José Martí, the United States, and Race by Anne Fountain (review)

José Martí spent the last fifteen years of his life living in the United States, writing and organizing the struggle for Cuban independence. Combining liberally his own observation and information culled from diverse sources, he wrote poetry, chronicles and articles for different newspapers in Latin America. In José Martí, the United States and Race, Anne Fountain, who has written extensively about Jose Martí’s familiarity with American authors, some of whom influenced him, provides a cogent and well-researched argument that Martí’s contact with the diverse nationalities and groups in the United States was pivotal in the development of his ideas on race and his vision of Cuba’s future. His experiences helped him to expand his notion of race, amplify his awareness of the dangers of racial intolerance and of the need to form a unifying national identity, which he called “cubanidad.”

Fountain is methodical and comprehensive in her nonpartisan presentation. She begins by outlining significant events of Martí’s life: his childhood knowledge of the abject condition of slavery, his academic brilliance, his dislike for and entanglement with Spanish colonial authorities, his work as a teacher, his repeated imprisonment and exile, and his spending most of the latter part of his life in the United States. She convincingly indicates the consistency of his ideas. For example, the universalism or racial inclusiveness of Mi Raza is already suggested in his youthful allegorical play on Cuban independence, Abdala, in which the protagonist is, suggestively, a Nubian slave.

Fountain’s exposition is occasionally dense as she outlines succinctly the interconnecting political and social threads from which Martí’s ideas arose. Martí connected emancipation and Cuban independence. After giving summaries of essays such as Mi Raza and Nuestra América, she comments on the portrayal of Marti’s attitude to race as depicted in films and provides a thorough review of commentators on Martí, both sympathetic and critical. She forcefully responds to critical comments by Lilian Guerra.

Subsequent chapters offer a meticulous and well-balanced description of Martí’s interaction with or writing about different groups: Black Cubans in the United States, African Americans, the Abolitionists, Native Americans and immigrants. Martí was not familiar with the writings of Cuban antislavery writers but, in his political activity, he befriended and worked with Cubans of all races. His newspaper Patria featured images of prominent Afro-Cubans. As with the Indians in Central America, Martí was initially influenced by the ideas of his time, and stereotypes about Afro-Americans were present in his writing. He was initially condescending to the latter in early articles, but later his opinions changed when writing about many examples of vicious racism, such as the Texarkana killings. Initially he criticized the Indians for their lack of initiative, but later emphasized their subjugation and oppression. Indeed, it is in the United States that his knowledge of the indigenous past of the Aztecs or Incas increased significantly. Afterwards he showed more respect, advocated education but not the need to “civilize” or imitate foreign models. He showed empathy for the immigrants also, about their misery, insalubrious housing and lack of skills and felt that the state needs to be inclusive and citizens had to adapt.

Fountain’s well-organized chapter on the writings and life of Americans who supported emancipation is informative and gripping. She not only comments on the lives and works of people like John Brown but also writes perceptively on their influence on Martí’s development. Unlike them, he chose to deemphasize sexual abuse when writing about slavery. He was influenced stylistically by Wendell Phillips, and his praise for abolitionist qualities were qualities to which he aspired in himself. Like some of them, he accepted violence as a remedy, and words as effective weapons in the struggle.

Martí also made a vigorous response to racism from writers from the United States. Frederick Remington, for example, accused Cubans of being corrupt, savage and decadent. In Patria, he vigorously responded to charges...