Reflections by comrade Fidel
THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE
OF JOSE MARTI’S DEATH
Leaving aside the problems afflicting
human beings today, our Homeland had the privilege of being the cradle of one
of the most extraordinary thinkers born in this hemisphere: Jose Marti.
Tomorrow, May 19th, will be 115th
anniversary of his glorious death.
It would not be possible to appreciate the
scope of his greatness without bearing in mind that the drama of his life was
written with such extraordinary personalities as Antonio Maceo,
an everlasting symbol of revolutionary firmness and the protagonist of the Baragua Protest, and Maximo
Gomez, a Dominican internationalist and a teacher of Cuban combatants in the
two wars of independence in which they took part. The Cuban Revolution, that
for more than half a century has endured the battering of the most powerful
empire that ever existed, was the result of the teachings of those
predecessors.
Despite the fact that four days of entries
to Marti’s diary have remained out of reach to historians, what is reflected in
the rest of that carefully written personal diary and other documents belonging
to him suffices to know the details of what happened. Just like in the Greek
tragedies, it was a discrepancy among giants.
On the eve of his death in combat he wrote
to his dear friend Manuel Mercado: “…Every day now I am in danger of giving my
life for my country and my duty –since I understand it and have the spirit to
carry it out—in order to prevent, by the timely independence of Cuba, the United
States from extending its hold across the Antilles and falling with all the
greater force on the lands of our America. All I have done up to now and I will
do is for that. It has had to be done in silence, and indirectly, for there are
things that must be concealed in order t o be attained: proclaiming them for
what they are would give rise to obstacles too formidable to be overcome.”
When Marti wrote these lapidary words,
Marx had already written The Communist
Manifesto in 1848, that is, 47 tears before Marti’s death, and Darwin had
published his book on The Origin of
Species in 1859, just to mention the two works that, in my view, have most
influenced the history of mankind.
Marx was so extraordinarily selfless that perhaps
his most important scientific work, The
Capital, would have never been published if Frederic Engels
had not collected and ordered the materials to which the author devoted his
entire life. Engels did not only do that but was also
the author of a work entitled Introduction
to the Dialectics of Nature, where he anticipated the moment when the
energy of the sun was depleted.
Man did not know then how to release the
energy contained in the matter which Einstein described in his famous formula
nor did he have the computers capable of performing billions of operations per
second and of collecting and transmitting the billions of reactions per second
that occur in the cells of the tens of pairs of chromosomes equally contributed
by mother and father, a genetic and reproductive phenomenon that I learned
about only after the victory of the Revolution, as I was looking for the best
characteristics to be used in the production of food of animal origin in the
conditions of our climate, which can be applied to plants subjected to the same
heredity laws.
The incomplete education that the people
with more resources received in school, --mostly private schools which were
considered the best education centers-- made us illiterates with a little
higher level than those who could neither read nor write or who attended public
schools.
On the other hand, the first country in
the world that attempted to implement Marx ideas was
Lenin, who established the First
International, believed that there was not any organization in the world more
loyal to Marx’s ideas than the Bolshevik fraction of the Social Democrat
Workers’ Party of Russia. Although a large part of that immense country lived
in semi feudal conditions, its working class was very active and extremely combative.
Lenin was a restless critic of chauvinism
in the books he wrote as of 1915. In his
work Imperialism, Higher Stage of
Capitalism written in April 1917, --months before the Bolshevik fraction of
that Party seized power from the Menshevik fraction-- he showed that he was the
first to understand the role to be played by the countries subjected to
colonialism such as China and other very important nations in various regions
of the world.
At the same time, Lenin’s courage and
audacity showed in his acceptance of the armored train that, for reasons of
tactical convenience, the German army offered him to travel from
Somehow, chance would have it that, thanks
to their personal qualities, two sons of Spain would end up playing a prominent
role in the Spanish-American War: the chief of the Spanish troops in the
fortification of El Viso, which defended the access
to Santiago from the heights of El Caney, an officer who fought until he was
mortally wounded and who caused more than three hundred casualties among the Rough Riders –tough American riders
organized by then Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and who were forced by
the hasty landing to leave their ardent horses behind—, and the Admiral who,
following the stupid orders of the Spanish government, set sail from the
Santiago de Cuba bay carrying on board the Marine Corps, a selective force, and
left with his squadron the only way he could, that is, parading his ships, one
by one, in the narrow access in front of the powerful Yankee fleet, which
displayed its armored ships with its powerful cannons to shoot against the much
slower and weak Spanish ships. As it was only logical, the Spanish ships with
their combat troops and marines were sunk in the deep waters of the Bartlett
Trench. Only one of them could make it to a few meters from the border of the
abyss. The survivors of that force fell captive of the
Martinez Campos was arrogant and
vindictive. As he was full of hatred for his failed attempt at pacifying the
island like in 1871, he supported the vile and rancorous policy of the Spanish
government. Valeriano Weyler
was his replacement in command of Cuba; this man, in cooperation with those who
sent the warship Maine looking for a
justification for an intervention in Cuba, decreed the concentration of the
population, an action that brought great suffering to the Cuban people and
served as a pretext to the United States for the imposition of its first
economic blockade, which caused a great shortage of food and the death of
countless people.
Thus were facilitated the Paris
negotiations where Spain renounced every right of sovereignty and property over
Cuba after over 400 years of occupation in the name of the King of Spain, since
mid October 1492, when Christopher Columbus said: “This is the most beautiful
land that human eyes ever saw.”
The Spanish version of the battle that
decided the fate of
An additional disgrace fell on the
Norwegian committee that awards the Nobel Prize when in the year 1906 it looked
for ridiculous pretexts to grant that honor to Theodore Roosevelt, who was
elected President of the
I can only bear witness to the way in
which the heroic city fell in the hands of the Rebel Army on
Then, Marti’s ideas triumphed in our
country!
Fidel Castro Ruz