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\nThe rereading of the Diaries today is, above all, to attend a profession of faith for Cuba. In this sense, Mart\u00ed 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.
\nThe 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 Mart\u00ed 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 Mart\u00ed 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.
\nAs 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. Mart\u00ed 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.
\nThe annotations in the Diario de campa\u00f1a de M\u00e1ximo G\u00f3mez, corresponding to May 19, 1895, allow us to reconstruct the last day of Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ed. Six hundred Spaniards, under Colonel Jos\u00e9 Xim\u00e9nes 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.
\nOn the 19th, on the eve of the fighting that is about to break out, Gomez and Mart\u00ed are sandy the troop. “Mart\u00ed 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 Mart\u00ed, the greatest misfortune.” The troops are filled with euphoria: they call him President again, as they had been doing days ago in the manigua.
\nTo this major misfortune would ride Mart\u00ed, mounted on the steed that Jos\u00e9 Maceo had given him and that would be the same one that would later accompany his son Jos\u00e9 Francisco, the Ismaelillo, in that same contest of ’95.
\nContravening the order of G\u00f3mez, who had already launched himself against the Spaniards, Mart\u00ed 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.
\n“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 Mart\u00ed, 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
\nFor the Major General of the Liberator Army, who has come with Mart\u00ed 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”.
\nThis succession of confusing scenes, which history collects from fragments full of smoke, gunpowder and lead, transform the dos R\u00edos stage into the altar for the martyr. The apostolic impulse that prompted Mart\u00ed to seek “his hour” was not, as has been claimed, neither a suicide nor a military naivety: Mart\u00ed was not proven in the royal war, but he had in-depth knowledge of science and war strategy.
\nHowever, 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 Mart\u00ed is a man inhabited by a deep historical sense and a consciousness \u2013 increasing judging by his Diaries and his last letters \u2013 of his encounter with the final mystery.
\nTo 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
\nWhere does the martyred polish towards symbolic death come from? Mart\u00ed was not a weak man, despite tiredness and illness. Since arriving in Cuba \u2013 to the surprise of M\u00e1ximo G\u00f3mez and the other expeditioners \u2013 Mart\u00ed 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 Mart\u00ed \u2013 who accompanies us without slackers of any kind, by these steep mountains.”4
\nAnd later, on the 21st, the fortress does not decay: “Mart\u00ed, to which we assumed weak by the unsused of the fatigues of these marches, remains strong and fearless.”5
\nAs they progress through the Cuban East, Mart\u00ed 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
\nBut with the advance comes also the metamorphosis of the poet in Mamb\u00ed, and of mamb\u00ed in the “President” that fills the symbolic void that Carlos Manuel left in the imaginary of the simple people. Mart\u00ed, 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 \u2013 his Word \u2013 has announced and foreseen for the Cuban.
\nHe speaks, for example, of a “Mambi day” where a jut\u00eda 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
\nSoon, 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.
\nOn 4 May, the Delegate and the General arrive at the court-martial of a Mamb\u00ed, Pilar Masab\u00f3, 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.” Mart\u00ed remembers how man advances to the wall without fear, contemplates the face of his executioners, his clothes wave in the wind. Gunshots are ringing. “Masab\u00f3 is dead brave,” Mart\u00ed writes.<\/p>\n
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While the process lasts, paying no attention to the prisoner’s drama, a mamb\u00ed peels a cane.
\nDeeply impressed by Masab\u00f3’s death, Mart\u00ed 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 Mart\u00ed. But in the warrior manigua, the reality is different: “How can I not be inspired by horror, the bloodstain I saw along the way?
\nFour days later, another court-martial is held, three mambises who “sowed terror” in the surrounding area. This time, Mart\u00ed 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.
\nThe dead fall, finally, and Mart\u00ed 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.
\nAlso, 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 S\u00e1nchez, head of sedations in the Great War, who according to what Mart\u00ed knows could have been poisoned or shot, but always to treason.
\nAt 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.
\n“What was the foundation of this premonition,” Ma\u00f1ach writes, “that Mart\u00ed had of his early death.”9 As May 19 approaches, so does the “feeling of the great shadow.” Mart\u00ed has prepared everything and untied the war in intensity, as besathed by urgency.
\nAnd he died urgently, with the entry of his word into history, giving the new war the symbolic impetus it needed.
\nThe iron man, Gomez, doesn’t believe or want to believe Mart\u00ed’s death. On the 20th he sent Ram\u00f3n Garriga, the custodian of the Diaries, with a letter addressed to Colonel Xim\u00e9nes 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 Mart\u00ed, he is being treated as a brother, not an enemy.
\nBut on the 21st, Garriga contradicts the notice and announces that “Mart\u00ed 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
\nMart\u00ed, man and apostle, general and president, poet and mamb\u00ed, 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.
\nThe 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 \u2013 as poets say \u2013 to give the Island its ethical and historical fullness.
\nThe 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 \u2013 that of the letter and that of the stone \u2013 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. \u03a9<\/p>\n
Notes
\n1 Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ed: “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.].
\n2 M\u00e1ximo G\u00f3mez: Campaign Journal, Havana, Cuban Book Institute, 1968, p. 284.
\n3 Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ed: “To General Antonio Maceo”, in O.C., t. 20, p. 161-163.
\n4 Maximum Gomez: Campaign journal, ed. cit., p. 278.
\n5 Ibid., p. 279.
\n6 Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ed: Campaign diaries, edition annotated by Mayra Beatriz Mart\u00ednez, Havana, Centro de Estudios Martianos, 2014, pp. 107-108.
\n7 Ibid., pp. 68-69.
\n8 Ibid., p. 79.
\n9 Jorge Ma\u00f1ach: Mart\u00ed in Jorge Ma\u00f1ach, selection, prologue and bibliography of Salvador Arias, Havana, Ed. Cuban Letters, 2014, p. 194.
\n10 M\u00e1ximo G\u00f3mez: Campaign Journal, Havana, Cuban Book Institute, 1968, p. 286.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"