JOSÉ MARTÍ, WARRIOR
OF WORDS
Magda Montiel Davis
Martí’s
passion for the written word sprung hand-in-hand with his quest for Cuba’s freedom
from Spanish colonial rule. At the age of fifteen, on the day after a massacre
of unarmed protesters at a Havana theatre, he published a play in a newspaper
he had founded about an adolescent boy in a fictional country who dies
defending the homeland from foreign attack. This, and a letter he sent to a
classmate chastising him for joining the Spanish volunteer militia, prompted
his arrest for treason. At sixteen, he was sentenced by a Spanish military
tribunal to six years of hard labor. Waist and leg shackles that he was made to
wear during the length of his incarceration left life-long stigmata where the
iron dug into his flesh.
Wounded
and sick, he was deported—repatriated, the Spanish called it—to Spain to renew
his loyalty to the mother country. He enrolled in law school pursuant to
dispensation by the Spanish authorities. But there, he made more revolution,
engaging the press, finding other Cuban deportees with whom to join forces and publishing
several essays, some reprinted in New York’s La República, some about the threat of U.S. expansionism into Cuba.
The ones against colonialism, he sent to the Spanish Prime Minister. Evading national
surveillance, he left for Paris, where he met and translated Mes Fils for Victor Hugo. Still under
order of deportation, and risking return to prison, he sneaked into Cuba using
his middle and maternal surname, Julián Pérez. He traveled to Mexico and
Guatemala to raise support for Cuban independence but then returned to Cuba. It was during this second
stay that he was once again deported to Spain. He fled across the Pyrenees,
destination: New York. It was in the Catskill Mountains, where U.S. doctors
sent him to recuperate from what may have been tuberculosis, that he wrote Versos sencillos.
Although
taking the conventional form of poetry, Martí’s highly acclaimed work is a
mosaic of essays. Using the first-person narrative, he moves from the
particular—the autobiographical—that he is, after all, part of a larger group,
that is to say, humanity. The son of a Spanish soldier who had immigrated to
Cuba, he eulogizes his father in Verse XLI:
Upon receipt of the news of the
honor bestowed upon me, I thought not of Rosa nor of Blanca, but of the gunman,
my father; the soldier, my father—the worker, silent in his deserted tomb.
He
writes where indignation propels him; a ship tosses from its doors black men by
the hundreds; slaves naked, bound in chains, hanged from a tree; a little boy
trembling at the sight, crying at their feet, and swearing retribution. (XXX).
With
affective connection to memory, he gets past places he otherwise couldn’t go.
Of his future wife, he writes in XVIII, XX, XXXV, XXXVII, but read about “la
niña de Guatemala,” and you see a man torn, a man anguished, a man who left the
woman he loved to fulfill his promise to marry his future wife. (IX).
Los versos sencillos
was published by Louis Weiss & Co of New York in 1891. Because Martí
wrote and published most of his books in the U.S., it could be argued that he
is part of the U.S. literary tradition, although you’d be hard-pressed to find
his works in most U.S. bookstores or libraries. The same year that Los versos sencillos was published, he
determined that the right conditions existed to bring “necessary war,” to secure
independence and also to halt U.S. expansionism into Cuba. He united the exile
community in Key West, founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party, and drafted its
mission: “…the establishment of a republic where every citizen, Cuban or
Spaniard, white or black, American or European, may enjoy in work and peace the
full rights of man.”
A poet, essayist, journalist, philosopher,
professor, publisher, revolutionary. And now, he would be a soldier. He sailed
for the Dominican Republic to join General Máximo Gómez, a black Dominican who
had led the struggle of the Ten Years’ War and was now Commander-in-chief of
Cuba’s Independence War. Against Máximo Gómez’s advice— Martí was a man of
letters, not a man of war—he prepared for warfare. Cultivo una rosa blanca, Martí had written, the first verse most
Cuban children are taught in school and one of the most anthologized in Latin
America. I cultivate a white rose/ in July
as in January/ for the friend who extends a sincere hand. And to the cruel who
rips the heart from which I live/ for him too I cultivate a white rose. (XXXIX).
He
arrived on the island by rowboat with Gómez and five others. For one of the
first planned attacks, Martí donned a black cape and mounted an all-white
horse—sure to be seen by the Spanish. Gómez ordered his men to retreat; the
Spanish had a vantage point between the palm trees. But Martí rode removed, and
alone. He was killed as he prophesied in XXIII: I want to leave the world/through its natural door/in a cart of green
leaves. Do not put me in the dark/to die like a traitor. I will die/ with my
face to the sun. A wordsmith, a warrior of ideas, he was. But a gunman,
like his father, he was not.
Step
into a Cuban classroom and a child stands, her back to the blackboard, reciting
Jose Martí: I cultivate a white rose/ in
July as in January.
My poetry will grow and I too will
grow under the grass.
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