Jose Marti's Major Accomplishments

Jose Marti, a poet and politician, one who contributed greatly to the corpus of Latin American literature and political thinking during his short life of 42 years. On the first of April 1895, Jose Marti and five other insurgents sailed from the Dominican Republic to invade Cuba. The five insurgents were:

Maximo Gomez, Francisco Borrero, Angel Guerra, Cesar Salas, and Marcos del Rosario. None of the six were sailors. Marti and Gomez chartered the sailboat the Brothers, a wooden vessel that had at least two masts, no auxiliary power, a single-deck, and outfitted with captain and crew (512). The trip was expected for only a length of two-days, but the crew actually landed on Cuba eleven days after the embarkation, not on Brothers, but in a rowboat.

They likely assumed the Spaniards would least suspect an invasion from the British Bahamas across the Bahama Channel. The easiest route led from independent Haiti across the Windward Passage (499). However, as soon as Marti, Gomez, and their four companions sailed into the Bahamian harbor at Inagua, the captain and crew of the Brothers got off and refused to sail further. After spend days tried to hire a new captain and crew have failed, Marti eventually negotiated a high-priced ride for the group with a fruit ship, the Nordstrand. However, this ship would not land them on Cuba, Nordstrand steamed 115 miles straight to Cape Haitian, Haiti, instead of bending to skirt the Cuban coastline so Marti and his men could get off. The rebel were once again landed on the Hispaniola island, and waited undercover for four more days. As the group once again aboard the Nordstrand, it was already 10 days after they leave Dominican Republic. But once again, they ship still did not get the rebel to their destination, The ship did a U-turn straight back to Inagua. In the late afternoon on 11 April, as the Nordstrand steamed from Inagua for Jamaica, the revolutionaries, equipped with the rowboat Marti bought for 100 pesos, were on board. Nordstrand’s captain hove to several miles from Cuba’s eastern-most shoreline, lowered the six insurgents and their rowboat into a

The night was very dark, none of group knew what to do or how to swim. The night grew even darker, nothing is visible to the insurgents. Later they saw some lights far away and believed they were Spanish troops. The rebel fought the sea that wanted to swallow them. Nonetheless, after eleven days, and after the insurgents logged nearly four times only short distance from where they started at 1 April and the shoreline where they scuttled in the long hours of 12 April, they stood on Cuba land