José Martí

Martí was sixteen when a letter he had written was found and he was sentenced to six years of hard labour in a stone quarry; the chains left scars on his ankles that he carried for life. Exiled to Spain, he took degrees in law and philosophy, then spent most of his adult years in New York, writing for newspapers across Latin America. His essays argued that the continent had to think with its own head rather than borrow Europe's, and warned, decades early and in detail, that the United States would seek to take the place Spain was losing.

He also wrote poetry of great simplicity — the Versos sencillos, some lines of which the world sings as Guantanamera without knowing whose they are. He spent years organising Cuban exiles, insisting the war be short, disciplined and free of the caudillo habits that had ruined earlier attempts, and that the republic afterwards be for all Cubans, with all and for the good of all. He landed in Cuba in April 1895 and was shot dead in a skirmish a month later, having never fought before. He is buried at Santa Ifigenia in Santiago.