José Martí

Biography

In October 1869, in the Havana house of the Valdés Domínguez family, Spanish volunteers found a letter. Two schoolboys, José Martí and his friend Fermín, had written it to a classmate who had joined the Spanish army, and they called him an apostate. On 21 October Martí, who was sixteen, was put in the National Jail on a charge of treason.

The sentence came on 4 March 1870: six years in prison. The punishment was later commuted to banishment to the Isle of Pines.

He was born on 28 January 1853 in Havana to a family from Spain: his father, Mariano Martí, came from Valencia, his mother, Leonor Pérez Cabrera, from the Canary Islands. At four he was taken to Valencia, and two years later the family returned to Cuba. In 1865 he entered the school of Rafael María de Mendive, a supporter of independence, who markedly shaped his views. In the same year, on hearing of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the pupils held a mourning ceremony for the president who had signed the abolition of slavery. In 1867 Martí enrolled for drawing classes at the Professional School of Painting and Sculpture in Havana. He found no commercial success in that field. In 1869, at the height of the Ten Years’ War, he put out a newspaper he had written himself, “La Patria Libre” (“The Free Fatherland”), and a patriotic verse drama, “Abdala”. The authorities closed the school that same year. In prison the chains badly lacerated his legs, and this was the reason for his transfer to the Isle of Pines.

In January 1871 he was banished to Spain. In Madrid he published the pamphlet “Political Imprisonment in Cuba”, and in 1873 he wrote a response to the proclamation of the First Spanish Republic: a republic, he said, was hypocritical if it did not grant Cuba its freedom. From the balcony of his Madrid lodgings the Cuban flag was flown in the city for the first time. He studied in Madrid and then in Zaragoza, where in 1874 he took a degree in civil and canon law and completed the course in philosophy and letters. His diplomas were not issued to him because he had no money to pay for them; the university put this right only in 1995.

The following years were spent on the move. Paris, where he met Victor Hugo; then Mexico, where in 1875 he joined the staff of the newspaper Revista Universal and translated a play by Hugo. In January 1877, under the name Julián Pérez, he made a secret trip to Cuba and stayed less than two months. Then Guatemala, where he taught literature and the history of philosophy. In Mexico he married Carmen Zayas Bazán. In August 1878 he returned to Cuba, but he was refused permission to practise law. He joined a revolutionary club and in September 1879, because of his ties to the Little War, he was banished to Spain a second time.

From 1880 he lived mainly in New York: he wrote for newspapers in Caracas, Buenos Aires and Mexico City, worked for the publisher Appleton as an editor and translator, and served as consul of Uruguay. A brief attempt to settle in Venezuela in 1881 ended after the second issue of his Revista Venezolana: the dictator Antonio Guzmán Blanco was displeased, and Martí had to leave. In 1884 he refused to take part in a plan for an immediate invasion drawn up by the generals Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo and, by his own account, feared a military dictatorship after victory. In 1889 came “La Edad de Oro” (“The Golden Age”), a magazine for children; in 1891 the collection “Versos Sencillos” (“Simple Verses”) and the essay “Nuestra América” (“Our America”).

The main work of those years, I would say, was not the writing but the journeys to the tobacco factories of Florida. In Tampa and Key West he spoke to workers in exile and raised money. In 1892 he wrote the bases and statutes of the Cuban Revolutionary Party and founded its newspaper, Patria. In 1893–94 he toured the Americas and the Caribbean, meeting Gómez and Maceo. The plan to ship arms from Florida was discovered in January 1895 and the ships were seized. He still signed the order for the uprising on 29 January, and it began on 24 February.

On 25 March 1895 Martí and Gómez signed the Manifesto of Montecristi, setting out the aims of the war. Before leaving, Martí drew up a literary will, entrusting his manuscripts to Gonzalo de Quesada. The expedition landed in Cuba on 11 April near Cape Maisí, and on 15 April he was given the rank of major general. On 18 May he wrote his last letter, to his friend Manuel Mercado.

On 19 May 1895 at Dos Ríos, where the Contramaestre flows into the Cauto, a Spanish column engaged the insurgents. Gómez ordered Martí to stay with the rear, but he separated from the detachment and rode toward Spaniards sheltering in the undergrowth. He was killed. The Spaniards first buried the body nearby and then, on learning who it was, dug it up and on 27 May reburied it in Santa Ifigenia Cemetery in Santiago de Cuba.