There is no disease to stop me.
Jose Marti

To evoke - "with tender affection and respect," according to the Apostle - the 168th anniversary of the birth of José Martí Pérez, I have decided to review the book Diseases of José Martí , authored by the writer and neurosurgeon, Dr. Ricardo Hodelín Tablada, preface by the doctor in Historical Sciences Ibrahim Hidalgo Paz , and published by Editorial Oriente.

In that text, written with tender love and respect for the life and work of the founder of the newspaper Patria , as well as scientific and historical research, the Master of Science also investigates, with the ability of a surgeon, each and every one somatic affections suffered by the most universal of Cubans during his brief life trajectory, and which - as he well clarifies in the quote that illustrates this review - could never stop him, much less keep him away - not even in dreams - from what the Maestro considered his most sacred duty: the fight for the freedom of Cuba.

For the outstanding researcher and historian from Santiago, the greatest poet of the great Latin American homeland was one of the first thinkers to proclaim the body-mind-soul unity and to make theoretical-conceptual contributions to the development of the nascent Cuban psychological science, cultivated in our country. through the venerable father Félix Varela: the ethical-humanist concept of man, the integral formation that he must receive throughout his life, as well as the unity of the cognitive and the affective, are his valuable contributions to the science of the spirit insular.

With the support of these coordinates, as well as in the writings of Martí (including the letters and testimonies of his contemporaries), Dr. Hodelín Tablada relives in the reader's imagination the moments in which the fragile biogenic balance on which the theory was sustained was altered. physical health of Martí, for whom "[…] the body is nothing more than a servant of the spirit."

The author of this jewel of specialized literature shows - among other documentary evidence - the findings of the forensic medical study carried out on the corpse of the Major General of the Liberation Army, who with his premature fall in Dos Ríos on May 19, 1895, offers him to posterity irrefutable proof of what he thought about Thanatos : "death should not be painful for those who have lived well, or for those who knew the virtues closely", because "[...] to die is to continue traveling ».

This work is structured in six chapters, very well articulated between them: "Don't cry for your love"; "Infinite pain"; "The noble fiber of the soul"; "What little health I have left"; "I will triumph after death"; "Long and serious illness"; annexes, graphic testimony, and an extensive bibliography of Marti, active and passive.

I am sure that the serene and reflective reading of Diseases of José Martí , by Dr. Ricardo Hodelín Tablada, will become a gentle caress to the minds and souls of those of us who carry in our hearts the ethical, intellectual and spiritual legacy that one of humanity left behind. the greatest geniuses of all time.