Havana, Cuba. – In 1953, Fidel Castro said that the attack on the Moncada barracks was a relief to José Martí, because, he said, “it seemed that the memory of the apostle was going to die in the year of his centenary.”
That statement was far from the truth. In the previous months, while Fidel Castro and his group prepared the attack on the Santiago barracks, the regime of Fulgencio Batista He commemorated in style the 100 years of the birth of Martí, on January 28, 1853.
Batista, who claimed “to continue the holy footprints of Martí”, had resumed in 1953, on the occasion of the Centenary, his 1937 initiative to build a great monument to Martí, which entrusted the sculptor Juan José Sicre, and which was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one who was the one He erected in the Civic Square, which would be renamed the Castro regime as Plaza de la Revolución.
In turn, Carlos Príothe president overthrown by the Batista quartelazo, on March 10, 1952, affirmed that his party, the authentic, “had collected the torch of the Cuban Revolutionary Party that remained in two rivers, invisible for a whole generation, but lighting, heating The best embers of the Cuban soul. ”
Prio referred to the party created in 1934 by his predecessor in the presidency, Ramón Grau San Martín, baptized with the same name that Martí created to organize the war of independence, but to which he added “authentic” in parentheses, he said, for differentiate from “the false Martians.”
From independence, all Cuban politicians, of all flags and ideological signs, both in power and opposition, have taken advantage of Martí, trying to appropriate and proclaiming being the continuators of their ideology.
But the one who took the palms in Martí’s appropriation attempts was Fidel Castro. Not enough to name him as “the intellectual author” of the attack on the Moncada barracks, he used it as the mentor of his pathological confrontation with the United States, and took the Cuban revolutionary party as a reference for the unique party of his communist dictatorship.
It is not just politicians who cite José Martí: all Cubans always have it on lip flower. It does not matter that many only know of Martí the few phrases and verses that they badly learned at school and that taught them to repeat from the wheelbarrow.
And there is a different Marti for each Cuban, almost always little understood or misunderstood, which is invoked according to the conveniences of each one.
We have done a myth of Martí, but we do not pay much attention to his teachings. Rather we contradict them. And we continue to idealize it, believing that if we have not died in two rivers on May 19, 1895, national history would have been very different.
Could Martí have, after independence, do better than as he did in the best and deal with those who intended to direct the Republic as if it were a military camp? Could I have imposed their civilist and democratic vision on mambises, voluntary and weapons leaders, such as José Miguel Gómez, Mario García Menocal and Gerardo Machado?
Martí, from exile, where he lived just over 20 of his 42 years, created with his pen an ideal tank. The one that undoubtedly dreamed would have been much better than the real if its countrymen would have managed to do it. But we could never.
What was that phrase so cited by Martí that he could never materialize, that of a republic and a nation “with all and for the good of all”? We just have to continue regretting our ills … and quote Martí.
