166TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF JOSÉ MARTÍ
Revisiting Our America
We must read José Martí’s Our America over and again, as it continues to surprise us with eloquent and relevant ideas
Author: Yenia Silva Correa | informacion@granma.cu
january 23, 2019 09:01:38
Photo: Painting by Jorge Arche
We must read José Martí’s Our America over and again, especially in these times, as it continues to surprise us with ideas as eloquent and relevant as this: “The incapacity lies not in the emerging country, which demands forms that are appropriate to it and a grandeur that is useful, but in leaders who try to rule unique nations of a singular and violent composition, with laws inherited from four centuries of free practice in the United States and nineteen centuries of monarchy in France.”
Martí also dazzles us with the wisdom of a visionary who, back in the 19th century, warned: “In America, the good ruler does not need to know how the German or Frenchman is governed, but what elements his own country is composed of and how he can marshal them so as to reach, by means and institutions born from the country itself, the desirable state in which every man knows himself and is active, and all men enjoy the abundance that Nature, for the good of all, has bestowed on the country they make fruitful by their labor and defend with their lives.”
Today, “our long-suffering American republics” — as Martí referred to them in that essay — continue to suffer, under new names, the old ills that four centuries of colonialism bequeathed them.