Jose marti biography book of poems

José Martí was a world class poet and essayist whose literary works ushered in the modernist literary tradition in Latin American letters.

He was also an impassioned revolutionary who spent most of life organizing and instigating for the cause of Cuban freedom from Spanish colonial rule. He died in battle fighting for Cuban liberation and is considered “the Apostle” of Cuban Independence.

José Julian Martí Pérez was born on January 28, 1853 in Havana, Cuba to Mariano Martí Navarro and Leonor Pérez Cabrera; he was the eldest and only boy of eight children.

In 1865, at the age of twelve, he enrolled in the Escuela de Instruccciónes Primarias Superior Municipal de Varrones where he met two people who would play key roles in his life: Rapahel Maria de Mendive, the director of the school, who would help shape Martí’s social views and help finance his studies, and a student his age, Fermín Valdes Doming