Where is our Marty? Not like with statues, pictures and speeches or actions and sermons. No, the Marty we’re talking about is completely different. Employees. The one we discover and carry beside us, in the hand or with the hand placed on his shoulder in the privacy of our conscience, and no one else knows about it.

This search raises other questions. How do we project it? In what tones? With solemnity or with irreverence with the threat (in both cases) to pervert it?

With so many events behind it, it seems like these questions have been more than answered and are therefore doomed to the obvious.

But it seems not. As the years passed and new people and circumstances appeared, José Martí returned to the coordinates of discovery.

Throughout this action, which involves time, intimate relationships can manifest in ways of accepting their thoughts and incorporating them into our lives.

And there, in this space, a plurality of views arises, which inevitably pass through individual and generic sensitivity. It’s an update point, really; but it can also become a zone of conflict.

Something similar was recently confirmed in a brief but heated debate on social media.

The problem was that the figure of Marty was featured in meme codes, those humorous graphic images that are always circulating the internet with a message and almost never go unnoticed.

The apostle in this case is presented in his traditional 19th-century costume, but with today’s glasses, and is accompanied by his thought: “The lazy one has respect, the great one goes forward. It’s a big job!”

However, the matter did not end there; Well, then came the dialogue (and this is where the other dimension of the meme came into play): “But Marty, you can’t say that,” he said. Immediately after that, below, in large letters, which in network codes can mean confirmation, the Apostle replied: “Of course I can.”

Everything seemed to be fine, until all sorts of questions and criteria began as to whether it was acceptable to treat the Hero of Two Rivers with such a high level of disrespect.

Someone made it clear that this was disrespectful (“What does the glasses have to do with it?” they repeated in their comments); while the other side claimed their right to move closer and live with Marty in the horizons of this emoji era, selfiecameras and software all heights and colors.

In truth, the figure of the apostle did not escape the seal of time in his images. To compile a list of these drawings would be long and even impossible to register in the coming years.

Many artists or ordinary people, the most modest and anonymous, with greater or lesser abilities for the plastic arts, made their graphics in ink, pencil or simple chalk on canvas, walls and sheets of paper, and even in the construction of frescoes. .

Each era brought its elevations and surprises. Only now it is the turn of the digital age with its push towards protocols.

So where do we stop? The question here would be insoluble, because the center of the problem, as it seems to us, is not so much in the forms, but in the content and consistency between intentions and what is shown.

Marty has endured every possible hardship due to the versatility of his work and the ethic in the service of the common good, which keeps his figure alive.

From there came his guide, as well as the affection that millions of beings have for him, even when this feeling is appreciated in the most modest or piquant drawings. Because he was that too: a whip full of poetry against injustice, but a whip nonetheless.

Therefore, the meme is welcome if through it this universal man continues to speak to us from his authenticity. Welcome to this drawing if it is filled with respect for the person and the culture it represents. Welcome, yes: because she is proof that she is not dead, because someone, no matter who, found her José Marti.

Source: Juventud Rebelde