José Martí
Early life, Cuba: 1853–70

José Julián Martí Pérez was born on January 28, 1853, in Havana, at 41 Paula Street, to Spanish parents, a Valencian father, Mariano Martí Navarro, and Leonor Pérez Cabrera, a native of the Canary Islands. Martí was the older brother to seven sisters: Leonor, Mariana, María del Carmen, María del Pilar, Rita Amelia, Antonia and Dolores. He was baptized on February 12 in Santo Ángel Custodio church. When he was four, his family moved from Cuba to Valencia, Spain, but two years later they returned to the island where they enrolled José at a local public school, in the Santa Clara neighborhood where his father worked as a prison guard.

In 1865, he enrolled in the Escuela de Instrucción Primaria Superior Municipal de Varones that was headed by Rafael María de Mendive. Mendive was influential in the development of Martí's political philosophies. Also instrumental in his development of a social and political conscience was his best friend Fermín Valdés Domínguez, the son of a wealthy slave-owning family. In April the same year, after hearing the news of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Martí and other young students expressed their pain—through group mourning—for the death of a man who had decreed the abolition of slavery in the United States. In 1866, Martí entered the Instituto de Segunda Enseñanza where Mendive financed his studies.

Martí signed up at the Escuela Profesional de Pintura y Escultura de La Habana (Professional School for Painting and Sculpture of Havana) in September 1867, known as Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, to take drawing classes. He hoped to flourish in this area but did not find commercial success. In 1867, he also entered the school of San Pablo, established and managed by Mendive, where he enrolled for the second and third years of his bachelor's degree and assisted Mendive with the school's administrative tasks. In April 1868, his poem dedicated to Mendive's wife, A Micaela. En la Muerte de Miguel Ángel appeared in Guanabacoa 's newspaper El Álbum.

When the Ten Years' War broke out in Cuba in 1868, clubs of supporters for the Cuban nationalist cause formed all over Cuba, and José and his friend Fermín joined them. Martí had a precocious desire for the independence and freedom of Cuba. He started writing poems about this vision, while, at the same time, trying to do something to achieve this dream. In 1869, he published his first political writings in the only edition of the newspaper El Diablo Cojuelo, published by Fermín Valdés Domínguez. That same year he published "Abdala", a patriotic drama in verse form in the one-volume La Patria Libre newspaper, which he published himself. "Abdala" is about a fictional country called Nubia which struggles for liberation. His sonnet "10 de Octubre", later to become one of his most famous poems, was also written during that year, and was published later in his school newspaper.

In March of that year, colonial authorities shut down the school, interrupting Martí's studies. He came to resent Spanish rule of his homeland at an early age; likewise, he developed a hatred of slavery, which was still practiced in Cuba.

On October 21, 1869, aged 16, he was arrested and incarcerated in the national jail, following an accusation of treason and bribery from the Spanish government upon the discovery of a "reproving" letter, which Martí and Fermín had written to a friend when the friend joined the Spanish army. More than four months later, Martí confessed to the charges and was condemned to six years in prison. His mother tried to free her son (who at 16 was still a minor) by writing letters to the government, and his father went to a lawyer friend for legal support, but these efforts failed. Eventually, Martí fell ill; his legs were severely lacerated by the chains that bound him. As a result, he was transferred to another part of Cuba known as Isla de Pinos instead of further imprisonment. Following that, the Spanish authorities decided to exile him to Spain. In Spain, Martí, who was 18 at the time, was allowed to continue his studies with the hopes that studying in Spain would renew his loyalty to Spain.
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