Martí in Prison: From Darkness to Light (+audio).

The experiences lived by José Julián Martí Pérez in the quarries of San Lázaro, when he was barely seventeen years old, not only molded his vision of the world by making him witness the atrocities of the colonial regime, but also strengthened his convictions and nurtured his political commitment to the independence struggle and the social causes of the Island.

The infidelity of which he was accused and for which he was condemned to prison on March 4th, 1870 by the Spanish War Council, involved a sharp missive found in the home of Fermín Valdés Domínguez and where Carlos de Castro y de Castro, a former classmate of both, was branded as an apostate for having enlisted in the Hispanic ranks.

But the threats made by the Iberian lieutenant colonel Francisco Ramírez y Martín, who was then in charge of the military tribunal where both the Master and his brother of a thousand battles were to be judged, were of no use, because to their surprise and in view of the uncertainty as to who was responsible for the similarity between their handwriting, both, with fervent courage, assumed the authorship of the aforementioned epistle.

While Valdés Domínguez received six months in prison as punishment, the Master would witness under number 113 of the First Brigade of Whites of the Royal Jail and for much more time of reclusion and forced labor, the weight of colonial oppression and the pain of a Cuba more and more distant from its emancipation.

These bitter experiences were later captured in his work «El Presidio Político en Cuba» (The Political Prison in Cuba) of 1871, where with his characteristic communicative sagacity and accurate criticism he denounced, forcefully, the hardships and subhuman conditions suffered by him and the other political prisoners under the colonial yoke.

He had then reached a maturity in his socio-political and revolutionary ideology that would transcend the limits of his youth and would undoubtedly turn him into a stubborn defender of justice, an architect of patriotism and, above all, the most universal hero of our independence.

…ONLINE AUDIO

Written by Yadiel Barbón Salgado.