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 the source of eternal feeling.
God does exist, and I come in his name to break in Spanish hearts the cold and indifferent glass that contains their tears.
God does exist, and if you people make me move away from here without having torn out of you your cowardly, unfortunate indifference, let me despise you, since I am unable to hate anyone; let me pity you in the name of my God.
I will not hate you, nor will I curse you.
If I were to hate anyone, I would hate myself for so doing.
If my God were to curse, I would deny him for so doing.
IV
You who have never had a thought of justice in your heads, or a word of truth upon your lips for the most grievously sacrificed, most cruelly crushed race upon this earth.
You who have sacrificed some people upon the altar of enticing words, and have gladly listened to others, to the most elemental principles of righteousness, to the most common notions of feeling — cry out for your honor, cry out at such sacrifice, cover your heads with dust, fall to your bare knees and begin picking up the pieces of your reputation which are scattering over the ground in all directions.
What were you beginning to do so many years ago?
What have you done?
There was a time when sunlight was not hidden from your lands. And today there is scarcely a ray of it shining upon them from here, as if the sun itself were ashamed of giving light to your possessions.
Mexico, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia, New Granada, the Antilles all came in festive attire, kissed your feet, and carpeted with gold the wide wake left by your ships upon the Atlantic. You crushed the freedom of all those countries; they all joined hands in placing one more sphere, one more world in your kingly crown.
Spain was reminiscent of Rome.
Caesar had returned to the world and had divided himself into pieces, each piece lodging in one of your men with their thirst for glory and their delirious ambition.
Centuries passed.
The subjugated nations had laid a golden highway across
