José Martí · Politics
Martí’s vision of the Cuban republic he was fighting to build - one founded not on racial hierarchy or narrow faction but on the ‘full dignity of man’ for every citizen regardless of color, summed up in the formula he asked Cubans to fly beside their flag’s star: ‘con todos, y para el bien de todos.’
Cuba in the 1880s and 1890s was a society still marked by slavery, only formally abolished in 1886, and by deep divisions between white Creoles, free and formerly enslaved Afro-Cubans, and Chinese indentured laborers who had also worked the island’s plantations. Martí understood that a war for independence fought by a divided population, for a republic that would simply hand power to whichever group came out on top, risked producing a Cuba no more just than the colonial one it replaced. So he made racial and social unity not a pleasant aspiration to pursue after victory, but a condition for winning the war at all: an army and a movement that Black and white Cubans built and led together, fighting for a republic that would owe both equally. This is the argument at the center of his most celebrated speeches and essays from the years immediately before the 1895 war.
Martí wrote ‘Mi raza’ (‘My Race,’ published in his newspaper Patria on 16 April 1893) partly to answer a real anxiety circulating among some white Cuban exiles: that an independence movement uniting Black and white Cubans in arms might, after victory, tip into a ‘race war’ or Black-led government that would exclude or subordinate whites, echoing fears stoked by the Haitian Revolution a century earlier and stirred up deliberately by pro-Spanish propaganda trying to split the independence coalition. Martí answered this fear head-on rather than avoiding it. He insisted a Cuban who is Black is ‘neither inferior nor superior to any other man,’ and that the entire premise of a coming race war was a colonial-era fiction designed to keep Cubans divided and therefore governable by outsiders.
On 26 November 1891, invited by Cuban exile clubs in Tampa, Florida - a center of the cigar-making industry that employed thousands of Cuban and Puerto Rican workers, Black and white alike, and had become a crucial base of financial and organizational support for the coming war - Martí delivered one of his most quoted speeches. Its closing line proposed a motto for the new republic’s flag: ‘pongamos alrededor de la estrella en la bandera nueva, esta fórmula del amor triunfante: con todos, y para el bien de todos’ - let us place around the star on the new flag this formula of triumphant love: with all, and for the good of all. The phrase was not empty oratory; it summarized the specific coalition Martí had spent years building among Cuban exiles across lines of race, class, and prior military faction, and it named the standard by which he wanted any future Cuban government to be judged.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Martí made racial unity a founding condition of Cuban independence rather than an afterthought, argued in ‘Mi raza’ that speaking of ‘my race’ - whether by a white person or a Black person - was a redundant and dangerous error because there is only one human race with a Cuban home, and closed his most…
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