by Jose Marti

Jose Marti was born January 28, 1853, in Havana, Cuba, to lower-middle-class Spanish parents. The man who would become known as the “Apostle,” and adored by Cubans of all political persuasions was only 17 when he was convicted of treason and sentenced to six years’ hard labor for agitating for Cuba’s independence from Spain. Martí spent his adult life in exile, most of it in New York City, a situation that he grew to think of as his “cup of poison” (Ronning, p. 8). While in exile, Martí wrote prolifically for Spanish-language Latin American newspapers, mostly about the United States and the necessity of defending and nurturing Latin American culture, and he organized what he hoped would be the revolutionary army that would at last free Cuba. His essay “Our America” speaks not just to Cuba but to the whole region now...