ABSTRACT
In 1895, José Martí, the patron saint of Cuban independence and founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC), died at the Battle of Dos Ríos under a hail of Spanish bullets. Martí’s demise was a demoralizing blow at the outset of the renewed Cuban independence struggle, though his martyrdom provided a powerful symbol of nationalist unity. As the New York-based revolution-inexile transitioned into a post-Martí reality, however, a power struggle emerged between the Americanized bourgeois elite and the working-class radicals who had formed an uneasy alliance under Martí’s leadership. The reactionary businessman Tomás Estrada Palma assumed leadership of the PRC while the black, working-class journeymen Rafael Serra and Sotero Figueroa set up their own newspaper to promulgate an alternative vision for the nation. They named the paper La Doctrina de Martí (The Martí Doctrine), a title that served as a veiled critique of those whom they believed to be betraying the martyred visionary’s legacy. Meanwhile, the prominent Afro-Cuban activist Juan Gualberto Gómez defined the struggle for equality in the new Cuba in more restrained terms, seeking to elevate Afro-Cubans’ place in society without making the systemic changes advocated by Serra and Figueroa.
