José Martí

(1853 - 1895)

Born in Havana in 1853, José Martí was publishing poems by the age of fifteen and founded a newspaper a year later. He was sentenced to six months of hard labor for revolutionary sympathies in 1868 and was deported to Spain in 1871. A symbol of liberty throughout Latin America, he died while invading Cuba in 1895; seven years later the country won its independence.