BY NAOMI CRAINE
May 19, 1995, marks the centennial of the death of Cuban revolutionary José Martí. Meetings and commemorations are planned around the world to celebrate the life of this independence fighter and what he represented in the struggle for sovereignty and dignity for Cuba and all oppressed peoples.

When the first war for Cuba's independence from Spain broke out in 1968 Martí, age 15, actively supported it. He was imprisoned for political reasons in 1869 and exiled to Spain in 1871. He lived for a time in Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, and from 1880 to 1895 in the United States, working as a journalist. In 1892 Martí founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party, with the immediate purpose of fighting for the independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico and the longer- range one of preventing U.S. expansion in the Antilles and then in the rest of Latin America. He returned to Cuba when the second war for Cuban independence began in February 1895, and was killed in combat with Spanish forces on May 19 of that year.

When Martí first arrived in the United States he wrote glowingly of "a country where everyone seems to be his own master." As he saw the struggles of working people unfold and the capitalist rulers in Washington begin to look hungrily southward at Latin America, however, his view shifted. "What is becoming apparent," he wrote in 1889, "is that the nature of the North American government is gradually changing its fundamental reality. Under the traditional labels of Republican and Democrat, with no innovation other than the contingent circumstances of place and character, the republic is becoming plutocratic and imperialistic."

Martí wrote for various newspapers in Latin America about life and politics in the United States. Among other things his articles covered labor struggles, racism and oppression faced by Blacks and Indians, and the fight for women's suffrage. He spoke out against colonialism around the world.

In 1883 Martí condemned "the pretext that civilization, which is the vulgar name given to the current state of the Europeans, should have the natural right to seize foreign land belonging to barbarism, which is the name those coveting someone else's land give to the current state of any people not from Europe or from European America; as if head for head, heart for heart, someone who crushes Irishmen or blows away sepoys [Indians in the British military service] tied to cannon, were worth more than one of those wise, loving, and unselfish Arabs who, undaunted by defeat or intimidated by numbers, defend their homeland with faith in Allah, a lance in each hand and a pistol between their teeth."

Below are four excerpts from Martí's writings. The first, on the rise of the labor movement in the United States in the 1880s, was published in La Nación in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The second is from a letter to the New York Evening Post responding to columns in that paper and in the Philadelphia Manufacturer debating whether Washington should attempt to annex Cuba. The third item was published in Patria, the semi- official organ of the Cuban Revolutionary Party edited by Martí. The last excerpt is from an unfinished letter written the day before Martí's death.

Many of Martí's articles and letters can be found in English in Inside the Monster: Writings on the United States and American Imperialism and Our America: Writings on Latin America and the Struggle for Cuban Independence, both edited by Philip Foner and published by Monthly Review Press.
 

BY JOSÉ MARTÍ
There is no longer a city without as many associations as trade unions. The workers have gathered into a colossal association known as the Knights of Labor. By the thirty thousands, as at this moment in Pittsburgh, they stand with folded arms, steadfast and spirited, before the iron foundries that stubbornly deny them the wages they demand. As in New York, the trains are stopped, the ships are at rest, produce is piled up on the loading platforms of railroad stations, and commerce throughout the nation is suffering a severe slowing down, and all because the freight loaders are asking the railroads for a wage that will let them eat meat.

They are asking for twenty cents an hour, plus the assurance of two dollars' worth of work per day, because a man who must travel many miles to and from his job, must eat away from home, has a wife and children there, and must live in a costly city in order to work, cannot live a city life on less than two dollars a day.

Formerly, if the country's workers decided to strike, the employers would approach the Italians, who were willing to work for a low wage. But now, since the Italians are resisting because they realize that if better working conditions are achieved for others, they will be achieved for themselves, the employers will have to yield to the just demands of the employed. For it is incredible that because of just demands, a worker whose fortune lies in the strength of his arms should run the risk of leaving his desolate house in hunger and misery.

July 15, 1882
This is not the occasion to discuss the question of the annexation of Cuba. It is probable that no self-respecting Cuban would like to see his country annexed to a nation where the leaders of opinion share towards him the prejudices excusable only to vulgar jingoism or rampant ignorance. No honest Cuban will stoop to be received as a moral pest for the sake of the usefulness of his land in a community where his ability is denied, his morality insulted, and his character despised. There are some Cubans who, from honorable motives, from an ardent admiration for progress and liberty, from a prescience of their own powers under better political conditions, from an unhappy ignorance of the history and tendency of annexation, would like to see the island annexed to the United States. But those who have fought in war and learned in exile, who have built, by the work of hands and mind, a virtuous home in the heart of an unfriendly community; who by their successful efforts as scientists and merchants, as railroad builders and engineers, as teachers, artists, lawyers, journalists, orators, and poets, as men of alert intelligence and uncommon activity, are honored wherever their powers have been called into action and the people are just enough to understand them; those who have raised, with their less prepared elements, a town of workingmen where the United States had previously a few huts in a barren cliff; those, more numerous than the others, do not desire the annexation of Cuba to the United States. They do not need it.

They admire this nation, the greatest ever built by liberty, but they dislike the evil conditions that, like worms in the heart, have begun in this mighty republic their work of destruction. They have made of the heroes of this country their own heroes, and look to the success of the American commonwealth as the crowning glory of mankind; but they cannot honestly believe that excessive individualism, reverence for wealth, and the protracted exultation of a terrible victory are preparing the United States to be the typical nation of liberty, where no opinion is to be based in greed, and no triumph or acquisition reached against charity and justice. We love the country of Lincoln as much as we fear the country of Cutting.(1)

March 25, 1889
The spectacle of our unity, and the meeting of free wills in the Cuban Revolutionary Party, would be worthless, even if the Party were to completely understand the country's internal problems and how to treat the wounds they cause, if it failed to take into account the even greater mission made obligatory by the times in which it comes into being, and by its position at the crossroads of the world. Cuba and Puerto Rico will enter freedom with very different structures, and in very different times, and with far greater responsibilities than have the other Spanish American nations. It is necessary to have the courage of greatness, and to understand one's obligations.

The Antilles lie astride the pivot of America; if enslaved, they would be nothing but a pontoon bridge for an imperialist republic's war against the suspicious and superior world already preparing to deny it power; they would be merely a fortress of an American Rome. If free - and deservedly so by order of an equitable and industrious liberty - they would be the guarantee of a continental balance, of independence for a still threatened Spanish America, and of honor for the great republic of the North. The United States will find more certain greatness in the development of its own land, unfortunately feudal and divided into two hostile parts, than in the ignoble conquest of its lesser neighbors, and in the inhumane struggle - once it has them in its possession - that it will unleash against the global powers for world domination.

Not with a light hand but with a consciousness developed over the centuries one must restore new life to the liberated Antilles. This great human responsibility should be undertaken with awesome respect. A person reaches tremendous heights through nobility of purpose, or falls to abysmal depths because of failing to understand. It is a world we are holding in balance, not merely a couple of islands we are about to free.

April 17, 1894
I am in daily danger of giving my life for my country and duty, for I understand that duty and have the courage to carry it out - the duty of preventing the United States from spreading through the Antilles as Cuba gains its independence, and from overpowering with that additional strength our lands of America. All I have done so far, and all I will do, is for this purpose. I have had to work quietly and somewhat indirectly, because to achieve certain objectives, they must be kept under cover; to proclaim them for what they are would raise such difficulties that the objectives could not be realized.

The same general and lesser duties of these nations - nations such as yours and mine that are most vitally concerned with preventing the opening in Cuba (by annexation on the part of the imperialists from there and the Spaniards) of the road that is to be closed, and is being closed with our blood, annexing our American nations to the brutal and turbulent North which despises them - prevented their apparent adherence and obvious assistance to this sacrifice made for their immediate benefit.

I have lived in the monster and I know its entrails; my sling is David's.

May 18, 1895