by old Negroes when they asked their owners for a blessing. Camagüey, by contrast, lived free of the slave-owning tradition that haunted much of the rest of the island. Its landed families formed huge clans that intermarried with each other, and were sometimes described as the “Wasps” of Cuba: White, Aristocratic, Spanish, in their tastes rather than allegiances, and Proud. All this gave the province a “special, freedom loving mentality,” as the great Cuban historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals described it. It also explains why Camagüey’s creole cattle barons fought so bravely and willingly in the first rebellion against the Spanish. Agramonte, still a venerated revolutionary figure as the Granma news story I had read in my hotel bedroom showed, came from Camagüey. So did his right-hand man, Colonel Enrique Loret de Mola, Bernabé’s brother-in-law and my other Cuban great-great-grandfather. One of their most daring feats of arms occupies a place in Cuban revolutionary mythology similar to Lord Cardigan’s charge of the Light Brigade at the Crimea in English history—although Agramonte’s attack with the colonel at the head of Camagüey’s famed cavalry corps against a larger Spanish column in 1871 met with success and only one death. “Trumpeter sound the charge!” Agramonte had ordered. Outnumbered almost four to one, the Cuban troops routed the Spanish, rescued a captured general with a slight wound to his right hand, and reports said the rebel cavalry’s movements were so synchronized that they appeared to act “as if just one body.” Gómez, who was Dominican, had fought alongside such men during his first battles against the Spanish, and remembered them proudly. “Without Camagüey’s support I will feel like a warrior, but not a true revolutionary,” he told Martí.
Martí had a more anguished relationship with Camagüey. Although he never visited the province, not once in his life, it often occupied his thoughts. In the twenty-eight volumes of his collected works, Martí mentions it 110 times; Puerto Príncipe, as its capital was then known, another 31; and people from the region on innumerable occasions. His wife, Carmen Zayas-Bazán, the daughter of a rich landowner, came from Puerto Príncipe. But Martí was a generous womanizer, theirs was an unsuccessful marriage, and when it finally fell apart in 1881, Carmen left her husband in New York and returned to her family home in Camagüey. She took with her their only child, José Francisco, whom Martí never saw again.
From that moment on, Camagüey became for exiled Martí a place forever linked not only with his lost country but also with his lost son. In Manhattan, Martí’s brilliant and restless mind continued to feed Cuba’s independence movement. He raised funds. He organized. He wrote, prolifically. It was through Martí, also the New York consul for Argentina and Paraguay, that South America learned about North America—not just the bustle of Yankee life, which Martí admired, but its cult of wealth too, which he detested. “I have lived inside the monster, and know its entrails” is his famous quote, taken from a letter written the day before he died. Yet, as Martí admitted to a friend in New York, “My mind is not here with me, but in Puerto Príncipe, where Carmen is and my son—the distance almost forces me to go to Cuba.”
Martí shaped this loss into his first published book of poetry, Ismaelillo. Its tender poems are filled with feverish longing, and have titles like “My Kinglet , ” “Son of My Soul,” and “Fragrant Arms”:
. . . two small arms
that know how to tug me,
and hang tightly
from my pale neck
and of mystic lilies
weave me a chain!
Forever far from me,
Fragrant arms!
But Martí also wrote in his diaries, “I love my duty more than my son.” He remained in New York, plotting revolution from the junta’s dingy office near Wall Street.
Martí is central to Cuban history, especially Castro’s
Martí had a more anguished relationship with Camagüey. Although he never visited the province, not once in his life, it often occupied his thoughts. In the twenty-eight volumes of his collected works, Martí mentions it 110 times; Puerto Príncipe, as its capital was then known, another 31; and people from the region on innumerable occasions. His wife, Carmen Zayas-Bazán, the daughter of a rich landowner, came from Puerto Príncipe. But Martí was a generous womanizer, theirs was an unsuccessful marriage, and when it finally fell apart in 1881, Carmen left her husband in New York and returned to her family home in Camagüey. She took with her their only child, José Francisco, whom Martí never saw again.
From that moment on, Camagüey became for exiled Martí a place forever linked not only with his lost country but also with his lost son. In Manhattan, Martí’s brilliant and restless mind continued to feed Cuba’s independence movement. He raised funds. He organized. He wrote, prolifically. It was through Martí, also the New York consul for Argentina and Paraguay, that South America learned about North America—not just the bustle of Yankee life, which Martí admired, but its cult of wealth too, which he detested. “I have lived inside the monster, and know its entrails” is his famous quote, taken from a letter written the day before he died. Yet, as Martí admitted to a friend in New York, “My mind is not here with me, but in Puerto Príncipe, where Carmen is and my son—the distance almost forces me to go to Cuba.”
Martí shaped this loss into his first published book of poetry, Ismaelillo. Its tender poems are filled with feverish longing, and have titles like “My Kinglet , ” “Son of My Soul,” and “Fragrant Arms”:
. . . two small arms
that know how to tug me,
and hang tightly
from my pale neck
and of mystic lilies
weave me a chain!
Forever far from me,
Fragrant arms!
But Martí also wrote in his diaries, “I love my duty more than my son.” He remained in New York, plotting revolution from the junta’s dingy office near Wall Street.
Martí is central to Cuban history, especially Castro’s
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