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By Glenn Garvin. ggarvin@herald.com Posted on Tue, Oct. 22,
2002 in The Miami
Herald.
• José Martí: Legacy of Freedom, 8-9 tonight,
WPBT-PBS 2.
Search José Martí's words long enough and you can find a few
to make him into most anything: Cuban nationalist. Populist rabble-rouser.
Sentimentalist ladies' man. Compulsive conspirator. Racial liberationist.
Confederate sympathizer. Anti-imperialist. Prison reformer. Boxing analyst. Even
pop-music troubadour; Guantanamera was adapted from a Martí poem. No
wonder the poet María Elena Cruz Varela compares him to an off-the-rack
suit: ''It fits everyone.'' That's how both Fidel Castro and the vast Cuban
diaspora can claim him as a hero and a spokesman.
José Martí: Legacy of Freedom, by Miami documentary-maker Joe
Cardona, explores the various Martís, reconciling some of them,
scratching its head in puzzlement over others. Narrated by Herald writer Liz
Balmaseda, with actor Andy Garcia reading Martí's own words aloud, it's a
quick but intelligent study of a complex man.
As a poet, novelist, playwright and journalist, Martí remade Spanish
literature, unspringing a simpler New World style from its baroque European
traditions. Legacy of Freedom pays respectful tribute to Martí's prolific
literary output, but it's his political trajectory that clearly interests
Cardona more.
A ceaseless advocate of Cuba's liberation from its Spanish rulers, Martí
was in trouble with the colonial government from the time he was a teenager and
spent nearly his entire life in exile. From the very beginning, his political
tracts smelled of gunpowder: ''Rights should be taken, not requested; they be
snatched, not begged for.'' No wonder a Spanish general who heard him whipping
up a crowd labeled Martí ''not just a crazy man, but a dangerous crazy
man'' and booted him off the island at once.
Castro and his apologists use Martí's resistance to Spanish rule, and
his harsh criticisms of the imperialist strains in late-19th-century American
political thought, as proof that Martí would side with today's Havana
regime.
But as Legacy of Freedom notes, Martí spent 15 years in the United
States and admired much about its political culture. ''I am deeply obliged to
this country for the friendless,'' he wrote. "A good idea finds always here
a suitable soft grateful ground. You must be intelligent, that is all, and do
something useful.''
Even more importantly, Martí understood clearly that tyranny could
arise as easily from inside Cuba as from without. He quarreled often with Máximo
Gómez and Antonio Maceo, the generals of his liberation movement, who he
thought were too concerned with military might, too little with political
rights.
The poet Varela even speculates, in Legacy of Freedom, that Martí
deliberately rode to his death in the middle of a skirmish with Spanish troops
after realizing that his arguments with Gómez and Maceo were hopeless.
And in doing that, she argues, he ultimately enshrined his belief in liberty
over theirs in simple nationalism: "The only legends that never fade are
those who die young.'' | 
