In the spirit of disrupting facile constructions of citizenship and belonging, I offer a strange document: Marco Pitchon’s José Martí y la comprension humana. In 1953, on the occasion of Martí’s one hundredth birthday,... [ view full abstract ]
In the spirit of disrupting facile constructions of citizenship and belonging, I offer a strange document: Marco Pitchon’s José Martí y la comprension humana. In 1953, on the occasion of Martí’s one hundredth birthday, Pitchon, president of B’nai B’rith Maimónides of Havana, sent letters across the globe, inviting world leaders to pay homage to the “apostle of freedom.” In 1957, Pitchon published the responses from heads of state—including Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, A. Somoza of Nicaragua, Chiang Kai-Shek of China, and Hector Trujillo Molina of the Dominican Republic—writers, scientists, journalists and religious leaders in a volume, entitled La comprension humana. The volume includes the letters in their original languages and in translation, a lengthy introduction by Fernando Ortiz, and a concluding essay that documents “lo hebreo en el pesamiento de José Martí.”
Why would a Jewish immigrant take it upon himself to introduce “el mentor y guía espiritual del pueblo cubano” to the world? Why would he spend four years engaged in the monumental task of compiling and translating hundreds of letters, and then distribute the resulting volume for free? My essay approaches these questions through the book’s epigraph, a quote from Martí, “el hombre no tiene ningún derecho especial porque pertenezca a una raza u otra” (7), that has been translated into 41 languages. As the quote and its translations reveal, Pitchon’s task is complex and somewhat contradictory, both conservative and disruptive. First, he represents Jews, a minor population that speaks a variety of inscrutable languages, as central to the Cuban national project; Martí’s call for equality extends to Jews living in Cuba. Further, Pitchon presents himself, through his heroic, multiyear effort to celebrate a Cuban hero, as a Jewish patriot. However, while Pitchon explicitly celebrates the Cuban national hero and the Cuban nation, his project actually makes the case for a kind of multilingual, global citizenship that transcends national boundaries. More than present Jews as acceptable citizens, Pitchon is actually attempting to remake identity as a collection of transnational, multilingual associations.
La comprension humana is spectacularly multilingual. The letters themselves appear in their original languages (with Spanish translation), and Pitchon, himself a speaker of French, Ladino, Spanish and English, devotes an entire paragraph in his brief opening essay to Martí’s own multilingualism. Pitchon routes his case for Jewish Cuban belonging through language (and across the globe). In the Americas, language has always been linked to national loyalty; both are structural institutions that keep both citizens and non-citizens in line. I argue that in light of our current citizenship moment, La comprension humana provides an instructive example of the complex and contradictory ways that we might continue to grapple with belonging. Pitchon’s volume encourages us to continue to refuse and re-imagine the twinned demands for cultural and linguistic assimilation.
Literature and Literary Studies , Transnational , Cuban , Jewish-Latino Studies , Humanities