Barack Obama turned to address the Cuban people directly. He began with a citation from José Martí:
“Libertad es el derecho que todo hombre tiene a ser honrado y a pensar y hablar sin hipocresía”
“Liberty is the right of every man to be honest.”
http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/the-new-normal
In “The New Normal: On Cuba and the Power of Translation,” Esther Allan analyzes the role of translation in the context of Barack Obama’s strategic use of the words of Cuba’s iconic and beloved insurgent, writer José Martí:
During the historic speech on December 17, 2014, when he announced the normalization of relations with Cuba, Barack Obama turned to address the Cuban people directly. He began with a citation from José Martí: “Liberty is the right of every man to be honest.” Cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar, a daughter of Cuban exiles whose work focuses on Cuba, hailed this as one of the most significant features of the speech for all Cubans, on or off the island. As a translator of Martí, I have to agree. Raul Castro would appear to agree as well, judging by the fact that a giant portrait of José Martí was hanging on the wall directly behind him throughout the speech he made at the same time to announce the prisoner exchange and the new understanding between Cuba and the U.S.
Martí’s life spanned the second half of the nineteenth century. He spent most of his adulthood in New York City, where he wrote voluminously about the United States in dispatches that were published across Latin America. Cuba was still a colony of Spain at the time and Martí was the primary architect of Cuban independence. But Cuba’s founding father was killed in 1895, in a skirmish with Spanish forces in the early weeks of the insurgency he started. Instead of Cuba’s revolution of independence, Martí’s struggle became the Spanish-American War, a battle between two empires. The United States occupied Cuba for most of the ensuing decade, and established a naval station on Guantánamo that, as we all know, is still there.
Martí’s complete works add up to twenty-four volumes in the most recent critical edition prepared by the Institute of José Martí Studies in Havana. It is, by my count, at least the twelfth edition of the complete works to have been compiled; the first was published in Washington D.C., Havana, Rome, and Berlin between 1900 and 1933. Other Obras completas have been published in Madrid, Caracas, Paris, and, of course, Havana. This editorial proliferation is only a small measure of Martí’s importance to Cubans and others across the globe.
As soon as Obama cited it, I started trying to dig up the source of the line. Martí’s work is so vast, so replete with complex juxtapositions and perspectives that people have tended to break it down into decontextualized aphorisms like this one. Quite a few of these turn out not to have been said by Martí at all, but I figured Obama was way too smart for that, and I was right.
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[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]What Marti actually said is considerably more complex than the translation given.
Even I, with my very poor Spanish, can see that at a glance and mechanical translations support it.
