1891 happens to be the same
year in which Jose Marti held found the Cuban Revolutionary Party. The
main object of this new movement in the ongoing struggle of Cuban
Libre was Cuban “independence from Spain and the United
States—untrammeled, unconditional, uncompromising national sovereignty.”
Marti asserted, “The solution to the Cuban problem is not a political
but a social one.”
Samuel Farber sums up Marti by insisting, “Marti’s thoughts and actions
were populist rather than aristocratic, democratic rather than pervaded
by the authoritarianism of Bolivar; and although he was not a socialist
his politics were certainly socially aware.”
Perhaps it is also important to highlight that Marti’s philosophy was
“accompanied by a strong element of voluntarism and romanticism which
came to pervade the Cuban populist tradition.”
Marti was likewise apprehensive regarding the intentions of the
U.S. Marti warned, “A country that trades with only one country dies.”
This caused Marti to advocate a speeding war, thus eliminating Spanish
rule before the US could act. In this was, movement Marti helped founds
had an economic, as well as social and political, component. Jean-Paul
Sartre argued, “The ‘great Spanish-Cuban war” was not simply an
anticolonialist insurrection. The country wanted to revise its outmoded
structures, to bring about, one hundred years late, its bourgeois
revolution, and to found its civil liberties on economic liberalism—the
rights of the citizen over those of the landowner, [and] a modest but
effectual industry.”
However, lamentably, Marti die early in the conflict and “far from being
the spontaneous mass uprising and quick overthrow of the Spanish
government Marti had envisioned...the War of Independence became a
protracted struggled which dragged on for three years and ended with the
foreign intervention Marti had hoped its quickness would forestall.”
For more information:
http://www.fiu.edu/~fcf/marti.pensamientos.10797.html
http://www.josemarti.org/
http://myhero.com/hero.asp?hero=J_Marti
