Myth, Martyrdom, and the Many Deaths of José Martí

The myth of José Martí’s heroic death is so central to his standing as Cuba’s national icon that no less a prominent figure than Abel Prieto—Cuba’s former minister of culture—has wondered what would be left of his myth of martyrdom if it were ever proven less than glorious. Yet one would be hard pressed to find a historically significant event in Martí’s life about which less is concretely known, or that has been subjected to more speculation and outright invention. Perhaps the very fact of the historical vacuum surrounding Martí’s death has even enabled fabrication: historical contingency molded into myth and hardened over time into unquestioned orthodoxy. This essay presents Martí’s death as part of a larger discursive process of national invention, by which the historical real is transformed in the act of narration into a myth of origins. An indispensable step in this naturalization of contingency into manageable myth is suppression of elements that challenge the myth’s internal coherence, thus threatening to unravel the national imaginary at the crucial moment of self-creation. My work shares the broader objectives of recent scholarship that seeks to demystify Martí by revealing the narrative machinery binding his myth to the nation-building project.