AND
This statement It is part of the opening paragraph of the visionary and at the same time programmatic text Our Americawhich for the first time clearly outlined the root identity of the peoples living from the Rio Bravo to Patagonia, with the sole purpose of providing them with those stones of conscience necessary for the peoples who are preparing to fight for their independence. The paragraph says: “These times are not for going to bed with a handkerchief on your head, but with weapons as a pillow.” […]. The weapons of judgment that defeat the others.” Knowledge, the awareness that is forged when discovering the real and fierce world that surrounds us, must be the weapons that bind the need to change. People who do not know each other must hurry to get to know each other, like those who are going to fight together.
. José Martí worked obsessively to achieve this awareness and to cement the unity so necessary in a struggle as unequal and difficult as the one that was beginning in those final years of the 19th century, when the nascent Yankee imperialism was preparing to fall upon our America.
Recently we were called by the Network in Defense of Humanity and against Neoliberalism to reflect on the validity of the thought of the Cuban visionary José Martí. Perhaps today, more than ever, this statement is decisive. We are under constant media bombardment, armed with a thousand computer and electronic flows that daily flood the world. Manuel Castells sentenced in The information age that the power of flow is greater than the flow of power
At that time, perhaps, the expected democratization of the open use of networks was credible, but as an increasingly exorbitant and developed technology is dominated by power, it has come to control the world through an unattainable and overwhelming flow.
We are witnessing a hybrid war, which combines genocidal interventionist warmongering that destroys countries; it is enough to point out Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria and today Palestine, which are televised with impunity every day; the economic blockades that deploy greater financial capacity and means of control than before, Cuba 65 years without truce embodies this resistance; with the new coups d’état implemented through the judicial powers, the lawfareaccompanied by the media onslaught that has dismissed legally
to the presidents: Lugo, of Paraguay; Zelaya, of Honduras; Rousseff, of Brazil; Castillo, of Peru; Lula imprisoned; persecuted the Kirchners and Correa; denies the victory of Arévalo in Guatemala, and slyly turns to ignoring the elections in Venezuela.
At the age of 15, Martí wrote a poem that managed to capture the essence of his struggle-destiny and the prophecy of his life: Love, mother, for the homeland / is not the ridiculous love for the earth, / nor for the grass that our feet tread on; / it is the invincible hatred of those who oppress it, / it is the eternal resentment of those who attack it.
At 17 he was sent to the stone quarries and then deported to Spain. He was deported twice until he settled in Spain. ouramericans and of the other
not ours, but from the turbulent and brutal north that disdains us and is in the time of debauchery and ambition
.
He died on the battlefield at the age of 42, producing a work collected in 28 volumes; journalist, essayist, poet, diplomat and above all a man consistent with his thinking, he was a tireless organizer who amalgamated the Cuban Revolutionary Party to give the final battle against Spanish colonialism and prevent American expansion. He himself called his work Fierce letters
without referring to them being cruel or savage, but to the fact that they were truthful and vigorous, revealing irrefutable essences. It was necessary to expose the falsehoods of those liberal dictatorships, a Porfirio Díaz, Julio Argentino Roca, Justo Rufino Barrios, who knew well, foreignizing liberals who governed imitating the empires, ignoring their own land left that the colony continued to live in the republic
; to be able to govern new towns
New governments are needed that know how to create. The new, natural man, there are no races, there are equal men. “The mute Indian went to the mountains, the black man alone and unknown sang at night, the peasant, creator, turned blind with indignation […]in them is the real man of our America.”
Martí’s strategic call was expressed with historic force in the second Declaration of Havana in 1962 and remains the central core of the struggles ouramericans: The problem of independence is not the change of forms, but of spirit
, It is time for the second and true independence
. This great humanity has said enough and has begun to move forward. Cuba, which includes Martí’s dream in its Constitution: The full dignity of man
Cuba, the country of Martí, Mella, Guiteras and Fidel, remains today the first bastion of resistance. ouramerican.
