Since he opened his eyes, José Martí was there, at home, at school, in books, in the air. Because the mother of journalist Reinaldo Cedeño, Santiago teacher Caridad Pineda, was very fond of the Apostle and always taught a phrase of his.
He does not say it as a routine or as a patriotic obligation, he expresses it with the conviction of someone who has read and meditated on Martí. The more I study him, the more I realize that he has many answers to give us. Despite falling in combat in the 19th century”, he said.
As a researcher he was interested in studying how the texts of the Master resisted the passage of time. That search led him to understand that the patriot went to ethics, to the essence. He did not care so much about the place of birth or death of people, but their inner value and integrity. Which he shows in his article “Céspedes and Agramonte”, where he discerns with greatness about both, without fanaticism or simplifications.
Martí is a healer, someone capable of looking at the soul without prejudice and defending values. He did it with José María Heredia, whom he rescued in his speech at Hardman Hall, New York, when he said that he was “the poet who had had courage for everything. Except to die without seeing his mother and his palms again”, he told the Cuban News Agency.
For Cedeño, the most necessary genius of Paula is not the marble one, but the one that moves, understands in depth the human experiences and looks at the authentic beyond the epidermal beauty. As he did in the prologue of “Los poetas de la guerra” when he extols the virtue above the techniques of the improvised tenths and the camp glosses, saying that “they rhymed badly, but only pedants and rascals would throw it in his face: because they died well”.
The author from Santiago finds in the text “Sobre los oficios de la alabanza” one of the most decisive and sincere lessons when the Apostle declares “he is a coward who sees the humble merit and does not praise it”, and it is there -he assures- where Cuban institutions and journalism find a moral mandate: to rescue those who live every day with passion, quietly, in the midst of harshness, in order to show their example to society.
I think I breathe Martí, he is on my shoulder, he said, because in his works he traces a path to resist and embrace ideals. One finds an embrace, a hope; that is why I want to believe like him in these difficult times that “truth and tenderness are not useless”.
I sometimes imagine him as my work colleague and I wonder what he would say, what he would do in the current circumstances of the country. It comforts me to think of his ability to not give up, not to walk the easy roads, but the right ones, he is a guide, he confesses.
130 years after his fall in combat, the journalist has no doubt that the ideology of the author of the Golden Age is alive. Overflies the original context and has validity as truths without expiration date, being the most genuine contact with the future.
The poet of the simple verses renounced to comforts, to affections, lived the exile, the distance, the uprooting and never stopped loving Cuba; and in times of migration, Cedeño stresses. He continues to remind us that the Homeland travels with the emigrated in its flavors and knowledge, because it is fine and consoling hope.
“Freedom is the right of every man to be honest, to think and speak without hypocrisy”, said the Cuban National Hero. That is why I try not to be hypocritical, because if I am, I am not Martiano, I am not Cuban, said the writer, recognized for his brilliant performance in cultural journalism.
He also said he plans to publish a compilation of his texts dedicated to the man who defended as a banner of life the attachment to truth. The will to heal and to bring together diverse spirits for a common cause: Cuba.
Martí illuminates, he is a perennial call, he is like the flag, like air, like water, a blessing, a gift, a sweet armor that fills, protects and makes us be better, he concluded.
With information by Nelson Hair Melik Marrero/CNA
Translated by Aliani Rojas Fernández
- Brain Stimulation: Promising Breakthrough for the Mind? - 21 de May de 2025
- Complex solutions for electricity supply in Cuba - 21 de May de 2025
- Teenage pregnancy, a timely reflection - 21 de May de 2025