Review of José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas, edited by Deborah Shnookal and Mirta Muñiz (Seven Stories Press, 2025)
Reviewing a reader is never easy, since such volumes are often uneven compilations of a range of authors and topics around a broad central theme. However, here the “theme” is one person, José Martí, and the collection largely focuses on his writings on the Americas, giving it greater coherence than many.
However, the editors have a different challenge to grapple with. As Cuba’s best-known historical figure until the rise of Fidel Castro, and certainly the one who was most widely respected (and even sanctified), Martí’s status as Cuba’s “national hero” was already well-established before 1959.
He wrote prolifically in several fields, his Complete Works filling twenty-six volumes. One of the Spanish-speaking world’s leading modernista poets, he was also an eloquent journalist and chronicler, a prodigious letter-writer, and even a diplomat for three Latin American countries.
For Cubans, however, he was simply the person who, from the age of eighteen, conspired to bring about Cuba’s independence from Spain, spending much of his life abroad campaigning for that goal and planning what would become Cuba’s third and final rebellion against Spain in 1895. This became known as the War of Independence, to distinguish it from the previous rebellions of 1868–78 and 1879–80.
Yet Martí himself was killed in 1895 during one of the rebellion’s first actions, leaving the…
Auteur: Antoni Kapcia
