Some notes about the thoughts of José Martí

A book that must be written

Everyday it seems that tomorrow will be “the day…”, the long-awaited day of social changes. Second reason: I look with dread to not doing what both our memories of the Apostle and necessity impose. Quite far from any patriotism, when I speak about José Martí, I feel the same emotion, the same fear one feels in view of supernatural things. Quite far from any patriotism, I say, because it’s the same emotion I feel for other great figures from other peoples.
 

But that book will be written anyway. It’s a necessity, let alone a duty to our epoch. It will be written by this quill in prison, aboard a ship, in a third-class train car, or in a hospital bed convalescing after any illness. Leisure times are most encouraging to work on your thoughts. Or someone else will write the book, any of my comrades, brothers of ideals, better fit to study than for action. But, I absolutely have to say it, the book will be written… It is necessary. It is essential that a voice from the new generation, free from prejudice and committed to today’s revolutionary class, be the writer. It is necessary to put a stop to or, if they refuse to obey, give a slap in the face of so many bastards, so many greedy hawkers, so many patriots, so many crawlers, so many hypocrites… who write or speak about José Martí.
 

Now it is the dissolute and tyrannical politician –dissolute with the strong, tyrannical with the people– who speaks about Martí. Or the cheap man of letters, orator of fake jewels and circus bells, who uses José Martí to fill in unison the stomach of his vanity and his body. Or it is also the “Ibero-Americanist”, propagandist for the resurrection of the old Spanish domination, mastermind of those who are once again searching for the markets of India, who takes over the task of “discovering José Martí for us”…
 

So much intellectual garbage is sickening. Enough! Martí –his works– demand serious critics who are dissociated from the interests of the retrogressive Cuban bourgeoisie and able to point out the value of his revolutionary work from the viewpoint of the historical moment when he acted. It has to be said, however, not with the fetishism of those who like adoring the past in vain, but of those who know how to appreciate historical facts and their significance for the future, that is, to these days.
 

There are two trends to assess historical developments. One is found in Blasco Ibáñez’s novel Los muertos mandan, is that of those who feel themselves bearing the burden of all past generations. To them, yesterday’s event is the supreme event. They are the ones who, when it comes to politics, love the French Revolution of ’89 as the only panacea. The graves of generations gone by fall on their shoulders like the corpse of the tightrope walker on Zarathustra. They are conservative, official patriots, reactionary, sterile emulators of Lot’s wife. There is another trend, fantastic and foolish, of some who like to be at the leftmost end of the revolutionary left-wing. These pieces of walking lava were not born from any mother. They are the whole history. Their actions –which are very seldom seen outside their dreaming rooms– are conclusive. They either are, or pretend to be, unaware of all things past. For them yesterday has no values. They are dissolute, good-for-nothing, selfish, antisocial. There is a third way of historical interpretation. It must be the true one. It is, no doubt. In the case of Martí and the revolution, taken only as examples, it involves seeing the socio-economic interest “created” by the Apostle, his poems of rebelliousness, his continental and revolutionary actions: to study  the fatal game of historical forces, unravel the mystery of the Revolutionary Party’s ultra-democratic platform, the miracle –or so it appears today– of the close cooperation between proletarian elements from the workshops in Florida and national bourgeoisie; the raison for being of anarchists and socialists in the ranks of the Revolutionary Party, etc., etc.
 

This would not be the end of his work. We would have to consider the contentiousness stemming from yesterday’s social forces. Today’s class struggle. The failure of the Revolutionary Party’s platform and the Montecristi Manifesto in Cuba’s republican times which “are returning to the colony”, as Varona says and we all see, “with great determination”.
 

In the light of today’s events, this study must end with an analysis of Martí’s general revolutionary principles. A revolutionary at heart, he interpreted a social need for transformation at a given time. Today, still a revolutionary, he would have perhaps interpreted this moment’s social need. What is this social need? Silly questions need not be answered, lest we make fools of ourselves. Martí understood well the republic’s role when he told one of his war comrades – Baliño – then a socialist who died after a magnificent membership in the Communist Party: “Revolution? Revolution is not what we will start in the scrublands, but what we will develop in the republic.”
 

Here is a fleeting interpretation of his words:
DEMOCRACIA IMPERIALISMO…
                        ¿Del tirano? Del tirano
                        di todo. ¡Di más!; y clava
con furia de mano esclava
sobre su oprobio al tirano.

                        ¿Del error? Pues del error
di el antro, di las veredas
oscuras: di cuanto puedas
del tirano y del error.[1]
 

(And if after having said everything, apostle and master, words are not sufficient or go unheeded, what to do?)
 

Martí believes it’s possible to have pure democracy and equality for all social classes. He dreamed of a republic “WITH ALL AND FOR ALL”, and didn’t think the Spanish dominator was the only tyrant. He anticipated that there could be domestic tyrants and, therefore, made his verses: he killed them before they were born. It would have been desirable that he lived until today. What would he have said and done when faced with the progress of imperialism, with imperialist control over political and economic life, with its ploys among Cubans to protect its interests? He would have been compelled to repeat the second verse about errors and put it into practice. “THERE IS NO POLITICAL DEMOCRACY WHERE THERE IS NO ECONOMIC JUSTICE”, would have been his statement. “Government is nothing more than the balance of the country's natural elements.” Maybe. But only there where there is no balance, where there are no “natural elements” –it’s never the wealthy capitalist, bourgeois and oppressive, or his master, imperialism– where there is no government, where there is nothing. All “unnatural” elements have to be eliminated.

More than once he expressed his ideas about social inequality, the danger posed by imperialism, and other similar topics. In his usual poetic language he said:

“The greatest people is not that where unequal, unrestrained wealth produces raw men and corruptible and selfish women…”
 

“If you are honest and born poor, there is no time to be wise and rich.”
 

I don’t know a better way to call our rich, the children of sugar, what they are: THIEVES! IGNORANT!
About the United States he said:
 

“I have lived inside the monster and know its entrails, and my weapon is only the slingshot of David.”
 

Regarding what Cuban politics should be:
 

“… put on your lips all the country’s defined and legitimate aspirations, either amidst the whispers of the wimpish, or with the revulsion of the pliable, or even among storms of grudges: if it must be more than just the compensation of mercantile interests, the satisfaction of a threatened social group and the belated, unfulfilled redemption of a race… [the black one]… then I toast to Cuban politics…”
 

Already in 1879, while in Guanabacoa, Martí acknowledged the existence of a class struggle in society and cried out for the liberation of black people.
 

In his beautiful work on the Chicago martyrs he spoke about “how this Republic [the United States] has been led by its cult of wealth to the same vices of an empire…”
 

INTERNATIONALISM
 

Despite being a patriot, that is, a genuine representative of the national French-like revolution of 1789, José Martí was, as Lenin said about Sun Yat-Sen, representative of a democratic bourgeoisie capable of many things, for his historical mission was yet to be fulfilled. He fought for Cuba because it was the last piece of land in the continent waiting for a revolution. But he never neglected the revolutionary struggle’s international character. He was said to be a son of America. It’s true. We just have to read “Mother America” and then we’ll be able to say:
 

There hasn’t been another revolutionary at the end of last century who felt more love for the continent and served it better with the quill, the word and the sword. America was always his obsession. What’s more, just as Cuba is only a piece of the beloved continent, the continent is nothing but a laboratory of the future universal society. He grasped, no doubt, the concept of internationalism. To be an internationalist it is not necessary to hate your place of birth, nor to forget it, despise it and attack it. That is how we, today’s internationalists and proletarian revolutionaries are stupidly described by some reactionary and mercenary quills. No. Internationalism means, first of all, national liberation from the foreign imperialist yoke and, similarly, solidarity, close relationship with the oppressed from other nations. Can only pure socialists be internationalist? It is not our fault that proletarians conform the current revolutionary and progressive class.

MARTI AND THE PROLETARIAT

This is one of the most important facets of José Martí’s life. It is likely to be the most interesting chapter of the book that will be written about him. As feudalism’s enemy, José Martí was a friend of black people’s. So many great and noble things he said about them! And as a friend of the national revolution against the Spanish empire’s and all other imperialist yokes, he also made friends with the proletariat, whose great revolutionary and constructive forces he understood. For this reason, during his stay in Florida among Tampa’s cigar-makers he not only sated his physical hunger with the humble contribution given by the ‘chaveta’[2] proletarians, but also let his spirit take a glimpse of that great paradise of international socialism…
 

“Peoples are like workers coming out of work: lime and mud on the outside, and in their hearts respectable virtues.” He thus poetically recognizes – as usual – that the working class amass more moral values than any other owing to their very way of life.
 

“Truth reveals itself better to the poor than it does the sufferers.”
 

“For a revolutionary, said Saint Just, there is no rest other than death.” “Universities must be workshops…” Thus we could continue with a full exploration of his respect towards and admiration for the proletariat.
 

If he hadn’t been led by the envy of genius-gnawers to a premature immolation in Dos Ríos, he would have been beside Diego Vicente Tejera in 1899 when he founded Cuba’s Socialist Party, the first to be founded in Cuba after Spanish domination, just like Baliño and Eusebio Hernández are with us now. But let us leave all this, and much more, to the future narrator, critic and promoter of José Martí’s personality. This insinuation and this proof of how much that book is necessary are sufficient for a hasty article. Let us finish by taking a few of the Apostle’s thoughts and making a quick gloss by way of “revolutionary litany”. Cubans need it right now. A reminder and an interpretation of some of his sentences might come handy:
 

“One day Man died at the cross; but we must learn to die at the cross every day.”
 

“All great ideas have their own Nazarene.”
Where are the citizens who didn’t learn this? Today your countrymen are not dying at any crosses. They are using them instead to stab the people.
 

“Tyranny is not corrupting, but enlightening!”
A secret commentary. We hear inside us the hymn of revolutions and see the red flags fluttering. Long live Social Justice!

“Redemptions have been theoretical and formal: they must be effective and fundamental.”
That is daily reiterated by the proletariat, and because of those words they endure prosecution, death and imprisonment…

“To calmly see a crime is to commit it.”
How many criminals we have in Cuba!

“A man who hides what he thinks, or dares not saying what he thinks, is not an honest man.”

That is not how they think in the Republic that you founded.

“A man’s word is the law.”
Now they say, “The law is the ‘man’s word.”

“Unite: this is the word of the world.”
Following your order, today we specifically say: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!”
 

“Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stones”.
 

May your words be fulfilled! Although it would be better to have both barricades at the same time!

From the book Seven Marxists Focus on Jose Marti (1987)