José Martí
José Martí organised the war that freed Cuba from Spain and was killed in his first action, six weeks after landing, which is how a poet became a country's apostle. He was born in Havana in 1853 to Spanish parents, was arrested at sixteen for a letter calling a schoolmate a traitor for joining the Spanish army, served months breaking stone in a quarry with a chain on his ankle, and was deported to Spain in 1871. He studied law at Zaragoza and taught and wrote in Mexico and Guatemala. He went home under the amnesty of 1878, was deported again the next year, and settled in New York in 1880 for what turned out to be the rest of his life. From there he was a correspondent for the great newspapers of Buenos Aires and Mexico City, the finest Spanish-language journalist of the century by common consent, and the poet of the Versos sencillos, whose opening lines are the words of Guantanamera. The essay Nuestra América of 1891 is his political testament: the republics of the south should govern themselves out of their own conditions and not out of imported theory, and should watch the giant to the north with seven-league boots, which he had watched for fifteen years and knew better than any Latin American of his time. He built the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892 among the tobacco workers of Tampa and Key West, and reconciled the generals of the first war, Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, who did not much trust a civilian. He launched the rising of February 1895. He landed in Oriente with Gómez in April, was made major general, and on 19 May at Dos Ríos rode out ahead of the column against orders, into Spanish fire, and was killed at forty-two. Spain lost the island three years later to an American war he had spent his life warning against. Every faction in Cuba since has claimed him, which is the surest sign that none of them owns him.
- Lived: 1853 CE – 1895 CE
- Nationality: Cuban
- Roles: writer, poet, revolutionary, journalist
