Earlier, children and teenagers, children of the workers of the headquarters and members of the Club Martiano, represented passages of the Master’s works and declaimed his poems.

Considered one of the most outstanding thinkers of the 19th century, Marti worked as a journalist, writer and poet, diplomat and revolutionary.

The Apostle founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party and organized the Necessary War that began on February 24, 1895 against the then Spanish colonial rule.

One day before his fall in combat -facing the sun, as he predicted- Marti wrote a letter that passed to posterity as a political testament and the highest expression of his Latin Americanist, anti-imperialist and anti-annexationist thought.

‘I am already every day in danger of giving my life for my country and for my duty (…) to prevent in time, with the independence of Cuba, the United States from spreading through the Antilles and falling, with that force again, on our lands of America.’

In his unfinished missive he also expressed that ‘what I have done until today, and will do, is for that’, in reference to his concern for the danger that the power of the United States represented for the region.

On Sunday, May 19, 1895, he died in Dos Ríos, a small town belonging to the municipality of Jiguani, in Bayamo, eastern Cuba.

abo/jha/dfm