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”.

 

The chain on his foot, “the strange clothes”, the cruel blow, the hallucinated fainting, Lino Figueredo and his 12 years old, the old man Nicolás del Castillo, the illness, the cynical laughter of the whip… were the common scenes. His homeland -he said then- had taken him in its arms, kissed him on the forehead, and left again, “pointing me with one hand to space and with the other to the quarries”.

The horror was not enough for the young man to grow abject feelings. Not even having seen his father place, choking with tears, the pads made by Leonor to avoid the rubbing of the shackle, which caused sores “of blood and dust” and “matter and mud”, awakened in him aversion. “And I still don’t know how to hate,” he alleged in recounting the dreadful experience.

What a lesson of probity in each page of the hero’s life! How much admirable in each gesture! How many astonishing impressions before each picture! How much righteousness and immeasurable humanism in everything that would come later, when the banishment, the death of his sister Ana, the love experience, the unstoppable pen to write beauty and denunciation, fatherhood, the podium of the classroom, the unique oratory, the conspiracy against the master, the second banishment, journalism, diplomacy, the founding of the Party and the Necessary War would be drawing the line of his days!

As a kind of extension of himself he took up friendship, for “great things cannot be done without great friends”; and in love he found “the excuse of life.” Virtue, he said, “cannot understand villainy”; and of glory, he understood that only by assaulting it can it be conquered.

Martí wrote about everything, because nothing was indifferent to him. Notions such as honor and humanity were tenacious in his thinking. Humanity would have its guidelines, but among its laws there would never be room for cowardice or indolence; and of honor only those who were capable of selling it, he said, would have “the courage to propose the sale of the honor of others”.

There was, however, a sweet and guarded word, perhaps the most beloved, which he did not know how to say without trembling and with which he was betrothed forever. Of such a sacred bond he wrote: “I wear an iron ring and have to perform iron feats. The name of my country is engraved on it and I must live or die for my country”.

That is why he put at her service his enormous reason, his capacity to unite forces, his diaphanous and incomparable soul. His voice did not tremble nor his pulse to defend, from all the fronts that were given to him, the name of Cuba, when someone dared to stain it.

The document that our history contemplates under the title of Vindication of Cuba, published in The Evening Post on March 25, 1889, and dated four days earlier in New York, is well known -and nowadays more valid than it has always been-.

It would be enough to return to those lines to not only vibrate before Martí’s imperturbable defense, but to perceive his legacy in our people, in days when the Island is defamed, distorting and distorting its truths, trying to overshadow his lighthouse light, which continues to be a guide for those with whom Martí wanted to cast his fate.

“(…) The struggle has not ceased (…) The new generation is worthy of its fathers (…) Only with life will the battle for freedom cease among us (…)”.

A few hours before falling in combat, Martí spoke to the Mambi troops and told them: “I want it on record that for the cause of Cuba I let myself be nailed to the cross”.

We are not unaware of these arguments. Every moment of his existence is a lesson and an example. Not a single one escapes his vocation of deeds, the only way to give body to conviction. Martí thought, lived and left for us the score of that music called Homeland.