Cuba - Lonely Planet [15]
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JOSé MARTí
For millions of Cubans worldwide José Martí is a heroic and emblematic figure; a potent unifying symbol in a nation fractiously divided by economy, ideology and 90 miles of shark-infested ocean. In Florida they have named a TV station after him. In Havana, Castro touts his name with an almost religious reverence. Throughout Cuba there is barely a town or village that hasn’t got at least one street, square or statue named proudly in his honor. The fact that Martí – who died prematurely at the age of 42 leading a suicidal cavalry charge headlong toward the Spanish lines – spent less that one-third of his life residing in his beloved motherland, is largely academic.
Born in Havana in 1853 to Spanish parents, Martí grew up fast, publishing his first newspaper, La Patria Libre, at the age of 16. But his provocative writings, flushed with the fervent prose and lyrical poetry that would one day make him famous, soon landed him in trouble. Tried and convicted in 1870 for penning a letter denouncing a friend who had attended a pro-Spanish rally during the First War of Independence, he was charged with treason and sentenced to six months of hard labor in a Havana stone quarry. Later that year, the still-teenage Martí was moved to Isla de Pinos and in 1871 he was exiled to Spain.
Slightly built, with a well-waxed Dalí-esque moustache and trademark black dinner suit, Martí cut a rather unlikely hero-to-be in his formative years. Graduating with a degree in law from Saragossa University in 1874, he relocated to Mexico City where he tentatively began a career in journalism.
For the next five years Martí was constantly on the move, living successively in Guatemala, Spain, France, Venezuela and Cuba, from where he was exiled for a second time in 1879 for his conspiratorial activities and anticolonial statements.
Gravitating toward the US, the wandering writer based himself in the Big Apple for 13 years with his wife and son, devoting his time to poetry, prose, politics and journalism. He was the New York correspondent for two Latin American newspapers, La Nación in Buenos Aires and La Opinión Nacional in Caracas, and was later appointed New York consul for the countries of Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina. Adamant to avoid cultural assimilation in the American melting pot, Martí nurtured a deep-rooted mistrust for the US system of government borne out of insider experience and a canny sense of political calculation. He argued vociferously for Cuban independence, and claimed consistently that the Americans were no better than the Spanish in their neocolonial ambitions. ‘I have lived inside the monster and know its entrails,’ he once stated portentously.
Never one to rest on his rhetoric, Martí left for Florida in 1892 to set up the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC; Cuban Revolutionary Party), the grassroots political movement that spearheaded the 1895–98 War of Independence against the Spanish.
Landing in Cuba in April 1895 at the remote beach of La Playita in Guantánamo province, Martí’s personal war effort lasted precisely 38 days. Destined to be more of a theorist than a man of action, he was cut down in a skirmish at Dos Ríos on May 19, one of the war’s first casualties and an instantly recognizable martyr.
Though never ostensibly a socialist during his lifetime, Martí propounded the values of liberty, equality and democracy as central to his fledgling manifesto for an independent Cuba. Unflinching in his hatred of racism and imperialism, he believed in the power of reason, extending friendship to those Spaniards who supported Cuban independence, but calling for war against those who didn’t.
The spirit of José Martí is still very much alive in Cuba today. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the country – with its distinct culture and enviable health and education systems – without his legacy. Artistically speaking, the scope of Martí the writer was, and still is, mind-boggling. From his eloquent political theorizing to his populist Versos Sencillos and his best-selling