Gonzalo de Quesada Aróstegui

A few months after the outbreak of the Ten Years' War (October 10, 1868), Gonzalo de Quesada y Aróstegui was born in Havana.

From the Cry of La Demajagua, issued by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes and a handful of patriots, and with the freeing of their slaves, Cubans began to think of their inalienable and absolute independence from the Spanish colonial yoke and from any other impediments that could deprive them of their rights in years to come.

When Quesada was an adolescent, he met who would later be his revolutionary teacher, José Martí, at an event in New York. It was on October 10, 1889, when Quesada y Aróstegui had the honor of introducing Martí, calling him for the first time, Apostle.

From that moment on, an unwavering and unbreakable loyalty would be sealed forever. Quesada joined Martí, helping him through his ability and good relations, in propaganda in favor of the Revolution, for which reason he also resigned as a lawyer at the law firm of Stearns and Curtis in New York.

Quesada provided Martí with all kinds of services for the revolutionary cause, among these his friendship with lawyer Horatio S. Rubens and through his intervention he managed to save a large part of the shipment of arms and ammunition when the Plan de la Fernandina failed (January 10, 1895).

The young disciple demonstrated talent, ability, and seriousness. Martí welcomed him as a favorite student and imparted his revolutionary teachings to him. He appointed him Secretary of the Cuban Revolutionary Party and entrusted him, along with Benjamín Guerra, with the publication of the newspaper Patria, the voice of the Revolution to the Cuban emigration.

When Martí left to participate in "the useful and necessary war," he entrusted Quesada with all the steps to continue providing material aid to the Revolution, such as sending armed expeditions and propaganda as editor of Patria, and in fact, as delegate to replace the Master. He also remained as Charge of Affairs of the Republic in Arms to serve it in whatever way he could help for its sustenance.

He was Secretary of the Argentine Delegation to the Pan-American Congress held in Washington in 1890. He served as private secretary to Roque Sáenz Peña, Argentine delegate whom he accompanied during his trip to Buenos Aires, later returning to the United States in 1891 as Consul of the Argentine Republic in Philadelphia, a position he resigned from to dedicate himself to independence propaganda.

When Cuba achieved its mediated independence with the interference of Yankee imperialism, Quesada was a member of the Constituent Convention that drafted the 1901 Constitution; first Plenipotentiary Minister of Cuba in the United States, from which position he negotiated with John Hay the Treaty that recognized Cuba's full sovereignty over the Isle of Pines (today Isle of Youth), known as the Hay-Quesada Treaty, signed on March 2, 1904.

He was a Cuban delegate to various Pan-American Conferences and to the Second Peace Conference and Minister of Cuba in Germany from 1910. Despite the difficult circumstances in which he found himself due to North American interventions in Cuba, he was seen resolving thorny diplomatic matters for future bilateral relations between the nascent Caribbean republic and the already powerful Northern empire, helping in this task the Generalissimo Máximo Gómez, in order to achieve full Cuban sovereignty as in 1903, when he accompanied him to Washington.

If Quesada y Aróstegui was a revolutionary-diplomat, he was also a creator. He published several works, among them: My First Offering, about which Martí expressed himself in a letter dated in New York in 1892 that served as a prologue to the aforementioned book, edited in New York in early 1892:

"Of course you must publish your First Offering. In this world there is nothing truly worthy except nobility and beauty. Believe in virtue, believe in art. You are good and you are sober: you neither fear painful truth nor seek pomp; you admire the brave and you love the humble; it is necessary to kindle hearts: publish your book".

And he adds:

"And the first thing that gives you the right to publish it, as far as literature goes, is that native vigor that cannot be set aside without risk nor forgotten with impunity, through which your natural soul, raised in the suffocation of these chimneys, shows in the fire and tenderness the persistence of the local entity, which lives within the human with its own methods and purposes and does not accommodate itself to others except to stagnate and disappear. What the liberator San Martín said is true: 'you will be what you must be; or if not, you will be nothing'. Against truth, nothing lasts; nor against nature. French Canada wants to be neither English nor North American; it wants to be French. Mexicans from California, after fifty years of life in the United States, do not want to be from the United States: they want to be Mexican. You, raised from the root in Northern schools, where they would have preferred you, and in their societies, where they praised you, and with the purest of a people, which is its youth, know in yourself the impossibility of accommodation, the futility and baneful nature of accommodation; and you are Cuban".

And the Master continues in his didactic prose with the disciple who would end up writing other texts like that brave pamphlet titled: Ignacio Mora, where he narrates and denounces one of the most atrocious violations of human rights of the nineteenth century Cuban history with the massacre of women and newborn children of the sisters of the Camagüey patriot Ignacio Mora during the Ten Years' War. It is a denunciation that Quesada y Aróstegui made for all humanity and all times.

To him José Martí would send his so-called literary testament letter, by entrusting him with all his papers. This missive is dated in Montecristi, April 1, 1895 and, among other things, the Apostle says to his student:

"I have not spoken to you about my books. Preserve them; since you will always need the office, and especially now; in order to sell them for Cuba at an opportune time, except for the History of America, or things about America, — Geography, letters, etc. — which you will give to Carmita to keep, in case I come out alive, or they expel me, and I return with them to earn my bread... "

Faithful to his Master, Quesada y Aróstegui published the Works of Martí reaching a total of 14 volumes, having already prepared volume 15 when death overtook him; this was published later by his widow Angelina Miranda. In the first volume, published in Washington in 1900, in the prologue dated May 19, the anniversary of the Hero's fall in combat, Quesada wrote:

"Engaged in the task of making Country — for which the Master bled and died — there has been no time to fulfill a promise to compile his literary works, comply with his last wishes and thus correspond to his noble trust. On the fifth anniversary of his heroic consecration, these pages are published — as a guide for later and more enduring editions — as the first stone of the monument that my admiration and gratitude will raise for him".

Gonzalo de Quesada y Aróstegui died on March 2, 1915 in Berlin while serving as Plenipotentiary Minister and Extraordinary Envoy of Cuba in Germany. His son, also a Martian bibliographer, Gonzalo de Quesada y Miranda, attempted to transfer his father's remains to his Homeland, but the family had to wait for the end of World War I, in order to avoid the risks of a sea voyage due to the threat of submarines. The cadaver was embalmed in the crypt of the Church of Saint Hedwig in Berlin, until it was finally brought to Havana where today it rests in the Colón necropolis.

José Martí also wrote these wise words to the student whom the Cuban Revolution today honors:

"We are made of all bloods, and we must seek modes of our own for the composite. With a page of Macaulay we are not going to govern the fleets of Guantánamo. You are Cuban of the new kind, who studies letters and men at the same time, so as not to fall into the irremediable incapacity of those who, bent over the writing table, do not see Nature boiling and ruling at their doors".