The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalism in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, several scholars of Cuban history, including Aline Helg, Alejandro de la Fuente, Louis Pérez, Antoni Kapcia, K. Lynn Stoner, and Kirwin Shaffer, have explored the complex and frequently conflicting dynamics that shaped the island’s political system and identity in the decades immediately following independence from Spain in 1898. Issues surrounding race and working-class conflicts have been at the center of much of this new research, especially as historians try to sort out what these conflicts say about evolving notions of what it meant to be Cuban. Lillian Guerra’s The Myth of José Martí is one of the latest books to explore these issues. What makes the book unique is how she couches the postindependence disputes surrounding Cuban nationalism within the framework of Martían mythology. By using an array of Cuban archival, newspaper, and published sources, Guerra illustrates how different groups invoked Martí and their vision of what he (and thus Cuban independence) meant in order to justify their agendas and their actions both during the war of 1895 – 98 and in the first two decades after independence.Guerra begins with an overview of Martí’s attempts to unify the revolutionary movement in the early 1890s. She portrays Martí as promoting unity above all else in order to gather support. Reading this chapter, one is led to believe that Martí had few firm ideas about what an independent Cuba should look like, because he was too busy burying such a specific agenda in order to bring as many Cubans on board to his Cuban Revolutionary Party as he could. Guerra then shows how different nationalist groups during the war (especially after Martí’s death in battle in 1895) quickly maneuvered to promote their own agendas. In essence, Martí’s PRC had no agenda for postwar Cuba — thanks in part to Martí, who had to balance competing interests that often differed over matters of race and class. This balancing act would serve as the basis for a myth of preindependence social unity; yet, at the same time this balancing became what Guerra labels “the Achilles’ heel of the Cuban revolutionary movement” (p. 45), as it undermined any agreed-upon nationalist agenda after 1898.Guerra divides the major players of Cuban political life according to three types of nationalist vision: “pro-imperialist nationalists” (those primarily from the upper classes and who had friendly relations with the United States), “revolutionary nationalists” (those mostly from the middle classes who sought a strong state that would reform the nation from the top down), and “popular nationalists” (primarily working-class Cubans whose interests revolved around labor and racial politics from the bottom up). Such dividing of early independence Cuba into broad categories is not new and is similar to that done by Kapcia, who discussed different forms of cubanía, and Francisco López Segrera, who identified different forms of nationalist “blocs.” Guerra’s contribution to such models is to show that although these groups represented distinct interests and visions, they all bought into “the myth of Martí as social unity [that] connected conflicting visions of nation to each other by positing a common origin or foundation.” Each nationalist group argued that it was fulfilling the true mission of Martí. When disputes arose after independence — be they labor strikes, governmental repression, armed uprisings, U.S. occupations, or something else — Cubans attacked the “violators” for having destroyed this mythical social unity for “‘sectoral’ reasons” (p. 7). Ultimately, Guerra argues that the lack of a unified preindependence vision for a future Cuba (necessary to create a broad coalition) actually led to sectoral divides that finally undermined the creation of a strong Cuban state, so that by 1921 Cuba’s political weakness made it a neocolonial subordinate of the United States. This subordination cannot be blamed solely on U.S. imperialism; rather, Guerra stresses that it was also based on Cuban in-fighting that emerged from strong, though very different and conflictive, senses of Cuban nationalism that led to the weak state.There is much to like about this book. Guerra weaves sources into a compelling narrative that, though covering the period 1895 – 1921, focuses most intently on the first decade of independence. In addition, scholars familiar with the growing literature on postindependence Cuba will welcome the way she brings forth issues of the day and shows how different nationalist groups (and sometimes divisions within those groups) interpreted such issues. Finally, her chapters covering the 1904 – 9 period (i.e., just prior to the 1906 Civil War, the war itself, and the second U.S. intervention of 1906 – 9) are some of the best scholarship on this period in English or Spanish. Besides Cubanists, those interested in Latin American nationalism and the role of race and class conflict in nationalist visions will find this book engaging and fruitful.