In Central Park, where Sixth Avenue ends, there is an equestrian statue of Cuban-American poet José Martí.
In 1945, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia and the New York City Council decided to rename Sixth Avenue “Avenue of the Americas” in order to “promote Pan-American ideals and principles” in the city that was home to the new headquarters of the United Nations. Straddling the two Americas, the Spanish and the Anglo-Saxon—that is to say, “ours” and “theirs”—the rider in the park personified the promise and conflict of those same ideals and principles.
The new name for the avenue did not catch on in the imagination of New Yorkers, who continued to call it “la Sexta,” and today few of the coats of arms of the American nations that adorned the streetlights remain. Perhaps this neglect indicates that the time has come to relaunch Sixth Avenue for the new century with the name of one of its most distinguished passers-by, an immigrant who celebrated and suffered New York and left his mark on every cobblestone in Manhattan.
The equestrian statue is the work of sculptor Anne Hyatt Huntington, wife of millionaire Archer M. Huntington, founder of the Hispanic Society of America. The statue measures 10 meters and weighs 5 tons, and was placed on its granite pedestal in 1965, amid another controversy between Cuban exiles and the regime in Havana, who were disputing—and still dispute—Martí’s spiritual legacy. The bronze figure holds his hand to his chest and grimaces in pain.
The startled steed, rearing up on its hind legs, indicates that the rider fell in combat. José Martí met his death in Dos Ríos, a town in eastern Cuba, on May 19, 1895. He had landed on the shores of his native country just six weeks earlier after fifteen years of exile in New York.
His intention was to join, as another combatant, the troops of Generals Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, who were taking up arms again in a new attempt to reignite the war for Cuban independence, which Martí himself had organized from New York.
Contemporary accounts give an idea of the incident at Dos Ríos[iv]. Soldier Pablo Raimundo Rodríguez García, an insurgent from the Canary Islands who fought on the Cuban side, recounts that on the morning of May 19, “lined up in pairs at the rear, we were harangued by Delegate Martí, who walked through the center of all the ranks; immediately afterwards, the order to advance was given…”
Shortly afterwards, “Martí, who was riding a fiery and swift horse and, because of this and also because of his impetuosity, had advanced five or six yards ahead of us, fell badly wounded from his horse, and even with his revolver still in his hand…”
The moment depicted in the sculpture on the Avenida de las Américas is exceptional. José Martí was a thinker and a poet, not a warrior. He had spent most of his life in exile, bent over a desk, first in Madrid and Zaragoza, as a student of philosophy and law, and then in an office on Front Street in Manhattan, where he wrote the newspaper dispatches on American reality that earned him his living and made him famous.
To be faithful to its model, the statue should have represented a man of letters, not an inexperienced man of action who was shot at point-blank range by enemy bullets. In addition to a revolver clenched in his fist, he carried in his jacket pocket a small book on the Life of Cicero, a gold watch, and an unfinished letter to a Mexican friend[v].
Spanish soldier Maximiliano Loizaga, who was part of Colonel José Ximénez de Sandoval’s troop, with which Martí clashed, describes the impression the young hero made on his adversaries:
“All of us soldiers who contemplated the fallen man felt a respectful impulse, the respect that the brave inspire in those who were so brave. The corpse [was] dressed in a dark gray striped suit with light white stripes, wearing black riding boots with steel spurs…”
Loizaga forgot to mention the beaver hat Martí was wearing that day. The classic inhabitant of the New York asphalt jungle fell riddled with bullets in the Cuban jungle.
The equestrian statue commemorates the patriot at the moment when he was absolutely faithful to his principles and totally alien to himself. The greatest of modern Spanish-American writers was exposed to the curiosity of passers-by, like one of the picturesque adventurers who populate the pages of his Escenas norteamericanas.
***
José Julián Martí Pérez was born on Paula Street, in Old Havana, on January 28, 1853. His father, Mariano Martí Navarro, a sergeant in the Royal Artillery Corps, was a native of Valencia, Spain; his mother, Leonor Pérez Cabrera, from Santa Cruz de Tenerife, had emigrated to Cuba at the age of thirteen.
The poet knew his parents’ homeland intimately. In 1857, the family returned to Spain, and Martí lived for two years on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Part of his education took place in a Spanish environment, and it is likely that he spoke Castilian Spanish with a Canarian accent. He was not yet “Latino,” as he is commonly classified today, but “Hispanic,” a key element of the melting pot of races in the United States at the end of the 19th century. The father of filmmaker George Romero, creator of zombies, was a Cuban immigrant of Hispanic descent, as was the adoptive father of novelist Truman Capote, author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The list of Cuban-American stepfathers includes Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon[viii]. For his part, José Martí is the maternal grandfather of actor César Romero[ix], the classic “Latin Lover” of B movies from Hollywood’s golden age[x].
Thanks to the constant moves required by his father’s job, the boy was able to discover the beautiful landscapes of the Cuban countryside. In 1860, they traveled together to the provinces of Pinar del Río and Las Villas, where rivers and tropical forests abound. At the age of nine, Martí went to Matanzas with Mariano, who had been appointed deputy judge of the Hanábana territorial district, and there he wrote his first known page: a description of a horse. The following year, they visited the Republic of Honduras, and in 1868 they were in Batabanó, a port town on the south coast of Havana, where his father was a police judge. José Martí’s mature writings reveal a detailed knowledge of the geography, flora, and fauna of the regions he visited as a child.
His adolescence was spent during the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878), the unsuccessful conflict for the independence of his native country[xi]. At the age of sixteen, the colonial authorities accused him of writing a letter in which he called a classmate who had enlisted in the Voluntarios, the civil militia that supported the Spanish army, a “traitor.” For this, Martí was sentenced to six years in prison as a “declared enemy of Spain.” A photo from the period shows him with a shackle around his waist and a chain around his ankle, working in the quarries of San Lázaro.
In 1871, he was sent to the Isle of Pines and from there deported to Spain. Between 1871 and 1874, while in exile, he studied philosophy and literature and obtained a law degree. During a break from his studies, he managed to travel to France, where he met Victor Hugo, the author of Les Misérables. In January 1874, he set sail from Liverpool on a transatlantic liner and arrived in the United States for the first time.
His stay in New York was brief. His first American pilgrimage took him to Mérida, Veracruz, and finally Mexico City, where his family was waiting for him, having moved there once again. In the Mexican capital, he published his first journalistic works and composed dramatic plays that were successfully premiered. He also met his future wife, Carmen Zayas Bazán.
In 1878, he returned to Cuba under an amnesty law. From the age of 25 to 26, he lived in Havana with his wife and son José Francisco, began writing Versos libres, published posthumously, and resumed his conspiratorial activities, for which he was arrested and deported back to Spain in September 1879.
Thanks to the influence of good friends, he managed to be sent to Madrid instead of the penal colony of Ceuta, the Spanish territory in North Africa. During his stay in Madrid, he visited the Prado Museum, studied the classical painters, and attended bullfights. In December, he secretly crossed into France, boarded a ship in the port of Le Havre, and arrived in New York on January 3, 1880.
***
Apart from his return to Cuba, where he died, and a brief interval in Venezuela, where he wrote Ismaelillo, the poem that launched the literary movement known as Modernism, José Martí lived in New York for the rest of his life.
The date of his arrival in Manhattan is a milestone in the history of Spanish-American literature.
For Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama, “there is a circumstance that divides (…) Martí’s work into two distinct periods: his assimilation of American thought beginning in 1880” and his earlier writing, which “lacks the seasoned clarity of thought that he acquired after that date.”
Critics emphasize the evolution and maturity of pensamiento—a word that conveys the idea of high culture—without noting that the “seasoned clarity” is also due to Martí’s assimilation of the knowledge and practices of mass culture in the United States.
Ángel Rama, like most commentators before and after him, cites the transcendentalist doctrine of philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson as the primary influence on the young immigrant’s thinking, without acknowledging the modern impact of sensationalism on Martí’s culture. The mark of commercialism is less evident because it is the substrate of a philosophy that is not so much transcendental as cheap.
In the 1880s, sensational news was already being offered under the label of “true events,” and media scandal became the exclusive merchandise of tabloids and “two-cent newspapers”: such was the intellectual environment into which Martí arrived.
The media revolution coincided with the opening of the Woolworth store, whose “five-and-dime” format served as a paradigm for the cultural operations of the time. “The patriot, if he loves his country, will not begin to read the newspaper with the editorial, which says what is thought, but with the advertisements, which say what is done,” is a phrase that clarifies José Martí’s little-noticed positivism.
The poem “El padre suizo” (The Swiss Father), from 1882, which belongs to his Versos libres (Free Verses), is based on the news of a mass suicide in Arkansas, copied and pasted directly from the tabloid press; while his first dispatches from New York report in detail the agony and death of President James Garfield, shot in the middle of a train station, and the trial of the assassin, Charles Guiteau. It is no coincidence, then, that the most publicized event of the late 19th century, a spectacular sequel to the death of José Martí in Dos Ríos, was the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, of which he had been the intellectual author.
Nor is it surprising that his “Complete Works” were a museum of the most diverse types of literature (“Take away his abundance and Martí dissolves,” warns Chilean Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral). In its extensive galleries, there are letters, novels, children’s stories, portraits of celebrities and ordinary people alongside cartoons, poems, reports, campaign diaries, translations, speeches, and plays. It is a crowded warehouse that can be entered through any door, without losing the thread and without the order of the fragments altering the product.
The assassination of a US president; a horse race; a strike; a rat fight; a public execution; the beneficial effects of electric light; the technique of color photography; the origin of species; the discovery of chlorophyll; the long feather on the tail of the quetzal; or a Sunday at Coney Island: the catalog of topics seems endless. It fell to the young lawyer Gonzalo de Quesada y Aróstegui to undertake the enormous task of placing the disparate pieces in a logical order. He had been Martí’s secretary in New York and, after the hero’s death, his literary representative. Martí called him “son,” and Gonzalo was the first to refer to him as “apostle.”
In a letter dated April 1, 1895, written in Monte Cristi, Dominican Republic, on his way to Cuba to join the war of independence, the Apostle entrusted his disciple with the publication of his scattered work, warning him “not to order the papers, nor to extract literature from them; all that is dead, and there is nothing here worthy of publication, in prose or verse: they are mere notes.“[xxiii]
He then proposes that ”from what has been printed, if necessary… material could be selected from the six main volumes.” The publication plan outlined by Martí appears in the same letter, which is considered his literary will:
“If I do not return, and you insist on putting my papers together, make the volumes as we planned: I. North Americans II. North Americans III. Spanish Americans IV. North American Scenes V. Books of America VI. Letters, Education, and Painting.”
The first of the sixteen volumes of the Martí series, published by Gonzalo de Quesada y Aróstegui, appeared in Washington, D.C., in 1900; the second and third in Havana in 1901 and 1902, respectively; the fifth in Rome; and the tenth in Berlin. The number of volumes grew as the compilers recycled the paperwork that Martí had given up for dead, reaching 74 volumes in the 1936-1949 edition.
In a letter to Néstor Carbonell y Rivero, another commentator and editor of Martí’s work, Gonzalo de Quesada lamented:
“Many believe that these volumes are produced by taking them out of a drawer where they are ready and in order, when in fact it is the work of a titan and of patience, requesting an article from Buenos Aires, a pamphlet from Guatemala, and discovering something remarkable and unknown in Venezuela or in the National Library here.”
Decades later, in his “Introduction” to the Obras Completas, published by the Editora Nacional de Cuba (1963-1965), Gonzalo de Quesada y Miranda, the son of Quesada y Aróstegui and continuer of his father’s work, explains how the collection was enriched with new contributions:
“Gonzalo de Quesada y Aróstegui jealously guards Martí’s precious papers, his manuscripts, and his notebooks in a small trunk. On his travels in the diplomatic service of his country, he always takes that Martí chest with him. Enriching its valuable contents was not always an easy task…”[xxvi].
Conceived as a series, each installment of the “Works” incorporates new revelations and new misconceptions. The poet riding a runaway horse in Central Park seems to have known that ubiquity—“I come from everywhere / and I go everywhere”—would define not only his life, but also his posterity.
***
“For some reason, Martí is relatively unknown and underappreciated in the United States. His name is not unfamiliar in Tampa, Key West, and Miami, Florida, where he is honored with busts in public parks, and he is familiar to American students of Latin American history and literature, even though, prior to the 1965 edition, the Encyclopaedia Britannica did not include his biography.”[xxvii]
So said Professor Richard B. Gray of Florida State University in the middle of the last century. Sixty years later, the problem persists. The author of Norteamericanos remains virtually unknown to the very culture that features in his most celebrated pages.
For his part, Professor Roberto González Echevarría of Yale University insists that “Martí does not travel well… in English. He does not travel well,“ something he attributes, in the case of the Versos sencillos, to the fact that ”his poetry, when translated, loses the charm of its simplicity and sounds banal.“ As for his prose, the academic judges it ”so rhetorical that, at least in English, it sounds bombastic and oratorical.”
Despite everything, the discreet charm of the Versos sencillos traveled without much trouble in the lyrics of La guantanamera, an international hit sung by Cuban singer Joseíto Fernández and troubadour Pete Seeger, as well as in countless karaoke bars around the world. To travel between two languages, it only needed a suitable vehicle: set to music, Martí does travel well.
At the end of the 19th century, Martí’s medium of communication had been newspaper, whose manufacture was then undergoing a radical transformation. Rag paper, made from cotton fibers, replaced cellulose pulp, allowing newspapers to increase the size of their sheets and better withstand frequent handling.
Starting in 1866, telegraph cables began to run parallel to the train lines that had been used to carry the news. Steam-powered presses multiplied the capacity for production and the creation of new newspapers—they became so numerous that they shared content through a system of “cut, copy, and paste,” which Martí adopted in his short pieces of 1881-1882 for the Sección Constante section of the Caracas newspaper La Opinión Nacional.
The material for the snippets probably came from established news agencies. It was common for quick notes to be unsigned, and Martí sometimes hid his identity behind the avatar M. de Z. Rags, cable, electricity, the rotary press, the avatar, and the museum of complete works: different ways of bringing Martí’s writing to life.
Then came the radio waves, where La guantanamera spread its hirsute verses, camouflaged in the red chronicles of the news. In 1890, Martí was read simultaneously in Buenos Aires, Caracas, Madrid, Bogotá, Guatemala, New York, and Montevideo. The mass media took it upon themselves to introduce him into every home in Our America.
José Martí, the modernist, invented a new language to represent an increasingly fast-paced reality. He was cultured and sensationalist, melodramatic and telegraphic, anticipating the broadband of the modern internet user. His teachers were Baltasar Gracián, Buffalo Bill, and Oscar Wilde.
Like his contemporary, Karl May, the German author of Western novels, Martí was an influencer and a creator of memes: stars, eagles, pink shoes, mischievous children, hearts, Apaches, butterflies, cupids, and revolutions—what seemed banal then is now virtual lingua franca. In his poems and speeches, readers of all ages found the first alphabet of emoticons.
***
Students of Martí’s texts must arm themselves with patience and a Wiktionary. The “rhetoric” to which Professor González Echevarría alludes can be simplified in two ways: by following the natural rhythm of the clauses and by dissecting sentences to analyze their internal structure.
An enormous amount of knowledge finds its way into each of his pieces. To give one example: when Martí writes “mirada de hoja de Toledo” (Toledo leaf gaze), he means “eyes that throw daggers,” because Toledo, a Spanish city 70 kilometers from Madrid, manufactures the best swords: Martí, the master, would have loved Google Earth.
It should also be borne in mind that the target audience for his teaching was a virtual audience: the Cuban nation conceived as a work in progress, since what he called “patria” (which was also the name of the newspaper he founded in Manhattan) existed only on paper, as a utopia. Not even the idea of independence was shared by all his compatriots. According to reports at the time, as many Cubans fought in the ranks of the pro-Spanish Volunteers as in the Mambí forces under Generals Maceo and Gómez[xxxiii].
The division reached the highest echelons of the revolutionary hierarchy. On a page of his Diario de campaña, dated at the La Mejorana hacienda, fourteen days before his death, Martí writes:
“Maceo and Gómez speak quietly, close to me: they call me over to the doorway: Maceo has another idea for the government: a junta of generals with command, through their representatives—and a General Secretariat:—the homeland, then, and all its offices, which create and animate the army, as the army’s secretariat.”
The four pages that follow, corresponding to Monday, May 6, were torn out at some point and never appeared. At the end of the war, the notebook remained in the hands of General Máximo Gómez, and later, his son Bernardo, who handed it over to the printer. This bibliographic gap is as eloquent as the 12,000 pages of the complete works, as it allows us to glimpse, in the blank space, the fate of the republic “that Martí dreamed of.”
For the man who read Cicero, war was a necessary evil. Civil institutions had to prevail even in the depths of the jungle. Revolution could only be a means to achieve independence, not an end in itself. In all other circumstances, Martí rejected rebellion—time and again, in several of the texts collected in this book—and repudiated anarchy.
***
“If I don’t return…” Martí writes in his literary testament, referring to the home away from home that New York was for him. There were his books, his inner circle of supporters and friends, and the young María Mantilla, his secret daughter. The United States was his second homeland, and the bulk of his written work is devoted to unraveling, for Spanish-speaking readers, the workings of the portentous—sometimes monstrous—democratic machinery. Like the biblical Jonah, he had lived in the belly of the beast, and that experience vindicates his status as a prophet.
Those who knew and studied him confirm his stature as a Pan-American apostle. The great Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral said of him: “He unleashes a flashing allegory, and follows it with a phrase worthy of a good woman, if not a child; (…) he constantly tones down sumptuous words by adding an adjective with a nice popular flavor. Perhaps he read his Bible jumping from one prophet to an evangelist, from Ezekiel to Luke, or else he went back and forth from Saint John the Divine to Saint Peter the fisherman.”[xxxvii]
To which Ángel Rama adds: “Many times, in his letters, in his prologues, in his personal notes not intended for publication, Martí recorded this visionary quality of his, to which he owes the best moments of his poetry. His intellectual honesty bears witness to the truthfulness of his words. These are generally brief, intermittent moments in which the poet sees imaginary or distant beings before him as if they were real. These moments compensate for their brevity with a hundredfold intensity and therefore resemble religious raptures.”[xxxviii]
The Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío recalls, with regard to “those lengthy epistles” that Martí sent to Spanish-American newspapers, that “there appeared Martí the thinker, Martí the philosopher, Martí the painter, Martí the musician, Martí the poet always,” and describes them as “thick floods of ink” and “mountains of images.”
Three of the six original volumes in which Martí sought to channel the “floods of ink” were devoted to figures, events, and customs of the United States of his time, and to the analysis of the culture, history, and institutions of a new civilization: the selection of texts in this book follows the same hierarchical order, in order to present without hindrance the unique vision of Martí the immigrant.
Fifteen years of literary production in the United States provide a perspective that simultaneously encompasses the north and south of the hemisphere, and it is from the point of view of the exile that Martí conceives the idea of “Our America.” The selection of texts in this volume seeks to give a modern twist to the meaning of “ours,” so that the possessive pronoun encompasses the Hispanic American community in the United States, a demographic sector that, from the 19th century to the present, has become a formidable economic, political, and cultural force north of the Rio Grande. What once seemed divided and incompatible is now an amalgamation of both Americas.
Martí was also a pioneer in this regard, and his portraits, studies, and vignettes allow us to compare notes with the writer who personifies the early period of the Hispanic American diaspora. His American writings establish the other “our” America, the nation of immigrants, multiple and unique, where the New Yorker José Martí claims his rightful place alongside Emerson and Walt Whitman.
Finally, it is fair to note that, even though there are countless volumes of Martí available to everyone, his writing is not easy to read. This does not mean that it is for a minority, but rather that his prose demands a certain degree of participation from the reader—and also passion, as required by great writers. Every author teaches us how to read him, and Martí is the pedagogical writer par excellence.
The formats he used in his writing were dispatches, epistles, and scenes; and the unity of meaning in his “mountain of images” is the “brief, interrupted moments” in the post style. The thematic fragmentation links him—spanning a century and a half of history—to the modern blogger. For this reason, rather than homogenizing it, I preferred to preserve the effect of the individual piece.
To give an idea of how Martí sounds in English, I include the article “The Bull Fight” (p. 192) written for The Sun of New York, with its corresponding Spanish translation. The note on President George Washington (p. 120), written in a concise, bilingual style that anticipates “text speech,” shows the intense preparatory work required for a Martí text.
Estados Unidos en la prosa de un inmigrante is divided into two parts. The first part contains the main articles that analyze and evaluate contemporary events and facts from the history of the United States. The second is a sample of the Sección Constante, the series of daily articles on “history, literature, biography, curiosities, and science”[xli] that José Martí wrote for La Nación of Caracas between 1881 and 1882, agile entries that will familiarize the reader with Martí’s lexicon, as well as offering a global overview of the period and a sample of recurring themes and characters in the works of the first part. In both the longer and shorter pieces, we see a Martí who learns as he teaches, who not only teaches how to think well, but also how to live a life of self-realization: Freedom and Culture are the pillars that support his world system.
This dual purpose, expressed in one of his most famous phrases, serves as an incentive to read Martí in our century: “Being educated is the only way to be free.”
In a letter to his young friend Gonzalo de Quesada, Martí left us the most beautiful image of the writer caught in the act:
“And I, who sometimes find myself, with all my abundance, spending half an hour turning the pen around, and making drawings and dots around the word that won’t come, as if attracting it with spells and sorcery, until at last the colorful and precise word emerges!”[xlii].
This book is about those intimate battles. It is about the hand-to-hand struggle with himself in search of beauty and sincerity, in which the genius of José Martí always emerged victorious.
[i] Kessner, Thomas. Firorello H. La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York, McGraw Hill, 1989.
[ii] https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2018/10/15/how-nyc-s-avenue-of-the-americas-got-its-name-
[iii] A history of The Hispanic Society of America, museum and library, The Hispanic Society of the Americas, 1954.
[iv] https://publicaciones.unirioja.es/ojs/index.php/brocar/article/viewFile/1788/1683
[v] Martí, José. Complete Works, volume 19, pp. 218-219, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, Havana, 1975.
[vi] Williams, Tony. George A. Romero: Interviews, University of Mississippi Press, 2011.
[vii] https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/109731687/jos_-garcia-capote
[viii] Reynolds, Elliot. Jeff Bezos: Biography of a Billionaire Business Titan, Independently Published, 2019
[ix] Ferández Levy, Delvis. A Human Legacy of José Martí, Wise Media Group, 2018
[x] http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/marti/maria-mantilla-1935.pdf
[xi] Guerra Sánchez, Ramiro. La Guerra de los Diez Años, 1968-1878, Cultural S.A. Havana, 1950.
[xii] Acevedo y Fonseca, Mirtha Luisa. Bautismo en la soledad. Biografía de Carmen Zayas Bazán, esposa de José Martí, Editorial Ácana, Camagüey, 2016.
[xiii] Schulman, Iván A. Ismaelillo/Versos sencillos/Versos libres. Ediciones Cátedra, Madrid, 2001.
[xiv] Schulman, Ivan; González, Manuel Pedro. Martí, Darío y el modernismo, Editorial Gredos, Madrid, 1969.
[xv] Rama, Ángel; Selection by Julio Ramos and Fernanda Pampín. Martí, modernidad y latinoamericanismo, Biblioteca Ayacucho, Caracas, 2015.
[xvi] Schwarzmann, Georg. The Influence of Emerson and Whitman on the Cuban Poet José Martí, The Edwin Mellen Press, New York, 2010.
[xvii] Knight, Charles. “The Commercial History of a Penny Magazine–No. I.” Penny Magazine 31 Sept. 1833: 377–384. Web. http://wayback.archive-it.org/4530/20150917234717/http://english.umn.edu/PM/CommHist.html
[xviii] Martí, José. Complete Works, Editorial Ciencias Sociales, Havana, 1975. Volume 12, p. 433
[xix] Millar, Candice. Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, Anchor Books, New York, 2012.
[xx] Teddy Roosevelt. The Rough Riders, Red and Black Publishers, St. Petersburg, Florida, 2009.
[xxi] Mistral, Gabriela. En verso y prosa: Antología, R. A. E., Madrid, 2019.
[xxii] Gray, Richard B. The Quesadas of Cuba: Biographers and Editors of José Martí, The Americas, vol. 22, No. 4, April 1966.
[xxiii] Martí, José. Complete Works, volume 20, Epistolario, Editorial Ciencias Sociales, Havana, 1991.
[xxiv] Obras completas de Martí, ed. Gonzalo de Qusada y Miranda (74 vols.; Havana, 1936-1949).
[xxv] Martí, José. Obras Completas, volume 1, Introduction by Gonzalo de Quesada y Miranda, Editorial Ciencias Sociales, Havana, 1975
[xxvi] Ibid.
[xxvii] Richard B. Gray, Op.cit, pp. 389-403.
[xxviii] González Echevarría, Roberto, Oye mi son. Essays and testimonies on Spanish-American literature, Editorial Renacimiento, Seville, 2018.
[xxix] https://youtu.be/X5JLCAIJLJ8
[xxx] Dodd, George. “A Day at a Printing-Office.” Days at the Factories; or, The Manufacturing Industry of Great Britain Described, and Illustrated by Numerous Engravings of Machines and Processes. Series I.- London. London: Charles Knight & Co., 1843. 326-62. Web. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3143000;view=1up;seq=340
[xxxi] Savage, William. A Dictionary of the Art of Printing. London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1841. Web. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044014812614
[xxxii] May, Karl, Mein Leben und Streben, Hofenberg, 2014.
[xxxiii] https://www.abc.es/historia/abci-verdad-incomoda-1898-lucharon-mas-cubanos-espana-independencia-201811120204_noticia.html
[xxxiv] Martí, José. Complete Works, volume 19, pp. 228-229, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, Havana, 1975.
[xxxv] http://blogs.monografias.com/cultura-cuba/2016/04/05/%C2%BFquien-arranco-las-paginas-del-diario-de-campana-de-jose-marti/
[xxxvi] https://www.infonews.com/newsweek/la-misteriosa-paternidad-marti-n127442
[xxxvii] Calderón, Alfonso. Prosa de Gabriela Mistral, Santiago de Chile: Editora Universitaria, 1989.
[xxxviii] Rama, Ángel, Op.cit. p. 101.
[xxxix] Darío, Rubén. Los raros, Madrid: Editorial Mundo Latino, 1920.
[xl] See “Apuntes sobre George Washington,” p. 115.
[xli] Martí, José. Obras Completas, volume 23, pp. 61-311, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, Havana, 1975.
[xlii] Letter to Gonzalo de Quesada y Aróstegui, October 20, 1887.
[Prologue to Estados Unidos en la prosa de un inmigrante, © Vintage Español, New York, 2021]
