Cuba's history must be rescued for the country's sake, because history can serve as a guide in the search for a national identity and because there seems to be a curious relationship between historical truth and social progress, as shown recently in the former socialist countries. The Soviet Union's first attempt to combat the economic and political chaos in which it found itself after the collapse of communism was to disavow the falsehoods which it had made its people believe: to vindicate the memory of the innocent who had long been misrepresented as traitors, to topple from their pedestals the real villains, and to punish those who perpetrated the big lies. It was a painful and embarrassing process. The peoples of the Soviet Union had to hear that their decades of sacrifices were in vain because the system did not work, never had worked, and was merely a house of cards built at the cost of suffering and blood.

In Cuba there has also been much deception. History was the first victim, but it will also be the final judge. It is no surprise that historians there should appropriate the legacy of José Martí, who is without a doubt the most dangerous adversary of the regime, not only because his words and his very life deny the ideas and practices of Marxism-Leninism but also because of Martí's deep roots in the Cuban consciousness. Cuba's national hero is at once the supreme patriot, the greatest thinker, and the most brilliant writer in its history, although such a combination of attributes in one man is not without disadvantages. Martí's extraordinary standing has made Cuba more vulnerable to the ambitions of those who have gained control of his image. Everything good that came before him is summarized in Martí, and what little good followed him in no small measure is owed to him. It has, therefore, become the highest aspiration of every crook to stake a claim to Martí's legacy, and this has been done by the simple announcement that Martí has been one's model and guide. In the days of the republic it was customary for all parties to contend for the possession of Martí, using him as they saw fit, but as with other evils that afflicted Cuba during the republic, Communist Cuba has raised to grotesque proportions the falsification of Martí.

The best way to understand this historical disfigurement is to trace how Cuban Communists treated Martí before 1959 and immediately thereafter. The most notable figure of Cuban Marxism, and also the most qualified to speak about José Martí, was Juan Marinello. In 1935 Marinello, a professor of literature at the Havana Teachers' College, wrote an article for a Costa Rican publication, Repertorio Americano, in which he stated that Martí had been "un gran fracasado" and "un abogado de los poderosos," and that, therefore, it was best "dar la espalda de una vez a sus doctrinas"(a "great failure" and "an advocate of powerful interests," and that, therefore, it was best to "turn our backs once and for all on his doctrines"). Marinello ended this attack with a true remark, namely, that Martí's ideas were incompatible with Marxism-Leninism and could not "servir más que como trampolín de oportunistas."³ Time would prove that the real "oportunistas" were the Cuban Communists themselves. Twenty-five years later they would use Martí as a trampolín to catapult them to power alongside Fidel Castro. Some time later, Marinello, a delegate to the convention that drafted the 1940 constitution, still determined to discredit Martí as a political thinker, traded impressions with Antonio Martínez Bello, who was attempting to make Martí appear closer to Marxism. In a letter Martínez Bello made public, Marinello wrote: "Estamos frente a un poeta que da [rienda] suelta a su élan por el camino político, no frente a un investigador exigente de los que hacen diario ejercicio de la razón. En verdad que sólo en nuestro tiempo, con Lenin, nace el guiador político injertado en el hombre científico" ("In Martí, we are confronted with a poet who gave free rein to his fancy when charting a political course, not with a strict researcher who daily made use of his reason. In truth it is only in our own time, with the rise of Lenin, that the political leader was welded to the scientific man").⁴

The Centro de Estudios Martianos, a branch of the Cuban Ministry of Culture, was created to press José Martí into the service of the regime and, with the help of other government agencies, to keep Martí confined as a kind of political prisoner. These agencies prevent Martí's words from being used with the intention with which they were written when the topic is freedom, democracy, justice, sovereignty, individual rights, spirituality, or the abuse of power. They tendentiously select Martí's ideas or words and use them out of context to make it appear that Martí shared with the Castro regime some of its policies and projects for Cuba. To conceal this trap, they complain that before 1959 Cuban historians downplayed, or ignored, Martí's anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, antiracist, and anticlerical teachings.

Using these teachings as a springboard, Communist historians fabricate intentions that Martí never voiced, stands he never took, and paths he never traveled, and so transform him into an accomplice of a regime with which he would never be associated, having repeatedly rejected overtures from governments that were far less repressive. To make Martí into a Marxist-Leninist precursor, they repeat a convoluted story: that Julio Antonio Mella, the student leader and co-founder of the Cuban Communist party, reported in turn that Carlos Baliño, a Key West émigré who was himself a co-founder of the party, had told him that Martí had once confided to Baliño that the revolution he was organizing to gain Cuba's independence was not the real revolution he planned. The real revolution would be waged after the republic had been founded, that is, a proletarian or socialist revolution. Such gossip has been repeated so often that it has been elevated to the status of fact. No one has ever questioned its validity. However, there is no proof that Martí ever said any such thing. To the contrary, there is abundant evidence that Martí never contemplated or wanted a social revolution along Marxist concepts.

It is also highly improbable that Martí would choose Carlos Baliño to be the recipient of a disclosure of this kind while leaving out others with more substantial revolutionary credentials. Baliño supported Martí in exile, as did hundreds of other Cuban tobacco workers, but it hardly seems enough for Martí to have placed the cause of Cuban independence -and, indeed, his life- in Baliño's hands through such a revelation. The Baliño myth has nonetheless had its intended effect. It causes people to reason as follows: If Martí was going to bring about a social revolution in Cuba, and his death prevented it from happening, then the revolution that succeeded in 1959 and claimed Martí as its "intellectual author" must be Martí's revolution. Consequently, Martí's revolution must be Castro's revolution and, therefore, we must submit to it and never question the ability of its leader or his orders. Martí speaks through Fidel Castro. Whoever denies Castro, denies Martí.⁷

It is time to refute the attempts to link Martí to Marxism on the basis of his relations with Carlos Baliño. While Baliño did help to found the Communist Party in Cuba in 1925, when he collaborated with Martí in the Cuban Revolutionary party thirty years before, Baliño was an anarchist, if in fact he could be identified with any ideology. As such, and not as a Marxist, Baliño was esteemed by Martí, who very ably made use of Baliño's support when anarchists on the island and among the émigrés refused to back the independence struggle.

In a speech delivered on October 10, 1892, and published in Patria, Baliño attempted to win the support of Cuban anarchists for independence by quoting several related sources: Dyer Lum, the anarchist friend and confidante of Robert Parson, executed for his alleged involvement in the Haymarket affair; the German anarchist Justus H. Schwab, who had organized in New York a Revolutionary Club similar to that of August Spies in Chicago; and Giuseppe Fanelli, the Italian anarchist who organized in Spain the International Association of Workers. Chief among those cited was Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian founder of anarchism as an international revolutionary movement and Marx's enemy, the first to predict that every manner of dictatorship of the proletariat would end up as a dictatorship over the proletariat. In Patria, Martí underscored these words in Baliño's speech: "Los anarquistas como tales deben ver en toda rebelión contra el tirano un acto de protesta que les toca alentar" ("Anarchists as such should see in every rebellion against a tyrant an act of protest which it is their duty to encourage").⁸

The origins of the Baliño myth can be traced to an article authored by Baliño himself which appeared in the August 1906 issue of La Voz Obrera (Havana), organ of the Partido Obrero Socialista. In it, Baliño stated: "Aquel paladín [Martí] que a algunos no gustaba porque tenía ideas ‘socialistas,’ solía decirnos a los obreros, sus amigos de siempre: 'Todo hay que hacerlo después de la independencia. Pero a mí no me dejarán vivir. A vosotros os [sic] tocará, como clase popular, como clase trabajadora, defender tenazmente las conquistas de la revolución'" ("That paladin of liberty [Martí], whom some did not like because of his `socialist' tendencies, used to tell us workers, who had always been his best friends: ‘All must be done after independence. But they won't let me live. It will be left to you, the popular class, the worker's class, to defend tenaciously the conquests of the Revolution' ).⁹ There is nothing remarkable in this supposed recommendation by Martí. Quite naturally, Martí would say that "all must be done after independence," because Cuba could not constitute itself as a sovereign state in the middle of a war. Therefore, he logically asked Cubans to defend "tenaciously the conquests of the Revolution" because, if they were not defended, what good would independence be? Notice that nothing in this passage suggests making a new revolution after the republic. It argues instead for the defense of the "conquests" of Martí's revolution.

The Baliño myth appears in Mella's 1927 article, "Glosando los pensamientos de José Martí,"¹⁰ a short and superficial analysis of Martí's thought ("a tentative article," according to its author, a total of eight pages) as is demonstrated by the numerous misquotations of Martí. In it, Mella mentions Baliño's recollection of Martí, but alters its meaning to read: "Martí comprendió cuando dijo a uno de sus camaradas de lucha -Baliño- que era entonces socialista [sic] y que murió militando magníficamente en el Partido Comunista: ‘¿La revolución? La revolución no es la que vamos a iniciar en las maniguas sino la que vamos a desarrollar en la República'" ("Martí understood when he told one of his comrades in the struggle-Baliño-who was then a socialist [sic] and ended his days agitating magnificently in the Communist party: ‘The revolution? The Revolution is not what we are going to start in the fields, but what we are going to develop in the Republic'".¹¹

The decree that authorized the Centro de Estudios Martianos, signed by Fidel Castro in 1977, stated:

Por cuanto, José Martí, autor intelectual del ataque al Cuartel Moncada, fue inspirador y guía de nuestro pueblo en su lucha por la definitiva liberación nacional . . . la tarea de esclarecer los vínculos profundos entre el ideario Martíano y la revolución contemporánea lo han venido realizando muchos estudiosos del pensamiento Martíano y del pensamiento marxista-leninista .... El Comité Ejecutivo del Consejo de Ministros [decreta] crear un Centro de Estudios Martianos adscripto al Ministerio de Cultura [el cual tendrá a su cargo] auspiciar el estudio de la vida, la obra y el pensamiento de José Martí, desde el punto de vista de los principios del materialismo dialéctico a histórico.¹³

(Inasmuch as José Martí, the intellectual author of Moncada, was the inspiration and guide of our people in our final struggle for national liberation . . . the task of clarifying the profound links between Martí's ideas and the Cuban Revolution has already been undertaken by students of Martí and Marxism-Leninism .... The Executive Committee of the Council of Ministers decrees the creation of a Center for Martí Studies as an adjunct of the Ministry of Culture, which will promote the study of the life, work, and thought of José Martí, from the perspective of historical and dialectical materialism.)

The day the center was inaugurated, Cuba's minister of education actually said in a speech:

Orientado por el materialismo histórico, e inspirado en la enseñanza de Fidel en el Moncada, el Centro de Estudios Martianos debe cumplir el compromiso de estudiar las relaciones entre el pensamiento de José Martí y las tareas de la revolución socialista. Grande y valioso aporte hará el Centro de Estudios Martianos si con el pensamiento de José Martí y con el instrumento científico de( materialismo histórico logra exponer, con información y datos concretos, los lazos que unen el movimiento democrático revolucionario del Maestro con el ideario socialista de Marx, Engels y Lenin. Bastaría con este empeño para justificar la existencia de la institución.¹⁴

(Guided by dialectical materialism, and inspired by the lessons Fidel taught us at Moncada, the Center for Martí Studies will fulfill its commitment of studying the relationship between José Martí's thought and the tasks of the socialist revolution. Great and invaluable will be the contribution that the Center for Martí Studies will make to our Revolution if it can show, by analyzing Martí's thought with the instrument of historical and dialectical materialism, the ties that unite the democratic revolutionary movement of our mentor, Martí, with the socialist ideology of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. If it succeeded in accomplishing only that, it would be enough to justify the existence of this institution.)

Clearly, the center in charge of supervising the study of José Martí was not created to search for the truth about Martí or to encourage researchers and students to discover what Martí may mean to them, which is the intellectual’s only honest mission, but rather to "clarify the profound links," as the government wished, between Martí's ideas and Marxism-Leninism, and to study "the relationship between José Martí's thought and the tasks of socialist revolution" to set forth "the links that bind" Martí to the socialist ideology of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. It is taken for granted that such a relationship exists and that it is the starting point for all studies of José Martí, which should be guided by "historical materialism and inspired by Fidel's teachings."

Another example illustrates how the Cuban people have been brainwashed into identifying Martí with Fidel Castro. One of the more notable publications of the Center for Martí Studies is a collection of texts in which Fidel Castro mentions José Martí, entitled El autor intelectual (1983). Cuba's Stalinist practices, encouraging the most ridiculous excesses in the cult of personality, are exhibited in the following passages by Luis Toledo Sande, eventually named director of the Center.

La radicalidad inagotable que definió al Héroe de Dos Ríos, así como el consiguiente legado cuya prolongación nos permitiría alcanzar Martínianamente, lo que la Segunda Declaración de La Habana replanteó para toda América como 'única, verdadera a irrenunciable independencia,' se abrazan en sustancial fusión histórica, donde una interpretación acertada y creadora ha dado entre sus imperecederos resultados las páginas que siguen. Ellas son el fruto del más eficaz modo de análisis científico: aquél donde la sabiduría y la devoción devienen unidad indivisible. El hecho contribuye a dar carácter incompleto al libro: la presencia de Martí alcanza en el autor jerarquía tal que el examen explícito, la valoración tácita, la glosa y la mención constituyen expresiones de un aprendizaje que fluye en el pensamiento y en la sangre, y difícilmente podría fragmentarse o escogerse con rigurosa precisión textual .... La investigación profunda y extensa reclamada por el tema permitirá en su momento esclarecer ese itinerario, el cual hace pensar en orígenes que se remontan a tempranas vivencias .... La luminosa prolongación de Martí en el pensamiento y los actos de Fidel Castro, alcanza en la transformación socialista protagonizada por nuestro pueblo con la invulnerable orientación del materialismo dialéctico a histórico, su más adecuado monumento, y de ello dan constancia las páginas de José Martí, autor intelectual. ¹⁵

(The inexhaustible radicalism of the hero of Dos Ríos, and the continuation of his legacy that enabled us to reach the Martí-inspired goal which the Second Declaration of Havana re-stated for all America as "the one true and unrelinquishable independence," are united, hero and legacy, in a substantial historical fusion [known as the Revolution]. The correct and creative interpretation of this fusion has given among its immortal fruits the following pages. These are the product of the most efficient method of scientific analysis, in which wisdom and devotion become an indivisible unit. We may attribute to this fusion the incomplete character of the book: the presence of Martí exercises such authority in the author that the explicit examination and tacit assessment of his subject, the casual comment or even the mere mention of Martí's name, constitute an expression of an apprenticeship that flows in the thought and lifeblood of Fidel Castro, and it would be difficult to extract it with rigorous textual precision .... The profound and extensive investigation that the subject demands shall, in due time, clarify the common journey of Fidel and Martí, which calls to mind origins that hark back to their earliest life experiences . . . . The luminous prolongation of Martí in the thought and acts of Fidel Castro, reaches its apex in the socialist transformation realized by our people with the unerring orientation of dialectical and historical materialism, and its most fitting monument in the pages of José Martí, autor intelectual.)

At the book-launching ceremony held at the offices of the Center for Martí Studies, attended by high officials from the government and the party, Roberto Fernández Retamar, then director of the center, expounded on the merits of Castro and El autor intelectual. He recalled that in his university days Fidel Castro read Martí "avidly and torrentially" and to such an extreme that it reminded him of the injunction in the Apocalypse that speaks of "devouring a book." According to Fernández Retamar, Castro "was making Martí flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood," and through this strange communion the Cuban Communist party had "inherited" the Cuban Revolutionary party founded by Martí. After affirming that Castro was "the true disciple, Martí's true organic descendant," Fernández Retamar related this anecdote: "El poeta ucraniano Dimitri Pavlichco, traductor y gran amador del magno cubano, nos deslumbró en una ocasión cuando -dando rienda suelta a su fantasía de poeta- nos decía que al leer Ismaelillo, le parecía ver sentado en el hombro de Martí, como un hijo pequeño suele estarlo en el padre, a Fidel" ("The Ukrainian poet Dimitri Pavlichco, translator and devoted admirer of the great Cuban, dazzled us once when he observed-giving free rein to his poet's imagination-that upon reading Ismaelillo, it seemed to him he could see Fidel seated on Martí's shoulder, as a son upon that of his father").¹⁶ Naturally, Pavlichco was thinking of a poem by Martí that begins: "Ved: sentado lo llevo / sobre mi hombro." ¹⁷ Following the train of these religious allusions, perhaps Pavlichco's vision means that Martí, like Christ on the Via Dolorosa, must carry Fidel Castro on his shoulder like a heavy cross.

In Cuba publications about Martí have increased considerably since 1959, and there is a surprising spate of Martí-related activities: young people's study groups, retreats, contests, and prizes; José Martí chairs at universities and Lenin-Martí [sic] reading rooms, in that order, where military instruction and lectures are offered by the Cuban armed forces. There is also a plethora of "specialists" who, guided by Communist party interests, devote themselves, with varying degrees of cynicism, and according to individual capacities and lack of intellectual honesty, to the falsification of Martí. Some such specialists, for example, purport to find in the structure of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano a forerunner of the Communist Party's democratic centralism, while others detect among Martí's friends and collaborators, the emergence of a class consensus. Still others see in Martí's vision of history an approach to Marxist science; in his criticism of monopolies, the foundation of scientific Socialism; in his denunciation of Yankee imperialism, an anticipation of Leninist theory on "the highest state of capitalism" and a harbinger of the proletarian revolution; in his concern for the countries of Latin America, the seeds of internationalism; and one in particular has gone so far as to elaborate, from a single word spoken by Martí as a child, an absurd theory of hatred.¹⁸

Yet another instance of the falsification of Martí involves his idea of a political party. Its aim is to justify the existence of a one-party state in Cuba and Castro's monopoly on power by claiming that both are rooted in Cuba's past. This particular argument was used in Cuba long before the Constitution of 1976 proclaimed, in Article V, that the Communist Party was "the vanguard of the working class" and the highest leading force of the society and the state. In a speech delivered on the eminently patriotic occasion of the centenary of the death of Ignacio Agramonte (1841-1873), Fidel Castro said: "Martí hizo un partido, no dos partidos, ni tres partidos, ni diez partidos; en lo cual podemos ver el precedente más hermoso y más legítimo del glorioso partido que hoy dirige nuestra revolución: el Partido Comunista de Cuba" ("Martí founded one party, not two parties, three parties, or ten parties, and in this we have the most beautiful and legitimate precedent for the glorious party led by our Revolution: the Communist party of Cuba").²⁰

The cynicism with which Communists in Cuba mislead the population by appropriating the prestigious figures of our past, who had nothing at all to do with Marxism and in no sense heralded it, reached truly Orwellian dimensions in the official ceremonies marking the centenary of Agramonte's death. The first Cuban to denounce Communism by name and correctly describe the consequences of state totalitarianism was precisely Agramonte. On completing his law studies at Havana University, Agramonte delivered an address at graduation exercises censuring despotic governments, the concentration of power, and the violation of individual liberties and human rights, in which he stated:

Funestas son las consecuencias de la intervención de la sociedad en la vida individual; y más funestas aún cuando esa intervención es dirigida a uniformarla, destruyendo así la individualidad, que es uno de los elementos del bienestar presente y futuro de ella . . . . La centralización hace desaparecer ese individualismo cuya conservación hemos sostenido como necesaria a la sociedad. De allí al comunismo no hay más que un paso; se comienza por declarar impotente al individuo y se concluye por justificar la intervención de la sociedad en su acción destruyendo su libertad, sujetando a reglamento sus deseos, sus pensamientos, sus más íntimas afecciones, sus necesidades, sus acciones todas .... El gobierno que con una centralización absoluta destruya ese franco desarrollo de la acción individual, y detenga la sociedad en su desenvolvimiento progresivo, no se funda en la justicia y en la razón, sino tan sólo en la fuerza; y el Estado que tal fundamento tenga, podrá en un momento de energía anunciarse al mundo como estable a imperecedero, pero tarde o temprano, cuando los hombres, conociendo sus derechos violados se propongan reivindicarlos, irá el estruendo del cañón a anunciarle que cesó su letal dominación.²¹

("The consequences of the intervention of society in the life of the individual are ominous; and even more so when this intervention is directed towards uniformity, destroying in this way the individuality which is one of the elements essential to the present and future well-being of society. Centralization results in the disappearance of individuality, which, as we have maintained, is necessary for the preservation of society. From there it is but a short step to communism; it begins by declaring the individual impotent and ends by justifying the intervention of society in his life, destroying his freedom, regulating his desires, thoughts, needs and most intimate affections, in sum all his actions .... A government that uses total centralization to destroy the open development of individual initiative, arrests the progress of society, and cannot be founded on justice and reason, but only on force; such a state may, in an energetic moment, announce to the world that it is stable and indestructible, but sooner or later, when men who know that their rights are violated decide to vindicate them, the roar of the cannon will announce that its lethal domination is at an end.")

All biographies of Agramonte reproduce generous extracts from this speech. Not only is it evidence of his thought and intellect, but one of the few surviving specimens of his oratory. The Agramonte biography that was published by the Castro government reproduces only certain phrases, however, and these are used to accuse Agramonte of being an "anachronism," ingenuous and a colonialist, branding him an "intelectual burgués en defensa del individualismo y contra el comunismo, con las mismas falsas razones y dibujando la misma caricatura que pintaban los reaccionarios de aquel tiempo y pintan los actuales" ("a bourgeois intellectual on the side of individualism and against communism, who used the same false reasons and drew the same caricature as the reactionaries of his day and ours").²²

The arbitrary and ridiculous comparison between Martí's Partido Revolucionario Cubano and Cuba's present Communist party has been used repeatedly by government spokesmen. Fidel Castro himself pressed this matter on several occasions. He said in a speech to a meeting of the American Association of Jurists, in Havana in late 1987: "No hay que tenerle temor al partido, porque el fundador de nuestra nacionalidad, que fue José Martí, lo primero que hizo fue organizar un partido -está en la tradición de Cuba- el Partido Revolucionario Cubano; no organizó ni 15 ni 25 partidos, organizó uno. Antes que Lenin, Martí desarrolló el concepto de un partido para dirigir la revolución" ("No one has to fear the party because it is part of Cuban tradition: the first thing that the founder of our nation, José Martí, did was to organize one party, the Cuban Revolutionary party; he did not organize 15 or 25 parties, but only one. Before Lenin, Martí had evolved the concept of a unitary party to lead a revolution"). ²³ More recently, in April 1991, besieged by friends and enemies alike who wanted him to allow a multiparty system in Cuba, Fidel Castro gave his answer in a speech commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion: "Nadie se haga ilusiones de que el socialismo cubano hará concesiones, porque tendremos un partido, (un único partido, como el que se corresponde con la etapa larga revolucionaria! (un único partido, como el que fundó José Martí para llevar adelante la guerra de independencia!" ("Let no one imagine that Cuban socialism will make any concessions; we will have one party and one party only. One party, because it is what best suits a long revolutionary era; one party, because José Martí founded just one to carry out our war of independence!").²⁴ Castro employed the same language in his closing speech to the Fourth Congress of the Cuban Communist party to justify the ban on opposition parties on the grounds that Martí founded only one party: "Pero tenemos un partido, un solo partido, como tuvo Martí, un partido, un solo partido para hacer la revolución" ("We have one party and just one party to make our revolution, one party only, as did Martí").²⁵

The argument that Cuba's totalitarian one-party state is a reflection of Martí's concept of a political party is so weak, false, and absurd that it would not be worthy of consideration were it not that its constant reiteration, coupled with the inability of anyone on the island to denounce it, has, quite naturally, misled many into believing it as a fact.

Let us briefly examine first the Marxist idea of a party. In the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels spoke of the need to create "an independent movement of the overwhelming proletarian majority to protect the interests of that majority,"²⁶ that is to say, a party that would be made up of workers. Some twenty years before the creation of Martí's Partido Revolucionario Cubano, in a "Resolution" adopted at the Hague Congress of the International Working Men's Association, they stated: "Against the collective power of the propertied classes, the working class cannot act as a class except by constituting itself into a political party distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed from the propertied classes." ²⁷ Lenin's idea of the party in turn improved upon this narrow conception. In What is to be Done? (1902) he defended the closed party, without the extensive base of the working class which Marx and Engels proposed. Lenin's "new type of party," he wrote, would be "the vanguard of the revolutionary forces . . . an organization of revolutionaries . . . who make revolutionary activity their profession . . . . Such an organization must perforce not be very extensive." ²⁸ Lenin's idea of the party and its ends is best summarized in these words: "The Party is the organized detachment of the working class . . . . The Party is not only the highest form of class association of the proletarians; it is also at the same time an instrument in the hands of the proletariat for achieving the dictatorship when that has not been achieved and for consolidating and expanding the dictatorship when it has already been achieved . . . . The proletariat needs the Party not only to achieve the dictatorship; it needs it still more to maintain the dictatorship, to consolidate and expand it in order to achieve the complete victory of socialism."²⁹ Joseph Stalin, the most constant though least acknowledged inspiration of Cuban Communism, justified his own rule by defending the thesis of the unitary party as indispensable for socialism. In 1938, he said: "In order not to err in policy one must pursue an uncompromising proletarian class policy, not a reformist policy of harmony of the interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Hence the party of the proletariat should not guide itself in practical activity by casual motives, but by the laws of development of society, and by practical deduction from these laws . . . . Hence, in order not to err in policy, in order not to find itself in the position of dreamers, the party of the proletariat must not base its activities on abstract ‘principles of human reason' . . . not on the good wishes of ‘great men,' but on the real needs of development of the material life of society."³⁰

Of course, Portuondo does not identify those "honest" revolutionaries who considered Martí's conduct "dictatorial and intolerable," but with this assertion he justifies the centralized structure of the Cuban Communist party and the dictatorial proceedings of its leaders. Whoever has a legitimate complaint against abuses of power in Cuba must keep silent or risk being considered incapable of understanding something that was begun by Martí.

How and why the Cuban Revolutionary party was founded will help us understand in what ways Martí's party differed from those with a Marxist-Leninist conception. Politically speaking, October 1891 was the most critical month in José Martí's life. A confluence of events seemed to push Martí to begin the decisive struggle for Cuba's independence. A few months earlier, the Washington Monetary Conference, which Martí attended as Uruguay's representative, had ended. There he was able to confirm what he had always suspected: U.S. expansionism posed a serious threat not only to the future independence of Cuba but to the very existence of other sovereign states in the Americas. He concluded that the best way to inhibit this dangerous trend in U. S. politics and protect Latin America from U.S. intrusion was to secure the independence of Cuba. From Washington, he wrote to Gonzalo de Quesada: "Libre el campo, al fin libre, libre y mejor dispuesto que nunca, para preparar, si queremos, la revolución ordenada en Cuba" ("At long last the field is cleared, finally cleared and well sown, and we are free to prepare, whenever we wish, an orderly revolution in Cuba").³⁶

Martí, who had served for nearly a decade as correspondent in the United States for the influential Buenos Aires daily La Nación, resigned his post to devote his time and energy to the cause of Cuban independence. He convened a meeting to commemorate October 10, 1868, the start of Cuba's Ten Years' War, and announced what would be the basis of the campaign he would wage to create a nation "for the good of all" and "a future in which all would have a stake." As if to give the lie to José Ignacio Rodriguez and all in Cuba who now attribute a class basis to his revolutionary work, Martí reminded his listeners of the sacrifices of wealthy men who were rich also in patriotism:

Aquellos padres de casa, servidos desde la cuna por esclavos, que decidieron servir a los esclavos con su sangre, y se trocaron en padres de nuestro pueblo; aquellos propietarios regalones que en la casa tenían su recién nacido y su mujer, y en una hora de transfiguración sublime, se entraron selva adentro, con la estrella a la frente; aquellos letrados entumidos que, al resplandor del primer rayo, saltaron de la toga tentadora al caballo de pelear; aquellos jóvenes angélicos que del altar de sus bodas o del festín de la fortuna salieron arrebatados de júbilo celeste, a sangrar y morir, sin agua y sin almohada, por nuestro decoro de hombres; aquéllos son carne nuestra, y entrañas y orgullo nuestros, y raíces de nuestra libertad y padres de nuestro corazón, y soles de nuestro cielo y del cielo de la justicia, y sombras que nadie ha de tocar sino con reverencia y ternura.

("The scions of great houses, served from the cradle by slaves, who decided to serve the slaves with their own blood and became the fathers of our country; those generous landowners with a wife and newborn in their homes, who, in the hour of sublime transformation, entered the forest with only a star on their foreheads to guide them; those awkward scholars who, at the dawn of liberty, shook off the enticing toga and mounted their horses into battle; those angelic youths who, overcome with joy sublime, departed the marriage altar or rose from the banquet of life to bleed and die without water or pillow, so that we could regain our dignity as men -such men are our own flesh, our entrails and our pride, the roots of our liberty and the fathers of our soul, the sun that lights our sky and shines wherever justice prevails, and a hallowed presence among us which none can approach without reverence or tenderness.")

Martí envisaged for the future republic not a social revolution, but a peaceful reconstruction:

Los días buenos, los días de trabajo después de la redención, los días de la reedificación, en el contento de un derecho igual, los días de aquella ardiente labor de paz que ha de seguir a la labor de guerra en que allá en el palacio de nuestra ley, con las palmas de mármol que le vamos a poner de pórtico, nos contemos, paseando entre las estatuas de los héroes, los sagaces junto a los fanáticos, que son tan útiles como el sagaz, los buenos juntos a los viles, que son tan necesarios, como los buenos, para indignarlos, y levantarlos y sacarles las chispas . . . los días buenos, del trabajo después de la redención, del trabajo continuo, y de buena fe, para evitar el exceso de política de los desocupados ambiciosos, o de los aspirantes soberbios, o de los logreros de la palabra y del valor.

("The days of work that will follow the redemption, a time of reconstruction in the full enjoyment of equal rights, when the ardent work of peace shall crown the hardships of war, and all alike, the sagacious and the no less useful fanatics, the good and the no less necessary bad, shall together sit in the legislative palace, which we will adorn with marble palms . . . the good days to come after our country is redeemed, days filled with continuous work and good faith, so that we might avoid the political excesses of ambitious idlers, arrogant aspirants to power, and the parasites who feed on the words and the valor of others.")

Such was the just and balanced politics Martí pursued. Finally, in his speech Martí criticized Cuban annexationists who "look to a foreign power to provide a salvation they know not is in their own power"; and the autonomists, advocates of home rule who wanted to arrive at an impossible arrangement with Spain, whom he called "rosewater liberals."³⁷

Perhaps Martí did lie in the pursuit of unspoken political ends, as others have done and continue to do. But shortly after that October tenth speech, Martí wrote: "La república, sin secretos. Para todos ha de ser justa, y se ha de hacer con todos . . . . Levantarse sobre intrigas es levantarse sobre serpientes. En revolución, los métodos han de ser callados, y los fines públicos" ("The republic must be built without secrets and must be just to all and built with all . . . . To rear a republic on intrigues is to raise it over serpents. Revolutions can conceal their means, but should make public their ends").³⁸ Martí did not lie; others did. On the day after his speech, a New York newspaper denounced Martí for making propaganda against Spain while acting as the Argentine consul. On October 11 Martí resigned his post. More eloquent than his oratory at the patriotic function was this act of renunciation: "An apostle," said Martí, "must be so at his own expense."³⁹ The Cuban émigré colony in Tampa was moved by his words and deeds, and the Ignacio Agramonte Club invited him to visit that city. It was Martí's first step in preparation for war. In Tampa he repeated what he had first advanced in New York: his republic was to be "with all and for the good of all," and he used words that were hypocritically incorporated into the preamble of Cuba's Socialist constitution: "I want the first law of our republic to be the reverence of Cubans for the total dignity of man."⁴⁰ It was then that Cuban residents of Key West learned of his program and invited Martí to visit them. There, in the Duval House hotel, owned by the patriot Josefina Bolio, the Cuban Revolutionary party was born, before twenty-six Cubans who favored independence: old soldiers like Fernando Figueredo and Gerardo Castellanos; owners of tobacco factories like Eduardo Hidalgo Gato and Teodoro Pérez; merchants like Cayetano Soria and Martín Herrera; intellectuals like Francisco Maria González and José Dolores Poyo; and workers like Carlos Baliño.

The Cuban Revolutionary party's bylaws were approved not because Martí imposed them, as Enrique Trujillo later implied and Cuban Communists still allege. Quite the contrary: they were approved precisely because they were not Martí's bylaws. They encompassed the best of all the organizational work that preceded Martí. The bylaws represented a program that favored Cuban independence in harmony with the émigré community's varied interests as well as a synthesis of the interests that would exist in the future republic. Article IV of the bylaws reads, for example: "El Partido Revolucionario Cubano [se propone] fundar en el ejercicio franco y cordial de las capacidades legítimas del hombre, un pueblo nuevo y de sincera democracia, capaz de vencer, por el orden del trabajo real y el equilibrio de las fuerzas sociales, los peligros de la libertad repentina en una sociedad compuesta para la esclavitud" ("The Cuban Revolutionary party proposes to found, in the open and cordial exercise of man's legitimate rights, a new and sincere democracy, capable of overcoming through honest work and the balance of social forces, the dangers of a precipitous independence in a society organized for slavery").

In Article V Martí adds: "El Partido Revolucionario Cubano no tiene por objeto llevar a Cuba una agrupación victoriosa que considere la Isla como su presa y dominio, sino preparar, con cuantos medios eficaces le permita la libertad del extranjero, la guerra que se ha de hacer para el decoro y bien de todos los cubanos, y entregar a todo el país la patria libre" ("The Cuban Revolutionary party does not have as its object to bring to Cuba a victorious faction that would take the island as its hostage and domain, but to prepare, with whatever effective means the liberty of a foreign country may allow us, a war which will be waged for the dignity and good of all Cubans, and then to deliver to all our countrymen a free fatherland").⁴¹ Note what the Cuban Revolutionary party proposed to do: "deliver to all our countrymen a free fatherland . . . [and] found, in the open and cordial exercise of man's legitimate rights, a new and sincere democracy [by] balancing social forces . . . for the dignity and good of all Cubans."

There is no evidence here of a desire to establish any sort of dictatorship. The meaning of the clause is made quite clear in a later article in Patria (October 24, 1894), where Martí again leaves proof of his party's program:

Ni se ha adulado, suponiendo que la virtud es sólo de los pobres, y de los ricos nunca; ni se ha ofrecido sin derecho, en nombre de una república a quien nadie puede llevar moldes o frenos, el beneficio del país para una casta de cubanos, ricos soberbios, o pobres codiciosos, sino la defensa ardiente, hasta la hora de morir, del derecho igual de todos los cubanos, ricos o pobres, a la opinión franca y al respeto pleno en los asuntos de la tierra.

("We have not flattered the poor by supposing that virtue only resides in them and never in the rich; nor have we offered the nation's wealth to any caste of Cubans, whether greedy millionaires or covetous paupers, because we have no right to do so in the name of a republic, which will not be shaped according to molds or stopped in its tracks by anyone; what we do offer is the ardent defense, even unto death, of the equal right of all Cubans, rich or poor, to express their opinions frankly and to have them respected in national affairs.")

Martí said this because he understood that "un pueblo está hecho de hombres que resisten, y hombres que empujan: del acomodo, que acapara, y de la justicia, que se rebela: de la soberbia, que sujeta y deprime, y del decoro, que no priva al soberbio de su puesto, ni cede el suyo: de los derechos y opiniones de sus hijos todos está hecho un pueblo, y no de los derechos y opiniones de una clase sola de sus hijos" ("a nation is made of men who resist and men who push, of affluence that monopolizes, and of justice that rebels, of arrogance that subjugates and belittles, and of decorum that neither deprives the arrogant of their place nor gives up his place to them. A nation is made of the rights and opinions of all its children, and not the rights and opinions of a single class").⁴²

The Cuban Revolutionary party was not Martí's capricious invention. It was the product of the combined wisdom and determination of those who had preceded him in the struggle for independence. In the structure and stated aims of Martí's party we can see the influence of a patriotic organization founded in 1871, in New York, by Miguel de Aldama.⁴³ Martí's party took its name from the Partido Revolucionario de la Isla de Cuba, the name used by José Morales Lemus when he entered into an agreement with the United States, also in 1871.⁴⁴ The statutes of the Cuban Revolutionary party borrowed from those of Calixto Garcia's Comité Revolucionario Cubano, founded in 1878, the idea that the revolutionary clubs "debían unirse en la obra común de la independencia, y que ellos funcionarían arbitrando y reuniendo recursos pecuniarios y elementos de guerra o por medio de la propaganda, generalizando y unificando la opinión en el pueblo, o conquistando nuevos prosélitos y simpatizadores que coadyuven al mismo fin" ("should join in the work of independence, and that the function of these clubs should be to collect financial resources and marshal the elements of war, whether by means of propaganda, unifying and directing public opinion, or by winning new converts and sympathizers to the cause").

Thus the Cuban Revolutionary party created a Cuerpo de Consejo with powers identical to those exercised by the New York branch of the Comité Revolucionario Cubano, which declared itself "El Centro de la organización general, con la cual están relacionados todos los clubs que se organicen en Cuba y en el extranjero" ("the center of the general organization, to which all other clubs on the island or abroad are associated").⁴⁵ Three of those who founded the Cuban Revolutionary party with Martí were also members of Club 25, which was organized in Key West on January 31, 1879, as an affiliate of the Comité Revolucionario Cubano: the journalist José Dolores Poyo, the industrialist Teodoro Pérez, and Martín Herrera, founder of the Club San Carlos.⁴⁶ The idea that the party waging the revolution should act as a model for the future republic is found in Máximo Gómez's 1884 "Programa," drawn up in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, when he tried to start another insurrection on the island. The program recommended the creation of clubs and committees under a "Junta Gubernativa" that would coordinate "true unity and action" and might serve as the "basis for the future organization of a provisional government in Cuba."⁴⁷ In 1886, Antonio Maceo, writing from Kingston, Jamaica, to an émigré in New York, also stressed the necessity of establishing a Partido Independiente, whose leaders would be elected by "free vote" and which would become the "official organ" of all Cubans: " Nuestras aspiraciones son amplias, y en ellas caben todos los hombres, cualquiera que sea su modo de pensar y juicio que formen de las cosas" ("Ours are ample aspirations, which accommodate all men regardless of what they think or the judgments they may have formed on different matters").⁴⁸

By the end of 1887, Martí was already formulating ideas that would be acceptable to Cuban émigrés precisely because they were based on previous efforts. Brigadier Juan Fernández Ruz's conspiracy had given Martí an opportunity to refine these concepts. As he wrote to the patriot Juan Arnao, several Cubans "of different opinions and backgrounds" had come together and proposed "acreditar en el país, disipando temores y procediendo en virtud de un fin democrático conocido, la solución revolucionaria . . . unir con espíritu democrático, y en relaciones de igualdad, todas las emigraciones [e] impedir que las simpatías revolucionarias en Cuba se tuerzan y esclavicen por ningún interés de grupo, para preponderancia de una clase social, o la autoridad desmedida de una agrupación militar o civil, ni de una raza sobre otra" ("dispelling fears and proceeding on a set democratic course to advance the revolutionary solution in our country, uniting in a democratic spirit, and on conditions of equality, all the émigré community, while keeping revolutionary sympathies on the island from becoming entangled and beholden to the interests of any one group, and thus prevent the preponderance of any social class, the excessive authority of any military or civilian clique, or of any given section of the country or race over another").⁴⁹

Shortly thereafter, both Key West and Tampa created two revolutionary organizations that were destined to assist greatly in carrying out Martí's project: the Convención Cubana and the Liga Patriótica. When Martí arrived in Tampa in 1891, he could say that everything there already "was done"⁵⁰ and agreed to a set of resoluciones that evolved into the bases and estatutos of his party, which presently were approved unanimously in Key West. The Cuban Revolutionary party was therefore not just Martí's party; as with other projects, Martí's political genius gave the organization its definitive character, but the impetus that engendered it had its beginnings in the work of earlier Cuban patriots. Under no circumstances could one logically say, then, that Martí's party was a precursor of Lenin's, unless we also count among Lenin's precursors Aldama, Morales Lemus, Calixto Garcia, Máximo Gómez, and Antonio Maceo, all of whom contributed in some measure to the creation of the Cuban Revolutionary party. With his proverbial nobility, Martí himself acknowledged this debt: "El Partido Revolucionario," he said in a letter dated August 1893, "no tiene una sola raíz, sino todas las raíces que le vienen de la unanimidad del deseo de independencia" ("does not come from one root only, but from all the roots with which the unanimous desire for independence endows it").⁵¹

Almost immediately after the Cuban Revolutionary party was founded, Enrique Collazo accused Martí, in an open letter, of being an opportunist, casting doubt on the goals of the new organization. In his reply, Martí, using the same ideas, and even the same words he had employed in the bylaws of his party, asked:

¿No ha oído estos días a miles de hijos de Cuba proclamar, sin una sola voz de disentimiento, ni de rico ni pobre, ni de negro ni de blanco, ni de patriota de ayer ni de patriota de hoy, ni de hombre de guerra ni de hombre de paz, que el Partido Revolucionario Cubano no tiene por objeto llevar a Cuba una agrupación victoriosa que considere la isla como su presa o dominio, sino preparar, con cuantos medios eficaces le permita la libertad del extranjero, la guerra que se ha de hacer para el decoro y bien de todos los cubanos, y entregar al país la patria libre?⁵²

("Have you not heard in these past days thousands of Cubans, rich and poor, black and white, the patriot of yesterday and the patriot of today, the man of war and the man of peace, proclaim without a single word of dissent, that the Cuban Revolutionary Party does not have as its object to bring to Cuba a victorious faction which would take the island as its hostage and domain, but to prepare, with whatever effective means the freedom of a foreign country allows us, a war which will be waged for the dignity and good of all Cubans, and to deliver to all our countrymen a free fatherland?")

Similarly, in a letter dated May 1892, Martí explained to Cuban émigrés in Jamaica that his party would prevent dictatorial governments, like those which plagued other Latin American countries after independence from arising in the future Cuban Republic: "Con estas Bases y Estatutos del Partido Revolucionario Cubano se ha querido . . . procurar desde la raíz salvar a Cuba de los peligros de la autoridad personal y de las disensiones en que, por falta de la intervención popular y de los hábitos democráticos en su organización, cayeron las primeras repúblicas americanas" ("With these bylaws and statutes the Cuban Revolutionary party endeavored from the very start to save Cuba from the dangers inherent in the abuse of personal power and to avoid the internal conflicts that caused the first Latin American republics to fall, because they were organized without popular participation and without democratic traditions"). ⁵³

The following month in Patria, we find Martí again speaking about the nature of the party:

Los partidos políticos que han de durar; los partidos que arrancan de la conciencia pública; los partidos que vienen a ser el molde visible del alma de un pueblo, y su brazo y su voz; los partidos que no tienen por objeto el beneficio de un hombre interesado, o de un grupo de hombres, no se han de organizar con la prisa indigna y artificiosa del interés personal, sino, como se organiza el Partido Revolucionario Cubano, con el desahogo y espontaneidad de la opinión libre

("The enduring political party that can shake the public conscience and is molded to the soul of the nation; the party which is the arm and voice of its people, and does not seek to benefit any self-seeking individual or group of men, cannot be organized with the unworthy haste and artifice that are associated with personal interest, but like the Cuban Revolutionary party with the ease and spontaneity of free opinion").⁵⁴

On yet another occasion Martí explained that the Cuban Revolutionary party was the "legitimate heir of the drafters of the Guáimaro constitution";⁵⁵ and he issued the official proclamation of his party on April 10, 1892, the anniversary of Céspedes's and Agramonte's constitution. In a travesty of this gesture, the Castro government opened "debate" of its 1976 socialist constitution on yet another anniversary of the Guáimaro constitution. Martí could in all fairness claim that his party was "legitimate heir of the Guáimaro constituents" because the leaders of the Ten Years' War created a democratic, republican, and parliamentary government based on the division of powers. Such was the independence of the legislature under the Guáimaro constitution of 1869 that in 1873 the House of Representatives went as far as impeaching and removing Carlos Manuel de Céspedes as president. There is, on the other hand, no basis for comparing the socialist constitution of 1976 -with its concentration of power in the Chief of State, who under "democratic centralism" is vested with unlimited authority as head of the Communist party -to the Guáimaro constitution, which founded a republic that was open to all.

The better to underscore the difference between Martí's party and the Communist party of Cuba, let us turn to another passage in Patria, where Martí describes a typical meeting of revolutionary clubs associated with his party:

El de la profesión está al lado del del oficio, y el del oficio va elegante y culto porque el amor de la libertad da al hombre con mayor respeto de sí, mayor respeto de los demás. El acaudalado ya canoso se estruja, para estar más cerca, entre dos jornaleros. La juventud, como un guardia, rodea la tribuna, y se bebe el discurso pálida y silenciosa.⁵⁶

(The professional sits next to the laborer, and the laborer is elegant and cultured because the love of liberty gives a man greater self-respect and makes him more respectful of others. The well-to-do old man huddles between two workers in order to hear better the proceedings. The silent and wan young men, like a guard of honor, encircle the rostrum, hanging on every word.)

Among those present on that particular occasion were Sotero Figueroa, a humble Puerto Rican who worked at a print shop; the lawyer Gonzalo de Quesada, who was employed at the law offices of Stern and Curtis, which specialized in creating the legal structure for the increasing U.S. monopolies in Latin America; Rafael Serra, a black journalist who, with Martí, founded a school for the poor; Manuel F. Barranco, owner of El Progreso tobacco factory, one of the largest in the city; the young poet, Francisco Gonzalo Marín; and Ramón Luis Miranda, one of the most successful Cuban physicians in the United States. The following year, Martí again celebrated the heterogeneous character of his organization:

Las glorias todas de la guerra, libres en el extranjero, están en el Partido Revolucionario Cubano . . . . Unense en el voto, a elegir su representación, doctores y obreros, fabricantes y mecánicos, comerciantes y generales. Junto al íntegro presidente de nuestra república, espera ansioso, puesto a la mesa de una industria humilde, el bachiller descontento de su inútil diploma.⁵⁷

(All the glorious figures of the last war, who enjoy freedom abroad, are in the Cuban Revolutionary party . . . . Doctors and workers, manufacturers and mechanics, merchants and generals, come together to vote and elect their representatives. Next to the honest former president of the Republic-in-Arms, an anxious university graduate with a useless diploma who works in a humble business, sits and waits.)

Yet again on April 17, 1894, still preaching unity and cooperation, Martí said, also in Patria:

Un pueblo es composición de muchas voluntades, viles o puras, francas o torvas, impedidas por la timidez o precipitadas por la ignorancia . . . . El peligro de nuestra sociedad estaría en conceder demasiado al empernido espíritu colonial, que quedará hoceando en las raíces mismas de la república . . . y otro peligro social pudiera haber en Cuba: adular, cobarde, los rencores y confusiones, que en las almas heridas y menesterosas deja la colonia arrogante tras sí, y levantar un poder infame sobre el odio o desprecio de la sociedad democrática naciente a los que, en use de su sagrada libertad, la desamen o se la opongan. A quien merme un derecho, córtesele la mano, bien sea el soberbio quien se lo merme al inculto, bien sea el inculto quien se lo merme al soberbio . . . . Si desde la sombra entrase en ligas con los humildes o con los soberbios, sería criminal la revolución, e indigna de que muriésemos por ella .... Triunfará con esa alma, y perecerá sin ella . . . . Sea nuestro lema: libertad sin ira.⁵⁸

"Libertad sin ira." These words alone would suffice to put Martí at odds with any doctrine based on class struggle, and the reduction of man to slavery by a totalitarian state. In Cuba games are played with names and labels, but no amount of stacking or shuffling of cards will ever place Martí on the losing side of history. Far from being a precursor of Lenin, Martí presaged the victory over Leninism, and was in this sense not a pre-Leninist, but a post-Leninist. Martí possessed the noble indignation which all great souls feel toward the social ills and excesses of capitalism, and one wonders at times how a man of his sensibilities did not succumb then to the lure of Marxism. Not because Martí was unacquainted with Karl Marx's theories, which certainly were not unknown in the New York of Martí's day.⁵⁹ Still, Martí was not led astray by Marxism, nor by any other of the radical ideologies that gained ground at the end of the 19th century as the result of the misery of the workers, the brazenness of corrupt politicians and the arrogance of the powerful.⁶⁰

As Ortega y Gasset explains, "Man is himself and his circumstances" but the genius sometimes knows no circumstances-that is, he is not bound by time and space as are other mortals. Martí transcended his own age and was able to foresee the failure of totalitarian political systems in our own day. For all of us, what has happened in the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries has come as a surprise. But one hundred years ago, Martí knew they would fail, as he also knew of the errors that could alienate the Cuban republic from his teachings and of the terrible retribution it would suffer as a consequence.