Q REPORTS — In his extensive journalistic output and his many roles, including essayist, poet, politician, and revolutionary, José Martí foresaw, with unparalleled foresight, the aspirations of a United States that has always sought to subjugate Spanish America, just as is happening again today.
“Sometimes the pen trembles, like a priest capable of sin who believes himself unworthy to fulfill his ministry. The agitated spirit soars. It desires wings to lift it up, not a pen to cut and mold it like a chisel. Writing is a pain, a debasement: it is like yoking a condor to a chariot. For when a great man disappears from the earth, he leaves behind pure clarity, a yearning for peace, and a hatred of noise. The universe resembles a temple.”
Thus began José Martí’s chronicle of the death of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which occurred on May 27, 1882, in Concord, Massachusetts.
That same brilliant pen that reported for La Nación of Buenos Aires, Argentina, on the death of the American philosopher, would repeatedly warn of the imperialist ideas permeating the United States and its desire to make Hispanic America its territory, and, later, its backyard.
On September 28, 1889, Martí began reporting on the Washington Congress, where the United States had convened the nations of the Americas, but not all attended, the celebrated chronicler recounts, because the host country demanded San Nicolás Bay from Haiti, and the Dominican Republic had been forced, at gunpoint, to hand over Samaná Bay.
The revolutionary Martí, who taught to make ends meet and wrote for numerous newspapers across the subcontinent, sensed the blood, the greed, and the impure desires of the seven-league giant, as he would later call the United States, which sought to seize the sovereignty of the Latin American peoples by the most direct route available.
This situation, already evident in the Washington Congress and later continued in the International Monetary Commission of the United States, represents two instances that clearly demonstrate the imperialist ambitions of the nation of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.
The astute, visionary journalist, the exquisite chronicler, the poet, and the revolutionary converge in Martí, revealing that that congress and that monetary commission were not seeking the common good of Hispanic America, but rather a strategy by the United States to seize the soul and resources of Latin America.
As we celebrate this Wednesday, January 28, 2026, the 173rd anniversary of Martí’s birth, his ideas, his proclamations, his visions spring forth like from a fresh and boundless source, because the world he chronicled, becoming what Ramón Becali defined as the correspondent of America, is not of yesterday, but still retains features that make it relevant today.
His concerns are not of the past. They cannot be, when on January 3, 2026, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, ordered the kidnapping of the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and under the pretext of establishing democracy, seized its oil, thus turning the South American nation into a variant of his pseudo-doctrine, the “Donroe Doctrine.”
The voice of Martí, in this international context—in which the power of the great nations, with the United States at the forefront, proclaims that the order that sustained the balance after the Second World War is no longer valid—emerges pure and clear, to illuminate a reflection from Latin America, one that has the foundation and the spirit of wanting to safeguard sovereignty, cultural and economic independence, so as not to submit to the design of the seven-league giant.
In this regard, in his letter to La Nación of Buenos Aires on November 2, 1889, Martí hints at how easily the nefarious intentions of the International Congress are revealed to the ogre.
After describing how the delegates were taken to the main cities of the United States, Martí, with considerable concern, warns of the true intentions behind that meeting.
“Never in America, from independence onward, has there been a matter that requires more prudence, more vigilance, or demands a clearer and more meticulous examination than the invitation extended by the powerful United States, overflowing with unsold goods and determined to extend its dominion in America, to the less powerful American nations, bound by free and profitable trade with European peoples, to forge an alliance against Europe and establish trade agreements with the rest of the world.”
Few, at that juncture, so clearly foresaw the true motives behind the International Congress of Washington, and, pen in hand, Martí set about recounting in newspapers the ambitions of a country preparing to seize everything it could, thus consolidating its leadership based on gaining an advantage in every endeavor.
This imperialist spirit that Martí foresaw was only the beginning of what would become a relationship of inequality lasting for more than a century, marked by interventions and interference in the sovereignty of most of the countries of the subcontinent.
Therefore, then, as now, it was necessary to sound the alarm and summon the heart of the free people, who yearned to maintain economic, political, and cultural independence from the ogre of the North.
“Spanish America managed to save itself from the tyranny of Spain; and now, after examining with a critical eye the antecedents, causes, and factors of this gathering, it is urgent to say, because it is the truth, that the time has come for Spanish America to declare its second independence.”
Forty-five words and three punctuation marks were enough for Martí to illuminate, like no other, what was then brewing from an ideological and political and cultural perspective.
And if the birth of the first independence had already meant blood, fire, and the death of hundreds of Spaniards who wanted to break free from the Spanish yoke, now the second crucial moment had arrived. Amidst the glamour of this gathering, as he called it, it was necessary to see the talons of the imperial eagle.
If Stefan Zweig, who was only eight years old when Martí wrote those words, had been able to read them later, one of the stories in Stellar Moments of Humanity would have been that declaration on the second independence, full of light, progress, commitment, and defense of a style and not a way of operating for peoples, alien to the conventions of the giant that wanted to export its capitalism and Protestantism at all costs.
Spur
Therefore, after learning of U.S. interests at the International Congress in Washington and the Monetary Conference of the Republics of America, Martí remained vigilant, warning the Hispanic nations about the true interests of the empire that was already looming.
It is in “Our America,” the programmatic essay published in La Revista Ilustrada of New York on January 10, 1891, that Martí clearly articulates the need to become aware of the dangers looming over these countries and lands.
“What remains of the village in America must awaken. These are not times to go to bed with a handkerchief on our heads, but with weapons under our pillows, like the men of Juan de Castellanos: the weapons of reason, which conquer all others. Trenches of ideas are worth more than trenches of stone.”
The ambition that sweeps the world today, driven by the declining American empire, as can be seen, is not new; only the means and circumstances have changed. But this spirit of controlling the resources and cultures of Hispanic countries was, even then, a currency of exchange.
Faced with this political, cultural, and economic siege, unity is urgently needed. The kind of unity that has been so disparate among the republics that separated from the Spanish yoke.
“We can no longer be a people of leaves, living in the air, with our crowns laden with blossoms, rustling or buzzing, as the whim of the light caresses us, or as the storms batter and fell us; the trees must stand in a line so that the seven-league giant cannot pass! It is the hour of reckoning, and of marching together, and we must walk in close formation, like the silver in the roots of the Andes.”
If we examine the present, we must realize that Hispanic America, as Martí liked to call it, is going its own way. While Washington decides the fate of Venezuela and daily threats are leveled against the Cuba of Martí himself and Fidel Castro, with the exceptions of Mexico and Brazil, the rest of the subcontinent maintains an overwhelming silence, fearful that the power of force and remote-controlled weapons could erupt at any time, now that the international order is broken and on the path to collapse.
Within this context, the martyr who gave his life for the independence of Cuba, on May 19, 1895, in Dos Ríos, always had a clear understanding of the need to maintain distance from the imperialist United States, which today persecutes immigrants in its own backyard, and which does not hesitate to assure, through its president, that the world belongs to it, and that distances do not matter, but rather rare earths, oil and other minerals that will increase the arsenal of resources that it lacks.
In Martí’s preaching, always courageous and imbued with the sensitivity of the poet and the revolutionary who coexisted within him, there is an undeniable call to action.
A call that today, once again, is lacking among the bloc of nations called upon to oppose the military, political, and cultural abuses of a United States thirsting for violence, folly, and bloodshed.
Faced with all this, Martí, like Simón Bolívar before him, calls for the unity of Hispanic America. And he appeals to the commitment with which the challenge of defending the republics of Latin America must be met.
In Our America, the poet of Simple Verses expressed it thus: “The arrogant man believes that the earth was made to serve as his pedestal, because he has a quick pen or colorful words, and he accuses his native republic of being incapable and irredeemable, because its new forests do not provide him with a continuous means of traveling the world as a famous landowner, guiding Persian horses and spilling champagne.”
Now that populism and neo-fascism are sweeping the world, threatening immigrants, denying cultures, and seeking the uniformity of the superior race, as already happened in the lead-up to the Second World War, what must prevail, in order to profess the authenticity of a people, who are beginning to defend their worldview and their culture, is, according to Martí, the need to look at the roots and forms that define a nation.
Imitation, as is happening even today, with chainsaws appearing in Milei’s Argentina or President Rodrigo Chaves’s Trump-like bravado, leads nowhere except to the ostracism that annihilates and obscures, even if it seems to illuminate reality in the present.
Again, at this point, Martí calls for reason, which is so scarce in the republics that separated from the Spanish mainland.
“A decree from Hamilton won’t stop the llanero’s colt. A phrase from Sieyès won’t unclog the stagnant blood of the Indian race. What is, where one governs, must be addressed in order to govern well.” And the good ruler in America is not the one who knows how the German or the French govern, but the one who knows what elements his country is made of, and how he can guide them together, to arrive, through methods and institutions born from the country itself, at that desirable state where each person knows and acts, and all enjoy the abundance that Nature placed for everyone in the land they cultivate with their labor and defend with their lives.
Therefore, the artificial, the populist clamor, the importation of models foreign to the cultural and political needs of a country, as is currently happening in a large swathe of Latin America, only leads to obscurantism and confusion.
“Government must be born from the country. The spirit of government must be that of the country. The form of government must conform to the country’s own constitution. Government is nothing more than the balance of the country’s natural elements. That is why imported books have been defeated in America by the natural man. Natural men have defeated the artificial intellectuals. The native mestizo has defeated the exotic Creole. There is no battle between civilization and barbarism, but between false erudition and nature.”
To defend a subcontinent, a republic, from the aftershocks of an empire that, by force of arms, imposes its law and its worldview, seeking to eradicate any native cultural expression, it is necessary to return to the roots, to the aboriginal trunk, to delve into the reality that the people demand. The alternative is to hire steeds to demonstrate greatness while deliberately concealing poverty in all its manifestations in the nations that today want to be governed with swords and iron.
To banish tyrannies, both international and national, internal examination is essential, as Martí explains in Our America, with the clarity of a distinguished revolutionary.
“In the world of politics, those who are ignorant of the basics should be denied entry. Prizes in competitions should not be awarded for the best ode, but for the best study of the factors affecting the country in which one lives. In newspapers, in lecture halls, in academia, the study of the country’s real factors must be pursued. Knowing them is enough, without blinders or ambiguity; because whoever deliberately or through forgetfulness sets aside a part of the truth, will ultimately fall because of the truth they lacked, which grows in negligence and topples what is built without it. Solving a problem after understanding its elements is easier than solving it without that knowledge. The natural man comes, indignant and strong, and tears down the accumulated justice of the books, because it is not administered in accordance with the country’s evident needs. To know is to solve. To know the country, and to govern it according to that knowledge, is the only way to free it from tyranny.”
Article translated and adapted from “Las advertencias de Martí sobre el imperialismo” published at SemanarioUniversidad.com