In everything José Martí wrote he left his soul; but his life, since he opened his eyes, and until he fell fighting for freedom in the Cuban fields, 130 years ago, was summarized in that kind of lyrical sentence he entitled Yugo y Estrella (Yoke and Star).
He was born “without sun”, and still a child, he knew what to choose between those two insignias, and how sadly comfortable it is to live, if “you serve the lords”; and also the growth, far from any involution, that entails sticking to the star. He was a child when the ignominy of slavery wrung his throat and at the foot of the dead he swore / to wash away the crime with his life; a child when he charted the course of his heroic existence.
Slave of his age and his doctrines, the adolescent paid a very high price for the love of his homeland. At the age of 15, he had created the newspaper La Patria Libre, and in the only issue that would circulate, would burn the verses of Abdala, an epic poem in which its protagonist, in circumstances similar to those of its author, knew that to throw off the yoke that oppressed his country was the only possible destiny.
That was the age of prison, which deprived him of his mother’s arms, and threw him into perpetual pain, “because the pain of prison is the harshest, the most devastating of pains, the one that kills the intelligence, and dries the soul, and leaves traces in it that will never be erased”.
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