José Julián Martí Pérez (28 January 1853 – 19 May 1895) was a Cuban nationalist, poet, philosopher, essayist, journalist, translator, professor, and publisher, who is considered a Cuban national hero because of his role in the liberation of his country from Spain. He was also an important figure in Latin American literature. He was a political activist and is considered an important philosopher and political theorist. Through his writings and political activity, he became a symbol of Cuba's bid for independence from the Spanish Empire in the 19th century and is referred to as the "Apostle of Cuban Independence".
A young writer meets colonial repression
José Julián Martí Pérez was born on 28 January 1853, in Havana, at 41 Paula Street, to Spanish parents, a Valencian father, Mariano Martí Navarro, and Leonor Pérez Cabrera, a native of the Canary Islands. Martí was the older brother to seven sisters: Leonor, Mariana, María del Carmen, María del Pilar, Rita Amelia, Antonia and Dolores. He was baptized on 12 February in Santo Ángel Custodio church. When he was four, his family moved from Cuba to Valencia, Spain, but two years later they returned to the island where they enrolled José at a local public school, in the Santa Clara neighborhood where his father worked as a prison guard. In 1865, he enrolled in the Escuela de Instrucción Primaria Superior Municipal de Varones that was headed by Rafael María de Mendive.
Mendive was influential in the development of Martí's political philosophies. Also instrumental in his development of a social and political conscience was his best friend Fermín Valdés Domínguez, the son of a wealthy slave-owning family. In April the same year, after hearing the news of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Martí and other young students expressed their pain—through group mourning—for the death of a man who had signed the Emancipation Proclamation and had a crucial influence in the abolition of slavery in the USA.. In 1866, Martí entered the Instituto de Segunda Enseñanza where Mendive financed his studies.
Organizing across borders
In 1881, after a brief stay in New York, Martí travelled to Venezuela and founded in Caracas the Revista Venezolana, or Venezuelan Review. The journal incurred the wrath of Venezuela's dictator, Antonio Guzmán Blanco, and Martí was forced to return to New York. There, Martí joined General Calixto García's Cuban revolutionary committee, composed of Cuban exiles advocating independence.
Here Martí openly supported Cuba's struggle for liberation, and worked as a journalist for La Nación of Buenos Aires and for several Central American journals, especially La Opinion Liberal in Mexico City. The article "El ajusticiamiento de Guiteau," an account of President Garfield's murderer's trial, was published in La Opinion Liberal in 1881, and later selected for inclusion in The Library of America's anthology of American True Crime writing.
On 1 January 1891, Martí's essay "Nuestra América" was published in New York's Revista Ilustrada, and on the 30th of that month in Mexico's El Partido Liberal. He actively participated in the Conferencia Monetaria Internacional (The International Monetary Conference) in New York during that time as well. On 30 June his wife and son arrived in New York. After a short time, during which Carmen Zayas Bazán realized that Martí's dedication to Cuban independence surpassed that of supporting his family, she returned to Havana with her son on 27 August. Martí would never see them again.
Independence and the written word
Martí wrote extensively about Spanish colonial control and the threat of United States expansion into Cuba. He argued that Cuba possessed its own identity rather than simply sharing the social and political life of Spain. His February 1873 pamphlet, The Spanish Republic and the Cuban Revolution, emphasized differences in trade, international connections, and customs. Independence, in this argument, concerned the political rights of a distinct society as well as opposition to colonial repression.
Martí as a writer covered a range of genres. In addition to producing newspaper articles and keeping up an extensive correspondence (his letters are included in the collection of his complete works), he wrote a serialized novel, composed poetry, wrote essays, and published four issues of a children's magazine, La Edad de Oro(The Golden Age, 1889). His essays and articles occupy more than fifty volumes of his complete works.
Martí’s prose was extensively read and influenced the modernist generation, especially the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, whom Martí called "my son" when they met in New York in 1893. Martí's style of writing is difficult to categorize. He used many aphorisms—short, memorable lines that convey truth and/or wisdom—and long complex sentences. He is considered a major contributor to the Spanish American literary movement known as Modernismo and has been linked to Latin American consciousness of the modern age and modernity.