José Julián Martí Pérez (1853-1895) seems to have known from a very young age that racial difference and discrimination in Cuba, and its use by Whites as a mechanism for social division, were the greatest obstacles to overcome in the island’s quest for independence from Spain – and especially for the creation of a modern, legally and socially egalitarian country. However, his writing has traditionally been classified as literature, even though that same corpus was meant to “do work in the world,” not just be archived, gather dust, or be dissected for its literary value. His writing was performative in that it was not just descriptive. He believed that language could change the world, not deterministically or relatively, but by resolving contradictions such as the dichotomies that separated people by origin, skin color, ethnicity, culture, nationality, religion, and language. Ultimately, it is the rhetorical Martí, the illocutionary and perlocutionary force of his written and spoken words, that needs to be further examined if we are to fully appreciate the transformative potential of many of his writing.

This chapter illuminates the diverse, emergent views of reading, writing, and the literary that unfolded in Cuban journalism, a key player in nineteenth-century print culture. Drawing on both ephemeral and longer-lived newspapers and magazines, the chapter unpacks questions of normative practices, cultural tastes, linguistic correction, and the tensions among the informational, didactic, and entertainment functions of the printed word and with the literary-artistic value implicit in the notions of the “highbrow,” all of which were raised by the democratization of print culture’s outreach to anybody who could read or find someone to read to them. An analysis of the shifting meanings of the words periodismo [journalism] and lo literario [the literary] anchors these questions, in a chapter that also contextualizes journalism’s rise within pressing social issues and questions about access to literary culture by focusing further on journalism’s role as a forum for writing by free men and women of color, by a few enslaved individuals, and by white women.