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Political Prison in Cuba

At the age of 16, José Martí was arrested and charged with treason on the basis of a letter signed by him and his friend Fermín Valdés Domínguez, accusing a fellow student of selling out to Spain. After serving several months of his sentence of six years’ hard labor, Martí was deported to Spain in January 1871. Soon after his arrival in Madrid, Martí published the pamphlet “Political Prison in Cuba,” excerpted here.

I

These pages should be known by no other name but infinite pain.

Infinite pain, for the pain of prison is the harshest, the most devastating of afflictions, that which kills the intelligence and withers the soul, leaving effects that will never be erased.

It begins with a length of iron chain; it drags with it this mysterious world that troubles the heart; it grows, nourished upon every somber sorrow, and finally wanders about magnified by every scalding tear.

Dante was never in prison.

If he had felt the dark cavern of that living torture topple upon his head, he would have stopped depicting his inferno. He would have set down those experiences and thus created a better description.

If a provident God had existed and he had seen him, he would have covered his face with one hand and with the other tossed such a denial of God into the abyss.

Yet God does exist in the idea of good, which watches over the birth of every being and leaves in the soul embodied in that being one pure tear. Good is God, and the tear the source of eternal feeling.

God does exist, and I come in his name to break in Spanish hearts the cold and indifferent glass that contains their tears.

God does exist, and if you people make me move away from here without having torn out of you your cowardly, unfortunate indifference, let me despise you, since I am unable to hate anyone; let me pity you in the name of my God.

I will not hate you, nor will I curse you.

If I were to hate anyone, I would hate myself for so doing.

If my God were to curse, I would deny him for so doing.

IV

You who have never had a thought of justice in your heads, or a word of truth upon your lips for the most grievously sacrificed, most cruelly crushed race upon this earth.

You who have sacrificed some people upon the altar of enticing words, and have gladly listened to others, to the most elemental principles of righteousness, to the most common notions of feeling — cry out for your honor, cry out at such sacrifice, cover your heads with dust, fall to your bare knees and begin picking up the pieces of your reputation which are scattering over the ground in all directions.

What were you beginning to do so many years ago?

What have you done?

There was a time when sunlight was not hidden from your lands. And today there is scarcely a ray of it shining upon them from here, as if the sun itself were ashamed of giving light to your possessions.

Mexico, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia, New Granada, the Antilles all came in festive attire, kissed your feet, and carpeted with gold the wide wake left by your ships upon the Atlantic. You crushed the freedom of all those countries; they all joined hands in placing one more sphere, one more world in your kingly crown.

Spain was reminiscent of Rome.

Caesar had returned to the world and had divided himself into pieces, each piece lodging in one of your men with their thirst for glory and their delirious ambition.

Centuries passed.

The subjugated nations had laid a golden highway across the North Atlantic for your ships. And across the South Atlantic our captains laid a path of clotted blood in whose swampy pools floated heads black as ebony; and threatening arms rose up like thunder paving the way for a storm.

And finally the storm broke; and just as it was slowly prepared, so it was furiously and inexorably unleashed upon us.

Venezuela, Bolivia, New Granada, Mexico, Peru and Chile bit your hands that were convulsively holding fast the reins of their freedom, opening deep wounds in them. And since your courage was flagging and weary and buffeted about, an ay! escaped from your lips, blow after blow resounded dismally in the bloody sea path, and the head of Spanish domination rolled over the American continent, traversing its plains, tramping its mountains, crossing its rivers, and falling at last to the bottom of a deep canyon, never again to rise from it.

The Antilles, the Antilles alone, especially Cuba, groveled at your feet, put her lips to your wounds, licked your hands, and carefully and affectionately made a new head for your mistreated shoulders.

And while she carefully restored your strength, you folded your arms beneath her arms, reached into her heart, tore it out, and ruptured its arteries of learning and morality.

And when she demanded of you a niggardly pittance in recompense for the hardships she had suffered, you held out your hands and showed her the shapeless mass of her shattered heart, and laughingly threw it in her face.

She felt her chest, found another new heart beating vigorously, and blushing with shame she stilled its beating, bowed her head, and waited.

But this time she waited on guard, and the treacherous claw was able to draw blood only from the iron wrist of the hand that covered her heart.

And when she again held out her hands pleading for more help, you once again showed her the mass of flesh and blood, once again laughed, and once again threw it in her face. And she felt the blood rise to her throat, choke her, and mount to her brain. It needed to flow, for it was com pressed in her vigorous heart, and boiling throughout her body in the heat of mockery and outrage. At last it did flow. It did because you yourselves drove it to do so, because your cruelty caused her veins to burst, because you have so many times broken her heart to pieces and she did not want you to break it again.

And if this was your desire, why are you surprised?

And if you think it is a question of honor to continue writing your colonial history with such pages, why do you not even sweeten with some justice your supreme effort to establish the shreds of your conqueror’s cloak in Cuba forever?

And if you know and recognize this, because you cannot help knowing and recognizing it; if you understand this, then why in your comprehension do you not even begin to practice those unavoidable precepts of honor whose avoidance makes you suffer so much?

When all is forgotten, when all is lost, when in the turbulent sea of human misery the God of Ages sometimes stirs the waves and finds a nation’s disgrace, he never finds compassion or feelings in them.

Honor can be stained. Justice can be sold.

Everything can be torn apart.

But the notion of righteousness floats over all and never sinks.

Preserve that notion in your land if in the history of this world you do not want the first ones to sink to be yourselves.

Preserve it, for that land can yet be a nation in which, even where all feelings have vanished, there might finally remain the feelings of sorrow and of its own dignity.

XII

And so many have died!

And so many sons are going to the quarries in the dark of night to weep upon the stone under which they assume rests the spirit of their forefathers!

And so many mothers have lost their reason!

Mother, mother! How I feel you living in my soul! How your memory inspires me! How the bitterest tears of your memory burn my cheeks!

Mother, mother! So many are weeping as you have wept! So many mothers are losing the sparkle in their eyes as you have lost it!

Mother, mother!

In the meantime, the nation’s deputies are applauding.

Look, look.

There before me parade in a heartrending and silent procession the specters that resemble living men, and the living men that resemble specters.

Look, look!

Here goes happy, satisfied, joyful cholera laughing with horrible laughter. It has exchanged its scythe for the prison whip. It carries a bundle of chains upon its back. From time to time a drop of blood falls from that shapeless group of men that raises an infernal noise. Always blood! This time the cholera is loading its back in the political prison of Cuba.

Look, look!

Here comes a head embellished with snow. It bends upon a neck that groans because it cannot support it. Purulent matter runs down its wretched clothing. A heavy chain clanks with a dull thud at its feet. And yet it smiles. Always that smile! The martyr is truly something of God. And how hapless the people when they murder God!

Look, look!

Here comes loathsome, filthy smallpox, a scarlet tear out of hell that laughs with frightful laughter. It has one eye like Quasimodo. It carries a living body on its hideous humped back. It throws the body upon the ground, leaps around it, tramples upon it, tosses it into the air, picks it up and replaces it upon its back, throws it down again, dances around it and cries: “Lino, Lino!” And the body moves, and it fastens shackles to the body and pushes it a long way, a very long way, down, far down to the mound over there known as the quarry. “Lino! Lino!” it repeats as it moves away. And the body rises to its feet, and the lash is brandished, and Lino works. Always that work! It is true that his spirit is God himself. How far astray do people go when they apply the lash to God!

Look, look!

Here it comes, laughing — a wide Negro mouth laughing. The world depends upon it. Memory folded the wings in its brain and flew farther. The curly wool is already white. It laughs and laughs.

“Master, why am I living?”

“Master, master, how ugly it sounds!” And he shakes the leg irons and laughs and laughs.

God is weeping.

And how the people weep when they make God weep!

Look, look!

Here comes the quarry. It is an immense mass. Many arms covered with gold braid are pushing it. And it rolls, rolls along, and at every revolution a mother’s despairing eyes shine forth within a black disc and disappear. And the men with the arms keep laughing and pushing, and the mass keeps rolling, and at every revolution a body is crushed and the chains clang together and a tear wells out of the stone and alights upon the neck of one of the laughing, pushing men. And the eyes shine and the bones break and the tears weigh heavily upon the necks, and the mass rolls along. Ay! When the mass finishes rolling, such a gross body will weigh upon your heads that you never will be able to lift them again. Never!

In the name of compassion, in the name of honor, in the name of God, stop that mass; stop it, lest it turn toward you men and drag you down with its horrible weight. Stop it, for it is scattering many tears upon the earth, and the tears of the martyrs are ascending to the sky in the mists, and then condensing; and if you fail to stop it, the sky will tumble down upon you.

The terrible cholera, the snowy head, the frightful smallpox, the wide Negro mouth, the mass of stone. And everything — like the corpse looming out of the coffin, like the white face looming out of the black robe — everything passes by enveloped in a heavy, spreading, reddish, suffocating atmosphere. Blood, always blood!

Oh, look, look!

Spain cannot be free.

Spain still has too much blood upon her head.

Now approve the Spanish government’s conduct in Cuba.

Now, fathers of the country, declare in the country’s name that you sanction the most iniquitous violation of morality, and the most complete obliviousness to every sentiment of justice.

Declare it, sanction it, approve it — if you can.