José Martí was an acute observer of the United States, where he lived for some fifteen years, and is considered one of the great writers of the Hispanic world. His importance for the American reader, however, stems even more from the universality and timeliness of his thought.

Martí devoted his life to ending colonial rule in Cuba and to preventing the island from falling under the control of the United States or a regime inimical to the democratic principles he held. With those goals, and with the conviction that the freedom of the Caribbean was crucial to Latin American security and to the balance of power in the world, he devoted his talent to the forging of a nation. Hence the breadth of his work: he was a revolutionary, a statesman, a guide, and a mentor. And because his vast learning enabled him to move comfortably in the most diverse fields, his teaching is rich indeed.

Martí was born in Havana in 1853. At seventeen he was exiled to Spain for his opposition to colonial rule. There he published a pamphlet exposing the horrors of political imprisonment in Cuba, which he himself had experienced. Upon graduating from the University of Saragossa, he established himself in Mexico City, where he began his literary career. His objection to a regime installed by a military coup led him to depart for Guatemala, but government abuses soon forced him to abandon that country as well. After returning to Cuba under a general amnesty in 1878, he joined in conspiracies against the Spanish authorities that once again led to his exile. Banished to Spain, he quickly left for the United States, and then, after a year in New York, for Venezuela, where he hoped to settle, only to have still another dictatorship force him to depart. Martí lived in New York again from 1881 through 1895, when he left to join the war for Cuban independence that he had painstakingly organized. There he died in one of its first skirmishes.

During the years he spent in the United States, Martí analyzed American society with clarity and insight as a correspondent for the most influential newspapers of Argentina, Venezuela, and Mexico. "In order to know a country," he wrote, "one must study all its aspects and expressions, its elements, its tendencies, its apostles, its poets, and its bandits." This he did, and because of his uncompromising honesty, his chronicles contain both criticism and praise that have sometimes been put to improper use. It was the period when the American experiment in self-government and free enterprise was crystallizing, now strengthening, now undermining moral values. Martí roundly censured materialism, prejudice, expansionist arrogance, and political corruption, and enthusiastically applauded love of liberty, tolerance, egalitarianism, and the practice of democracy. Thus, in October 1885, contrasting the opulence and poverty in New York, he warned his readers: "It is necessary to study the way this nation sins, the way it errs, the way it founders, so as not to founder as it does. . . . One must not merely take the statistics at face value but hold them up to examination and, without being dazzled, see the meaning they contain. This is a great nation, and the only one where men can be men, but as a result of conceit over its prosperity and of its inability to satisfy its appetites, it is falling into moral pygmyism, into a poisoning of reason, into a reprehensible adoration of all success."

Martí's thought has ethical foundations: as a political theorist and artist he can be understood only in terms of his faith in morality. Every inquiry into the nature of man and his role on earth led Martí to identify good with truth. For him there was no force behind what he considered right unless it had the strength of truth. He believed that "every human being has within him an ideal man, just as every piece of marble contains in a rough state a statue as beautiful as the one that Praxiteles the Greek made of the god Apollo." To attain the salvation of man the only thing needed, he felt, was to free man from apathy and egotism.

Although given to pure speculation, Martí had an overriding desire to affect reality, and so constantly strove to reduce abstract thought to concrete formulae of conduct. His ability to do so was singular. Martí himself explained the exercise thus: "What proud work could be done by sending forth to face life together three beings who think differently about it: one, like the Brahman and the Morabite, given to the impossible worship of absolute truth, the second to exuberant self-interest, and the third with a Brahman's spirit restrained by prudent reason and going through life as I do, sadly and sure that no reward will come, daily drawing fresh water from an ever recalcitrant stone."

How to achieve a functional accommodation of truth, self-interest, and reason was the central question posed by Martí. Although he did not systematize his knowledge and, therefore, left no treatise on political philosophy, his works are replete with ideas on the purpose of the state and its relations to society. He thought it possible to reconcile individual with collective needs and disapproved of all governmental forms that proposed subjecting either, since freedom was for him the only viable climate for human existence: "A nation is made of the rights and opinions of all its children," he wrote, "and not the rights and opinions of a single class." He knew that the differences and inequalities among men could not be ignored, but that neither could they be left to the whims of history or the manipulation of a single group. Rather, he recommended correcting the imbalances through "social charity and social concern," the objectives of which were, he declared, "to reform nature herself, for man can do that much; to give long arms to those whose arms are short; to even the chances for men who have few gifts; to compensate for lack of genius with education."

Martí's own example lent validity to his doctrines, and the strength of his style enhanced their effectiveness as political and philosophical instruments. His literary work is an invaluable achievement of expression and is conditioned throughout by moral objectives; the artist and the apostle became inseparable in his work. "In literature one should not be Narcissus but a missionary," he proclaimed. For Martí aesthetics was but an aspect of ethics: "Man is noble and inclined to what is best. After knowing beauty and the morality that comes from it, he can never after live without morality and beauty." In his art and as a critic of art he resolutely voiced faith in human perfectibility, a faith in total agreement with his insistence on coupling act with thought.

Insofar as Martí made freedom and justice cornerstones and could never accept curtailment of the natural expansiveness of the human spirit, insofar as he believed, on the contrary, that man's redemption would come through love and unfettered reason, his doctrine has become subversive in Cuba. However, those who hold power there cannot erase Martí from the minds of his people. They distort and falsify his image, twisting his words or taking them out of context. One of Martí's most familiar apothegms is: "I want the first law of our republic to be the reverence of Cubans for the total dignity of man." The Cuban socialist Constitution maliciously incorporates that sentence, but both the Constitution and the system that issued it disregard the remainder of the thought: "Either the republic is built on the character of each one of its children, on their habit of working with their hands and thinking for themselves, on the full exercise of their abilities and respect for the right of others fully to exercise theirs, as if it were a matter of family honor, in short, on a passion for the dignity of man, or the republic is not worth a single tear from one of our women, a single drop of blood from one of our brave men."

Martí's teachings controvert the political system that has been implanted in Cuba-the restraint on individual freedom, the intolerance, the materialism, the foreign dependence-just as his writings condemn all despotic regimes and all abridgments of human rights, including the lack of spirituality, mammonism, and arrogance of capitalist society. For this reason, it is of great urgency to disseminate his thought with its full force: his own words speak more eloquently against the Cuban apostasy than all the accusations others might make.