José Martí

José Martí was born in Havana in 1853 to Spanish immigrant parents, when Cuba was still a Spanish colony. At sixteen, for a letter accusing a schoolfellow of siding with the colonial authorities, he was sentenced to six years' hard labour and worked in a stone quarry in shackles, suffering injuries that stayed with him for life, before being deported to Spain. He took degrees in law and letters at Zaragoza and then moved through Mexico, Guatemala and Venezuela, living fifteen years in New York, where he wrote dispatches for newspapers across Latin America and served as consul for Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay. In 1892 he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party to prepare the war of independence. When war broke out in 1895 he landed in Cuba with the rebels and, a little over a month later, was shot dead while charging on horseback at the battle of Dos Ríos, aged forty-two. Cubans revere him as their national hero and 'the Apostle', and he was a forerunner of Latin American modernismo.