The latter part of 1896 was a pivotal juncture for Jose Rizal, who, after having spent four years as an exile in Dapitan, sought permission to sail for an embattled Cuba as a medical volunteer. The wars of independence against Spain were simultaneously being waged at the time by revolutionaries from both colonies. The Spanish Crown was in danger of losing its last remaining colonies which were being coveted by American expansionists at the tail end of the nineteenth century, including Puerto Rico which was swiftly turned over to the United States in 1898.
Rizal, who was being beseeched by adherents of the Katipunan movement to support the rebellion in his own country, turned the other way instead, towards offering his medical skills to combat an ongoing epidemic in Cuba. Yellow fever had already claimed the lives of thousands of troops and civilians alike at the height of a rebellion.
Ramon Blanco, then Governor-General of the Philippines who had placed eight provinces in Luzon under martial law, was more lenient with Rizal, giving him a reprieve from the doldrums of being cast out in isolated Dapitan, though not without greater peril, the permission to travel and serve as military doctor in the battle-weary, plague-stricken Spanish territory of Cuba.
Whether this was a benevolent gesture by Rizal to demonstrate his loyalty to Spain or a tactical move to dissociate himself from the brains of the muddled early stages of the revolution in his own country, Blanco was amenable to Rizal’s request. This blunder by Blanco infuriated the conservatives which included the Catholic Church. He was forced to rescind his decision and ordered Rizal’s arrest while he was en route to Cuba. Rizal’s destiny with martyrdom was ascertained when Camilo Polavieja, a puppet of friars, was chosen to replace the more lenient Blanco, to pin down the archenemy of the church, so to speak, and oversee the court martial that led to Rizal’s execution towards the end of 1896.
The sudden turn of events leading to Rizal being sent back to Manila obscures the grounds by which Rizal made the unflattering choice of volunteering offshore when his compatriots were seeking his moral and symbolic leadership for their own struggle at home. Some revolutionaries as well as detractors of Rizal laid blame on him for being uncommitted to the cause of Filipino rebels and a sell out to the cause of colonial Spain which was then fighting a much larger rebellion in Cuba.
What must have been unfathomable to those compatriots whom Rizal disappointed was his commitment to offer his medical service under the colonial army that was being led by none other than the General-in-Chief Valeriano Weyler himself, who earned the moniker ‘El Carnicero’ or ‘The Butcher’ from the American press. Rizal despised the man himself for making life miserable for his family and all of Calamba back in the 1880s. It was Weyler’s later assignment in Cuba moreover, where he displayed his most ruthless suppression of the rebellion through the policy of mass-concentration which is estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of Cubans.
Had Rizal been allowed to pursue this dauntless mission with nothing but an indomitable faith in the Divine Providence, the patriot, not that he was conscious of his imminent martyrdom, was risking the version of heroism that made him immortalized over a probable unglorified demise in the jungle trails of Cuba. Prior to his departure, he assured his ailing mother, “not all who go to Cuba die; anyway, if one has to die, it is better to die doing some good.”
Had he died of a mosquito bite, all the good he had done would have been eclipsed by the vicious yellow fever virus. Just imagine. Undeterred by the grim scenario in Cuba, his firm decision ‘to do some good’ under the flag of his own people’s oppressors is unheard of in any corner in the world of lesser mortals who could not even protect and save their own kind.
Rizal’s temerity was unmatched and often misinterpreted as a self-conscious effort to aggrandize himself dying a hero’s death. The Cavite Mutiny and martyrdom of GomBurZa, (the three priests executed for subversion in 1872), made an indelible impression on the young eleven-year old Rizal, that his satirical essays, stories and novel’s propulsion to expose the inequity of abusive Spanish authority and religious orders, became his lifelong undertaking.
Both colonies shared the same goal of achieving independence from the Spanish empire through armed resistance, though the Cuban Liberation Army had began its protracted war against the common enemy much sooner than the newly formed Katipunan in Luzon. Rizal could never support a revolution that was thrown into disorder by treachery and infighting, aside from being ill equipped. The aim of La Liga Filipina he founded was to unite Filipinos and press the administration for social reforms.
He did not call for an armed revolution that was bereft of ideals. Yet he was banished for laying out principles deemed necessary for a country to survive and thrive as a people. Promoting the rights of Filipinos as equal to any man in the civilized world was his desire, the way the French revolution was successful in its struggle to achieve the rights and freedom for the common man. This was the same mainspring that drove Cuban revolutionaries to launch three wars of independence against Spain, which began with the Ten Years’ War spearheaded by Carlos Manuel de Cespedes in 1868.
Had it not been for the discovery of the ill-organized Filipino secret society Katipunan, the outbreak against authority would not have turned instead into a massive crackdown which resulted in thousands of arrests, not to mention a number of executions.
Though he supported the cause of freedom from Spanish oppression, Rizal’s idea of independence, knowing how volatile the situation was with the remarkable ineptitude of insurgents, was more centered on the liberation of the masses from ignorance and servitude, not to mention their being credulous and superstitious. His vision of deliverance of society is one that fosters national dignity and at the time that he wanted to witness for himself the realities of a long-drawn out revolution in Cuba, he could only envision the road to emancipation for his countrymen to be unimaginably more gruesome.
Rizal was a proponent of institutional reforms by peaceful means. He had no plan whatsoever of organized violence to go along with the rising tide of revolution. Though he never advocated violence, Rizal, nonetheless, had become the symbolic center of a growing movement for Filipino national consciousness. And rightly so.
It was his martyrdom that served as the catalyst that precipitated the Philippine Revolution, a revolution mired by a historical narrative of treachery, murder and assassination of two of its illustrious military leaders, Andres Bonifacio and Antonio Luna by their own compatriots. Had he borne arms to fight, Rizal could have been just another victim in the power struggle.
But no, Rizal had a more ‘graceful departure’ at Bagumbayan, thanks to the intervention of ‘devoted’ enemies who are adept at parables, dramaturgy and bizarre rituals. It was worthy of a poet’s romantic farewell to his weepy, but quick to festive mood, Motherland. ####