A Posthumous History of Jose Marti

A Posthumous History of Jose Marti: The Apostle and His Afterlife focuses on Marti's posthumous legacy and his lasting influence on succeeding generations of Cubans on the island and abroad. Over 120 years after his death on a Cuban battlefield in 1895, Marti studies have long been the contested property of opposing sides in an ongoing ideological battle. Both the Cuban nation-state, which claims Marti as a crucial inspiration for its Marxist revolutionary government, and diasporic communities in the US who honor Marti as a figure of hope for the Cuban nation-in-exile, insist on the centrality of his words and image for their respective visions of Cuban nationhood. The book also explores more recent scholarship that has reassessed Marti's literary, cultural, and ideological value, allowing us to read him beyond the Havana-Miami axis toward engagement with a broader historical and geographical tableau. Marti has thus begun to outgrow his mutually-reinforcing cults in Cuba and the diaspora, to assume his true significance as a hemispheric and global writer and thinker.