June 2025 – Leonor Pérez Cabrera, mother of Cuban National Hero José Martí, died on June 19, 1907. Born in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, she arrived in Cuba with her family when she was just 15 years old, a beautiful, intelligent, cheerful young woman with extremely austere habits.
At one of the few parties she attended, she met the young Valencian Mariano Martí y Navarro, whom she married in February 1852. They lived upstairs in a modest house at 41 Paula Street (today Leonor Pérez 314), where the firstborn and only son of the couple’s eight children was born. As a strong-willed, hardworking, and honorable woman, she devoted herself entirely to her family.
When the family settled in Mexico in 1874, they were joined there by José, who had been deported to Spain in 1871 for his independence ideals. After becoming a widow, Doña Leonor left for New York in November 1887, where she lived with her son until the end of January 1888, the date that would mark her last meeting with the organizer of the Necessary War, to whose ethical and moral formation she contributed decisively.
After that year, mother and son communicated through letters, and after the latter’s death in combat at Dos Ríos on May 19, 1895, suffering, but also pride, were present in the final years of Leonor Pérez’s life.
A widow, almost completely blind, without resources, and completely deprived of any official support, Doña Leonor went to live with her daughter Amelia on Consulado Street in Havana. She never received any protection from the governments of the Republic that her son conceived for the Cubans, and she, a woman of integrity and rebellion, creator with her husband of a family with many virtuous offspring, claimed nothing.
