Martí on Marx by Bruno Bosteels

Neither Saint-Simon, nor Karl Marx, nor Marlo, nor Bakunin. Instead, the reforms that are best suited to our own bodies. - José Martí, La Nación, February 20, 1890.

If Marx fails to see any revolutionary potential in the realities of Latin America, overshadowed as these would be by the constant temptation of despotism due to a lagging or insufficient development of civil society, we should hasten to add that the misunderstanding often turns out to be reciprocal. Think of "Honores a Karl Marx, que ha muerto" ("Tributes to Karl Marx, who has died"), a well-known but strangely under-studied chronicle by the Cuban writer and independence fighter José Martí, written when he resided in New York and worked as a foreign correspondent for, among others, the Argentine daily newspaper La Nación. This chronicle has been acknowledged as being "a first pillar in the reception of Marxism in the strict philosophical sense in Latin America. "1 In it, Martí focuses on a commemorative event that took place on March 19, 1883 in the Great Hall at the Cooper Union in Manhattan, marking the occasion of Marx's death five days earlier.