José Martí: Thougts - INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

José Martí was an acute observer of the United States, where he lived for some fifteen years, and he is considered one of the great writers of the Hispanic world. His importance for the American reader, however, stems even more from the universality and timeliness of his thought. Martí devoted his life to ending colonial rule in Cuba and to preventing the island from falling under the control of the United States or a regime inimical to the democratic principles he held. With those goals, and with the conviction that the freedom of the Caribbean was crucial to Latin American security and to the balance of power in the world, he devoted his talents to the forging of a nation. Thence the breadth of his work: he was a revolutionary, a statesman, a guide, and a mentor. And because his vast learning enabled him to move comfortably in the most diverse fields, his teaching is rich indeed.

Martí was born in Havana in 1853. At seventeen he was exiled to Spain for his opposition to colonial rule. There he published a pamphlet exposing the horrors of political imprisonment in Cuba, which he himself had experienced. Upon graduating from the University of Saragossa, he established himself in Mexico City, where he began his literary career. His objection to a regime installed by a military coup led him to depart for Guatemala, but government abuses forced him to abandon that country as well. In 1878 he returned to Cuba under a general amnesty, but he conspired against the Spanish authorities and again was banished. From exile in Spain, he quickly left for the United States, and then, after a year in New York, for Venezuela, where he hoped to settle, only to have still another dictatorship force him to depart. Martí lived in New York from 1881 to 1895, when he left to join the war for Cuban independence that he had painstakingly organized. There he died in one of its first skirmishes.

During the years he spent in the United States, Martí analyzed American society with clarity and insight as a correspondent for the most influential newspapers of Argentina, Venezuela and Mexico. "In order to know a country," he wrote, "one must study all its aspects and expressions, its elements, its tendencies, its apostles, its poets, and its bandits." This he did, and because of his uncompromising honesty, his chronicles contain both criticism and praise that have sometimes been put to improper use. It was the period when the American experiment in self-government and free enterprise was crystallizing, now strengthening, now undermining moral values. Martí roundly censured materialism, prejudice, expansionist arrogance, and political corruption, and enthusiastically applauded love of liberty, tolerance, egalitarianism, and the practice of democracy. Thus, in October of 1885, contrasting opulence and poverty in New York, he warned his readers: "It is necessary to study the way this nation sins, the way it errs, the way it founders, so as not to founder as it does.... One must not merely take the statistics at face value but hold them up to examination and, without being dazzled, see the meaning they contain. This is a great nation, and the only one where men can be men, but as a result of conceit over its prosperity and of its inability to satisfy its appetites, it is falling into moral pygmyism, into a poisoning of reason, into a reprehensible adoration of all success."

Martí's thought has ethical foundations; as a political theorist and as an artist he can be understood only in terms of his faith in morality. Every inquiry into the nature of man and his role on earth led Martí to identify good with truth. For him there was no force behind what he considered right unless it had the strength of truth. He believed that "every person has within an ideal being, just as every piece of marble contains in a rough state a statue as beautiful as the one that Praxiteles the Greek made of the god Apollo." To attain human salvation, the only thing needed, Martí felt, was to free people from apathy and egotism. Martí's overriding desire to affect reality kept him away from pure speculative thought: he constantly strove to reduce abstract thought to concrete formulae of conduct, and, his ability to do so was singular. Martí himself explained the exercise thus: "What proud work could be done by sending forth to face life together three beings who think differently about it: one, like the Brahman and the Morabite, given to the impossible worship of absolute truth, the second to exuberant self-interest, and the third with a Brahman's spirit restrained by prudent reason and going through life as I do, sadly and sure that no reward will come, daily drawing fresh water from an ever recalcitrant stone."

How to achieve a functional accommodation of "truth," "self-interest," and "reason" was the central question posed by Martí. Although he did not systematize his knowledge and, therefore, left no treatise on political science, his works are replete with ideas on the purpose of the State and its relations to society. He thought it possible to reconcile individual with collective needs and disapproved of all governmental forms that proposed suppressing either, since freedom was for him the only viable climate for human existence: "A nation is made of the rights and opinions of all its children," he wrote, "and not the rights and opinions of a single class." He knew that the differences and inequalities among men could not be ignored, but that neither could they be left to the whims of history or the manipulation of a single group. Rather, he recommended correcting the imbalances through "social charity and social concern," the objectives of which were, he declared, "to reform nature herself, for people can do that much; to give long arms to those whose arms are short; to even the chances for those who have few gifts; to compensate for lack of genius with education."

Martí's own example lent validity to his doctrines, and the strength of his style enhanced their effectiveness as political and philosophical instruments. His literary work is an invaluable achievement of expression and is conditioned throughout by moral objectives; the artist and the apostle became inseparable in his work. "In literature one should not be Narcissus but a missionary," he proclaimed. For Martí aesthetics was but an aspect of ethics: "Human nature is noble and inclined to what is best. After knowing beauty and the morality that comes from it, people can never after live without morality and beauty." In his art and as a critic of art he resolutely voiced faith in human perfectibility, a faith in total agreement with his insistence on coupling act with thought.

Insofar as Martí made freedom and justice cornerstones and could never accept curtailment of the natural expansiveness of the human spirit, insofar as he believed, on the contrary, that man's redemption would come through love and unfettered reason, his doctrine is, and must be, at odds with the totalitarian dogma that has been implanted in Cuba. All of Martí's teachings controvert that political system with its restraints on individual freedom, its intolerance and materialism, just as his writings condemn all despotic regimes and abridgments of human rights; just as they denounce the lack of spirituality, the Mammonism and arrogance that capitalist society has tended to breed. For this reason, the dissemination of Martí's thought in all its force is of the greatest importance today; his words, which can guide democracies and, if heeded, offer them greater security, speak more eloquently against the Cuban apostasy than all the accusations that others might make.

Thus, one of the aims of this collection is to reveal the aspirations of the Cuban national spirit through its most prominent exponent, so that the resistance of Cubans to oppression and tyranny and their efforts to balance justice and liberty can better be understood.

When I put together the first edition of this anthology I had confidence in the intrinsic value of the examples of Martí's thoughts that it included, and I was certain that they had importance for our times, but I never imagined that interest in the anthology would spread as quickly as it has, or as widely. The generous welcome with which that volume was received led to the publication of a second edition and now has led to the publication of this third, revised, edition published by the Cuban American National Foundation, on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of Martí's death.

I wish to express my gratitude to all those who have supported the dissemination of Martí's thought, to the editors of the previous editions, the Unión de Cubanos en el Exilio, from New York, and in particular to Dr. Linda B. Klein for her generous help in preparing this collection.

(The Spanish language originals of the material presented in this volume appeared in José Martí: Thoughts/Pensamientos; A Bilingual Anthology, 1980 and 1985)