered for his political activity, and certainly not for his writing. For from his vantage point, the Cuban revolutionary movement might have remained just another attempt at independence. In fact very few grasped Martí's stature as a thinker and artist prior to his death.

The prophecy is finally being fulfilled, as scholars delve into Martí's works and evaluate his poetry. But however diverse the interpretations of his work, no facet of his production has been subject to such heated debate as his political thought. One -perhaps the most controversial- aspect of that thought is the subject of this study: Martí's views on socialism.

By way of introduction, we should first review Cuban Marxist thought on Martí, particularly the equivocations of Marxists forced to reconsider Martí's importance at crucial junctures. We will then look at what was known about socialism in Martí's day and the opportunities he may have had to learn about it. Next, we will discuss the continuity of Martí's thought on socialism, and finally, a little-known book on the topic for which Martí wrote the preface and which leaves no room for doubt about his views.

During the Cuban Republic's first twenty-five years Martí was, as Peruvian writer Garcia Calderón(1) called him, "an illustrious unknown." It was the generation of 1923 that "rescued" Martí, bringing him into the life of the republic. But the birth of that generation coincided with that of Cuban communism; so the interpretation of Martí's work took different courses depending on the ideology of the interpreter. Julio Antonio Mella and Rubén Martínez Villena(2) turned toward Martí, as did Jorge Mañach and Félix Lizaso,(3) but as the nation' s awareness of Martí grew, so too did the dichotomy in interpretation of his importance.

Cuban communism has at times rejected Martí, at times ignored him, and on occasion Communists have tried to bring him into their ideological fold grasping at accidental common ideas. The most radical change in the Communist view of Martí came in 1959, when Fidel Castro appeared in the Cuban political arena making use of Martí's words. Marxists then had to shed their prior position and acquire a new perspective on Martí. A prime example of this change can be observed in Juan Marinello, the most respected authority among the Communists on Martí. In 1935, Marinello(4) position was as follows:

The straight and honest path is to understand Martí -and to respect and admire him enormously, more and more each day- in his function as a great loser, a great man betrayed, as are so many idealists, by the all-consuming power of money. Without knowing or wishing to be, he was the advocate of the powerful. To admire him as such, and only in the context of the permanent value of his personal life as a man, is as important as to finally turn our backs on his doctrine. This is what we should do. If he could see this turn of events, nobody would be happier than he at this necessary and useful denial.... Martí's ideas have nothing to offer and can do nothing more than serve as a springboard for opportunists.

Following Marinellos trajectory to 1940, when he represented his party at the Constitutional Convention, we find him saying of Martí: "We are confronted by a poet who gives free rein to his élan for politics, not by a demanding investigator who thinks daily." A short time later, he added: "To maintain today that José Martí left behind an indelible design for revolutionary activity in Cuba, is to act either in bad faith or out of ignorance.... Socialism was not the final aim of Martí's action. . . . Martí did not have Marxism as a guiding force for his political action." During the celebrations on the centennial of Martí's birth in 1953, Marinello stated that a review of Martí's work confirmed the great differences that existed "whether directly or indirectly [between it] and Marx's basic concepts."

When the Communists took power, this negative posture, although discreet, had to be changed. In Cuba, one could criticize Martí from the standpoint of a minority opposition party, but it would have been impossible to govern without making greater concessions to his thought. Marinello, charged with writing the preface to Martí's Complete Works, overlooked the "advocate of the powerful," the poet "who gives free rein to his élan for politics," whose ideas had nothing

to offer Cuba, and wrote: "Martí's stance is connected to all equalizing transformations and is a powerful and legitimate precedent for our socialist development. . . . A homeland styled after Martí's ideas, built by the revolution headed by Fidel Castro, brings to all Cubans the work of the liberator of 1895."

Once their position was secure, at the beginning of the 1970s, Cuban communists approached Martí more cautiously. Since then, they have stressed his anti-imperialist views and his position as precursor of Latin American revolutions. This later attitude is reflected in the new direction taken by the Anuario Martiano, a publication dedicated to Martí studies, and in the published work of Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, Blas Roca, and Raúl Roa(5) on Martí, which tend to show him only in that light or at best touch tangentially on other ideas to the extent that they do not conflict with official dogma.

The Marxists' favorite explanation of the difference between their credo and Martí's thought is that he was wholly ignorant in the realm of social problems. This is the only possible explanation for the failure of such an intelligent man, so concerned with justice, so sympathetic toward "the poor of this earth," to embrace socialism. To test this thesis, we must explore nineteenth-century socialism, that answer to the industrial revolution and to crisis in liberal thought.

The term socialism was coined in France in 1832 as an antonym for individualism, understood as the supremacy of the individual over the group. If we take the word in this broad sense, as a philosophy that justifies the voluntary subordination of the part to the whole, the relinquishment of man's natural egotism to altruistic goals, Martí may be considered a socialist. But even in his time, distinctions were drawn between a "socialism of all classes," or a sort of nationalism, and a "socialism of the working class," which places in the hands of the state the direction of the social group and its individual members. In this context, which approximates Marxism, Martí is not a socialist. It should also be noted that the socialist propagandists of Martí's day tried to differentiate themselves from those who propounded violence to achieve control. Aware of these differences, Martí wrote in his journal: "The first thing is to learn what kind of socialism we are dealing with, whether Cabet's Icarian Christianity, Alcott's Socratic visions, Prudhomme's mutualism, the familistère of Guise, Collinsism in Belgium, or the socialism of the Hegelian youth of Germany -although it can be seen, if one digs a little deeper, that all of them agree on general principles like nationalization of the land and the means of production." Immediately following that notation, Martí added in quotation marks and in English, this statement taken from his readings: "The nation's land and all other instruments of production shall be made the joint property of the community, and the direction of all industrial operations shall be placed under the direct administration of the State."

To say that Martí was unaware of the socialist undercurrents of his time is to ignore the avid reader in him, the politician in search of formulas for the betterment of society, and the revolutionary who would not have ceased in his efforts to achieve justice. Besides, socialism was a timely topic: in 1886 there were thirty-four publications in the United States, five of them dailies, representing several socialist factions. According to the Colombian writer Ramón Vélez, who visited Martí frequently in New York, Martí had a copy of Das Kapital in his library and among the many other books "he handled daily" was Marx's work. If that were not enough, one additional fact would suffice to prove the inaccuracy of the portrayal of Martí as an "uninformed layman" in social matters -as was said of Cervantes, also inaccurately, about his knowledge of contemporary culture: Martí's library included one of the most important books written in English at the time on this topic: Contemporary Socialism, by John Rae, published in 1884 by Charles Scribner's Sons, which was so well received by critics that it was reprinted several times in just a few years.

Rae held an intermediate position between the most advanced socialists and the Manchester school, and had first-hand information about all the socialist trends. The chapters he dedicates to Marx, Bakunin, and Marlo coincide with Martí's opinions about them and with his doubts concerning social reforms that would abolish freedom and fail to establish justice.

When the Argentine professor and president of the Argentine Society of Authors, Dardo Cúneo, visited Havana in the 1950s, he stopped by the office of the city historian, Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, where, as he stated in his 1955 anthology Martí y la Argentina, he was able to look over some of the books Martí had in his library. Contemporary Socialism was among the books he examined. Curiously, when these books were moved to the Martí Room of the National Library in 1968, at the order of the Cuban Institute of History (under what is now the Academy of Sciences), Rae's volume did not arrive. At least it is not listed with the rest in that year's Anuario Martiano . Perhaps the reason for its disappearance will be discovered some day. In the meantime it is tempting to see the disappearance as a convenient way to keep alive the legend of Martí as ignorant of socialism and of a book where Marxist theory is severely criticized in passages like the following, which could not but irritate Cuban Communists: "Communism leads to the opposite of everything it seeks. It seeks equality, it ends in inequality; it seeks the abolition of monopoly, it creates monopoly; it seeks to increase happiness; it actually diminishes it. It is pure utopia, and why? Because . . . the greatest possible equality and the greatest possible freedom can only be realized together."

Marxists have also tried to invent a kind of evolution of Martí's social thought, positing a change from conservatism to radicalism. If one accepts this premise, one can be led to suppose that, had he lived to be sixty-five, Martí would have read Lenin's State and Revolution and thus understood the function of the traditional state as the instrument of class oppression, the need for revolution to achieve a proletarian dictatorship, and the inevitable evolution from capitalism to communism. There is no doubt that Martí, after many years and various experiences in the United States, accentuated his preoccupation with social problems. This does not mean that his thought changed.

Martí's first contact with the conflict between capital and labor came in Mexico. While working as a journalist, he devoted some of his own time to representing labor at a convention, worked with local union chapters, and took part in strikes during which he gained student support for the strikers and defended the newspaper El Proletario.

Martí was helped in analyzing these problems by the Mexican thinkers of the Reform movement. One of the strongest personalities of the generation was Ignacio Ramírez(6) who said, summing up liberal thought of contemporary political leaders in 1874: "I am against communist systems which degrade human dignity; I want a just arrangement between capital and labor, an arrangement in which authority need not intervene directly. . . . It is not a matter of sacrificing anybody, rich or poor, but of having them come to terms." A year later Martí stated: "The right of labor can never be achieved through hatred of capital: instead, harmony, settlement, approximation are needed." He also expressed his aversion to imported doctrines to resolve conflicts: "Servile imitation causes one to lose the way in economy, in literature, and in politics. . . . In each country, labor and capital have a particular history; each country has its own peculiarities in the conflict between them.... Our own history calls for our own solutions. Let us not tie down the Mexican economist to certain rules of doubtful value even in their country of origin."

During his years in the United States, Martí wrote often of social struggles, so often that a review of that writing is not possible here. What is important is that, faced with Henry George's campaign, the trial of the Chicago anarchists, the demands of the Knights of Labor, labor strikes, capitalist excesses, and political corruption, Martí did not alter his views. With characteristic fairness, he pointed out the faults of the system that allowed human misery and abuses by the powerful, yet always condemned violence and expressed his faith in freedom, because he believed that only through freedom was it possible to pave the road to justice.

An important though little known moment late in Martí's life is of interest to our inquiry at this point. Two of Martí's closest friends, Fermín Valdés Domínguez and Serafín Sánchez(7), were involved in the preparations for the May Day labor celebrations in Key West in 1894. On April 28 Valdés Domínguez wrote to Gonzalo de Quesada(8): "Here, I am little more than a political agitator: the Cuban workers are going to have a party and hold a meeting May 1. It is in San Carlos and I am the one making all the noise." Sánchez also sent Martí an article on the event announcing the planned celebration. In writing of it to Quesada, he commented: "I am sorry Martí boycotted my article for Patria(9) and that it was not published, because it deals with Robespierre. The article, written in red ink, oozes blood; that shows my faith as an old revolutionary." Why had Martí rejected the article?

From all evidence, he thought the tone of the celebration wrong and improper, for he wrote in Patria that the members of the Cuban Revolutionary Party "do not perceive the happiness of their country in the superiority of one class over another (even without the poison and voluntary degradation that accompanies the very idea of classes) [for] compassion for the unfortunate, for the ignorant and dispossessed, cannot be carried so far as to encourage their mistakes. Acknowledgment of the silent, evil forces within society ... cannot be taken so far as to lead us to join with the arrogance of the powerless to provoke the sure anger of a powerful freedom." To this he added:

We must set aside, tie up, sacrifice a lot, dismiss our fantasies, deal with our nation in turmoil, lifting up the sinners by the scruff of their necks whether their sin be dressed in finery or the coarsest cloth; we must extricate virtue from the depths, without committing the error of ignoring it because it is dressed humbly or denying it because it walks hand in hand with wealth and culture. . . . There is another social danger that could affect Cuba: spineless flattery to the rancor and confusion left behind by arrogant colonialism in the wounded and needy souls, and the raising of an infamous structure on hatred or contempt for a nascent democratic society by those who, using the sanctity of freedom, oppose or detest it. If someone takes away a human right let his hand be cut off, whether it be the hand of the arrogant depriving the uneducated of their rights or the uneducated depriving the arrogant of theirs. . . . If the revolution entered into alliances in the shadows, whether with the humble or the arrogant, the revolution would be criminal and unworthy of our deaths. . . . Let this be our motto: freedom without anger.

And writing to Valdés Domínguez about those labor union celebrations in Key West, he said: "I must commend you for something, that is, your manly warmth and respect for those Cubans who are seeking, under one name or another, a little more cordial order and indispensable balance in the administration of worldly affairs.... [But] socialism has two dangers: foreign readings, confused and incomplete, and the hidden contempt and anger of those ambitious people who, as they make their way in the world, pass themselves off as avid defenders of the poor just to use them as stepping stones. . . . We must not compromise justice by using excessive or incorrect methods to request it. And you and I must always be on the side of justice, because errors in its form are not sufficient reason to abandon its defense."

In their studies of Martí's views on social problems, scholars have paid due attention to his article on Herbert Spencer, where he expresses opinions on Spencerian individualism that coincide with John Rae's in Contemporary Socialism. Both point to the dangers of "the new slavery" and lament the English philosopher's insensitivity to poverty and social injustice. Another very enlightening source has not, however, received attention. It is Martí's prologue for Cuentos de hoy y de mañana (tales of today and tomorrow) by Rafael de Castro Palomino, a forgotten and extremely rare book containing two short stories about socialism. Martí's prologue, of course, is well known, but critics have not appreciated its true importance because they have not read it together with Castro Palominos text.

Castro Palomino was a member of the large community of Cuban émigrés in New York at the end of the century. He was a teacher and a close collaborator and friend of Martí. In 1883 he published the stories which, incidentally, have little literary value, subtitled Cuadros políticos y sociales. The two stories in the volume are: "Un hombre, por amor de Dios" (a man, for God's sake) and "Del caos no saldrá la luz" (light will not come out of chaos). In the prologue Martí describes the volume as a "healthy book, a vigorous book, a useful book. . . . Neither hate, nor self-interest, nor worries cloud the judgment of the sensible and modest author of Cuentos de hoy y de mañana, a book which discloses in a pleasant manner the pros and cons of several social solutions [and which] popularizes the humane manner in which totally human problems will be resolved." The following is a passage of the prologue that more closely touches on the philosophy underlying the stories:

With unusual tact and quiet discernment, the author neither praises the rich nor chastises the poor: he does not hide from one the urgency of respecting the rights of man to a noble and well remunerated life, nor does he hide from the others how demented and bloody it would be to impose confusing or inhuman solutions on the rich and strong masses, even though they anger him sometimes.... Trees will be the earth's canopy and the sky man's pavement before the human spirit abandons its creative pleasures, [which are] an embrace of the spirit of others, a search for the unknown, and the lasting and proud exercise of oneself. If the earth ever became a vast community, no tree would be more laden with fruit than the scaffold would be with triumphant rebels.... This book, which teaches all of this, is more than a book, it is a good deed.

A brief examination of the stories is in order if we are to understand this positive evaluation of Castro Palomino's views on social problems.

The first story introduces several characters who represent certain political interests and tendencies: capital, labor, protectionism, militant imperialism, anarchism, and Marxism. Gathered in a New York tavern, they discuss and present their programs to abolish social conflict. Since they cannot agree, they decide to consult with an admirable man, Mr. Wisdom, who will decide who is right. He listens to each one and then evaluates the weaknesses and contradictions in their programs until they see their errors. After the first four visitors are dealt with, Mr. Wisdom is left with Mr. Labor and Mr. Dollar. He explains how important they are to each other and warns them that the only answer to their differences is "a more just and equal distribution of wealth, which will be possible when, through "the natural evolution of society the time will come when capital and labor, enemies today, will join together and help each other." The story ends after Mr. Wisdom concludes, referring to anarchism and Marxism: "Violence only breeds ruin: brute force may win many times, but it will never, in the long run, win us over."

"Del caos no saldrá la luz" is especially valuable in providing insight into Martí's social views. Under the influence of European naturalism, then the vogue, Castro Palomino decided to experiment with the story as Emile Zola had with the novel: he placed his characters in a particular setting and proceeded to draw conclusions from their acts. Today this may seem simplistic, but in its time the exercise seemed valid. The setting is a communist colony, in which Castro Palomino seeks to test social theories just as Zola tested biological determinism. We must keep in mind that at the time it was not possible to talk about Marxism except theoretically, since it had not yet become established as a system anywhere. This kind of laboratory experiment was therefore necessary to see how it might work.

The story's plot is as follows. After the Paris Commune, toward the end of 1871, two Marxists who had participated in the proletarian uprising arrived in the United States. One was a young Frenchman, Colonel La Chimêre, the dreamer; the other, a "radical communist," Captain Unthunlich, which in German means something like "the one who does what he should not." Following the program of the French Commune, they establish a town of about one thousand people, all communists, near a Pennsylvania mine. Their purpose is to show off the system's advantages so that others may follow the example. The discussion in the story occurs ten years later, after the experiment had failed and its two initiators had abandoned their communist ideology. They are having dinner with Mr. Truth, a Boston lawyer, and explain to him the reasons for the project's failure.

When they began, they tell him, the first problem arose as the more productive workers complained about some of their coworkers' laziness. The answer was to appoint "watchmen" to try to equalize production levels. The Frenchman describes the outcome: "What happened was to be expected: our enthusiasm and self-imposed duty, notwithstanding their intensity, did not suffice to quiet our natural feelings as men, and so self-interest started to appear." What developed was what we today refer to as the black market; in the Frenchman's words: "The more frugal workers kept in their homes what was left over from their share of production, and so it became necessary to make a careful door-to-door check to prevent people from owning property. This procedure generated confidence missions permitting each person, secretly, to inspect his neighbor's home as soon as he became suspicious, regardless of whether the suspicions were well founded." That is, in that imaginary commune a century ago, it became necessary to create the repressive mechanisms described by George Orwell.

Today's issue of moral versus material incentives came up too. As the narrator tells it: "Production diminished because eventually the good workers, those who gave the project a push, lacked incentive and paced their productivity to that of the slower workers.... [Thus] communism, as we practiced it, not only eliminated property, but also work. It was impossible, regardless of our enthusiasm, to bear the injustice of equal weight and pay for all activities. That stimulus which makes you excel in your job with the hope of seeing your efforts rewarded could not exist among us."

Other odd events took place in the Pennsylvania commune. The narrator continues: "We also eliminated freedom, since we obeyed inflexible, grossly uniform laws . . . under a perpetual, unbearable inquisition. . . . Besides, the desire to command, to keep the best jobs, brought on an inexplicable bewilderment." Luckily, the coal mine had no guards patrolling the borders and, as could be expected, the exodus began: "desertion increased and the colony was quickly reduced to a few dreamers without any opinions." The commune's old colonel comments: "Society can only be regenerated by reorganizing its parts, and it is not possible to improve it through systems that substitute a central authority for individual judgment, regardless of the nature of the authority. It is futile to use restrictions to accomplish what can only be accomplished by freedom." Mr. Truth summarizes the book's theme, the result of that experiment: "Social organization cannot tolerate any change that disturbs the laws of human nature: when they are rejected, the reaction is inevitable," and if the changes are imposed, "coercion becomes necessary to maintain order because men are not angels . . . . [and] this force eventually gives rise to a far stronger, more tyrannical government than the one it deposed. ... The stronger members, because of their courage or for whatever reasons, become absolutely powerful, and only the law of force can work . . . . the beginning of tyranny. All contrary efforts would be blind and fruitless: economic freedom can only be acquired through political freedom."

Certainly when we read Cuentos de hoy y de mañana today, we can conclude that Rafael de Castro Palomino was not a great writer, but we cannot deny him the gift of foresight in his experimental exercise. However, more important for us is Martí's agreement in this prologue with the conclusions reached by the forgotten Cuban storyteller. Further evidence of his position regarding Castro Palomino's conclusions may be found in Martí's review of the book in the magazine La América toward the end of 1883: "Those who are poor and have failed in life, who wave their fists at the poor who do succeed; the luckless workers who become angry at lucky workers, are madmen who want to deprive human nature of the legitimate use of the faculties that go hand in hand with it." On the specific question of social conflict, he reasons:

The purpose of social charity and social concern is to reform nature herself, for man can do that much; to give long arms to those whose arms are short, to even the chances for men who have few gifts; to compensate for lack of genius with education.

The review includes brief synopses of the stories. Of the first, he says:

An American senator by the name of Mr. Wisdom shows that there is no single human intellect, no matter how energetic and fruitful, who can twist the slow progress of the natural elements of life, which continue to perfect and transform themselves ever higher, for man's education and freedom; that rights requested intelligently will prevail without violence; that the only efficient way to improve the present social evil, by natural and effective means, is to improve education and ardently defend those noble and vital rights that go together with the general meaning of freedom.

Of the second story, "Del caos no saldrá la luz," Martí adds:

Mr. Palomino tells, clearly and well, how a certain communist experiment lived and died. So that readers can be cured quickly and directly, he gives life and action to current elements in and arguments sustained by the Communist Party, and he tells, through literature and example, why communist societies were born and died in the United States, and by what means and in what ways those which still survive endure.

Earlier that year, Karl Marx had died and Martí had published his well-known views on the German thinker in La Nación of Buenos Aires. In that chronicle he speaks of two kinds of workers, "fanatics of love and fanatics of hate," and he chastises the latter because they do not understand "that Justice itself does not give us children; it is love that engenders them. The conquest of the future must take place with clean hands." Of Marx himself Martí wrote at that time:

Because he sided with the weak he should be honored. But it does no good to point to evil with a generous, burning hope of putting an end to it; the good is in showing a tender solution to evil. The task of pitting men against each other for someone else's advantage is frightening. . . . Karl Marx studied ways of placing the world on a new foundation, and he woke up the sleeping and showed them how to bring down the broken stanchions. But he was in a hurry and walked in the shadows and did not realize that children born without the benefit of a natural period of gestation and labor are not viable, regardless of whether they issue from the womb of a nation in history or the womb of a woman in her home.

Describing those who stood around Marx's coffin, Martí concluded: "These impatient and generous men, tainted with anger, are not the ones who will lay the foundations of the new world: they are the spurs, and they have come in time, like the voice of a conscience that might fall asleep: but the steel of the spur is not right for a constructive hammer."

After this review of Martí's thought on social issues, his words, his comments on other authors, we might doubt his credentials as a revolutionary. Had he been ignorant of contemporary currents of thought, as we have been told, we might justify his distance and reserve in the face of extreme positions. But knowing that he was familiar with those trends, should we conclude that Martí was a petit bourgeois, the cowardly individualist that the Cuban Marxists portrayed at one time? How are we to understand that Martí, so sensitive to hunger, discrimination, and selfishness, could remain aloof from those who sought social equality through class struggle? Is Martí a symbol of selfishness proclaiming freedom? Would we be right in asking him: You, who wished to share your fate with the poor of this earth ,why did you not devote your life to helping those who were goading the world toward social redemption? The answer, I believe, is that Martí's seeming lack of enthusiasm was wisdom; his apparent blindness and caution, foresight. Martí thought of genius as fore science and foresight; a genius is one who does not need proof, who sees the event before it happens. Genius is a kind of prophecy. Martí did not need, as we do, to live the experiment in order to know its consequences. In his desire for redemption, in his projects for humanity, he was more of a socialist than many who have raised a socialist banner. Martí was more of a revolutionary than many who have tried to change the course of the world. He knew that it is one thing to want justice to triumph and another to turn it over to forces that seek to enslave; it is one thing to transform society and another to dress ourselves up in the uniform of change while injustice and abuse continue. Martí had no faith in programs of social reform that could not be implemented in an environment of freedom, although he knew that freedom is the refuge of greed, and that unfortunately there is bourgeois and proletarian freedom.

Because he believed freedom indispensable for the advancement of society, the attempts of Marxist-Leninists to seek support for their error in Martí must be futile. He advanced the betterment of men because there cannot be solutions for mankind as a whole without freedom for individuals to better themselves. Given the imperfect systems of his time and ours, socialism can only work if, consistent with Martí's thought, it permits men to struggle and experiment with, and openly demand, those truly fundamental changes that will create a society favorable to the "total dignity of man."