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:
"A spirited idea, flamed in time before the world, stop like the mystic banner of doomsday, to a squadron of battleships."
Martí is often quoted as if he were a biblical prophet, however, the phrase copied above is not the result of an occasional selection to support a speech, it expresses a political ideal because word by word, concept by concept, it fits the strategy of the Venezuelan opposition against the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro, which has become a tyranny already in its final self-destructive phase.
The spirited idea, to prove the electoral fraud whose execution was known beforehand. The idea of proving the electoral fraud, the execution of which was known beforehand, was flamed in time before the world because in less than 24 hours reliable certified election returns were presented, in sufficient quantity to irrefutably validate the popular will in electing Edmundo Gonzáles Urrutia, and at the same time these proofs are available to all persons, inside and outside the country, who wish to consult them.
As for the mystical flag, thousands of Venezuelans have turned a peculiar ceremony into a symbol of their demands for respect for popular sovereignty: raising rosaries to the sky in the parks of the cities, and praying prayers for peace and national harmony.
Regarding the squadron of battleships, any similarity with the criminal gang that has taken over the country is not a mere coincidence, it is an eloquent simile.
Marti's idea is one of the pillars of what has been called "A More Powerful Force", the title of a series of publications sponsored by The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), www.nonviolent-conflict.org whose work summarizes the historical experience of nonviolent struggles in the world.
A series of six documentaries, books, and other materials published by the center of reference, among other cases, relate the independence of India, the end of Apartheid in South Africa, the struggle for civil rights against racism in the United States, the resistance of the Danes to Hitler's occupation, the collapse of totalitarian communism in Poland and the transition to democracy in Chile.
José Martí lived six months of his short life in Caracas, where he arrived from New York on January 21, 1881. An exiled friend in the Big Apple, Nicanor Bolet Peraza, had warned him about the authoritarianism reigning in his country, governed by Antonio Guzmán Blanco.
The desire to meet Bolivar and his people was stronger, and the Cuban was received with unusual appreciation by the Caracas intelligentsia despite his young age of 28. From a balcony of the city, Martí gave a speech interrupted many times with applause, where he seemed to be portraying the present day:
"Caracas, the capital of the Republic, the Jerusalem of the South Americans, the cradle of the free continent, where Andres Bello, a Virgil, studied; where Bolivar, a Jupiter, was born; where grow at once the myrtle of poets and the laurel of warriors, where all that is great has been thought and all that is terrible has been suffered; where Liberty, from having fought there so long, is wrapped in a mantle dyed in its own blood."
However, the historical picture does not mislead the visitor, because, on that March 21, 1881, the young Cuban warns those present: "I have come to ask the sons of Bolivar for a place in the militia of peace".
The inevitable clash with the dictator came soon after, when as a journalist and teacher in the Venezuelan capital, he visited on a couple of occasions the veteran educator Cecilio Acosta, renowned in the educational circles as a "philosopher and forger of consciences".
Cecilio Acosta was the personification of the Marti apostolate for freedom, an emblematic opponent of Guzmán Blanco, one of whose statues, shamelessly erected by order of the autocrat, received the popular nickname of "El manganzón", which means character enriched without working.
The sudden death of the veteran dissident prompted an article signed by Martí, publicly praising Acosta's civic virtues. The dictator's response was to demand that the Cuban publicly retract what he had written or leave the country.
On the verge of taking the boat back to the United States, because he refused Guzmán Blanco's blackmail, Martí wrote to the director of the Caracas newspaper La Opinión Nacional, Fausto Teodoro Aldrey: "Give me Venezuela to serve her: she has a son in me".
Author Vicente Morin Aguado. Cuban independent journalist, professor of history and philosophy, and contributor to the digital media Havana Times, Diario de Cuba, Cubanet, Palabra Nueva, and other media. He currently lives in the United States.
