HAVANA.- This May 19 marks the 129th anniversary of the death of the Apostle of Cuban Independence, José Martí, in Dos Ríos, in eastern Cuba, during a combat with a Spanish column. More than a century of history in which a prosperous land was promised, and today only vestiges remain used by the dictatorship.
His death, like his life, acquired the mythical overtones of the heroes of great epics that he remembered in his writings. The Martí who came to Cubans dozens of years after his fall in the midst of the “necessary war”, and who has been used for decades by the dictatorship as a political banner, hides under his clothes the man we do not know, recalls the portal Web Martí News.
His manuscripts are a faithful copy of libertarian sentiment. Martí explained to the world that his homeland needed to stop being a colony and start being fertile land for itself.
The humanist decided that the war of independence from Spain was the only way to free Cuba from the colonizing yoke and turn it into an independent, free and prosperous island. “From its roots the country must be constituted with viable forms, and born of its own, so that a government without reality or sanction does not lead it to partiality or tyranny,” he wrote in the Montecristi Manifesto.
Plans for Cuba from exile
Without military experience, the poet, journalist, diplomat, essayist, philosopher and politician insisted on the need to participate directly in the struggle that he had tirelessly organized from exile.
He had spent the last years of his life in the United States, adjusting the details of the war that broke out on February 24, 1895, and in April of that year he landed in Playitas de Cajobabo, in Guantánamo, to lead the war alongside the generals. Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo. A little more than a month later he was dead, Noticias Martí recalls.
In Dos Ríos, he separated from the Mambisa forces, ignoring General Gómez’s orders to remain in the rear, and together with the young Ángel de la Guardia he advanced on the right flank, while the rest of the Mambisa forces did so on the left. , and entered an open field.
A sharp burst of enemy fire hit the intrepid rider, causing his death, or at least that’s what De la Guardia reported after the event.
From Two Rivers to Santa Ifigenia
About six months would have passed since the events in Dos Ríos when the peasant José Rosalía Pacheco pointed out to Enrique Loynaz del Castillo the exact place where the “president of the insurgents” had fallen, marked by a heart stick. “Here, right here I collected Martí’s blood. “You can still see the imprint of the knife where I pulled out the entire pool of coagulated blood from the ground to keep it in a knob,” the web portal reports. CubaNet.
Three kilometers northwest of Palma Soriano, where the Cauto and Contramaestre rivers converge, the Spanish army caused a single casualty that midday on May 19, 1895. In vain, the young lieutenant Ángel de la Guardia had tried to rescue the fallen man, believing him still wounded in the skirmish. Minutes after the retreat and subsequent return to the Cuban troops, the Baconao horse appeared covered in blood as immediate confirmation of the misfortune.
At the moment of the fatal shot, Martí was an easy target for enemy sight: he was wearing ankle boots, a black jacket and a dark beaver hat, and in his hand he carried the Colt revolver with a mother-of-pearl handle given to him by Panchito Gómez Toroheld around the neck by a cord, from which not a single cartridge was fired.
In his possession he had a watch and a handkerchief, both with his initials (JM), and several precious documents in his pockets: letters and a portrait of María Mantilla and other letters from Carmen Miyares, Bartholomew Mason and Clemencia Gómez addressed to him, according to the late researcher Rolando Rodríguez in his book Dos Ríos: On horseback and with the sun on our foreheads.
Source: WRITING
