then become the name for a mode of thinking of the missed encounter as such, now understood as the thought of unlinking or of the constitutive lack at the heart of the social link—that is, the structurally uneven development of society under the historical conditions of capitalism. This would enable us to imagine a posthumous dialogue between Marx and Martí.
After all, especially starting in the 1870s, Marx also began to formulate a series of hypotheses regarding the notion of uneven development that enabled him to generalize a logic of contingency and unevenness for the entire capitalist world, and not only for the so-called peripheral, backward, semi-capitalist, or colonial countries. As we have seen, Marx never fully took advantage of these hypotheses in order to take a fresh look at Latin America. However, making up for this absence, we can find a strange set of indications that go in the same direction in the writings of Martí.
If I may be allowed a play on words, the issue before us at this point no longer concerns the absent corpse of Marx, but the absence of his corpus in Martí’s work: How much, or which parts, of Marx’s published oeuvre could Martí have read during his years in New York? What did he actually read? Did he ever consult The Communist Manifesto, perhaps in the English translation that was available as early as 1850? Or did he perhaps manage to get a hold of the cheap edition of the Manifesto that was prepared with financial contributions gathered precisely during the commemorative event of 1883 at the Cooper Union? How much did Martí know, if anything, about this text of which we recently celebrated the 160th anniversary? And how informed was he about the critique of political economy in Das Kapital, about which a number of speakers at the Cooper Union already raved so eloquently? Did he ever consult the popular summary of the book prepared by the German Johann Most with the help of Marx himself, or the English-language pamphlet version translated by Otto Weydemeyer and published in 1875 in Hoboken, New Jersey—just a stone’s throw away from Martí’s residence in New York City?23
Even Fidel Castro, in a recent autobiographical interview with Ignacio Ramonet, confesses to a certain wise ignorance in this regard. Or, at least, he cleverly transposes his own supposed ignorance by attributing it to the specialists of Martí’s work. “He had apparently read a little Marx, because in his works he talks about him. He has two or three magnificent phrases, when he mentions Marx, and one of them, I remember now, is ‘Given that he took the side of the poor, he deserves honour.’ And like that one, there are other phrases that praise Marx,” says Fidel, surreptitiously putting the “poor” back in the place of the “weak,” and ignoring the fact that almost all references to Marx in Martí’s complete works (depending on the edition used, this amounts to four or five references) are actually negative ones, similar to the one used as an epigraph to the present chapter. Promptly, though, the Cuban leader adds his doubts about the matter:
I’m not certain whether even the experts in Martí’s thought know what [Martí] knew about Marx, but he did know that Marx was a fighter on the side of the poor. Remember that Marx was fighting for the organization of workers, founding the Communist International. And Martí certainly knew that, even though those debates centred almost exclusively on Europe, and Martí of course was fighting for the independence of a colonized, slave-holding country [in another hemisphere altogether].24
In reality, no matter how much the leaders of the Cuban revolution may regret this, we have no palpable proof that Martí would have been directly familiar with any of Marx’s texts. Martí’s references not only consist of open or coded criticisms, but also speak exclusively of Marx’s work as a political organizer, without mentioning any of his publications. However, we do have at our disposal an unexpected source for comparison, this time literary in nature—namely, the only novel written by Martí, Lucía Jerez, also known by the earlier title Amistad funesta (Baneful Friendship), under which Martí, writing under the pseudonym Adelaida Ral, first published the novel in nine installments, between May 15 and September 15, 1885, in the New York biweekly El Latino-americano. In certain parts of this novel, in fact, the Cuban writer almost seems to be summarizing, word for word, the logic of revolutionary social change that we find in so many of Marx’s classical statements, which since then have been buried under a mountain of glosses both orthodox and heretical.
We can also read in the second chronicle on the trial of the Chicago anarchists, in which Martí already looked with much more sympathy upon the ideological work of Bakunin’s followers: “They do not understand that they are only a wheel in the social mechanism and that in order for them to change the whole mechanism must be changed.”25 The logic of this great mechanism or engranaje is what Martí himself, in Lucía Jerez as well as in many of his best-known chronicles and essays, including the “Prologue to Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde’s Poem of Niagara” and most famously “Our America” describes as the production of structural disjunctions, maladjustments, or dismemberments at all levels of social life—from the dress code of the youth that no longer corresponds to the distinction of their soul, all the way to the radical upset, or the sudden turnabout, caused by the lack of adaptation between the level of economic development and the attendant social, political, and cultural relations.
Here is how the narrator describes the situation in a high-sounding didactic aside in Lucía Jerez:
These times of ours are disjointed, and with the collapse of the old social barriers and the refinements of education, there has come into being a new and vast class of aristocrats of intelligence, with all the needs of appearance and rich tastes that follow from it, without there having been any time as of yet, in the rapidity of the turnabout, for the change in the organization and distribution of fortunes to correspond to the brusque alteration of social relations, produced by the political liberties and the vulgarization of knowledge.26
In Martí’s text, this logic of uneven development, based on a structural lack of correspondence, in the first place affects the life of intellectuals in Latin America:
Since with our Spanish American heads, filled with ideas from Europe and North America, we find ourselves in our countries in the manner of fruits without a market, like excrescences of the earth that weigh down on it and disturb it, and not as its natural flourishing, it so happens that those who possess intelligence, which is sterile among us due to its ill guidance, finding themselves in need of making it fertile so as simply to subsist, devote it with exclusive excess to the political battles, in the noblest of cases, thus producing an imbalance between the scarce country and the political surfeit; or else, pressured by the urgencies of life, they serve the strong man in power who pays and corrupts them, or they strive to topple him when, bothered by needy newcomers, the same strong man withdraws his abundant payment for their baneful services.27
Thus, the very “baneful” or “ill-fated” nature of the mysterious “friendship” alluded to in the novel’s original title, Amistad funesta, would somehow be related to the disastrously imbalanced outcomes of uneven development. Indeed, the only other two references in the novel to the element of lo funesto also allude to the effects of a structural maladjustment. Juan Jerez is thus said to “have given in, in his life filled with books and abstractions, to the sweet necessity, which is so often baneful, of squeezing against his heart a little pale hand, this one or that one, it mattered little to him; he saw in womanhood the symbol of ideal beauties more so than a real being.”28 And about Pedro, the dandyish figure whose physical attractiveness is matched only by his arrogance, we are told that he “saw in his own beauty, the baneful beauty of a lazy and ordinary man, a natural title, that of a lion, over all earthly goods, including the greatest among them, which are its beautiful creatures.”29 But, for the narrator, this is only another example of “that rich beauty of a man, graceful and firm, with which nature clothes a scarce soul.”30 Friendship and love, among other phenomena, become baneful or fatal in Martí’s novel precisely due to such maladjustments between the ideal and the real, between physical beauty and moral scarcity, between the life of the mind and the life of the heart, or between the paucity of bourgeois-civil society and the surfeit of politics.
Some of the fragments quoted above, in particular the first one, obviously recall the famous Preface to the 1859 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in which Marx sums up the theoretical and methodological presuppositions of his work in preparation for Capital. Though famous to the point of saturation, this passage deserves to be quoted at length once more, if for no other