Raul Roa was an revolutionary leader whose career began in the 1930s and continued through the 1970s. He was a supporter of and participant in the revolutionary process itself where he served as an early Foreign Minister. The Spanish term for "Foreign Minister" is "Chancellor" and Roa is known historically as the "Chancellor of Dignity". He presented Cuba's position at the United Nations where he answered Adlai Stevenson's false declaration that the United States was not involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Today, Cuba's school for diplomats, where representatives from other countries also receive some training, the Superior Institute for Foreign Relations (ISRI) is named after this most interesting and important historical figure.

This essay appeared in an anthology of commentaries by Cubans published in 1987, Seven Marxists Focus on José Martí. Other authors included were Julio Antonio Mella, Juan Marinello and Blas Roca. PLEASE NOTE: Spanish and English are different languages and they are structured differently. Sentences which are very long and would be considered "run-on" in English are normal in Spanish. This translation has been as faithful as possible, but as an editor I found it very, very difficult at times to break Roa's very long sentences up into more easily-comprehensible ones, to the English-speaking reader.
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Rescue and projection of Martí
By Raúl Roa
May 19, 1937 in Havana’s Municipal Amphitheater.

A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.

MUCH has been written and said in the last few years about José Martí. However, no adequate version of his exciting and generous life has been made yet, nor has the scope of his political ideas been fully vouched for. Julio Antonio Mella –one of Martí’s most fervent admirers– described such work as “a necessity, indeed a duty for our epoch”. More than once he dreamed of writing a book about Martí while “in prison, aboard a ship, in a third-class train car, or in a hospital bed convalescing after any illness”, since for him those were –counterposed forces in permanent duel– the “most encouraging times to work on your thoughts”. Cunning bullets shattered that impetuous, shining life, hope and banner of the oppressed. Mella yearned to rescue Martí from “so many greedy hawkers, so many crawlers, so many hypocrites… who write or speak about him”.

That book is yet to be written, but it must be. And only a clean, vigorous and truly revolutionary pen will be able to bring such venture to an end. That book must give us back, as it was, Martí’s vibrant and poetic figure, “the most moving, pathetic and profound personality” “so far produced by the Hispanic soul in America,”as Fernando de los Ríos observed. In its pages we must find Martí in his entirety: the poet who paid more attention to the uselessness of beauty than he did its subjective enjoyment; the sparkling writer with a great personality; the tribune of uncommon motion and unfathomable findings; the unflagging, mist-burning, summer-spoiling lover. But above all there will be, as a resplendent summary of these outstanding qualities, the commendable revolutionary. And only then will we be able to gauge that larger-than-life man who stated, forevermore, that “the stages of peoples are not measured by their epochs of fruitless subjugation, but by their instants of rebellion”. Whoever writes that book –which Julio Antonio Mella could have successfully concluded– will be worthy of our everlasting gratitude. In the meantime, may each of us contribute as we can to disseminate major the highlights of José Martí’s life and to decipher the essence of his revolutionary thinking, in order to cast his extremely powerful light upon the bitter darkness of today’s Cuba.

Nobody among us deserves more tribute and remembrance than José Martí. Small wonder that he is our “great guarantor” around the world. And seen in perspective, as a man and as a revolutionary, he has but very few legitimate peers in history. To honor, honors. To recall him, ennobles. However, such recollection and praise cannot be kept within the restraining bounds of an abstract cult. It has to be, it must be, a living, combative, belligerent cult, a tribute such as that we are paying him this evening. We are not meeting in this anniversary of his death to see him as he was not, nor to draw him with attributes or leashes that he never used or had, nor to rid his mortal flesh of worms and, stupidly, to stuff it instead with divine palm leaves, nor to cover with chaste muslin his magnificent and exultant nakedness. We are meeting this evening to see him as he was, as he must be seen, as we see other peoples’ unique figures, as a function of reality. Geniuses also obey the relentless laws of space and time. And, the more a poet, a thinker or a revolutionary belongs to his present and his environment, the more dilated the resonance of his accent, message or behavior in history will be.

Being from La Mancha –wrote Miguel de Unamuno– makes an ecumenical symbol out of Don Quixote. Being very much of his time and his milieu turns José Martí into the whole world’s son. Shortly before leaving for Santo Domingo – where Generalissimo Máximo Gómez was impatiently waiting for him, already dressed up and wearing the twinkling star on his mambí[1] hat–, in a letter to the Club 10 de Octubre in Puerto Plata, Martí wrote: “We are doing universal work. Who rises with Cuba today, rises for all times.”

“Until today”, he said, once he arrived in our eastern land, “I had not felt like a man. All my life I have lived in shame, dragging my homeland’s chains. The divine clarity of the soul makes my body lighter; this rest and well-being explains why men persistently and joyfully offer themselves in sacrifice.” And on May 18, on the very eve of his horrifying fall, he sent a letter to Manuel Mercado in which he collected with barely contained emotion his purest and everlasting revolutionary thoughts:

… I am now in daily danger of giving my life for my country and duty for I understand that duty and have the courage to carry it out-the duty of preventing the United States from spreading through the Antilles as Cuba gains its independence, and from empowering with that additional strength our lands of America. All I have done so far, and all I will do, is for this purpose.

His letter was truncated by the inescapable urgency of combat, as was the great work to which Martí offered his life.

But that life and that work have not perished in Dos Ríos. As long as the colony keeps living inside the Republic and Puerto Rico stays out of America, most of whose lacerated flesh still suffers the deadly pliers of foreign domination and has its entrails torn by the vulture of leadership and tyranny, now mimetically covered with pseudo-democratic plumage, José Martí’s work will need be completed. His political thinking will have much to do in America, alongside Simón Bolívar’s sword and Sandino’s rifle. And that is precisely why, since Martí lives and encourages, and is riding on his stamping horse, once again ready to fight for America’s liberty and social justice, we must rescue him –as Mella asked– from the false interpreters of his doctrine, from those who shamelessly use his self-sacrifice, from those who, by calling themselves his disciples, have not hesitated in turning his devotion into a check, and from those who, among the latter, have claimed as their own, with unprecedented boldness, Martí’s unmistakable literary treasures. We have to rescue him from prutient hands and impure lips and change him again into a banner of faith and hope, into a tribune and a barricade. We have to rescue him from scribes and big bosses who every day take up, for their own benefit, Martí’s radiant aphorisms and heated maxims. It’s high time that we waylaid the insatiable robbers of his glory, those who traffic in his bones, those who repeat his letter while betraying his spirit, those who ,when push comes to shove, are incapable of sustaining with their behavior, the imperative mandates of his ethic doctrine on civil conduct.

Anyone can write or speak about Martí. What not everybody can do is live, as their own, Martí’s life of self-sacrifice, self-denial and courage. Living as Martí lived, in heroic tension against what is and has been overcome, is the exclusive patrimony of those who live for instead of from Martí; of those who feel in their bowels the pain and injustice of a republic hired by a rapacious oligarchy against all and for its own good; of those who, because of their creative position in the social process, yearn to attain by themselves higher stages of development. For them, who represent our nationality’s driving force, Martí has to be rescued, so that he can live as he wanted and needed to live, dissolved, as a mysterious essence, amidst the most incorruptible roots of America’s dispossessed and persecuted.

To contribute to that pressing rescue, I came precisely this evening, invited by students from the Instituto de La Habana, who have always been, together with their university comrades, “a bastion of Cuba’s freedom and its strongest army”. Martí said: “The universities seem useless, but apostles and heroes come out of them.” Experience shows that in ours –that glorious house which we must defend, insofar as it is possible, from both internal and external fights– fully testifies to the validity of this assertion. Apostles and heroes have come out, as fertile seeds, of Cuban classrooms. I summarize such very large constellation in these eminent names: Julio Antonio Mella, Mariano González Rubiera, Rafael Trejo, Ramiro Valdés Daussá. These dashing young men, all genuine Martí supporters, never hid what they thought, nor calmly witnessed any crime. They were at all times faithful to both themselves and to Cuba’s destiny, without giving in or getting downhearted.

When faced with the holocaust, their valor grew, and faced with opprobrium they stood up in anger, and they still live despite being dead, and point out the route to us with unshakable forefingers. How far these practitioners of Martí’s doctrine are from the civil conduct of those others who have and still reduce their cult of Martí to external rites, cabinet appearances, bibliographic exploits, pointless sanctifications, and juicy speculation! How distanced these advocates of Martí’s ideology are from those untimely pen-pushers who, had they lived in his time, would have left him alone because he was a great scholar in his own right, and one who, between the fattening, humiliating yoke and the illuminating, killing star, would have happily embraced the former! No, those who now go against him in political practice and citizenly deportment, with mouths bejewelled with quotations and hands full of papers, could not have been beside him. Félix Ernesto Alpízar could have been beside him, as well as Mariano González Gutiérrez, Ivo Fernández Sánchez, and Antonio Guiteras. All those who in Republican times have offered their lives to finish his work of national and social liberation could have been beside him.

It is that Martí, the revolutionary Martí, that we strive to interpret, we young people who are yet to make a pact with those who, on his behalf, subdue, confuse, frighten and kill; we who have not joined –nor will ever join– the Batista music wagon.

José Martí’s revolutionary vocation sprouted very early. When he was barely seventeen he was court-martialed, together with Fermín Valdés Domínguez, and sentenced to six years in prison. It was his first encounter with colonial Spain’s repressive apparatus which Franco’s regime aggravatingly reproduces today. His unappealable condemnation inevitably blazes in our memories: “If Dante would have been in prison, he wouldn’t have needed to describe hell: he would have copied it.” His sentence having been commuted by exile, Martí was deported to Spain and lived there until 1874. Upon the establishment of the Republic in that country, Martí stood up to it and demanded the immediate recognition of Cuban independency, already accomplished in unequal contest against the Bourbon monarchy’s well fed and supplied armies. From Spain he went to France and then to England, and from there he set course for Mexico.

That was no doubt a decisive moment of his existence. Mexico was America, the America of Juárez: “Greater because it has been more unhappy and because it is ours than the America of Lincoln”. There, by the smoking volcanoes and the squeezed Indian population, he got closely involved with our American reality, abounding with injustice and teeming with energy. A reality that “came neither from Washington nor Rousseau, but from itself”; and consequently in urgent need of “expressing in new and endemic ways a long-time ferment in maturation”. Thus, to José Martí, America was the “continent of human hope”. And by defining himself as its son, he devoted his time to its “urgent revelation, thrashing and foundation”, in boundless keenness to “put the peoples of our America soul to soul and hand to hand”.

Mexico stole his heart and ripened his pupil, set in fire by war in Cuba. “Mexico”, he wrote, “doesn’t fail, and consolidates and adds itself while its neighbor from the North becomes inflamed and decays.” Years later, in a meeting organized in honor of Mexico, Martí greeted “America’s model and prudent people, the republic that works out to be the yeast of freedom in America”. In his distress for their fate, he severely reminded them of their heroic and unavoidable continental duty:

Oh dear Mexico! Oh beloved Mexico, watch out for dangers surrounding you! Heed the clamor of one of your sons, not sprung from you! In the north, a wicked neighbor takes shape. You will come to order, you will understand, you will guide; I will be dead, oh Mexico! for defending and loving you; but if your hands abate and you prove unworthy of your continental duty, I would cry, beneath the earth, with tears that will later turn into iron candles for spears, as a son who, rising on his coffin, sees a worm eating his mother’s entrails.

Mexico opens America’s picket fences to him. And through them Martí enters, jubilant and anxious, as if into virgin forests. But America will still be Mexico and Martí will return from his exploits. with his backpack brimming with wonders and molasses, his spirit being deeply disturbed by the destiny of those lands, coveted preys of the “turbulent and brutal North” which despises them. “Little is known”, he concludes, “about sociology and its laws, as accurate as this one: the peoples of America are more free and prosperous as they stray away from the United States.” Formulated, in the very entrails of the “monster”, as a straightforward result of his observation of and studies about U.S. reality, this sociological law will never drift from Martí’s meditations and political actions.

From upon that sociological law will rise his revolutionary concept about the West Indian problem and its continental implications and consequences. “In America’s needle”, he asserts with amazing insight, are the Antilles, which would be, if enslaved, be just a pontoon for the war waged by an imperial republic against the jealous and higher world already prepared to refuse it power –a mere bunker of the American Rome–; and if freed –and worthy thereof conformant to the order of equitable and working freedom– they would be to the continent a guarantee of balance, independence for Spanish America, still threatened, and honor for the great republic of the north, which in the development of its territory –unfortunately already feudal and divided into hostile sections– will find safer greatness than it will in the ignoble conquest of its smaller neighbors, and in the inhuman struggle their possession would cause against the powers of order for world predominance.

Thus, the Cuban revolution could not, without betraying its historical fate, selfishly confine itself to the oppressed island. Instead, it also had to liberate Puerto Rico from Spain’s yoke and erect with its triumph a stack impregnable to any future expansions as well as to that of the U.S., nearly turned into an imperialist process. And to succeed, it had to widen and increase that revolution’s social content and prevent with its participation the United States from capitalizing the emancipating movement to benefit their financiers and politicians. Martí took to it, aware of his limitations and difficulties.

More than once has the historical scope of that task made us wonder whether Martí actually went beyond, in his theoretical and practical conception, the national independence revolution’s specific sphere. Some have said that Martí was deeply socialist. It’s an exceedingly risky opinion. Gathering a resounding bundle of isolated phrases and use them as evidence is not enough. At any rate, even if Martí had been intimately socialist –which he wasn’t– he would have been unable to act, as such, in those circumstances. There was no other real solution to our problem then other than the triggering of revolutionary violence against Spain’s colonial domination, every day more exasperating and bloodier. The genius of his political thinking lies in his conception of a national independence revolution on foundations capable of making its subsequent development viable. This conception of his, which turns him into a pioneer of anti-imperialist struggle in America, tripped over the army leaders’ aftertaste of the 1868 war, who were superbly well versed in military activities but politically nearsighted, and over some groups of émigrés, still victims of an inferiority complex stemming from the annexationists’ fallacious sermon.

Martí was ruthless with all of them. When Máximo Gómez requested his support for the armed movement of 1884, he firmly replied: “A nation is not founded, General, the way one commands a military camp.” And when surrender rises its ugly head among Cuban émigrés and paves the way for Cuba to become another state of the U.S. empire, Martí goes red with anger and flogs the deserters’ faces with the burning whip of his speech. Only before the autonomists does Martí feel a repulsion similar to that he feels towards annexationists of his time, who are today’s submitters, the same ones who tried to sit him at the round table of mediation in complicity with imperialism and Machado’s representatives.

At the end, Martí’s tenacity managed to break the dams built by the nearsightedness of some and the incomprehension of others, linking the great goal demanded by his time to Maceo and Moncada, Máximo Gómez and Flor Crombet, the old pines and the new pines, the hardened heroes of ’68 and the green fighters of ’95. And in order to facilitate such a great goal, to achieve Cuba’s independence and foster and help Puerto Rico’s, he created and organized the Cuban Revolutionary Party, which summoned to war “for the good of America and the world”. Martí said, “We fight in Cuba to ensure, with ours, Spanish America’s independence”.

However, where we find crystal-clear evidence that the revolutionary movement organized and led by Martí aimed essentially at keeping Cuba and Puerto Rico from exchanging colonial leashes, or theoretical independence from being merely a formal dressing for an effective protectorate under whose suffocating protection the millionaire from the north and the native foreman could combine to bleed us to death and deplete us, is in the sense Martí gives to war and in the mission and content he assigns to the Republic. The necessary war is aimed neither at Spaniards nor at Spain, but exclusively at its oppressive and exhausting domination, fed and supported by the Bourbon monarchy and its roguish nobility. Just like his knowledge about the hegemonic role the U.S. hoped to play, failed to keep him from praising its legitimate glories and outstanding men, and calling the great American people an ally for being victim as well of their ruling imperial organization, Martí warned about the coexistence of two radically different Spains: an artificial Spain, without authority, cruel, greedy and parasitical, and the vital Spain, the true, only one, unfortunate and provisional fief of the former, against which it rose up in epic outbreak on July 18, 1936. Had he been around, José Martí, colonial Spain’s last adversary in America, he would have bowed, overjoyed and reverent, to the Spanish people who splendidly and in loneliness dispute with international gangsterism, their right to life and liberty.

Although the democratic republic’s economic foundations have to be necessarily implanted in the general capitalist system, Martí wants the Cuban republic –congenial friend of the mighty neighbor, albeit deprived of any interference, submission or mortgage subordinating it by slavery to its ruling class’s political and economic interests– to satisfy every citizen’s wishes and needs, regardless of race or class, by abolishing all social inequalities and providing for equal distribution of wealth. There can be no doubt about his opinion in this regard. Martí embodies in America the purest and most progressive essence of democratic thinking. “The revolution”, he writes in response to Carlos Baliño, “is not what we will start in the scrublands, but what we will develop in the republic.” And he sharply warns: “If the republic is not based upon the entire character of its children, the habit of working with their hands and thinking by themselves, the upright exercise of their own self, and the respect, as a family honor, for the upright exercise of others; in brief, upon passion for man’s decorum, the republic is worth neither one tear of our women nor a drop of blood of our brave. We work for truths, not for dreams. We work to liberate Cuba, not to corner it.”

“We have to stop”, he categorically states, “Cuba’s sympathy from being twisted and enslaved by group interests, or by the unmeasured authority of a military or civilian association, or by a given region, or by a race over another.”

“Man”, he accurately pointed out then and forever, has no special right for belonging to one race or another: say man, and all rights will have been said. The black, for being black, is neither less nor more than any other: a white man who says my race is being redundant, as is the black who says my race. Everything that divides men, everything that separates, specifies or corners, is a sin against humanity. Man is more than white, more than mulatto, more than black. Two racists would be equally guilty: the white racist and the black racist.”

This is Martí’s advance response to the Nazis, Falangists and Fascists who, disguised as democrats, infect our Republic today. Martí’s advance response to Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, supreme leaders of totalitarian mafia, corporate regression, and a brutal return to glebe and auto-da-fés.

“A government”, he said, can sympathize with a given cult, but by accepting the ruling role, very difficult for all to understand and fulfill, it is accepting also the constitution and related laws that responsibility entails: said laws forbid favoring leniency to any cult; the law assists no religious act because the Law is the State; the State must have no religious principles, because there is no room for special attention to a given religious tendency in those who have a duty to treat them all the same.”

“In our countries”, he wrote,

there must be a radical revolution of education, lest they will always be, as some still are today, irregular, atrophied and deformed like Horace’s monster. Against Theology, Physics. Let elementary teaching be elementary scientific: let the history of Earth formation be taught instead of Joseph’s. It’s not enough, not anymore, in order to teach, to place the pointer against cities on a map, nor successfully string together some verses in schools for Aesculapian priests. Let us raise this flag without dropping it: primary education has to be scientific.”

That is Martí’s replication, also in advance, to those who now wave against Cuba’s public and private school, the fluttering banner of freedom of education in a desperate effort to control that freedom in favor of foreign clergy and a totalitarian approach to life and the world. For those sappers of our nationality, Martí wrote these words: “It’s impossible to use respect as a weapon to fight against those who, above any respect, jump and destroy. There can be no constitutional consideration for those who build their nests in the heart of the constitution with the intention of hurting and devouring it.” And by rounding off his view of the republic for which effective creation he fought, he delivers his profound aversion to man being exploited by man. José Martí craved –a summary of his political thinking– for a loose, free and cordial republic whose prime and fundamental law were the devotion to man’s full dignity, a secular and generous republic, with “the mass who think beside the mass who earn their daily bread”, a republic with no serfs, no beggars, no slaves. “Slave”, he points out, “is any person who works for another who has control over him.” And adds with a vision and language very much in line with the present: “It is imperative to make common cause with the oppressed, in order to secure a new system opposed to the ambitions and governing habits of the oppressors. As long as there is a poor, unless he is lazy or dissolute, there is injustice.” The homeland is not worthy in itself: it is worth insofar as it is fair.” It is not triumph, but agony and duty. It is never made. It has to be made and remade everyday. If creating is a poet’s trade, bringing life to what’s created is a man’s trade.

José Martí’s fall was a catastrophe for Cuba and Puerto Rico. The new delegate, Tomás Estrada Palma, did his best to mortgage the Cuban Republic before its birth. And the Puerto Rican cause was abandoned to its fate. Amid those blunders, and in absence of a strong Cuban bourgeoisie, monopoly capital made its appearance in the United States –after the end of its internal expansion and to the detriment of Mexico’s richest regions–, eager for new markets and new, preferably less developed territories in which to dump the surplus of their mechanical production, to extract raw materials essential to their growing industry and to invest optimally their idle dollars. But at the same time the U.S., due to its strategic imperatives and subsequent purposes, needed to strengthen its position in the Caribbean Sea. Thus, the collapse of Spanish power in America was replaced by U.S. colonial domination in Puerto Rico, and economic and political control over Cuba through the Platt Amendment, facilitating the unlimited availability of our wealth to their bankers and businessmen. “Land”, Martí had warned, “is man’s only full property and a common treasure that equals all men, so for both the person’s good fortune and public calm, it must not be ceded, nor credited to another, nor ever mortgaged.”

Of no value were Manuel Sanguily’s admonitory and prophetic words in the Republic’s Senate, let alone his bill –which was not even discussed– to ban the disposal of land and real estate. Thus was José Martí’s generous, consequential and revolutionary work frustrated by his premature death and a conjunction of hostile factors. We have suffered from the outcome of that frustration for thirty-five years of pseudo-democratic farce and colonial reality, during which Cuba has been the bloody patrimony of a victorious minority and a sugar factory surrounded by palm trees. Opposing his predicament and purpose, the Republic has been –is now more than ever– “a perpetuation under new forms, or with alterations more apparent than essential, of the colony’s bureaucratic, militarist and corrupted spirit”. The curve of economic subjugation is reaching its highest temperatures. Cuba leads today an anemic, bogged-down life at the mercy of U.S. tariff barriers, unilateral reciprocity treaties, and intervened loans. Martí warned,

“Whoever says economic union says political union. Trade must be balanced to assure freedom. Let there be no unions of America against Europe, nor with Europe against an American nation. The geographical fact of living together in America does not oblige political union, except in the mind of some candidate or some college graduate. Union with the world, and with a part of it; nor with one part against another.”

Truncated in 1895, José Martí’s emancipating work remains to be done. Doing that work, transfusing to historical reality the ideal of living that fed his existence and gave symbolic value to his death, is the immediate stage Cuba is facing during this violent transit that the world is preparing to confront, that is being already confronted in Europe and Asia. If this is so –and denying it would be to ignore the internal dynamics of historical processes, a vital link between failed situations and subsequent states–, then José Martí, who tirelessly fought to make Spain’s monarchy give back the riches it snatched from Cuba and control over his destiny on truly democratic grounds, serves, has to serve today, when old servitudes are faced with a new, darker slavery, as a propelling wheel operating for a long distance of the winding road. People’s spirit, with its quite fine, typical perceptiveness, was the first to warn about this militant link between Martí’s unbinding thoughts and today’s historical juncture and therefore, also before anyone else, strongly tightened itself around his democratic ideals, ready to defend them from interloping hands and criminal distortion.

To the Cuban people, and particularly to its young students, belong the culmination of José Martí’s unfinished job: to fulfill ourselves in history without alien interference. We are against fascism, a thousand-headed monster fathered in the gloomy belly of a decadent civilization; but we are also against those who, on behalf of democracy, intend to conquer us. Against them all: with justice for all, with true democracy and fair wealth for all, with the right to self-determination for all.

The fight for what we want to be, born in José Martí, was resumed on September 30, 1930. Violently diverted on August 12, 1933, it had its haughty start in the general strike of 1935. Now it’s living underground, biding its time. It doesn’t matter that for the time being the stars seem adverse. The responsibility for this stinking and confusing moment, when the most oppressive and reactionary interests prevail in public life, is out of our people’s direct reach. That responsibility belongs exclusively with those who altered their course and betrayed their historical duty. It’s a responsibility that will soon be demanded. “When a people starts a revolution”, Martí said, “remains in it until its finished”. The destiny of that revolution is our own destiny. Standing in front of the future, let us embrace it as if it were the star that illuminates and saves. And let us accept José Martí as our leader, while that destiny remains within the liberating goals of the national independence revolution, since he won’t miss the appointment, just as he didn’t miss May 19, 1895 to die again, facing the enemy, as he had dreamed and requested, for Cuba’s and Puerto Rico’s independence, for America’s future, in order to “place man in full possession of himself”.

---ooOoo---

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[1] Rebel in the Cuban uprising of 1868 (T.N.)



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