José Martí

Cuban poet, journalist, and nationalist leader

• Born: January 28, 1853
• Birthplace: Havana, Cuba
• Died: May 19, 1895
• Place of death: Dos Ríos, Cuba

A gifted writer and political leader, Martí dedicated his life to the struggle for Cuba’s independence from Spain, and his poetry ranks him among the finest Latin American writers. Although he died as the final war for Cuban independence began, he remains a powerful patriotic symbol for all Cubans.

Early Life

José Martí (mahr-TEE) was born in Cuba, the son of Spanish parents Leonor Pérez and Mariano Martí y Navarro. His father was a soldier in a Spanish army that was sent to Cuba to discourage independence movements. By the time José was born, several uprisings had been suppressed, and offers by the United States to buy the island from Spain had been rejected.

In 1865, the twelve-year-old José became a student in Havana, where his teacher, Rafael Maria Mendives, fostered Martí’s literary and political interests. At an early age, José showed writing talent and a passion for Cuban independence. He began writing patriotic plays, poems, and essays, and in 1869 printed his own newspaper, Patria Libre (free homeland).

In 1868, while Martí was still a student, a new war for independence began under the leadership of Carlos Manuel Cespedes; it would continue for ten years. During that war, Spanish authorities used increasingly harsh methods to suppress dissent, and executions—often for nonviolent offenses—and imprisonments increased. On the strength of a letter found in the home of a friend, Martí himself was arrested and imprisoned in 1869. The following year, he was sent to work in a rock quarry until he was deported to Spain.

After arriving in Spain in 1871, Martí began his university education but also continued writing in support of Cuban independence. In 1871, he wrote an essay on political prisons in Cuba that eloquently described the plight of sick old men and frightened young boys who were sent to work in Cuban quarries, where they were whipped and afflicted with smallpox and cholera. Written in a dramatic, emotional style, Martí’s essay reveals a thorough training in classical rhetoric that was to benefit him later as a speaker.

After graduating from the University of Zaragoza in 1874, Martí traveled throughout Europe, where he made the acquaintance of the French writer Victor Hugo. He also visited New York. In 1875, he settled in Mexico, where he worked as a journalist, teacher, and dramatist.

Life’s Work

During the two years that Martí spent in Mexico, he made regular contributions to newspapers and magazines, often on political topics. During that period he became familiar with Mexican history and doubtless became more aware of the 1846-1848 war between the United States and Mexico that ended with the United States taking possession of a large portion of northern Mexico that included California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Martí’s dramatic work soon attracted a following.

Martí became acquainted with officials in the Mexican government, but these relationships put him at risk after the ruling administration was overthrown by the militarist Porfirio Díaz. In 1876, Martí left Mexico and settled in Guatemala, where he became a friend of Rubén Darío, one of the leading modernist poets in Latin American literature. Martí spent one and one-half years in Guatemala as a professor and a journalist.

While Martí was in Guatemala, he may have engaged in a love affair similar to the one described in his poem “La Niña de Guatemala” (the girl of Guatemala). In 1877, he returned briefly to Mexico, where he married Carmen Zayas Bazan and then returned with his bride to Guatemala. Political troubles intervened once again when the president of Guatemala removed a friend of Martí’s from his position. Martí then took his wife back to Cuba, where his only son was born. He again engaged in revolutionary activities and was again deported to Spain. From there, he went to New York in 1880, spent a brief period teaching and writing in Venezuela, and then settled down in New York in 1881.

Martí’s approximately fifteen years in New York were marked by his intense activity on behalf of Cuban independence, social activism, teaching, and writing. He soon became the leader of both New York’s Cuban exile community and the Cuban Revolutionary Party. In Cuba, the ten-year independence struggle had concluded unsatisfactorily during the late 1870’s. However, the so-called “little war” of 1880 was a sign of continued nationalist unrest, and Martí became close to the rebel Cuban generals Maximo Gomez and Antonio Maceo.

As Martí wrote for papers in Argentina, Venezuela, and Mexico and edited La America in New York, he refined his ideas about the Cuban revolution. Fearing the danger of a Cuban military dictatorship, he broke with Maceo and Gomez, and he also feared the possibility of American intervention. Against the backdrop of the American war with Mexico, Martí was suspicious of American imperialistic designs. He was also aware of the oppression of African Americans and Native Americans within the United States. He described a lynching in striking detail and sent it to papers in Latin America.

Martí’s literary activity during that period was also intense. He wrote the poetry for Versos libres (free verses) and Versos sencillos (simple verses), and Ismaello . He started a magazine for children, La Edad de Oro. He stressed the importance of education and taught a class for black Hispanics.

Meanwhile, Martí traveled extensively around the United States and the Caribbean and spoke before members of Cuban exile groups about his plans for the Cuban revolution—especially in Tampa and Key West, Florida, where there were large numbers of Cuban emigrants working in cigar factories. Martí’s group planned the war of independence and raised enough money to outfit three steamers to transport weapons to Cuba; however, the ships were seized by the United States.

In 1895, Martí landed in Cuba and wrote daily letters from the battlefield. However, he died in his first hostile engagement with Spanish troops, while leading a charge at Dos Rios in 1895. The war continued until 1898, by which time the independence forces were in control of much of the devastated and burned-over countryside. By then, the United States—which feared a truly independent Cuba, as Martí had predicted—intervened on the pretext of a Spanish attack on the USS Maine. American forces took control of the entire island and occupied it until 1902 and on several later occasions. The United States continued to dominate Cuba’s government until Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959.

Significance

In the twenty-first century, José Martí remains an icon to Cubans of conservative and radical political beliefs. Standing in Havana’s Plaza of the Revolution is an enormous statue of Martí. Several editions of his Complete Works have been sponsored by both conservative and Marxist governments in Havana, and the Castro government has used Martí’s writings for both children’s school texts and adult literacy programs.

Martí’s observations of the United States during the late nineteenth century provide unique insights into American social history. He praised American leaders such as Abraham Lincoln and Grover Cleveland but also vividly described the lynching of a black man in the South and the deplorable conditions under which Native Americans lived. He observed and wrote in detail about political conventions, social customs, and even sports.

Martí’s writings promoted democracy in Latin America, and he envisioned a Spanish America—which he called “Our America”—as a community of nations that would not be overwhelmed by their powerful English-speaking neighbor to the north. Although he admired American enterprise, he expressed in his writings his concerns that the need of American industry for foreign markets could eventually consume and marginalize Latin America.

In the field of Latin American poetry, Martí is considered an important modernist, ranked alongside Rubén Darío. He led a break with the Romanticism of the past and initiated an almost surrealistic poetry, sometimes of dream images, that foreshadowed the work of others. His poetry is still popular in Cuba, whose highly literate population have an exceptional appreciation of literature.

Bibliography

Kirk, John M. José Martí: Mentor of the Cuban Nation. Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1983. After a review of differing interpretations of Martí’s work, Kirk analyzes the growth of Martí’s political thought through a detailed examination of the writings. Particularly insightful is Kirk’s discussion of how Martí’s prison experience influenced his ideas about the independence struggle. Includes an extensive bibliography and a detailed chronology.

Martí, José. Selected Writings. Translated and edited by Esther Allen. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. The introduction by Roberto González Echevarría includes an overview of Martí’s life and a critical review of his political and literary writings, followed by a year-by-year chronological outline of Martí’s life and a two-page list of suggested readings. The volume contains more than four hundred pages of Martí’s writings in English translation, including samples of his poetry, his personal letters, his dispatches to newspapers, and his notebook and diary excerpts.

Perez, Louis J., ed. José Martí in the United States: The Florida Experience. Tempe: Arizona State University Center for Latin American Studies, 1995. Focuses on Martí’s work with the exile Cuban populations in Florida, especially Tampa and Key West.

Shonookal, Deborah, and Mirta Muñez, eds. José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas. New York: Ocean Press, 1999. A collection of translated writings, less extensive than Allen’s, but with a thirteen-page introduction by Ivan A. Schulman, one of the leading American students of Martí and his poetry, that offers a thorough overview of Martí’s poetical works and scholarship about them.