The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba (review)

Lillian Guerra's superbly documented and written book, The Myth of José Martí, takes the reader on a breathtaking historical journey through the politics of power in the early Cuban Republic (1902–1921). Guerra offers an in-depth interdisciplinary analysis on class, race, culture, and gender, as well as on hemispheric relations during the first Cuban administrations, including the U.S. occupation (1898–1902) and the U.S. provisional government (1906–1909), in the context of what different political groups viewed as José Martí's legacy, particularly his "discourse of social unity" (6).

As Guerra points out, the two-party system that dominated Cuban politics in the early Republic perpetuated the social chasm of the colonial era, although now associated with the rise to power of the Cuban bourgeoisie. Working-class Cubans, black and white, male and female, were excluded from the benefits of independence, in particular the widely anticipated possibility of a more equitable society. A sentence in Martí's well-known essay "Our America" (1891), which Guerra discusses at length, foreshadows the cultural destiny of the Republic: "The colony continued living in the Republic."

The Cuban nation, as well as the Republic, may be considered an imagined community, according to the ideas about nationalism proposed by Benedict Anderson and elaborated by Patha Chatterjee, Eric Habshawn, and Florence Mallon. As an imagined community, the Cuban nation appears in early foundational texts such as the poem Espejo de paciencia (1608) by Silvestre de Balboa, or even the legend of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, which may have inspired the idea of national identity in the novel Sab (1841) by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. These texts showed an alternative multicultural path to Cuban identity. Cuba, however, ultimately achieved independence in large part because of Martí's strategic discourse on national identity, whose genealogy the writer traced back to the first war of independence (1868–1878). Martí's discourse on national identity was both cultural and political. The myth, according to Guerra, developed precisely around the idea of national unity that Martí constructed and put into practice as part of his political strategy to gain independence. His vision was based on notions of "self-abnegation, mediation of differences, and material denial for the sake of a collective end" (24). Guerra explains how after Martí's death, Cuban political groups whose ideas were more often than not in conflict with each other, used Martí as a validating symbol to pursue their own interests.

Guerra distinguishes three types of nationalism forged during the 1895 revolution of independence and divided along social, ethnic, and cultural lines. With close ties to the United States, proimperialist nationalism—an otherwise unusual combination of terms—served the interests of the upper echelons of the Cuban bourgeoisie. As Guerra points out, class was not the only determinant of power for the elite (20); race and culture also were co-determinants. The conservative governments of Estrada Palma (1902–1906) and General Mario Menocal (1913–1921) are examples of pro-imperialist nationalists that envisioned the Cuban nation as white and of Spaniard descent, and considered the United States and Europe as models of modernization.

Revolutionary nationalism, the second type of nationalism outlined by Guerra, was associated with liberal leaders of independence, such as General Máximo Gómez and activist Juan Gualberto Gómez. Revolutionary nationalists were more racially inclusive than proimperialists; however, class and race also became major factors for revolutionary nationalists when the labor movement challenged the liberal government of José Miguel Gómez (1909–1913). At the bottom of the sociocultural pyramid, black and white workers, cigar-makers, stevedores, and the rank and file of the wars of independence embodied popular nationalism, which strived for equality and social justice. Their most prominent leaders included Afro-Cuban leader Alfredo Estenoz and former slave and war hero General Quintín Banderas.

The United States was the power broker among these...