Latino Americans

by Ray Suarez

  Even as the United States struggled throughout the nineteenth century to “form a more perfect union,” American ideals about liberty did “enlighten the world.” The century was one of constant cross-pollination between North America and the rest of the hemisphere.

  One of the idealists inspired by the American Revolution was a twenty-seven-year-old Cuban named José Julian Martí Pérez.

  José Julian Martí Pérez: Often called “The George Washington of Cuba,” José Martí struggled for Cuban independence from his teens. During long years of exile he wrote prodigiously: Poetry, essays, news reports, and political writing poured from his pen. CREDIT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  You might have no idea who José Martí is just from hearing his name. Maybe his iconic face, that of a young, dreamy aesthete with a flamboyant mustache, would spark some recognition. Perhaps you have passed the famous image of Martí, dressed in a dark suit and holding the reins of a rearing horse, reproduced as a heroic statue at the foot of New York’s Central Park. It is more likely you have heard some of Martí’s poetry, in the stanzas of “Guantanamera,” or “Woman from Guantánamo,” arguably the best-known Cuban song in the world.

  • • •

  IN JANUARY 1880, Martí was one of the more than thirty million people who made their way to the United States from around the world. He had been arrested for sedition, jailed and abused back in Cuba for his writing and for having contact with other men who wanted to send the Spanish packing and start a republic. He was deported, and wandered from Spain to Central America, to Mexico, and then to New York.

  The poet, philosopher, and essayist liked what he saw in the North. For one thing, the young man was relieved to no longer be on the run: “Elsewhere they make men flee; but here they welcome the fleeing man with a smile. From this goodness has arisen the strength of a nation.”

  His early years in the United States were marked by repeated admiration for the young and powerful nation, as he notes in an arts and culture magazine called The Hour: “I am, at last, in a country where everyone looks like his own master. One can breathe freely, freedom being here the foundation, the shield, the essence of life. One can be proud of his species here.”

  Historian C. Neale Ronning does what we sometimes have to rely on historians to do: point out the obvious. José Martí was hardly a revolutionary leader from central casting. “How can we explain the emergence of Martí as the authoritative leader of the Cuban Revolution? He was young, chronically ill, nervous, small of stature, intellectual, and hopelessly romantic. These are not the qualities usually associated with the charismatic leader of a war for independence. They are hardly the qualities we might expect to have appealed to the veteran leaders of the earlier wars for independence.” In reply to his own query, Ronning cites Martí’s charisma, as observed by his contemporaries, and his fierce intellectual energy.

  During the American years, Martí wrote at a furious pace about every aspect of American life. He felt the power, the energy, and the pace of nineteenth-century New York. In his essay “North American Scenes” he writes of the workers’ playground of Coney Island in Brooklyn: “Nothing in the annals of humanity can compare to the marvelous prosperity of the United States of the North. Does the country lack deep roots? Are ties of sacrifice and shared suffering more lasting within countries than those of common interest? Does this colossal nation contain ferocious and terrible elements? Does the absence of the feminine spirit, source of artistic sensibility and complement to national identity, harden and corrupt the heart of this astonishing people? Only time will tell.

  “For now it is certain that never has a happier, more joyous, better equipped, more densely packed, more jovial, or more frenetic multitude lived in such useful labor in any land on earth, or generated and enjoyed greater wealth, or covered rivers and seas with more gaily bedecked steamers, or spread out with more bustling order and naïve merriment across gentle coastlines, gigantic piers, and fantastical glittering promenades.”

  Martí’s reflections on nineteenth-century America echoed those of some of the first Europeans to see the North American continent, and Old World intellectuals who never actually made the journey, who gobbled up everything they could read about the prodigiously gifted continent across the sea.

  During the New York years, Martí hitched his intellect to his energy and his powerful curiosity and got to work. He wrote poetry. He wrote essays. He translated novels into Spanish and edited a Cuban independence newspaper Patria—Fatherland—and helped found the Cuban Revolutionary Party. He traveled widely, in the United States and throughout the Caribbean, rallying Cuban émigré communities around the anti-imperial cause.

  The young Cuban covered the trial of President James A. Garfield’s assassin, Charles Guiteau, for a Mexico City newspaper, La Opinión Liberal. After a long passage describing Garfield’s killer in monstrous terms, as subhuman, Martí pivots and makes this paradoxical plea: that Guiteau’s life be spared. Martí asks for Guiteau’s life not for the killer’s sake, but for society’s. “Reason demands that his life be spared, because of the futility of his horrendous act and because killing the monster is an inadequate way of ending nature’s power to grow monsters—for, in the end, moved by prolonged solitude and fear watered by tears, the gnawed-away man may revive deep within his body, and in these days of wrath justice might appear to be vengeance. One should not kill a wild beast at a time when one feels oneself to be a wild beast.”

  • • •

  WHEN JOSÉ MARTÍ arrived in the United States, Cuban nationalists were making very little headway in their struggle to be free of Spain, and the island was still in the midst of a protracted transition from slavery to emancipation. The Cortes, Spain’s parliament, had just approved an emancipation law, but it set out an eight-year path to freedom for most of the island’s enslaved workers that included years of patronato, patronage, or instruction that would prepare black Cubans for citizenship.

  From his youth, Martí was a fierce opponent of racism and slavery. When the Ten Years’ War, an unsuccessful fight for independence, began in 1868, slaves were enlisted in the struggle. Today the scene of the ringing of a plantation bell, the farm called La Demajagua, is a national monument in Cuba, intended to preserve the memory of the summoning of the slaves and free men from the sugar fields by grower Carlos Manuel de Céspedes. The plantation owner asked all his field hands and foremen, slave and free, to join him in a war to liberate Cuba. The Mambises, the rebel soldiers, did not prevail. In 1878 a peace treaty with Spain ended the fighting, with slavery still widespread on the island and colonial rule intact.

  Though still just a teenager, Martí would attract renown and the attention of the Spanish authorities with his writing. He was arrested and branded a traitor. In much the same way as the Ten Years’ War set the stage for eventual Cuban independence, Martí’s deportation created the conditions for him to become an international figure, not just a Cuban one. The long-established Cuban exile groups got a leader who could rally them with his passion, his vision, and his pen.

  Reading Martí today, from more than a century’s remove, it is fascinating to see the author’s strong attraction, admiration, and at the same time the revulsion for the United States that would feature in the observations of so many Latin American intellectuals in the coming decades. The economic dynamism and personal freedom they saw in America was what they wanted for their own societies, while at the same time some of the downsides of that freedom—the casual racism and stark inequality—forced them to reconsider their own feelings.

  In many of his writings, Martí reflects on the differences between North Americans of the English-speaking world and the people he called “Hispanoamericans.” In his powerful essay about Coney Island, after riffing on the tremendous wealth and productivity demonstrated even on what was a day trip for everyday New Yorkers, he includes this aside: “. . . the traveler goes in and out of the dining rooms, vast as the pampas, a
nd climbs to the tops of the colossal buildings, high as the mountains; seated in a comfortable chair by the sea, the passerby fills his lungs with a powerful and salubrious air, and yet it is well known that a sad melancholy steals over the men of our Hispanoamerican peoples who live here. They seek each other in vain, and however much the first impressions may have gratified their senses, enamored their eyes, and dazzled and befuddled their minds, the anguish of solitude possesses them in the end. Nostalgia for a superior spiritual world invades and afflicts them; they feel like lambs with no mother or shepherd, lost from the flock, and though their eyes may be dry, the frightened spirit breaks into a torrent of the bitterest tears because this great land is devoid of spirit.”

  Martí saw the North American view of the Spanish-speaking countries as condescending, ignorant, and self-congratulatory. Toward the end of his New York years, as U.S. disdain for Spanish presence in the hemisphere and Cuban speculation about an American protectorate grew, he wrote the editor of the New Evening Post: “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.

  “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 cannot honestly believe that excessive individualism and reverence for wealth are preparing the United States to be the typical nation of liberty. . . . 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.”

  The worries about the United States and speculation about the larger country’s territorial ambitions in Cuba were grounded in reality. American leaders talked about Cuba frequently during the nineteenth century. That defender of American liberty, Thomas Jefferson, sounded like a stone-cold imperialist when he wrote in 1809, “I candidly confess that I have ever looked upon Cuba as the most interesting addition that can be made to our system of States, the possession of which (with Florida Point), would give us control over the Gulf of Mexico and the countries and isthmus bordering upon it, and would fill up the measure of our political well-being.”

  In 1823, President James Monroe declared that any efforts by European powers to expand their Western Hemisphere colonies would be regarded as an act of aggression and trigger resistance from the United States, a declaration called the Monroe Doctrine. That same year Jefferson wrote to President Monroe that adding Cuba to American territory “is exactly what is wanting to round out our power as a nation to the point of its utmost interest.” In other letters to Monroe that year, the third president spoke of taking Cuba as not only being desirable for U.S. interests, but also essential to keeping Britain and France from seizing it first.

  John Quincy Adams, who served as Monroe’s secretary of state, speculated that “annexation of Cuba to our Federal Republic will be indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself.” Adams sounds like an expansionist and an anticolonialist in the very same passage when he writes, “Cuba, forcibly disjointed from its own unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only toward the North American Union, which by the same law of nature cannot cast her off from its bosom.”

  In midcentury, American ambassadors meeting on the Belgian coast (including the future president James Buchanan, then serving as the U.S. ambassador to Britain) wrote a notorious document called the Ostend Manifesto, recommending, among other things:

  1. The United States ought, if practicable, to purchase Cuba with as little delay as possible.

  2. The probability is great that the Government and Cortes of Spain will prove willing to sell it, because this would essentially promote the highest and best interests of the Spanish people.

  Then, first. It must be clear to every reflecting mind that from the peculiarity of its geographical position, and considerations attendant on it, Cuba is as necessary to the North American Republic as any of its present members. . . .

  It must be clear to every reflecting mind. It is hard to get more overtly grasping than that. Getting Cuba one way or another had become by the 1850s a particular ambition of American Southern planters and politicians, who craved the island as an additional slave state. Northern politicians and abolitionists passionately opposed the move, but Southerners dreamed of maintaining the balance of power in the U.S. Senate by adding two proslavery senators and as many as nine members of the House of Representatives. Whether by what President Polk called “amicable purchase” or by what the minister to Spain William Marcy described as “detachment” from Spain, growing numbers of Americans were crafting rationales for taking Cuba.

  At least twice in the mid–nineteenth century, American presidents tried to purchase the island outright: In 1848 James K. Polk, who was already absorbing much of Spain’s former North American empire by defeating Mexico in war, offered $100 million, and Franklin Pierce raised the offer to $130 million. Both times the offers were rebuffed by Spain.

  In the political pressure cooker of 1850s America, race played a major role in the feverish speculation over Cuba. You may remember in chapter one the misgivings expressed by influential South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, who worried about U.S. annexation of Mexican territories containing so many new residents who might upset the racial mathematics of American society.

  The Ostend Manifesto of 1854 was written by three diplomats, the U.S. ministers to France, Spain and Great Britain, to the U.S. Secretary of State, William L. Marcy. The manifesto maintained that the United States was fully justified in seizing Cuba if Spain would not sell it, in order to prevent the island from following Haiti into slave revolution against white masters. “We should, however, be recreant to our duty, be unworthy of our gallant forefathers, and commit base treason against our posterity, should we permit Cuba to be Africanized and become a second St. Domingo [Haiti], with all its attendant horrors to the white race, and suffer the flames to extend to our own neighboring shores, seriously to endanger or actually to consume the fair fabric of our Union.” A slave uprising in Cuba was an approaching “catastrophe,” according to the manifesto, that justified “wresting” Cuba away from Spain.

  The Cuban-born Martí was himself the son of European immigrants to the island, and thus had no long-standing familial history there. Yet he embraced the mixed-race history and contemporary reality of his homeland and the vast Latin lands of the hemisphere. He loathed racism at home in Cuba and in his U.S. sanctuary. Martí chronicled the mistreatment of native peoples and the descendants of black slaves across the hemisphere and went out of his way to credit non-European peoples for their significant and undeniable cultural legacy that made them the Caribbeans, Central, and South Americans they were.

  In his landmark essay “Nuestra America,” “Our America,” Martí is determined not to let his brothers and sisters of European ancestry from across the hemisphere run away from their own families’ pasts. “These sons of carpenters who are ashamed that their father was a carpenter! These men born in America who are ashamed of the mother that raised them because she wears an Indian apron, these delinquents who disown their sick mother and leave her alone in her sickbed!”

  On the political and military sides, the Cuban fight against Spain was multiracial. Martí and rebel military leader General Calixto GarcÍa were white. Juan Gualberto Gómez, journalist, revolutionary leader, and politician, was born to slaves on a sugar plantation, and bought his freedom. Another key rebel leader, General Antonio Maceo, called the Bronze Titan, El Titán de Bronce, was mixed-race, the child of a Venezuelan trader and an Afro-Cuban.

  To make sure Cubans got the point, Martí did not shy away from discussing race on either side of the Flor
ida Straits. Writing in Patria in 1893, in an essay called “My Race,” Martí insisted the fate of the revolution would not rise or fall by race: “Cubans are more than whites, mulattos or Negroes. On the field of battle, dying for Cuba, the souls of whites and Negroes have risen together into the air.

  “In the daily life of defense, loyalty, brotherhood and shrewdness, Negroes have always been there, alongside whites. Negroes, like whites, are divided by their character—timid or brave, self-sacrificing or selfish—into the diverse parties in which men group themselves.”

  In “Our America,” Martí alternates between hardheaded political observation and romantic evocation of the America dreamed of in European salons during the Age of Discovery, when in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the big empires sent small expeditionary fleets across the Atlantic. “Our feet upon a rosary, our heads white, and our bodies a motley of Indian and criollo [Creole, native-born children of white colonists] we boldly entered the community of nations. Bearing the standard of the Virgin, we went out to conquer our liberty. A priest, a few lieutenants, and a woman built a republic in Mexico upon the shoulders of the Indians. A Spanish cleric, under cover of his priestly cape, taught French liberty to a handful of magnificent students who chose a Spanish general to lead Central America against Spain. Still accustomed to monarchy, and with the sun on their chests, the Venezuelans in the north and the Argentines in the south set out to construct nations.”

  Martí was a cofounder and organizer of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. The party’s manifesto, written by Martí and published in his newspaper Patria, identifies Puerto Ricans as brothers in the struggle, and again reaches across lines of class and color to declare that the party, and its aims, do not belong just to European-descended elites. He reached back to the Ten Years’ War, its triumphs and tragedies, and exhorted his countrymen inside and outside Cuba to do better this time.