Martí’s global history narratives for children: inspiration and historical context

Martí’s project to sever Cuba from the Spanish empire was intrinsically related to Cuba joining a free pan-Latin American concert of nations.Footnote ⁶ In separate instances, Martí expressed how ‘we fight in Cuba to secure, with our [own], the independence of [all] Spanish America’.Footnote ⁷ Although he never specified that Pan-Latin American unity would take the form of an overarching government, he nevertheless advocated a united Latin American front against foreign encroachments, whether in the form of Spanish colonialism or motivated by the US expansionist politics that he saw in the media after his arrival in New York City in 1880. He especially had in mind efforts by the United States to expand their economic hegemony in Latin America through a Pan-American monetary conference, a convention to further a US-led, hemispheric monetary and customs union. This project began to be deliberated in Washington DC in October 1889, during The Golden Years’ final month of publication.Footnote ⁸

Martí’s sense of nationalism was strongly Cuban, for which he fought his entire adult life and ultimately sacrificed himself in battle, yet it was linked to a Pan-Latin American unified spiritual consciousness. He commented once, ‘I am a son of America and I owe myself to her’.Footnote ⁹ His calls for an independent Cuba were not pleas for the region to unite under one government, or to rally around one flag.Footnote ¹⁰ His strong sense of Cuban nationalism did not depend on whether Latin America would be politically united at some future point, but he believed that a viable independent Cuba did rely at a minimal level on the moral and political support of Cuba’s Latin American sister republics.

The two global history narratives surveyed in this article also reflect Martí’s desire to allow ‘other [world] areas’ to ‘fertilize the crop [of raising Latin American children]’. However, as he explained to his lifelong friend Manuel Mercado, ‘the farming must be done according to our soil; our children, we must raise as men and women of their time, and as men and women of the Americas’.Footnote ¹¹The Golden Years also contained fictional stories, essays on current events, and poetry, yet it carried throughout a pedagogical, thoroughly modern moralizing intent. A deep political purpose was affirmed by Martí in an August 1889 Uruguayan newspaper article, in which he said that ‘to be a citizen of a republic is a difficult thing, and [it] must [be] exercised from childhood’.Footnote ¹²The Golden Years may also be considered the partner children’s publication of his later Patria, the official organ of the Cuban Revolutionary Party’s activities, for Martí entirely edited both periodicals.Footnote ¹³

The year in which he wrote The Golden Years, 1889, was one of significant activity for Martí. He published these children’s global history narratives in the midst of arduous political campaigning, speech-giving, and fund-raising activity for the cause of Cuban independence, and while representing Latin American interests in the United States. Since 1886, he had reported extensively on North American subjects as foreign correspondent for leading newspapers in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Caracas, and other Latin American cities. In 1889, he wrote twenty-six newspaper articles for La Nación of Buenos Aires, and accepted work for La Opinión Nacional of Montevideo, promising two opinion pieces bi-weekly. He was also writing for El Partido Liberal of Mexico City, and penning a major essay confronting the exclusionary US nationalism of ‘manifest destiny’ in ‘Vindication of Cuba’, which appeared in The New York Evening Post. In October 1889, he called passionately for a free Cuba in nationalist rallies in New York City’s Hardman Hall.

In addition to these activities, Martí served as honorary consul general of Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay in New York City, his office a veritable entre y sale (‘an in-and-out [of people]’).Footnote ¹⁴ The narratives in The Golden Years were also written while he represented Uruguay in the Pan-American Monetary Conference in Washington, DC. Martí wrote a first newspaper article critiquing the monetary conference for La Nación of Buenos Aires on 8 November 1889, after drafting the global history narrative surveyed in this essay, ‘A journey through the land of the Annamese’, which appeared in The Golden Years’ final, October 1889, issue.

Martí was also composing his global history narratives while he founded and operated La Liga (‘The League’), a charitable institution that educated disadvantaged African-Cuban and African-Puerto Rican adults in New York City.Footnote ¹⁵ By 1892, he had established the Cuban Revolutionary Party to funnel all activities and resources for the Cuban independence war. ‘The story of humanity, told through its houses’ and ‘A journey through the land of the Annamese’ were thus written during this intense political and humanitarian activity. Although many have ignored the political value of these global history narratives, Martí’s stories contain strong political directives, and were written in the context of these significant political efforts. Ironically, these children’s history narratives provide a concise overview of Martí’s nationalist ideology.

As he had earned a reputation as a gifted orator, political campaigner, and organizer during the years preceding his publication of The Golden Years, many contemporaries chided Martí for writing a project perceived as infantile and distracting.Footnote ¹⁶ However, because he wrote these narratives during so much serious political activity, they deserve our attention for their nation-building, political value. Perhaps the example most revealing his intentions in writing the narratives is found in his August 1889 letter to Manuel Mercado in Mexico, in which he wrote that he ‘entered in this [The Golden Years] endeavour, for while [he] waited to die in another greater one [the independence war against Spain], in this one … [he] could place, in an enduring and useful manner, all that had been maturing, in pure blood, through [his] soul’.Footnote ¹⁷

Beyond the Cuban and Latin American children who would read these stories, Martí also intended the enclosed teachings for the adults reading the stories to them. Indeed, Martí had adults in mind when writing his children’s narratives. In the same letter to Mercado, he asks his Mexican friend ‘to please tell [him] honestly what [Mercado’s] children thought of the magazine’, but also what he ‘as an adult thought of it’.Footnote ¹⁸

The Cuban leader sent five hundred copies of The Golden Years’ first issue to Mercado in Mexico, and charged him with ‘finding a central agent that would distribute them throughout the largest cities’,Footnote ¹⁹ so that local governments would use the magazine in elementary schools. This was also to satisfy the hopes for commercial success of the magazine’s financial supporter, Aaron da Costa Gómez.Footnote ²⁰ Martí expressed to Mercado that he had received orders from Argentina for 1,250 copies of the first issue. Copies were also sent to Cuba.Footnote ²¹ The total sum of issues published or sold in Latin America is unknown, but through Martí’s personal letters it appears that nearly 10,000 copies were printed for each of the four issues.Footnote ²²

The Golden Years proved popular in Latin America. It received favourable reviews, particularly from leading intellectuals on the cutting edge of Spanish-American literature, such as the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío and the Mexican journalist Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera. Enrique José Varona, a major Cuban scholar, affirmed at the time that, although ‘it is a journal for little ones, [it] deserves the attention of all the grownups’.Footnote ²³

Inspired by late nineteenth-century English-language children’s journals that he read during his fifteen-year sojourn in New York City, Martí also wrote The Golden Years to challenge what traditional Spanish-language children’s magazines taught youngsters. Profoundly interested in modernizing Spanish-language pedagogy, Martí found English-language magazines such as Harper’s Young People and St. Nicholas inspiring.Footnote ²⁴ He patterned fictional stories in The Golden Years on stories such as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, appearing in the November 1885 issue of St. Nicholas, and interspersed references to characters from it.Footnote ²⁵ In other stories of The Golden Years, Martí adopted tales and poems from Helen Hunt Jackson and Ralph Waldo Emerson.Footnote ²⁶ Writings by Emerson and other New England Transcendentalists would be a major source of inspiration in Martí’s ideological formation.Footnote ²⁷

The most popular children’s journals sold in Spain and Latin America at the time were Los Niños (‘The Children’), El Camarada (‘The Buddy’), and El Museo de la Juventud (‘The Museum for Youngsters’). These Spanish-language journals contained articles such as ‘The lives of saints’ and ‘The moral sentiments’, which urged children to submit to higher authority, and to depend on adults for making their decisions. Martí emphasized the opposite: the need for children to think freely and independently. While these moralizing Spanish publications were being imported into Cuba, Cuban authors attempted to write alternative narratives, suitable to the island’s environment and indirectly fostering the growing sense of Cuban nationalism. Press censorship in Cuba under the colonial regime, however, did not allow conspicuous challenges to Spanish rule. Cuban journals such as La Niñez (‘Childhood’), emerging nearly a decade before The Golden Years and to which Martí contributed, experienced heavy pressure and ultimately ceased publication.Footnote ²⁸ Martí was therefore aware of the need not to antagonize the colonial authorities directly, and knew how to craft narratives carefully, with nation-building values encoded in histories of distant global societies.

The innovative North American, British, and French children’s journals that Martí read diverged from the prevailing Spanish children’s magazines, which carried instructions to children such as ‘submission and dependency are so important in this world that going against them would be a cause for innumerable evils’.Footnote ²⁹ Martí looked to the British, French, and North American traditions of children’s writings as an alternative source to the constraining Spanish ones. In this sense, he remained faithful to the views expressed in his letter to Mercado that ‘other [world] areas may fertilize the crop [of raising Latin American children]’, but the final published product would be specifically designed for the cause of raising Latin American awareness through new perspectives for children.

The line of modern children’s narratives dated back to the first English- and French-language stories written by Charles Perrault (1697), Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe, 1719), and Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s travels, 1726). It continued through the first early nineteenth-century journals created for children in England, such as The Boy’s Own Magazine and Aunt Judy’s Magazine. In the US, there were The Juvenile Miscellany (1827), Harper’s Young People, and the better known St. Nicholas, published from 1873 to 1939, all of which inspired Martí.Footnote ³⁰ Other sources of inspiration were Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s adventures in wonderland (1865), Louisa May Alcott’s Little women (1868), and Mark Twain’s The adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884).Footnote ³¹ Martí found further inspiration in the French author Édouard René Lefevre de Laboulaye (1811–83), and in Hans Christian Andersen (1805–75), translating and adopting stories from these authors for The Golden Years. Laboulaye was a journalist and pedagogue, who publicly criticized the policies of the French Second Empire, defending the freedoms of religion, press, and secular instruction. Laboulaye also wrote the introduction to Réformes dans les îles de Cuba et Porto Rico (Paris, 1869), a pro-Cuban treatise written by Porfirio Valiente y Cuevas, a Cuban independence fighter and consul general of the Republic of Cuba at arms in Paris.Footnote ³² Again, the link between the Cuban independence movement and educating children through imaginative tales emerges.

Martí created the magazine to be visually stimulating, incorporating the latest graphic techniques, as images in his stories demonstrate. He followed the graphic techniques developed by Nicholas Pellerin, director of the graphic studios Épinal in France, who substituted lithographs for literature from 1845, ultimately developing the first comic strips. In writing ‘The story of humanity’, Martí closely followed the weekly journal L’Exposition de Paris de 1889, published in forty issues from October 1888. This French journal was entirely dedicated to the 1889 Paris World Fair Exhibition, and contained many drawings, sketches, and graphics.Footnote ³³ Although studying the impact of Martí’s children magazine for its contribution to the history of children’s literature as a whole remains beyond the scope of this article, we can see that Martí’s integration of different techniques from non-Spanish sources for his children’s magazines underscores the innovative and global character of his project to edify Cuban and Latin American children with nation-building values.

Sadly though, Martí’s children’s journal ran for only four issues, abruptly ending in October 1889, despite the existence of material for many more issues. He ceased publication because of philosophical differences with the journal’s financier who ‘for conviction or commercial apprehension wanted [Martí] to speak of “the fear of God”’ in his stories, and not to challenge prevailing conventions, as Martí confessed to Mercado in a letter of November 1889.Footnote ³⁴ Martí suffered from the pressure of his ideas being perceived as subversive by those invested in the traditionally moralizing stories of Spanish children’s journals.

Despite the prolonged desire to publish an innovative magazine for Latin American children, first visibly surfacing in a letter of October 1888 to his friend Enrique Estrázulas, and notwithstanding his personal attachment to the magazine, Martí expressed to Mercado that ‘it is the first time, despite the hardships in my life, that I abandon something that I have truly endeavoured’.Footnote ³⁵The Golden Years assuaged his emotions of being an absent father, for writing the children’s journal relieved the longing to be with his young son in distant Cuba. He also drew inspiration from his strong paternal affections for María Mantilla, the young daughter of the widowed Carmen Mantilla, owner and manager of the boarding house where Martí lived while in New York City. Moreover, he received praise from leading avant-garde intellectuals. Despite all this, Martí refused to readjust his writing in order to please the magazine’s financial supporter’s more conventional outlook on what to teach children.Footnote ³⁶

‘The story of humanity, told through its houses’ and ‘Journey through the land of the Annamese’ promote Martí’s unique elaboration of nationalist ideals, devoid of the exclusionary politics that characterized late nineteenth-century US and European nationalist doctrines. Studies on European nationalism have represented the nation as a construct of ruling elites to gain the consent of people opposed to them on other grounds.Footnote ³⁷ Mass nationalism developed in nineteenth-century Europe not as a ‘fixed product of economic and social developments but [as] an evanescent construct, rising in response to crises and elite campaigns to mobilize patriotic sentiment, dwindling away at other times, always in flux’.Footnote ³⁸ A recent study of the 1895 Cuban independence war, ideologically shaped by Martí, presents in a precise manner the Cuban leader’s unique sense of nationalism:

This sense of nationalism as emanating from within the people finds analogous sentiments in Ernest Renan’s spiritual conceptions of the nation that Martí praised in separate writings.Footnote ⁴⁰ Martí’s views of the ‘collective flowering of humanity in its constituent national communities’ compare favourably to those of Immanuel Kant, who also suggested a league of nations as a way to secure the freedom of humanity, although Martí did not articulate the need for any type of international structure.Footnote ⁴¹ Certain aspects of Martí’s nationalist ideas were not original, finding inspiration in major European and North American secular thinkers, such as Henry David Thoreau. Martí’s originality lies, however, in distilling European and North American nationalist ideas and developing a new nationalist doctrine free of racial demarcations for the consumption of Cuban and Latin American heterogeneous audiences. In the line of Simón Bolívar and Toussaint Louverture before him, yet in a different form from these intellectual predecessors, Martí presented his inclusionary politics in children’s stories of the world’s past.

‘The story of humanity’ is specifically modelled after the French essays on the 1889 Paris World Fair pavilions that showcased the development of human dwellings. Interested in the benefits of a modern industrial age, Martí wrote other stories in The Golden Years, as well as opinion pieces for Latin American newspapers, such as on New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge, which illustrate an idealistic fascination with the technological feats of his time. Historiographically, the narrative of ‘The story of humanity’ reflects methodologies developed by scholars such as Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) and Cesare Cantù (1804–95), who pioneered the use of architecture as a reliable historical source for understanding past societies.Footnote ⁴² Martí lays a bridge between the present and the past, writing on a thoroughly modern event, the World Fair, but highlighting the past of global societies.

In The Golden Years, Martí contradicted traditional late nineteenth-century notions, earning the ire of conservatives, by showcasing cultures commonly considered to be inferior to European ones. In this respect, Martí preceded anti-colonial writers of the early twentieth century, who also undermined European cultural hegemony by highlighting the value of non-Western history. In this sense, Martí’s views were original for their time. Nevertheless, he did not abandon European models entirely. His narratives also echo leading European thinkers, such as Niccolò Machiavelli’s ‘civic republicanism’ and other defenders of Italian city-states in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, who viewed ‘the survival of the republic, and of the freedoms which it represented, [as] dependent upon the civic virtue of its citizens’.Footnote ⁴³ In Martí’s global history narratives, the reader also confronts G. W. F. Hegel’s notions of history as the progression of human consciousness and freedom. Martí’s narratives reveal a Hegelian-inspired idealist spirit, particularly in the idea that nations have a more-or-less singular culture. However, Hegel considered that cultures could be assessed in terms of their degree of development and complexity, and viewed non-Western history as ‘outside of the world’s history, not part of the overall process of [global] development’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Remarkably for a child of Europeans, Martí considered and portrayed non-European cultures as equal, if not more exemplary, affirming the non-superiority of European civilization and undermining the European civilizing mission. These notions support the first key to the globalism of Martí’s nationalism, his belief in a nation’s right to self-determination. To Martí, societies were not superior to others, but were superior to their own pasts. Fighting for Cuban independence and promoting Latin American regional pride and awareness, Martí would not accept or promote European thinkers’ notions of the superiority of Europe or of European culture over non-Western cultures, even though he avidly admired French art and Italian cuisine.Footnote ⁴⁵

The first key: the right to self-determination at the national level

In ‘The story of humanity’, Martí undermines notions of European civilizational superiority by favourably comparing the Mayans of Mesoamerica and the Gauls of Europe. Martí demonstrates in the narrative that the menhir, a prehistoric upright stone placed by the Gauls in Europe to commemorate major past events, is comparable to Mayan structures in Mexico, who referred to their version as the katún. The Mayans and Europeans had similar traditions, despite the Mayans being unaware of the Gauls’ existence ‘on the other side of the ocean’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Mayans, Martí affirms, created similar architectural objects to those of the distant Gauls and Germanic tribes of Europe. By providing examples of how diverse cultures created different objects for similar purposes, Martí leads the reader to reflect on the underlying commonality of humanity: different cultures through time and space do indeed have points in common.

The Cuban leader eschews presenting the Mayans as less technologically advanced than the Europeans. Rather, through the depictions of architectural structures, Martí persuades the reader to view European and American indigenous cultures as equally significant to human history, for they had comparable structures that achieved similar cultural objectives. Even though the Mayans were unaware of the existence of the Gauls, they created similar architectural structures. Implying that the Mayans did not replicate European culture, Martí undermines prevailing notions of Europeans bringing ‘civilization’ to the indigenous Americans.

In ‘The story of humanity’, Martí tells the child reader that ‘when European men lived in the Bronze Age, they built better houses, although not as detailed or perfected as the Mexicans and the Peruvians of the Americas, who lived simultaneously in two ages’. This was because, as Martí explains, the Mexicans and the Peruvians ‘continued working with flints when they had already developed their gold mines, and their temples with golden suns like the ones in the sky, and their huacas, which were Peruvian cemeteries, where they placed their dead with the jars and jewels they used while living’.Footnote ⁴⁷ By not specifically referring to indigenous American societies in the narrative as Inca, Mexica, or Aztec when describing their homes as more perfect and detailed than the Europeans’, and by identifying them in nationalist terms as ‘Mexican’ and ‘Peruvian’, Martí implies that the Mexicans and Peruvians of his time owed their cultural legacy not only to the conquering Europeans but equally to the indigenous peoples. Referring to the pre-Columbian indigenous peoples as ‘Mexican’ or ‘Peruvian’ affirms that Martí’s presentation of history has political implications. By not differentiating between those contemporaries identified as ‘Mexican’ or ‘Peruvian’ and the pre-colonial indigenous peoples, Martí persuades the Latin American child reader to embrace the indigenous past and not to reject it. A thread of nativism thus emerges throughout Martí’s narrative.

Naming people in Mexico and Peru as ‘Mexicans’ and ‘Peruvians’ before European invasion and after decolonization, implies that European elements in Mexican and Peruvian cultures do not prevail over native ones. By continuing to refer to indigenous peoples in ‘The story of humanity’ as ‘Mexicans’ and ‘Peruvians’, and not as ‘Spanish-Americans’, Martí implies that indigenous American culture within Spanish-American society successfully overcame nearly four centuries of European political suppression.

Martí also rebalances notions of the Spanish or European conquest of the Americas as a positive event. Martí teaches the child reader that the Spaniards destroyed indigenous architecture, ‘everything the Indians had built’, except the structures on which the Spanish depended and could not replace, for European technology did not effectively substitute for the indigenous variety in all cases. Spaniards and Europeans are not presented as saviours or harbingers of civilization and progress. Rather, Martí portrays Europeans as ‘barbarians’, uncivilized people who tore everything down by their ignorance, for they were unable to replace indigenous technology.Footnote ⁴⁸ Native American technology surpassed European in many ways, for example by bringing indispensable water, and by creating a system of paved roads that, according to Martí, allowed for communication and commerce, essential for the survival and dominance of transplanted European societies in the Americas.

Martí also challenges children to think that ‘civilized’ societies need not develop in European or linear terms. The pre-Columbian Mexicans and Peruvians lived simultaneously in the Stone and Bronze Ages, since they continued using flints while mining precious metals and constructing beautiful buildings of gold. A deeper reading of Martí’s narrative reveals that his descriptions of indigenous American societies, employing techniques of both ages and living simultaneously in two developmental periods, are a moral commentary on the value of maintaining older traditions, particularly indigenous American ones. He echoes this sentiment of treasuring what is home-grown and genuine in a separate fictional story in The Golden Years, where a young girl chooses for sentimental reasons an old, black ragged doll over a more expensive new one. By demonstrating that Native Americans maintained older techniques and simultaneously embraced new technologies, Martí implies that technology is not necessarily incompatible with longstanding traditions. In this context, Martí’s statements emerge as a critique of the wholesale adoption of European cultural norms, driven by the pursuit of the latest fashions, material consumption, and waste, which he particularly criticized in separate journalistic essays on North American life in Latin American newspapers. Although it would be difficult to imagine a young child understanding this point, an adult reading this story would certainly grasp it.

In ‘The story of humanity’, Martí also implies that, for societies to be considered worthy of admiration, patterns of European development need not be projected onto them, in this case pointing to indigenous American ones. One should not assume, according to Martí, that societies must develop along European linear patterns in order to reach significant levels of complexity. Martí teaches the child reader that societies developed in different ways, and that different types of development are not inherently or morally inferior or superior, but only divergent. These points are particularly remarkable considering that Martí lived in a time of rising racism, when Europeans employed judgements of ‘technological and civilizational development’, along with racial notions, to craft colonial policies towards non-Europeans.Footnote ⁴⁹ Martí injects in the narrative the assumption that, if Europeans are not the sole purveyors of civilization, then Cuba and Latin America need not be controlled by these outsiders.

Teaching children to view the indigenous peoples of the Americas, long portrayed as inferior, as more perfect, more beautiful, equally valuable, and in many ways technologically superior, complicates traditional late nineteenth-century presentations of non-European societies as backward. Martí courageously diverges from the social expectations of his late nineteenth-century Western environment by promoting the notion that indigenous cultures should not be dismissed in order to strengthen Spanish-American consciousness. Indeed, love for the Spanish-American homeland (patria) was, to Martí, inseparable from love for Cuba.Footnote ⁵⁰ He edified Cuban nationalism and, in a larger sense, pan-Spanish-American pride by teaching children to embrace the local past, regardless of how the ‘civilized’ Europeans and their descendents perceived it.

Martí further complicates notions of European superiority in ‘The story of humanity’ by promoting the environment as a critical factor determining levels of societal complexity. He teaches that indigenous American and European societies emerged and developed in similar ways, for instance, when

By describing how ‘civilized man’ appeared in the Americas in similar environmental and topographical conditions as in Europe, Martí undermines notions of European exceptionalism. Indigenous American societies urbanized in the same ways as the Europeans when facing similar environmental conditions. Separately, Martí also rejected the notions of George Bancroft, the North American historian, as to US or Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, labelling Bancroft as provincial in outlook.Footnote ⁵²

In addition to the environment, cross-cultural interactions also shape societal conditions. Martí believed that societal development is not a product of a linear progression of unique and innate intellectual qualities. Societal development, in Martí’s mind, is not related to the time needed for developing inherent qualities, but to the willingness and the ability to acquire knowledge of the world and of other cultures. In this sense, Martí believed that cross-cultural interactions facilitate growth and development. He held that sophisticated ‘civilized’ societies are a product of effective responses to the environment and cross-cultural interactions. Martí’s views, that societies grow by exchanging knowledge and technology, do not diverge from those of later global historians, such as William McNeill, who highlighted the role of cultural diffusion in societal development.Footnote ⁵³

Martí’s belief in the role of cross-cultural interactions underscores the globalism of his nationalism. A fresh understanding of global history, as he presented it, complicates notions of the European civilizing mission. He undermines the belief in accepting foreigners as superiors, defusing the power of late nineteenth-century imperialist messages. His environmentally based conception of societal development also unpacks racially exclusionary nationalist notions, allowing individuals of all backgrounds to engage in civil society, ultimately promoting democratic self-rule.

‘Journey through the land of the Annamese’, appearing in the final, October 1889, issue of The Golden Years, further supports the first ideological key to the globalism of Martí’s nationalism, a nation’s right to self-determination, by challenging the superiority of European civilization. While in ‘The story of humanity’ Martí depicted diverse societies of the world through architecture, praising indigenous societies in order to undermine the European civilizing mission, in ‘Journey’ Martí presents the history of a Southeast Asian country to criticize colonial abuses in Cuba. No evidence has been found that Martí was aware of the Spanish participating in the 1858–62 French aggression against Vietnam with forces from the Philippines, for he would have lambasted the Spanish for spending resources in the French empire that could have been more aptly employed in the administration and welfare of its own colonies.Footnote ⁵⁴ Indeed, one of Martí’s constant justifications for Cuban independence was that Spain did not have the resources to ensure the welfare of Cuba. Martí was nonetheless well informed of major events in Asia, such as the consolidation of the French presence in Indochina in 1887, and the nationalist uprisings there, due to his extensive reading of domestic and foreign periodicals while living in New York City from 1880 to 1895.

Employing the history of Annam (the name often used at the time for Vietnam) to promote democratic values, Martí conveys throughout ‘Journey’ how the people of Annam suffered at the hands of outsiders. Martí engages European cultural stereotypes of the time, and overturns them in order to defend an Annamese viewpoint. By presenting how Europeans perceived these Southeast Asians, and rebutting their prejudicial notions in a dialogue with a fictional Annamese character, Martí teaches children that conceptions of beauty are relative and, significantly, that European perceptions are not necessarily better than Asian ones. Martí describes the Annamese thus: ‘they do not appear with beautiful-like bodies, nor do we appear handsome to them: [the Annamese] say that it is a sin to cut one’s hair, since nature [has given] us long hair, and he who believes himself wiser than nature is presumptuous’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Martí continues to undermine the ideology legitimizing European rule over others by describing how the Annamese ‘say that men do not need to have stronger, wider backs because the Cambodians are taller and more robust than the Annamese, yet in war, the Annamese have always defeated their Cambodian neighbours.’ Martí further undermines racial ideology by writing in the voice of an Annamese character who tells the reader that

To the average Cuban or Latin American child, who had most likely never met a Southeast Asian, an Annamese, or a Cambodian, Martí teaches that, when following Western cultural stereotypes, Western judgements of how the Annamese appear are flawed. What the Annamese find attractive is not necessarily what Europeans may deem beautiful. In undermining European stereotypes of superiority and contradicting views on which attributes are attractive, once again Martí’s belief in the inherent equality and commonality of all peoples emerges.

Beyond providing a critique of European ideologies of racial superiority, the voice of the Annamese character also serves to legitimize the Annamese fight for freedom against the French. Martí writes,

Although they may appear inferior to Western eyes, Martí portrays the Annamese as proud, defensive, and defiant. The Annamese emerge as morally superior to the French throughout the narrative because they have known how to defend their homeland. Martí also weaves a nativist thread into this story, for the Annamese have demonstrated their ability to fight for their freedom from foreign powers. Conveying that French colonial rule should not be deemed permanent, Martí declares, in the voice of the Annamese character, ‘today they are our masters; tomorrow, who knows?’ This ‘who knows?’ indicates that foreign rule over Annam is not assured and, if the Annamese have laid down their lives to close the path of the French in the past, then in the future the French will, most certainly, be expelled from Annam. For a late nineteenth-century children’s story, these views, undermining traditional Western perceptions of non-European peoples and empowering the colonial subject, are subversive.Footnote ⁵⁸ The French in Annam were not on a mission of peace, but were invading Annamese cities and taking their wealth. In this sense, Annamese rebellion is justified, implying that individuals should rise in defence of communal and national freedoms. Martí employed the history of Annam’s struggle against the French as a metaphor for Cuba’s colonial struggles against Spanish domination, and also as a call to Latin Americans to resist the nineteenth-century expansionist policies of the United States and other predatory powers.

In The Golden Years, gender roles are often polarized according to the rigid binarism of the times, where ‘little girls are told that they are the mothers of tomorrow, while little boys will grow up to be virtuous “gentlemen”’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Nevertheless, Martí’s messages of resistance include female Annamese warriors, portrayed as fierce heroines who expelled the Chinese from their trenches and fought for Annam’s freedom. Martí’s masculinized-for-its-time portrayal of two Annamese females demonstrates that he also departed from traditional late nineteenth-century attitudes by not shying away from presenting women in the same light as men. Young girls, although expected to be raised as future mothers, could nevertheless identify with the Annamese female warriors.

Questioning French rule over Annam in ‘Journey’, and presenting Europeans not as saviours or sole harbingers of civilization in ‘The story of humanity’, Martí promotes in both narratives the message that indigenous peoples have equal, if not superior, capacities to those of their invaders. Promoting this in a journal for children, at a time when positivist notions of replicating European and North American norms prevailed in Latin America, was not only innovative but also audacious. The French are not portrayed in ‘Journey’ as coming to civilize, for the Annamese are already highly civilized in Martí’s descriptions. He presents the Annamese as having had material wealth, such as ‘beautiful cities with palaces and stock-piled warehouses’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Martí declares in the narrative that the Annamese appear like a ‘society of followers’, even though they had ‘raised three storied pagodas’ and ‘built gigantic porcelain and bronze lions’. This is what happens, according to the Cuban leader, when societies tire ‘of defending themselves: they haul like beasts their master’s carriage: while the master riding in it, [looks] tanned and fat’. Martí metaphorically describes the exploitive nature of the colonial master–subject relationship, hinting at Cuba’s condition by expressing that ‘it is a difficult life for small societies’. He informs his audience that the Annamese have also defended themselves against the Chinese and the Siamese, who ‘have wanted to conquer them’.Footnote ⁶¹ The Annamese know how to fight for a greater, noble cause and to sacrifice their lives while achieving a higher purpose, in this case Annam’s freedom. Martí echoed these views in a letter of August 1889 to Manuel Mercado, indicating that he wrote The Golden Years while waiting for the greater sacrifice of redeeming Cuba from its colonial condition.

Martí underscores the importance of fostering local, indigenous culture by relating that the Annamese seek to nurture knowledge of their history in the face of French imperial indoctrination. He relates in the narrative that the Annamese have increased their attendance at local temples and theatres, seeking to learn about their local traditions. According to Martí, the Annamese ‘have been living as slaves’ and they ‘visit their pagodas often for there their priests speak of the saints of their homeland who are not the saints of the French: they visit their theatres a lot, where they are not told things to laugh about, instead the history of their generals and of their kings: they kneel to listen, quietly, the history of their battles’.Footnote ⁶² The image of the Annamese engaged in nurturing local traditions in their spaces, free from French intrusion, facilitates Martí’s message of the importance of maintaining indigenous customs. By showing Latin American children how the Annamese subverted the cultural norms imposed by the French colonial system by frequenting Annamese cultural spaces, Martí affirms the view that Cuba and Latin America should nurture their cultural heritage, and not indiscriminately import or adopt foreign ideas from Europe or North America.

Affirming a nation’s right to self-determination, the Cuban leader teaches that ‘smaller societies’ have significantly more difficultly in surviving as independent states vis-à-vis larger nations, and yet they have a right to exist independently. Having lived as a youngster during the failed 1868–78 push for independence, and seeking to re-ignite the struggle as he formed the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892, Martí’s depictions of the Annamese centuries-long fight reflect his belief that Cuba deserved independence, especially after having fought for decades for it, even in the face of North American annexationist drives and Spanish colonial loyalist sentiment. Martí illustrates in the narrative that the Annamese sought alliances with other nations who offered friendship, and who presented themselves as saviours, only to later enslave those in need. Martí indirectly instructs the child reader to be wary of seemingly well-principled declarations of assistance that later turn duplicitous. Separately, he described in his last writings, before dying in battle in 1895, the possible detrimental effects on Cuban independence if the United States were to intervene in the war against Spain. The Annamese narrative allowed Martí indirectly to transmit his views on resisting foreign oppression, and on the right for Cuba to be independent. Employing the history of a distant Southeast Asian nation’s struggle for freedom allowed Martí to cloak the issue of Cuba’s own struggle, thus not directly antagonizing the Spanish. On a practical level, he avoided Spanish censorship of his children’s magazine in Cuba.

The second key: the right to self-determination at the personal level

The second key to the globalism of Martí’s nationalism emerges through his challenge of constraining ideologies and demagogies, particularly since these legitimized Spanish rule over Cuba during his lifetime. In ‘The story of humanity’, Martí encodes, in descriptions of Spanish and Greek dwellings, the value of eschewing religious dogma. The Cuban leader renounces a Christian bias in describing these dwellings by writing that ‘in Spain the Romans had also ruled, but later the Moors came to conquer, and built those temples known as mosques, and those palaces that seem the thing of dreams’.Footnote ⁶³ He then explains that Renaissance architecture emerged when ‘the Christians began not to believe as much in heaven as before’. When people in Europe began to think about ‘how great Rome had been: they celebrated Greek art for its simplicity: they said that there were already too many churches: they looked for new ways to make palaces: and all that created a new way of building, like the Greeks, known as the architecture of the “Renaissance”’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Gothic architecture, according to Martí, was a product of men believing in the ‘heaven of the Christians’,Footnote ⁶⁵ and he describes the Renaissance in ‘The story of humanity’ as a time of ‘richness and art, of great conquests; therefore, there were many nobles and merchants with palaces. Never had humans lived in such beautiful houses.’Footnote ⁶⁶ Martí conspicuously displays his predilection for the Renaissance as a ‘glorious’ period, notions surely shared by his contemporaries. Nevertheless, this ‘glorious’ period was a result of men believing less in a Christian ‘heaven’ or in religion. Martí therefore implies that there are benefits to abandoning religious dogma and focusing on simplicity and rationality like the Greeks had done.

Martí begins ‘Journey’ with an adaptation of a traditional Jain folk tale of six blind men and an elephant. In Martí’s version of the parable, four blind men travel to an Indian prince’s palace to determine the nature of an elephant by touch. Upon meeting the blind men, the prince declares that the ‘blind men are saints’. The Cuban leader affirms, through the prince’s voice, that ‘men who seek knowledge are saints: men should learn everything on their own and not believe without questioning or speak without understanding or think like slaves who are told what to believe: go forth, four blind men to see, with your hands, what the docile elephant is like’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The example of the prince and the blind men serves Martí in transmitting the importance of independent, critical thinking.

Through stories of Buddhist monks, Martí also condemns the use of overarching ideologies, such as religion, to advance ambitions of power and material gain. He relates how a corrupt band of Buddhist disciples used their religion to further the earthly ambitions of a king. By chastising the nefarious Buddhist monks of Annam, Martí reiterates the negative portrayals of the European conquest of the Americas in ‘The story of humanity’, and in other stories of The Golden Years, such as that of Father Bartolomé Las Casas, defender of indigenous Americans. He thus readjusts perceptions of the conquest and colonization of the Americas as a positive event. Martí’s critiques of the corrupt Buddhist monks allows him indirectly to censure the role of Roman Catholicism in the conquest and colonization of Spanish America, without directly injuring the sensibilities of Latin American Roman Catholic readers. Martí describes how ‘some [of the Buddha’s] disciples did what the king wanted, and went with the king’s army to take away the freedom from the surrounding countries, under the pretext of teaching Buddha’s truths’, insinuating that there were Catholic missionaries who took the freedom of indigenous Americans in the name of the Spanish king. Martí relays that ‘then there were others who said that these disciples were lying and that the king was stealing, and that the freedom of a small nation is more important to the world than the power of an ambitious king’. The parallels between the Buddhist and Catholic corrupt monks appear undeniable. Some Roman Catholic mendicants, such as Father Las Casas, chastised the use of Roman Catholic ideology to exploit American natives. There were also virtuous Buddhist monks, according to Martí, who revealed to the people ‘the lies of the priests that serve the king for money’, and told them that ‘if Buddha were alive, he would have said the truth, that he did not come down from heaven, instead [he came] like all other people, with heaven within themselves’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Martí’s depictions of dissenting Buddhist disciples admonishing the actions of corrupt Buddhist monks were intended to teach children the value of having the courage to denounce abuses of power as they happen, and to correct wrongdoings wherever they occur, ‘for love of humanity’. During the late nineteenth century, teaching children to have the courage to undermine authority when they deemed it illegitimate was considered subversive by those who taught children to be unquestionably obedient, such as Spanish-language children’s magazine publishers. Throughout ‘Journey’, Martí identifies the wrongdoers: French imperialists, Siamese, Chinese, and corrupt Buddhist monks, who have all played a role in taking the land away from the Annamese. However, Martí’s idealism emerges when he transmits throughout the story that actions of resistance should be based on love, by treating the evil person with ‘compassion’ as a ‘sick man who needs healing’.Footnote ⁶⁹ This leads to the third and final key to the globalism of Martí’s nationalism, a sense of humanitarianism.

The third key: humanitarianism

The third key to Martí’s globalism is the promotion of humanitarian ideals. Martí’s humanitarian approach in transmitting civic values that build the nation and elevate Latin American consciousness diverged from ‘the radical nationalism, the “ethnicism” of late nineteenth-century Europe’ that focused on who ‘belonged to the nation on the basis of “race”’, and that ‘claimed to have a “scientific” answer to the problems of society’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Humanitarianism is a strong theme throughout both global history narratives.

In ‘The story of humanity’, Martí describes diverse dwellings, such as the Hindu, Hebrew, and the Egyptian, but it is in his description of the Greek dwelling that he reveals his belief in the importance of friendship. Describing the Greek Parthenon, Martí encodes the significance of friendship, of material modesty, and of embracing different cultures:

Martí imbues the Parthenon with human qualities and depicts it as a friend of the child reader. The Parthenon personifies friendship and modesty, values that Martí seeks to emphasize. In affirming the human qualities of beauty and friendship, Martí teaches a moral lesson regarding the type of structure that is truly distinctive, and which elements ignorant people praise. In his view, those who adorn or embellish themselves without a deeper purpose are foolish, for beauty is a result of function.

Martí’s humanitarian-oriented idealism emerges again in the conclusion of ‘The story of humanity’. Demonstrating that his nationalism lacked the ethnocentrism of prevailing late nineteenth-century nationalist doctrines, he concludes the global history narrative by expressing how

Martí concludes ‘The story of humanity’ as a story of ‘coming together’, of unity, and of friendship. He positively depicts modern cities, new technologies, and a new era as allowing different cultural expressions to exist simultaneously, reflecting an idealist stance regarding the technological feats of his time.

In ‘Journey’, Martí features Buddhist teachings by presenting to the child readers of The Golden Years the story of the Buddha, and this is particularly striking for promoting Buddhist principles to Latin American children, who were most likely to have been educated as Roman Catholics. In his discussion of the Buddha in ‘Journey’, Martí builds on the theme that perceptions are not always reflections of reality, but may be false illusions. He mentioned this earlier in ‘Journey’, when describing how the Annamese appeared submissive to the French rulers, but in reality were not. Beyond equipping young readers with the moral values that make for responsible citizens of a budding republic, Martí also conveys Buddhist principles as a way to sensitize children to global cultures. Martí’s discussion of Buddhist principles, which may coincide with Christian beliefs, underscores his view that distant societies share commonalities in ideas and traditions, as seen earlier in his portrayal of the architecture of Mayans and Gauls. Martí indeed, as has been said above, conceived the freedom of the Cuban nation as ‘the precondition for the collective flowering of humanity in its constituent national communities’.Footnote ⁷³

Further supporting the humanitarian orientation of his nationalism, Martí describes in ‘Journey’ how nirvana, according to the Buddha, is reached by understanding and

By improving humanity and elevating one’s larger world, one achieves nirvana, as promoted in ‘Journey’. Redemption or nirvana is not limited to serving an ethnically based, exclusionary nation. Martí imbues ‘Journey’ with Buddhist spiritual teachings that persuade Latin American children to serve others, regardless of skin colour or origin.

The Cuban leader further develops the theme of humanitarianism and selflessness by describing how principled Buddhist monks advised the populace that ‘the love of humanity and honesty’ leads them to become ‘as if they were not of flesh and bone, but of a clear light’. The honest Buddhist monks preached, in Martí’s words, that ‘for the evil person, [one should] have compassion, as for sick men who need healing and to the good ones [one should] give strength, so that they will not tire of inspiring and serving the world: now that is truly heaven, and divine joy!’Footnote ⁷⁵ ‘Journey’ showcases in a vivid manner the third and final key to the globalism of Martí’s nationalism: a strong sense of the individual as a member of an interdependent global community.

Conclusion

The Golden Years is a magazine abundant in rhythmic poetry and metaphorical descriptions of global historical figures and events. Martí created narratives for Cuban and Latin American children to strengthen democratic values, so that Cubans would cast aside the yoke of Spanish colonialism, and so that Latin Americans would reject authoritarian governments, such as the ones that he had fled from in Mexico, Guatemala, and Venezuela during his periods of exile from Cuba. Martí included teachings for Cuban and Latin American children in stories about diverse global subjects, in order to avoid the antagonism that more direct critiques of the Spanish rule of Cuba would cast upon his independence project. When considering The Golden Years as an instrument of his nation-building efforts, the global historical narratives in the magazine emerge as stories that promote innovative and subversive ideas. Martí filled his children’s narratives with raw language, depicting stories of death, pain, suffering, deceit, exploitation, and greed; ‘The story of humanity’ and ‘Journey’ do not embellish Europeans and their actions. The Golden Years is therefore not entirely set in magical, imaginary worlds, as might be expected of children’s tales, and yet Martí’s idealism remains with the reader. The past may be sorrowful, but the present and the future are influenced by human agency. These notions most certainly echo Hegelian views of history and, particularly, Martí’s view that knowledge of history strengthened the nation. Martí’s struggle to free Cuba underpinned a Weltanschauung characterized by humanity’s capacity for progress, but a progression considered impossible as long as nations deserving to be free were not.

The two global histories in The Golden Years provide access to Martí’s unique elaboration of a nationalist doctrine in the late nineteenth-century world. The young readers of The Golden Years provided a receptive and malleable audience for teaching the values that edified Cuban national consciousness, elevated Latin American pride, and averted anti-democratic, foreign threats, as well as serving to improve the condition of humanity.Footnote ⁷⁶ They encapsulated Martí’s nationalist ideology, his advocacy of the right of nations and individuals to self-determination, and his notions of how serving humanity strengthened the nation and the individual. Martí’s idealism may have reflected late nineteenth-century European and North American philanthropic notions of improving society, but they challenged Eurocentric versions of such notions by overturning discriminatory beliefs, notably that European history and culture were superior to indigenous ones, be it in the Americas or in Southeast Asia. ‘The history of humanity, told through its houses’ and ‘Journey through the land of the Annamese’ portray subjects of the global past as ennobling personal and social catalysts. These narratives emerge as tools in undermining imperial rule over Cuba and the wholesale adoption of European and North American values in Latin America at the expense of local traditions.Footnote ⁷⁷

Like nineteenth-century historians, Martí believed that history lessons made children better citizens. Unlike most European and North American historians, however, Martí believed non-Western, indigenous archetypes could serve as models for writing histories,Footnote ⁷⁸ promoting Hegelian-like notions of humanity on its march of freedom. Among the first to write these types of histories for children in Latin America, and preceding the better known nationalist global histories for children of the Indian independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru decades later, Martí subverted prevailing racial and ethnic notions. He taught children to do so as well, in order to foster the love of homeland in an ethnically heterogeneous Cuba and Latin America. Using global history to build the notion at an early age, the global history narratives of The Golden Years impart values aimed at resisting and overthrowing oppressive ruling systems, whether externally imposed (imperialism) or internally derived (dictatorships).

Martí’s global history narratives present the inherent contradictions in late nineteenth-century doctrines of nationalism. From the pen of a Cuban nationalist, nationalism appears void of popular discriminatory ethnocentrism, directly challenging the pseudo-racial science of the time. Indeed, his nation-building messages beg for ideas on the general intellectual climate of the period to be rethought. Three key components – a nativist thread that undermines notions of European civilizational and racial superiority; a call for citizens to be critical of authority and to subvert restrictive ideologies when necessary; and a strong sense of humanitarianism founded on humanity’s common bonds and the need for citizens to learn from and engage the larger world – affirm the globalism of José Martí’s iconoclastic late nineteenth-century nationalism.