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MARX AND MARTÍ |
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Raymond Carr's review, "A Revolutionary Hero"[NYRB,
July 21], demonstrates his lack of familiarity with the life and
works of José Martí and with Cuban history; in both areas Carr fails
to note mistakes made by the editor of the three books reviewed, Philip
Foner, and makes mistakes of his own.
For example, Carr states that while living in Spain Martí was in touch
"with native radicals." The literature on this stage of Martí's
life shows that this simply is not true. Carr is also wrong in saying
that Martí moved "towards a socialist position" late in life.
For but one piece of evidence to the contrary, Carr might refer to a
letter from Martí to his friend, Valdés Domínguez, written just a
year before Martí's death, in which he criticized the "arrogance
and hidden rage" of "socialist ideology" whose adherents,
"in order to climb up in the world, pretend to be frantic defenders
of the helpless." Although convenient for adapting Cuban history to
fit Lenin's theory of "the historic role of the proletariat as the
builder of socialist society," it is also false that Martí
"transformed the struggle against Spain from a purely political
movement into one whose aim was that the humble should find their reward
in a free Cuba." Martí's political writings give the lie to this
assertion and the notion that Martí gave "social content" to
the war.
A related distortion of the facts is Carr's assertion that of the three
"features [that] dominated" Martí's "'revolutionary
strategy" the first was that the revolution should "embrace
the black population." Carr probably owes this misconception to
Foner, who superimposes a struggle against racial inequality on Martí's
work. An example: in recounting that "Martí helped Rafael Serra, a
Cuban Negro exile, to found the League in New York City," Foner
glorifies the League as a training school for the revolution." In
fact, Rafael Serra was an ultraconservative and an apologist for the
United States, and the League produced neither revolutionaries nor
soldiers for the war; its only purpose was to educate a small number of
poor Cuban and Puerto Rican workers.
These and other distortions in Foner's books and Carr's review are the
fruit of a campaign that Cuba's communists have orchestrated for over 25
years. There is abundant proof that before they rose to power they
rejected Martí's ideology as incompatible with their own. Nothing could
be further from their beliefs than Martí's condemnation of the
dictatorship of the proletariat which he prophetically called "a
new and fearful tyranny" and his unwavering defense of the
individual liberties that Marxism-Leninism calls "bourgeois
freedoms." "Liberty," Martí wrote, "is the right of
every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy";
"Liberty is the essence of life. Whatever is done without it is
imperfect."
But the revolution of 1959 gained power proclaiming its adherence to Martí's
ideals, so when it later adopted Marxism-Leninism, the government had to
adapt Martí to its new program. Thus began the Marxification of Martí.
In the epitome of Orwellian "doublethink" ("to be
conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed
lies"), the same communist writers who had publicly rejected Martí
began to reshape him to seem a precursor of Cuban communism. As is
happening in the Soviet Union today, in Cuba one day history
examinations will be suspended until the truth can be printed in the
history texts. It will then be apparent that Stalinist techniques were
used to manipulate Martí's words and acts to support Marxist dogma.
Foner's books and Carr's review will then be valuable tools for studying
this kind of falsification of history.
