Where did the awakening of José Martí’s ideology come from? From the age of nine, Martí experienced the profound rejection of slavery after seeing for the first time the abuses against slaves, the stocks, the whips, the barracks and the humiliations during his stay in his father’s sugar cane plantations in Matanzas.
After being educated in a centered humanism and in the refined spiritualism of Rafael Maria de Mendive, he wrote for juvenile newspapers; accused of infidelity to the metropolis he was condemned to 6 years of imprisonment and deported to Spain. In 1871, when he was 18 years old, he published El presidio político en Cuba, a document denouncing the penitentiary system in the colony; the Apostle began knowing the Spanish politics through one of its worst areas, that is why he concluded in this pamphlet affirming that “Spain cannot be free. Spain still has a lot of blood on its forehead”.
At the Central University of Madrid, as a free education student, he studied Law, Literature, History, Philosophy, Logic, Ethics, Poetics, Psychology… and polemicized in the Spanish press on political issues. In 1873, on the occasion of the proclamation of the first Republic, he published La República Española ante la Revolución Cubana, a text of irrefutable logic of political analysis; Martí, in this formative stage, welcomed the Republic, but urged it to fulfill its obligations, without the double standards typical of colonial powers: “Man of good will, I salute the Republic that triumphs, I salute it today as I will curse it tomorrow when a Republic drowns another Republic, when a free people at last compresses the liberties of another people, when a nation that explains itself to be so, subjugates and subjugates another nation that has to prove to it that it wants to be so. […]. And if Cuba proclaims its independence by the same right that the Republic proclaims itself, how can the Republic deny Cuba its right to be free, which is the same right it used to be free? How can the Republic deny itself?
Also in Mexico he was involved in his politics, of a very complex practice; however, what he wrote and polemized about most was the “Cuban question”, a subject that already obsessed him. When he was 25 years old, he published his booklet Guatemala, a travelogue that has become one of the most complete and lucid comprehensive essays on that country, due to the deep knowledge of the society, written with the look of a statesman and a sociologist, but above all, of a politician; however, from that country and year, he commented to his Mexican friend Manuel Mercado, on March 8: “The closer I touch political things, the more repugnance they inspire in me”.
When he returned to Cuba, after the Ten Years’ War, his political culture began a process of maturation that he intentionally deepened in order to continue with the patriotic struggle. In his notes for his speeches at the Artistic and Literary Lyceum of Guanabacoa in 1879, we can discover an intimate writing submerged in the Cuban life of the time, which gives account of his first criteria on the newly created parties after the Zanjón: “To stop what is going seems a human attempt: In the political movement -how old is this as everything new- it is necessary that there are those who push and those who restrain. Every conservative party must be liberal. Every liberal party must be conservative. Every party must be generous. What is not generous is hateful”. His time in Mexico and Guatemala, and his time in Cuba until his second deportation, gave him a working knowledge of the application of bad policies in those societies; and his disagreements and foresight toward them were sharpened when he began to live in the United States.
In journalism, that is to say, in a public way, we find the most revealing opinions of the early process of lucidity of his political thought, since he arrived in New York in 1880, during all that decade and until his death, both in the historical-social journalism and in that of artistic-literary subjects, although his personal correspondence and notes reveal other political issues. From his comments, for example, in “News from France” or in “Flaubert’s Last Work”, some important concepts emerge in the labyrinthine context of that nation: “politics is the art of inventing a resource to each new resource of the opposites, of converting setbacks into fortune; of adapting oneself to the present moment, without the adaptation costing sacrifice, or the important diminution of the ideal one is pursuing; of ceasing to take thrust; of falling upon the enemy, before he has his armies in line, and his battle prepared.”