Martí has dedicated his life to that other America: he wants to revive everything in it that has been killed from the conquest onward, and wants to reveal it and make it rebel, because its hidden and betrayed identity will not be revealed until it loosens its bonds.
What fault can my great mother America throw in my face?
Son of Europeans but son of America, Cuban patriot of the great fatherland, Matrí feels flowing in his veins the blood of the sorely wounded peoples who were born of palm or corn seeds and who called the Milky Way road of the soul and the moon sun of night or sun asleep. So he writes, replying to Sarmiento, who is enamored of what is foreign: This is no battle between civilization and barbarism, but between false learning and nature.
(112 and 354)
1891: New York
The Thinking Begins to Be Ours, Believes José Martí
… To know is to resolve. Knowing the country, and governing it according to our knowledge, is the only way to free it from tyrannies. The European university must yield to the American university. The history of America, from the Incas till now, must be put at our fingertips, even though that of the Greek Archons is not taught. Our Greece is preferable to the Greece that is not ours. It is more necessary for us. National politicians must replace exotic politicians. Let the world be grafted onto our republics; but the trunk must be that of our republics. And let the defeated pedant keep quiet; for there is no fatherland in which man can take more pride than our wounded American republics …
We were a mask, with trousers from England, Parisian vest, jacket from North America, and cap from Spain …We were epaulettes and togas, in countries that came into the world with sandaled feet and banded hair … Neither the European book, nor the Yanqui book, has provided the key to the Hispanic American enigma …
The peoples stand and greet one another. “What are we like?” they ask; and they tell one another what they are like. When a problem arises in Cojímar, they don’t go to Danzig for the solution. The frock coats are still French, but the thinking begins to be American …
(199)
1891: Guanajuato
34 Cantarranas Street. Instant Photography
The hooded gunner bends and takes aim. The victim, a highborn gentleman of Guanajuato, does not smile or blink or breathe. There is no escape. Behind him the curtain has fallen, leafy landscape of painted plaster, and the stage-prop staircase leads nowhere. Surrounded by paper flowers and cardboard columns and balustrades, the solemn personage rests his hand on the arm of a chair and with dignity confronts the cannon-mouth of the bellows camera.
All Guanajuato has itself shot in the studio at 34 Cantarranas Street. Romualdo García photographs gentlemen of the uppermost crust and their wives and children, boys who look like dwarves wrapped in large vests with pocket watches, and girls austere as grandmothers crushed by beribboned silken bonnets. He photographs plump friars and soldiers in full dress uniform, the first-communioned and the newly wed; and also some poor people who come from afar and give what they don’t have just to pose, bountifully hairdressed and ironed, wearing their best clothes, before the camera of the Mexican artist who won a prize in Paris.
The magician Romualdo García turns persons into statues and sells eternity to mortals.
(158)
1891: Putísima del Rincón
Lives
He learned from no one; he paints for the love of it. Hermenegildo Bustos is paid in kind or at four pennies a portrait. The people of Purísima del Rincón have no photographer, but they have a painter.
Forty years ago Hermenegildo did a portrait of Leocadia López, the belle of the town, and it was very much her. Since then, the town of Purísima has seen successful burials and weddings, many serenades, and one or another disembowelment in the bars; some girl eloped with the clown of a traveling circus, the earth trembled more than once, and more than once a new political boss was sent from Mexico City; and as the slow days passed with their suns and downpours, Hermenegildo Bustos kept painting the live people he saw and the dead ones he remembered.
He is also a market gardener, an ice cream man, and a dozen more things. He plants corn and beans on his own land or by commission, and he keeps busy deworming crops. He makes ices with the frost he collects from maguey leaves; and when the cold spell lets up he makes orange preserves. He also embroiders national flags, fixes leaky roofs, directs the drumming during Holy Week, decorates screens, beds, and coffins, and with a very delicate touch paints Doña Pomposa López giving thanks to the Most Holy Virgin, who pulled her from her deathbed, and Doña Refugio Segovia, highlighting her charms, not omitting a hair of the curls on her forehead and copying the gold brooch at her throat which says “Refugito.”
He paints, and paints himself: freshly shaved and barbered, prominent cheekbones and frowning eyebrows, military uniform. And on the back of his image he writes: Hermenegildo Bustos, Indian of this town of Purísima del Rincón, I was born on 13 April 1832 and I painted my portrait to see if I could on 19 June 1891.
(333)
1892: Paris
The Canal Scandal
A French court has decreed the bankruptcy of the Panama Canal Company. Work is suspended and scandal explodes. Suddenly, the savings of thousands of French peasants and petty bourgeois disappear. The enterprise that was to open a swathe between the oceans, that passage the conquistadors sought and dreamed about, has been a colossal swindle. The multi-million-dollar squanderings to bribe politicians and silence journalists are published. From London, Fried-rich Engels writes: The Panama business could well become for the bourgeois republic a Pandora’s box, this grand National Steeplechase of Scandals. The miracle has been performed of transforming a canal which has not been dug out, into an unfathomable abyss …
No one mentions the Antillean, Chinese, and East Indian workers whom yellow fever and malaria have exterminated at the rate of seven hundred dead per kilometer of canal opened through the mountains.
(102, 201, and 324)
1892: San Jose, Costa Rica
Prophesy of a Young Nicaraguan Poet Named Rubén Darío
The coming century will see the greatest of the revolutions that have bloodied the earth. Big fish eat little fish? So be it, but soon we will have our own back. Pauperism reigns, and the worker carries on his shoulders a mountainous curse. Nothing matters now but miserable gold. The disinherited are the eternal flock for the eternal slaughterhouse …
No force will be able to contain the torrent of fatal vengeance. We will have to sing a new Marseillaise which, like the trumpets of Jericho, will bring down the dwellings of the wicked …The heavens will see with fearful joy, amid the thunder of the redemptive catastrophe, the castigation of arrogant evildoers, the supreme and terrible vengeance of drunken poverty.
(308)
1893: Canudos
Antonio Conselheiro
For a long time prophets have roamed the burning lands of northeast Brazil. They announce that King Sebastian will return from the island of Las Brumas and punish the rich and turn blacks into whites and old into young. When the century ends, they say, the desert will be sea and the sea, desert; and fire will destroy the coastal cities, frenetic worshipers of money and sin. On the ashes of Recife, Bahia, Rio, and São Paulo will rise a new Jerusalem and in it Christ will reign for a thousand years. The hour of the poor is approaching, announce the prophets. In seven years’ time the heavens will descend to earth. Then there will be no disease or death; and in the new terrestrial and celestial reign every injustice will be corrected.
The pious Antonio Conselheiro wanders from town to town, squalid and dusty phantom, followed by a chorus of litanies. His skin is a jaded armor of leather; his beard, a thicket of brambles; his tunic, a ragged shroud. He does not eat or sleep. He distributes among the unfortunate the alms he receives. He talks to women with his back turned. He refuses obedience to the impious government of the republic and in the plaza of the town of Bom Conselho throws the tax edicts on a fire.
Pursued by the police, he flees into the desert. With two hundred pilgrims he founds the community of Canudos beside the bed of an ephemeral river. Here, heat does not permit rain to touch the soil. From bald hillsides rise the first huts of mud and straw. In the middle of this sullen land, promised land, first stair up to heaven, Antonio Conselheiro triumphantly raises the image of Christ and announces the apocalypse: The rich, the unbelieving, and the fickle will be wiped out. The waters will be dyed with blood. There will be only one shepherd and one flock. Many hats and few heads …
(80 and 252)
1895: Key West
Freedom Travels in a Cigar
He never sleeps, eats little. José Martí collects people and money, writes articles and letters, gives speeches, poetry readings, and lectures; discusses, organizes, buys weapons. More than twenty years of exile have not been able to put out his light.
He always knew that Cuba could not be itself without a revolution. Three years ago he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party on three Florida coasts. The party was born in the tobacco workshops of Tampa and Key West, under the aegis of exiled Cuban workers who have heard Martí in person and from the printed page.
The workshops are like labor universities. It is the tradition that someone reads books or articles while the others work in silence, and thus the tobacco workers daily receive ideas and news, and daily travel through the world and history and the wonderful regions of the imagination. Through the mouth of the “reader” the human word shoots out and penetrates the women who strip tobacco and the men who twist the leaves and shape cigars on thigh or table.
By agreement with generals Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, Martí gives the order to rise. The order travels from these Florida workshops and reaches Cuba concealed within a Havana cigar.
(165, 200, and 242)
1895: Playitas
The Landing
Forty years from now, Marcos del Rosario will recall: “General Gómez didn’t like me at first sight. He asked me, ‘What are you going to Cuba for? Did you lose something there?’”
Marcos will clap his hands, knocking the dirt off them. “General Gómez was a fabulous little old guy, strong, strong, and very agile, and talked very loud and sometimes would rear up and try to swallow you …”
He will cross the orchard looking for shade. “Finally we found a ship that put us close to the coast of Cuba.”
He will show off the iron rings of his hammock. “These are from that ship.”
Lying in the hammock, he will light a cigar. “The ship left us in the sea and there was a terrific swell …”
Two Dominicans and four Cubans in a boat. The storm plays with them. They have sworn that Cuba will be free.
“A dark night, you couldn’t see a thing …”
A red moon rises, fights with the clouds. The boat fights with the hungry sea.
“The old guy was up in the prow. He was holding the wheel and Martí had the boat’s compass. A big wave tore the wheel from the general … We were fighting the sea that wanted to swallow us and didn’t want to let us reach land in Cuba …”
By some magic the boat does not shatter against the cliffs. The boat flies and plunges and surges back. Suddenly, it tacks about, the waves open up, and a little beach appears, a tiny horseshoe of sand.
“And General Gómez jumped onto the beach and when he stood on terra firma, he kissed the ground straight off and crowed like a rooster.”
(258 and 286)
1895: Arroyo Hondo
In the Sierra
Not sadly but radiantly, festively, Marcos del Rosario will speak of Martí. “When I saw him, I thought he was too weak. And then I saw he was a little live wire, who would jump here and land over there …”
Martí teaches him to write. Martí puts his hand on Marcos’s while he draws the letter A. “He had gone to school and was a superb man.”
Marcos looks after Martí. He makes him good mattresses of dry leaves; he brings him coconut water to drink. The six men who landed at Playitas become a hundred, a thousand … Martí marches, knapsack on back, rifle over shoulder, climbing the sierra and stirring up people.
“When we were climbing the mountains, all loaded up, sometimes he’d fall. And I’d go to pick him up and right away he’d say, ‘No, thanks, no.’ He had a ring made out of the shackles the Spaniards put on him when he was still a child.”
(286)
1895: Dos Rios Camp
Martí’s Testament
In the camp, in his shirtsleeves, Martí writes a letter to the Mexican Manuel Mercado, his intimate friend. He tells him that his life is in danger every day, and that it is well worthwhile to give it for his country, and for my duty to prevent, in time, with the independence of Cuba, the United States from extending itself into the Antilles and from falling, with that extra force, upon our American lands. All I have done until now, and all I will do, is for that. It has had to be done in silence … Shedding blood, writes Martí, the Cubans are preventing the annexation of the peoples of our America by the turbulent and brutal North which despises them … I lived within the monster and I know its entrails—and my sling is the sling of David. And further on: This is death or life, and there is no room for error.
Later his tone changes. He has other things to tell about. And now, I will talk to you about myself. But the night stops him, or maybe modesty, as soon as he starts to offer his friend those depths of his soul. There is an affection of such delicate honesty … he writes, and that is the last thing he writes.
At noon the next day, a bullet tumbles him from his horse.
(199)
1895: Niquinohomo
His Name Will Be Sandino
At the doors of this adobe house people gather, drawn by the cry. Like an upside-down spider the newborn baby moves his arms and legs. No Magi Kings come from afar to welcome him, but a farm laborer, a carpenter, and a passing market woman leave gifts.
The godmother offers lavender water to the mother and to the child a pinch of honey, which is his first taste of the world.
Later the godmother buries the placenta, which looks so like a root, in a corner of the garden. She buries it in a good spot, where there is plenty of sun, so that it will become soil here in Niquinohomo.
Within a few years, the child that just came from that placenta will become soil too, the rebellious soil of all Nicaragua.
(8 and 317)
1896: Port-au-Prince
Disguises
According to the Constitution of Haiti, the republic of free blacks speaks French and professes the Christian religion. The doctors are mortified because, despite laws and punishments, “Creole” continues as the language of nearly all Haitians and nearly all continue believing in the voodoo gods who wander at large through woods and bodies.
The government demands that peasants publicly swear an oath: “I swear to destroy all fetishes and objects of superstition, if I carry them with me or have them in my house or on my land. I swear never to lower myself to any superstitious practice …”
(68)
1896: Boca de Dos Rios
Requiem
“Was it here?”
A year has passed, and Máximo Gómez is telling the story to Calixto García. The old warriors for Cuba’s independence lead the way from the Contramaestre River. Behind come their armies. General Gómez tells, that midday, how Martí had eaten with a good appetite and afterwards recited some verses, as was his custom, and how they then heard some shots. Everyone ran looking for a horse.
“Was it here?”
They come to a thicket, at the entrance to the road to Palo Picado.
“Here,” someone says.
Machete wielders clear the little patch of ground.
“I never heard him complain or saw him give in,” says Gómez. Grumbling and getting angry, he adds, “I ordered him … I advised him to stay behind.”
A patch of ground the size of his body.
General Maximo Gómez drops a stone. General Calixt
o García another stone. And officers and soldiers keep filing past, and one after another stones fall with a sharp click, stones on top of stones, as Martí’s memorial mound rears toward the sky, and only those clicks can be heard in the immense silence of Cuba.
(105)
1896: Papeete
Flora Tristán
The canvas, bare and immense, offers itself challengingly. Paul Gauguin paints, hunts around, throws on color as if bidding farewell to the world; and his desperate hand writes: Where do we come from, what are we, where are we going?
Over half a century ago, Gauguin’s grandmother asked the same question in one of her books, and died finding out. The Peruvian family of Flora Tristán never mentioned it, as if it were bad luck or as if she were crazy or a ghost. When Paul asked about his grandmother, in the remote years of his childhood in Lima, they answered him:
“Time to go to bed, it’s late.”
Flora Tristán had burned up her short life preaching revolution, the proletarian revolution and the revolution of women enslaved by father, employer, and husband. Illness and the police finished her off. She died in France. The workers of Bordeaux paid for her coffin and carried her on a bier to the cemetery.