A Repairable Debt to Mendive, the Master's Master

August 16, 2018

"And how do you want me to 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 sorrows of his homeland?"

No words more endowed with tenderness and affection about Rafael María de Mendive exist than those of José Martí, the eminent student who gave his life to the just cause of achieving independence.

Such selflessness could only have been possible thanks to the fertile hand of that professor at Colegio San Pablo, who knew how to sow the seed of independence in the soul of young Pepe.

That is why, perhaps, Mendive is recognized more for his teaching and influence on the thinking of a generation of young people, in which Martí stood out, while little is said about other facets of his intellectual life.

Journalist Josefina Ortega, in her article Rafael María de Mendive: a poet, published in the cultural magazine La Jiribilla, clarifies that the trajectory in literature of the Apostle's spiritual master began when he studied at the Real Colegio de San Carlos and later at the Faculty of Laws of the University of La Habana.

From that era, date the first sonnets he published in the press of the interior of the country, for example, in El Correo de Trinidad. Historians and literary critics suppose that he wanted to escape the rigorous scrutiny of the connoisseurs of the capital; but also, El Faro Industrial, a Havana publication, reproduced some of these poems, with a favorable review from the distinguished university professor and bibliographer, Antonio Bachiller y Morales.

"In fact, Mendive himself acknowledged on one occasion that thanks to the encouragement of Bachiller y Morales he persevered in the cultivation of poetry," affirms journalist Oscar Ferrer, Prize winner in Biography and Memoirs from the Editorial de Ciencias Sociales in 2004, who has studied the figure of José Martí's spiritual master for more than thirty years.

In 1847, the professor of Colegio de San Pablo published his first book, Pasionarias, which opened the doors to the creole Parnassus of letters. The poetess Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, a towering figure of Cuban literary Romanticism, opined about him: "He is an extremely tender singer, whose noble and passionate soul always shines through in his verses."

Authors such as Max Henríquez Ureña consider that his poetic work does not reach the depth of the great romantics of the nineteenth century on the Island, and various texts only cite José Jacinto Milanés, Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido), Domingo del Monte, Cirilo Villaverde and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, as the main exponents of said literary tendency.

Aimeé Almeida, professor of the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Letters at the University of La Habana, explains that Mendive's lyric poetry was recognized internationally by publications of the era and they qualified him as "the renovator of good taste, which explains that in 1851 his verses were included in the anthology Spanish and American Poets of the Nineteenth Century."

The Cuban independence fighter José Manuel Carbonell, disciple of the National Hero, defines him as "a poet of minor tone, his poetry, more inclined to the tenderness of the idyll than to the roar of tragedy and epic (...) Model of mental equilibrium and good taste (...) Always moderate, to the right of romanticism, never fell into maudlin sentimentality, nor adorned himself with rags and flounces covered in sequins."

Regarding this, the narrator, critic and essayist Cintio Vitier, makes clear that "thanks in large part to Mendive, Cuban poets let rest the epic trumpet, for which few had sufficient breath, and drew near with simple lyres, like him, to the stream."

Mendive, Journalist

The intellectual work of the Master's Master was centered in a stage where the emergence of short-lived magazines with encyclopedic and romantic tendencies was constant. Examples of this were Guirnalda Cubana, Revista Habanera, Álbum de lo Bueno y lo Bello, El Correo de la Tarde and the Diario de La Habana.

"These pamphlets gather the attempts of creole intellectuality to seek in folkloric and customary elements their affirmation. However, they are manifested permeated by the influence of European neoclassicism that hinders the expression of its own content," explains the National History Prize winner, María del Carmen Barcia, researcher at the Centro Fernando Ortiz.

The professor of Colegio San Pablo ventured as a journalist in many of the aforementioned publications, likewise, he directed and founded the magazines Flores del Siglo (1945-1846) and Revista Habanera (1853-1857). His texts responded to the tendencies of opinion journalism, typical of the era, in which style tended toward the literary and the author's presence was total.

The Link between Varela and Martí

Enrique Román, journalist and professor of the subject History of the Press at the Faculty of Communication at the University of La Habana, regarding the influence of Mendive's lyric and prose on the work of the Apostle expressed that "there is no connection between one and the other, as far as themes and poetic styles are concerned. It is easier to explain if they are seen as two different paths. Mendive was not a great poet; in fact, his intrinsic qualities paled when he attempted to be a civil poet. Writings such as A Italia, on the death of the Count of Cavour and Benito Juárez, do not have outstanding merits.

"Martí, however, carries out an inverse process, since he begins as a writer with Abdala, a masterkey within his work and Cuban literature of the nineteenth century, and there is no need to speak of the rest of his literary creations."

-What role did he then play in young Pepe's life?

"Rafael María de Mendive studied at Colegio San Carlos, where Father Félix Varela elaborated the emancipatory doctrine, which gave a new definition to ethics in Cuba. Mendive is an intermediate link between the political and philosophical ideas of Catholic Enlightenment, and Martí."

-If Mendive preached independence ideas, why is it said that at the end of his days he joined autonomism?

"Autonomism, despite not defending independence, was a reformist movement that made great criticisms of the metropolis and the Island's political system, so it also cannot be judged as a conformist and lackey current to the crown.

"Also, one must take into account that during the Fecund Truce, Mendive was a man of approximately sixty and something years old, considered quite elderly in an era where people died at an early age. It happened on more than one occasion that many figures of independentism allied themselves with this current because they had no possibility of connection with the separatist movement. That may have been the case of the master of Colegio San Pablo."

Ideological or Merely Physical Distancing?

Another aspect of Rafael María de Mendive's life that is little treated is the absence of subsequent contacts with José Martí. The intimate teacher-student relationship they maintained is known, and how the adolescent along with other students of Colegio San Pablo always accompanied the teacher's wife to the prison of Castillo del Príncipe where he was imprisoned, following the events at the Teatro Villanueva, on January 22, 1869, when cheers for Cuba and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes were heard during the performance of the work El perro huevero.

However, Pedro Pablo Rodríguez, researcher at the Centro de Estudios Martianos and National History Prize winner, states that there is no record of epistolary correspondence between the master and the outstanding student, years later, after Mendive's exile in 1869, and the Apostle's, in 1871.

He adds that if no evidence of written dialogue remained in the extensive Martian bibliography, collected by various historians, it is because it does not exist, despite the constant exchange of letters that the Apostle maintained with figures such as Manuel Mercado, Juan Gualberto Gómez and the Mantilla family, among others.

Salvador Arias, also a researcher at the Centro de Estudios Martianos, suggests that the absence of contact may have been due to Mendive's inclination toward autonomism, after the culmination of the Ten Years' War. But he agrees that it should not have been the cause since the Man of Two Rivers maintained friendship with figures such as Nicolás Azcárate, a declared follower of the current, whom he could not convince to abandon it.

The only known reference, written by José Martí about his master, is the article published in the newspaper El Porvenir, of New York in 1891, on the anniversary of the mentor's death, where he asserted: "Of his life as a man I shall not speak, because he knows little of Cuba who does not know how he fought for her from his youth..."

It is clear that in the awakening of young Pepe to the world of the most advanced thinking of his time, Rafael María de Mendive occupied a towering place, which was enough to earn him a special place in the history of Cuba. His intellectual work also deserves recognition and wider dissemination.

Not for nothing did José Martí express:

"I prefer to remember him, alone, in the long walks of the corridor, when, the house quiet, from the light of the night and the rustling of the leaves he fashioned his verse; or when, speaking of those who fell on the Cuban scaffold, he would rise angrily from his chair, and his beard would tremble."