Vol. 72/No. 49      December 15, 2008

Conference presentations and panels, according to the organizers, will discuss “how to confront the world crisis today and how to defend the interests of the vast majority of toiling humanity.” Most participants are expected to come from Mexico, the United States, Cuba, and Canada.

Martí was the most outstanding international leader in Latin America as the 19th century came to a close and the imperialist epoch was born. He was the central organizer of Cuba’s final independence struggle against Spanish colonial rule. Juárez led Mexico’s 1858-61 democratic revolution and the 1862-67 war to defeat a French invasion. Lincoln, elected president of the United States in 1860, marshaled the forces that assured the victory of the second American revolution, which overthrew the slavocracy, and backed Juárez’s forces in Mexico.

“Guided by Martí’s statement, ‘To be educated is the only way to be free,’ the principal goal of the conference is to promote an Alternative for the Americas Inspired by the Ideas of Martí (in Spanish, Alternativa Martiana para las Américas—ALMA, or soul),” the organizers said in a conference announcement.

The International Conference on Martí, Juárez, and Lincoln in the Soul of Our America will include panels on topics such as: Martí’s thought in Cuba’s revolutionary struggles; Lincoln, Martí, Juárez, and the struggle to abolish slavery; Karl Marx and José Martí; Martí, pedagogy, and universalizing education and culture in Latin America; workers, farmers, and struggles for power; and the premise that “A better world is possible.”

The ALMA conference has broad interest for academics involved in Latin American, Mexican, and Cuban studies, as well as immigration and Black studies. Organizers are encouraging participation by Chicano, Latin American, Black, and other student organizations, as well as workers involved in the fight for immigrant rights and other social struggles.

Among the special guests at the event will be Armando Hart, president of the Cuban National Commission of the Martí Program. The ALMA conference itself came out of the success of Hart’s April 2008 speaking tour in Monterrey and Zacatecas, Mexico, in which he spoke to hundreds of interested students, teachers, artists, and others on “Marx and Martí in the Roots of Cuba’s Socialist Revolution” and related themes.

A historic leader of the Cuban Revolution, Hart was Cuba’s education minister during the massive 1961 campaign that wiped out illiteracy in Cuba, and later served as minister of culture for two decades.

Initial conference sponsors include the José Martí Cultural Society in Monterrey; Autonomous University of Nuevo León; Autonomous University of Coahuila; José Martí Studies Program at the University of Guadalajara; Center for Martí Studies in Havana; and the Latin American Studies Program at the University of Houston.

Among the U.S. academics promoting the conference are Dr. Susan Kellogg, director of the University of Houston Latin American Studies Program; Dionicio Valdés of Michigan State University’s History Department; August Nimtz, professor of political science at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis; and Lorenzo Cano, associate director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Houston.

April 19 is the deadline for submitting titles and abstracts of papers to present at the conference. To register for the event and for more information, write to Alma2008@uh.edu, or contact Dr. Agueda Marisel Oliva of the Instituto José Martí de Educación Superior in Monterrey at marisel.oliva@josemarti.edu.mx.  
 
 
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