This stone bust on a pedestal column stands in the town hall square in Coles.
It shows the head of the Cuban writer with an enormous moustache.
It was installed in 1995 and created in 1994 by the sculptor Delarra.
"Jose Marti
(José Julián Martí Pérez; Havana, 1853 - Dos Ríos, Cuba, 1895) Cuban politician and writer, prominent precursor of Latin American literary Modernism and one of the main leaders of his country's independence.
Born into a Spanish family with few economic resources, at the age of twelve José Martí began studying at the municipal school run by the poet Rafael María de Mendive , who noticed the boy's intellectual qualities and decided to dedicate himself personally to their education.
The young Martí soon felt attracted by the revolutionary ideas of many Cubans, and after the start of the Ten Years' War (1868-1878) and the imprisonment of his mentor, he began his revolutionary activity: he published the newsletter El Diablo Cojuelo , and shortly after a magazine, La Patria Libre , which contained his dramatic poem Abdala . At the age of seventeen, José Martí was sentenced to six years in prison for his membership in independence groups; He performed forced labor in the prison until his poor health earned him a pardon.
Deported to Spain, in this country he published his first important work, the drama La adúltera . He began studying law in Madrid and graduated in law and philosophy and literature from the University of Zaragoza. During his years in Spain, a deep affection for the country arose in him, although he never forgave its colonial policies. In his work The Spanish Republic before the Cuban Revolution he demanded that the metropolis make an act of contrition and recognize the errors committed in Cuba.
After traveling for three years through Europe and America, José Martí ended up settling in Mexico. There he married the Cuban Carmen Zayas-Bazán and, shortly after, thanks to the Peace of Zanjón, which concluded the Ten Years' War, he moved to Cuba. Deported again by the Cuban authorities, fearful of his revolutionary past, he settled in New York and dedicated himself completely to political and literary activity.
From his residence in exile, José Martí worked to organize a new revolutionary process in Cuba, and in 1892 he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party and the magazine Patria . He then became the greatest champion of the fight for the independence of his country.
Two years later, after meeting with Generalissimo Máximo Gómez , he joined a new attempt that would lead to the definitive War of Independence (1895-1898). Despite the embargo of his ships by the American authorities, he was able to leave at the head of a small contingent towards Cuba, but he was shot down by royalist troops in 1895; He was forty-two years old. Along with Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín , José Martí is considered one of the main protagonists of the emancipation process of Latin America.
In addition to being a prominent ideologue and politician, José Martí was one of the greatest Latin American poets and the most prominent figure of the transition period to Modernism, which in America marked the arrival of new artistic ideals. As a poet he is known for Free Verses (1878-1882, published posthumously); Ismaelillo (1882), a work that can be considered a preview of modernist assumptions due to the dominance of form over content; and Simple Verses (1891), a decidedly modernist collection of poems in which autobiographical notes and popular character predominate.
Written for the most part in 1882, the poems in Versos Libres did not see the light of day until their posthumous publication in 1913, many years after his death. Martí himself described those verses as "hirsute hendecasyllables, born of great fears, or of great hopes, or of indomitable love of freedom, or of painful love of beauty."
The strong and harsh tone of this volume, for which Martí proclaimed his own preference, strongly impressed Miguel de Unamuno , whose judgments would be the starting point of the evaluation of the work. His vibratory force, both formally and in content, becomes evident in compositions such as "Poética", "Mi poética" or "Cuentan que antaño", in which he used a vigorous and dark language, at times even passionate. .
José Martí's poetry is based on a dualistic vision of humanity: reality and idealism, spirit and matter, truth and falsehood, consciousness and unconsciousness, light and darkness. Ismaelillo 's poems (1882), a book dedicated to his son, are an example of this: the weakness and innocence of the child are his strength.
In Simple Verses (1891), José Martí expresses the feeling that the joy of nature and the evil of civilization awakens in him. Suffering and fear of the passage of time were also frequent elements in his lyrics, where an approach to romanticism that many critics have considered superior to that of others of his contemporaries can be seen. In To my brothers dead on November 27 (1872), published during his exile in Spain, Martí dedicates his verses to the students killed in a massacre that occurred on that date.
Work in prose
Her only novel, Amistad funesta , also called Lucía Jérez and signed with the pseudonym Adelaida Ral, was published in installments in the newspaper El Latino-Americano between May and September 1885; Although the love theme predominates in its plot, social elements also appear in this work with a tragic ending. Among her dramatic works , Abdala (1869) stands out, a symbolic drama in one act and in octosyllables, La Adúltera (1873) and Amor con amor se pago (1875), also in verse and premiered in Mexico.
Martí's prose was influenced by the work of the American Ralph Waldo Emerson , for whom the word had to be as eloquent as it was poetic and intense within a simple and concise speech. He was aware, as perhaps only the modernists immediately after him were, of all the possibilities of language, and considered that its resources were closely linked to the human qualities of the people, who were ultimately the ones who invented them.
Both Martí's prose and poetry are inseparable from his biography; He himself declared that they were an indisputable part of his greatest concern, which was none other than politics. Optimistic personality, his opinions on man, poetry or society are aspects that appear in his works in the service of concepts that always had the human being as the center. In the long term his objective was the improvement of humanity, but in the short term it was the liberation of Cuba, to which he dedicated all his efforts.
For this reason, his prose production was mostly functional, like his essays on Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín or General José Antonio Páez , in relation to the heroes of the past, and on General Máximo Gómez, Walt Whitman or Ralph Waldo Emerson among contemporaries; In such texts, which constituted the best of his prose, he exalted the qualities of characters he admired. Within the first edition of his complete works, the volume titled North Americans posthumously brought together his studies on northern figures; two other volumes, under the title Our America, contain Martí's works dedicated to studying aspects of the life, culture and history of Hispanic America. In them he expressed his Americanist message and summarized his precursor theory of the weakness of Hispanic nations, in which there was an enormous chasm between the ruling and intellectual classes and the people.
An exceptional chronicler and critic, he turned many of his texts into authentic essays, some of a revolutionary nature such as The Political Prison in Cuba (1871), a lyrically powerful reflection of his sentence to forced labor in which he denounces the hardships suffered by the independentists. It is also worth highlighting The Spanish Republic before the Cuban Revolution (1873) and Cuba and the United States (1889), a refutation of the attacks of the North American press on Cuban patriots, as well as The Montecristi Manifesto or his Campaign Diary .
He also founded a children's magazine, The Golden Age (1889), published in New York and in which the stories Baby and Mr. Don Pomposo , Nené naughty , and The Black Doll appeared . Entirely written by Martí, this publication shows a series of aspects of his personality and is also a demonstration of how he knew how to anticipate many achievements of modern pedagogy: once again, he highlighted in these writings his concern for the norms of justice and human dignity, which should be cultivated in the child from his earliest age.
José Martí collaborated throughout his life in countless publications from different countries, such as La Revista Venezolana , La Opinión Nacional of Caracas, La Nación of Buenos Aires or the Universal Magazine of Mexico. His Complete Works (which in the 1963-1965 edition consist of twenty-five volumes) also include a large epistolary (his letters, also revealing of his unique personality, have deserved exceptional comments) and numerous speeches, many of them dedicated to inflaming the feeling patriotic message of the Cubans who lived like him in emigration, calling them to the common effort thanks to which the independence of the homeland would be achieved."
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