José Martí

Born in Havana, Cuba, José Julián Martí y Pérez was the son of poor Spanish immigrants. Thanks to the aid of his teacher, he was able to go to high school just at the time the Ten Years' War, Cuba's first struggle for independence, began. Martí quickly committed himself to the cause, publishing his first newspaper La Patria Libre (Free Fatherland) in 1869. Soon he was arrested for denouncing a pro-Spanish classmate and was sentenced to six years at hard labor.

Freed after only a few months, Martí began the exile that would characterize the better part of the rest of his life. He went to Spain where he published, El presidio político en Cuba, a rousing attack on Cuban prisons. He received his university education in Madrid and Zaragoza and then returned to the Western Hemisphere.

From 1881 until his fateful return to Cuba in 1895, Martí spent much of his time in New York. He reported on life in the United States for many newspapers in Latin America including Opinión Nacional (Caracas) and La Nación (Buenos Aires). He wrote everything from a magazine for children (Edad de Oro) to poetry (Versos sencillos 1891), to essays on the nature of the United States which he admired for its energy and industry as well as its notable statesmen, particularly the framers of the Constitution. However, he denounced its imperialist attitude toward its southern neighbors.

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