Marti is the hero of Cuba with statues everywhere on the island and where his poems and prose continue to be a part of every schoolchild’s studies.  Marti was born in Havana in 1853.  His father had come to Cuba with the Spanish army and married a girl from Spain.  He was radicalized when he attended a school whose headmaster was a revolutionary poet and journalist.  A visit to his imprisoned headmaster as well as his own imprisonment for writing a radical poem during the Ten Year War (1868-78) began a life of revolutionary activism.  Prison, deportation, and exile dominated his next 24 years during which he only visited Cuba twice until landing in April 11, 1895 when he led the War of Independence and died in battle.  He lived in London, Paris, Mexico, Guatemala, Spain, New York, Caracas, Tampa and Key West where he wrote for leading newspapers, translated books into Spanish, published magazines, and wrote poetry, essays, articles, plays and children’s stories.  He was a rare combination of a man of ideas and a man of action.  His poetry is traditional though credited with being the front edge of Modernism in Latin America in his poem Ismaelillo about his son.  Worth reading and a true patriotic hero, ala Bolivar and Washington.