Jose? Marti? and the global dimensions of late nineteenth-century Cuban nation building

by 1971- Garcia, Armand

by Armand Garcia, Ph.D. Washington State University December 2006 This transnational study of the nation building efforts of the late nineteenthcentury Cuban independence leader José Martí (1853-1895) argues that the Cuban anticolonial struggle had significant, yet overlooked global dimensions. In five chapters, it demonstrates that, in his work to free Cuba from Spain and in raising Cuban national awareness and Latin American consciousness, Martí transmitted political, ethical, and spiritual values aimed at resisting oppressive ruling systems and at building a democratic society in his biographies on U.S. luminaries and Civil War figures, primarily of Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), and in the world history narratives of his children’s magazine, The Golden Years (La Edad de Oro). It also reveals that, to inspire and promote Cuban nation building, Martí employed subjects from world history such as Hindu ideas in the Bhagavad-Gita. This dissertation reconceptualizes commonly-held perceptions of the 1895 Cuban independence movement by engaging notions of gender and demonstrating that, although highly nationalistic, it transcended national and regional boundaries. The dissertation also reveals that the didactic historical writings surveyed provide a means to decipher Martí’s visions for the independent Cuba he did not live to see. By disclosing how Martí engaged the world to promote progressive notions of race, gender, and the value of non-European cultures in an age of rising racism and iv “High” Imperialism, this dissertation also provides a basis for an interpretation of the patterns of globally oriented Latin American revolutions as having their genesis in the nineteenth- and not the twentieth-century. Through Martí’s “globalism,” the 1895 Cuban revolution thus marks a divergence in Latin America from the Atlantic-oriented revolutions of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries (e.g. the Haitian & Simón Bolívar’s uprisings in northern South America) to the globally-charged ones of the twentieth-century (e.g. the 1910s Mexican Revolution), an understanding facilitated by the global approach of this study. v