A Cuban Nationalist Proves Prophetic

You may have heard of several polls that reveal that the Latino community is the ethnic group most supportive of gay marriage.  This is bad news for everybody everywhere.

A memorable call for transnationalism was published in 1891 by José Martí.

Martí hailed from Cuba, which was one of the last colonial holdouts of the Spanish empire.  Most former possessions had broken away from Spain in the Bolivarian revolutions of seven decades earlier.

Coming close to the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's landing in the Caribbean, the essay "Nuestra América" appealed to Latin Americans to wake up to threats to their indigenous culture.  Martí's answer is not necessarily nationalism, though many Latin American nationalist movements would freely invoke his name in the twentieth century.  In some ways, with his opening critiques of an archetypal aldeano vanidoso, or "petty villager," upon whom he blames many of Latin America's woes, Martí asks for a continental spirit to overcome parochialism and build transnational alliances among vulnerable indigenous peoples.

Nevertheless, Martí's essay proffers a harsh denunciation of the wrong kind of internationalism by the third paragraph of the essay.  (more...)

A Cuban Nationalist Proves Prophetic

Some background...

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