Our America

The squalid inability of the United States to understand the rest of the countries of America was denounced by José Martí in his essay published in 1891, and today it radiates in the IX Summit of Los Angeles.

Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, first Secretary of the Party and President of the Republic of Cuba, when speaking to the civil society excluded from the IX Summit of the Americas, quoted the words of the Apostle: "When a strong people wants to fight against another, it compels alliance and service to those who need it. The first thing that a people does to get to dominate another, is to separate it from the other peoples.’

Our America, an essay by José Martí Pérez, was first published in La Revista Ilustrada in New York on January 1, 1891, and 29 days later in El Partido Liberal in Mexico.

In just twelve paragraphs,he defines, with total transparency, the fundamental problems of our America. He calls for the unity of the peoples against the threat of the United States, for the defense of the sovereignty and independence of Spain, from a transformation to recover its autochthony, so as to implant the world onto it and thus be able to ensure its true independence and development.

“The vain villager believes that the whole world is his village”, is how Martí begins the essay. It is an alert to the radical positions that are taking place at that time... "What remains of the village in America has to wake up..."

It ends with the prediction that these are not times to settle down and that in the coming struggle, once all the Latin American republics have been liberated from European colonialism, the fundamental weapons will be ideas.

It defends unity as the cornerstone on which the Latin American project must be based.

He insists on creating awareness among Latin American nations and calls for pride in their origins, confronting those who are ashamed of their roots, with total defense of national identity and the taking of sides by the popular classes, described by Martí as the man natural.

The essay today is considered by scholars not only as one of the fundamental works of Martí’s ideology, but also as a particularly outstanding piece in the history of Latin American ideas at all times.

Martí never believes in the so-called racial, cultural and historical inability of those countries to leave behind the mode of existence established by colonialism, but rather in the repeated and mistaken decision to assume, uncritically, in the Creole republics the forms of political organization and from Western Europe and the United States.

“There is no battle between civilization and barbarism, but between false erudition and nature”, he states when describing this permanent imbalance between the molds and the society that was intended to conform to them: “the imported book has been defeated by man natural; this natural man has overcome the artificial lawyer; the native mestizo has conquered the exotic Creole"…

He writes the essay after attending the Monetary Conference, an interested invitation from the thriving United States to the young republics of Our America at that time.

Accredited by the Government of Uruguay, a country for which he was consul general in New York since 1887, Martí was almost excluded due to inexplicable delays and lying excuses from the State Department.

That Conference failed and warned about the dangers to which Our America was exposed by accepting the monetary union.
Today with the IX Summit, a spectacle of the United States, without the Americas, 130 years later, Martí's warnings are more solid about the inability of the United States to understand its neighbors to the South and the call to that America mestiza to integrate into a single nation to defend its sovereignty.

That message of José Martí is more valid in the struggle of the peoples against their neighbor to the north.