José Martí

Born in Havana in 1853, Martí turned to political activism as a teenager and spent much of his life in forced travel: Spain, Latin America, the United States. He wrote for dozens of newspapers, founded others - including Patria, the engine of his independence campaign - and used his pen to unify the fractured Cuban émigré community in Florida. By the 1890s he had designed the Cuban Revolutionary Party and its ideology, bridging literature and insurgency. On 19 May 1895, he died in military action at the Battle of Dos Ríos, just weeks into the war he'd spent years planning. His verses from Versos Sencillos later became "Guantanamera"; his concepts of liberty shaped poets like Rubén Darío and Gabriela Mistral. After 1959, the revolution claimed him as its prophet.