Cubans living on and off the island agree on very little, but they do acknowledge the importance of José Martí as independence leader, patriot, intellectual, and martyr. At 42, Martí died fighting against Spain (May 1895) as Cuba crawled toward an independence secured by the rest of Latin America (with the exception of Puerto Rico) some 70 years earlier.
Cuba, politics, and the United States are inexorably linked. Ironically, the independence Martí died for never really materialized, thanks in large part to the economic and political designs of the powerful Protestant nation 90 miles to the north. Its supreme court having just passed a decision that separated the races into two groups (blacks and whites) in 1896 (Plessy v. Ferguson), that nation would not tolerate an “independent” nation, so nearby and with so many dark-skinned people in positions of authority in the army and other segments of society. Thus, the war that Martí helped start was concluded by the United States in 1898, and this conclusion turned a hard-fought Cuban war of independence into an American war of conquest. Martí predicted as much: “To change masters is not to be free,” he wrote, a not so thinly veiled reference to his real fears of US designs for the island.
Ann Fountain, Professor Emerita of Spanish and Latin American studies at San José State University, spent her career focusing on Martí, Cuba, and Martí's association with and influence on American writers. This short book is a scholarly synthesis of years of engagement with the subjects of nineteenth-century Cuban-American crosscultural influences, Martí, and race in the Americas. Her text is carefully organized and documented, and it should find wide readership among the many people in the Americas who are looking for new ways to focus on a complex writer whose writings are literally scattered throughout the Americas. Martí was not an “easy” writer; he wrote through abundant aphorisms, and his sentences were often turgid and meandering. But most agree he was a modernist master, deserving of recognition as essayist, poet, newspaper writer, writer of political texts, and translator. Fountain notes that his writing in English and Spanish was distinct; he was much more careful of criticizing American policy and politics in his US newspaper work (he spent about a third of his life living in exile, mostly in New York City), but his Spanish-language journalism offered blistering attacks on the United States.
Fountain seems defensive of Martí as she tries to squeeze him into a twenty-first-century discussion of race, language, and writing, where he does not belong. He was well ahead of his time and certainly viewed all people as human, connected by their “humanity” rather than divided by the color of their skin. But he was a highly educated white man, of Spanish origin (his father was from Spain, his mother was born in the Canary Islands) who rode a white horse and wore at all times a medium-length black coat. Martí was a little removed from the common people, but he worked tirelessly for a political program called Cuba Libre, in which everyone on the island would unify and fight for the socio-political independence that he viewed as crucial for the island's future and the betterment of all Cuban people.
Tragically, it was the racism sanctioned by the US Supreme Court that doomed the island nation. Historian Lester D. Langley shows in his book The Banana Wars: United States Intervention in the Caribbean, 1898–1934 (2002) how surviving Cuban patriot fighters were pushed aside after the “Splendid Little War” of 1898 that all but guaranteed US control of the island. That control would last for decades and eventually provoked the histrionic reaction known as the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Martí's thinking about race would be relegated to deep background during the go-go days of US control over Cuba: tourism, corruption, investment, rum, and fun would define the two nations' relationship until the barbudos arrived. Ann Fountain is correct to note that scholars and students are now revisiting Martí's writings, to see the work of a literary giant, comfortable in both Americas, whose humanity was clarifying, unifying, and mostly race-neutral.
