A Hijacked Patriot
Myles B. Kantor
Thursday, Feb. 13, 2002
Reprinted from NewsMax.com
http://newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/2/12/155140.shtml
One of Cuba's founding fathers recently had his 150th birthday.
Born in Havana on Jan. 28, 1853, José Martí had a passion for independence. Cuba was a colony of the Spanish Empire; Martí felt his homeland deserved better.
A precocious patriot, he started an anti-imperialist newspaper at 16 and was arrested for treason in 1869. (Cuba's First War for Independence was from 1868-1878.) He was sentenced to six years' hard labor, but Spain commuted his sentence and deported him in 1871.
"Life wants permanent roots," Martí once wrote. Because he abhorred tyranny, permanent roots eluded him.
Martí moved to Mexico in 1875 and fled after Gen. Porfirio Díaz's coup in 1876; taught in Guatemala and fled in 1878 after strongman Justo Rufino Barrios dismissed a colleague; returned to Cuba and was deported in 1879 for anti-imperial activities; and spent less than a year in Venezuela due to another strongman, Antonio Guzmán Blanco.
In America, Martí found a place where "One can breathe freely "and "every one looks like his own master. "He settled in New York in 1881 and lived in America until 1895.
Martí remained preoccupied with Cuba during his American years, serving in the New York-based Cuban Revolutionary Committee and in 1892 co-founding the Cuban Revolutionary Party in Key West. When Martí perceived dictatorial ambitions in a fellow revolutionary, he broke with him and wrote of his
determination not to contribute by one iota, out of blind love for the idea that is consuming my life, to bringing a regime of personal despotism [emphasis added] to my land, a regime that would be even more shameful and calamitous than the political despotism it now endures, and more serious and difficult to eradicate, because it would be excused by certain virtues, and established upon an idea which it embodied, and legitimized by triumph.
And so Martí prefigures Cuba since 1959. Fidel Castro's cult of personality embodies his worst fears, the severity of his despotism dwarfing the strongmen Martí fled.
Herman Melville described one of his characters as "no crusader after perils. "Martí, however, was. He wrote his mother at 16 that imprisonment "has given me plenty of lessons for my life, which I foresee will be very short"; in 1895 he wrote to her of "my growing and necessary agony "and "a life that loves sacrifice."
Martí returned to Cuba that year to participate in the war for independence he had organized. On May 19 in the eastern province of Oriente, he fatally rode into Spanish troops. He had been in Cuba a little more a month.
Today Martí is an icon in Communist Cuba. Visitors disembark at José Martí International Airport in Havana, whose Plaza de la Revolución contains a prominent statue of him. In 2000, Castro had a "José Martí Anti-Imperialist Tribunal "built in front of the U.S. Interests Section.
Of course, Castro and his henchmen assert harmony between their totalitarianism and Martí --the "intellectual author "of the regime, according to Castro.
Martí wrote of the "natural peace "produced by "free thought, "that "to speak what one thinks without fear "is a foundation of life. So precious was this liberty to him that he compared its violation to death: "I feel like a child of mine has been murdered every time a man is deprived of his right to think."
Under Castro, Cubans cannot criticize Castro, his henchmen or their dogma. A colossal network of secret police, informers and paramilitary gangs terrorizes Cubans with scientific savagery.
"No idea can ever justify an orgy of blood, "Martí wrote in his account of forced labor, "Political Prison in Cuba. "Castro has perpetrated an orgy of blood for 44 years to fulfill an idea that seeks to subjugate the human soul. (An awful continuity exists between "Political Prison in Cuba "and modern accounts of Cuba such as Ana Rodríguez's "Diary of a Survivor "and Armando Valladares' "Against All Hope.")
No, Martí isn't the intellectual author of this infernal regime. But he will be the author of Cuba's emancipation from it.
Contact Myles Kantor at kantor@FreeEmigration.com.
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