José Martí

Childhood and early years in Cuba

José Julián Martí Pérez was born in Havana on 28 January 1853, when the island was a colony of the Spanish Empire. His father, Mariano Martí, was from Valencia, and his mother, Leonor Pérez Cabrera, came from the Canary Islands. When he was four the family moved to Valencia, but two years later they returned to Cuba. Back on the island, José enrolled in a public school in the Santa Clara district, where his father worked as a prison guard.

Intellectual formation

In 1865 he enrolled at the Escuela de Instrucción Primaria Superior Municipal de Varones, headed by Rafael María de Mendive, a teacher who shaped his political ideas. His closest friend, Fermín Valdés Domínguez, from a wealthy family that owned slaves, shared in the growth of his social and political conscience. In 1866 he entered the Instituto de Segunda Enseñanza in Havana, with his studies financed by Mendive. In 1867 he also enrolled at the Professional School of Painting and Sculpture, known as San Alejandro, to study drawing, though he never found the commercial success he hoped for in that field. He also worked at Mendive's San Pablo school, helping with its administration.

First writings and the Ten Years' War

In 1868 the Ten Years' War broke out in Cuba, and Martí joined, together with Fermín, the clubs supporting the independence cause. He was already writing poems about Cuban freedom. In 1869 he published his first political texts in El Diablo Cojuelo and the verse drama Abdala, whose hero fights for the liberation of an imaginary country called Nubia. That same year he wrote the sonnet