- Vicente Morín Aguado
Evocation of Cuban hero José Martí in María Corina Machado's Venezuela
Millions of visitors have seen José Martí, his chest offered to bullets, the rider of a horse with front legs raised, a symbol of death, the last equestrian figure sculpted by Anna Hyatt Huntington, a Cuban gift to the people of the United States of America, planted on the south side of New York's Central Park.
Passing in front of the imposing sculpture, the visitor can read the following inscription, inlaid on black granite:
"Jose Marti, the apostle of Cuban independence/ leader of the peoples of America and defender of human dignity. His literacy genius vied with his political foresight. He was born in Havana on January 28, 1853. For fifteen years of his exile, he lived in the city of New York. He died in action at Dos Rios in Oriente province on May 19, 1895.
The only episode of violence due to his will, imposed by the manners of the 19th century, was so strange to the conduct of a poet, that Rubén Darío, upon learning of the sacrifice, exclaimed: "Master, what have you done!
The phrase, from poet to poet, had its antecedents in the trajectory of the Cuban bard, founder together with his Nicaraguan emulator of Modernism. A year after Martí disembarked in Manhattan, on January 10, 1881, the New York Illustrated Magazine published his essay Nuestra América (Our América), where he anticipated María Corina Machado's epic by writing:
