retamar caliban by Unknown Author Read Free Book Online

by Ercilla, are nothing more than a handful of loathesome Indians. We would have them hanged today were they to reappear in a war of the Araucanos against Chile, a country that has nothing to do with such rabble.
    This naturally implies a vision of the Spanish conquest radically different from that upheld by Marti. For Sarmiento, “Spanish—repeated a hundred times in the odious sense of impious, immoral, ravisher and impostor—is synonymous with civilization, with the European tradition brought by them to these countries.” And while for Marti, “there is no racial hatred, because there are no races,” the author of Conflicto y armonias de las rams en America [Conflict and Harmony among the Races in America) bases himself thus on pseudoscientific theories:
    It may be very unjust to exterminate savages, suffocate rising civilizations, conquer peoples who are in possession of a privileged piece of land. But thanks to this injustice, America, instead of remaining abandoned to the savages, incapable of progress, is today occupied by the Caucasian race—the most perfect, the most intelligent, the most beautiful and most progressive of those that people the earth. Thanks to these injustices, Oceania is filled with civilized peoples, Asia begins to move under the European impulse, Africa sees the times of Carthage and the glorious days of Egypt reborn on her coats. Thus, the population of the world is subject to revolutions that recognize immutable laws; the strong races exterminate the weak ones and the civilized peoples supplant the savages in the possession of the earth.
    There was no need then to cross the Atlantic and seek out Renan to hear such words: a man of this America was saying them. The fact is that if he did not learn them on this side of the ocean, they were at least reinforced for him here—not in our America but in the other, “European [,] America,” of which Sarmiento was the most fanatical devotee in our mestizo lands during the nineteenth century. Although in that century there is no shortage of Latin Americans who adored the Yankees, our discovery of people among us equal to Sarmiento in their devotion to the United States would be due above all to the ranting seqoyism in which our twentieth-century Latin America has been so prodigal. What Sarmiento wanted for Argentina was exactly what the United States had achieved for itself. The last words he wrote (1888) were: “We shall catch up to the United States. . . . Let us become the United States.” His travels in that country produced in him a genuine bedazzlement, a never-ending historical orgasm. He tried to establish in his homeland the bases for an enterprising bourgeoisie, similar to what he saw there. Its present fate makes any commentary unnecessary.
    What Marti saw in the United States is also sufficiently well known that we need not dwell upon the point. Suffice it to recall that he was the first militant anti-imperialist of our continent; that he denounced over a period of fifteen years “the crude, inequitable, the decadent character of the United States, and the continued existence therein of all the violence, discord, immorality, and disorder for which the Hispano-American peoples are censured” 56 ; that a few hours before his death on the battlefield, he confided in a letter to his great friend, the Mexican Manuel Mercado, “Everything I have done to this day, and everything I shall do is to that end [,]... to prevent in time the expansion of the United States into the Antilles and to prevent her from falling, with ever greater force, upon our American lands.” 57
    Sarmiento did not remain silent before the criticism that Marti — frequently from the very pages of La Nacidn —leveled against his idolized United States. He commented on one occasion on this incredible boldness:
    Don Jfos6 Marti lacks only one requirement to be a journalist ... He has failed to regenerate himself, to educate himself, so to speak, to receive