On January 19, 1881, exactly 142 years ago, the Cuban Apostle disembarked in Puerto Cabello, in the state of Carabobo, in the north-central part of the country, and embarked on the Cuba at night and at dawn the following day 21st, arriving in Puerto from La Guayra.
With the passion of those who love the hero in the depth of thought and action, the adviser to the Casa de Nuestra América José Martí in that capital, Rubén Rodríguez, revealed this historical fact to Prensa Latina on the 170th anniversary of the politician’s birth on May 28. January 1853.
This house was founded by the commanders Hugo Chávez (1954-2013) and Fidel Castro (1926-2016), commented the professor, who assures that the Cuban poet more than lived up to the phrase: “Give me Venezuela, with which I give him.” shall serve : in me there is a son”.
He recalled that on embarking through Puerto Cabello, Cesta de Flores, as he called it in his text A Voyage to Venezuela, he spent six hours there with the Freemasons of that city, and they were the ones who welcomed him.
Rodríguez clarified that Friday, January 21, 1881, around 6:00 p.m. local time, is usually mentioned as his arrival in that country, but on this date he arrives at Plaza Bolívar in Caracas.
We always appeal to the epic of Martí’s stay in front of the statue of El Libertador between those tall and fragrant trees in the plaza, but we must look for other conditions, he commented when referring to the historical circumstances in which he left Venezuelan land touched.
It must be taken into account that the Ten Years’ War ended with all the discouragement and confusion at not having achieved the peace, freedom and independence that the heroes dreamed of, he stressed.
The president of the José Martí Cultural Society Foundation here recalled that, like other Cuban fighters (Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo), he had migrated to other areas of America in search of a place to settle and earn family support.
Venezuela, he said, is a good option and has the history and vocation to “come and look for Simón Bolívar,” moreover, this country is fundamental to the formation of Major General José Martí’s military thought, he added.
The university professor added that the Bolivarian nation had led our American’s independence movement and was building the new society, “with flaws and virtues, with Antonio Guzmán Blanco at the helm, but he did it,” he said.
He pointed out that this country was also one of the greatest supporters of Cuban arms during the Ten Years’ War with the Venezuelan vanguard, the Bolivarian expedition and the associations founded here.
Rodríguez assured that Martí was not coming to a desolate country, he was coming to one that gave a lot of support, both from its people and from its then ruler, but it was a “promised land where an émigré, an exile, with revolutionary ideas , had a broth of cultivation to find his family”.
When he left Venezuela on July 28, 1881, expelled by Blanco, he had already made his contribution, for Martí was a literary, political and revolutionary figure who angered the regime.
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