So Close to the Monster

Letters

Vol. 22 No. 15 · 10 August 2000

From Esther Allen

Gilberto Perez's discussion of US-Cuban relations (LRB, 22 June) alludes to both Elián González and the exiled 19th-century Cuban patriot José Martí, but without mentioning a quite remarkable connection between them. In classic Latin American fashion, Martí was both poet and politician, and his first poem cycle, Ismaelillo ('Little Ishmael'), published in New York City in 1882, pours out his longing for his young son, whose mother had taken him back to Cuba, where Martí could not follow. The father who speaks in these poems repeatedly pictures his son set adrift on the ocean: 'Always I see, floating/a boy, who calls to me'.

Earlier this year Fidel Castro, at great expense, had a statue of Martí erected on the waterfront plaza in Havana that was the officially designated site of many of the Elián-related protests. The statue – one of dozens of Martí that stand across Cuba and wherever a Cuban community of any size exists in the United States – shows Martí holding a young boy in one arm and pointing an accusatory finger at the nearby offices of the US Special Interests Section. Martí's own views about the US were in fact contradictory. In his last letter, cited by Perez, he does speak ominously of the US 'falling upon the other lands of Our America', but this letter was written to a Mexican friend and pleads for Mexico to find an 'effective and immediate way of helping … its own defender' – i.e. Cuba. If the ghastly spectre of US imperialism could scare up some Mexican assistance for his cause, Martí was willing to conjure it up.

On the other hand, one of his last letters was to Maria Mantilla, his illegitimate adolescent daughter, in New York City. Strangely certain that he was about to die, Martí took leave of Maria by recommending that she found a bilingual school for young girls in Brooklyn. He gave precise instructions as to curriculum and pedagogical method and describes a vision of Mantilla moving attentively among her young charges. This doesn't seem like an evocation of life inside a 'monster'.

Mantilla went on to become the mother of César Romero, Golden Age Hollywood's quintessential Latin lover, who is best remembered for playing the Joker in the television version of Batman.

Esther Allen
New York

Vol. 22 No. 17 · 7 September 2000

From Gilberto Perez

Esther Allen (Letters, 10 August) says that José Martí held contradictory views of the US. I said the same thing in my article. But Allen seems to want to resolve the contradictions in a certain way. She suggests that the strong anti-American sentiments expressed in Martí's last letter, from which I quoted, shouldn't be taken too seriously because that letter was addressed to a Mexican friend and intended as an appeal for Mexican help in the Cuban War of Independence. As Allen would have it, Martí didn't really mean what he said about the 'monster': look at his advice to his daughter in New York to start a bilingual school in Brooklyn. But it was politically, not personally, that Martí felt the US was a monster. His appeal to the Mexicans should be taken very seriously and the Mexicans should have heeded it. An independent Cuba, free from Spanish rule and from American dominance, would have benefited all of Latin America. Martí's personal feelings about the US, mixed as they were, are not the issue.

Gilberto Perez
University of Missouri<br />Rolla, Missouri