Jose Julián Martí's birthday

The son of a Valencian and a native of the Canary Islands, Cuban Jose Julian Marti (1853-1895) is considered one of the most prominent thinkers of the American continent.

His revolutionary social ideas, the depth of his anti-colonialist views and his continuous struggle to achieve not only complete political independence, but also the economic and cultural independence of all pro-American countries, give his concepts an amazing vitality of modernity, applicable even in the analysis and search for solutions to many problems that confront humanity today, on the threshold of the twenty-first century.

On the other hand, his valuable and extensive literary work made him one of the greatest figures of Spanish studies of the second half of the last century and honored him as “the most important phenomenon of Latin American culture of the nineteenth century”.

The ideas of Jose Marti inherit and continue the thoughts of Simon Bolivar and other great Latin American figures in the struggle for independence. His political life is marked by a constant presence of ethics and social justice. For Marti, this is fully and inextricably linked with the protection and assertion of the rights of the poorest, disadvantaged strata in the southern countries of the American continent, and, moreover, serves as a very strong basis for the indomitable and permanent protection of the national and cultural independence of these peoples.

From his early youth, José Marti embarked on a long campaign for independence in a Cuban colony that immediately led him to political imprisonment, hard labor and exile from the country for more than two decades at the age of 17, and this dragged on almost to the very end of his short and very active life.

After being deported first to Spain (where he stayed from 1871 to 1874), Marti was able to study at the Faculty of Law of the Central University of Madrid, the Institute of Zaragoza and the University of that city, where he received the titles of Bachelor and Licensee of Civil and Canon Law, Philosophy and Philology.

His life experience was enriched by a direct acquaintance with the reality of the American continent. In Mexico, where José Marti lived from 1875 to 1876, he showed himself vividly in journalism and in a deep analysis of Mexican society and the specificity of the America that was formerly Spanish. From 1877 to 1878, he was in Guatemala teaching at the university and pre-university levels. Then, and for the only time after his exile, he was able to stay only a few months in Havana, until 1879, when he was again deported to Spain for clandestine activities in organizing a new phase of Cuba's war for national liberation. In 1880 he lived for several months in New York, and in the first half of 1881 he settled in Caracas. After that, he finally settled in the United States, where he continued his work to organize the Cuban independence forces. For his intensive political, educational and explanatory work among the broadest strata of the Cuban and Puerto Rican emigration, especially among the Cuban Negro revolutionary emigration located in New York, his contemporaries themselves during his lifetime gave him honorary names, which later came to be called him and the people, and which he is honored in Cuba, the Antilles and in Latin America even in our time - the Apostle and the Teacher.

Just a few weeks after the resumption in February 1895 of the revolutionary war for the independence of Cuba and to support Puerto Rico, Jose Marti arrives in the far east of Cuba as part of a small expeditionary group, going there from the shores of another Antilles island, constantly showing solidarity, from the neighboring Dominican Republic. A few weeks later, on May 19, he was killed in the Battle of Dos Rios, the culmination of a life in which his clear position of standing with the underprivileged and underprivileged in his Caribbean homeland and elsewhere in Latin America played a decisive role.

Having died at the age of 42, José Marti managed to penetrate with his amazing insight, as a true visionary, into the economic and social realities of the American continent and the dangers that were already gathering over its southern part.