🇨🇺José
Martí

José Martí was sixteen years old when the Spanish colonial authorities arrested him for subversive correspondence, sentenced him to six years of hard labor in the stone quarries of Havana, and branded his legs with iron shackles that permanently damaged his health. He was seventeen when he was transferred to the Isle of Pines and then deported to Spain. He was eighteen when he published, in Madrid, his first political pamphlet: El presidio político en Cuba — Political Prison in Cuba — a searing account of the conditions in which Cuban political prisoners were held. It is one of the most powerful pieces of political prose ever written in Spanish, and it was written by a teenager who had already been broken by the system he was describing. He would spend the next twenty-five years — in Spain, Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, and New York — preparing the revolution that would end Spanish rule in Cuba. He died on his first day of battle.

Born in Havana on January 28, 1853, to Spanish parents of modest means, José Julián Martí Pérez grew up in a colonial Cuba stratified by race and class, where the Spanish-born enjoyed full rights and the Cuban-born were administered as subjects of an empire. His political consciousness was formed early by his teacher, the poet and nationalist Rafael María de Mendive, who was himself arrested for supporting the Ten Years' War — Cuba's first independence uprising, which began in 1868 when Martí was fifteen. His schoolboy solidarity with the cause led to his own arrest and imprisonment. The experience did not moderate him. It radicalized him permanently.

In his years of exile — he lived in New York from 1880 to 1895, the longest continuous period — Martí became one of the most prolific and versatile Spanish-language writers of the nineteenth century. He wrote political journalism, literary criticism, children's literature, and poetry. He was the Latin American correspondent for major newspapers including La Nación of Buenos Aires and La Opinión Nacional of Caracas, and his chronicles — long, essayistic dispatches about American life — introduced Latin American readers to the Gilded Age United States with a perspicacity and elegance that still astonishes. He described the Brooklyn Bridge, Walt Whitman, the Democratic National Convention, Coney Island, and the economic anxieties of industrial capitalism with the same analytical precision and moral intensity he brought to Cuban politics.

Versos sencillos — Simple Verses — published in 1891, are his most celebrated poems: short, formally precise lyrics in the octosyllabic romance tradition, written with apparent simplicity that conceals great emotional and intellectual density. They were composed in the Catskill Mountains, where Martí had gone to recover his health following the stress of organizing the Cuban independence movement. The opening stanzas — "I am a sincere man / from the land where the palm trees grow / and before dying I want / to let out the verses of my soul" — became, decades after his death, the lyrics of "Guantanamera," the world's most famous Cuban song, performed by Pete Seeger in the 1960s and known in every country on earth. The verses themselves are tougher and more melancholy than the song's joyful associations suggest.

His essay Nuestra América — Our America — published in 1891, is the founding document of Latin American anti-imperialism: a call for the peoples of Latin America to govern themselves according to their own realities rather than the imported political models of Europe or North America, and a warning about the growing power of the United States in the hemisphere that reads as prophetic from the vantage of the twenty-first century. "The scorn of our formidable neighbor who does not know us is Our America's greatest danger," he wrote. The essay is the intellectual foundation of Latin American independence thought and is still read as the essential statement of the region's self-understanding.

In 1892, Martí co-founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party in Tampa and Key West, organizing the Cuban exile community in the United States and raising funds for the independence war. He returned to Cuba on April 11, 1895, with the rebel general Máximo Gómez, landing by rowboat on the southeastern coast. On May 19, 1895 — thirty-nine days after landing — he rode into the Battle of Dos Ríos against explicit orders from Gómez, who had told him to stay back. He was shot from his horse and killed by Spanish soldiers. He was forty-two. He had never seen a free Cuba. He is the Apostle of Cuba — the father of its national identity, the source of its moral vocabulary, the martyr whose sacrifice made the independence movement's final success feel morally inevitable. No other figure in Cuban culture approaches his stature.