La conmemoración de las Independencias hispanoamericanas en José Martí­: El intelectual moderno y la guerra

Abstract

Bolí­var, San Martin and Páez are the only Independence protagonists to whom Martí­ devotes his celebratory speeches and chronicles. Those texts were published throughout a decade [from 1883 to 1894], exactly when Latin American political and cultural leaders regard themselves as having the right to establish [not without dispute] those "places of memory" [in the sense of Nora 2003] which monumentalize a recent heroic history. The texts by Martí­ are interesting in this sense: facing the imminent fight for the independence of Cuba, his evocation of past heroic deeds acquires a special symbolic value. It assumes the return to a finished era but from which ethical, social and political key values for the present must be extracted. Martí­ encourages the cult of the heroes but, at the same time, he imposes specific and divergent meanings. He celebrates the heroic deed but also emphasizes the bond between the leaders and the people, by pointing out the authority of both of them in materializing independency and the exclusion of the latter from the processes of modernization. And also, in his assessment, he warns about the errors of the leaders linked to the 'blindness of power'