Every day, thousands walk past José Martí’s larger-than-life statue at Avenue of the Americas and Central Park South, New York City, the same city where Martí (January 18, 1853 – May 19, 1895) spent most of his adult life as a political exile from Spanish-ruled Cuba. Anne Huntington’s sculpture depicts the moment of his death in an absurdly unnecesary skirmish, shortly after disembarking in his beloved island with an invading revolutionary army (a constant of Cuban revolutionaries of every political persuasion throughout history). The sculpture looms large between those of José de San Martín and Simón Bolívar, the two greatest South American Libertadores, overpowering them in dramatic intensity and monumentality.
Yet except among a small number of scholars and a few others, Martí’s significance both as a major figure in Latin American culture and as one of the most perceptive observers of American society of the 19th century remains probably as unnoticed in the United States as it was in his own lifetime. Among those who are familiar with his work, the assessment of his political thought—especially its alleged links with Marxism and the Cuban Revolution—remains a matter of controversy.
In 2002, Esther Allen’s translation of Martí’s Selected Writings, published by Penguin, helped to fill that gap and straighten out some of the misunderstandings that still today surround Martí’s work. Ms. Allen, currently a professor of Latin American literature at Baruch College and one of most important American contemporary translators of Spanish-language authors, rummaged through the 12,000 pages of Martí’s Collected Works and put together a relevant sample of his essays, letters, diary entries, and poetry. With an introduction by Yale’s Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature Roberto González Echevarría, a substantial body of notes, and an up-dated bibliography, this is the most comprehensive edition of Martí’s writings currently available in English.
José Martí devoted his life to one single, passionate purpose: the independence of Cuba. He was poignantly aware, however, of the formidable obstacles that thwarted that goal. Those same forces had set the Caribbean island apart from the revolutionary wave that shook the rest of Latin America in the first decades of the 19th century. Indeed, Cuba was trapped in an international power struggle that exceeded the resources of patriotism.
As González Echevarría points out in his introduction, that situation was anything but new. Ever since the Europeans had arrived in the New World Cuba had played a critical role on the chessboard of international politics. The key to the Caribbean, Cuba provided a platform for the expansion of the Spanish Empire in North and Central America. Havana was a hub that connected the most remote points of that Empire, from Seville to the Philippines, and a permanent target for the British Navy.
Cuba was also at the center of the Atlantic slave trade and the plantation system that had spread throughout the Caribbean basin and the American South since the 1500s. After the Haitian revolution, Cuba took over as the world’s first-ranked provider of sugar. The United States inherited Britain’s role as Spain’s hemispheric competitor, and by the end of the 19th century, Cuba was as much an integral part of U.S. economy through American investment in plantations, sugar mills and railroads as it was a political colony of Spain.
That duality ended with the Spanish-American war, which marked the belated demise of the Spanish Empire and the birth of the United States as a global power. The “Splendid Little War” had, thus, an historical impact that was larger than that of the more bloody Latin American wars of independence. This, as González Echevarría suggests, might have strengthened the feeling of being the center of the world, a sentiment that Cubans may have had since colonial times. Something similar happened when Cuba became instrumental in the power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union.
