A Monument in Cuba That’s Hard to Love
By Angry GenXer
HAVANA TIMES – Jose Marti is someone whom most people born in Cuba feel respect for. He died under fire from Spanish colonial troops on May 19, 1895. Since the early 20th century, few Cubans have dared to criticize or question him (perhaps the writer Antonio Jose Ponte, with his essay “El abrigo de aire,” is the best known since the 1990s).
Visually, Cuba is filled with Marti, referred to here as the “National Hero,” the “Apostle,” or simply “The Teacher.” Every school or daycare center, most state and Communist Party organizations, and since 1953, all former municipal seats, have a bust or another type of monument to him. The first one inaugurated (in 1905) seems to be the one in Central Park in Old Havana: a standing Marti, in white marble, pointing toward the future. The most famous is probably the one in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolucion (formerly Civic Plaza), with its star-shaped obelisk.
Another monument, inaugurated in 2018 in front of the former Presidential Palace (just a few blocks from Central Park), is an equestrian statue of the Apostle that depicts the precise moment of his death. Marti appears struck by the fatal bullet, in the act of beginning to fall from his horse. The statue is made of bronze and rests on a black marble pedestal.
That memorial stirs in me nostalgia, fascination, and annoyance.
It is an exact replica of the statue in New York City’s Central Park, created by US sculptor Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington (probably the first and for a long time the only equestrian statue of Marti). The original was completed in 1958, when the artist was 82 years old, and the monument was inaugurated in 1965 (there’s a tale of intrigue behind the delay). I’ve never been to NYC’s Central Park, but I often pass by the Cuban Presidential Palace (now the Museum of the Revolution; I’ve known the area since childhood), so seeing the replica gives me a strange sense of nostalgia—like a reverse déjà vu.
The fascination lies in the careful craftsmanship of the sculpture, which portrays exactly that: a mortally wounded man falling from his mount. Anna Huntington was a master of equestrian statues; she began learning animal anatomy from her father, a professor of paleontology at Harvard and MIT. And now, let me explain why the statue annoys me.
First of all, its location. This sculptural Marti dies eternally right next to the Spanish Embassy, whose colonialism in Cuba and Puerto Rico he fought against. At the foot of the embassy, right beside the statue of the dying Apostle, hundreds of Cubans line up for Spanish citizenship and visas to travel to that country. I have nothing against dual citizenship, and even less against international travel, but this spatial coincidence is somewhat grotesque. The grotesqueness lies in a sad irony that is not just historical or geopolitical but experiential: people here seek other lives in other lands mainly due to the conditions in this country—under discourses that evoke Marti as a founding figure—and now it seems as though he came to die next to the embassy of the former colonial power.
Second, again the location, and something more: the statue stands in a plaza called Parque 13 de Marzo, in homage to those who, on that date in 1957, stormed the Presidential Palace (which dominates the square) in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate dictator Fulgencio Batista. It was to Batista that Huntington dedicated the original monument in NYC. This tension overshadows the fact that, although Marti was surely a major inspiration for the Revolutionary Directorate command that led the 1957 assault, placing a monument to him there tends to obscure the tribute conveyed by the plaza’s name. Among so many sculptural images of Marti—one of the most representative and beloved just a few meters away (in Havana’s Central Park), and several others nearby—having a dying Marti there mutes the intended meaning of that image.
Third—again the location, but from a semiotic perspective. The equestrian statue of Marti is positioned right BEHIND another, older equestrian statue of General-in-Chief Maximo Gomez, depicting the Cuban Generalissimo surveying the space, which in this case aligns with the sea of the Florida Strait. Gomez died of old age, after the war. He was very close to Marti, but not without disagreements. Marti’s death came just hours after a heated debate with Gomez, in which Marti apparently argued forcefully with him and Maceo over how to conduct and organize the war. On the day Marti died, Gomez, already in battle, insisted multiple times that Marti stay behind the front lines, but Marti—militarily subordinate to Gomez—disobeyed, ignored the order, and went to confront a well-trained Spanish army, dressed in a black suit and armed with a revolver. He wasn’t behind Gomez; he was ahead. Why he did so is another matter, but the positioning of the monuments to these heroes morbidly falsifies the circumstances of the fall of the more universal of the two. It erases from Havana’s map the memory of a Marti who defied his military command.
Anna Hyatt Huntington didn’t just dedicate the original Central Park Marti to Fulgencio Batista. In Havana, since 1956, in a cozy little park very close to Civic Plaza (home to the largest Marti statue), there has been another monument by the US sculptor: The Torch Bearers, or The Relay: an exhausted man leaning on a stone passes a torch to another man on horseback. The statue pays homage to the Hispanic legacy and is one of several identical sculptures found in the USA, Latin America, and Spain (Madrid and Valencia). The Spanish versions of the statue were gifts from Huntington to the Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, whose government was then promoting “Hispanidad” as a form of soft power in the Americas; the Cuban replica was for Batista. A hippie once confessed to me that in his circle, they joked that what the man on the stone was handing to the one on horseback was a joint.
I believe that for many Havana residents, more than anything else, Huntington’s dying Marti serves as a reminder of the end of the Obama era and the rapprochement that took place between the US and Cuban governments, with the resulting increase in people-to-people exchanges—even though the statue was installed after the Obama era had already ended.
I don’t know of many equestrian statues that depict a historical hero in the act of dying. In fact, I can’t think of another right now. Marti’s statue re-enacts the myth of his death. Myths exist where things remain unexplained—like, for example, why Marti disobeyed Gomez, and whether it was Gomez who tore out the pages of Marti’s campaign diary that contained notes about the fateful meeting between the three main leaders of the revolution.
It is a statue with originality, therefore, but at the same time controversial—and in my opinion, more controversial because of where it is located than for any other reason. There are working-class neighborhoods in Cuba practically devoid of monuments; Alamar is one of them. Just because it’s a working-class district made mostly of prefabricated five-story buildings doesn’t mean Alamar wouldn’t deserve to have Huntington’s sculpture in one of its parks.
Or it could fittingly be placed in Dos Ríos itself, the town in the former Oriente province where the event that Huntington so skillfully sought to depict actually took place.