The first time there was contact between Martí and Maceo was through a letter that the Apostle wrote to him on July 20, 1882. He began the letter by calling him “lord and friend,” and ended by saying: “Perhaps, because of my hatred of useless advertising, you ignore who writes this letter”. In fact, the Titan was completely unaware of who the sender was and, as we say today in messaging language, he almost left it obvious.
The Maestro did not have the pedigree of having been a war hero, although he empathized with it from the first moment, when he was barely 15 years old. Martí was sentenced to prison and exile early. But his intelligence, culture and romanticism led him to commit himself completely to the preparation of a definitive feat. The same man who wrote with such tenderness for children dreamed of “the beauty of dying on horseback, fighting for the country, at the foot of a palm tree.”
A sickly intellectual, without military experience and without legends, he had to make a double effort to be taken seriously by his heroes. The author of the Simple verses He discarded all peaceful alternatives to achieve independence and opted for the most radical path: war. And although he tried to fill that word with adjectives such as necessary, generous and brief, cultured, inevitable… the poet knew that a war is not waged only with ink and pen, it also carries blood. He then had to have men skilled in the use of the machete, in the command and discipline of the troops, with the coldness required to empty the drum of the revolver against another human being. Martí was never able to reach that point. When he fell in Dos Ríos, they say that his weapon was intact.
Other patriots had written to him warning him about Dr. Martí, speaking of duplicity and falsehood, retrograde tendencies, infamy and slander.
Maceo’s suspicions about that little man by whom Máximo Gómez seemed bewitched came from references from third parties. Other patriots had written to him warning him about Dr. Martí, speaking of duplicity and falsehood, retrograde tendencies, infamy and slander. They called him a “fatal element” and affirmed that Martí “neither worked nor let him work,” that he generated antipathy and that he wasted the savings from exile.
An important turning point in the relationship between both figures was Martí’s break with the Gómez-Maceo Plan. Gómez rebuked Martí for ignoring Maceo as leader, while the Titan made it clear to the poet that war should be the exclusive property of the generalissimo. This meeting motivated the Apostle’s famous letter to Gómez, where he tells him: “A town is not founded, General, as a camp is ordered.” Although it is true that in matters of war both leaders far surpassed Martí, he had a much more strategic political vision than his idols.
After that disagreement, the tension between the two seemed to calm down, as their exchanged letters show, although Martí was much more lavish in praise than his compatriot. But after the failure of the Fernandina Plan, the matter became tangled again. Martí offered Maceo 2,000 pesos to prepare his expedition. The Titan, unaware of the real funds that the Cuban Revolutionary Party had, demanded three times as much. Then Flor Crombet offered to do it for a much smaller amount.
Martí tried to act in the best possible way. He consulted Gómez first and wrote very delicately to Maceo, but he learned of the decision through other means, before receiving his letter. Offended in his pride, the next meeting between them would become one of the most speculated topics in the history of Cuba.
Regarding the meeting in La Mejorana there has even been talk of blows, although it is difficult to imagine Maceo punching someone like Martí
Regarding the meeting in La Mejorana there has even been talk of blows, although it is difficult to imagine Maceo punching someone like Martí. Perhaps, this imaginary vision is biased by the alpha male portrait with which Maceo has been commonly described to us. And the mystery grows even more due to the fatality of the pages torn from Martí’s diary.
But there were big differences in that meeting. Maceo made it clear to Martí and Gómez who was the leader there with broad convening power. Martí spoke of sadness, with that sadness he slept that night, and with that sadness he died a few days later.
Today, in times of constant “tiraeras”, divisions and fights over the leadership of the opposition, many tend to become disappointed and lose faith in the triumph of change. But, as the biblical Ecclesiastes says, there is nothing new under the sun.
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