When President Obama placed a wreath at the memorial to José Martí on Monday, the president paid his respects to the most Cuban of Cuban writers — a journalist and poet whose ideals are invoked with heart-thumping zeal in both Miami and Havana.

He’s that rare descendant whom both sides of a feuding family claim as their own.

Or, as Achy Obejas, the Cuban-American novelist put it: “He’s a little like the Bible: Whatever you want to find support for, there’s usually a little something in his work that will reflect your desire.”

“Want some really gripping anti-imperialist words implicating the U.S. as a bully? Got it,” she said. “Want some poetry exalting individual freedom? Got it. A little anti-racism? No problem. Warnings about dictators? Here it is.”

Among the old guard in Havana, Martí is best known for his searing criticism of an America obsessed with wealth and blind to inequality. Martí saw it firsthand. He lived “in the monster, and I know its entrails,” by which he apparently meant the United States. He lived in New York just about longer than anywhere else, and while he wrote admiringly about the American culture of “utility” — “this overwhelming and invincible, constant and frenetic drive to expand” — he also condemned the arrogance he saw and identified divisions still apparent today.

Here’s Martí writing about class warfare in Chicago in 1886: “This republic in its excessive worship of wealth, has fallen, without any of the restraints of tradition, into the inequality, injustice and violence of the monarchies.”

Here he is writing on Karl Marx and societal values in 1890: “Rome prided itself on its generals: The United States prides itself on its rich men.”

And yet, ultimately, Martí endures for Cubans and many non-Cubans because he focused on sovereignty, for both individuals and small nations fearing imperialism.

Latin America, he wrote, has long been forced to worry “about the disdain of the formidable neighbor who does not know her,” and sovereignty has long been a Cuban obsession.

And not just when Cubans look north. Martí died in 1895 fighting the Spanish for Cuban independence and he often worried about how his fellow soldiers would run the country if they won. He seemed quite aware that many would not live up to his ideals: “To govern well, one must attend closely to the reality of the place that is governed,” he warned.

Just look at the memorial Mr. Obama is visiting. It was started under Fulgencio Batista, the inept, head-bashing dictator who fled ahead of Fidel Castro’s march into Havana. The site was a cash register of corruption — when the design was chosen in 1943, The Times noted that “criticism has been publicly and openly expressed” on the exorbitant cost.

The hulking memorial ended up a homely one, too: The Martí statue, nearly 60 feet tall, was designed to go with its angular tower reaching about 360 feet into the air.

But then the memorial was appropriated as a backdrop for Fidel Castro’s communist government.

Mr. Obama’s arrival at the memorial will carry some symbolic weight. “Standing in that space seems a gesture of both modesty and daring,” said Ana María Dopico, a comparative literature professor at New York University.

“His visit to the monument honors a physical space that has been the anchor of the Plaza of the Revolution, a site of mass political life where Martí was often invoked to denounce American imperialism, aggression and embargo,” Prof. Dopico said. “But the wreath-laying is not merely official stagecraft to signal the end of a long stalemate. It allows for a kind of mind-blowing recoding, of monuments and leaders and national protagonists.”