Today we are commemorating the 120th anniversary of the martyrdom of our national hero, Dr. Jose Rizal. In the early morning of December 30, 1896, after the Spanish military court found him guilty of conspiracy, sedition and rebellion, he took the firing squad’s bullets and dropped dead face up in Bagumbayan. Paeans to his heroism will not bring him back to life. We will do Rizal more honor remembering not only how he died, but how he lived.
In his most prescient essay, The Philippines A Century Hence, written in 1889 and in his December 15, 1896, memorandum for use by his counsel, Rizal made the following predictions: One, “the Philippines will one day declare herself independent”; two, “the great American Republic with interests in the Pacific…may one day think of acquiring possessions beyond the seas”; three, “the Philippines will defend with indescribable ardor the liberty she bought at the cost of so much blood and sacrifice”; four, “Japan will swallow us”; five, “[once liberated] the Philippines will, perhaps, establish a federal republic”; and six, “[the Philippines] will, perhaps, enter openly the wide road of progress and will work jointly to strengthen the Mother Country at home, as well as abroad…”
All but two of his predictions had come to pass. Now Malacanang is vigorously pursuing federalism while Congress, as a constituent assembly, is poised to take it up. One wonders: Could Rizal’s felicitous last vision for the country been playing out in his mind even before he put it in writing?
For sure, he attempted to give it teeth when he launched La Liga Filipina on July 2, 1892, seven days after returning from Hong Kong. The mutual aid society sought to unite the archipelago into a homogenous body, whose members were bound by a shared responsibility to defend it against injustice and promote the common good through education, agriculture and commerce, and the pursuit of sociopolitical reforms.
Sadly, La Liga was short-lived. On July 6, 1892, Rizal was arrested for smuggling subversive antifriar leaflets into Manila. Without a trial, the Spanish authorities banished him to Dapitan on July 15, 1892.
In Dapitan Rizal had no friends, no position of influence, no money. And the town was backwater poor. Despite these obstacles, he would transform Dapitan into a maquette for his ideal society.
Lady Luck was on the hero’s side. His host, Dapitan governor and military commandant Capt. Ricardo Carnicero, who would later become his friend, a Spanish resident of Dipolog and he invested on a lottery ticket. They won the second prize.
With his share of P6,200, Rizal sent P2,000 to his father in Manila and P200 to pay a debt to his friend Basa in Hong Kong. The rest of the money enabled him to move to Talisay, a coastal barrio off the Dapitan poblacion, where he bought a 16-hectare piece of land, big enough to accommodate a spacious house, a clinic and a school and dormitory for boys. The property also teemed with fruit trees and had ample space for growing rice and corn and raising livestock. Eventually, the hero, buying more land, turned the spread into a sprawling 70-hectare model farm.
Rizal taught farmers modern farming methods through the use of fertilizers, crop rotation and farm machines learned from his sojourns abroad. He introduced fishermen to scientific fishing methods to increase their catch. He taught people the European method of brickmaking, bought and sold copra and hemp, and formed a cooperative to break the Chinese trade monopoly in town.
As Dapitan’s self-appointed development technocrat, he inspired the town to undertake public-works projects. The folk provided labor while local authorities, both government and religious, voluntarily provided funding. Together they built Dapitan’s first water systems made up of clay and bamboo pipes, introduced street lighting using coconut oil, dredged canals to control malaria and beautified the town plaza replete with flowers and a map of Mindanao.
In his one-doctor hospital, he performed surgeries. He treated the poor gratis but made the rich pay so that he could buy medical supplies and instruments.
He anchored his school on a strong liberal-arts curriculum to enrich the mind. He taught his young wards fencing, boxing, wrestling, hunting, swimming and sailing and took them on dangerous excursions. He instructed them on agriculture to learn the practical arts, to collect butterflies, bugs, shells and reptiles to love nature, and to render community service to become sensitive to the needs of others. In short, he inspired in his pupils the concept of the “whole man”, one courageous and fit to stand up to the unpredictable world outside the classroom where intelligence was needed most.
All the while, Rizal, the polyglot and polymath, continued corresponding with friends both in the Philippines and abroad and wrote poetry, a vocabulary and history.
On July 31, 1896, Rizal left Dapitan for Cuba to serve as doctor for the Spanish army fighting Cuban rebels. Nearly the entire town and its marching band saw off the man who had empowered them to live better lives. They knew they would never see their “doctor” again. When the band played Chopin’s funeral march, they wept.
Going back to his felicitous last prediction: “[the Philippines] will, perhaps, enter openly the wide road of progress and will work jointly to strengthen the Mother Country at home, as well as abroad…” In Dapitan Rizal turned his prison without bars into a microcosm of a happy, progressive community. Perhaps, the time has come for his felicitous prediction to be realized on a national scale.
This is no idle musing. It is supported by hard data. According to the London School of Economics Professor Danny Quah, “… by 2050 the world’s economic centers of gravity, a theoretical measure of the focal point of global economic activity based on GDP, will have shifted eastward to lie somewhere between China and India.” Concurs the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU): “53 percent of the world’s GDP will be generated in the [Asian] region.”