José Martí Reader. Jose Marti
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style comes with maturity.” His early prose works, mentioned above, were followed by a voluminous opus of imaginative, rhythmic, chromatic pieces that found their way into the cultural and literary life of his period through a network of contemporary artists and the columns of the most prestigious newspapers of both North and South America. It is perhaps as a cronista, a chronicler of contemporary events — political, social and literary — that Martí is best known. He read accounts of current events voraciously. Such was his imagination that he was capable of creating visions of them as they occurred, even when he was not a witness to them.
His 1889 account of the opening of the Oklahoma frontier, for example, appears to have been written by a journalist astride a horse, who observed the excitement and violence of the events. His moving account of the 1886 earthquake in Charleston, South Carolina, contained the shrill cries and the emotional despair, the fervent, frightened prayers of the residents, as if the chronicler himself had experienced the tragedy. Martí wrote with vision, compassion, uncanny perception and a highly developed concept of innovative style on subjects as diverse as European monarchs, American anarchists, New York elevated railways, urban tenements, violent crimes, St. Valentine’s Day, Buffalo Bill, the Cody Brothers, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American technology, and agricultural and floral exhibitions. On all of these, and others too numerous to mention, Martí informed his Latin American readers. He was especially careful to show them the advantages as well as the dangers of life in a modernizing, capitalist society such as the United States, hoping to interest his fellow men in technical innovations while avoiding the social, racial, and political strife he observed in New York. For his American readers of the New York Sun he wrote mainly of life in Europe, signing with a pseudonym, M. de S.
Another of Martí’s major undertakings while in New York was La Edad de Oro: Publicación mensual de recreo e instrucción dedicada a los niños de América (The Golden Age: A Monthly Magazine of Instruction Dedicated to the Children of Spanish America). He contributed his own writing to the magazine as well as selecting artists for translations. La Edad de Oro became a milestone in Spanish children’s literature.
Freedom from Spanish rule for his native Cuba, the liberation of Puerto Rico, and economic and political independence for the Antilles and Latin America were constantly on Martí’s mind. In essays, speeches and poems, this liberating discourse — a hallmark of Modernism — is a recurring mark. Though he suffered physically and emotionally at the hands of the Spanish colonial authorities in Cuba, Martí never expressed a sense of animosity toward Spain. Instead, he espoused a doctrine of love and brotherhood; he hoped that the war with Spain, if unavoidable, would be brief and swift. In his writings on Cuba he argued for political unity, economic modernization (without the pitfalls of US capitalism), respect for human rights, and a broad, democratic, participatory social compact. When it was clear there was no other road but revolution to achieve Cuba’s freedom from colonial rule, he organized a political party among exiled Cubans residing in the United States — the Cuban Revolutionary Party — and almost single-handedly planned the 1895 invasion of Cuba. As a political strategist his sights were set on achieving independence for his native island, hence, like so many other Latin American essayists, his political writings are fundamentally instrumental or programmatic. His grasp of contemporary and future social and economic institutions was stunning, so much so that critics such as Cintio Vitier perceive in his essays on Cuba a futurity that guided not merely Martí’s generation, but generations of writers and thinkers since. Martí wrote no single, organic political treatise on Cuba. However, he left a rich legacy of conceptualizations — perceptive and “necessary” — in separate, substantive essays such as “Con todos y para el bien de todos” (“With All and For the Good of All”), “El Partido Revolucionario Cubano” (“The Cuban Political Party”), or “El manifiesto de Montecristi” (“The Montecristi Manifesto”).
Less known, and less studied, are Martí’s letters. His epistolary art fascinated Unamuno and continues to attract devoted readers. Next to his poetry, the medium in which Martí expressed his most intimate thoughts are his letters, especially those to his closest friends and confidants. The letters to his friend Manuel A. Mercado, to María Mantilla, to his mother, are filled with the tenderness and anguish of Free Verse. In his letters Martí dared to bare his soul and allowed the solitude and suffering of a mission-driven artist and revolutionary to surface. The prose of these epistolary pieces is baroque at times, at others, limpid; sometimes convoluted, sometimes succinct; at others telegraphic. He once complained: “Words I cannot.” The reader at such moments is placed in the role of having to add, interpret, complete.
One other prose genre merits special comment: the novel — Martí wrote a single narrative without great enthusiasm as a favor to a friend. She had accepted to write the work for a New York magazine but could not. Under the pseudonym of Adelaida Ral, the Cuban agreed to compose a novel in her place in seven days; its format followed the prescriptions laid down by the editor: lots of love, a death, many young girls, no sinful passions, and nothing that might offend fathers of families or priests. And, it had to have a Spanish American setting. The narrative was not Martí’s favorite genre because, as he put it, one had to feign the existence of people, scenes and dialogues.
In this narrative, in his other prose pieces, his poetry, letters, and in his journals, Martí understood that man stood at the crossroads of an entirely new world order, the Age of Modernity. He understood its metamorphic qualities, he often felt anguished about their influence over man, the socioeconomic progress of Latin America, and the liberation of Cuba and Puerto Rico, always uppermost in his mind. He saw and understood the falling away of traditional institutions — religious, social and economic — and the accompanying cultural and ideological void. This visionary writer was thus able to write as early as 1882: “There are no permanent works, because those which are the product of reframing and recasting are by their very essence mutable and restless; there are no constant roads; the new altars, great and open as the woods, are barely visible.” Though they were invisible to most people, Martí was able to see and foresee, to write and speak the signs of both his age and the future, scanning the past and linking its universal values to an unstable chaotic present.
Ivan A. Schulman
PART 1
Political Prison in Cuba
At the age of 16, José Martí was arrested and charged with treason on the basis of a letter signed by him and his friend Fermín Valdés Domínguez, accusing a fellow student of selling out to Spain. After serving several months of his sentence of six years’ hard labor, Martí was deported to Spain in January 1871. Soon after his arrival in Madrid, Martí published the pamphlet “Political Prison in Cuba,” excerpted here.
I
These pages should be known by no other name but infinite pain.
Infinite pain, for the pain of prison is the harshest, the most devastating of afflictions, that which kills the intelligence and withers the soul, leaving effects that will never be erased.
It begins with a length of iron chain; it drags with it this mysterious world that troubles the heart; it grows, nourished upon every somber sorrow, and finally wanders about magnified by every scalding tear.
Dante was never in prison.
If he had felt the dark cavern of that living torture topple upon his head, he would have stopped depicting his inferno. He would have set down those experiences and thus created a better description.
If a provident God had existed and he had seen him, he would have covered his face with one hand and with the other tossed such a denial of God into the abyss.
Yet God does exist in the idea of good, which watches over the birth of every being and leaves in the soul embodied in that being one pure tear. Good is God, and the tear