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Conclusion to The Politics of Letters: José Martí’s Revolutionary Discourse Thesis for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, University of Toronto, 2006 By Pamela Barnett References to Martí’s work are from Obras completas. 27 vols. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975. Scroll down for a bibliography of works cited. You can read more about Martí in The Politics of Letters: José Martí’s Revolutionary Discourse. Doctoral Thesis, University of Toronto, 2006. Martí’s writing conveys a radical optimism in the creative power of individuals to effect change, as well as in resistance and unified struggle as means to achieve historical transformation and genuine human progress. In Martí’s view of the world, every nation can contribute to human progress and independent Cuba, which will achieve equality, dignity and social justice for all its citizens, will light the way for nuestra América’s transition to true independence, thereby contributing to genuine human progress as well as to harmony and balance in political and economic affairs on a hemispheric and global scale. The revolutionary nature of his purpose and vision; his resistance, in all aspects of his life and work, to all forms of enslavement and oppression; his commitment to achieving justice and dignity for all Cubans through a just, necessary and inevitable war of independence; his exemplary leadership of the Cuban revolutionary movement that fought for Cuba’s emancipation from colonial despotism; and his death on the battlefield in Dos Ríos have made him a revered martyr and a national hero in Cuba and a heroic figure throughout Latin America. Martí’s ideas transcend his region and his time. His writings on colonialism, Cuban liberation and nuestroamericanismo occupy a central place in the “literature of combat” in the new political and economic era that emerged in the final decades of the nineteenth century. His “radical democratic nationalism” and critical response to the “global transformations of modern imperialism” as they were emerging represent the first serious challenge to Eurocentrism, register a prescient voice against United States hegemony, and mark the beginning of radical nationalist revolutions in Latin America (Larsen 184-85). The ultimate defeat of Spanish imperialism in America, in 1898, after the military intervention of the United States in the Cuban independence war heralded the start of the new imperialism and confirmed the accuracy of Martí’s analysis. His prescience and vigilance place him among the world’s great pensadores and his writings continue to reach and inspire new and wider audiences. Martí’s struggle against imperialism and colonialism and his criticism of the national bourgeousie of neo-colonial Spanish America anticipate later radical revolutionary thinkers still relevant today, such as Franz Fanon, for whom, as for Martí, humanism is the necessary foundation and defining characteristic of the political and social consciousness required to transform nations into independent and just societies, and for whom also moral progress is as important an indicator of national development as material accumulation and technological growth. It will be useful, therefore, in concluding this study, to draw attention to key areas where Martí’s ideas transcend his era and anticipate Fanon by noting substantial similarities between the nineteenth-century Martí and the twentieth-century Fanon, both humanists and Antillean revolutionaries whose ideas about culture and human development continue to have currency in contemporary literary and political discourses. The intent is to emphasize the currency and relevance of Martí’s writings, support an understanding of his role as the continuing inspiration and architect of the Cuban revolution, and underline the currency and utility of his ideas as a critical framework for understanding the role of imperialism in contributing to the political, social and economic problems in the region and around the globe, even in our twenty-first century. Imagining the Nation: the Latin American Writer in the Late 1800s Martí’s discourse of identity, inclusion and resistance is a critical voice situated outside the elitist discursive realm that Angel Rama calls la ciudad letrada that throughout the colonial period and most of the nineteenth century was the urban-centred domain of writing closely linked to and dependent on the state (88). Writing was the enterprise of the elite intellectuals whose task it was to articulate the ideology and edicts of the institutions of state that authorized them. Ramos states that letters “occupied a central place in the organization of the new Latin American societies” (xxxvi) and the lettered city guaranteed “the close relationship between letters and politics that remained dominant until the 1870s” (44). The letrados artificiales of Martí’s “Nuestra América” are the nineteenth-century intellectual successors of the letrados that documented and served the interests of empire in the colonial period. Like many peninsulares loyal to the Spanish crown, many letrados would have sought refuge in Cuba from the upheavals of the South American independence wars. Those that remained had the “remarkable capacity,” says Rama, not only to “weather the revolutionary storm and reconstitute their power in the independent republics” (45), but even “to graft themselves comfortably on to the trunk of caudillo power” (51), broadening and strengthening their foundations when urban-centred reforms in education expanded their ranks in the areas of education, diplomacy and journalism (57). Their institutionalized patterns of thinking maintained the continuity of the colony within the republic and the exclusion of the marginalized sectors. Martí would have agreed with Fanon that it is the condition of colonialism that “every effort is made to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behaviour, to recognize the unreality of his ‘nation,’ and, in the last extreme, the confused and imperfect character of his own biological structure” (The Wretched 236) and that consequently, as Fanon states, true “decolonization is the veritable creation of new men” (36). For Martí, the creation of the “new men” of America (authentic men for these authentic times, “en estos tiempos reales, el hombre real” 6: 20) requires the political and economic independence of Cuba and the rest of nuestra América, cultural emancipation and the social transformation of these nations into just and integrated societies developed in harmony with their local, natural elements. The creation of truly decolonized people and just societies requires, therefore, radical changes in institutionalized patterns of thinking, as well as in social and economic relations, including the integration of the lower classes and marginalized sectors through meaningful and productive work, the enjoyment of rights and benefits, and the celebration of culture. In Spain’s colonies in America, however, the leaders of the anti-colonial revolts of the early nineteenth century consciously adopted European models of bourgeois revolutions, and the hegemony of European knowledge and culture remained unbroken in the new republics (Larsen 184-85). When the intellectuals of the new nations surveyed the cultural, political and geographical landscape after the devastating wars, they were like the colonizers before them who could recognize and understand only through comparison with European forms of knowledge and realities they valued and privileged. Their capacity to apprehend was restricted by an understanding of “the national” that was informed by elitist values and sectarian interests and which did not include local knowledge, culture and human potential or the indigenous myths that reinforced the values and sustained the cultures of autochthonous America. They were given to measuring human progress in terms of technology and material accumulation and paradigms of bourgeois rationality and refinement. They saw a vast empty landscape of nothingness, substantiating Fanon’s belief that “the scapegoat for white society—which is based on myths of progress, civilization, liberalism, education, enlightenment, refinement—will be precisely the force that opposes the expansion and the triumph of these myths” (Black Skin 194). They fixed their servile gaze on Europe and North America and sought wisdom in the familiarity of imported discursive traditions, overlooking the original character of the new nations, the value of the knowledge and cultures of the people, and their potential for social transformation and development based on creative, local solutions for local conditions. In the writings of the letrados, the “brutal opposing force” is supplied by the marginalized rural people of the neglected countryside—Martí’s “natural man” and disdained autochthonous America. “Beginning with the 1820s,” says Ramos, “the activity of writing became a response to the necessity of overcoming the catastrophe of war, the absence of discourse, and the annihilation of established structures in the war’s aftermath. To write, in such a world, was to forge the modernizing project; it was to civilize, to order the randomness of American ‘barbarism’” (3). Barbarism became institutionalized in the rhetoric of the era as the brutal force opposing civilization. It was the primitive, unformed and undisciplined reality ultimately inaccessible to progress and modernity. Such is the view represented in Domingo F. Sarmiento’s influential Facundo. Ramos argues that Sarmiento positions himself as the polemical adversary of Andrés Bello’s disciplined and university-authorized discourses, and furthermore assumes a subaltern position in relation to the disciplined discourse characteristic of the letrados and European scholarship (Ramos 3-20). Sarmiento manipulates this position, says Ramos, to establish and benefit from the authority of an alternative discourse, representing himself as the intellectual best placed to mediate between civilization’s written discourse and the orality of barbarism. He claims an attempt to establish order and achieve modernity by listening to and transcribing the alternative knowledge of the other to incorporate it into the nation’s modernizing project, thereby closing the “interstitial gap” between civilization and barbarism through which caudillos rose to power. “To hear, then, is the technique of a historiographical practice. And it was literature . . . that would be the discourse most suited to that project of listening to the voice of tradition” (Ramos 12). In the “hierarchized space of discourse,” continues Rama, Sarmiento assumes for himself the role of transcriber between civilization and barbarism to re-present the other, “the feared outside of discourse”; but the confused and irregular voice of barbarism renders it resistant to representation and it must ultimately be subdued and subordinated to the rational laws governing civilization, productive labour and the emerging market (18). Ramos maintains that “the formal procedure of including the spoken word of the other, only to subordinate it to a higher authority, indicates an attempt to resolve a contradiction on which Facundo continually reflects: the lack of law in a society based on the irregularity and arbitrary nature of the caudillo” (18). Notwithstanding Sarmiento’s self-representation as civilization’s subaltern voice, and regardless of the locus of the writer within the institutionalized discourse, the rhetoric of barbarism presupposes a civilized we that is morally, culturally and biologically superior to a primitive, undisciplined other. Writing was a civilizing project through which the letrado could claim an attempt to replace chaos and backwardness with order and modernity, for it was assumed that the unwritten word, unauthorized by discourse, lacked the power to order chaos and the capacity to modernize. Disdain towards rural and autochthonous America and the governing ideology informed by the rhetoric of barbarism prevailed well into the twentieth century. So did the assumption that the elite sectors are the effective, rational agents of progress and development while the marginalized rural population, whose confused voices must be subdued and whose backward traditions must be subordinated to the march of civilization, are a brutal force that has to be repressed or eliminated. Martí, however, challenges the institutionalized representation of reality. He criticizes the “false erudition” of the letrados and faults the incapacity of the ruling elites, who owe their privileges to those who labour without benefit, to govern for the good of all sectors and for the welfare of the nation. He condemns their sectarian agenda and their consequent failure to integrate and transform their nations into just societies for the good of all their people. Fanon asserts similarly that “the poverty of the people, national oppression, and the inhibition of culture are one and the same thing” (The Wretched 238). In “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” (The Wretched 148-205), he argues that the neo-colonial elite classes, the self-serving national bourgeoisie, are the obstructive forces that must be opposed if social transformation and progress are to be achieved and he condemns the cosmopolitan mindset of the new state’s self-interested “national bourgeoisie” who lack both the capital and imagination of an “authentic bourgeoisie” that could contribute to the material and cultural developnent of the nation. For Fanon, it is a self-centred class characterized by its unwillingness to mobilize the masses and its incapacity to harmoniously unite and develop the nation, which renders it useless in a developing nation that must rapidly transform national consciousness to political and social consciousness—“in other words into humanism” (204)—to avoid “the process of retrogression” in which “the nation is passed over for the race, and the tribe is preferred to the state” (148-49). Political and social consciousness provides the validity and vigour which find expression in rich forms of culture that embody the people’s aspirations, while valid forms of national culture are necessary to ensure the existence of the state that enables them and through which a people’s national culture that can make its contribution to the world (148-49, 179, 204, 246). We have seen, however, that the realities and aspirations of the majority were systematically excluded from both the autonomist agenda in colonial Cuba, from the road to progress charted by the ruling elites in the Spanish American republics, and from the exclusive we that defined for the privileged the identity of the nation. The authority of representation rested with the letrados, who assumed the interests and desires of the elite, urban sectors were for the welfare and good of the nation. In the republics, the modernizing spirit that emerged around 1870 created professions and institutions less dependent on the state, but did little to include the margins within the representation of the nation. Nor did it reduce the authority and prestige of the letrados. It did, however, allow educators and journalists a degree of autonomy from the state and opened a space for writing outside the lettered city, mostly through journalism, to intellectuals who could not or would not include themselves within that privileged space. The spirit of modernity thus gave rise to the literato and made possible an autonomous literary voice and enlarged the space for creative writing. In so doing, it also initiated a struggle for legitimacy attended by the need to situate the locus of authority for letters in the literary sphere, for autonomy from the state also removed the writer’s claim to that authority, and letters was not institutionalized as a separate authority in the academic domain until 1896 following a break between letters and law (Ramos 49-53). Nevertheless, larger urban populations, gradually expanding literacy and expanded markets for newspapers and magazines in cities and towns made the literato accessible to unprecedented numbers of new readers (Rama 50-57).  The neglected countryside, however, was largely excluded from the institutionalized ideologies and educational reforms. Even when elements of rural customs and oral traditions became incorporated into the canonized literatures of the new nation states, the subaltern remained beyond hearing distance from the critical voice and outside the dialogue of discourse and the written word. Re-imagining the Nation: the Inversion of Values Martí’s discourse of identity, affiliation and resistance subverts the civilization-barbarism dichotomy by re-ordering the hierarchy of knowledge, culture and values and claiming the autochthonous and original as the spiritual foundation of national identity. His nuestroamericanismo discourse challenges the authority and relevance of European rationality for the task of creating a new people and original republics, and redefines national identity to meaningfully integrate all social and economic sectors. The newspaper, the pamphlet and oratory are the standard media for informing his public, persuading his audience toward his concept of a re-imagined, unifying, Spanish-American identity, and preparing Cuban patriots for a new war of independence.  To the extent that the non-literate subaltern remains beyond hearing distance of Martí’s nuestroamericanismo discourse and thereby excluded from the you and I of dialogue and the written word, it is subordinated in a hierarchized relationship with the intellectual and the reading public, but this hierarchy is effectively reversed by Martí’s privileging of the indigenous and original over the European and imported. Unlike Sarmiento, who claims an unsuccessful attempt to mediate between “civilization” and “barbarism,” Martí makes no claim to mediate between the margins and the governing ideologies; nevertheless, his discourse of the autochthonous effected such a mediation. Neither does Martí claim to represent the subaltern voice, but the marginalized sectors are without doubt included in his collective we as the foundational elements of the re-imagined national identity. They are no longer the other—the undisciplined, irredeemable force of barbarism. The other is represented in Martí’s discourse by the forces of “retrogression” and imperialism: the outside-looking “artificial” intellectuals (the tiger within the republic), and the aggressive industrialized United States (the tiger that threatens from outside). The speaker is positioned in a different relationship with the audience in Martí’s revolutionary speeches, for both the historical listeners and the audience assumed by the dialogic you and I include and represent the marginalized sectors in the collective, patriotic we, while Spain, the autonomists and their allies constitute the other. All sectors, however, are ultimately redeemable in Martí’s discourse of unity. Bibliography of Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983 Barnett, Pamela. The Politics of Letters: José Martí’s Revolutionary Discourse. Doctoral Thesis, University of Toronto: 2006. Becali, Ramón. Martí corresponsal. La Habana: Editorial Orbe, 1976. Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1967. _______________. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1963. Foner, Philip S. Our America by José Martí. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977. Larsen, Neil. Determinations. London: Verso, 2001. Martí, José. Obras completas. 27 vols. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975. Meo Zilio, Giovanni. “José Martí. Tres estudios estilísticos.” Anuario Martiano 2 (1970): 9-94. Portuondo, José Antonio. José Martí.  Crítico literario. Washington: Unión Panamericana, 1953. Rama, Angel. The Lettered City. Trans. John Charles Chasteen. Durham: Duke U. P., 1996. (La Ciudad Letrada. Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1984.) Ramos, Julio. Divergent Modernities. Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Trans. John D. Blanco. Durham: Duke U. P., 1996.) Toledo Sande, Cesto de llamas. Biografía de José Martí. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2000. Vitier, Cintio. “Los discursos de Martí” Anuario Martiano 1, 1969: 293-318. Zavala, Iris M. Colonialism and Culture: Hispanic Modernisms and the Social Imaginary. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana U. P., 1992.

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Copyright 2006 Pamela Rubina Elizabeth Barnett