Vol. 74/No. 9      March 8, 2010

As part of that presentation, mathematics professor Carlos Cepero spoke about Martí’s appreciation of form and beauty in nature and quoted from his writings. For Martí, he emphasized, the greatest products of human creativity enhance, as opposed to destroy, such natural form and beauty.

To illustrate the point, Cepero pointed to the graceful power of the Eiffel Tower, designed and built in the late 1880s by what were at the time some of the most farsighted engineers in France as a symbol of the country’s modernity. The tower was constructed as an explicit response to the Sacré-Coeur Basilica on the heights of Montmartre, one of the greatest eyesores in Paris.

The Sacré-Coeur, whose cornerstone was laid in 1875, was built by decree of France’s National Assembly “to atone for the crimes of the communards”—a monument to the French bourgeoisie’s reactionary drowning in blood of the revolutionary uprising that had brought to power the first workers government in history, the Paris Commune of 1871.

What a wonderful joining of class-struggle politics with scientific training and education. The real “liberal arts!”

—MARY-ALICE WATERS