José Dolores Poyo Estenoz

Journalist, writer, poet and tobacco factory reader, friend and close collaborator of José Martí in the creation of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. He was one of the founders of the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC) and a prominent figure in the emigration during the preparations for the War of Independence of 1895-1898. He presided over the Council Body of Cayo Hueso, elected annually (1892-1898) and the revolutionary club Luz de Yara; he also belonged to the Cayo Hueso Club and the Serafín Sánchez Club.

However, it was only in late 1891 that Martí visited Cayo Hueso for the first time to shake his hand—founding hands according to his own words—and to embrace those emigrants close to his heart, invited by a committee from that locality. From that moment began the history of a great friendship and collaboration.

Martí had written to Poyo from New York on December 5, 1891, grateful for a brief piece that he qualifies as respectable about his visit to Tampa, included on November 8 in his newspaper El Yara.

This letter, which was also published by the newspaper immediately, carries a famous Martian phrase that would endure with time: "It is the hour of the furnaces, in which nothing but light must be seen."

In Tampa, invited by the patriotic club Ignacio Agramonte, he had delivered his famous speeches With All and for the Good of All (November 26) and The New Pines (November 27).

Martí's desire for a rapprochement is evident in the first and extensive letter to Poyo, dated November 29, 1887:

"Out of that never excessive respect for the freedom of others' opinion and for my own honor, I have never dared, in eight years of ceaseless patriotic concerns, to seek communication with those with whom I most desired it, with the exemplary Cubans of Cayo Hueso. But today you will not take it amiss if, yielding as much to my desire as to friendly suggestions, I greet in you one of those who with the greatest vigor and selflessness will undoubtedly work to prepare the grand and difficult times to which our homeland seems already to be drawing near."

"I notice that, with the confidence that your patriotic love inspires in me, I have let my pen run with more length than a first letter authorizes; but does not the bleeding together from the same wound make sincere men suddenly friends?"

"I have nothing special to ask of you and nothing more do I propose, although my land is all my life, than to serve it with my loyal judgment, without assuming any position other than that duty in which, as now, the will of my countrymen places me."

According to his descendant Gerald E. Poyo, that community did not respond in 1887 to Martí's efforts to revitalize the independence movement because they "considered him an inspired nationalist propagandist, but a timid revolutionary" who, due to disagreements over methods, had separated from Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo.

For a long time before, this simple Cuban who emigrated to Cayo Hueso with his wife Clara Camus de la Hoz and three daughters in 1869, being persecuted in Havana for his defense of the independence cause, enjoyed great esteem among the veterans of the Ten Years' War.

By coincidence, when the young José Martí publishes, in January 1869, his first works in favor of Cuba, the proofreader of the Gazeta de la Havana José Dolores Poyo, 32 years old, is engaged in heated discussions with Spanish officers who frequented the newspaper.

A victim of economic hardship, he began as a tobacco factory reader for a factory belonging to Vicente Martínez Ibor at the same time he founded the Cuban Patriotic Club of Cayo Hueso with tobacco workers, the first of its kind.

He was among those who rejected the Peace of Zanjón. In August 1878 he joined with other patriots in the secret society Order of the Sun and on October 12 of that year he founded, with his scarce resources, El Yara, which he published for 20 years. He was president of the Cuban Revolutionary Club No. 25, established on November 8, 1878 and, in 1884, he was part of the Cuban Convention.

In the life of José Dolores Poyo, born in Havana on March 24, 1836, many other facts are also interesting.

On March 23, 1880, before departing for Cuba to the Little War, Major General Calixto García sent him a farewell letter and a portrait—so that he not forget his good friend—and a good embrace that he hopes to give him truly in Havana.

A few months later, Major General Antonio Maceo, in a brief note, asked the Director of El Yara "…to insert in the columns of your esteemed newspaper the writings that follow, and for all this he anticipates to you the most expressive thanks of your affectionate friend and compatriot."

It is a letter from Maceo to Spanish General Camilo Polavieja (Kingston, Jamaica, May 16, 1881) and a commentary also his, dated in that same city on June 14, 1881, regarding his previous missive to he who violently suppressed the Little War in Cuba (1879-1880).

In the Macea documents there is another letter to Poyo (San Pedro, June 13, 1884); the content of its final lines is cited as the essence of the thought and principles of the later Lieutenant General of the Liberating Army without its source always being indicated:

"Cuba will be free when the redeeming sword casts its enemies into the sea. Spanish domination was a disgrace and shame for the world that suffered it, but for us it is a disgrace that dishonors us. Whoever attempts to seize Cuba will reap the dust of its soil soaked in blood, if he does not perish in the struggle. Cuba has many sons who have renounced family and well-being to preserve honor and Fatherland. With her we will perish rather than be dominated again; we want independence and freedom."

Dated in El Roble (free territory of the Sierra del Rosario, Pinar del Río), on July 16, 1896, Maceo tells him at the end of a letter "…What need have we of foreign interventions or interference, which we neither need nor would benefit from? Cuba is conquering her independence with the arm and heart of her sons; she will be free in a short time without needing their aid."

Upon returning to Havana in 1898, José Dolores Poyo did not have the resources for the realization of his dream, the publication of El Yara in a free Cuba. He asked for work and was only offered a position as night watchman at the Havana Customs House.

Later, in 1900 he had a position as auxiliary to Vidal Morales, head of the archives of the Island of Cuba, and upon his death he was appointed to replace him on August 31, 1904, without adequate facilities or resources.

In the years that followed until his death, which occurred on October 26, 1911, in Havana, Poyo participated in a heartening event from his almost anonymous presence in the nascent neocolonial society: the fundraising for the monument to Martí, in the Central Park of the capital officially inaugurated on February 24, 1905.

He was vice president of the commission headed by the mambí general Emilio Núñez who, penny by penny, with complete honesty, collected $4,599.68 in United States currency, $174.51 in Spanish currency and $607.81 in Spanish silver.