retamar caliban (4 page)

Now, if that knowledge, because of the curious circumstances alluded to, was denied or available only in a limited way to the early generations of this century, who frequently had to base their defense of subsequent radical arguments on a “first launching pad” as well-intentioned but at the same time as weak as the nineteenth-century work
Ariel,
what can we say of more recent authors to whom editions of Marti are now available but who nevertheless persist in ignoring him? I am thinking, of course, not of scholars more or less ignorant of our problems but, on the contrary, of those who maintain a consistently anticolonialist attitude. The only explanation of this situation is a painful one: we have been so thoroughly steeped in colonialism that we read with real respect only those anticolonialist authors
disseminated from the metropolis.
In this way we cast aside the greatest lesson of Marti; thus, we are barely familiar with Artigas, Recabarren, Mella, and even Mariategui and Ponce. And I have the sad suspicion that if the extraordinary texts of Che Guevara have enjoyed the greatest dissemination ever accorded a Latin American, the fact that he is read with such avidity by our people is to a certain extent due to the prestige his name has even in the metropolitan capitals—where, to be sure, he is frequently the object of the most shameless manipulation. For consistency in our anticolonialist attitude we must in effect turn to those of our people who have incarnated and illustrated that attitude in their behavior and thinking.
⁴³
And for this, there is no case more useful than that of Marti.

I know of no other Latin-American author who has given so immediate and so coherent an answer to another question put to me by my interlocutor, the European journalist whom I mentioned at the beginning of these lines (and whom, if he did not exist, I would have had to invent, although this would have deprived me of his friendship, which I trust will survive this monologue): “What relationship,’’ this guileless wit asked me, “does Borges have to the Incas?’’ Borges is almost a reductio ad absurdum and, in any event, I shall discuss him later. But it is only right and fair to ask what relationship we, the present inhabitants of this America in whose zoological and cultural heritage Europe has played an unquestionable part, have to the primitive inhabitants of this same America—those peoples who constructed or were in the process of constructing admirable cultures and who were exterminated or martyred by Europeans of various nations, about whom neither a white nor black legend can be build, only an infernal truth of blood, that, together with such deeds as the enslavement of Africans, constitutes their eternal dishonor. Marti, whose father was from Valencia and whose mother was from the Canaries, who wrote the most prodigious Spanish of his—and our—age, and who came to have the greatest knowledge of the Euro-North American culture ever possessed by a man of our American, also asked this question. He answered it as follows: “We are descended from Valencian
fathers and
Canary Island mothers and feel the inflamed blood of Tamanaco and Paramaconi coursing through our veins; we see the blood that fell amid the brambles of Mount Calvary as our own, along with that shed by the naked and heroic Caracas as they struggled breast to breast with the gonzalos in their iron-plated armor.’’
⁴
*

I presume that the reader, if he or she is not a Venezuelan, will be unfamiliar with the names evoked by Marti. So was 1. This lack of familiarity is but another proof of our subjection to the colonialist perspective of history that has been imposed on us, causing names, dates, circumstances, and truths to vanish from our consciousness. Under other circumstances—but closely related to these—did not the bourgeois version of history try to erase the heroes of the Commune of 1871, the martyrs of 1 May
1886
(significantly reclaimed by Marti)? At any rate, Tamanaco, Paramaconi, “the naked and heroic Caracas’’ were natives of what is today called Venezuela, of
Carib blood, the blood of Caliban,
coursing through his veins. This will not be the only time he expresses such an idea, which is central to his thinking.
⁴³
Again making use of such heroes, he was to repeat sometime later: “We must stand with Guaicaipuro, Paramaconi [heroes of Venezuela, probably of Carib origin], and not with the flames that burned them, nor with the ropes that bound them, nor with the steel that beheaded them, nor with the dogs that devoured them.”
⁴⁶
Marti’s rejection of the ethnocide that Europe practiced is
total
, No less total is his identification with the American peoples that
offered
heroic resistance to the invader, and in whom Marti say the natural forerunners of the Latin-American
independentistas.
This explains why in the notebook in which this last quotation appears, he continues writing, almost without transition, on Aztec mythology (“no less beautiful than the Greek”), on the ashes of Quetzacoatl, on “Ayachucho on the solitary plateau,” on "Bolivar, like the rivers.”
⁴⁷

Marti, however, dreams not of a restoration now impossible but of the future integration of our America—an America rising organically from a firm grasp of its true roots to the heights of authentic modernity. For this reason, the first quotation in which he speaks of feeling valiant Carib blood coursing through his veins continues as follows:

It is good to open canals, to promote schools, to create steamship lines, to keep abreast of one’s own time, to be on the side of the vanguard in the beautiful march of humanity. But in order not to falter because of a lack of spirit or the vanity of a false spirit, it is good also to nourish oneself through memory and admiration, through righteous study and loving compassion, on that fervent spirit of the natural surroundings in which one is born—a spirit matured and quickened by those of every race that issues from such surroundings and finds its final repose in them. Politics and literature flourish only when they are direct. The American intelligence is an indigenous plumage. Is it not evident that America itself was paralyzed by the same blow that paralyzed the Indian? And until the Indian is caused to walk, America itself will not begin to walk well. [“AAA,” 337]

Marti's identification with our aboriginal culture was thus accompanied by a complete sense of the concrete tasks imposed upon him by his circumstances. Far from hampering him, that identification nurtured in him the most radical and modern criteria of his time in the colonial countries.

Naturally, Martis approach to the Indian was also applied to the black
⁴⁸
Unfortunately, while in his day serious inquiries into American aboriginal cultures (which Marti studied passionately) had already been undertaken, only in the twentieth century would then appear similar studies of African cultures and their considerable contribution to the makeup of our mestizo America (see Frobenius, Delafosse, Suret-Canale; Ortiz, Ramos, Herskovits, Roumain, Metraux, Bastide, Franco).
⁴⁹
And Marti died five years before the dawning of our century. In any event, in his treatment of Indian culture and in his concrete behavior toward the black, he left a very clear outline of a “battle plan” in this area.

This is the way in which Marti forms his Calibanesque vision of the culture of what he called “our America.” Marti is, as Fidel was later to be, aware of how difficult it is even to find a name that in designating us defines us conceptually. For this reason, after several attempts, he favored that modest descriptive formula that above and beyond race, language, and secondary circumstances embraces the communities that live, with their common problems, “from the [Rio] Bravo to Patagonia,” and that are distinct from “European America.” I have already said that although it is found scattered throughout his very numerous writings, this conception of our culture is aptly summarized in the article-manifesto “Our America,” and [ direct the reader to it: to his insistence upon the idea that one cannot “rule new peoples with a singular and violent composition, with laws inherited from four centuries of free practice in the United States, or nineteen centuries of monarchy in France. One does not stop the blow in the chest of the plainsman’s horse with one of Hamilton’s decrees. One does not clear the congealed blood of the Indian race with a sentence of Sieyes”; to his deeply rooted concept that ‘ ‘the imported book has been conquered in America by the natural man. Natural men have conquered the artificial men of learning.
The authentic mestizo has conquered the exotic Creole”
(my emphasis); and finally to his fundamental advice:

The European university must yield to the American university. The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught letter perfect, even
if
that of the Argonauts of Greece is not taught. Our own Greece is preferable to that Greece that is not ours. We have greater need of it. National politicians must replace foreign and exotic politicians. Graft the world onto our republics, but the trunk must be that of our republics. And let the conquered pedant be silent: there is no homeland of which the individual can be more proud than our unhappy American republics.

The Real Life of a False Dilemma

It is impossible
not to
see in this text—which, as has been said, summarizes in lightning fashion Marti’s judgment on this essential problem—his violent rejection of the imposition of Prospero (“the European university... the     European book [,]... the Yankee book”), which ‘
‘must yield’'
to the reality
of
Caliban (“the [Latin] American university [,]... the Latin American enigma”): “The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught letter perfect even, if that of the Argonauts of Greece is not taught. Our own Greece is preferable to that Greece that is
not
ours.” And later: “Common cause must be made with the oppressed so as to secure the system against the interest and customs of the oppressors.”

But our America has also heard, expressed with vehemence by a talented and energetic man who died three years before Marti’s work appeared, the thesis that was the exact opposite: the thesis of Prospero.
⁵⁰
The interlocutors were not called then Prospero and Caliban, but rather
Civilization and Barbarism,
the title that the Argentinean Domingo Faustino Sarmiento gave to the first edition (1845) of his great book on Facundo Quiroga. I do not believe that autobiographical confessions are of much interest here, but since I have already mentioned, by way of self-inflicted punishment, the forgettable pleasures of the westerns and Tarzan films by which we were innoculated, unbeknownst to us, with the ideology that we verbally repudiated in the Nazis (I was twelve years old when the Second World War was at its height), I must also confess that only a few years afterward, I read this book passionately. In the margins of my old copy, I find my enthusiasms, my rejections of the “tyrant of the Republic of Argentina” who had exclaimed, “Tlraitors to the American cause!” I also find, a few pages later, the comment, “It is strange how one thinks of Pertm.” It was many years later, specifically after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 (when we began to live and to read the world in another way), that I understood I had not been on the best side in that otherwise remarkable book. It was not possible to be simultaneously in agreement with
Facundo
and with “Our America.” What is more, “Our America”—along with a large part of Martis entire work—is an implicit, and at times explicit, dialogue with the Sarmiento theses. If not, what then does this lapidary sentence of Mart/’s mean: “
There is no battle between civilization and barbarism
, only between false erudition and nature.” Eight years before “Our America” appeared (1891)—within Sarmiento’s lifetime—Marti had already spoken (in the sentence 1 have quoted more than once) of the ‘ ‘pretext that civilization, which is the vulgar name under which contemporary European man operates, has the natural right to seize the land of foreigners, which is the name given by those who desire foreign lands to every contemporary human being who does not come from Europe or European America.”
³¹
In both cases, Marti
rejects the false
dichotomy that Sarmiento, falling into the trap adroitly set by the colonizer, takes for granted. For this reason, when I said sometime ago that “in coming out on the side of ‘barbarism’ Marti foreshadows Fanon and our Revolution”
⁵²
(a phrase that some hasty people, without noticing the quotation marks, misunderstood—as if Fanon, Fidel, and Che were apostles of barbarism),

I wrote “barbarism” in this way, between quotation marks, to indicate that in fact there was not such state. The presumed barbarism of our peoples was invented with crude cynicism by “those who desire foreign lands”; those who, with equal effrontery, give the “popular name” of “civilization” to the “contemporary” human being who comes “from Europe or European America.” What was surely more painful for Marti was to see a man of our America—a man whom, despite incurable differences, he admired in his positive aspects
⁵³
—fall into this very grave error. Thinking of figures such as Sarmiento, it was Martinez Estrada (who had
previously
written so many pages extolling Sarmiento) who in 1962 wrote in his book
Diferencias y semejanzas entre los paises de la America Latina
[Similarities and Differences among Latin-American Countries]:

We can immediately establish the premise that those who have worked,

in some cases patriotically, to shape social life in complete accordance

with models of other highly developed countries, whose practices are the result of an organic process over the course of centuries, have betrayed the cause of the true emancipation of Latin America.
⁵⁴

I lack the necessary information to discuss here the virtues and defects of this bourgeois antagonist and shall limit myself to pointing out this opposition to Marti, and the coherence between his thought and conduct. As a postulator of
Civilization,
which he found incarnated in archetypal form in the United States, he advocated the extermination of the indigenous peoples according to the savage Yankee model; what is more, he adored that growing republic to the north that had by mid-century still not demonstrated so clearly the flaws that Marti would later discover. In both extremes—and they are precisely that: extremes, margins of their respective thinking—he and Marti differed irreconcilably.