Completely dedicated to organizing the so-called Necessary War, his speeches were an effective ideological weapon for gaining sympathizers for the cause. He used them to unite those who wished to rise up against Spanish colonialism and to express his ideas about the republic he wanted to form in Cuba, a republic “with all and for the good of all,” where Blacks, whites, and mestizos, women and men, would have equal opportunities.
This is how a young friend of his describes him: “His declamation contributed to his intuition. His well-tuned voice had infinite inflections. He began with a soft, measured tone. He spoke slowly, convincingly. He articulated carefully, tracing the contours of his words, slightly emphasizing the final s’s, in the Mexican style. He didn’t pronounce the c’s and z’s in the Spanish way. But when he touched on the subject of the oppressed homeland and the need to fight for it, the flow of words increased, accelerating the tempo: his voice took on bronze accents and a torrent flowed from his lips. The thin man of medium height towered over the platform, and the audience was captivated by his spell.”
Although many of his speeches have not survived the ages, due to the lack of today’s technological advances at that time, those that did attest to his magnificence as an orator. Two of the most important are “With All and for the Good of All” and “The New Pines.”
These speeches were delivered at the Cuban Lyceum in Tampa on November 26 and 27, 1891, respectively, where he was invited by the Ignacio Agramonte Club to participate in an artistic and literary event benefiting the Club. This speech was taken down in shorthand by Francisco María González, a lecturer at Eduardo H. Gato’s workshop in Key West, and reproduced on loose sheets with the title “For Cuba and for Cuba.”
By this time, he had renounced all his journalistic, diplomatic, and literary activities to devote himself entirely to revolutionary work, and his prestige had spread beyond the exile community in New York and other cities in the northeastern United States.
“For Cuba, which is suffering, the first word. Cuba must be taken as an altar, to offer our lives to it, and not as a pedestal, to raise ourselves upon it.” Thus began his speech, “With all and for the good of all,” in which he outlined his vision of what the Republic of Cuba would be like once the ties that bound it to Spain were broken: “Either the republic is based on the complete character of each of its children, the habit of working with their hands and thinking for themselves, the honest exercise of self and respect, as if it were a family honor, for the honest exercise of others; the passion, in short, for human dignity—or the republic is not worth a tear from our women or a single drop of blood from our brave men.”
The following day, November 27, at the same place, at a tribute evening organized by the Cuban Convention to commemorate the execution of medical students in 1871, Martí gave the speech entitled “The New Pines,” who were none other than themselves, the new generation of revolutionaries who would continue, with the help and experience of the veterans, walking the path of independence.
“The landscape was damp and blackish; the muddy stream ran turbulent; the reeds, few and withered, did not sway their greenery plaintively, like those beloved ones through which those who fertilized them with their death beg for redemption, but rather, harsh and shaggy, like foreign daggers, pierced the heart: and high among the torn clouds, a pine tree, defying the storm, stood tall, its crown intact. The sun suddenly broke over a clearing in the forest, and there, in the flash of the sudden light, I saw, above the yellowing grass, rising, around the black trunk of the fallen pines, the joyful clusters of the new pines. That’s what we are: new pines!”