Download José Martí`s Immanent Critique of American

José Martí’s Immanent Critique of American Imperialism
Joshua Simon
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“We are not yet American enough.”1
On March 16th, 1889, the Philadelphia Manufacturer printed an editorial under the
headline, “Do We Want Cuba?” The question was occasioned by President Benjamin
Harrison’s appointment of James G. Blaine as Secretary of State. Blaine was famous for his
efforts to expand U.S. influence throughout independent Spanish America, and for
supporting plans to actually add Cuba—one of the last remnants of the Spanish Empire in
the Americas—to the United States. The editorial’s author acknowledged that there were
many reasons for the United States to consider acquiring “the most splendid island in the
Antilles”. Positioned between the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, Cuba “dominat[ed] a
vast expanse of water.” Whoever held Cuba could control access to the Mississippi, and gain
“almost exclusive dominion over the approaches to any of the interocean waterways” that
engineers proposed to build through Central America. What was more, Cuba’s “productive
capacity [was] unexcelled by any other land on the globe.” After acquiring Cuba, the borders
of the United States would contain every important agricultural climate, reducing its
dependence on imported goods: “There would be almost no fruit grown anywhere on earth
… that could not be produced within our dominions.”2
The attraction Cuba exerted on the North American imagination went beyond grand
strategy and economic independence, though, approaching something like destiny. As our
editorialist noted, the island “is so close to Florida that Nature seems to indicate her
affiliation with the dominant nation on this continent.” Once in charge, the United States
could rescue Cuba from the economic stagnation Spanish tyranny had induced, allowing the
island realize its potential: “American energy, … with a free government under the rule of
law and order, with security for life and property, … would make Cuba what she once was, a
José Martí, “Proyecto de Instrucción Pública”, Revista Universal, 26 October 1875, From José Martí Obras
Completas (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1991) 26 vols. [hereafter JMOC] VI, 352. Unless otherwise
noted, all translations from the Spanish are my own.
2
The Manufacturer editorial was translated into Spanish and reprinted as part of a pamphlet titled “Cuba y los
Estados Unidos” New York, 3 April 1889, from JMOC, I, 232-4.
1
producer of marvelous riches and power and productiveness.” In an era of reinvigorated
imperial activity by the great powers of Europe, Cuba offered the United States an arena in
which to pursue its own civilizing missions.3
Against these manifold advantages and enticing prospects, the Manufacturer’s editorial
weighed a singular concern: “What would be the result of attempts to incorporate into our
political community a population such as Cuba’s?” Each stratum of the island’s social
hierarchy presented particular problems. Having presided over a colonial government that
combined “fanaticism with tyranny, swaggering arrogance with abysmal corruption,” the
Spanish inhabitants of Cuba had proven themselves “less prepared for American citizenship
than … the men of any other white race.” Meanwhile, the island-born “Cubans of Spanish
origin” were worse yet, evincing all “the defects of [their] paternal race” as well as an
“effeminacy and an aversion to all effort, truly to the extent of an illness,” which the
Manufacturer attributed to their tropical upbringing and openness to miscegenation. The
deficiencies of Cuba’s Creoles had been well demonstrated in their “pitifully ineffective”
attempts to gain independence from Spain. Finally, Cuba’s large population of former slaves
and free men of color were “clearly at the level of barbarity”—less capable of discharging
the duties of American citizenship, in the Manufacturer’s analysis, than the “most degraded
Negro in Georgia” was prepared to assume the presidency.
Taken together, the Cuban population was entirely unfit for life under a republican
government. “To invest such men with the responsibility of directing this government, and
giving them the same degree of power as that possessed by the free citizens of our northern
states, would be to call upon them to perform duties for which they have not the slightest
ability.” The editorial’s author indicated that he might be prepared to acquire Cuba if the
island and its inhabitants could be permanently relegated to some inferior status short of
statehood, but alas, the Constitution of the United States “leaves no room for bodies of
Americans who are not citizens, or who cannot aspire to be.” As such, he argued against
annexation, warning that “we could saddle ourselves with Cuba at a very low cost, and still
pay dearly.”4
The Manufacturer’s arguments against annexation were so compelling that even its
political opponents at the New York Evening Post reprinted them a week later, alongside an
3
4
Ibid., 232-4.
Ibid., 232-4.
“emphatic endorse[ment]” of the author’s concerns regarding the Cuban population’s
readiness for republican citizenship. This caught the attention of José Martí, a Cuban patriot
living in exile in New York. Martí made his living writing regular dispatches on American
history, culture, and politics for newspapers throughout Spanish America. The reprinted
Manufacturer editorial, however, inspired him to send “A Vindication of Cuba”, in English, to
the Evening Post.
While acknowledging that some of his compatriots had, with “honorable motives”,
supported or even proposed plans for incorporating Cuba into the United States, Martí
insisted that “no self-respecting Cuban would like to see his country annexed to a nation
where the leaders of opinion share towards him prejudices excusable only to vulgar jingoism
or rampant ignorance.” Both sins seemed operative in the Manufacturer’s editorial. Far from
quietly submitting to Spanish tyranny, Cubans had “fought like men, sometimes like giants,
to be freemen,” and they had done so in the face of active opposition from the supposed
beacon of liberty to their north. “We deserve in our misfortune the respect of those who did
not help us in our need,” Martí argued. “We had no Hessians and no Frenchmen, no
Lafayette or Steuben, no monarchical rivals to help us; we had but one neighbor who
confessedly ‘stretched the limits of his power and acted against the will of the people’ to help
the foes of those who were fighting for the same Charter of Liberties on which he built his
independence.” In these adverse circumstances, far from displaying the vices attributed to
them by the Manufacturer, Cubans had developed “a capacity for free government so natural
to him that he established it, even to the excess of its practices, in the midst of the war”.
Even while facing defeat, Cubans had resisted the temptations of emergency dictatorship,
“snatch[ing] the sabre, without fear of consideration, from the hands of every military
pretender, however glorious,” who arose within the patriot ranks. Beyond the battlefield,
Martí added, Cubans had proven neither effeminate nor indolent, but demonstrated both
inventiveness and industry in exile, building profitable cigar-making enclaves in New York,
Tampa, and Key West, serving as mechanics, clerks, physicians, and contractors throughout
Central America, and helping to design and develop rail and river transportation
infrastructure in Colombia and Venezuela.5
Moving past the insulting arguments of the Manufacturer, Martí indicted the United
States’ entire conduct of foreign policy toward Cuba, reserving especial ire for the supporters
5
Ibid., 236-41.
of annexation. “It is not to be expected, for the honor of mankind, that the nation that was
rocked in freedom, and received for three centuries the best blood of liberty-loving men, will
employ the power thus acquired in depriving a less fortunate neighbor of its liberty.” For
Martí, the annexationist movement indicated that avarice and ambition, racism and jingoism,
had finally eclipsed the noble ideals expressed in the course of the American independence
movement—ideals that Cuban patriots ardently embraced:
They admire this nation, the greatest ever built by liberty, but they dislike the evil
conditions that, like worms in the heart, have begun in this mighty republic their
work of destruction. They have made the heroes of this country their own heroes,
and look to the success of the American commonwealth as the crowning glory of
mankind; but they cannot honestly believe that excessive individualism, reverence for
wealth, and the protracted exultation of a terrible victory are preparing the United
States to be the typical nation of liberty, where no opinion is to be based in greed,
and no triumph or acquisition reached against charity and justice. We love the
country of Lincoln as much as we fear the country of Cutting.6
Pairing the Great Emancipator with Colonel Francis Cutting, a founder of the American
Annexationist League and President of the Company for the Occupation and Development
of Northern Mexico, Martí effectively captured the two, contradictory sides of the United
States that, by the closing decade of the nineteenth century, Latin Americans had come to
know all too well.
An exemplar of colonial revolution whose republican constitution had inspired
imitation throughout the hemisphere, in 1822 the United States became the first nation in
the world to recognize the independence of Spain’s mainland American colonies, pledging a
year later to oppose any European attempt to reconquer New World territories. But in
subsequent decades the U.S. itself conquered half of neighboring Mexico, recognized the
government of a rogue filibuster in Nicaragua, provoked a civil war in order to seize a
strategic peninsula in Haiti, and consistently opposed Cubans’ aspirations for independence,
in hopes that the island might one day be annexed. If Lincoln’s expansive reading of the
Declaration of Independence seemed to open a path toward racial reconciliation in the
6
Ibid., 237.
Americas, the racially-charged ideology that expansionists like Cutting invoked to justify the
United States’ incipient hegemony within the hemisphere indicated just how far North
Americans remained from realizing the ideal of equality expressed in their founding
document.
What makes Martí’s critique of the emerging American Empire notable is its
immanence. Martí did not reject the political ideals and progressive philosophy of history,
rooted in the ideology of the American independence movement, that were invoked in order
to justify the United States’ serial expansions and interventions in Spanish America. To the
contrary, and like other Spanish American patriots before him, he embraced these ideas
wholeheartedly, proudly insisting that the republics of the New World stood in the vanguard
of global civilization, forging republican political institutions and liberal modes of social
organization decisively superior to those of monarchical, mercantilist Europe. He appealed
to precisely these ideals and this progressive philosophy of history in denouncing the poverty
and racism that marred the United States’ democracy at home, and the expansionist impulse
that deformed its conduct of foreign policy abroad. Ultimately, Martí became convinced that
the “worms in the heart” of the United States could not be extracted, but he did not
renounce his commitment to distinctively American ideals of domestic and international
politics. Rather, he argued that that the nations of what he famously called “Our America”,
that is, Latin America, should build political institutions capable of resisting North American
influence and realizing the shared ideals of the American independence movements more
fully than the United States itself had done.
In this essay, I examine the role of one such shared ideal—the union as a means of
organizing relations between sovereign states—in José Martí’s imminent critique of the
emerging American Empire. I show how the ideal of the union emerged in the political
thought of both the British and Spanish American independence movements as an
alternative to the “balance of powers” system that regulated inter-state relations in Europe,
and framed early interactions between the American republics emerging from British and
Spanish rule. I chart the gradual eclipse of unionism in the foreign policy of the United
States and its replacement by an aggressive expansionism organized under the institutional
form of the protectorate, noting the influence of the rising ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy
in this important transition. I then describe Martí’s interventions in debates on interAmerican relations at the high-point of his intellectual and political career in the late 1880s
and early 1890s, devoting particular attention to his essays on the first “Pan-American”
Congress, convened in Washington in 1889 by Secretary of State Blaine. I argue that Martí’s
forceful rejection of this U.S.-led effort to integrate the Americas was not premised on a
rejection of the union as an ideal mode of organizing hemispheric and international relations,
but rather an unmasking of the new imperial aims the U.S. sought to justify using the old
language of unionism, and a call for the nations of Spanish America to defend the original
unionist ideal against the increasingly predatory United States. Martí attacked the ideology of
Anglo-Saxon supremacy that underpinned U.S. expansionism and interventionism directly,
insisting that Spanish Americans should embrace the distinctive racial heterogeneity of their
societies in order to overcome the contradictions that constrained the United States’ advance
toward a fuller realization of the hemisphere’s shared ideals.
American Systems
The independence movements of both British and Spanish America originated in
American-born colonists’ insistence upon their own fundamental equality with the
metropolitan subjects of their respective monarchs. Inequities in the empires’ systems of
political representation and judicial review, imbalances of trans-Atlantic trade, and what the
colonists regarded as excessive commercial regulation and taxation were all regarded as
evidence of Europeans’ intent to deprive American colonists of the political, economic, and
social rights they deserved. Eventually, metropolitan intransigence in response to demands
for reform convinced colonists that only separation from Europe could secure the Americas’
equal standing in the world.
It was in the course of their struggles to achieve independence that both British and
Spanish Americans alighted upon a new idea: the New World was not merely equal to the
old, but superior. The conflicts underway were not mere independence movements, but
revolutions. American patriots sought not just an end to European rule, but to usher in a new
era of human civilization. Before independence had even been declared, Thomas Paine’s
famous pamphlet Common Sense inspired British North Americans to believe that they “had
the power to begin the world over again,” to tear down the crumbling edifices of colonial
rule and create “an asylum for mankind” in America.7 Half a world away and half a century
later, the Chilean patriot Bernardo O’Higgins expressed similar sentiments:
It is evident that the Republics of the New World bear the vanguard of the freedom
of the whole world, and that destiny is leading them on to break the chains of the
human race; for in the example of America may be found the most encouraging
hopes of the philosopher and the patriot. The centuries of oppression have passed;
the human spirit yearns for its freedom; and now there shines the dawn of a
complete re-ordering of civil society through the irresistible progress of opinion and
enlightenment.8
O’Higgins confident forecast of his hemisphere’s destiny offers an early formulation of what
the historian Arthur P. Whitaker called the “Western Hemisphere Idea”: “the proposition
that the peoples of the Western Hemisphere are united in a special relationship to one
another that sets them apart from the rest of the world; [and] above all, apart from
Europe.”9 Scholarship on the political thought of the American independence movements
has usually emphasized how innovations in the design of domestic political institutions—
written constitutions, federalism, bicameralism and the separation of powers, charters of
basic rights, and so on—distinguished the early American republics from the monarchies of
Europe, but a growing literature has shown that the leaders of the American revolutions
were as focused on advancing beyond European accomplishments in the organization of
international relations. Here, the most decisive American innovation aimed not only to set
the New World apart from the Old, but to actually bring it together under the auspices of
expansive and expanding unions of formerly sovereign states.10
7 Thomas Paine, “Common Sense”, 1776. In Bruce Kucklick, ed., Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 44.
8 Cited in Collier, Chilean Independence, 240.
9 Arthur P. Whitaker, “The Origin of the Western Hemisphere Idea”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society, Vol. 98, No. 5 (October, 1954), 323. See also Whitaker, The Western Hemisphere Idea: Its Rise and Decline
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1954).
10 See especially: Peter Onuf and Nicholas Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World: The Law of Nations in an Age of
Revolutions, 1776-1814 (Madison: Madison House Publishers, 1993); Daniel H. Deudney, “The Philadelphian
System: Sovereignty, Arms Control, and Balance of Power in the American States-Union, circa 1787–1861,”
International Organization, Vol. 49, No. 2 (March 1995), 191 – 228; James E. Lewis, Jr., The American Union and the
Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1998); David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2003). The literature on the idea of union, specifically, and on foreign policy
thinking, more generally, in the Spanish American foundings is much thinner, but see: Germán A. de la Reza,
La invención de la paz: de la República Cristiana del Duque de Sully a la Sociedad de Naciones de Simón Bolívar (Mexico
City: Siglo XXI, 2009), for an excellent discussion of the theme.
The idea of the union as a superior means of organizing inter-American relations is
closely related to the Americas’ more familiar innovations in the design of domestic political
institutions. The political theorists that directed both British and Spanish America’s
independence movements recognized that the “balance of powers” system that governed
interactions amongst Europe’s sovereign states was incompatible with the prosperous
republics they aimed to establish in the Americas. An ever-present threat of invasion had
forced European states to sustain high levels of military spending, and, as a consequence, to
impose heavy taxes upon their populations, often adopting tyrannical means of enforcing
these extractions. Europe’s history contained innumerable instances of weak states that
sought safety in an alliance with stronger ones and ended up compromising their
independence. Uncertain lines of succession, commercial competition, and overseas
expansion constantly threatened to tip the system’s tenuous balance from peace to war, with
disastrous consequences for personal and political freedoms, and for economic, scientific,
and artistic development.
Though the Americas’ trans-Atlantic isolation afforded a temporary respite, political
thinkers throughout the hemisphere believed that if they remained fully sovereign, the states
emerging from imperial rule would eventually either become entangled in conflicting
European alliances, or replicate Europe’s destructive history of inter-state conflict and
warfare on the American continents. The unions forged out of former colonies, first in the
United States, then in the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata (comprising present-day
Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and, Bolivia), “Gran” Colombia (comprising present-day
Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador), the first republic of Mexico (comprising
present-day Mexico and most of the western United States), and the United Provinces of
Central America (comprising present-day Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and
Costa Rica) were created in order to prevent the Americas’ regression to a European pattern.
These unions joined states that might one day come into conflict under common
governments invested with some portion of their members’ sovereignty, allowing them to
arbitrate inter-state territorial disputes, conduct a unified foreign policy, and regulate interstate commerce. While they could not erase the differences in climate, population, and
history that invested different parts of the Americas with divergent interests, the founders of
these unions argued that common governments would discourage members’ resort to arms
or to foreign alliances in their disagreements with other members, and, at the same time,
encourage the Americas’ economic independence from Europe by erasing customs and
regulatory barriers to trade between the hemisphere’s complimentary economies. Unified,
Americans would also exert more leverage in their negotiations for recognition and trade
with Europe, and could call on greater resources in their efforts to incorporate indigenous
territories on their frontiers.11
The unionist ideal presided over the United States’ approach to westward expansion.
Both the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Enabling Act of 1802 commanded that
territories ceded to the U.S. by Britain and France, respectively, should eventually be
admitted to the union as equal states, equally subject to the terms of the Constitution, equally
represented in Congress, and equally protected by the full panoply of personal and political
rights enjoyed by the citizens of the original thirteen states.12
Unionism also informed early interactions between the U.S. and the Spanish
American colonies that began their struggle for independence in the first and second decades
of the nineteenth century. In the eleventh Federalist, written well before Spanish Americans
had begun their wars of independence, Alexander Hamilton exhorted his readers to view the
union contemplated in the proposed Constitution as the first step toward “erecting one great
American system, superior to the controul of all trans-atlantic force or influence, and able to
dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!”13 Of course, some
North Americans were more skeptical of their southern neighbors than Hamilton,
expressing particular doubts about the influence that Roman Catholicism might exert in
Spanish American politics even after independence. In a letter to Alexander von Humboldt,
written shortly after news of the first Spanish American independence movements had
reached the United States, Thomas Jefferson noted unhappily that “History … furnishes no
example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.” Still, he insisted that
In whatever governments they end they will be American governments, no longer to
be involved in the never-ceasing broils of Europe. The European nations constitute
11 I describe the economic importance of the Americas’ early unions in Joshua Simon, “The Americas’ More
Perfect Unions: New Institutional Insights from Comparative Political Theory” Perspectives on Politics, vol. 12,
no. 4 (December, 2014), 808-828.
12 Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1987); Gary Lawson and Guy Seidman, The Constitution of Empire: Territorial Expansion and American Legal History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 17-85; David Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire: The American
Debate over International Relations, 1789-1941 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 25-67.
13 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist with Letters of “Brutus”, Terence Ball, ed.,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 52.
a separate division of the globe; their localities make them part of a distinct system;
they have a set of interests of their own in which it is our business never to engage
ourselves. America has a hemisphere to itself. It must have its separate system of
interests, which must not be subordinated to those of Europe.
Jefferson thought that with time and ample tutelage, Spanish Americans might overcome
their religious disadvantages and learn to live by the “principles” embodied in the political
institutions of the United States, “concur[ring] with us in the maintenance of the same
system,” on a hemispheric scale.14
The idea of a hemisphere-wide “American system”, geographically distant from
Europe and regulated by a distinctive set of principles and institutions that would prevent its
degeneration into European-style infighting, gained support as patriotic forces in Spanish
America made progress in their wars against Spain, and as Europe’s Great Powers met in
Vienna to restore the monarchical order challenged by the French Revolution and Napoleon
I’s conquests. Fearing that the “Holy Alliance” might take up Spain’s cause in the Americas,
Spanish Americans appealed to the United States for aid and for recognition of the
independence they had already established on the ground. These appeals met with disfavor
amongst politicians committed to maintaining the U.S.’s neutrality, but found champions as
well. The influential Kentucky Congressman Henry Clay passionately invoked the unionist
ideal adumbrated by Hamilton and Jefferson in his calls for recognition and support of
Spanish America’s struggle:
There can not be a doubt that Spanish America, once independent, whatever may be
the form of government established in its several parts, these governments will be
animated by an American feeling, and guided by an American policy. They will obey
the laws of the system of the new world, of which they will compose a part, in
contradistinction to that of Europe. … all America will be interested in maintaining
and enforcing such a system. The independence of Spanish America, then, is an
interest of primary consideration.15
Clay’s “American System” is now usually remembered as a legislative program to stimulate
industrialization and growth through the chartering of a national bank, higher tariff rates,
Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, 6 December 1813, from Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Works
of Thomas Jefferson, 12 vols. (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1904-5), XI, 351.
15 Henry Clay, Speech in the House of Representatives, 24 March 1818, Annals of Congress, 15th cong., 1st sess.,
1482.
14
and federal funding for the improvement of domestic transportation and communications
infrastructure. But for Clay himself, the political and economic integration of the Americas
formed a key part of the United States’ path to global preeminence. Spanish America, freed
of restrictive imperial commercial regulations, would provide a market for North American
manufactures, sending scarce raw materials, foodstuffs, and precious metals north in return,
allowing the United States to perform a role in the hemisphere analogous to the one that
“the people of New England [had performed] for the rest of the United States.”16
While the domestic portions of Clay’s American System were enacted in the late
1810s, recognition of and support for Spanish American independence were delayed by the
opposition of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who shared Jefferson’s misgivings
about Catholic Spanish Americans’ capacity for self-government, but not his optimistic
outlook on the region’s future. Adams dismissed Clay’s vision of a hemispheric “American
System”, arguing that “we [already] have it—we constitute the whole of it … there is no
community of interests between North and South America … no basis for any such
system.” In his famous Fourth of July speech in 1821, addressing the same topic, Adams
insisted that while the United States was “the well-wisher to the freedom and independence
of all”, she should be “the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Despite these
seemingly firm convictions, less than a year later Adams became one of the principle
proponents of the United States’ path-breaking decision to recognize the independent
Spanish American republics, and then, less than a year after that, one of the principle authors
of the approach to inter-American relations outlined in President James Monroe’s 1823 State
of the Union Address, which committed the United States to the defense of independent
Spanish America against European reconquest. Adams’ conversion to the cause of
recognition, and the formulation of what came to be called the “Monroe Doctrine” both
reflect the influence of the unionist ideal.
As the Spanish American independence movements finally achieved some stable
success in the early 1820s, the prospect that the New World might recapitulate the history of
the Old, tearing itself apart in inter-state conflicts and ultimately stalling its advance toward
political liberty and economic prosperity, arose once again and with new force. Left in the
full possession of their sovereignty, the new states of Spanish America might enter alliances
Cited in Lewis, The American Union, 141. See also Randolph B. Campbell, “The Spanish American Aspect of
Henry Clay's American System” The Americas, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Jul., 1967), 3-17.
16
with conflicting European powers, or initiate conflicts amongst themselves, leading to wars
that would threaten the expanding borders of the United States. The problem was brought
dramatically home in April 1823 when the restored monarchy of France intervened in Spain
to suppress a constitutionalist rebellion and restore Fernando VII to the throne. Leaders in
the United States now joined their Spanish American colleagues in expressing concern that
the American republics would be next on the Holy Allies’ agenda. Brazil’s emergence as an
independent, but monarchical Empire, at war with Buenos Aires, and Mexico’s flirtation
with legitimist solutions to its interminable internal disorders seemed to offer the Allies
footholds on the American continents from which to launch a reconquest. The Monroe
Doctrine, outlined in President James Monroe’s 1823 Address to Congress, marked a return
to the idea of a separate American System ordered by the unionist ideal developed by
Hamilton, Jefferson, and Clay.
In the closing paragraphs of his Address, Monroe took up the Allies’ intervention in
Spain, noting that while “the citizens of the United States cherish sentiments the most
friendly in favor of the liberty and happiness of their fellow men on that side of the
Atlantic,” they considered it inappropriate to take sides in European conflicts. “But,” he
insisted, “in regard to [the Americas] circumstances are eminently and conspicuously
different. It is impossible that the allied powers should extend their political system to any
portion of either continent without endangering our peace and happiness.” The unionist
ideal informing the organization of the United States had facilitated in a short time an
“improvement in all the important circumstances which constitute the happiness of a
nation” unexampled in previous human history. The country’s population had more than
tripled, its territories had more than doubled, with both increases “eminently augment[ing]
our resources and add[ing] to our strength and respectability.” “It is manifest,” Monroe
argued,
that by enlarging the basis of our system and increasing the number of States the
system itself has been greatly strengthened …. Consolidation and disunion have
thereby been rendered equally impracticable. Each Government, confiding in its own
strength, has less to apprehend from the other, and in consequence each, enjoying a
greater freedom of action, is rendered more efficient for all the purposes for which it
was instituted.
With its neat division of the globe into separate halves defined by rival political systems,
both foreign and domestic, its invocation of the manifold advantages an expansive and
expanding union had brought to the United States, and its vision of a closely integrated
future for the Americas, the original statement of the Monroe Doctrine represented a major
advance of the unionist ideal toward a truly hemispheric American System. It met with howls
of protest from Europeans like British foreign minister George Canning, who declared that
“the great danger of the time” was “a division of the world into European and American,
Republican and Monarchical; a league of worn-out Govts on the one hand, and of youthful
and stirring Nations, with the Un[ited] States at their head, on the other.” 17 Spanish
Americans, by contrast, enthusiastically greeted Monroe’s message and what appeared to
them to be its promise to place the arms and resources of the hemisphere’s greatest power
between their fragile sovereignty and a concert of European monarchs contemplating reconquest.
However, the original statement of the Monroe Doctrine turned out to be a highpoint for the unionist ideal and the idea of an American System. Representatives of the
Spanish American republics in Washington immediately began asking for clarification of
how the commitments made in Monroe’s Address ideas would be implemented. The
message inspired the Foreign Minister of Colombia invite the United States to send
representatives to a Congress of the American republics in Panama. The invitation was
warmly received by now-President John Quincy Adams and his Secretary of State, Henry
Clay, but Adams and Clay ran into unexpected opposition in Congress when they moved to
appropriate funds to finance their delegates’ trip. Congressional representatives from the
slave states, in particular, decried any effort to bind the United States more closely to
Spanish American republics that had abolished slavery after independence, and that might
object to their plans to build a slaveholding empire throughout the Caribbean.18 Opponents
of U.S. participation in the Panama Congress tended to make their case in terms that
superficially resembled Jefferson and Adams misgivings about Spanish Americans’ political
capacities, but which departed signally from these earlier arguments by locating the source of
Spanish Americans’ deficiencies in their race rather than their religion. Both the southern
European origins of the region’s colonists and the relative preponderance of African and
Cited in Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and
Wang, 2011), 63-4.
18 Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1973).
17
Native Americans within its population were discussed as obstacles to the emergence of
republican government in Spanish America and as reasons for the United States to avoid any
entangling alliances with their neighbors.19
The fate of the island of Cuba presented another important sticking point in
negotiations over the Panama Congress. Representatives from Colombia and Mexico
suggested that the Congress should form plans for a joint American force to liberate the
island and its neighbor Puerto Rice from Spanish rule and integrate them into one or
another of the regional unions that had emerged from the wars of independence. This
proposal was emphatically rejected in the United States, not only by southerners concerned
that yet another outpost of slavery might fall to the abolitionist onslaught, but also by
northerners who worried that the move might excite a response from the Holy Allies, or that
Britain might seize upon the resulting chaos as an opportunity to establish a naval base on
the strategically-located island, advancing its capacity to influence U.S. shipping and
commerce. After overcoming southern opposition to attending, Adams and Clay instructed
their representatives in Panama to inform Colombia and Mexico that if an attempt to liberate
Cuba resulted in a war with any European power, “the United States, … might find
themselves, contrary to their inclination, reluctantly drawn by a current of events to their
[that is, the European] side.” Ultimately, Adams and Clay’s instructions directed their
representatives to draw a firm line against the most ambitious prospects for the Panama
Congress:
All notion is rejected of an amphictyonic council, invested with power finally to
decide controversies between the American States or to regulate in any respect their
conduct. Such a council might have been well enough adapted to a number of small
contracted States, whose united territory would fall short of the extent of that of the
smallest of the American powers. The complicated and various interests which
appertain to the nations of this vast continent cannot be safely confided to the
superintendence of one legislative authority. We should almost as soon expect to see
an amphictyonic council to regulate the affairs of the whole globe.
It would be difficult to find a more succinct and total rejection of the unionist ideal
cherished by earlier generations of American statesmen and political thinkers, or of the idea
19 See, for the rise of “racial Anglo-Saxonism” in the United States, and its consequences for U.S. foreign policy
in Latin America, Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), passim.
of an American System that Adams and, especially, Clay had done so much to develop. The
Cuban controversy even moved Clay to take up the arguments of his domestic political
opponents, breaking decisively with his earlier sympathies with Spanish Americans’
aspirations for independence to declare that the “population itself, of the Islands, is
incompetent at present from its composition and its amount to maintain self-government”.20
The ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy implicit in Clay’s comment and explicit in
the arguments of his southern opponents formed the basis for a new, latitudinal line of
division between North and South America that would ultimately undermine and replace the
longitudinal division between the Old and New Worlds central to the unionist ideal and the
idea of an American system. Indeed, succeeding decades would see the United States
become more and more European in its outlook on and approach to the western
hemisphere. As this transition progressed, the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine shifted
dramatically, changing from a statement of inter-American solidarity into an assertion of the
United States’ hegemony within a sphere of influence co-extensive with the Americas. In his
1845 State of the Union Address, President James K. Polk invoked “Monroe’s doctrine” in
order to justify the annexation of Texas, a breakaway province of neighboring Mexico. Like
earlier exponents of the unionist ideal, Polk argued that the addition of new states to the
union would forestall European attempts to establish a “balance of power” on the North
American continent.21 Unlike his predecessors, however, Polk’s alternative to the European
system of inter-state relations was a continental empire established by the unilateral assertion
of the United States’ military power, rather than an agreement amongst sovereign states to
form a union. Ultimately, the annexation of Texas triggered a war with Mexico that ended in
a treaty transferring half of Mexico’s territory to the United States.
The complex effects of the ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy can be seen in the
settlement of the Mexican-American War as well. As U.S. Army troops occupied Mexico
City, the fringe “All of Mexico” movement was defeated by the advocates of a more limited
annexation, who argued that Mexicans were unfit for U.S. citizenship, and thus sought a
border further to the north that would add only sparsely-populated areas of Mexico to the
United States.22 Again, while the decision not to incorporate the entirety of Mexico into the
United States might be read in retrospect as a victory for the opponents of imperialism, the
Cited in Sexton, Monroe Doctrine, 71.
First Annual Message to Congress, 2 December 1845.
22 See Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 229-48.
20
21
racist arguments that underpinned it demonstrate how far policy makers and political
thinkers in the United States had retreated from the unionist ideal and the idea of an
American System.
As the Manufacturer editorial described at this essay’s outset demonstrates, this racist,
anti-expansionist position still held sway at the end of the nineteenth century, when the
problem it pointed to was solved by the advent of the “protectorate” as a category of
international law. Though the term protectorate had a long and varied historical usage prior
to nineteenth century, it was “introduced into international relations” only in the 1885
“General Act of the Conference of Berlin Concerning the Congo”, to which the United
States was, along with the Ottoman Empire and the major powers of Europe, a signatory.
The Act defined the rights and responsibilities of the states to which it conceded
“sovereignty or influence” over parts of Africa, in order that they might increase the “moral
and material well being of the indigenous populations.” 23 As the European powers
scrambled for Africa throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United
States asserted its control over parts of Spanish America and the Caribbean, establishing
temporary protectorates in Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican
Republic, and a more enduring relationship with Puerto Rico. These instances of territorial
expansion without any prospect of statehood, equal representation in Congress, or equal
protection of inhabitants’ personal and political freedoms bear witness to the complete
collapse of the unionist ideal as a regulative principle of U.S. foreign policy. It was within the
context of this collapse that José Martí forged his immanent critique of the emerging
American empire.
There Are No Races
José Martí was born in 1853 on an island dominated, in more than one sense, by the
institution of slavery. Slaves made up over a third of Cuba’s population at mid-century, and
new conscripts continued to arrive from Africa in large numbers until British pressure put an
end to the trade in 1867. On the strength of this workforce, Cuba became the world’s largest
exporter of sugar, and sugar plantations and refineries spread across the island, replacing
“General Act of the Conference of Berlin Concerning the Congo,” 26 February 1885, Republished in The
American Journal of International Law, Vol. 3, No. 1 (January, 1909), 7-25.
23
farms producing diverse foodstuffs using paid, if still very poor, labor, with monoculture
manned by slaves.
The centrality of slavery to the Cuban economy also contributed to the exceptional
longevity of its submission to Spain. While the European-descended, American-born Creoles
of mainland Spanish America fought for their independence throughout the first quarter of
the nineteenth century, Cuba’s Creoles cooperated with the metropole to suppress insurgent
activities on their island, fearing that winning their own freedom would entail abolition, or
worse, excite a slave insurrection like the one that consumed the near-by French colony of
St. Domingue.
Spanish administrators actively stoked these fears, recognizing how effectively the
Haitian sword of Damocles kept its profitable Caribbean possession within the imperial fold.
Newspapers reported frequently on plots by Cuban slaves to escape their chains and
annihilate their masters, suggesting in no uncertain terms that Cuba “would either be
Spanish or it would be African.”24 Cuban patriots eventually came to understand that they
could only achieve independence by attracting the island’s slaves and free people of color to
the cause, but they faced a formidable challenge in their attempts to do so without
completely alienating influential Creoles. The centrality of concerns with race and racism in
Martí’s political thought originates in his efforts to address this challenge, but, as I shall show
below, during his time in exile Martí also forged a powerful, immanent critique of racial
inequality within the United States, and of the ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy that
underpinned the U.S.’s newly imperial approach to inter-American relations.
In 1868 a sugar plantation owner on the poorer, eastern side of the island of Cuba,
frustrated with the slow pace of reform in the Spanish Empire’s commercial regulations, and
suffering from new restrictions placed on exports to the United States, freed his slaves and
invited them to join him and a small circle of conspirators fighting for Cuban independence.
Spanish authorities underestimated the depth of nationalist sentiments amongst eastern
planters, and failed to respond quickly to the insurgency as it gained strength and occupied a
larger and larger portion of the island. A recognized prodigy from a young age, Martí was at
this time still a student at an elite academy in Havana, the largest city on Cuba’s wealthier,
and loyalist, west side. But, under the tutelage of a politically radical headmaster, he had
Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1999), 2.
24
already become a convinced proponent of Cuban independence. As the insurgency grew,
Martí contributed to a covert propaganda campaign, writing and publishing a patriotic
newsletter. A street confrontation led the police to search the home of a close friend and coconspirator, where they found a letter signed by Martí, haranguing another classmate who
had enlisted in the Spanish Army.
Martí was arrested and sentenced to six years of hard labor. After serving four
months in a quarry, shackled 24 hours a day, he developed a serious skin infection on his
ankle and became very ill. His father, a former policeman himself, appealed to his colleagues
in the colonial administration and won a commutation of Martí’s sentence, contingent upon
his moving to Spain to pursue his education. Thus began a life lived almost entirely in exile.
Martí earned degrees in philosophy and law in Zaragoza, before moving to Mexico City,
where he began his career in journalism, writing for the country’s most prominent liberal
newspaper. His critical articles on the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz forced Martí to flee
Mexico for Guatemala, where he remained for a time, teaching in a university and continuing
to write. In Guatemala, Martí had the opportunity for the first time to observe at close range
the poor conditions in which Indigenous Spanish Americans continued to live after
independence, and the often fractious relations they maintained with determinedly reformist,
liberal governments. In one of his first long-form writings, a book titled Guatemala, Martí
enthusiastically described efforts to build schools in Indigenous communities, and to
integrate Indigenous farmers into the national and global agricultural economies, but he also
began to develop a theme that would reappear in his later, more famous works, calling upon
the Guatemalan government to adapt its policies to the conditions that actually existed in the
country, rather than blindly applying a European model that could only deepen divisions and
slow progress. “Today,” he conceded, the resistance Indigenous Guatemalans presented to
reform efforts was “a terrible punishment” for the country’s leaders, but “tomorrow they
will be the great masses who will move the young nation forward … They are intelligent,
resigned, tireless, artistic by nature. What a great nation can be made out of them!”25
In 1878, after ten years of fighting, Spanish and Cuban forces brokered a tenuous
peace treaty, which offered amnesty to former rebels in exile and abolished slavery, while
offering slaveowners compensation in the form of obligatory labor at low wages from their
former slaves. Martí returned home, now with his wife and young family, to Havana, but he
25
Guatemala, Mexico City, 1878, from JMOC VII, 157-8.
refusing to renounce the patriotic cause. After a Spanish spy overheard a fiery speech he
delivered at a social club, he was arrested again and transported in chains back to Spain.
While awaiting transfer to a prison on the Mediterranean island of Ceuta, Martí escaped
from prison in murky circumstances that are not well described anywhere in his writings. He
made his way out of Spain, back across the Atlantic to New York, where, apart from short
trips to Venezuela, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, he would live until his final,
tragic return to Cuba.
It was in New York that Martí fully developed his distinctive style of non-fiction
writing, known to students of Spanish literature as the crónica. Written and published as long
letters to the editors of influential newspapers throughout Spanish America, Martí’s crónicas
would typically begin by describing some recent event in politics, economics, art, literature,
sport, or popular culture, using this as a point of departure for extensive editorializing,
abstract philosophical, political, and social theorizing, and bursts of poetry. Though they
treat every subject imaginable, race relations in the United States form a frequent focus of
Martí’s crónicas. He was particularly concerned to refute the ascendant “scientific” racism,
which tied negative behaviors by non-white Americans to features of their genetics or cranial
anatomy in order to justify the disenfranchisement, exclusion, exploitation, and murder of
former slaves and Native Americans in the United States. If African Americans were more
likely to be illiterate than white Americans, or if Native Americans were prone to
drunkenness, it was not, Martí argued, because these were inborn characteristics of their
respective races, but rather the result of a long history of persecution that continued in the
present day. “In these sons of fathers impoverished by slavery, the character and intelligence
of the free man shines brightly. Reparation for the offense is due them, most assuredly, …
[but] instead of raising them from the wretchedness imposed upon them, taking away the
miserable and disagreeable appearance so criminally given them, we make use of it to refuse
them association with mankind.”26 Inverting the common, and related rhetoric of civilization
and savagery, Martí denounced the expropriation of indigenous lands in the North American
west as “a violent act resented by every civilized nation”, and called for the abolition of the
“unfair and corrupting reservation system”. As in Spanish America, he favored the gradual
privatization of lands controlled by the federal government with large grants for both former
slaves and Native Americans. Freed from persecution and in possession of the material
26
La Nación, Buenos Aires, 16 August 1887 from JMOC XI, 237-8.
requisites for dignity and self-respect, Martí looked forward to the integration of African and
Native American into the American citizenry on equal terms.27
Martí often paired his critiques of racism in the United States with complimentary
portraits of its political and social life, describing an annual commemoration of the
Emancipation Proclamation in New York, for example, before noting the rising number of
lynchings in the south.28 He could be quite effusive in his praise of his adoptive country, and
particularly of its founding ideals. In a column on the presidential election of 1884, he
declared that if he could he would “sculpt in porphyry statues of the extraordinary men who
forged the Constitution of the United States, … opening a wide marble road” to allow
pilgrims from throughout the hemisphere to come and pay periodic homage. It was not the
large, and growing size of the country that impressed him, nor the already impressive, and
still rapidly multiplying wealth of its citizens, but its democratic political institutions:
When one sees the majesty of the vote, this new nobility of every living man,
whether vagabond or propertied, this monarch made up of many heads, … when
one attends this unanimous exercise of will by ten million men, one feels as if he
were mounted on a steed of light, spurring on winged hooves, leaving behind an old
world in ruins to pass through open gates into a universe of dignity.29
Here, again, the echoes of Whitaker’s Western Hemisphere Idea are strong; like his
predecessors in the Americas’ first wave of independence movements, Martí saw the end of
European rule in the Americas as a step forward for all of mankind. But he was quick to
point out that the political freedom the founders of the United States had forged was a
“selfish and unjust freedom, wobbling on the shoulders of an enslaved race of men.”30 He
noted how the persistence of slavery after independence had destabilized the republican
institutions of the United States and nearly brought it crashing to the ground.
Martí did not think that it was impossible for the United States to overcome the
racial inequality that still marred and weakened its democracy, but he was not certain that it
would. His overall depiction of the country was of a society at war with itself, still harboring
within the opposed tendencies of its original settlement: “the pilgrim, who refused to tolerate
La Nación, Buenos Aires, 4 December 1885 from JMOC X, 321-7.
La Nación, Buenos Aires, 10 November 1889 from JMOC XII, 334-43.
29 La Nación, Buenos Aires, 9 May 1885 from JMOC X, 183-4.
30 “Discurso Pronunciado en la Sociedad Literaria Hispanoamericana”, 19 December 1889 from JMOC VI,
135.
27
28
a master above him or a servant below him, or any conquest other than those made by the
grain in the earth and by love in the heart, and the shrewd and grasping adventurer, born to
acquire and to move forward in the forests, who knows no law but that of his own desires
and no limits but the reach of his arm, a solitary and dreaded companion of leopards and
eagles.” These two figures, he thought, were “fighting for predominance in the republic and
in the world.”31 He could not say which would prevail. It was for this reason that Martí
thought it important that Spanish Americans “study the people [of the United States], the
ways they sin, the ways they err, the ways they founder, so as not to founder like them.”32
Eliminating the persistent racism that he attributed to Spanish America’s colonial history
was, in his mind, the key to consolidating Cuba’s independence in the present, and to
advancing beyond the stalled and partial progress toward a truly civilized society the United
States had achieved.
New York also provided the site for Martí’s political maturation and rise to
leadership within the Cuban independence movement. The latter entailed delicate diplomacy
with the former field generals of the failed insurgency, also in exile, who thought that a
temporary military dictatorship might help assure stability on the island during future efforts
to secure independence. Martí built his alternative, determinedly liberal and democratic
movement on a new base, speaking frequently to groups of mostly Black and mixed-race
Cuban workers in exile, who had formed profitable cigar-making enclaves in New York,
Tampa, and Key West. With Martí’s encouragement, these workers provided a more reliable
source of funding for the movement than their bosses, whose allegiances tended to waver
with their financial interests. In 1892, he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party, an
umbrella organization joining local clubs of patriotic Cuban exiles in the U.S. and
throughout the Caribbean with the island’s remaining insurgents. The Party’s platform
emphasized the connections between Cuba’s independence and that of the rest of the
Americas, presenting the island as a geographically indispensible bulwark of independence in
the New World. It also insisted that the organization would not “work directly for the
present or future predominance of any one class,” but, “in conformity with democratic
methods,” establish a “just and frank republic, unified in territory, laws, work, and cordiality,
31
32
Ibid., 135.
La Nación, Buenos Aires, 22 October 1885 from JMOC X, 299.
built by all for the benefit of all.”33 Martí’s success as a spokesman for Cuban independence
depended critically on his ability to address the persistent racial question without alienating
either former slaves or former slaveowners.
Soon after the formation of the Party, Martí began publishing Patria, an official
newspaper for the revolution. This provided him with a forum in which to fully develop his
ideas on race and racism in Cuba and the Americas. He began one column by declaring that,
A man has no special rights because he belongs to one race or another: simply by
being a man he is entitled to all of man’s rights. … Anything that divides men,
anything that specifies them, separates them, corrals them, is a sin against humanity.
… To insist upon racial divisions, on racial differences, within an already divided
people, creates obstacles to both public and individual well-being, which is achieved
by bringing together elements that have to cooperate.34
In the course of the column, and in others that followed, Martí criticized both white Cubans
who shrunk away from the revolution because they feared it would lead to a race war, and
black Cubans who, in his evaluation, gave white Cubans grounds for their fears by
presenting the independence movement as a war for racial justice. For Martí, the abolition of
slavery was the “purest and most transcendent accomplishment of the Cuban revolution”,
and “uprooting” the discriminatory “social relations” that had grown under slavery and
survived its abolition was essential to winning and consolidating independence, 35 but he
insisted framing these accomplishments in terms of their universal value: the progress that
they would represent for humanity in general.
In his most famous essay, published in 1891, Martí argued that Spanish America was
destined, by dint of its history, to make this progress on behalf of humanity. Echoing, and
again, inverting, the Anglo-Saxon supremacists who attacked the idea of a united New World
by drawing a sharp line between North and South America, Martí distinguished between
“Nuestra América, or “Our America”, meaning Spanish America, and the “other” America,
the United States. He acknowledged that, enjoying unique advantages derived from its
citizens’ broader experience with representative political institutions under British rule, the
U.S. had been better positioned than the countries of Spanish America to build stable
republican government and achieve economic growth after independence. But he
“Bases del Partido Revolucionario Cubano”, 5 January 1892, from JMOC I, 279-80.
“Mi Raza”, Patria, New York, 22 April 1893, from JMOC II, 298.
35 “El Plato de Lentejas”, Patria, New York, 5 January 1894, from JMOC III, 26-7.
33
34
emphasized the advantages, and especially the potential for civilizational progress, that
Spanish America derived from its unique racial diversity, a potential that persistent
discrimination and genocide had put out of reach for the United States. “Our America,” he
wrote, “will be saved by its Indians and is growing better,” while “North America drowns its
Indians in blood and is growing worse.”36
The difficulties Spanish Americans had encountered after winning their
independence, the endemic civil wars and economic stagnation, were not caused by the new
nations’ racially-mixed populations, as racists in both Spanish America and the United States
alleged, but by their founders’ attempts to impose institutions imported from Europe and
North America—institutions that perpetuated colonial exclusions and hierarchies within
independent countries, destabilizing their fragile republics.
We were a masquerader in English breeches, Parisian vest, North American jacket
and Spanish cap. The Indian, silent, circled our perimeter, and went off to the
mountain, to the top of the mountain, to baptize his children. The Negro, scorned,
sang his heart out in the night, alone and unknown amongst the waves and wild
animals. The peasant, the creator, turned in blind indignation against the disdainful
city, against his own creature. We wore epaulets and judges’ robes in countries that
came into the world wearing hemp sandals on their feet and headbands on their
heads. A genius, with care in his heart and the daring of a founding father, would
have joined the headband to the robe; would have freed the Indian and made a place
for the competent Negro; would have fit liberty to the body of those who rose up
and conquered it.
The failures of Spanish America’s first generation of leaders were real, but the struggles they
produced had not been fought in vain. Martí viewed Cuba’s fight for independence as an
integral part of a second independence movement that would sweep the entire region,
eliminating internal sources of discord and freeing Spanish America from external restraints
imposed by economic dependence and foreign interventions.37 Already, young patriots were
Rolling up their sleeves, digging their hands into the dough, and making it rise with
the sweat of their brows. They realize that creation holds the key to salvation.
‘Create’ is the password of this generation. The wine is made from plantain, but even
“Nuestra América”
Philip S. Foner, “Introduction” from Foner, ed., Our America: Writings on Latin America and the Struggle for
Cuban Independence (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 24-5.
36
37
if it turns sour, it is our own wine! That a country’s form of government must be in
keeping with its natural elements is a foregone conclusion. … If a republic refuses to
open its arms to all, and move ahead with all, it dies. The tiger within sneaks in
through the crack; so does the tiger from without.
Amongst the proponents of this second independence movement, “there can be no racial
animosity, because there are no races.” Black, white, and mixed-race, slave and free, Cuban
patriots would demonstrate that it was possible to throw off colonial rule and its racial
vestiges all at once, fighting side by side and then governing themselves under equal laws and
representative institutions. But in order to sustain this freedom, in the face of old and new
threats alike, Cubans would require the support of their fellow Americans. For this, Martí
argued, they had to return to and revitalize the ideal of union.
A Union in the Continental Spirit
“Our America” appeared in 1891, at the end of a series of twelve articles Martí wrote
on the First Conference of American States, known popularly as the “Pan-American
Congress”, held in Washington D.C. from the autumn of 1889 to the spring of 1890.
Following the Panama Congress of 1826, the nations of Spanish America had convened
conferences in Lima, Peru, in 1847, in Santiago, Chile, in 1856, and in Lima again, in 1864.
The United States was absent from all three, having by this time adopted a determinedly
unilateralist and expansionist approach to its hemisphere, largely under the leadership of a
Democratic party that had opposed U.S. participation at Panama. The first Lima Congress
was held as U.S. troops occupied Mexico City, and imposed a treaty transferring half of
Mexico’s territory to the United States. The Santiago Congress followed closely on President
Pierce’s decision to recognize the regime established by the filibuster William Walker in
Nicaragua, whose conquest of the chronically unstable Central American state was widely
hailed in the U.S. as a striking demonstration of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. The second Lima
Congress occurred as the U.S. declined to offer anything more than rhetorical opposition to
a French occupation of Mexico and the installation of a member of the Hapsburg family as
Emperor of its southern neighbor.
In this context, the idea of an American System, joining the New World’s republics
in peaceful and prosperous union, while insulating them from the corrupting influence of the
Old World’s unstable balance of powers, became increasingly remote. But Latin American
statesmen did not abandon the unionist ideal their forebears had cherished. Instead, they
rose at each Congress to call for cooperation amongst what they now often referred to as the
“Latin” American states in resisting both the old imperialism of Europe and the new
imperialism of the United States. By adopting this modifier, a term of derision amongst
Anglo-Saxon supremacists, Latin American political thinkers sought to forge a common
identity for the citizens of the union they hoped to build.38 José Martí’s articles on the PanAmerican Congress, culminating in his famous “Our America” essay, continued these
efforts, deploying an immanent critique of the emerging North American empire as the
intellectual basis for a Latin American union intended to defend members’ political and
economic independence while spreading liberal, democratic institutions and combatting
racism throughout the hemisphere.
The Pan-American Congress of 1889 was the brainchild of James G. Blaine, who
first proposed the idea during his first term as Secretary of State in 1881. Blaine developed
the idea in response to the War of the Pacific—a conflict between Chile and an alliance of
Bolivia and Peru over the mineral-rich deserts in what was then the southern coast of
Bolivia. With superior land and naval forces, Chile quickly took control of the contested
areas, refusing all offers of mediation that might have forced them to return territory to
Bolivia. Blaine became concerned that European powers would take sides in the conflict,
using it as a wedge to increase their political influence and economic access to South
America’s Pacific coast. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine, he convinced Congress to
appropriate funds for a Conference of American States in Washington, where he hoped to
forge a resolution to the conflict and to establish a compulsory system of arbitration for all
future inter-American conflicts, while further expanding the United States’ diplomatic
presence in the hemisphere. Though the Conference found some support amongst North
American businessmen interested in new markets, and amongst Spanish Americans outside
Chile, it fell apart after the assassination of President Garfield, whose successor removed
Blaine from office and abandoned his foreign policy initiatives.39
See Michel Gobat, “The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism,
Democracy, and Race”, American Historical Review, vol. 118, no. 5 (December 2013), 1345-1375.
39 For Blaine’s diplomatic career, see: Edward P. Crapol, James G. Blaine: Architect of Empire (Wilmington:
Scholarly Resources, 2000); and David Healy, James G. Blaine and Latin America (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 2001).
38
Still, the idea of a “Pan-American” Conference lived on, gaining momentum through
the 1880s as economic recession gripped the United States and politicians in both parties
came to view the expansion of exports to Latin America as a means of alleviating chronic
overproduction and turning back the tide of European influence in the area. Impressed by
the positive results that Germans had reaped from the Zollverein customs union established in
1833, and by the lobbying of American industrial concerns, in 1888 a joint House-Senate
conference approved the McCreary-Frye Act, instructing the president to invite the
governments of Latin America to a conference in Washington, in order to discuss
establishing an inter-American customs union, stimulating greater steamship and railroad
communication and travel, a common system of weights and measures, a common silver
coin, and intellectual property laws. When Blaine returned to the office of Secretary of State
under President James Buchanan in 1889, he added his original ambition to establish an
inter-American system of conflict arbitration to the Conference agenda.40
As delegates from seventeen Latin American nations assembled in Washington in
October 1889, Martí reported from New York for La Nación, an Argentinian newspaper. An
early article established what he believed were the stakes of the meeting: “Never in America,
since independence, has a matter arisen requiring better judgment and closer vigilance.” To
properly form an opinion of the Conference, and of the ambitious program it was to pursue,
Martí wrote, it was necessary that one “examine” the nation that instigated it, “at its roots …
so as not to be deceived by sudden shifts of policy, or by the cohabitation of lofty virtues
with rapacious desires” that, for Martí, defined its national character. The United States was
a “nation that saw no crime in leaving a mass of men enslaved to others who refused to be
slaves themselves.” It was a nation that, even when it “saw at its gates an epic race fighting a
stirring war for the very principles of decency in whose name it had raised the banner against
the English” refused to extend aid or offer recognition until Spanish American
independence was a fait accompli. It was a nation that, “with lips that had just proclaimed
that no European monarch could have slaves in America, demanded that the armies of the
South abandon their plans to go and redeem the American islands of the Gulf from
enslavement to a European monarchy.” A nation that, “having just united thirteen states,
with no less difficulty than the hybrid colonies of the South, prevented the latter from
40 Joseph Smith, “The First Conference of American States (1889-1890) and the Early Pan American Policy of
the United States”, from David Sheinin, ed., Beyond the Ideal: Pan Americanism in Inter-American Affairs (Westport:
Praeger, 2000), 19-32.
fortifying, as they could have fortified and could still, an essential union of southern
peoples.” A nation that, rather than fostering union, “launched a war against a neighboring
country, and carved a coveted region out of its live flesh.” This was the nation that had
initiated the Conference, inviting the nations of Latin America to Washington, Martí wrote,
to “form a confederacy for purposes of controlling them.” 41 Martí’s serial pairings of
political ideals with hypocritical actions is not only rhetorically effective, but philosophically
compelling: the racism that still deeply structured North American society, and the United
States’ imperial turn were problematic, he argued, because it contradicted the ideas upon
which the nation was founded, ideas shared with the very peoples that suffered the worst
consequences of its foreign aggression.
Martí argued forcefully that the ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy that marred
North American democracy at home also lay behind the new imperial approach the United
States took abroad. He packed his articles on the Pan-American Congress with translated
quotations from North American newspapers, revealing the derisive terms in which North
Americans of all political persuasions discussed the inhabitants of their sister nations to the
south. He warned his readers that the battle for the United States’ soul, fought between
contradictory commitments to democracy and empire, equality and racial hierarchy, was
being won by “the element which consumed the native race, fomented and lived from the
slavery of another race,” and now had turned to “robbing neighboring countries.”
They believe in the invincible superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race over the Latin.
They believe in the inferiority of the Negroes whom they enslaved yesterday and are
criticizing today, and of the Indians whom they are exterminating. They believe that
the Spanish American nations are formed principally of Indians and Negroes. As
long as the United States knows no more about Spanish America, and respects it no
more…can this country invite Spanish America to an alliance that would be honest
and useful to our Spanish American nations?42
With this depiction of the United States in the background, Martí turned to the proposals
the Conference’s delegates would consider. He favored the idea of common weights and
measures, and a common exchange rate for gold and silver currency. “All legal tender in the
world should be standardized. It shall be. Everything primitive, such as coinage differences,
“El Congreso de Washington”, La Nación, Buenos Aires, 19 December 1889, from JMOC VI, 47-48.
“La Conferencia Monetaria de las Repúblicas de América”, La Revista Illustrada, New York, May 1890, from
JMOC, VI, 159-60.
41
42
will disappear when there are no longer any primitive nations.” He also favored the
proposals to improve railroad and steamship transportation and communication throughout
the hemisphere, and indeed, the world. “All that brings man closer together and makes life
more moral and tolerable must be desired and helped to become a reality. All that brings
nations together must be realized.” These were economic components of the original ideal
of union the founders of the Americas had developed in common. The proposed interAmerican customs union represented the very pinnacle of their liberal commercial
philosophy—the idea that states bound by dense relations of interdependence and a sturdy
political union would enjoy peace and prosperity unavailable within a competitive balance of
powers.
But Martí argued that the United States no longer pursued these policies in service of
that original unionist ideal, but its opposite. North American rivalry with Europe was no
longer based in their opposed political systems, or the threat Europe posed to the new ideas
emerging from the Americas, but in barren commercial competition. The United States’
interest in Latin America was no longer that of a sister nation engaged in a common effort to
advance human civilization, but a scramble for markets that might help clear its clogged
warehouses, and establish parity for its preferred precious metal. A Pan-American union
established in these circumstances would not consolidate Latin America’s political
independence or hasten its economic development, but assure its permanent subordination
to the hemisphere’s hegemonic power.
As to Blaine’s cherished proposal for a permanent court of arbitration for interAmerican disputes, Martí argued that “Arbitration would be an excellent thing if it could be
hoped that in the fullness of its power this still adolescent republic … would yield its own
appetites to arbitration.” He saw no indication, though, in its recent conduct of foreign
policy, that the U.S. would ever allow a court to decide controversies to which it was a party
or in which it had an interest. He described in close detail the day of the Conference on
which the arbitration proposal was discussed, noting with particular relish an amendment
offered by the Argentinian delegation:
The Conference resolves: that conquest shall be eliminated for ever from American
public law; that territorial cessions shall be null if they are made under the threat of
war or the pressure of an armed force; that the nation which makes such treaties
shall always have the right to recur to arbitration to invalidate them; that the
renunciation of the right to recur to arbitration shall lack value and efficacy, in
whatever conditions it was made.43
In Martí’s telling, the reading of the conquest amendment sparked a heated exchange
between Blaine and an Argentinian delegate. The United States refused to support the
amendment, and eventually succeeded in having it struck from the proposed arbitration
resolution, though at the cost of several countries’ support. The resolution was eventually
adopted, though never ratified by any member state. Ultimately, the first Conference of
American States closed without accomplishing any of its proponents’ ambitions, an outcome
that Martí regarded as an important victory.
Martí’s forceful opposition to the Pan-American conference could be read as a
rejection of the ideal of union that occupied such a central place in American and Latin
American political thought prior to the emergence of the United States as an imperial power.
But his critique of Blaine’s attempt to employ the language and institutions of union to
project the United States influence throughout the hemisphere must be read in concert with
his positive proposals for organizing Latin America’s resistance to North American
hegemony within the hemisphere. These appear in his essay on “Our America”. After
discussing the importance of racial diversity in the Americas’ history, the different policies
that the United States and the nations of Spanish America adopted in relation to their
Indigenous and African populations, and the de-stabilizing effects that efforts to maintain
colonial social hierarchies after independence had on both continents, Martí turns to interAmerican relations. “Our America is running another risk,” he wrote, “that does not come
from itself but from the difference in origins, methods, and interests between the two halves
of the continent. The time is near at hand when an enterprising and vigorous people who
scorn or ignore Our America will even so approach it and demand a close relationship.” The
same ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy that North Americans employed to justify the
continued domestic inequalities and injustices felt by indigenous and African Americans now
increasingly served to justify interventions in and annexations of Latin American territories.
Latin Americans, then, had to assume that efforts to effect a diplomatic rapprochement like
the one seemingly on offer at the Pan-American Conference were actually continuous with
efforts to dominate the hemisphere economically and militarily.
43
“La Conferencia de Washington”, La Nación, Buenos Aires, 31 May 1890, from JMOC VI, 88.
In the face of this threat, Latin Americans could not afford to retreat into their local
communities, or seek separate accommodation for their individual states within a
hemisphere structured by North American hegemony. “We can no longer be a people of
leaves living in the air, our foliage heavy with blooms and crackling or humming at the whim
of the sun’s caress, or buffeted and tossed by the storms. The trees must form ranks to keep
the giant with seven-league boots from passing.” The institutional form Martí recommended
was one with deep roots in American political thought: “immediate union in the continental
spirit.” “The pressing need of Our America,” he wrote, “is to show itself as it is, one and
spirit and intent, the swift conqueror of a suffocating past, stained only by enriching blood
drawn from hands that struggled to clear away the ruins” of colonial rule. Unified, Latin
Americans would not only force the United States to “remove its hands out of respect”, but
could begin to turn their northern neighbor away from the imperialist path it had begun to
travel. “With a single voice the hymn is already being sung. The present generation is
carrying industrious America along the road enriched by their sublime fathers.” The
formation of Latin American union, then, would be an accomplishment of global
importance, redeeming the common ideals of the Americas’ founding, cleansing them of
their contradictions, and providing an example to be emulated by oppressed peoples
throughout the world.
Implications
In April, 1895, José Martí returned to Cuba to join the independence movement that
he had organized from New York. Though he was not a soldier, and had no expertise in
military strategy, he felt that it was important that he be physically present to continue
coordinating the movement’s at-times discordant factions, and to directly confront any
military leader who might try to turn the movement away from the liberal and democratic
future he envisioned for Cuba. Martí spent a month in the island’s eastern backcountry,
moving with troops led by Máximo Gómez, a veteran of earlier efforts to win independence.
Then, during a skirmish with Spanish troops, he was shot and killed, his career as a
statesman and, possibly, the founder of a new nation were cut tragically short. The
insurgency continued to gain ground without its “apostle”, as Martí came to be known, but,
at the moment when victory seemed probable, the United States intervened in the conflict,
declaring war on Spain in April 1898. The Spanish-American war lasted only a few months,
and left U.S. troops occupying not only Spain’s Caribbean possessions, Cuba and Puerto
Rico, but also the Pacific islands of Guam and the Philippines. All four former colonies
would, in one way or another, come under the direct control of the United States
government—Cuba and the Philippines as protectorates, Puerto Rico and Guam as
“unincorporated territories”—but none were added to the union. In this sense, Martí’s
deepest concerns regarding the United States’ intentions were realized even more
dramatically than he ever anticipated.
Despite this immediate political ineffectiveness, Martí’s ideas exerted a lasting
influence in Latin American political thought. His immanent critique of the American
empire only beginning to emerge in his own time inspired later generations of Latin
American critics, who have continued to denounce yanquí aggression as a contradiction of
the ideals the United States purports to uphold in the world. His proposals for a Latin
American union, though never realized to the extent he hoped, have been cited repeatedly by
the proponents of political and economic integration from his time to the present. Perhaps
most importantly, Martí stands at the head of a school of Latin American political and legal
theorists, who developed the concept of “American International Law”—a vision of
interstate relations governed by legal principles of non-aggression and sovereign equality.
Latin American proposals at the first Pan-American Congress also influenced Woodrow
Wilson’s internationalism and the League of Nations Treaty, and Latin Americans formed an
important voting block at the founding of the United Nations, lending their united weight to
proposals that enshrined human rights and non-aggression in international law.
These long-term and hemisphere-wide echoes of Martí’s thought signal one
important implication of the present study, showing that American and Latin American
political thought have not evolved in isolation from one another, or existed in a onedirectional relationship of imitation or reaction. Rather, Americans and Latin American
political thinkers have long been in dialogue with one another, working out in different ways
the meanings of ideals they have shared since their independence movements. In order to
understand either tradition properly, it is important to understand this important history of
interaction.
A second, related implication concerns these shared ideals themselves. In the large
and growing literature on imperialism and the history of political thought, scholars have
shown that dominant traditions of political thinking in Europe and North America, and
particularly the liberal tradition, have evolved in close relation to projects of conquest and
colonization, and that these traditions’ ideals—individual and collective freedom, progress,
and equality—have routinely been invoked in order to justify European and North American
aggression abroad. Similar connections have been demonstrated between the construction of
international political, legal, and economic institutions and the persistence of European and
North American global hegemony beyond decolonization and up to the present day. The
historical association of liberalism, republicanism, international law, and international
institutions with imperialism has led some scholars to reject the value of these traditions and
institutions entirely, arguing that the imperial urge is “internal” to their ideals, that conquest
and colonization follow as a matter of logical entailment from their first principles and
original purposes. Alongside a few other recent works,44 this study of José Martí and the
ideal of union demonstrates that the traditions of liberalism and republicanism can be
effectively mobilized in immanent critiques of imperialism, and that international
institutions, if properly designed, might serve to constrain economically and militarily
powerful nations in their relations with the world.
This leads to a final, methodological implication. Scholars working in the emerging
subfield of Comparative Political Theory have called for political theorists to pay greater
attention to traditions of political thought traditionally excluded from the Western canon,
arguing that the dominance of European and North American political thinkers within
academic study both reflects and serves to perpetuate the dominant position of Europe and
the United States in the world. Studying East and South Asian, Islamic, or African political
thought, these scholars suggest, will reveal the contingency of principles that are taken for
granted within the European and North American tradition. This study shows, however, that
comparative political theorists might also search for compelling critiques of the Western
canon in traditions of political thought that depart from similar first principles, but which
have evolved in contexts different from those prevailing in Europe and North America.
From the period of the independence movements forward, Latin American political thinkers
like José Martí shared many political and philosophical commitments with their North
American counterparts, but as the United States evolved into first a hemispheric and then a
44
C. A. Bayly “Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–30” Modern
Intellectual History, vol., no. 1 (April 2007), 25 – 41; Jennifer Pitts, “Liberalism and Empire an a Nineteenth
Century Algerian Mirror” Modern Intellectual History,Vol. 6 No. 2 (August 2009), 287 – 313.
global hegemon, they mobilized these commitments to criticize the domestic inequalities and
foreign aggression they saw and experienced, forging an alternative tradition of thinking
about freedom, democracy, and international relations. These alternative traditions, though
intimately connected to the Western canon, should form an important area of focus for
comparative political theory.