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Introduction to José Martí's Revolutionary Oratory By Pamela Barnett From The Politics of Letters: José Martí’s Revolutionary Discourse Thesis for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, 2006 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 second deportation to Spain occurred on September 25, 1879, one month after the outbreak in Oriente on August 24 of La Guerra Chiquita. Not long after his arrival on the Peninsula, he undertook a clandestine departure and made his way through Paris to New York, arriving on January 3, 1880. There he served as sub-delegate of the Revolutionary Committee that had been organized by General Calixto García, a veteran of La Guerra de Diez Años, to prepare and direct the new insurgency that was raging on the island. Martí had previously collaborated with the committee’s delegate, Juan Gualberto Gómez, in La Habana, to organize support on the island for a new independence war after El Pacto del Zanjón had brought a negotiated end to the first war of independence and an uneasy peace. The pact “generated as much dissention among Cubans in arms as did any other single issue in the Ten Years’ War,” says Louis A. Pérez, Jr., and Maceo’s Protesta de Baraguá, which extended the war an additional ten weeks, “set the stage for a renewal of the conflict” (125, 136). For Philip S. Foner, Baraguá was “the symbol of the best that was in the Cuban Revolution; it was a great protest against those who had surrendered without achieving the main goals—independence and abolition of slavery—and it was a formal rejection of the Pact,” which was nothing more than a truce (A History of Cuba 2: 269, 275). On January 24, 1880, shortly after his arrival in New York, Martí delivered the two-hour lecture in Steck Hall that initiated his revolutionary speeches in the United States and marked the beginning of his campaign among Cuban émigrés for support for Cuba’s war of independence. Appealing directly to an audience that included wealthy émigrés, immigrant workers and veterans of the first war of independence, a range of social and economic classes, he used the occasion to rally their support for the new uprising, portraying the renewal of insurgency as the continuing epic of Cuba’s heroic struggle for independence. It appears certain that Martí conceived “The Steck Hall Lecture” (4: 181-211) as the event that would open a new phase of the work he would undertake for the nation: “breve y raquítica muestra de la que intento en beneficio de la patria” (4: 183). The note accompanying its publication days later as the pamphlet Asuntos cubanos reveals that he planned it as a lecture (“lectura”) and had given careful consideration to the special tone required for the conditions of its reception and the expectations of his wide-ranging audience: "El tono especial de las lecturas, a que ésta había de acomodarse, requerido además por el levantado patriotismo de la emigración a quien el lector se dirigía, pudiera hacer creer a algunos espíritus prácticos que la exaltación ocupa en estas páginas el lugar del raciocinio. Corría el riesgo el lector de parecer a unos sobrado fogoso, y a otros escaso de fuego. Salven los de ánima fría aquello que no pareció mal, sin embargo, a los de altivo corazón, y hallarán tal vez, en estas breves consideraciones, apuntadas al correr de la pluma, algún motivo de serios pensamientos. Falta aún mucho que decir,—y será dicho, puesto que decir es un modo de hacer. Gracias, en tanto, a los que oyeron esta lectura con tan vivo amor, y a los que se empeñan a darla profusamente a luz" (4: 183). Its immediate publication and these comments to his reading audience suggest that in preparing the text, Martí was mindful of its dissemination through both print and oral media. Its rhetorical elements reveal that to build broad-based support for the war of independence and foment the spirit of revolution, he intended to inform as much as to inspire, for although it contains ample evidence of patriotic ardour and metaphorical intensity, it is the expository will that prevails in the analytical and reflective nature of this speech. We shall see that the historical analysis it provides and the range of topics and ideas it covers more resemble his expository writing than the briefer, more narrowly focused and intensively figurative revolutionary oratory of the 1890s. Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983 Barnett, Pamela. The Politics of Letters: José Martí’s Revolutionary Discourse. Doctoral Thesis, University of Toronto: 2006. Foner, Philip S. Our America by José Martí. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977. Martí, José. Obras completas. 27 vols. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975. Pérez , Jr., Louis A. Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution. New York: Oxford U. P., 1988. Portuondo, José Antonio. José Martí.  Crítico literario. Washington: Unión Panamericana, 1953. 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. (My Translation,  Basket of Flames: A Biography of José Martí.  La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2000). Vitier, Cintio. “Los discursos de Martí” Anuario Martiano 1, 1969: 293-318.

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Copyright 2006 Pamela Rubina Elizabeth Barnett