This mammoth mahogany desk stands in the childhood home of Cuba’s premier nationalist leader of the 1880s and 1890s, José Martí, as a witness to his enduring literary brilliance and indefatigable activism on behalf of Cuban Independence from Spain. It was a gift to the Cuban Republic (1902-1958) sent by Cuban émigrés in the United States whom Martí had personally organized into a vast network of revolutionary clubs for the liberation of Cuba in the years leading up to and during the War of 1895. Attesting to the sacred value that Cubans then and now place on relics of Martí’s life and work, the desk sits atop an elevated marble platform. I photographed it on my very first research trip to Cuba in June 1995, almost exactly one hundred years after the death of José Martí on May 19, 1895, in his very first encounter with Spanish troops at the start of the Independence War.
