José Martí

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José Martí
Bust of José Martí
Tomb of José Martí in Santiago de Cuba
Bust of Martí in Cádiz ( Spain ).
Bust of José Martí in Sofia ( Bulgaria ).
Bust of 'Hose Marti' in Hanoi ( Vietnam )

José Julián Martí y Pérez (born January 28, 1853 in Havana , † May 19, 1895 in Dos Ríos , Jiguaní , Oriente ) was a Cuban poet and writer and is considered a Cuban national hero and a symbol of his country's struggle for independence. As a writer, he and the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío co-founded the first fully independent Latin American literary movement, modernism .

Life

His parents had both immigrated to the colony of Cuba from motherland Spain: Mariano Martí Navarro, who came from Valencia , was transferred to Cuba as a sergeant in the Spanish colonial army, his wife Leonor Pérez Cabrera came from the Canary island of Tenerife . José was the first born of the couple's eight children. Martí began to write poetry as a teenager and to sympathize with the resistance to Spanish colonial rule. In his short play Abdala, for example, the 16-year-old expresses his combative patriotism bluntly. Patriotism is " el odio invencible a quien la oprime " (German: the invincible hatred of the oppressor ). For such criticism he was sentenced to forced labor in 1871 and deported to Spain . There he took the opportunity to study law in Saragossa .

He returned to Cuba in 1878, but was sent back into exile in 1879. At first he lived in Mexico , where he studied the Maya culture and visited its structural remains. From April 1877 to July 1878 he lived in Guatemala . He then went back to Havana for a short time before moving to New York in 1881 for political work .

In exile he wrote several writings, including the volume of poetry Versos sencillos ("Simple Verses"), from which parts of the text of the famous song Guantanamera come. Martí also organized the political and military struggle against the Spanish colonial power. Together with the Cuban tobacco workers in Florida , he founded the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Cuban Revolutionary Party ) in 1892 and persuaded the most important military leaders of the guerrilla war from 1868 to 1878, Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo , to resume the fight against Spain. From 1889 to 1891 he was an observer and most famous commentator of the first Pan-American conference in Washington .

Only two narrow volumes of poetry, Ismaelillo (1882) and Versos sencillos (1891), were published during his lifetime . Two further volumes of poetry were published posthumously: Versos libres (1913) and Flores del destierro (1933).

In 1895 José Martí returned to Cuba to take part in the war of independence against Spain . On May 19 of this year he fell in fighting near Dos Ríos in what was then the province of Oriente .

The tomb of José Martí is in Santiago de Cuba in the Cementerio Santa Ifigenia cemetery . A guard of honor regularly celebrates a change of guard in front of the tomb. José Martí was a Freemason . Hundreds of Freemasons are present at the annual wreath-laying ceremony. ( See also: History of Freemasonry in Cuba )

Every Cuban school has a bust of José Martí at the entrance or in the school yard.

Political thinking

Martí's political thinking was determined by anti-imperialism towards the USA and by the vision of a new Cuba. However, he stayed away from the socialist and communist parties of the time . Instead, Martí was shaped by radical humanism and independence . The lower classes should be actively involved in the government, the military should provide external protection, but not monitor the government. The state should support the national economy, especially agriculture. Foreign policy should be based on a union of Latin American states and counter the expansionist interests of the USA. A Cuban government according to Martí's ideas should eliminate the extreme social inequality - caused by the colonial rule of Spain - and consolidate the Cuban identity and culture to the point that complete political independence can be achieved.

Martí campaigned for the rights of local people in Latin America. Nevertheless, he ideologically supported the action of the Argentine President Julio Argentino Roca against Indians in Patagonia . Until the mid-1880s, he also justified the expropriation of indigenous people if the land was not used for agriculture. In 1885 he broke with these views. He later turned against military forms of government. Shortly before his death he wrote to General Máximo Gómez : “A republic, my general, is not founded in the same way as a barracks is ordered!”

An insight into Martí's ideas and political thinking can be found in the essay Nuestra América .

José Martí's political legacy

While the importance of the poet Martí for world literature and especially for Latin American literature is undisputed, the emergence of the Republic of Cuba in 1902 sparked a struggle for Martí's political legacy, which continues to this day. Two main trends can be identified in the reception of his political thinking:

  • Even the founding fathers of the Republic of Cuba saw Martí's struggle for a Cuban nation as over with the institutionalization of the republic . In 1934, one of the government parties that supported the state was named after the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Auténticos) party founded by Martí . With this position Martí became a significant historical figure, a monument in the history of Cuba. This is to be taken quite literally: The José Martí monument as one of the landmarks of Havana was built under the dictator Fulgencio Batista . The naming of the radio station Radio and TV Martí , established by the US Congress, also refers to this interpretation by Martí.
  • Based on Martí's warnings about US domination in Latin America and his demands for social justice and the unification of Latin American states, Martí was already understood as a socialist and anti-imperialist at the beginning of the 20th century . Today he is revered by the Cuban state and many political groups striving for the political and economic independence of Latin America as a pioneer of their endeavors. The Martí bust in front of every Cuban school in post-revolutionary Cuba is supposed to be a reference to Martí's demands for general popular education. Socialist Cuba sees itself as the legacy of the thought of José Martí and Karl Marx , whose ideas are to be seen as a mandate for politics.

literature

From José Martí

  • Gonzalo de Questa y Miranda (ed.): Obras Completas La Habana, Editorial Trópico, 1936–1949, 70 volumes. This edition of the Collected Works is not complete.
  • La Edad de Oro
  • New York under the snow , published in La Nación , Argentina.
  • With pen and machete - poems, prose writings and diary entries , Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1974.
  • De Marti a Castro , Ed. Grijalbo, Barcelona 1974.
  • Inside the Monster: Writings on the United States and American Imperialism , New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008, ISBN 0853454035

About José Martí

  • Christopher Abel (Ed.): José Martí : revolutionary democrat. - Durham: Duke Univ. Pr., 1986. - ISBN 0-8223-0679-4
  • Raúl Fornet-Betancourt : José Martí read intercultural . - Nordhausen: Bautz Verlag, 2007. - ISBN 978-3-88309-174-7
  • Ottmar Ette : José Martí . Part I: Apostle - Poet - Revolutionary. A story of its reception. - Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag (series mimesis, vol. 10) 1991. - ISBN 978-3-484-55010-0
  • Ottmar Ette / Titus Heydenreich (eds.): José Martí 1895/1995 . Literatura - Política - Filosofía - Estética. 10 ° Coloquio interdisciplinario de la Sección Latinoamérica del Instituto Central de la Universidad de Erlangen-Nürnberg. - Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert Verlag (Series Latin America Studies, Vol. 34), 1994. - ISBN 3-89354-734-7
  • John M. Kirk: José Martí : mentor of the Cuban nation. - Tampa, Fl .: Univ. Pr., 1984. - ISBN 0-8130-0812-3
  • Julio Rodríguez-Luis (ed.): Re-reading José Martí (1853–1895): One Hundred Years Later. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000. ISBN 9781438417608 (English)
  • Kurt Schnelle: José Martí : Apostle of the free America. - Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1981. - ISBN 3-7609-0629-X
  • Susanne Grunwald: José Martí and the Indiothematics of Nuestra América. Race - Category - Culture - Poetry. Cologne, University of Cologne, dissertation, 2010 ( online )

Web links

Commons : José Martí  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: José Martí  - Quotes
Wikiquote: José Martí  - Quotes (Spanish)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Ted Henken: Cuba: A Global Studies Handbook , ABC-CLIO (2007), ISBN 978-1851099849 . P. 366
  2. ↑ Pedro Antonio García: Leonor Pérez Cabrera: La tierna madre del apóstol , in: Bohemia from May 30, 2012, accessed on August 1, 2013 (Spanish)
  3. ↑ José Martí: Abdala , in: Obras Completas, Volume 18, La Habana 1964, p. 19.
  4. ↑ Carlos Bojorquez Urzaiz: Indigenous Components in the Discourse of "Nuestra América". In: Radical History Review. 89, spring 2004, pp. 206 - 213, here p. 208.
  5. ↑ a b Bert Hoffmann : Kuba , 3rd edition 2009, page 34 f.
  6. ↑ For the entire paragraph: Jorge Camacho: Contra el peligro. José Martí, la crítica modernista y la justificación de las políticas liberales en el siglo XIX. In: MLN, 124, 2, March 2009, pp. 424-437, here pp. 425-430.
personal data
SURNAME Martí, José
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Martí y Pérez, José Julián (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Cuban writer and national hero
DATE OF BIRTH January 28, 1853
PLACE OF BIRTH Havana
DATE OF DEATH May 19, 1895
Place of death Dos Ríos , Jiguaní , Oriente Province , Cuba