Jose Marti

Jose Julian Marti y Perez was born on January 28, 1853, in Havana, then the capital of Spain's most valuable remaining American colony. His father, Mariano Marti, was a sergeant from Valencia who worked as a night watchman and minor official; his mother, Leonor Perez, came from the Canary Islands. The family was poor, and Marti grew up as the only son among seven sisters ^[1].

His talent surfaced early at the Escuela de Instruccion Primaria Superior Municipal de Varones, where the poet and educator Rafael Maria de Mendive took the boy under his protection, paid for his secondary schooling, and introduced him to literature and to the cause of Cuban self-rule ^[2]. When the Ten Years' War broke out in 1868, the fifteen-year-old Marti threw himself into patriotic writing. He published a dramatic poem, Abdala, in a small newspaper he helped produce, La Patria Libre, in January 1869 ^[1].

That same year the colonial authorities found a letter, signed by Marti and a classmate, denouncing a fellow student for marching with a Spanish volunteer corps. Charged with treason at sixteen, he was sentenced to six years of hard labor and sent to the San Lazaro stone quarries in Havana, where chains left injuries that troubled him for the rest of his life ^[3]. Family petitions eventually got the sentence commuted to banishment, and in January 1871 he was deported to Spain.

Spain gave the young deportee both a wound and a platform. Within months of arriving he published El presidio politico en Cuba (1871), a searing pamphlet describing the quarry prison and indicting the colonial system that ran it ^[3]. Rather than silencing him, exile turned him into a public voice.

He enrolled at the Universidad Central de Madrid and later transferred to the University of Zaragoza, where he completed degrees in law and in philosophy and letters by 1874 ^[1]. Alongside his studies he followed Spanish politics closely, and when the short-lived First Spanish Republic was proclaimed in 1873 he argued in print that a republic which denied Cuba its freedom betrayed its own principles ^[2].

Barred from returning home, Marti began the wandering that defined his adult years. He moved to Mexico City in 1875, joined its literary press, and then taught in Guatemala from 1877. A general amnesty after the Pact of Zanjon ended the Ten Years' War in 1878 allowed him back to Cuba, but the reprieve was brief. Suspected of conspiracy during the abortive Guerra Chiquita, he was deported to Spain a second time in 1879, slipped away to France, and by 1881 had settled in New York City ^[3].

New York became Marti's base for the last fourteen years of his life, and the most productive period of his career as a writer. He supported himself as a correspondent, sending chronicles of life in the United States to major Spanish-language newspapers, above all La Nacion of Buenos Aires, whose readers across Latin America came to know the giant republic to the north largely through his eyes ^[4]. He also served for a time as consul in New York for Uruguay, and later represented Argentina and Paraguay ^[1].

As a poet he helped open a new era in Spanish letters. Ismaelillo (1882), a small book of verses addressed to his young son, is often cited among the founding works of modernismo, the movement associated with Ruben Dario that renovated Spanish-language poetry at the end of the nineteenth century ^[5]. Versos sencillos (1891), written during a period of illness in the Catskills, distilled his style into short, deceptively plain stanzas; decades later several of them were set to music as the popular song Guantanamera ^[5].

His prose ranged just as widely. In 1889 he wrote and published La Edad de Oro, a magazine for the children of the Americas that he filled almost entirely himself and that remains a classic of children's literature in Spanish ^[4]. His 1891 essay Nuestra America argued that the nations south of the Rio Grande had to govern themselves according to their own realities rather than imported models, and warned of the expansionist ambitions of the United States, a country he admired in many respects and observed with growing unease ^[6].

Anyone asking who was Jose Marti in the 1890s would have received two answers: a celebrated man of letters, and the tireless organizer of Cuban independence. From New York he set out to unite the fractious exile community, traveling repeatedly to the cigar-worker towns of Florida. Speeches he gave in Tampa and Key West in late 1891 rallied the tobacco workers whose wages helped finance the movement ^[7].

In April 1892 he founded the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Cuban Revolutionary Party), which coordinated exile clubs in the United States and the Caribbean, and he launched the newspaper Patria as its voice ^[7]. Marti insisted that the coming war be short, that it avoid the caudillo rule that had followed independence elsewhere in Latin America, and that the future republic belong equally to black and white Cubans, a conviction shaped by his friendship with leaders such as the Afro-Cuban general Antonio Maceo ^[6].

He recruited the veteran commanders of the earlier war, Maximo Gomez and Maceo, to lead the military effort while civilians retained political authority. A first expedition assembled at Fernandina, Florida, was seized by United States authorities in January 1895, a costly setback, but the order for the uprising went out anyway, and the war began in Cuba on February 24, 1895 ^[3].

Marti's private life bore the strain of permanent exile. In Mexico he met Carmen Zayas Bazan, the daughter of a wealthy Cuban family, and they married in 1877 while he was working in Guatemala. Their son, Jose Francisco, called Ismael and later nicknamed Pepito, was born in Havana in 1878 and inspired the poems of Ismaelillo ^[1].

The marriage did not survive his political vocation. Carmen, who wanted a settled domestic life, twice left New York and returned to Cuba with their son, and the couple separated definitively in 1891 ^[3]. In New York, Marti found a second family in the household of Manuel Mantilla and Carmen Miyares, whose boarding house he lived in for years; Carmen Miyares's daughter Maria Mantilla remained devoted to him, and he wrote her some of his most tender letters on the eve of his death ^[3].

Physically slight and chronically ill, marked by the scars of the quarry chains, Marti drove himself through punishing rounds of writing, teaching and travel. Friends described a man of unusual personal magnetism whose oratory could hold audiences for hours, a skill that earned him the exile community's affectionate title of Maestro ^[7].

Once the insurrection began, Marti resolved to share its dangers rather than direct it from abroad. In March 1895 he and Maximo Gomez signed the Manifesto of Montecristi in the Dominican Republic, setting out the aims of the war: independence, civilian rule and a republic without racial hatred ^[6].

On the night of April 11, 1895, Marti, Gomez and four companions landed by rowboat at Playitas de Cajobabo on Cuba's remote southeastern coast and made their way inland to join the rebel forces. In the field the poet was given the rank of major general, though he had no military experience ^[1].

On May 19, 1895, Spanish troops surprised the insurgent column near the confluence of the Contramaestre and Cauto rivers at Dos Rios, in Oriente Province. Ignoring Gomez's order to stay back, Marti rode toward the firing line and was shot from his horse and killed. He was forty-two. Spanish forces recovered the body and buried it in Santiago de Cuba, where his tomb in the Santa Ifigenia cemetery later became a national shrine ^[3]. Among his papers was an unfinished letter warning that he had lived inside the monster, meaning the United States, and knew its entrails, a line endlessly quoted in later debates over his meaning ^[6].

Any account of Jose Marti achievements has to hold two careers in one frame. As a writer he left roughly twenty-eight volumes of collected work: poetry that helped launch modernismo, essays and chronicles that shaped Latin American ideas about identity and about the United States, and journalism read across a continent ^[5]. As a political figure he built the organization and articulated the ideals behind Cuba's final independence war, even though he did not live to see Spanish rule end in 1898 ^[1].

In Cuba he is honored as the Apostle of Independence. His image appears on the one-peso coin and note, Havana's international airport carries his name, and the vast memorial tower in the Plaza de la Revolucion dominates the capital's skyline. Both the revolutionary government installed in 1959 and its exiled opponents have invoked him as their intellectual ancestor, a rare distinction that says much about the breadth of his writing ^[8].

Beyond the island, statues of Marti stand in New York's Central Park and across Latin America, and Nuestra America remains a standard reference in discussions of hemispheric relations. Any list of essential Jose Marti facts ends the same way: a life of forty-two years, most of it in exile, that produced a body of words and a national idea still argued over more than a century after Dos Rios ^[8].