Guantanamo Province | Cuban Sovereign of Thought and Word venceremos.cu

Photo by Martí for MeliHe had spoken and read so much about the apostle that it seemed impossible to discover anything new. The teacher’s words touched my soul, they filled me with amazement and pride: Martí was a journalist.

How could it not have been deduced beforehand? Magazines, newspapers, words like streams: so much knowledge could only be the result of an equally intensive study. His eponymous intellect to his sentence: “The journalist must know from the cloud to the microbe.”

Apostle, national hero, so much has been written and done by our country and the Great Homeland that we sometimes seem to forget that he was a man of basic needs, was very ill and had to work to support himself and his family, Since he recently graduated, the Martí-Pérez in Mexico have lived in precarious conditions.

From the age of 22 he worked as a journalist for a living – according to García Márquez the best in the world – and the revelation of this facet from the age of 16 with the devil Cojuelo is inseparable from the independence movement and reinforced by the publication of a single issue of La Patria Libre, and in it the poem Abdala, a prophecy of his story.

In a similar work, how can you predict life and even death at just 16? Who is able to write with majesty an unchanging decision and an unstoppable war of his exalted homeland? Only he prophesied so young: “Death is of little concern to me because I managed to save it”, even if it was accomplished a few years after his hundredth birthday.

Today our homeland is free, today we have a revolution, and even today – 170 years after the birth of the most universal Cuban – I agree with Cintio Vitier that “we believe that we know what is necessary about Martí until we later intuitive that we hardly know enough”.

The discovery of another facet in the apostle’s life piqued my curiosity, the internet is always the first way to search – Mama Google, some students call it – and although much research and writing has been done, and although we are working on computerization, It is difficult to have easy access to these bibliographies – we could undoubtedly work to reverse this scenario.

But knowing Martí as a journalist, as a student in the middle of his career, as a future professional meant essentially two things: guessing what he thought of the press and what he wanted it to be like in his conception. Though much remains to be examined, I found enough to increase the challenge: “To say is to do when said in time,” the press’s turn to watch, and “It’s not friendly approval or abusive anger; it is suggestion, study, examination and consultation”.

The Patria newspaper was his journalistic masterpiece, the pen: his sword, Patria: one more soldier, like our press has to be, one more revolutionary, always with and for the people, which, according to the apostle, “are made of people who resist and men who push”, these times deserve both, as well as a scrutiny of Martí: Cuban sovereign of thought and word, whose voice – to remain valid – lasts for centuries.