José Martí is honored on his 155th birth anniversary by all people who are proud of being Cuban.

Along the century, historians and teachers of this island have intensively cultivated that we call tribute to Martí without feeling ashamed or embarrassed. It did not mediate the selfish desire of getting the attention to what is our as something different, unique, but the truth is that our Apostle had exceptional qualities inside the American philosophers.

Each outstanding leading man has their own title: El Libertador (Bolívar), Benemérito de las Américas (Juárez), Protector de los Pueblos Libres... Uruguayan José Gervasio Artigas (1764-1850) made history with this nickname. The march he carried out in 1812 from the south to the north, known as the Exodus of the Eastern people, is similar to that of the Hebrew people leaded by Moses.

In this way, we move near José Martí... When I talk about him, I am referring to the man, because I will always see him this way. It would be a big mistake to begin gathering gold and carving cornucopias to place him with saint's aureole in the shrine once again. His virtues would be inimitable then.

His talent was great and varied wrote Enrique Collazo who did not love him a lot for a while. Martí was amazing. During his youth he had reached a surprising domain of the world reality: he traveled through the classical philosophers from Greece and Rome to the oldest towns, cults and ancestral Eastern countries. He had the gift of expressing himself in his mother tongue and other languages. That is to say, he spoke and prepared himself to interpret the decisive languages in the world of his time.

As he masters several languages, he was also able to speak with the French man that him and the Cubans considered the supreme genius of the civil rights: Victor Hugo. He got really impressed about the powerful columnist of the events happened in France after revolution of 1789 and its echo in 1848.

Martí would summarize in himself the spirit and the work of those Cubans as José Agustín Caballero, José Antonio Saco, Domingo del Monte... and priest Varela whose remains are in the marble cenotaph in the Aula Magna of the Havana University, founded 280 years ago.

Cuba has had many talented women and men, endowed with the gift of the loquacity; a country where the live word has had a predominant, essential and unique meaning.

We can publish hundreds of books and newspapers, but it is necessary the word to get to Cubans´ heart. But besides of being a great speaker and an eager reader, Martí was an artist who was able to recognize the talent of others.

How many times he would have been scolded at home! How much he should have suffered those so many times repeated words from his admirable mother letters: while you cannot move away from all that is political and journalism, you won't have a day of calmness (...) or I think, son, that while you do not let the papers of the newspapers go, your luck won't vary (...). But Martí should have tolerated such things because of the loved he felt for his good and generous parents who also loved him immensely.

It is necessary to understand that Martí was not a docile person; he was not fainted on the corners, smelling flowers either... He was persistent, obsessive with a single idea when he had to look for something... He felt disappointments because he wanted to conquer spirits and everybody is not conquerable. Loving beauty, he resigned from it... Wanting the beautiful books - and not the cheapest ones that are defoliated after leaving knowledge in the heart and memory -, he could only have those whose pages he filled with written notes in the margins... Loving the women - as they should love men: with passion -, and being him a great lover, he should give up painfully to marry the ethereal and distant girlfriend... That is why the iron ring with the name of Cuba, is the symbol of his strange and exceptional marriage.

The infinite legacy of Martí lies in his copious mail, his eloquence, his journalistic work, in its work as revolutionary plotter... It reveals his ability to convince, persuade, unite... outliving the poisoned arrows of the envious and mediocre people, because there are people that admire, but jealously. He was able to make a newspaper from many newspapers; a party, from other so many parties and flags; a voice, from infinite voices... to become the unquestionable leader of the Cuban nation. So that a worker and a teacher of the poor call him Apostle; they told him it with the same humility and recognition as other people had identified El Libertador years ago.

But Cuba has only one Apostle. Here there are not twelve, neither four nor six, there is one; because he did not live in banquets or dissipations, but with the discretion of the apostles. He had that charisma which, according to the Greeks, was able to light a perennial fire in the hearts and conscience of the other people.

He attended his death as to indispensable wedlock; with pain and feeling that partners can consider it was not his place. Fate placed him on the road: before a ravine, the canyon of the river... When we look at the plain in which his calvary evaporated, stood in the border and before the flooding waters of May, we imagine the ford...

My verse will grow: under the grass, / I will also grow (...), he said once. And the verse grew because poetry was not only the mechanical rhyme, but the vital blow that encourages it and the inspiration that promotes it.

When an agnostic asks me: Did Martí spoke or prophesy about everything? I tell him they ignore how integral and immense Marti’s moral work was. And when we turn the historical thing into mechanical reduction, we forget the main, biggest and most outstanding achievement of Cuban Revolution: its moral work. As Cintio Vitier has said, Martí has not left a single loose end in the history of Cuba. He tried to give solution to big enigmas and complexities of his time and the future. His thought has led us to pursue the union of the continent as a goal till nowadays.

That is the redeeming strength, so that legitimate homage to a man from all time; not only in Cuba, but also in the rest of the world: José Martí.

Taken from an article by Eusebio Leal Spengler, published in Granma newspaper.

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