A couple of days ago I was sent a Hypermedia article signed by Jorge Camacho in which he “interprets some little-known phrases by the Cuban writer —referring to José Martí!— with the aim of drawing attention to that dark, invisibilized side of his personality that neither Cuban institutions nor Cuban artists have shown any interest in exploring.”

Camacho assembles a group of illustrations titled My favorite Martí is not so pretty, using an AI application —ChatGPT— to visualize his reading of certain phrases. The program interprets them, as he himself does with poems, turning word into image.

Before writing a single line, I check his biography and realize —not without a certain astonishment, because this is not the kind of publication one can take lightly— that he is a “read and written” man. Professor of Spanish, Comparative Literature, and Latin American Studies at the University of Southern California. His courses span from early colonial literature to contemporary Latin American poetry and the novel. He has held leadership positions as Director of the Spanish Program, Graduate Director of the Comparative Literature Program, and Director of Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latinx Studies at the Walker Institute. His CV is extensive.

From the summit of such a copious résumé, one can throw potatoes and cabbages at passersby. There will always be a luminous reason for doing so. We all also have the right to interpret and “see” others just as they, if fortunate enough to be able to do so, can see and interpret us.

We have been interrogating —with a certain cruelty— almost all relevant figures of our culture, sport, or politics for a long time now. It is fashionable. To reinterpret everything, to erase what has been written, in order to narrate the world in the way we find convenient. This is not a Cuban problem, it is global. The best way to make oneself visible is to climb onto those who are already up there, fold them into the family, bring them down to ground level, ridicule them, and turn them into mass, into people, into neighbors and in-laws.

What more can be said about Martí, a figure claimed by all ideologies, about whom Lezama once said: the great mystery that accompanies us?

When I read his speeches, his prose —less so his poetry— I feel a kind of warm pride. It reassures me that he was born in Cuba, to Spanish parents. Conditions that perhaps weigh more than we imagine. The way I see it, I have no interest in seeing, for instance, a photograph of his rotting skull, of the dust he is today. I would not be interested in seeing him —if some kind of sorcery made it possible— vomiting from a hangover, complaining of a toothache. Shitting, farting.

We all have mothers, fathers, grandparents… loved relatives. Do you know why we are here? Because they fucked, they fornicatingly dissolved themselves in cries and sighs, in whatever acrobatic positions you can imagine. Are we really going to go there… and ask artificial intelligence to make a hardcore video of our profane conception? Do you want to see your holy mothers on all fours, tearing a pillow to shreds with their teeth? I don’t… I am not interested.