peña del júcaro martiano: a space for free thought in the interior of the island

Abstract

When 1995 marked the 100th anniversary of José Martí's death, three men from Camagüey decided to pay tribute to him through a poetic action or performance, continuity of a legend whose origin goes back to the Diario de Campaña, and which we learned about through the beautiful book of testimonies Martí a flor de labios, by Froilán Escobar, who gathers it from the mouth of one of those peasants who surrounded the hero in his final days. Apocryphal or not, the story speaks about the júcaro tree under whose shade Martí rested, and of which there is an annotation in the Diary: "They clean a tree for us and we write at the foot". It seems that the peasants of the area marked the tree, which they worshipped until 1952 when it was felled by order of a landowner.