Jose Marti and the Global Origins of Cuban Independence

A nationalist campaigner, civil rights advocate, diplomat, lecturer and orator, journalist, poet, author of children's stories, visionary champion of anti-colonial Latin American and Caribbean thought, all are expressions of Josae Martai's (1853-95) extraordinary life in fighting for Cuba's definitive independence. This work opens a new path in studies of Martai's efforts to build a modern democratic Cuba by widening the lens under which the Cuban hero has been examined. In joining these different facets of Martai and by going beyond the national and hemispheric, Garcaia de la Torre introduces the largely ignored global influences and dimensions that marked the revolutionary's work and ideas. From Martai's global histories for children to his adaptation of Hindu and Eastern conceptions, through a juxtaposition of The Bhagavad-Gita, to his relationships and inspirations from the African diaspora to the US Civil War and Ulysses S. Grant, Garcaia de la Torre vividly reveals the global origins of Martai's ideas regarding governance, citizenship, independence and spirituality. In bridging the familiar and the individual with larger global patterns and processes of the late nineteenth century, this work gives birth to a modern Cuba understood from a truly global perspective.