Of this quite extraordinary chronicle, officially dated March 29, 1883 by its author and published in La Nación on May 13 and 16, 1883, I wish in the first place to single out the curious mise-en-scène. Martí, as he had done the previous year with Oscar Wilde, indeed invites his distant readers to become the virtual spectators of a scene to which he appears to have been a personal eyewitness. “Ved esta gran sala. Karl Marx ha muerto,” writes Martí—“Look at this great hall. Karl Marx has died”—repeating the visual interpellation just a few lines later: “Ved esta sala.”2 What we are invited to look at, for obvious reasons, is a velorio a cuerpo ausente—that is, a wake in the absence of the deceased’s corpse. Of that famous Karl Marx whom the resolutions of the “impassioned assembly” in the end proclaim to be “the most noble hero and the most powerful thinker of the working world,” we will have obtained only the effigy or figure, by way of a large crayon portrait standing behind the back of the speakers: “Look at this hall. Presiding over it, wreathed in green leaves, is the portrait of that ardent reformer, uniter of men of different nations, tireless and forceful organizer.”3
Around this absent corpse, not to say ghost, Martí describes how there gathers a whole collective scene of men and women who respectfully take turns to invoke and pay tribute to some aspect or other of the figure of Marx. The void of the dead man’s body thus seems to be filled, as if compensated for by a surfeit of affectivity ranging from anger to awe. Through this public display of affect, the Great Hall of the Cooper Union in New York City becomes first and foremost the stage for a concrete example of what Martí considers the true labor of the coauthor of The Communist Manifesto—namely, his role as a political organizer, rather than the pursuit of scientific ambition displayed in Capital—a project of which the Cuban writer in any event only seems to have a vague idea at best, and which would not begin to be translated into Spanish until 1895, the year of Martí’s death, when the Argentine Juan B. Justo began his version of the first volume of Marx’s Das Kapital. “The International was his work, and men of all nations are coming to pay tribute to him,” writes Martí, but not without immediately offering the following judgment, adopting a slightly paternalistic, gendered tone that will come back toward the end of the chronicle: “The multitude, made up of valiant laborers the sight of whom is touching and comforting, displays more muscles than adornments, more honest faces than silken scarves.”4 All of this, incidentally, is framed in something that we might call a moral aesthetic, or an ethics of the beauty of work, based on a normative and transcendentalist idea of nature, inspired by Emerson. “Work makes men beautiful. The sight of a field hand, an ironworker, or a sailor is rejuvenating. As they grapple with nature’s forces, they come to be as fair as nature.”5
Despite this attempt at a natural-organicist aestheticization of the world of workers, Martí’s chronicle never ceases to respond adversely to the great labor of Marx as a militant political organizer. Up to half a dozen times, Martí repeats the same reproach that Marx and his followers in the first International seek to accomplish their noble ends with wrong or misguided means: “Karl Marx has died. He deserves to be honored, for he placed himself on the side of the weak. But it is not the man who points out the harm and burns with generous eagerness to remedy it who does well—it is the man who advocates a mild remedy.”6 If this first formulation remains suspiciously convoluted, to the point of blurring the line between the good and the bad ways of remedying a wrong, the following phrasing does little to clear up the confusion. “To set men against men is an appalling task,” writes Martí, without clarifying whether this is what he sees Marx and his followers as doing or whether he is merely describing the daunting aspect of what they, like any other human being for that matter, are up against: “The forced bestialization of some men for the profit of others stirs our indignation. But that indignation must be vented in such a way that the beast ceases to be, without escaping its bonds and causing fear.”7 A third phrasing seems necessary in order to dispel all doubts regarding the main thrust of Martí’s objection against Marx. This formulation, furthermore, is absolutely crucial if we keep in mind not only the Hegelian prejudice that, according to José Aricó, would have kept Marx from properly understanding the Latin American realities, but also a certain ideological image of women and the limited role that Martí attributes to them in the process of social transformation:
Karl Marx studied the means of establishing the world on new bases; he awoke the sleepers and showed them how to cast down the cracked pillars. But he went very fast and sometimes in darkness; he did not see that without a natural and laborious gestation, children are not born viable, from a nation in history or from a woman in the home.8
Social change, even or especially when revolutionary in nature, would thus by necessity have to follow the various stages of a seemingly natural process, without allowing it to become hurried or premature. Or, sticking to the same metaphor, we might say that the difference between Marx and Martí lies in the fact that, for the Cuban writer, the gestation and birth of a nation in history, like that of a child at home, should be able to do without the force or violence that, for the author of Das Kapital, is “the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one.”9
Martí subsequently repeats the same criticism three more times, referring not just to Marx himself but also to his acolytes, the members and sympathizers of the International Working Men’s Association whose militant activists he sees gathered in the Great Hall that Monday evening in New York City. About the fellow countrymen and women of “a certain Lecovitch,” who speaks to them with Babelic confusion in English, German, and Russian, the Cuban exile says: “But no, these impatient, generous men, defiled by wrath, will not be the ones to lay the foundations of the new world: they are the spur, and serve their purpose, like the voice of conscience that might fall asleep, but the long sharp steel of a horseman’s goad is of little use as a founding hammer.”10 About the German communist-anarchist John (Johann) Most, he says that his “right hand carries no balm with which to heal the wounds inflicted by his left.” Finally, about the meeting in general, Martí adds one last overarching note of condemnation: “Music is heard and choirs ring out, but it is not the music of peace.”11
The reasons for Martí’s missed encounter with the internationalist politics of Marx would thus seem to be clear enough. According to this hero of Cuban independence and long-time resident in the belly of the monster from the North, Marx would have been the Apostle of the religion of hatred instead of love, and of war instead of peace. In fact, here we would do well to recall that Martí frames his account of the commemorative event for Marx between two strange vignettes: he thus begins his chronicle by portraying the difference between the workers’ movements in America and in Europe, and he quickly follows his account of the Marx memorial by evaluating the possible decision of Columbia University in New York City either to open its doors to female students or else to create a separate undergraduate college for women, as would eventually come to pass in 1889 with the foundation of Barnard College.
Evidently, even though in most extant editions these parts are left out, there is a close connection between the two sections that immediately frame Martí’s chronicle and the central part about the commemorative event at the Cooper Union in honor of Marx. Indeed, in talking about the contrast between the tactics of workers from the Old and New Worlds, Martí does no more than prepare the ground in anticipation of his reproach that Marx would have fomented hatred instead of love amid the working class:
The future must be conquered with clean hands. The workmen of the United States would be more prudent if the most aggrieved and enraged workmen of Europe were not emptying the dregs of their hatred into their ears. Germans, Frenchmen, and Russians guide these discussions. The Americans tend to resolve the concrete matter at hand in their meetings, while those from abroad raise it to an abstract plane. Good sense and the fact of having been born into a free cradle make the men of this place slow to wrath. The rage of those from abroad is roiling and explosive because their prolonged enslavement has repressed and concentrated it. But the rotten apple must not be allowed to spoil the whole healthy barrel—though it could! The excrescences of monarchy, which rot and gnaw at Liberty’s bosom like a poison, cannot match Liberty’s power!12
In a number of chronicles from the same period, Martí would time and again reiterate this distinction in organizational