La Raza

We all know that Martí famously said that there are no races, and yet throughout his writings we find the expression "la raza." Of course, there is no contradiction in terms. The races which Martí denied were the artificial constructs which divided men on the basis of the quantity of melanin in their skin or the contours of their facial features or hair. For Martí, "race" meant something else. In a word, identity. That is, what an indidivual happened to identify himself as, not how society identified him. Marti extolled la raza at every opportunity. He knew such a diverse people as inhabited "Our America" could only find common ground in a shared identity that transcended color or ethnic origins and embraced everyone who claimed a share in it. Although Martí tended to idealize the indigenous peoples, he did not do so at the expense of the Spanish. Never in his writings will you find any mention of the Black Legend which purported that Spaniards were more bloodthirsty, rapacious and brutal than any other European people. This canard, invented by the English to explain Spain's predominance in the Americas, could have been exploited to good advantage by Marti among their American descendents, who continued to believe it long after the English discovered that the French were the real "villains" of Europe. But Marti rejected the Black Legend because it was a lie and he had no intention of building the future upon a lie. He also surmised that it would be the greatest folly for Hispanics to attack the mother country on such grounds, because sooner or later that same Black Legend would be transposed on the descendents of the Spaniards once the Spaniards themselves had been forced to quit Cuba and Puerto Rico.

Ironically, Marti's death unleashed just such a response in the U.S. media of the time. An industry actually grew up around defaming Spain, which was nurtured by William Randolph Hearst and other imperialist editors, who championed Cuba's freedom but not her independence. Freedom, that is, under the aegis of the United States. Of course, the Spanish committed atrocities enough in Cuba to require no embellishment, particularly in the 2 years of Valeriano Weyler's rule. But the anomaly was transformed into the norm. Cuba was the "Ever-Faithful Isle" for nearly 400 years not because Spain was always cruel to us, but because she was not. It was only in the last 50 years years of its 400-year rule that Spain became a cruel mother and then it was not because she disdained us but because she didn't want to let us go. That break would have been quick and relatively painless except for the U.S., which sanctioned and abetted Spain's abuses while turning its back and worse on the rebels who only asked from this country what the Thirteen Colonies had asked of France and Spain.

The U.S., of course, wanted Cuba as a slave state and tried on numerous occasions to buy the island from Spain for extravagant amounts. When Spain declined to sell (and bless you for that, Spain), the U.S. decided that it was in its interest to uphold Spain's claims in Cuba until the day that it would wrest Cuba from her. What it didn't want to do was wrest the "ripe apple" from a victorious Cuban Republic, and it did everything in its power to make sure it wouldn't have to. Like a vulture that circled its prey for a century, the U.S. finally moved against Cuba when the rebels had wrested control of 90 percent of the island from Spain and were on the verge of ending Spanish rule in Cuba. Then came the yellow press, jingoism, Manifest Destiny and finally the misnamed Spanish-American war where with a loss of no more than 200 soldiers (and most of these from diarrhea) the Americans stole the victory which a half-million Cuban lives had secured and then came Occupation, the Platt Amendment, and Guantanamo which framed the birth of the Cuban Republic, and, a half-century later, the Eisenhower State Department (which Senator McCarthy was right to say was riddled with Communist agents), The New York Times, the embargo on arms sales to Cuba and the ultimatum to Batista to turn Cuba over to that "Jeffersonian democrat" Fidel Castro. After they had killed the Cuban Republic, the Americans buried it but good with the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy-Khruschev Pact and a hundred over betrayals, which brings us to today's "Wet Foot/Dry Foot" policy and the U.S. becoming, Communist Cuba's largest trading partner.

BUCL's campaign against Spain ignored two vital facts: the first was that we (not the Americans) defeated Spain more than 100 years ago, and, second, that we have yet to overcome the consequences of U.S. meddling in Cuba, and that not until we do shall Cuba again be free.

I sense, because I can read the BUCLERs and anticipate their acts — no great praise accruing to me therefor, since it is like guessing the tricks of really simple children — that they are soon to conclude their Campaign against Spain and move on to another target of opportunity; Italy, perhaps. Before we conclude the Spanish imbroglio, however, I should like to point out the reason that attacking the Spaniards is no different from attacking our own oppressed brothers on the island.

The first to discern this fact was not a Cuban, but the great Puerto Rican patriot and philosopher Eugenio Maria de Hostos (1839-1903), himself, incidentally, the grandson of Cubans and married to a Cuban. Of him Marti said that if Cubans had heeded Hostos' advice in the Great War (1868-1878) they might have prevailed. So Hostos' opinion is important; very important. Call him, if you will, along with Betances, the Puerto Rican Marti. He observed this about Spaniards and Cubans and what he noted 130 years ago is still true today:

"The Spanish, whose will is misguided, have not been able to commit the one evil deed that would forever have condemned Cubans to the horrors of being Spaniards: they have not been able to engender Spanish children. The Spaniards mixed with Indian women, and had Cuban children; with negro women, and had Cuban children; with foreign women, and had Spanish children; with Spanish women, and even they bore Cuban children. They brought them up to love Spain and hate Cuba; but their children became Cubans in their love for the oppressed island and their bitter hatred for the oppressor. They taught them to be zealots of the Spanish God, the Spanish king, and Spanish grandeur, but their children became Cubans in their zealotry against Spanish zealots. They sent them to Spain to make them forget Cuba, but their children came back cursing Spain. When the revolution broke out all the young Cubans who could left Spain, where they had spent most of their active years, to go fight against Spain in Cuba, where they had lived only the early years of childhood. This is the rebellion of nature; it is the sacred abhorrence of injustice; the divine anger of goodness.

If the Spanish at some time opresssed us, it was their children who helped to liberate us. It was in Cuba, also, that the Spanish character, purified and refined in that crucible, reached its greatest expression, not only in our glorious Martí, son of an asturiano and an isleña, but in millions of other Cubans, even Cubans born in Spain herself, who found in Cuba not just a refuge but a home and repaid their adopted country with their honest labor and industry.

For the last time: any Cuban who undertakes a bigotted campaign against the mother country does not know or does not care to know that what we are, for good much more than for ill, is the children of Spain:

"La raza is the greater homeland and ought by right to command from all the countries she engendered the same tribute owed a mother by her children." — José Martí