Havana, Martí and Eusebio Leal

November 16, 2020

"Havana is the city of José Martí." Among the many virtues of Cuba's capital that he taught us to safeguard, Eusebio Leal placed in the very first place that argument of a spiritual nature and patriotic love.

To the small museum house on Paula Street, where such an illustrious Cuban was born, he used to go every January 28th, in a very personal ceremony. He would walk through the spaces and stop to contemplate the objects with undiminished curiosity, as if it were the first time. And he would again praise the beautiful cockade, with the Cuban flag embroidered on queen fabric with beads. José Martí wore it when he fell in combat at Dos Ríos, in 1895, and it belonged to Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, whom Leal venerated as the cornerstone of the nation's independence and emphasized through historiographical research – let us remember his introductory essay and the notes made when the Lost Diary of the Father of the Nation came to light.

In Martí's little house, in the heart of Old Havana, he suffered as his own the martyrdom of young José Julián, upon observing the shackle that with heavy chain he had to drag in prison because of his early libertarian ideas. Many times he referred to that young man "wounded in the most intimate part of his being by an unjust sentence that he accepted as both reward and punishment for his early love for Cuba. The yoke opened a wound in his skin – and in the most intimate part of his human condition – a wound that never healed. The jewel he most appreciated was precisely an iron ring, forged from that fragment of the shackle that a jeweler had melted for him, a symbolic marriage with a wife superior to all carnal passion. The wife was Cuba, his infinite love!"

Faced with such a sacrifice, Leal used to be moved and repeatedly express that Cuba could boast of very illustrious heroes and patriots, but there was only one Apostle:

"How can one not consider him an Apostle, if he lived not in revelry nor in dissipation, but devoted completely to an apostolate of persuasion that led him to forgo everything that is dear to a man: carnal love, family, love of beauty, of fine books, of good food?"

That example of dedication to one's neighbor and to Cuba, his beloved homeland, took root in Leal's soul forever, from his school years. It was an obsession of his to rescue the school of Rafael María de Mendive, on Prado Street, number 88. The director of San Pablo School was "a sower of ideas and concerns. When classes ended, the students went up to the private house and attended small concerts, poetry readings by the teacher who was also a poet. The teacher exercises a profound influence on them."

How comforting it was for him to enjoy the hopeful sight of children attending classes again at Martí's school, on Prado Street, Number 88; of pioneers who could discover the school records of the author of The Golden Age and develop on those same grounds! He knew the powerful influence a teacher exercises over his students, guided by the philosophy of the pedagogue Mendive, so well described by the Apostle:

"And how can I say in a few lines all the good and new things I could say about that lover of beauty, who wanted it in letters as in the things of life, and never wrote except about truths of his heart or about the sorrows of the Homeland? (…)".

With heart and with the Homeland, these are the early Martían virtues that Leal embraced. From Martí he also received the keys to a project for the restoration of Havana's Historic Center that is not carried out to hedonistically contemplate the architectural and urban values of the capital. The human being is its first objective and the axis that structures all notions of local development: "The Apostle calls us to fight for social justice," he affirmed, "for the equality of men, for the full and absolute dignity of women."

Today we understand, by the character that his greatest work came to acquire – the rehabilitation of Old Havana – that any path had to lead him to Fidel Castro. The leader of the Cuban Revolution was his ideal interlocutor and he was also an avowed Martían, who in 1953 declared the Apostle as the intellectual author of the revolutionary movement that achieved definitive independence:

"The hero of Moncada had him as a fundamental figure. He sought him out anxiously with the witnesses of that time to learn of that thought and that idea, and from then on we were obsessed with the principle: unity, unity, unity... Only Fidel could achieve it from political power. When one lives in clandestinity or in insurrection, one can only plan and dream. Only power allows one to change society and history."

In the early nineties, the Commander in Chief asked him, flying over the city of Cartagena de Indias, what more could we do to save Old Havana? And there was hardly an occasion when Leal did not recall that precise moment. This led to Fidel, personally, working as the lawyer he was, in the creation of a Decree-Law that granted sovereignty in self-management and consolidated the principle of authority of the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana, to safeguard the Historic Center declared by UNESCO, in 1982, as a World Heritage Site.

"Decree-Law No. 143 of 1993 changed history," he confessed to me in one of the many interviews I had the privilege of conducting with him, "and it was, without a doubt, the most advanced legal document regarding the protection of cultural heritage that was ever made." Subsequent history is more recent. Hundreds of his collaborators today defend that legacy from the Office of the Historian with a clear inspiration. To act well and to make of ruins works of salvation, not only of heritage but also of society, Martían passion surrounds us.

Leal, José Martí had a close relationship with this city and when from afar he looked toward Cuba, his beloved homeland, to a great extent he contemplated Havana. What was the city like for Martí?

He said that Havana's issues he carried personally and he was right. Havana was very important, it had great weight in the Cuba of his time and in ours. So, that city of Martí is the city in whose name generations that have continued him have taken his symbols and his values to advance a national and universal cause that is to achieve all possible justice. That is why the Birth House, the Martían Forge, his monument in Central Park, the one in Revolution Square, all are landmarks of his passage through history, alive or in spirit.

Havana remains his city. Havana's matters must continue to be carried forward by Martí with his sense of ethics, with that urgent need to preach – more than defect and darkness – civic virtue, family and generational harmony, the compatibility of interests of all those who inhabit a city that, in Martí's time, had at most 200 thousand inhabitants and that today has two and a half million or who knows how many inhabitants, because we never know the exact number.

I can only tell you that when I go out into the street I realize that there are many of us to act well for our city.

What would those virtues and typicalities of habanero character be that we can today exhibit?

It is said and sometimes it is a somewhat heavy slogan, for being repetitive, that Havana is the capital of all Cubans. It is true that it is a redundancy: Havana is the capital.

Havana is a hospitable city. Everything said against that is untrue. Even when we hear some denigrate the presence of Cubans from other provinces, they forget its character as a capital and its cosmopolitan character. That is how it is and that is how it must be.

Perhaps the development of the country and the necessary measures that prevent Havana from becoming what other Latin American capitals are – infernal spaces where only those who live in its center and not in its immense and dramatic periphery can enjoy the sense of the city – we may come to the conclusion that it has been and is a hospitable city, one that receives.

I keep in my memory how this city welcomed the Revolution, the literacy teachers, the peasants, how it received us and receives us each time we go out to fight for the economy, peace, freedom… and return to it.

Havana is a city that has these values not only as a constitutional and formal attribution, but also because people from all parts of the world have lived in Havana; it has been a crossroads in the American Mediterranean.

How can we speak of Havana without recognizing the presence in it of all that is worth and shines from each of the Latin American nations and the world? In that sense, we can feel fortunate that after five centuries, our city maintains that vigor that it had on the first day when a group of newcomers planted themselves beside a tree and said: this is the village, this will be the camp, this will be the town, this will be the city, this will be the capital. And so it was: they dreamed it and future generations consummated it until today.