José Martí: A Revolutionary Life by Alfred J. López (review)

Anyone who is aware of the old, tired, and often furious enmity between the two opposing political ideologies that have prevailed among Cubans, especially after the Castros came to power in January 1959, knows that it is rather unusual, and at times even risky, to take something resembling an objective position regarding José Martí (or regarding anything interpreted as political, for that matter). The reason this political fury concentrates on the figure of Martí is rather simple. For more than a century now, Martí has been the icon of embattled Cuban nationalism. Most Cubans want to own Martí, and they often claim that his ideas and life coincide exactly with their own political convictions, regardless of what the opponents of those convictions say or do. Perhaps the most convincing elements of a new biography of José Martí are its high degree of objectivity and factual information.

If readers of López's biography of Martí are looking for details about the tense relationship Martí experienced most of his life with Mariano, his father, or the tender one with Leonor, his mother, they can find them in the ample and well-researched sections of López's book. If their interest lies in the horrendous tribulations of Martí's childhood to the time of his death, López's text will answer all and at times more than can be imagined. Martí's almost-fifteen-year stay in New York City is explained very well in this biography, especially his deliriously active political work in that city and across the United States. Intimate details about Martí's possible love affair with Carmita Mantilla are written herein without exaggerations or salacious tones. But nothing prepares the reader for the wealth of information and fascinating twists and turns that this book clearly states about Martí's final months of life.

Unless readers are already expert in those specific details, the book is very revealing of Martí's relationship with Antonio Maceo and even with Máximo Gómez, the two main generals of Cuba's Ten-Year War (1868–1878) who finally agreed to participate in the War of Independence (1895–1898) that Martí had so carefully prepared from exile. We have always read about Maceo's rejection of Martí's political principle of establishing a civilian government for the future Cuba once it was freed from Spanish domination, and Maceo's insistence that a military junta must prevail, at least for a while. Nevertheless, López's final chapter explains, with many facts coming from various sources, how deleterious were Maceo's position and actions when it came to Martí's own safety. Another fascinating section of López's book is the extremely careful and historically honest explanations of the difficulty, or better yet, impossibility, of knowing what really happened in Martí's last hours, or minutes, of life. How was he really killed, charging heroically against the Spanish troops contravening General Gómez's cautious command to stay behind? Or was Martí so confused in those moments of the battle that his death was far from heroic and Colonel Ximénez de Sandoval's troops easily killed him as a result of his confusion and lack of military experience? What have the eyewitnesses said about these last moments, and what could have been their personal and/or patriotic motivations for their opposing versions of the facts and the timing with which they made them public? On this historically honest note ends López's biography of José Martí.

If we were to be very demanding with the scholarly merit of López's biography of Martí, and try to find some kind of weakness in its research and/or inclusion or exclusion of important issues or sources, we could mention only two possibilities. The first would be some lack of information regarding Martí as a literary man, his poems and essays, and the connection between his politics and his literature, his life and his art. Some...