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परिचय

José Martí, a Cuban poet and independence activist living in exile in New York, published the essay in January 1891 in La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York and shortly afterwards in the Mexican newspaper El Partido Liberal. It followed the first Pan-American Conference in Washington (1889–90), which had shown him the ambitions of the United States. He calls for Latin American governments grounded in knowledge of their own peoples – Indigenous, Black and rural – rather than in imported European or North American models: “the imported book has been defeated in America by the natural man”. There can be no racial hatred, he writes, because there are no races. The essay became a founding text of Latin American anti-imperialism.