el machete: Get Your Red Hands Off Him!

With fidel fading, the Cuban communist party is attempting to latch on to a new hero, a new symbol, to be the face of the party: José Martí.

[W]ithin weeks of [f]idel [c]astro undergoing emergency surgery for an undisclosed intestinal problem in July 2006, a delegation from Cuba's Communist Party flew to Vietnam to consult with their counterparts on how to maintain control after Cuba's leader dies.

"Our purpose is to study the Vietnamese model, where the party was able to preserve its power and organization intact after Ho Chi Minh's death," a Cuban official, who participated in talks with the Vietnamese, [said].

The lesson imparted was that for the Communist Party, however it chooses to evolve, to succeed, it has to transcend [c]astro's mortality by linking itself to someone who, long dead, is still very much alive in the hearts and minds of Cubans.

That person is none other than José Martí, the 19th century liberator who was a leader in Cuba's War of Independence from Spain, and who died in the battlefield in 1895. A poet, his eloquence reverberates in the Cuban mind, and Martí’s writings remain among the most eloquent in 19th century Spanish-language literature.

Commie overlords: get your grimy red hands off him. If Martí were still alive, he'd be a freedom fighter for the people just as he was when he stood up against Spain, and thus likely would have been writing his poems in jail. Or worse, had Martí been alive during the beginning of the castro years, his death by che's pistol would have been all but certain.

José Martí loved our beautiful island and its people too much to associate himself with a government that has done so much harm; on the contrary, with rosa blanca in hand he would have railed against the communist hypocrisy and the autocratic machine. Popular opinion has already glorified the true evil that was che; now will the re-writers of history bastardize José Martí's legacy by posthumously associating him with castro's communist regime?