Havana Cuba. — 127 years have passed since that day in which a shot broke Martí’s chest; and I would have liked to write a loving, substantial and even exalted text; a text that had the force of gunpowder, of the shrapnel that stabbed into his chest making him fall off his horse and remain still, forever, on his land, Cuba. I would like to praise Martí best, but there are already many very good ones, although none reached the true dimensions of the Patrician. Long and very wide are the humanities of Martí, and many, but they are never enough.
I would like to distance myself from those kitsch that accompany the speeches that tried, still try, to exalt the figure of Martí, but I am not sure that I can achieve it. I don’t want to make it rain on wet, and I know that nothing will make me get the essence of it. Perhaps it would be good to talk about Martí in love with one woman and then with another, but those stories of the man who made women surrender have already rained. Novels have been written about his life, and stories that speculate, that even fabulate with the loves that he awakened for the world. I myself once made him the object of someone’s desire.
One could speak of the investigations into the many illnesses that Martí suffered, of his damaged teeth, of that frightful injury to one of his testicles, the one that produced a shackle chain when he was in the Havana quarries, but they already have a long book, an excellent book. Much has been written about Martí, and a lot of things are also said, and some are ridiculous, like the one that blames him for being the intellectual author of the assault on the Moncada barracks. Much is said about Martí, so much so that it is even speculated that today he was a Fidelista, that he would have walked arm in arm with the Castros.
And one thing is the speech and another is the truth. In Cuba, little and badly, Martí is read, and if a child is asked about him, he will immediately mention “The Pink Shoes” and Pilar, and the same will happen if a university student is questioned, even if we have a “ Center for Martian Studies” which is based in a house in Vedado that belonged to Martí’s son and his wife, although, in schools, children know his work by hearsay, due to brief fragments of his poems reproduced in textbooks , for the image that presents him on the battlefield, after the shot and just before falling to the ground.
And the most terrible thing is that Martí is, for the Cuban power, only a subterfuge. Martí is not in the blood of those who invoke him in assemblies and congresses. Marti’s doctrines are frivolously repeated in the communist cloisters; those that have the name of party congress or national assembly of popular power. And the heroic stories have some vulgarity, they are masks, they are just tics. The Martí that exists in those who hold power is just resentment, it is guilt, and all of that determines their behavior, and distances them from the duties and moral obligations they have with the people, even with the figure of Martí.
Martí is, for the communists, an order that is pinned, and with a brief hook, on the shirt of a communist as a reward for his fidelity, for his silence, for the applause dedicated before to power. Martí is a photo behind the image of Fidel. Martí is a “Study Center” in the house where his son lived, while the house in which that son was born is just rubble.
From the Center for Martian Studies to the Fidel Castro Center
The house of Martí’s son and his wife now houses the Martí studies center, founded a few years ago to centralize, to control, studies on the hero, a hero who must surely be closely related to communism and the figure of Fidel Castro and with everything he represents. The Martí studies center is made to prove that Martí is Fidel, or the other way around. Martí was for Fidel only a portrait behind his figure. Martí served to legitimize his outrages, as a warning that he was the “intellectual author” of all the disaster that the one who was born in Birán, so far from Bethlehem, achieved.
Martí has a center where his work is studied. Fidel now has a study center about his work in what used to be an old mansion in Vedado. A center whose restoration cost a Potosí; cost the marble, and the exuberant garden with plants brought from anywhere on the Island, as many as 11,000 plants, and also nine exhibition halls and a replica of the Granma yacht and a jeep, and a lot of other objects, which according to someone: “they could make anyone bristle”, I suppose because of the luxury of each corner, because of their diamond-shaped ceilings that remind us of their epaulettes and their rank of commander. And bristle, make the walls that light up to highlight some of his many phrases, and more, and more.
And there is the Fidel Castro center, of an exultant and also insulting luxury, especially when compared to the discretion of the center of studies of Martí, where they say that the work of the most universal of Cubans, the apostle of the country, is protected. that did not provoke much remembrance for the anniversary of his death, that which does not matter much after that of Fidel Castro, of that Fidel whose boots are kept today, made by the same shoemaker who previously made the ones that really fit on his feet, those same feet that paved the way that led to Martí’s oblivion, even on the anniversaries of his death.
OPINION ARTICLE
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