There are not many peoples who can find their soul in the life of a hero, or better still, in that of a human being who with his acts reached an ethical height capable of illuminating an entire nation. Not many people have a man like José Martí as their spiritual guide. We are happy to live in the land that saw him born, forge his revolutionary character, appropriate and realize justice, ascend to immortality.

Martí is a mystery, said Lezama Lima, but not indecipherable or remote from material life; It is a challenging mystery that, with extraordinary simplicity, takes you by the hand through the immensity of life, through the purest and most sensitive things that define a human being: love, justice, ethics and truth. No wonder Gabriela Mistral defined him as the purest man of the race.

And it is that Martí, as Cintio Vitier told us: «is one of those (men) who forces us to put all our intellectual and affective forces under tension. The latter are, of course, the first to come, because the person of José Martí, exceptionally endowed with the gift of moving and improving, enters our soul long before we have been able to fully understand the significance of his work ».

Therein also lies the mystery, in that force that we have to call martianism, in the assumption of the Martian values ​​that make us better people, do for others, overcome selfishness, safeguard what is sacred as the Homeland and its symbols. It is like Martí himself when he expressed, referring to the exemplary heroism of the Medicine students shot in 1871, in his speech known as Los Pinos Nuevos: «... thus, from those continuous invisible links, the soul of the country is being woven! ».

Take care of it, fill it with love and go out on the redemptive path when we see it in danger of being tainted, or when it is violated; it is our duty. Historically it has been for the Cuban people, it is in their entrails, in their roots. What defines Cuba, amid so much moral rot and hurt existence in which humanity lives? Its history, its mambisa and rebellious condition, its unwavering faith in victory, its heroic resistance to the visceral hatred of the cruel and crafty empire, and its martiality.

The soul of Cuba is embodied by Martí, raised and opened as that sun of the moral world. The soul of the Cuban homeland has been woven with blood, that spilled by their children in pursuit of decorum and dignity, with sacrifices because the country needs them, she, the Apostle warns us, is ara and not pedestal, we must serve him but never take it to serve it.

And we could ask ourselves, as Roberto Fernández Retamar did: «Who is this extraordinary man to whom, at the end of the century of his birth, Fidel Castro himself attributes the paternity of the most creative revolution in the American continent; to whom do the schoolchildren of their land and the most demanding writers recite from memory? ».

That is Martí, a symbol of the fight for a better world, for human improvement, for the utility of virtue; A reference point for many generations of Cubans, a spiritual guide for the nation, a man whose actuality and universality are extraordinary; because despite its sowing so many years ago, that spirit flourishes that does not abandon us and continues to signal the destiny of the homeland.

Then, what does Martí mean for Cubans ?; The question was asked by the Commander-in-Chief on the 150th anniversary of the Apostle's birthday, and whose answer he himself left for posterity: "For us Cubans, Martí is the idea of ​​the good that he described." Marti's greatness is such that when his character tries to denigrate himself by beings with low souls, his thought is manipulated and distorted by petty interests, his life is ridiculed, or his marble image is outraged, be it in bust, statue or monument; The hearts of the children of the country swell and the blood inflames and love explodes for those who represent the most sacred of a nation.

As the human body is that of the nations, we learned it from the Master, they have a heart where they cannot be seen; but when recklessness hurts him or outrage raises him; the heart is still there, presiding and guiding. This is what has happened these days before the outrage committed against the image of our National Hero by vandalism who did not hesitate to play the worst imperialist scourge, the Miami mafia and the fascist Government of the United States, a symbol of evil , which at all costs aims to overthrow the Cuban Revolution.

Martí is not offended, he is not tainted; doing it is like getting rid of the roots, it is like being soulless. Cuban who does not feel his heart shudder before José Martí, and worse still; execute, conceive, induce or finance such execrable acts, should not be called Cuban; it lacks an indispensable ingredient: the pride of being one, the cubanía that is reflected in the love for the national symbols, in the respect and veneration of the heroes and martyrs, in the defense of the portion of humanity in which they were born and that look closer.

It is necessary to go to Mella, who wanted to write a book about Martí; This is how he expressed it in his glosses on Marti's thought, a longing that he could not achieve because, as he himself said: «(…) Well away from all patriotism, when I speak of José Martí, I feel the same emotion, the same fear, that he feels before the supernatural things… ».

And it's not that it was (supernatural), but that's how sacred things feel. Martí's greatness is there, in that without being supernatural, because he is not a god, he became essence, root, skeleton; in which without having to name him he is present, alive as Che maintained in a transcendental speech, in which he asks us to approach Martí, "... without regret, without thinking that they are approaching a god, but a man more greater than other men, wiser and more sacrificed than other men, and to think that they revive him a little every time they think of him and revive him a lot every time they act as he wanted them to act… ».

When we commemorate the 167th anniversary of the birth of José Martí, and in the same spirit with which he wrote Vindication of Cuba; Today we can say that Martí has ​​not died and will not die. Let us never allow his legacy to be covered in dust, let us not neglect the spaces or the most diverse ways of honoring him in the whirlwind of everyday life, let us be entirely Marti: of thought and action. As we stated a while ago: to be martianos is to be good, fair, patriotic.

The daily question, what is it to be a Martiano today ?, invites young people to fight, to grow with the tremendous desire of youth to revolutionize reality, to change with the permanent motivation of being aware of the historical moment, of what to do, what is the way, that we are children of Martí and Fidel, and therefore anti-imperialist, risky and eternally dissatisfied with what is wrong, with what weakens us. We must continue to harbor revolutionary unity, because the key continues to be: unite to win; and don't divide and you will win.