Armando Hart Dávalos

IN the words of introduction to this series which concludes today, I recalled Carlos Rafael Rodríguez who, on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of our national hero in 1953, affirmed: "Martí was not only a guide for his times, but at the same time, has to be considered as an anticipator of our own." Today, close to 40 years after he spoke those words, we can confirm, on rereading Nuestra América, and bearing in mind the essential lines of Martí’s thought, that our national hero continues to be a guide for our times and an anticipator of those to come.

A cornerstone of his political and moral ideas is to be found in this magisterial essay which he titled Nuestra América. The title itself gives a clear forewarning of the need to differentiate it from what he called the America which is not ours. There is the starting point of all Martí’s political and moral concepts. Without understanding this cardinal judgment of Martí and extracting all the practical consequences from it, it is not possible to talk about Cuban identity, of national spirit, of Cuban culture. But, moreover, without comprehending the meaning of this fact, it is not possible to think correctly about Cuban politics.

Recalling Martí’s words in Nuestra América, we could also emphasize that "these times are not for lying down with a handkerchief to the head, but with the weapons of the pillow, like the boys of Juan de Castellanos: the weapons of reason, which vanquish the others. Trenches of ideas are worth more than trenches of stone." On another occasion, following that same line of thought, our national hero affirmed: "A just principle, from the depths of a cave, can do more than an army." And it has to be borne in mind that Cuba today, at the end of the 20th century, in addition to just principles, has a people trained for war, and is not exactly in the depths of a cave. On the contrary, it is to be found at the center of the hemisphere’s problems.

We find ourselves in the most recent setting of the colossal battle between, on one hand, the hard-working, impassioned and romantic America which, embracing a history of struggle and endless pain, holds high the banner of Bolivar; and, on the other, Saxon America, which will only be able to find its genuine liberty and human dignity if it is capable of emerging from the reactionary carapace that is paralyzing and impeding the development of its greatest creative possibilities. The prolonged predominance of powerful sects and classes have prevented the United States from playing a noble and just role in the world of yesterday, today and the immediate tomorrow. And this dominance was what José Martí was condemning, with clarity, in Nuestra América and other highly diverse essays.

He knew how to distinguish the homeland of Lincoln from the homeland of Cutting. The narrow concepts of U.S. politics, past and present, make it impossible for yankee governments to appreciate the contemporary world in all its depth, magnitude and subtlety. Enclosed in the shell of a supposed grandeur, which served it as a cynical pretext for seizing half of Mexico, Puerto Rico; the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua for a time and, more recently, Grenada and Panama, demonstrates, in the dramatic reality of our lives, how the odious standards of the killer pirate and the sinister symbol of the Nazi swastika are, in truth, the only flags that the United States has defended in the world. And with unmatched cynicism, and the manipulation of words and ideas, it presents itself to the world as the egregious defender of freedom.

One has to go to the infinite wellspring of José Martí’s thinking in order to show how, even then, the fateful seeds of the negation of all freedom were to be found in North America. The seeds of the most refined and terrible dictatorship already existed in that era. We can take them from the maestro’s body of ideas, which has attained, in our era, a truly universal dimension. What is there in the background? Let’s go to the beautiful image which appears in the first lines of Nuestra América. José Martí says: "The vain village believes that the entire world is its village and as such it remains the mayor, whether it torments the rival who took away its bride to be, whether its savings grow in its money-box, it takes for granted the universal order, without knowing about the giants in seven-league boots which can step on it with those boots, nor of the battle of the comets in the sky, which move in their sleep through the air engulfing worlds."

The reactionary U.S. politicians of today would seem to be enclosed in their own village. Doubtless this is a giant village. Here lies the greatest danger. To paraphrase Martí’s words, we could say that the vain politicians of the United States believe that the entire world is their village and, as long as they remain president, governor or senator, or the moneybox grows, there you have the universal order.

This is the fundamental basis of current U.S. policy, with the aggravating factor that the moneybox does not appear to be growing.

The danger lies in that the ferocious tiger, arrogant and conceited, is not at all aware of the inevitable limits of its power; it believes it to be unlimited, it feels that it has the power to exercise it. But it carries, in its own innards, the seeds of its own destruction; its greed is killing it, as was the case in Vietnam; its incomprehension that the world has ceased being a village is incapacitating. And the tiger is feeling more powerful because, in Eastern Europe, a historical retrogression has taken place. It feels itself at the pinnacle of its glory. For the United States, the class struggle has disappeared; it thinks that economic liberalism has triumphed. However, the real drama of history is reaching us from the Arab nations, loaded with material wealth, with a power that is not to be underestimated and in the midst of confusion and passion: peace is in danger. A war is foretold.

Our America is alone; the hour of the final judgment of its history is arriving. And, in order to find the way, there is no need to go to a U.S. or European university. One has to search for the initial source of wisdom in this magnificent, alarming call from Martí in his article published on January 1, 1891, in La Revista Ilustrada of New York. Our America has here its manifesto of hope. Don’t look for it anywhere else, walk in this direction and you will find your definitive vocation of being what the foreign conquistadors never wanted you to be; what the mutinous and brutal North which scorns us never wanted you to be; what the Europe laden with jewels, wealth and ancestral prejudices never wanted you to be; what the seven-league giants never wanted you to be.

To get to its essence and follow this path, the foundation of which is the quoted Martí work, we have to make haste; we have to know each other, like people who are going to fight together. While these ideas of the maestro were valid in 1891, they are so, with more reason, in 1990. In terms of Cuba, let us not move in secondary directions, let us not entertain ourselves with infertile passions; let us get to the heart of things. Cuba is standing on its feet to save the socialist Revolution and, of course, the Revolution of Martí. And in that work of salvation and historic service, unity is the prime objective of revolutionaries and the prime aspiration of the enemy is to promote division. In order to march in this direction, one has to understand that the problem of independence and thus of our identity as a nation, was not a simple matter of changing forms. We had to, and have to, change the spirit; we had to, and have to, place ourselves on the side of the oppressed; we had to, and have to, strengthen the system opposed to the interests and commanding habits of the oppressors.

And it is worth recalling, also, that (I quote) "the good governor in America is not he who knows how the German or Frenchman governs, but he who knows of what elements his country is made, and how he can go about guiding them together, in order to reach, through methods and institutions born in the same country, that desirable state where everyone knows each other and works, and enjoys all the abundance that Nature placed for everyone in the nation to make fertile with their work and to defend with their lives. Governments have to be born from the country. The spirit of government has to be that of the country. The form of government has to be reconciled with the country’s own constitution. Government is no more than the balance of the country’s natural elements.

"For that reason imported books have been conquered in America by native people. Native people have overcome the false literati. The indigenous mestizo has defeated the foreign national. There is no battle between civilization and barbarity, but between false erudition and nature." (End of quote)

Let us leave aside exotic theories, rhetoric that swims in superficiality and let us go, as the example of Martí and Fidel teaches us, to the real and concrete thread of our national and Latin American history. Let verbal artifices, confusing words, elements of distraction be left behind and let us promote a constantly growing unity among ourselves and the veritable road of Cuban revolutionary thinking.

On commenting on the immortal pages of Nuestra América, it is fitting, at a moment like the present, when ideas have to be strengthened, conviction has to grow and what is most genuinely ours has to be promoted, to reflect on crucial aspects of Cuban revolutionary thinking, of Cuban political thinking, because that is what it is about. At this time when community effort and the moral unity of the nation are being imposed as an objective necessity for our struggles, it is not the opportune moment for erroneous doctrinaire concepts which distract and limit our action and impede the strengthening and growth of Cuban ideas as an effective formula for defending the Revolution and socialism. And every question has to be resolved in the correct and opportune place and trying, by all means within our reach, not to create confusion and disorder. That is to create politics. To make politics in the style of Martí, to make them starting from the political history of our people. And young people should learn to do so in the Martí and Fidel sense of the word, with a sense of uniting on the fundamentals of the most rigorous and demanding principles.

Doctrinaire thinking has to be overcome by political wisdom and its healthy practice. In Martí, this sense of the real, the concrete, is derived from his political temperament. Politics, as the art or way of organizing or directing people and nations for the realization of determined ends, was his most exceptional virtue. Perhaps it is this which most identifies him with the temperament of his people. The Cuban people, let us not forget, have always had a political temperament.

In the past, this virtue was corrupted by politicking and submission to the yankee empire. The political nature of our people must be exalted today with the example of Martí’s exceptional intelligence. It was that exceptional intelligence and that political and practical sense of life which led the maestro to express the synthesis of the conscience of America in the historical document which we are discussing. The maestro arrived at good ideas via good political practice. Make politics in the style of the maestro and you will arrive, as demonstrated by the experience of his finest disciple – in other words, of Fidel – at the most refined and purest revolutionary concepts.

Because it is only possible to arrive at the just idea, the just principle, with just and correct politics. Through his political genius, Martí arrived at stating "Homeland is humanity," and he came to say it because he made politics with a clarity as to their universal meaning, with excellence of method, with uncompromising firmness in their ends, with an extraordinarily realistic foresight in terms of the dangers and limitations and with a resolute, serene and heroic passion to overcome them. With such a politics, one arrives at the triumph of the finest, most revolutionary and most consistent ideas. And when, in virtue of a just politics, a revolutionary principle, the masses are made aware, such ideas serve to direct our action. One could give examples, but this is neither the time nor the place.

In order to achieve good politics, wisdom and culture play an enormously significant role. The finest Cuban thinkers, from Félix Varela, José de la Luz y Caballero and, why not, José Antonio Saco, to the pinnacle of the 19th century, who is José Martí, and the continuer of this cultural body of ideas in the initial decades of the 20th century, Enrique José Varona, had a clear vision of thought dedicated to political and social action. It is not in the finest, cultural, moral and political Cuban tradition to inhibit oneself, to become paralyzed or to evade the political and social problems of each historic moment.

Political commitment, which is alive in all these lines of Nuestra América, is also present in Varela’s anti-slavery and pro-independence thinking; in these immortal verses of Heredia: "Not in vain, between Cuba and Spain, the sea extends its immense waves;" in the vocation of the great mastery of Luz y Caballero; in Saco’s economic ideas, ahead of their time; and, above all, in the anti-imperialism and Latin Americanism of Martí. As José Martí’s prophetic words charged with impressive beauty teach, Cuban thinkers in our era of creation were not removed from the most urgent problems of the homeland, revolution or the world. This has been, is and will be the tradition of Cuban thinking.

It is for that reason that, in the modern era in which we live, the most complex thought, the most elevated culture and the highest-flown banner are expressed in a natural, organic and consistent form in the words and actions of Fidel. For that reason, he is the genuine spokesman of the men of a committed culture dedicated to action, who had, in the mastery of the Cuban school of the 19th century, and especially in Martí’s body of ideas, an inexhaustible source of wisdom. Because, and these paragraphs of Martí which we are commenting on confirm it, it was never intended that the finest Cuban thought should remain in the realm of pure thinking. There were always efforts to promote political and social action and to intertwine it with the revolutionary battles of each historical era. This is the issue.

And it is a real fact, in our view, that the soundness of that thinking, with an evident tendency toward social mobilization and combat in favor of the causes of the Cuban people and thus, with the cause of our socialist Revolution, constitutes a primary element of political education. It is particularly necessary that those, who have the vocation and determination to take the complicated road to which Fidel has called us, know to think with our own heads. But our heads have to be impregnated with the revolutionary ideas of the Cuban nation. They have to procure unity among the people in the face of the seven-league giant. Everything that unites the intellectual, moral and revolutionary forces of the Cuban nation and promotes its fusion and articulation with the people as a whole will be useful for our politics. And everything that unnecessarily divides will be prejudicial to the revolutionary cause of the Cuban nation. This is, moreover, they key to all the politics of Martí and Fidel.

What a work of union, within the most profound principles and interest of Cuba the maestro created! He understood from the experience of the Ten Years’ War, that division was the root cause of the failure of the Zanjón pact. He went to the deepest essence of that epic fight and said that Baraguá was one of the most glorious pages of our history. He unified all the greats of the revolution of 1868; he worked with them with a passion. Uniting men and peoples is not a task that is exempt from heartaches and bitterness, and Martí also experienced that drama.

For that reason, in his historic letter addressed to General Máximo Gómez, inviting him to join the war, he affirmed, "I offer (invite) you, without fear of a refusal, (to) this new work, now that I have no other remuneration to offer you than the pleasure of sacrifice and the probable ingratitude of men." Despite the heartaches that are an essential part of a battle in which human passions are inevitably present, José Martí was untiring; he continued persevering, firm and serene, illuminated by his genius, with the task of uniting Cubans. The maestro knew that the Achilles heel of the Republic that he was going to found would be in its lack of unity.

He organized the [Cuban Revolutionary] Party; he united the Liberation Army; he was able to group the brave giants, who came with the glories of war, he was able to group them into one sole army, into one sole party. And he was capable of organizing that war and of bringing to it the technical means and indispensable material so that the spark would extend throughout the national territory. Martí was a man of thought directed toward political action who organized a war and founded an independence party. In that way, he was faithful to the finest tradition of Cuban cultural thinking. He did not want the republic of which he dreamed to remain on the margin of the ideas and the principles with which he had woven the fibers of the free homeland

Martí said to Valdés Domínguez:

"One thing gives me much to celebrate, and it is your affection in relating to people; and your respect for people, for the Cubans who, over here are sincerely seeking, with one name or another, a little more cordial order and indispensable balance in the administration of the things of this world. One has to judge an aspiration for its nobility: and not by this or that wart that human passion inflicts upon it. The socialist idea has two dangers, like so many others: that of alien, confused and incomplete readings and that of the thinly disguised arrogance and fury of the ambitious who, in order to elevate themselves in the world, as to have men on whose shoulders to stand, begin to act as fanatical defenders of the unprotected. (…) But the risk is not so great in our nations as in more irascible societies and with less natural clarity; our work will be to explain, plainly and profoundly, as you know how to do; the issue is not to compromise sublime justice with erroneous models or those too excessive to ask of her. And always with justice, you and I, because errors in its form do not authorize souls of good birth to desert its defense. Very well, so, to the 1st of May. I anxiously await your account."

Years later, Enrique José Varona, who had replaced Martí as editor of Patria magazine, and who was the pinnacle of Cuban thought in the first quarter of the century, affirmed in 1906 – in other words, 11 years prior to Lenin’s Revolution and 11 years after Martí’s death. "Marxism is an exaggerated truth, because it is not only economic factors that decide historic evolution. Other factors also impose themselves." And then Varona makes an analysis of the Cuban wars of 1868 and 1895, the essence of which is valid in terms of a scientific, materialist and historic interpretation of our epic battles for independence. Of course, what the eminent teacher from Camagüey did not know was that the exaggeration was not on the part of Marx, but the "Marxists." Neither Engels nor Marx posed the economic factor as the only fundamental one.

But, from where did the Cuban independence hero extract the ideas of that really outstanding paragraph on socialism and its dangers which, as with every idea, had and have tremendous validity and shake our consciousness? How was this affirmation, incredible for a non-Marxist Cuban thinker at the beginning of the [20th] century, born in Enrique José Varona? They extracted these ideas from the analysis of a genuine fact: U.S. imperialism was going to prevent, and later did prevent, the full independence of the homeland, and paralyzed, delayed and diverted from its natural course the evolution of a cultural and political body of ideas during the first half of the 20th century. These ideas were born from a cultural tradition closely linked to a profound analysis of concrete social, political and ideological problems which Cuban society has experienced.

There is the key to a thinking the highest expression of which is to be found in the 19th century, in José Martí, the clearest expression of which is in this magnificent work on Our America, whose centenary we are about to commemorate. The idea of a philosophy and culture committed to the cause of the poor, of the exploited of the earth, with an essential commitment to Latin Americanism, and with a brilliant foresight of the dangers which were then awaiting the country and which later turned into a historic tragedy, were present in the birth and growth of Cubans’ spiritual lives.

From there, from our culture, from that of José Martí, we have inherited elements essential to our political action. Obviously, a cultural tradition like the Cuban one, directed toward political commitment and action, can never remain on the margins of debate in any historical era. That debate has to take place in order to strengthen our unity and make us more capable of confronting ideas at an international level.

It is the hour of the closest unity among everyone representing the intellectual movement, understanding this expression in its most profound and full meaning and its definitive fusion with the economic and social moment. And it is also the time to link ideas, methods and cultural principles with socioeconomic processes and with the ideological, moral and spiritual movement of the people. The nature as a whole of all the foregoing is a sacred and unyielding principle of the Cuban nation. Such integrity responds to the calling of a committed culture and a tradition that comes to us from the most advanced Cuban thinkers. But it is, moreover, a noble and just aspiration of the working people.

In relation to culture, difficulties and insuperable contradictions do not always lie in a doctrinaire or culturological elaboration, the meaning of which we have to know how to analyze within an academic framework and which can find an intelligent solution precisely in the institutional environment. The principal present and future dangers in relation to the country’s spiritual life include turning liberty into license and the emergence of anarchistic tendencies outside of any discipline; these affect indispensable cohesion and unity. Those anarchist tendencies do not have a basis in the finest cultural tradition of the Cubans, but can find one in the insensibility, in the ignorance or in the limitations which we have had in our efforts to establish a set of values in the function of which our liberty and our democracy could develop.

Abrupt procedures, linked to conduct headed for dissociation and to certain expressions of anarchy, are contributing to the creation of a breeding ground for enemy action. The cultural tradition of the Cuban homeland, its ethical and political values, must be imposed in an organic way and, in order to do that, systematic action and the compression of everything is required. This is also to be found in the purest Martí tradition, in which, in addition to a cultural vision of commitment to the poor of the earth, an effort to attain unity among Cubans was imposed, which made the War of 1895 possible. That effort to create unity, cohesion and discipline, which has had in Fidel an unsurpassable maestro in our era, is now located as a cardinal question in the politics and culture of three generations of Cubans. These are tasks for the [Communist] Party. And Fidel gave it its finest definition: "The Party is the cement of society."

In 1992, we will be commemorating the centenary of the founding of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, the predecessor of the Communist Party founded by Mella and the Communist Party of Cuba founded by Fidel. The people and intellectuals as part of these, are bound together in a tight sheaf in order to say to our enemies or to the simply confused: ‘Gentlemen, this is not Prague, Warsaw or Berlin. It is Cuba, the American university has to defeat the European university.’ In Cuba, "the history of America, of the Incas here, has to be taught inside out, even if that of the Athenian magistrates is not. Our Greece is preferable to the Greece which is not ours. It is more necessary for us, national politics have to replace foreign politics. Graft the world onto our republic; but the trunk has to be that of our republics. And silence the defeated pedant; let there be no other homeland of which people can be more proud than in our painful American republics."