Camagüey City.- Another January 28 arrived and along with it the 159th anniversary of the birth of our dear and respected José Martí.
Nowadays, from a distance, we can appreciate how his political work refers to the “natural man” who irrupts in the middle of an oppressing society. In his outstanding essay Nuestra América (1891) he claims: “here comes the natural man, outraged and strong, bringing down the justice accumulated in the books”.
It is important to remember that Martí’s libertarian position is one of the moments of a vast and continued emancipator project, whose origins are more clearly viewed in our lands since the last decades of the 18th Century. Within this mobilizing project, part of a complex revolutionary movement, are comprised the Independence Wars of the continent held between 1808 and 1824, which were prolonged in the Caribbean until the end of the 19th Century. The independent states conforming Latin America emerged from them.
The current “consumer society” as it is regarded in the First World countries, has spread the idea that every need is “ideological”. The system is the one that creates or repress them according to its own logic, the one of the market, and needs acquire, within this demoniac vision of the world and life, radical mobility and inconsistency.
There is no need which is not culturally influenced; a fact that does not justify the intrusive assertion that every need is radically “ideological”.
There are some, precisely, with such strength capable of breaking the strictly ideological point of view. It is obvious that values can hardly be measured by needs. In fact, it seems they are determined by axiological preferences. The manipulations of those preferences are just the foundations on which the so called “consumer society” has been built.
But, there are certain indispensable needs referred to values which cannot be reduced to axiological preferences easily manipulated even when they might show profound cultural signs. Those are the ones we deal with when talking about José Martí’s “natural man” and they are the ones which indispensably integrate to the value “human life” by forming an axiological complex with it.
That would be the root of primary morality that has been referred to and the place where the morality of impugnation of all power ethics is born.
A full length revolutionary in his writings, thoughts and acts, José Martí insisted on a new kind of writing according to the new times. That is the reason why he pushed the Spanish language to a new dimension with his original style, acknowledged as absolutely innovative even by his colleagues of the time.
His influence on the Cubans is huge. He is regarded by his country fellows as the main shaper of Cuban nationality as we know it currently. His prestige is reflected on the titles he is called upon: Apostle of the Independence and Maestro. We should honor every day this, our natural man, our Martí.
