Martí: the solar man

The dawn is leaving; the newspapers announce that the gallows are ready to kill a man in the public square. It is very cold in Havana. A child is born, whom everyone would call José Julián. The sun is a small creature in Leonor's arms. It is January 28, 1853.

 

And from that day on, her whole life is a struggle of a family facing hardship and pain. At the age of nine, he sees a black man whipped, hanging from a ceibo tree in the bush, and swears to wash the crime with his blood. He jumps from the school bench to the prison bench.

 

Cuba is already in his veins and he is ready to die for it. In the quarries of San Lazaro, they skin his back, his ankle, his groin, his eyes, they bite him with hate, and he does not know how to hate: he turns love into the only way of human salvation.

 

He is deported to the Isle of Pines, then to Spain, and goes around the world carrying chains inside him.

 

He defends Cuba with the fire of his words; he has already defended it with the blood of his wounds. Martí is also a man of the 10th of October and of the deed that explodes under the cry of a bell.

 

He writes for the newspapers of many countries, because writing is an ethical and pedagogical exercise. He plunges his hands into Our America and reveals the telluric force of the natural man. He understands that there are two Americas and that the brutal North is the greatest danger to our lands. And he is not anti-American; he loves Lincoln and fears Cutting, the Yankee adventurer who stirs up war against Mexico.

 

He gives his son a booklet of poems, and for the soul of Cuba, the Versos Sencillos. His poetry is a giant that rises to warn that justice is not alien to beauty. He creates a magazine for children, its pages are open to the dialogue of all times.

 

He is the politician, the hero and the artist. He interprets and fights within his time, and the utopia of his message is always installed in the horizon of the future. He not only wants the independence of Cuba, but to balance the world from the Caribbean Islands and to build a moral Republic with all and for the good of all.

 

It is not a set phrase, it is the formula of triumphant love. Everyone receives the open arms of Cuba, with a condition of human fraternity: to want the good of all. That is not an easy task; that is why in Martí we will not find the fullness of triumph, but what he calls the Homeland as agony and duty.

 

His criticism of modernity that believes excessively in science as a way to happiness, and his observations on socialist ideas, cross the centuries and warn us about the dangers at the time of any redemption of men. He knows the human soul, finds it ugly, but never loses faith in the best of human beings.

 

He prepares a war that he finds painful and necessary. Only unity can ensure independence and justice. He does not fall into the trap of sacrificing the opinion of others, and assures us that "the unity of thought does not mean the servitude of opinion." And he does not fail to understand that "the people that divides itself kills itself."

 

He wants to die facing the sun and lives the moment when Gómez kisses the stones of Playita de Cajobabo. He comes to give his blood so that the verse can be saved together with his artist's hands. The shots sound in Dos Ríos, and the grass keeps the sacred seed.

 

Cuba needs Martí because his immense jungle is a hymn to the dignity of man, to the pride of being Cuban, to the respect for all cultures and creeds; ecumenism and spherical thought that respects an insect, a tree, life.

 

His ideas are lanterns in the darkest night, and if from Marti's jungle you only want to take one thought, you will always find a luminous message: "The only law of authority is love".  

 

When Leonor carried her son that cold dawn, she did not know that she had given birth to a solar man. Cuba and the world know it.

 

And we must not forget the mystery of justice embraced by the earth where the palms grow.