Cuban Apostle who wrote Simple Verses into Guantanamera
José Julián Martí Pérez (1853–1895) was poet, journalist, and organizer of Cuba’s independence struggle against Spain. He built émigré networks in Florida, founded the newspaper Patria and the Cuban Revolutionary Party’s ideology, and died in the war he helped design—later enshrined as a national hero.
Born 28 January 1853 at 41 Paula Street, Havana, to Valencian father Mariano Martí Navarro and Canary-born Leonor Pérez Cabrera, he was eldest of seven sisters and baptized at Santo Ángel Custodio. A childhood spell in Valencia ended with return to Cuba. At Rafael María de Mendive’s school from 1865, and beside friend Fermín Valdés Domínguez, he formed early politics—mourning Lincoln’s assassination with classmates. Drawing classes at Havana’s San Alejandro academy in 1867 brought little commercial success; San Pablo under Mendive continued his bachelor studies.
When the Ten Years’ War erupted in 1868, the boys joined nationalist clubs. In 1869 Martí published first political prose in Fermín’s single-issue El Diablo Cojuelo and the dramatic poem Abdala in La Patria Libre; authorities shut Mendive’s school that March. Hatred of colonial rule and of still-legal Cuban slavery hardened early. Later travels across Spain, Latin America, and the United States raised support; unifying Cuban communities especially in Florida proved crucial to the Cuban War of Independence. He wrote for many papers and launched others, using Patria as a campaign organ.
Verses from Versos Sencillos later fed the song “Guantanamera,” a Cuban emblem. Freedom, liberty, and democracy thread his essays and poems, which shaped modernist Latin American letters. Political theorist as much as lyrical nationalist, he planned revolutionary organization and ideology before dying on 19 May 1895 in the field.
The Apostle’s afterlife is literary and civic: independence martyr, continental essayist, and voice still hummed in a folk anthem built from his “simple verses.”
Source: José Martí
