“In the four major points
santa Ifigenia Cemetery, the spirit
storms has launched his invitation.
Anybody want to fire Jose Martí’s duel?”
José Lezama Lima
The National Capitol was inaugurated on May 20, 1929. It represents and guards the majesty of the Fatherland, the symbolic essence of the island and the historical foundation of the nation. The Cuban who walks through its doors, if he understands the meaning of what he does, knows that he does not enter a museum but in the heart of the Republic.
A sacred building, as is the Capitol, protects the memory of the people who build it. That is the reason that justifies the bronze of the Beloved Fatherland, who presides over the Hall of Lost Steps. On the right, in the Chamber that the government must occupy, the war flags adorn the hall where the 1940 Constitution was signed.
In perfect symmetry, if the Cuban descends further into the work, he will find a white crypt under the diamond of kilometer zero. In it are kept the symbols that continuously feed the Fatherland, arranged there not to forget: a plaque with the notes of La Bayamesa; the coat of arms of the Republic; the words of Céspedes, when he assumed the presidency in Guáimaro and, in the center of the room, the tomb of an unmarked mambí.
It is disturbing that an unknown mambí, a shadow that died in solitude, is the cornerstone of Cuba.
When Martí says that “the dead are the roots of the peoples”, or that “every dead soldier is a root”, perhaps he thought that the Fatherland is not the solitary responsibility of the generals, but the raison d’etion of that un nameless soldier. The death of the unknown mambí synthesizes all the symbolic dead of the Cuban War: a Céspedes, who according to Manuel Sanguily fell into the abyss like a sun shrouded in flames; to Agramonte, who died young and in love; to Maceo, who had the strong blood of the immortals; and Martí, the well-loved dead man of the Fatherland.
Mambí, diamond, statue, dome: each symbol executes on the next, in its same line, a strengthening of the Cuban spirit and returns a kind of pillar, solid column, where to raise the country every day.
But the Fatherland, and that cannot be forgotten, is grounded, “rooted”, in a glorious and symbolic dead man, who has no name or who actually has all the names of war.
Martí’s tour of the “marble cloisters” of his simple verses, where heroes wait unequidly to perform their utopias, sums up their position in front of history. In the mausoleum of the Fatherland – which is so reminiscent of the primitive meaning of the Capitol for Cubans – the poet establishes an ongoing dialogue with those who thought of the nation. As in the text, History “sweeps the earth” with the conscience of the patriot, who cannot passively attend the fate of Cuba, whose roots are fixed on the death and legacy of his great men.
Martí was born in the same year that Father Varela died, exiled, as if in Cuba a father of the homeland could not die without another emerging and continuing his foundation work. This common date is due to coincidence, but what is not coincidental in these men is their essential bond in thought, which they share with other Cuban 19th-century “marble men”.
“Those times,” Martí says, recalling the men of ’68, “were truly wonderful. With tree branches they kept, and cast back, the enemy rifle; applied virgin ingenuity to wild nature; created civilization in the poetry of freedom; they were confused in death, for nothing less than death was necessary for the master and servant to be confused.”1
The invisible chain that unifies the Cuban patriotic tradition is summarized in concrete texts, born of poor and essential men, such as the elective philosophy of Father José Agustín Caballero; the Aphorisms of Light; all the writing of Varela or Heredia; the Lost Journal of Grass and, of course, the papers that are so similar to the last testimony of the Father of the Fatherland: the Diaries of José Martí.
The rereading of the Diaries today is, above all, to attend a profession of faith for Cuba. In this sense, Martí is truly an Apostle, that is, prophet and martyr of his vocation to die for Cuba, by giving war, despite the human horror that she entails, her necessary condition. The Diaries are the fragmented and bleeding writing of that vocation.
The path that begins in the renewed reading of the Martyred Diaries leads the Cuban to the discovery of a genealogy: from the men of the Seminary College San Carlos and San Ambrosio to the prosperous of ’68, and from these to Martí and the heroes who accompany him in the dream of the Republic possible. It also means a passage into the last chronicle of the Indies: the count of a traveler astonished at the insula and its nature. And, of course, the reconstruction and dialogue that Martí engages with the history of Cuba, through countless voices and shadows that appear to him on his route and that tell him his truth about the wars past and its protagonists.
As before many Martyred texts, but in this with special intensity, the reader of his Diaries has to dig up nothing less than the origin and fortification of the Cuban idea, which with it reaches its founding fullness. Martí also turns the Diaries into a continuous examination of conscience about their role in war and in the future nation until they understand, during the darkest moments of the story, the imminence and sense of their martyrdom.
The annotations in the Diario de campaña de Máximo Gómez, corresponding to May 19, 1895, allow us to reconstruct the last day of José Martí. Six hundred Spaniards, under Colonel José Ximénes de Sandoval, came from Bayamo in search of the insurgent troops. Gomez, who had already left to attack them “with an advantage” on May 17, had not yet made contact with them.
On the 19th, on the eve of the fighting that is about to break out, Gomez and Martí are sandy the troop. “Martí spoke with true spirit and ardor warrior,” writes El Viejo, “ignoring that the enemy was marching on my trail and that misfortune prepared for us and for Martí, the greatest misfortune.” The troops are filled with euphoria: they call him President again, as they had been doing days ago in the manigua.
To this major misfortune would ride Martí, mounted on the steed that José Maceo had given him and that would be the same one that would later accompany his son José Francisco, the Ismaelillo, in that same contest of ’95.
Contravening the order of Gómez, who had already launched himself against the Spaniards, Martí leaves the assigned position in the company of the young Angel de la Guardia. He receives, in his fatal hour, a heavy shock that knocks him down. His assistant tries to charge him and save the body, but the corpse is heavy and has fixed himself to the ground.
“I have never seen myself in more engaged lance,” Gomez acknowledges, “for in the first onslaught the enemy’s avant-garde swept away, but he immediately loosened, and certainly the enemy became firm with a very nourishing fire; and Martí, who did not stand by me, fell wounded or killed in a place where he could not be picked up and was left in the possession of the enemy.”2
For the Major General of the Liberator Army, who has come with Martí to the island and has progressively discovered his greatness, the death of the “friend, the companion, the patriot” is not possible and has had to withdraw from battle “with the soul saddened”.
This succession of confusing scenes, which history collects from fragments full of smoke, gunpowder and lead, transform the dos Ríos stage into the altar for the martyr. The apostolic impulse that prompted Martí to seek “his hour” was not, as has been claimed, neither a suicide nor a military naivety: Martí was not proven in the royal war, but he had in-depth knowledge of science and war strategy.
However, any interpretation of the events of May 19 is silent in the face of the certainty of a man who knows he is going to die. The difference is that Martí is a man inhabited by a deep historical sense and a consciousness – increasing judging by his Diaries and his last letters – of his encounter with the final mystery.
To his old friend Manuel Mercado he has written, with serenity of spirit, that he is already “every day in danger of giving my life for my country and for my duty”. Because there is no doubt in the soul of Cuba, that “it is one, I know, the will of the country”. “In me,” he insists, “I will only defend what I have by guarantee or service of the revolution. I know how to disappear. But my thought would not disappear, nor would my darkness sour.”3
Where does the martyred polish towards symbolic death come from? Martí was not a weak man, despite tiredness and illness. Since arriving in Cuba – to the surprise of Máximo Gómez and the other expeditioners – Martí shows signs of a superhuman ability to withstand the fatigues of the manigua. On April 14, El Viejo writes: “We admire each other, the old warriors accustomed to these rudenesses, of the resistance of Martí – who accompanies us without slackers of any kind, by these steep mountains.”4
And later, on the 21st, the fortress does not decay: “Martí, to which we assumed weak by the unsused of the fatigues of these marches, remains strong and fearless.”5
As they progress through the Cuban East, Martí collects a series of remedies, observations, recipes to make dishes with the same ingredients offered by Cuban nature. These are the most contemplative and serene moments of tone, in which the Apostle enters into the mystique of the “beautiful night”, which does not let him sleep. In fact, the last sentence of the second diary is neither a political testament nor a part of battle, but the image of a man who feeds, who rests: “roast bananas, and majan cow appraisal, with a stone on the pylon, for the newcomers. […] and brings me Valentin a jar boiled in sweet, with fig leaves.”6
But with the advance comes also the metamorphosis of the poet in Mambí, and of mambí in the “President” that fills the symbolic void that Carlos Manuel left in the imaginary of the simple people. Martí, stripped of this political quality of command, is indeed “the one who presides, the one who convenes”, the voice that animates the war and that impels it, because he embodies himself what his word – his Word – has announced and foreseen for the Cuban.
He speaks, for example, of a “Mambi day” where a jutía is killed and seasoned with sour orange that will feed the troop; where Cuban hills that “sister men” are uploaded; where you have to sleep on the ground, on stacked yaguas and “all day, what light, what air, what fills the chest, how light the body distressed! I look at the ranch outside, and I see, at the top of the ridge back, a palm and a star.”7
Soon, however, the traveler’s diary becomes a war diary. The echo of the Spaniards is heard in the camp and the troops are launched into the first fights. Restlessness is on the rise and death surrounds the story, since at the same time as the battle we must punish internal rebellion, banditry and indisciplines.
On 4 May, the Delegate and the General arrive at the court-martial of a Mambí, Pilar Masabó, who is accused of being a thief and rapist. The defense attorney begs the newcomers for clemency for the convict. But Gomez, immovable, says, “This man is not our companion: he is a vile worm.” Martí remembers how man advances to the wall without fear, contemplates the face of his executioners, his clothes wave in the wind. Gunshots are ringing. “Masabó is dead brave,” Martí writes.
While the process lasts, paying no attention to the prisoner’s drama, a mambí peels a cane.
Deeply impressed by Masabó’s death, Martí attends the shedding of his own blood, to the “vipers” who, as Gomez had already told him, were born in the bowels of the war. Besathed by sickness and suffering, death is no stranger to Martí. But in the warrior manigua, the reality is different: “How can I not be inspired by horror, the bloodstain I saw along the way?
Four days later, another court-martial is held, three mambises who “sowed terror” in the surrounding area. This time, Martí intervenes and achieves forgiveness for two of the prisoners. But he cannot stop the death of the third, on which Gomez acts again with an iron hand. “That criminal has stained our flag,” the General says, as the inso comes crying before the firing squad. It’s Gomez himself who orders a fire to open.
The dead fall, finally, and Martí observes the survivors: one sweats cold and the other, “unscathed from the face”, continues to flee back from panic, even if it is still tied up.
Also, in his own memory or in the voice of others, he remembers the death of the heroes. “Will it be true that Flor is dead?” he asks, on April 21, at rumors announcing The Death of Flor Crombet. It is also recalled the death of Limbano Sánchez, head of sedations in the Great War, who according to what Martí knows could have been poisoned or shot, but always to treason.
At the end of the Diaries, death has already occupied a visible and prophetic extension: soon the delegate will have the time he has waited to execute his sacrifice for the Fatherland. He arrives, as Lezama says, at the center of himself which is, however, his greater remoteness. He comes to Cuba to die, and he knows it.
“What was the foundation of this premonition,” Mañach writes, “that Martí had of his early death.”9 As May 19 approaches, so does the “feeling of the great shadow.” Martí has prepared everything and untied the war in intensity, as besathed by urgency.
And he died urgently, with the entry of his word into history, giving the new war the symbolic impetus it needed.
The iron man, Gomez, doesn’t believe or want to believe Martí’s death. On the 20th he sent Ramón Garriga, the custodian of the Diaries, with a letter addressed to Colonel Ximénes de Sandoval, to find out if “he is killed or lives with serious injury, or whatever.” The colonel “understands” Gomez that, since he is a Freezer like Martí, he is being treated as a brother, not an enemy.
But on the 21st, Garriga contradicts the notice and announces that “Martí is dead and that his head is separated, they reserve it; and the body buried in the cemetery of that village.” On the day of the fight, the final score is not written by the General-in-Chief but by an old, fatigued man: “What a war is it! I thought at night that next to an instant of slight pleasure, another of bitter pain appears. We already lack the best of companions and the soul we can say of the uprising.”10
Martí, man and apostle, general and president, poet and mambí, consumed his life in passion for Cuba as his elders did, in exile and in manigua. This passion must be recognized in its two senses: that of love for Cuba and the other, which involves suffering, sacrifice and death.
The luminous path that has been rebuilt here, from the memory of the Founding Fathers to the monumental pantheon of the Capitol, must be read as the progression of the Cuban idea in history. A path in which the Fatherland is transfiguring and enriching itself, even incarnating itself in the man who makes an image – as poets say – to give the Island its ethical and historical fullness.
The return to founding texts like the Diaries is as urgent as going to that temple of the Cuban that is the Capitol. With an equivalent commitment, both monuments – that of the letter and that of the stone – force the addition of Cuba as an essence and as a daily vocation. It is not a salvation through the ghosts, but a enlightenment, terrible to be so necessary, of the lost and the buried, of a restoration of patriotic memory in the return to our essential symbols. Ω
Notes
1 José Martí: “Speech in commemoration of October 10, in Masonic Temple, New York. October 10, 1888,” in Complete Works, Havana, Ed. Social Sciences, 1992, t. 4, p. 237. [Hereinafter: O.C.].
2 Máximo Gómez: Campaign Journal, Havana, Cuban Book Institute, 1968, p. 284.
3 José Martí: “To General Antonio Maceo”, in O.C., t. 20, p. 161-163.
4 Maximum Gomez: Campaign journal, ed. cit., p. 278.
5 Ibid., p. 279.
6 José Martí: Campaign diaries, edition annotated by Mayra Beatriz Martínez, Havana, Centro de Estudios Martianos, 2014, pp. 107-108.
7 Ibid., pp. 68-69.
8 Ibid., p. 79.
9 Jorge Mañach: Martí in Jorge Mañach, selection, prologue and bibliography of Salvador Arias, Havana, Ed. Cuban Letters, 2014, p. 194.
10 Máximo Gómez: Campaign Journal, Havana, Cuban Book Institute, 1968, p. 286.
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