Speaker: Angel Esteban, University of Delaware
The figure of José Martí has been used in different ways since his death in 1895 to the present, by individuals or groups that have wanted to assimilate it to certain political causes of opposite rank, social, religious, cultural and literary. For almost a hundred years, that image has almost completely derived from a hagiographic vision of the Cuban writer and revolutionary, but since the eighties and especially in the last years of the twentieth century and the beginning of the present, a demystifying process of the hero has begun, that has sown certain controversies among the intellectuals. The historical novel is one of the most representative ways of this process of reactualization of the Cuban identity associated with the charismatic leader.