José Martí and the Global Origins of Cuban Independence

A nationalist campaigner, civil rights advocate, diplomat, lecturer and orator, journalist, poet, author of children’s stories, visionary champion of anti-colonial Latin American and Caribbean thought, all are expressions of José Martí’s (1853–95) extraordinary life in fighting for Cuba’s definitive independence. This work opens a new path in studies of Martí's efforts to build a modern democratic Cuba by widening the lens under which the Cuban hero has been examined. In joining these different facets of Martí and by going beyond the national and hemispheric, García de la Torre introduces the largely ignored global influences and dimensions that marked the revolutionary’s work and ideas.
From Martí’s global histories for children to his adaptation of Hindu and Eastern conceptions, through a juxtaposition of The Bhagavad-Gita, to his relationships and inspirations from the African diaspora to the US Civil War and Ulysses S. Grant, García de la Torre vividly reveals the global origins of Martí’s ideas regarding governance, citizenship, independence and spirituality. In bridging the familiar and the individual with larger global patterns and processes of the late nineteenth century, José Martí and the Global Origins of Cuban Independence gives birth to a modern Cuba understood from a truly global perspective.

Armando García De La Torre is Lecturer in History, University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. He is the editor and translator of Spanish Trinidad, by Francisco Morales Padrón.