ABSTRACT
Octavio Paz considered this well-known poem by Cuban writer José Martí an emblem of Latin America's poetic modernity, which he associated with the Fin-De-Siècle literary movement known as modernismo. The Spanish American War brought Spanish colonial rule to a complete end after the loss of the Empire’s last bastions in Latin America (Cuba and Puerto Rico), leading to new geopolitical alignments. For intellectuals like Sarmiento, writing was a space where they could weigh the downside of modernization against the dangers of what Sarmiento considered Latin America's inherent barbarism. Such intellectuals also turned to writing to address the risk of becoming fully dependent on the Western metropolises, which held the monopoly of civilization in terms of material and intellectual resources. The modernista chronicle was a form of writing connected to journalism and cultivated by emerging poets in major cities and capitals at the turn of the century.
