Battling for the National Icon

Abstract

In Latin America, the apogee of monument building in honor of dead national heroes took place between the last years of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century (Achúgar 2003, 208–9). This is the time when new nation states like Cuba (whose First Republic began in 1902) deepened their ceremonial repertoireas a way for their new governments to acquire legitimacy. Monument building as well served to articulate a sense of national history and memory (Winter 2010, 322; Nora 1989, 7–25). As Hugo Achúgar states about the official Latin American monuments: “the place of the monument, in peripheral countries, is the place of memory and the place from which one speaks, from which authority speaks […] monumentalization of memory proclaimed a single, national, homogenizing memory” (Achúgar 2003, 191; 208–9). Nevertheless, in spite of the official proclamations of national univocity and homogeneity, monuments— Martí’s among them— have almost always been sites where opposing discourses of power do battle or negotiate for control of national memory and authority over knowledge itself.¹ Martí’s monuments often become sites of countervoices to authority, expressions of discontent, controversy, reappropriation, and opposition.