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“Soul of a Continent” Writing in 1888 from his exile of more than seven years in New York, the intellectual architect and political organizer of Cuban independence, José Martí, then only thirty-five years old, privately disclosed the broad outlines of an enterprise to which his omnivorous attention was consistently and ineluctably drawn. “Do you know that, after eighteen years of thinking about it,” he confided to his friend and colleague, the Uruguayan diplomat Enrique Estrázulas: I have lately been turning over the idea of publishing here a journal, El mes, or some such, entirely written by me with each issue so complete in itself as to be something like the running history and synthesis, at once clear and critical, of everything of outstanding and essential interest—in high politics, theater, the movements of nations, contemporary science, books— that occurs here [in the United States] and there [in Latin America], and in any other place where the world truly lives.1 The sheer audacity and sweep of this project must seem nothing short of foolhardy hubris to an intelligentsia gone hoary with disciplinary specialization and cliquish parochialism. Advanced by an intelligence less vigorously polymath or productive, a proposal so intimidating and encyclopedic in its aspiration might even have been casually dismissed with patronizing indulgence by Martí’s correspondent as the pardonable sign of an outsized ambition in an otherwise fetching naiveté. But Martí was neither presumptuous, naïve, nor easily dismissed. One of the most remarkable figures to have come out of either America in the second half of the nineteenth century, he had, in the years since 1870, given dramatic evidence of a precocious, polygeneric talent, amply cosmopolitan interests, and revolutionary initiative and convictions. The publication of El presidio político en Cuba in 1871, on the eve of Martí’s eighteenth birthday, revealed a liberal Creole patriot of powerful moral sensibility and a literary personality of impressive force and resources.2 His moving denunciation of the horrors of prison life under 169 170 Occasions, Views, and Reviews Spanish colonialism and the failure of metropolitan policy which he saw embodied in the “hell of stones and groans” (OA, 184) that he himself had only recently experienced had the compelling ethical authority and importunate fury of a Bartolomé de Las Casas or of Émile Zola’s J’accuse and an intellectual and political sophistication unusual in one so young. Its author, who had paid for the independentista sympathies of his earliest poetry with six months at hard labor and immediate deportation to Spain, had at the time already published the first of his dramatic pieces. The eloquence and acuity of the commentaries on art, literature, current affairs, and civil society which Martí subsequently published with daunting regularity throughout the hemisphere as pamphlets , and in books, magazines, newspapers, and journals that he was often instrumental in establishing or editing, earned him a reputation as a keen observer of the contemporary scene and as a thinker, polemicist, and prose stylist of the first rank. The verse of the mature poet would come to be regarded as an exemplary precursor of the formal originality and innovative spirit of the seminal modernista movement. A gifted orator, he was also to acquire an increasing celebrity as a powerful and effective public speaker. At the peak of his powers and entering upon the most decisive period of his intellectual and political life when writing to Estrázulas, Martí was particularly well positioned to carry off the project he proposed. An anticolonialist in the breach between the final collapse of one empire and the formidable emergence of another, he was pivotally situated (by his talents, romantic temperament, liberal outlook, Creole middle-class affiliations, and strategic location) effectively to engage the drift and import of an entire panoply of emerging cultural and political forces. A radical nationalist from a distinctively agricultural Hispanic-American country who resided in an industrial, presumptively Anglo-Saxon metropolis , Martí acquired an uncommon perspective from which to view an epoch marked by critical historical realignments and accelerated social transformations. It sharpened his ability to intuit and to draw out the implications of the shift of axis represented by an emerging working class and an increasingly heterogeneous community of old veterans from the protracted First War of Independence (1868–1878; 1879–1880), and a new generation of rebels, economic exiles, and émigr és. And successfully to give to that intuition an ideologically cohesive institutional form—El Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC)—which transformed that community...

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