The purpose of this essay is to review the attitude of Cubans toward José Martí from the inauguration of the republic to the present, with particular emphasis on the current Cuban commitment to studying "the life, work, and thought of José Martí from the point of view of historical, dialectal materialism."(1) The second part of the essay is an examination of José Martí, Mentor of the Cuban Nation,(2) by John M. Kirk, which clearly shows the effects of that approach to studies of Martí.

Cuba did not achieve full independence in 1902 when its first republican government was installed, for the United States, which had governed the island from 1898 to 1902, required the new nation to accept a constitutional provision authorizing U.S. intervention in Cuban affairs. Known as the "Platt Amendment,"(3) that limitation on Cuban sovereignty provided as follows: "The government of Cuba consents that the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence [and] the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty."(4)

The imposed curtailment on national sovereignty did much to shape Cuban intellectual life during the first generation after independence. The restriction seemed to confirm fears about U.S. designs on the island that could be traced back to the early nineteenth century, when Thomas Jefferson proposed that a sign saying "Nec plus ultra" be placed at the southern tip of Cuba to mark a boundary to future U.S. expansion. Not long after, John Quincy Adams stated the same general idea somewhat differently in expressing what might be called the "ripe fruit" theory: "There are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation; and if an apple severed by the tempest from its native tree cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain . . . can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which by the same law of nature cannot cast her off its bosom."(5)

The Platt Amendment was a constant reminder of such American statements of territorial hunger, and it gave rise to a national sense of gloom and despair.(6) Many wondered whether the advocates of independence might not have been wrong. After all, Cuban autonomists and annexationists had warned that the country was not prepared to govern itself and therefore had urged continued political ties to Spain and union with the United States, respectively. As long as there were doubts about the country's aptitude for self-rule, Martí, the forger of the independence movement, was ignored or thought of as an ill-advised optimist.

His promise of a "brief and generous war" against Spain had not been fulfilled. True, there had been early victories, owing in large part to the element of surprise. But that advantage was soon lost, and Martí was killed in battle and, in the confusion surrounding his death, there were costly delays in sending new armed expeditions to support the insurgents on the island. Finally, after more than three years of fighting, the United States intervened to end the bloody struggle.

Some members of Cuba's first republican generation blamed Martí for the outcome. Since they were living the aftermath, and little was known of Martí's life and works, it is not surprising that his revolutionary and political genius was either ignored or misunderstood at the time. During those years of pessimism, even Jorge Mañach, the leading figure of the second republican generation and Martí's first biographer, mused: "More than one serene Cuban mind has wondered secretly whether we became free before we became a nation; whether Martí might not have been mistaken in believing he could see a real Cuban will to be free 'under the surface,' when the surface appearance was indifferent and contrary and so many counseled doubt."(7)

By the time the Platt Amendment was abrogated in 1934, Cuba had entered a new era. The country seemed determined to defeat its previous fatalism, reevaluate its history, and search its past for guides for the future. It was at this juncture that Martí was rediscovered. Years later, C.A.M. Hennessey described this process:

It was this lost generation of students, exiles in their own land, who re-discovered Martí, with his nostalgic yearning for an idealized patria and his exile's vision of a socially united, racially harmonious, and economically independent country. His stature grew as the expansion of United States cultural and economic influence brought a note of urgency to the intellectuals' search for national identity.

The concept of the "frustrated revolution" of 1895 now helped to explain the contrast between Martí's dream of a rejuvenated nation and the reality of graft and corruption. In this interpretation, United States intervention, rather than the legacies of Spanish rule and of indigenous weaknesses, was responsible for the distortions in public life, and for the diversion of Cuban history from the course which Martí had mapped out.(8)

To use the words of a Spanish observer at the time, the young thinkers of that second Cuban generation set to "deciphering the historical enigma"(9)' of the nation through their study of Martí, each following his own ideological bent.(10)

From 1933 through the 1952 coup d'état led by Fulgencio Batista, articles, monographs, and books on Martí abounded, and it was generally believed that the hopes of the nation lay in giving effect to his doctrine. Then, after the coup, the revolutionary movement to overthrow Batista looked to Martí for inspiration. The youths who participated in it were known as members of the "generation of the Centennial" -the centennial of Martí's birth.

The revolt began with an attack on the Moncada barracks on July 26, 1953. The communiqué that was to have been broadcast by radio if the attack had been successful explained its purpose in terms of "the ideals of José Martí." Written by Fidel Castro, it foreshadowed the reliance on Martí's thought that would again appear in History Will Absolve Me, Castro's apologia of his actions from prison, and to an even greater extent in the Program-Manifesto of the 26th of July Movement, first published in Mexico but dated Havana, 1956. The opening lines of the manifesto say: "The ideas that lend to this struggle its basic reason for being ... are the same that inspired our wars of liberation, that later find their best and most concrete expression in the political thought of the martyr of Dos Ríos: José Martí is the ideological source of the 26th of July Movement."(11)

After the ouster of Batista,(12) when the revolutionary regime turned to Marxism-Leninism, its leaders were forced to justify the unexpected change to the people. And since Cuban tradition in no way supported the new ideology, they had to rewrite history. José Antonio Portuondo, a leading Cuban Marxist historian, put it thus:

One pressing need brought to the fore by the triumph of the Socialist Revolution is the need to study the historical process of Cuba in the light of Marxism-Leninism.... We still do not have a good study of our historiography that will permit us to follow the development of our written history step by step as a thoroughly classist expression. ... Through a Marxist-Leninist interpretation of history, history ceases to be a cold recounting of past events to become a scientific study of a dynamic process in which the past is the foundation and antecedent of the impetuous movement toward the future. A movement of which the historian is a witness and a conscious protagonist. Hence, the creative and combative sense that must characterize the historian's works.(13)

The first major product of the effort was the History of Cuba published by the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR). The prologue to the third edition tells the story: "In 1967, eight years after the triumph of the revolution, our fighters and middle-level students did not have a text that adequately set forth the principal aspects of our colonial and semicolonial history from a revolutionary Marxist perspective, one that could offer them the information necessary for their scholarly education while at the same time contributing to their ideological development. This work was prepared to fi11 that urgent need. "(14)

At first, studies on Martí were little affected by the post-1959 political changes. But in April 1971 a new era, which continues today, was ushered in at the First Congress on Education and Culture, which marked the official adoption of clear Stalinist policies in Cuban education and cultural affairs. Fidel Castro proclaimed at the congress that education and culture could no longer exist independently of the aims of the Communist Party: "We, a revolutionary people in a revolutionary process, value culture and literary creations with only one criterion: their utility to the people. Our evaluation is a political evaluation."(15)

The resolutions adopted by that congress led to purges at the universities and other cultural centers, and these in turn had a decisive impact on studies of Martí's life and works. Until 1972 two North American university professors, Manuel Pedro González and Ivan Schulman, contributed articles to the principal forum for Martí studies in Cuba, the Anuario Martiano, but in June 1972 Raúl Castro accused the Martí Foundation, which they had established with funding from the Ford Foundation, of "holding Martí's thought up against the Cuban revolution through distortion of his anti-imperialist doctrine."(16) In the next issue (no. 5, 1974) of Anuario Martiano, a relative newcomer to Martí studies, Salvador Morales, appeared as director, and the lead article, written by Morales, adopted a distinctive, socialist, combative tone:

Diversionist methods, as they become more refined, require a more precise and firm response.... There will be no truce or peace with the apátridas and their fellow adventurers in diversionism who seek to present deformed and confusing images of Martí. A suicidal Martí is unacceptable, as is a transcendentalist, or Christian, religious Martí, and as are others that have been popular or new versions from the imperialist arsenal. These Martís are alien to the revolutionary, the hero, the anti-imperialist that José Martí was.(17)

The objective was clear -to make Martí serve Marxism-Leninism, and subsequent Martí studies published in Cuba have sought to achieve that goal. Later issues of the Anuario (nos. 5, 6, and 7, of 1974, 1976, and 1977) followed those guidelines until they were superseded by an even clearer set announced in the successor periodical, Anuario del Centro de Estudios Martianos:

The primary aim of the center is to study and disseminate Martí's great work from the perspective that makes it fully intelligible: the scientific conception of the world, dialectic materialism, the historical perspective that underlies the very process of our revolution. That means, therefore, that we reject and combat all efforts to distort Martí's acts and thought in the way that reactionary writers in the service of the bourgeoisie and imperialism have done.... That does not in any way mean that we will try to present Martí as a Marxist-Leninist, which he was not and could not be . . . but we will insist on the radical nature of Martí's thought; on his brilliantly early anti-imperialism .... his certainty that the revolution would not be accomplished in the battlefields but rather in the republic that would be born from them: all his brilliant work and all his life of useful acts and sacrifice lead necessarily, organically, to our revolution that ... gratefully and proudly declares itself Martian a and Marxist-Leninist.(18)

In 1984 Orwell's character O'Brien explains a slogan of "the Party" on control of the past: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." Underlying the slogan is the conviction that history exists to be manipulated for party ends. In the case of Cuba, once in control of the present, the Castro regime took control of the past, and it has used that control, where Martí is concerned, to make him seem an advocate of its policies.

Unfortunately, that manipulation of Martí's "life, works, and thought from the point of view of historical, dialectical materialism" has had repercussions outside Cuba. A good example is José Martí, Mentor of the Cuban Nation, by John M. Kirk. The preface claims that the book "allows Martí's thought to speak for itself, presenting a well documented synthesis of his aspirations concerning the type of political, social, and economic structure that undoubtedly Martí would have striven to introduce in an independent Cuba" (x). In fact, however, the book articulates a series of unfounded assumptions drawn from excerpts from Martí's writings that Kirk often misquotes, mistranslates, or takes out of context to render them supportive of Castroite politics and policies. Ironically, Kirk bemoans the need for a "fresh, constructive, and essentially 'neutral' study" of Martí and assures his readers not only that "an important step has been taken in revolutionary Cuba" in that direction but also that his book itself "constitutes an important step in this necessary reassessment" (18, 19).

The basic theme in the book is that Martí underwent a progressive radicalization that led him to propose ever more drastic solutions to the world's problems, and that, had he lived, once Cuban independence was won he would have renounced his democratic beliefs.(19)

Martí was indeed interested in the meaning of radicalism. He wrote: "A genuine man goes to the roots. To be radical is no more than that: to go to the roots. He who does not see things in their depths should not call himself a radical" (II, 380). In that sense Martí doubtless became progressively more radical throughout his life, but there is no basis for Kirk's proposition of a qualitative change in the nature of the remedies proposed by Martí for the world's ills.

Another basic, and false, assumption of the book is that the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC) organized by Martí was not democratically run; that, like the Castro government, it was run on the basis of "a form of democratic centralism, with the final decision in any matter being taken by the delegate [Martí]" (84). The parallelism is further pursued by the wholly unjustified assertion that "in many ways the charismatic form of democracy favored by Martí for the liberated patria can be ascertained from the manner in which he organized the Cuban exiles" (79).

Kirk could not be more mistaken. The PRC was composed of groups of Cuban exiles whose members elected a Body of Councilors for each region. The councils -consisting of the presidents of the groups- voted annually for the delegate or head of the PRC, and the principles and bylaws of the party were subject to amendment by consensus of the councils.(20) The structure of the PRC depended on free expression of the will of the majority through elections, and there is no reason to believe that Martí would have proposed anything fundamentally different for the government of a free Cuba. His writings expressly belie Kirk's assumptions about charismatic rule.(21)

Karl Marx theorized that capitalist society would be followed by the dictatorship of the proletariat, or socialist society, which in turn would lead people, cleansed of their imperfections, to a perfect communist state. That purified being was the "new man," who would be free of all individualism. The desired perfection would be achieved by stimulation of communist awareness and substitution of moral for bourgeois, material incentives.

Contrary to recommendations from the Soviet Union and old-line Cuban Stalinists, Fidel Castro at first sought the simultaneous creation of socialism and communism.(22) Encouraged by Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Castro insisted on forging the "new man' and eradicating material incentives to workers. The result was national economic collapse, and when the Soviet Union finally came to Castro's aid, the price in obeisance to Moscow's dictates was high. The timetable therefore changed, but the goal of creating the "new man' has continued.

In his efforts to portray Martí as a precursor of the current Cuban regime, Kirk finds in Martí a constant will to form Marx's "new man." Although he never quite says as much, his use of the term (in quotation marks at first [86]) makes his purpose abundantly clear, as the following example should suffice to show. Referring to Martí's view on social justice, Kirk writes: "This, however, was not as impractical as it may seem: eventually the new man (Martí never estimated how long it would take for his master plan to develop), imbued with a heightened awareness of his many social responsibilities and of his innate dignity as a citizen of the Republic, would learn to appreciate the inherent justice of any particular situation' (98).

Martí did write of his hope that man would one day become a "new king" enriched physically and spiritually by the opportunity to use his energy and intelligence to the fullest, in accordance with his nature and "without fear or delay" (VIII, 473). But it is ludicrous to suggest, as Kirk does, albeit indirectly, that Martí's ideal for the future development of the human race can be equated with the Castroite program for creation of the "new man," for that program rests on compulsory channeling of the individual's energies and abilities, on a timetable dictated by the state and in an atmosphere of fear. The Cuban Marxist-Leninist process of forced perfection of man is wholly at odds with Martí's views, which call for acknowledgment of human frailties and eschew attempts to suppress them or wish them away: "Whoever seeks to improve man should not try to do so by eliminating his evil passions but rather should count them as a very important factor and try not to work against them but rather with them" (VIII, 291).(23)

At the core of Martí's thought is his great belief in and commitment to the preservation of individual freedom. For him liberty was "the right of every man to be honest, to think and speak without hypocrisy" (XVIII, 304). In 1894 he wrote: "Respect for the freedom and ideas of others, of even the most wretched being, is my fanaticism. If I die, or am killed, it will be because of that" (111, 166). Kirk misses the point of that commitment and, ever intent on seeking parallels between Martí and Castroism, has the following to say: "Martí's interpretation of freedom was essentially a socially oriented view that was rather vague and naive at times, while at others it was truly thought-provoking because of its startling relevance to modern times (as for instance his plans for a concentrated mass literacy campaign, on which an almost identical scheme was modeled by the Castro government in 1961, the "Year of Education)" (131).

Although the basis for the comparison is never explained, Kirk was probably thinking of Martí's well-known article "Itinerant Teachers." But there Martí stated that "it is necessary to keep men informed about the earth and the lasting transcendent nature of life" (VIII, 288) -hardly the objective of Marxist-Leninist literacy campaigns aimed rather at facilitating political indoctrination. The aim of the 1961 Cuban campaign is contrary to Martí's belief that "he who under the pretext of guiding the young teaches them a group of isolated and absolute doctrines and preaches to them the barbarous gospel of hate, instead of the sweet gospel of love, is a treacherous assassin, ingrate to God, and enemy of man" (VII, 230). In addition, Kirk wrongly asserts that Martí spoke of "necessary political education" as part of a "totally new and far-reaching educational policy, evident from his notes on the theme of 'Educación Popular"' (125). Even the diligent reader who locates Martí's notes on "Popular Education" disregarding the incorrect citation given by Kirk will search in vain for even the slightest allusion to "necessary political education." The notes merely address education of "the sentiments" and "moral qualities" enhanced by "instruction" (IX, 375).

Kirk does even greater violence to another passage by Martí to draw parallels between his work and socialism. Martí did not generally speak favorably of socialism. The year before his death he wrote: "Socialist ideology, like so many others, has two main dangers. One stems from confused and incomplete readings of foreign texts, and the other from the arrogance and hidden rage of those who in order to climb up in the world pretend to be frantic defenders of the forsaken so as to have shoulders on which to stand" (111, 168). In the face of that condemnation, Kirk turns to the word sociabilidad (sociability) in an article by Martí as the foundation on which to build the theory that Martí envisioned an independent Cuba in which its citizens would be expected "to cooperate at all times placing the best interests of the state before their own" (92). The basis for that far-reaching conclusion is the following statement written by Martí in Mexico: "Sociability is a law from which another important one, that of harmony and agreement, springs" (VI, 307).

Sociabilidad, as Martí correctly used the Spanish word, means the tendency toward active participation in social life. It is a characteristic of amiable, sociable people. The topic of the article in which Martí used the word was the Liceo Hidalgo, a cultural association at which writers and their admirers regularly met. Martí was made a member in March 1875 and his sketch, from August of that year, complained that few were attending the meetings, where he was beginning to become known for his public speaking. It was in the context of that complaint, and an exhortation to young Mexicans to attend the sessions ("literary challenge is good: life involving it is beautiful: the friendship born from it is very lasting and pure"), that Martí wrote the words used by Kirk to concoct the theory of sociability he attributes to Martí.

The disbelieving reader will be even more amazed to find that the leap from that simple statement on sociability to a broad social theory was based on the third meaning of "sociability" in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. To quote Kirk on the definition: "A broader conception which is necessary in the case of Martí, would encompass all political learning, formal and informal, deliberate and unplanned, at every stage of the life cycle, including not only explicitly political learning but also nominally nonpolitical learning that affects political behavior, such as the learning of politically relevant social attitudes and the acquisition of politically relevant personality characteristics" (93).

Having found a theoretical springboard in a modern English language source for his interpretation of Martí's nineteenth-century use of the Spanish sociabilidad, Kirk speculates that for Martí sociability "was quite simply . . . exemplary social solidarity," a "process of shared adversity ... a common plan of personal sacrifice . . . offering [Cubans] a bright and just future after the island had been stabilized" (93). The end product of Kirk's imaginings on the subject is a "sociability program" he attributes to Martí, which "obviously [quite a bit is obvious to Kirk] hinged closely on the popular acceptance of the rigorous sacrifices inherent in [it]" (102). Needless to say, the "program," as "reconstructed" by Kirk, has uncanny resemblance to the social, political, and economic policies of the Castro regime.

José Martí, Mentor of the Cuban Nation, illustrates perfectly the technique of rewriting Cuban history to accommodate Marxist-Leninist goals. If it were not such a good example of such a distressing phenomenon, it would not be worth a reviewer's time, particularly because Kirk's ignorance of Cuban history ill suits him for his task.

A few examples should suffice. According to Kirk, Cuba' s Ten Years' War for independence from Spain (1868-78) was a "rebellion commonly known as the Grito de Yara (Cry of Yara) after the small town where the uprising broke out," led by Manuel de Céspedes (28), and was a war in which the "leading protagonists were low income farmers who deeply resented the increased taxation recently imposed by Spain" (127). To begin with, the insurrection began at La Demajagua, a sugar cane plantation owned by the leader of the rebellion, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes; Yara was merely the site of the first encounter with Spanish troops. And far from being "low income farmers," the "leading protagonists," including Céspedes, were rich landowners from some of the best-educated and most sophisticated families on the island.(24) Finally, to say that they rose up because of resentment against taxation is not only wrong but offensive -although it is certainly a convenient explanation from a Marxist point of view. Spain had indeed imposed a new tax on Cuba and Puerto Rico shortly before the uprising, but the patriots were not moved to take up arms by the tax. Among their many reasons were the deaf ears turned to their demands for reform when they and their Puerto Rican brothers sent an Information Junta to Madrid in 1867. In addition, there was the appointment of a military despot, Francisco Lersundi, as captain general of Cuba, the establishment of military tribunals that sent hundreds of Cubans to prison, and censorship of the press and suppression of freedom of speech.

Kirk's ignorance or rewriting of Cuban history also leads him to commit serious errors in describing Martí's contributions to the nation and his differences with other leaders of the Cuban revolutionary movement. For example, had he known anything about the Guáimaro Constitution of 1869 he could not have credited Martí with demanding "the introduction (for the first time in Cuba's history) of a democratic and Cuban form of government" (77). Martí himself greatly admired that wartime Constitution precisely because it provided for a democratic, egalitarian, parliamentary republic under civilian rule.

In addition, Kirk's lack of knowledge of the Ten Years' War, that Constitution, and their legacy leads him to grave mistakes in interpreting the later revolutionary efforts during which Martí was active. One took place in 1884 and was led by prominent military figures of the Ten Years' War, generals Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo. With no understanding of the circumstances, Kirk affirms that Martí "gradually came to suspect that . . . [Gómez and Maceo] were in fact motivated by the idea of their own personal gain after independence had been won," and cites a letter written by Martí to Gómez at the time as proof that Martí dissociated himself from the unsuccessful conspiracy because of "his displeasure with what he interpreted as [the generals'] selfish desire to exploit the revolutionary struggle of the Cuban people for their own personal benefit" (17). Those statements are far from true. The underlying reason for the tension between Martí and the generals was his commitment to civilian rule, and theirs to centralized, military rule for the revolution. Gómez and Maceo had participated in the Ten Years' War and had seen their efforts frustrated in part by an ineffectual civilian government-in arms. Martí, on the other hand, feared that centralization of power in the military during wartime could carry over into the government of an independent Cuba. The following passage from Martí's letter to Gómez alone belies Kirk's characterization of the incident: "I acknowledge your merits [and] believe that I love you, but not the war that you represent, it seems to me, perhaps because of mistakes in form"(1, 180).(25)

Perhaps the most serious flaw in José Martí, Mentor of the Cuban Nation, is Kirk's repeated use of Martí's writings out of context. The result is the worst kind of distortion of Martí's thought, because the unsuspecting reader can easily be led by a quotation to believe, and repeat, the distortion. Again, a few examples will suffice.

In 1882 Martí wrote a chronicle on a variety of events, including a celebration in Boston in remembrance of the pilgrims for a Venezuelan newspaper. Kirk presents a quotation from the chronicle by stating that "Martí's displeasure at the internal U.S. structure" and his fear of U.S. imperialism made his reports on American life at the time adopt "a more concerned tone" than that which had characterized his earlier articles (52). The example offered is the following:

The descendants of the pilgrim fathers had their celebrations. What a difference, though! Now they are no longer humble, nor tread the snow of Cape Cod with workers' boots. Instead they now lace up their military boots aggressively and they see on one side Canada and on the other Mexico ... [I, 14].

In the first place, "aggressively" is not in the chronicle and was added by Kirk, and in the second, the words are not Martí's: the language deleted (signaled by ellipses) from the quotation, makes quite clear that Martí was quoting a speaker at the ceremony, Senator Joseph Hawley, whom Martí went on to praise in connection with other remarks he quotes or paraphrases.

Martí was very aware of the dangers of U.S. expansionism and repeatedly warned his Latin American readers of them. But just as he alerted them to that and other serious problems in the United States and its relations with other countries in the continent, so too did he repeatedly praise the many positive aspects of U.S. society that he observed. Marxist interpreters of Martí's works choose to point only to the negative commentaries, isolating them from the favorable ones that often appear immediately before or after, as they do in the distorted quotation just examined.

That quotation is followed by another that Kirk takes out of context to suggest that Martí had nothing but scorn for and fear of the United States. According to Kirk, "Martí's task [during the 1880s] became one of defining, advising, warning, of revealing the secrets of the apparently marvelous successes (in actual fact all appearance and no essence) of this country" (53). On the basis of the quoted statement, Kirk concludes that "after seeing a firm intention on the part of many U.S. interest groups to exploit the countries of 'Nuestra América,' Martí found himself forced to adopt, quite noticeably, a more radical stance" (53). Ironically, the words quoted by Kirk come from the first issue of La América, a magazine edited by Martí which was intended as "a faithful aid to North American producers and South American purchasers .... an explanation of the mind of the United States" for Latin America (VIII, 266). That is, it was a publication designed to promote the sale of everything from U.S.-made trolley cars to gymnasium equipment. A Marxist could easily conclude from Martí's work for the publication that he cooperated with "neocolonialism" inasmuch as he was helping to open underdeveloped markets to the surplus production of capitalist countries. In the very article quoted by Kirk, Martí wrote:

The manufacturers of North America ... have come to produce more articles than the country needs, but are unable, as a result of the cost of production ... to place their excess production in foreign markets, [and] today they urgently and actually need to display and sell their surplus at low cost in the nearby American markets; and with their additional production, in the absence of a corresponding demand to absorb it, the surplus will continue to accumulate on top of the current surplus. People here, thus, need someone to display their products. People there need someone to explain and point out to them the appropriateness and advantages of their purchases. La América is a timely answer to both needs [VIII, 267].

On another occasion Kirk puts someone else's words in Martí's mouth, stating that "as the danger of severe social unrest loomed ominously" in the United States, Martí believed that "in order to stave off severe social and political unrest, it would be absolutely essential to 'distribute the national wealth better' [XII, 250]" (150). Undoubtedly Martí's sense of social justice would have led him to favor a more equitable distribution of the nation's wealth, but the fact is that those quoted words were not Martí's. The paragraph from which Kirk took them says:

In New York they are hunting socialists in the streets, or just about, but in Boston the thinkers are getting together to think about public problems, and a group of the rich and the aristocracy have declared that relations between people are currently barbarous and fearsome, and that the rich of Boston must study how to distribute the nation's wealth better [XII, 250].

One last example again demonstrates that Kirk's distortion of Martí's thought is a reflection of intentional abuse of quotations combined with ignorance of Martí's life and works as well as of Spanish. Kirk writes: "Martí's awareness of and displeasure with the fundamental injustice of class division can be seen in his 'Diario de Montecristi a Cabo Haitiano,' in which he poked fun at one of the more farsical manifestations of class inequality in Cuba" (113). The passage referred to deals with how inhabitants of rural and urban areas speak of birth. Kirk renders the passage as follows, mistranslating parió ("gave birth" or "delivered") with the vulgar expression "got knocked up": "It is to do with Arthur who was recently married. His wife went to stay with her relatives in Santiago to have the baby. The question comes from Arthur: Why is it that, if it's to do with my wife, they say she 'got knocked up,' and if it is Jiménez's wife, then they say she is 'with child'?" (113). He then proceeds to the following non sequitur: "At first glance this desire for a classless society, the second fundamental reform program of Martí for the patria, clashes with the general impression given by Martí's 'Escenas norteamericanas"' (113).

Wholly apart from the absurdity of drawing that cryptic conclusion from Martí's observation of a regional linguistic peculiarity, there is a basic flaw in Kirk's premise that the observation was at all relevant to Martí's program for class justice in Cuba, for the peasant quoted by Martí was not Cuban but Dominican. The diary collects notes from Martí's trip from Montecristi, in the Dominican Republic, to Cap Haitien, in Haiti, and the city referred to is Santiago de los Caballeros, in the Dominican Republic, not Santiago de Cuba.

One day Martí will become one of the "undesirable subjects" that cannot be touched in communist states. No matter how hard they may try, the Castro regime and its supporters will in the long run be unable to conceal Martí's unshakable commitment to social justice within a society that respects individual freedom. According to the Cuban Marxist leader Julio Antonio Mella,(26) Carlos Baliño,(27) the founder of the Cuban Communist Party, recounted that Martí had told him: "The revolution is not the one we are going to start in the manigua [the rural Cuban battlefields] but the one we are going to carry out in the Republic."(28) Even if Baliño's story were true, there is not the slightest reason to believe that Martí could have been referring to a socialist revolution, for if we were to suppose that, we would also have to accept that throughout his life he had been hypocritical in expressing grave reservations about communism and total commitment to individual freedom in a democratic, pluralistic society. Marxist-Leninist interpreters of Martí's works affirm that he would have joined their ranks if only he had lived long enough, because they wrongly assume that anyone who disapproves in any way of bourgeois society, of the injustice and contradictions of capitalism, must of course agree with curing society's ills in a totalitarian, communist state.

But until that future day when they eschew Martí for his liberalism, they will undoubtedly continue to distort his works so that they appear consistent with the aim of "historical, dialectical materialism." And unfortunately, there will likely continue to be some who, out of ignorance or fanaticism, will lend their services to that distortion. As Martí himself warned: "Every tyranny has at hand one of those learned men to think and write, to justify, to extenuate, and to disguise. Sometimes it has many of them, because literature is often coupled with an appetite for luxury, and with the latter comes a willingness to sell oneself to whoever can satisfy it" (XII, 276).