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Martí: “If you sow it in the earth, it will grow”

By Martin Corona Jeres

When you carefully read the writings of Cuba’s National Hero Jose Marti or study his life, you can see how his vital experience and knowledge made him grow as a poet, journalist, narrator, critic, politician and independent thinker.

Marti’s thinking was so illuminated, such creation and so sure that he had chosen the path of the good that he could convincingly affirm: “If you sow it in the earth, it will grow…”.

Who can doubt that after his glorious death, 115 years ago on May 19th, 1895, the man of the “Golden Age” continued growing?

What other way can we explain his presence among the Latin American and Caribbean revolutionary intellectuals at the start of the 20th century?

How can one understand how his thinking has remained in a fundamental place in the socio-political conceptions in Cuban revolutionaries?

How can you explain that Marti’s thinking is strongly seeded in the first socialist revolution in the western hemisphere?

Cintio Vitier, maestro of Cuban intellectuals, affirmed in 1992 that the Cuban revolutionaries’ naturalness in following Marti and Marx is “without a doubt a spiritual event, the most original thinking of the Cuban Revolution, whose total knowledge cannot be really understood completely and whose results is a long way away from being exhausted”.

Jose Marti, who died in combat in Dos Rios, learned from Simon Bolivar and other great independence heroes of the continent; from the Cuban defeat in the 10-Year-War (1868-1878 uprising against Spain); of the US penetration south of the Bravo River and its intentions which he discovered in the 1st International American Congress and the International Monetary Conference.

He saw two opposite and non stop processes: the peak of US imperialism and the liberation of Latin America.

In 1899 he said: “Only a virile and unanimous response, for which there is still time without risk, can free all the Spanish American nations at one time from the anxiety and agitation - fatal in a country's hour of development - in which the secular and admittedly predominant policy of a powerful and ambitious neighbor”.

Six years later he wrote: “A free Antilles will save the Independence of Our America, and the already doubtful honor and pain of the British America, and perhaps they will accelerate and secure the balance of the world”.

On May 18th, 1895, a day before falling in combat, Marti confessed that his revolutionary work intended to “prevent for a time, with the independence of Cuba, the United States from extending itself through the Antilles and falling….on the lands of America”.

The Jose Marti Conference, held in Havana in 1992, declared: “In the modern world, with a crisis in moral values and unarmed in his hopes and utopias for those that have created out of their thoughts; culture and in general all human activity, a simple change of value, Marti, as a man, writer and revolutionary, exemplifies the most profound ethic values, those that remain and transforms, enriches and contributes to humanity’s progress.”  (Cubaminrex- ACN)

 

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