About my writing on Marti's work.

Fernandez Retamar, Roberto

AS FOR SO MANY OTHERS, Jose Marti (1853-95) is my life's main figure. I will profit from this exceptional occasion to offer a resume of some of the many comments I have written about his work, and to update that resume.

The first time I aspired to consider the matter in depth was in an essay written between 1963 and 1964, published the next year with the title "Marti in His (Third) World." (1) After almost four decades adding and subtracting from it, it remains the fundamental source of my further studies on Marti. The title itself, which became "Introduction to Jose Marti," is among the few reductions, some of which today seem to me incomprehensible; I felt obliged to make the change for, notwithstanding the reticence I expressed there with regard to the denomination Third World, so popular at the time, that reticence did not stop the title from seemingly swallowing the text. (After all, readers pay more attention to titles than to texts.) And though that expression had been forged eleven or twelve years before my essay by Alfred Sauvy, I wasn't too happy to collaborate in its diffusion; similarly, as the great French demographer confessed to me in a Havana interview in 1971, Sauvy himself was not too pleased about it, either.

However, I have now returned to the original title, for, after all, such coined terms as "West," "North," or "South"--to say nothing of "First World"--are as vulnerable (or defensible) as "Third World." I still feel the core of the effort displayed in the essay is worthy of attention; that is, to have put the emphasis on Marti's thought about the poor of the Earth as a whole; that his perspective became ecumenical, springing from his identification with the humiliated and offended, the oppressed par excellence, the colonized that, in order not to be so, fought (and fight and will continue fighting "hasta la victoria siempre"). I received this basic idea, in general outline, from the better spirit of the Cuban revolution (Che even encouraged me by commenting on my text) and, in particular, from my scintillating maestro Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, who, for that reason, was one of the two persons to whom the essay was dedicated. The other one was Manuel Pedro Gonzalez, whose contagious enthusiasm for Marti, especially in studying his literary output and the role it played in the emergence of the new Spanish American literature, was highly stimulating for me. The meeting and the clash between those two great old and cantankerous men illuminated Cuban intellectual life in the fertile years of the early 1960s. If I were to simplify to the extreme, I could say that Manuel Pedro helped me better to understand the "form" of Marti's work, while don Ezequiel would do so for his "thought." But, as I said and will repeat, this is but a simplification.

Though I will come back to that essay (on occasion tacitly), I will now take a leap in time to the words I wrote to preface an edition of Marti's Edad de Oro published in 1992 by the Fondo de Cultura Economica in Mexico. In cases like his, the separation between the two lines [form/ thought] ... is the product of an abstraction often made for didactic reasons, for it is necessary to say about Marti what in 1875, when he was twenty-two, he said about Hugo: "His form is a part of his work, and a true thought." (Unless so indicated, in this as in other cases, the emphasis is my own.)

Twenty years before, in a section called "Essence and Form" of the prologue to a selection I prepared of Marti's essays on art and literature, I had already stated: Another aspect among the many that can be distinguished in Marti's critique refers to the relation that [he] saw, in the work of art, between the formal elements and those some call of content, which Marti, more adequately, preferred to name "of essence." In accordance with his conception of reality, he did not consider both elements separately but instead as closely merged: "All rebellion of form," he wrote in 1886 when considering the French impressionist painters, "drags with it a rebellion of essence."

And if these concepts point to form in order to signal its vinculum with thought (that here, as in other occasions, Marti preferred to name essence, though it is possible that for him both terms were not identifiable), others spring from thought and flow into form--and not only into it. In an annotation made in Caracas in 1881, Marti wrote: "There are no letters, which are expression, till there is an essence to express in them. Nor will there be Hispanic American literature till there is Hispanic America." The first idea reappears fundamentally in 1890, when, on writing about the poet Francisco Sellen, he speaks about the French, who in this transitional time have not much to say, so that while the new thought condenses, they polish and give the finishing strokes to the form, and sometimes cut a precious stone, ladles of fine small facets, where they empty all they find full of grace and color of the antiques, or rime, for show or amusement, the pessimism of fashionable lace cuffs, fit for unemployed litterateurs in the city full of literature.

For a moment, I will leave Marti in order to come back to him with added strength. In Salamanca in 1912, when finishing his unforgettable book Del sentimiento tragico de la vida, Unamuno coined his well-known words about how "our philosophy, Spanish philosophy, is liquid and widespread in our literature, in our life, in our action--in our mystic, above all--and not in philosophical systems. It is concrete." In Mexico, thirty-three years later, those words would resound in the introduction with which Jose Gaos presented his Antologia del pensamiento de lengua espanola en la Edad Contemporanea (1945). But in that anthology, Gaos, who limits the work to the contemporary epoch, englobes Spain and Spanish America and writes about a certain "special literature ... of thought, or just plain thought," one specialization of which is philosophy. Further on, he states that the thinkers considered by him--as the Spaniards confront the decadence of their country and as the Spanish Americans wish to obtain or consolidate the independence of theirs--they carry out actions of politics in the ample etymological sense of the word ... and not only in its strictest meaning.... And it can almost be added that in the measure in which [that] thought ... moves away from politics in its ample sense toward pure philosophy, it loses in originality and worth. As to form, that of a treaty of systematic and methodic course is the least original and worthy part,... that of the essay and the article and the speech [the most valuable], often of a style with aesthetic value, that in some is of a high degree.... The greatest thinkers of the Spanish language since the Golden Age of Spanish literature are ... [its] great prose writers.

I have taken my time over these quotations because the criteria there expressed shed light on the value of Marti's relation between form and thought. In my 1968 paper "Modernismo, 98, subdesarrollo," I already pointed out the evident similitudes (with their accompanying differences, also evident) between Marti and Unamuno as writers-thinkers on the periphery of the West. The arduous Basque, who wrote that he had been "among the first to speak about him [Marti] in Spain," understood this well. And frequently, he spoke with great discernment. For example, he said Marti's epistolary style reminded him of that of Saint Theresa--an observation already made by the then young Pedro Henriquez Urena--and added: "It is not always written in prose, but in that unformed expression, protoplasmic, that preceded prose and verse. His words seemed creations, acts." Unamuno and Gaos, in lines I have just quoted and that I am going to bring together and abbreviate, understand that thought in Spanish language is immersed, to a high degree, in our literature rather than in texts of an explicitly philosophical purpose. Unamuno goes further and affirms that it is in our life, in our action.

All this is paradigmatically applicable to Marti. Haven't we just heard that for the rector of Salamanca, Marti's words seem creations, acts? Marti was a man of acts (above all, acts of love). And in an often-quoted phrase, though insufficiently formulated, Guillermo Diaz-Plaja called him "of course, the first prose `creator' the Hispanic world has had." One cannot but link this with Gaos's observation that our greatest thinkers since the edad de oro are our greatest prose writers (like Unamuno, I would not forget our greatest poets). It is then necessary, when talking about Marti as a thinker, to consider him also as a writer, and vice versa. Many pertinent things have been said about this. I would like to quote, among them, David Lagmanovich's words: "The metaphoric expression is Marti's thought, it constitutes the very substance of his thought" (emphasis in the original).

The previous lines do not imply ignorance of the specificity of a work of thought as well as that of a literary work. However, Marti offers great difficulties when considered only in one or another of these facets, for his unity is resistant to any partition. If Unamuno's acute commentary as to Marti's epistolary style is in a way valid for almost all his verbal output, its depth also casts light on the entire figure of the Cuban, who gives the impression of existing in a moment previous to the one when the human being divides itself into various functions. We already know that in him, the thinker does not exist apart from the writer. Neither is the political revolutionary (and he belongs to the major historical figures of the kind) separate from the spiritualist with a vocation for transcendence, the man thirsty for justice from the erotic creature, the attentive man for family and friends from the exquisite artist, the profound sage from the natural man, the fiery democrat from the aristocrat of the spirit, the announcer of the future from the profound archaic man. In the initial poem of his complex Versos sencillos, Marti explained: "Yo vengo de todas partes, / Y hacia todas partes voy; / Arte soy entre las artes, / En los montes, monte soy" [I'm a traveler to all parts, / And a newcomer to none; / I am art among the arts, / With the mountains I am one]. Max Scheler proposed in "The Future of Man" that the human being should aspire, not to the superman, but to the whole man. Marti belongs to the scant number of beings in whom that goal comes to the fore. With the syntagm "new man," and from Saint Paul to Che Guevara, many have claimed something similar, as others have done before them and as will be done again in the future, for the aim to surpass what we are is a permanent demand. For Marti, this was a capital claim, for he saw the whole world "De Minotauro yendo a mariposa" [Going from Minotaur to butterfly], as he put it in his prodigious free verse.

During his whole life, Marti was confident of the perfectibility of everything in existence, in its ultimate harmony ("Todo es musica y razon" [All is music and reason], he wrote), in the love that animates the universe, and in the need we have of accepting our quota of duty for the achievement of that perfectibility and, as he said (like many mystics), enjoying with fruition the benefits of death. It is true that in his thought, as is usual, there are phases. It is also true, however, that the nucleus of that thought, though enriched, knows no fundamental alterations after it first comes to light during his painful adolescence. Banished from his homeland, he publishes in Madrid his first booklet, El presidio politico en Cuba (1871), in which the kernel of his political, ethical, and religious beliefs already appear in an astonishing expressive testimony.

Marti is wholly there. He has just turned eighteen, and that is his Saison en enfer. (Rimbaud, one year younger than Marti, also wrote in 1871 his "Lettres du Voyant" and, two years later, his own Saison.) Marti would never disown a word of that text, or of all the others he wrote or said--they are firmly inscribed. What this seer has contemplated, and what he talks about, is a horrible reality pertaining to colonialism. But it reveals to him, not only the evil of oppression, but also the nobleness of the meek, the value of sacrifice, the compassion (Unamuno's padecer con, "suffering with"), the imperishability of love; it reveals to him what his struggle is to be, and his strength to carry it out; it reveals to him that "the supernatural is truly carnal," as Peguy would later write. In that supernatural carnality, which would relate him to Saint Theresa (and link the proximity of their styles), he will live the rest of his short resplendent life.

From the first moment, Marti assumes that he has the duty of contributing to the liberation of his homeland, and he gives himself to the accomplishment of that duty till his last breath. His is perceptively a political task, therefore, under an unequivocal revolutionary sign. This task will be enriched with social goals, as Marti understands more and more the part played by "the people, the painful mass [that] is the genuine head of revolutions," even though "despots ignore" it, as he wrote in 1880; and that, consequent to that understanding, he decided to "throw [his] luck" in "with the poor of the earth," to make "common cause" with the oppressed, as he added ten years later. For Marti was not one of those "soft revolutionaries" he upbraided in 1888, those who "are always esteemed by the privileged classes, who are entertained by them, like children with paper balloons." On the contrary, he was an extreme radical and, because of it, not at all an extremist or a demagogue. "Man," he declared in 1893, "is he who studies the roots of things. The rest is a flock." And he also stated that "a radical is just that: he who goes to the roots. One should not name radical he who does not help in the security and happiness of other men."

The strife that opened up to him in the social sphere did likewise in the political one. Marti began impugning the oppression of Spain, the old metropolis of America that, by the late nineteenth century, only had two colonies in the Americas--Cuba and Puerto Rico--both of which he proposed liberating. Alluding to the zone where the first battle for Cuban independence took place in 1868, he exclaimed (at the age of sixteen): "Either Yara or Madrid." Marti later added two major issues to this line of thought: the ensemble of nations of what he would soon call "our America," an ensemble to which he felt himself profoundly allied and of which he made the best defense; and what he considered "the European America," the United States, where he lived as an exile for almost fifteen years, and of which, as no other thinker of his orbit, he came to appreciate the virtues and the risks of what would come to be known as the capitalist modernity par excellence. This brought him to project another modernity, an alternative one, the first elaboration of which appeared in his 1882 "Prologo al Poema del Niagara." It also prompted him to offer an unsurpassed radiograph of this country, in chronicles of intense beauty and sharp analysis, fervently read during his lifetime throughout Spanish America. And lastly, it led him to take concrete steps to oppose the projects of incipient North American imperialism: censuring with energy the first Pan-American conferences that took place between 1889 and 1891, and preparing a war in Cuba that would not only be against the archaic Spanish empire but also against the new burgeoning Empire. Even more, he put the emphasis on the latter, as is made clear in his well-known posthumous letter to Mercado, written from the battlefield on the eve of his death (May 19, 1895); he there confesses that he is fulfilling his "duty ... of preventing in time, with Cuba's independence, the United States from spreading through the Antilles, and falling with that added strength on our lands of America. All I have done so far, and all I will do, is for this purpose." In truth, however, his purpose would already go much further. He not only thought of all our lands of America, as he expressed in the letter I have just quoted, but he had also written a year before: "It is a world we are equilibrating: it is not only two islands we are going to liberate." And, he added, "A mistake in Cuba is a mistake in America, a mistake in modern humanity. Who rises today with Cuba, rises for all time."

If the enormous horizon of this design, which shows Marti in the other root of the present world, would not place him among the major political thinkers, the nature of his politics would be relevant enough to give him such a place, and others as well. For in him, politics was one with ethics, guided by love in a process of spiritual ascension and purification, which has little to do with what is current nowadays. That is why Martinez Estrada could say that "his figure appears before us as that of an anachronistic hero" and turned to myths in order to try to fully understand it. It is also possible to think, as I have already suggested, that it is an announcement of the future we need--which doesn't have much to do, either, with the deplorable presentolatry to which so many are devoted.

I have knowingly been referring indistinctly to Marti's works in prose and verse, and in examples of diverse genres: letters, poems, testimony, speeches, articles, essays, chronicles, political analysis. Marti's thought made use of those and other genres. For Marti did not propose, academically, to abide by genres nor, neoacademically, did he propose to surpass them. Beyond genre, he saw before him functions, tasks, duties, and he set about their accomplishment. In many ways, Marti indicated that he did not want to be viewed as a poet of words but rather as a poet of actions, and also that expression is the female of action, in an evident reference to the loving copulation that guarantees life's persistence. This verse from the Cid would have satisfied him: "!Lengua sin manos,--!quomo osas fablar?" [Tongue without hands, how dareth thou speak?]; as would Henri Bergson's words: "Conscience means possible action." However, there could be nothing more foreign to this man than the worship of pure action, about which we well know the deplorable consequences. His was an impure generative action. However much form and thought interested him, function always interested him above all else. It is a happy paradox that his commitment to function brought forth in him the other two realities. That is why I wrote, some time ago, that if it had not been so serious, it could have been called what Jean Cocteau said of himself: the Paganini of Ingres's violin. Among the numerous enunciations in this regard, I feel that what Pedro Henriquez Urena wrote in 1931 is particularly just. [Marti] could, like Ruben Dario, sacrifice everything to the sole idea of being a poet, but he above all wanted to adhere to the standards of honesty, and duty and love grew bigger--completed themselves in the devotion to his land.... But the writer, who diminished himself in order to give way to the man of love and duty, reappeared augmented, transfigured by love and duty: the loving vibrations make each of his lines tremble, the heat of duty gives them transparency. And when he gives himself, devoted, to his supreme devotion--Cuba--he already writes as if he were melted into pure energy: his letter from Montecristi, two months before falling in Dos Rios, is like the architecture of light.

It may not perhaps be useless to recall that the letter to which Henriquez Urena refers is one Marti wrote on March 25, 1895, to Federico Henriquez y Carvajal, his uncle. The same can and should be said of the letter that Marti wrote his mother that day, even more so of a text the Dominican Henriquez Urena did not know about when he wrote his essay, for it was first published in 1941--Marti's last Diary.

Because it is an excellent example of how Marti linked form and thought regarding a function ("possible action"), I shall concentrate for a moment on his essential text, "Nuestra America" [Our America]. Before coming to it, I shall call attention to its locus dicendi: La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York, where it was published on January 1, 1891, and the Mexican journal El Partido Liberal, where it appeared on the 30th of that same month. Marti sent chronicles and comments about specific matters to both publications; this is not the case with "Nuestra America." What, then, is the genre of this text, whose strangeness cannot be ignored by any slightly attentive reader? It is difficult not to see in it, first of all, an analytic balance of what Marti came to know about our greater homeland, its history, its components, its risks; and, at the same time, a project that looks to the threatened future. But it is equally difficult not to feel overcome by the imposing beauty of those words. Thinker and poet are highly identified here. That is why, more than thirty years ago, I affirmed that in "Nuestra America," "the scientist's penetrating analysis and the poetic flight of the creator of myths ... are joined." And the text, which is not a chronicle, is, at the same time, both essay and poem. Or, if you wish, a poematic essay, whose density of concept and imagery is such that it was considered by one of its best commentators to be "truly hair-raising." I have already said that only by a process of abstraction, often made with didactic ends, is it possible to separate form and thought in Marti. I will now, with the necessary caution, attend to those ends.

As to his thought, Cintio Vitier published in 1982 an "Esquema de `Nuestra America'" [Sketch of "Our America"], from which I will freely draw. The threats confronted by our America are internal--parochialism and uprooting--and external--imperialism (a term Marti did not use in the text). The first internal danger, parochialism, is blind and inane in front of powerful countries, who are, in turn, blind to the small and the weak. Surpassing that spirit supposes self-conscientiousness, and a linkage with those who are in similar situations, in order to form a united cohort. The second internal danger leads to foreignism and treason. Its cause lies in the shame of our poverty and in the complex of belonging to non-"white" races. Those who are uprooted are attracted to the countries of the West, whose wealth is fed by the exploitation of our countries: such exploitation has accomplices in those who abandon our lands and assume the values of the metropolis to be their own. Shame is joined by individualistic arrogance, which brings those who have been uprooted to accuse their people of inferiority. This point provokes in Marti some of the more indignant lines of the text.

The supposed inferiority of our people is born of the disjunction between their originality and the artificial application made on them of forms born in (and for) different people. Solutions must surge from the understanding of their own problems. The government must be autochthonous, and autochthony is the antidote to uprooting. That is why the natural man, the autochthonous mestizo, has defeated the imported book, the artificial learned man, the exotic criollo. Almost immediately, we have the open impugnment of Sarmiento's famous thesis: "There is no battle between civilization and barbarism, but between false erudition and Nature."

Seven years before, in 1884 (when Sarmiento was still alive), Marti had refuted the pretext that civilization, which is the vulgar name given to the present state of the European man, has the natural right to grasp the land that is not his, pertaining to barbarism, which is the name given to the present state of men not pertaining to Europe or European America by those wanting to grasp lands belonging to others.

Now, in "Nuestra America," he will state that the natural man, good and discerning, defrauded in America by the lack of adjustment between the original country and the false government, can be manipulated by tyrants who seemingly attend to the natural elements, but as soon as such tyrants betray them, they (the tyrants) fall. Our governments have been of the anarchic and despotic "uncultured" types or of the "cultured" ones coming out of universities, with perspectives foreign to the real conditions of our people and of the art of governing them. That is why our education must be based, first of all, on the knowledge of our history, then enriched with the contribution of the rest of the world: "Graft the world on our republics, but the trunk must be that of our republics." After the independence wars, a period of disjunction between our peculiar, hybrid elements and the mechanically applied, imported forms of government came into being. And then, an opinion that reveals the radicalization of Marti's social thought: "A common cause had to be established among the oppressed in order to consolidate the system in opposition to the interests and command habits of the oppressors." As this did not happen, the colony continued living in the republic. But it will die in our America, where the real man, in these real times, is coming alive. We were a caricature of the metropoles, amid the pluricolored originality of our America, facing the oligarchy and its amanuensis. The proposed false solutions--the book (European, Yankee), the hatred (tyrannies, civil wars)--failed, and the only real solution was revealed: creative love. Salvation lay in creation.

Overcoming the indubitable internal dangers, one external danger remains: burgeoning imperialism, impelled by expansionist power and disdain. The theme is touched upon all through the essay: in the second paragraph, "trees must line up, so the seven-league giant cannot pass"; in the eighth paragraph, with the image of the tiger (I'll come back to it) that "awaits, behind each tree, crouching in every corner"; and in the eleventh one, after a previous intimation ("But, perhaps, our America is in another danger"), there is an unequivocal statement: "The major danger of our America is the disdain of the formidable neighbor that does not know her." It has been said that "the semantic notion of danger determines the essay's external structure" and that such danger is "that of absorption by the United States." Even more, the notion of "danger" provokes the very existence of this complex though not at all ambiguous essay, and lies at the root of what, according to Marti, should oppose that notion: the solutions proposed for the internal dangers--self-consciousness, union, courage, dignity, creation, common cause with the oppressed. The constant vigilance must be of a critical nature, "but with only one chest and one mind," and without race hatred, for there are no races. The best defense was pointed out from the start: the union of our America, conceived as a union of workers, projected toward the future.

In the brilliant coda, Marti evokes "the unanimous hymn" of "laborious America" and fuses two indigenous myths: that of the Semi or Cemi, deity of the Antillean aborigines (Jose Lezama Lima would name the protagonist of his novel Paradiso after this Taino spirit), and that of the Venezuelan aborigines, Amalivaca, whose seeds, from which the men and women of the new America would be born, "the great Semi, seated on the back of the condor, strew on the romantic nations of the continent and on the painful islands of the sea."

When considering the text's structures, I will freely call on the study I have been quoting: "Lectura de un ensayo: `Nuestra America,' de Jose Marti." After all, Julio Ramos could affirm, in 1989, that "in `Nuestra America,' the form itself fulfills a fundamental political function" (emphasis in the original). There is an external, an intermediate, and a profound structure in "Nuestra America." The first one, of which the semantic notion of danger--as already pointed out--is determinant, implicates three parts: announcement of the danger (in the first two paragraphs), development of the theme (between the third and the tenth paragraphs), and its conclusion (in the last paragraphs, basically of recapitulation and prophetic conclusion); aphoristic endings to paragraphs are frequent in this external structure, as are the varied uses of the same term, the unforeseen or disconcerting use of adjectives, the play of allusions, and mirrors of certain lexical elements. In the intermediate structure, the predominant verbal tenses notably underline the essay's raison d'etre (the call of attention in the face of danger), which is revealed in the great presence of forms with a future value, especially with a tinge of obligation. As to the profound structure, it dwells in the opposition of symbols taken from vegetal and animal kingdoms that "resolve themselves in a great transcendent symbol." For the author I have been following, "the frightening symbol of the tiger is ... what constitutes the real motor of this essay by Marti"; it is "the structuring symbol of the whole essay." Marti, who cannot be suspected of xenophobia of any kind (in this same energetic text he warns that "it is not to be supposed, by an antipathy proper of a village, that the blond people of the continent are of an innate and fatal evil"), has symbolized in his tiger, on one hand, not a country but a depredating system, call it colonialism, imperialism, neocolonialism, or any other word signifying exploitation and oppression of one country by another--such is "the tiger from outside"; and on the other hand, the local exploitation and oppression, no less abominable--"the tiger from inside."

If the double image of the tiger in this founding essay-poem, written more than a century ago, represents what our countries have to combat in order to save themselves, the irruption in the text of the oppressed implies the other pole of this combat. And as this battle is far from having come to an end, the vertiginous text, an authentic manifesto of our second (and definitive) independence--claimed by Marti since 1889--maintains its urgent and dramatic timeliness.

Before concluding, it is fitting to ask oneself: to what line of thought does Marti belong? The problem of answering that question was posed over a century ago, and I believe we are still only approaching an answer to it. Impressed by Marti's mixture of vast information and constant originality, Gabriela Mistral named him, in a paradoxically fortunate formula, "a cultured Adam." Other authors, as impressed as she--in this case by Marti's familiarity with the fathers of the language and wishing to know which of them his own work resembled--arrived at the conclusion that Marti resembles them so much by coincidence because he is one of them. I would like to apply to Marti's thought a similar process of thinking.

Marti's information allowed him to contemplate many spheres of thought, underlining sympathies and differences (to use terms coined by Alfonso Reyes). And in all cases, including those in which sympathy was great, Marti was faithful to his circumstances and maintained his own image, which has frequently been presented as that of a heterodox. In religious questions, it is obvious that Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo would have made a place for this anticlerical man in his juvenile, erudite, and battling Historia de los heterodoxos espanoles. But wouldn't he have done the same for a priest like Teilhard de Chardin, some of whose hopeful ideas (I surmised some time ago) would have been joyfully accepted by Marti? Of course, to brand someone as heterodox, on whatever grounds, one must be firmly rooted in an orthodoxy as Menendez y Pelayo was. And sometimes, one must be more or less walled up, which was not the case, for example, with the delightful Chesterton, whose singular orthodoxy did not keep him from paying his contradictory Shaw the most beautiful eulogy I know of. As to politics, to which Marti vehemently gave himself, instead of labeling him heterodox, wouldn't it be more apropos to accept that the radical Marti, beside other relevant figures, ostensibly is also one of them?

ANNIVERSARIES USUALLY PROVOKE quite a few empty rituals. A few months away from the sesquicentenary of Marti's birth, our duty is to avoid such rituals and, at the same time, not to fear saying of him what his greatness deserves, though knowing there will always be a homunculus that, on hearing our words, will try to mock us. That is why I am going to insist, on coming to the end, that I am convinced that Marti belongs to the small and precious stock of founders of great universal beliefs, and that we are, at the outset of the so-called third millennium, present at the beginning of the expansion of Marti, in the way we talk of a galaxy's expansion. To start with, he is, in conditions often highly arduous, the greatest treasure and the greatest shield of his immediate country, the one in which he was born. But his lessons far from exhaust themselves in it. He defended and built for us and for many others, for his time and for times to come. It was well known by the man who wrote "Mi verso crecera: bajo la yerba / Yo tambien crecere" [My verse will grow; under the grass / I too shall grow]: "Viva yo en modestia oscura; / Muera en silencio y pobreza; / !Que ya veran mi cabeza / Por sobre mi sepultura!" [May I live in obscure modesty; / Die in silence and poverty, / That they will see my head / Over my grave!].

According to Lezama Lima, Marti is a mystery that accompanies us. This mystery will accompany humanity for an unforeseeable time into the future, in the same manner that it is impossible to foresee the future of humanity itself. Perhaps we may not wholly understand some of the things Marti said. Others have turned out to be prophetic in the terrible "short twentieth century" (Hobsbawm), a century that saw so many negative realities in its temporary involution toward barbarism, to the extent of giving the impression of having been a lost century, as was said, from an economic point of view, of the decade of the 1980s in our America. But it has not seen, nor will see, men and women of good will in compliance with the destiny for the growing poor of the earth that the haughty, the powerful, and the avaricious make nightmares of; nor has it seen nor will it see extinguished the light brought forth by Jose Marti.

Havana

(1) Editorial note: For a recent selection of Marti's writings in English--including "Nuestra America" and "Prologo al Poema del Niagara"--see Jose Marti, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Esther Allen (New York: Penguin, 2002). In Spanish, the two-volume Paginas escogidas, ed. Roberto Fernandez Retamar (Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1974, 1985), is the standard edition. And for a recent reconsideration of Marti's "Our America," see Nuestra America, ed. Maria Cristina Eduardo (Havana: Casa Editorial Abril, 2001).