José Martí Pérez was unparalleled in Latin American literature. He called journalism the profession of earning a living and practiced it systematically between 1881 and 1892. “It was the principal vehicle of his thought. Transforming it into analysis, poetry, warning, and vision. The chronicle represents intensity in its all-encompassing word. It becomes a witness to the conquests and dangers of modernity,” says Cintio Vitier.
Martí wrote more than 300 chronicles, dozens of articles, and reports. His North American Scenes are images that depict the events in the daily life of the United States.
The Martí scholar Vitier asserts that “He transformed the profession with his pen into a method for understanding the real and the possible. He made news a subject, a laboratory of the event, of the ephemeral poem.” He displayed, with the scent of fresh ink and for all time. His gallery of exemplary portraits, not disdaining the cell or the newsworthy atom… He practiced journalism as poetic as it was scientific….”
On March 14th, 1892, he founded the newspaper Patria, though his work was already recognized in newspapers and magazines across the continent. Regarding the founding of Patria, he said: “This newspaper is born from the will and with the resources of independent Cubans and Puerto Ricans in New York. Also to contribute, tirelessly and without haste, to the organization of free men… To unite and love, and to live in the passion of truth, this newspaper is born.”
In the article “On Journalism,” published in Patria in 1892, Martí defines the missions of journalism as follows: “(…) that there be no manifestation of life whose daily events do not surprise the diarist: that is to make a good newspaper. To say what is convenient for everyone and to not fail to say anything that might be convenient for someone (…).”
Cintio Vitier, in his book *Life and Work of the Apostle José Martí*, states, “…If he was always right in the end. It was because of a prior success: the ethical principles on which he founded his life.”
By: Enma Colina Bruzón
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