Juan Clemente Zenea Fornaris

Cuban writer recognized for having exerted great influence on Cuban literature by reviving Romanticism, marking a new line in Hispanic American poetry. While in prison, he wrote 16 compositions that were gathered posthumously under the title Diary of a Martyr.

He was born in Bayamo. He was the son of a Spanish lieutenant and a sister of Cuban poet José Fornaris. He completed his primary education in a private school in his native city. At the age of thirteen in 1845 he moved to Havana where his literary talent soon opened doors for him in journalism. He enrolled in the El Salvador school, run by José de la Luz y Caballero, where he broadened his knowledge, although despite this and being the nephew on his mother's side of poet José Fornaris it is believed that most of his education was acquired through self-teaching.

In 1846 he published his first poems in La Prensa, a Havana newspaper of which he became editor in 1849.

A serial novel of his, published in this newspaper during a Holy Week, would have caused the Bishopric to excommunicate him, had his father not intervened by publishing a letter of retraction that he made him sign.

In collaboration with José Fornaris and Rafael Otero he published The Woman: Is She an Angel? She is Not an Angel! Could She Be or Could She Not Be? (Havana, Soler Printing, 1850). He edited together with Idelfonso Estrada Zenea El Almendares and contributed to The Voice of the People. Implicated in the case against Eduardo Facciolo for the publication of this clandestine newspaper, he left in 1852 for New Orleans. He contributed to The Louisiana Mail, The Independent and Lighthouse of Cuba, in which his campaigns against the Spanish government appeared.

In New York, he carried out annexationist propaganda in The Truth, The Filibuster, The Cuban. In 1853 he was sentenced to death in Havana, but thanks to a general amnesty he was able to return the following year to this city, where he resided for more than ten years with the exception of a trip to the United States in 1856.

His poems were included in the compilation The Lute of the Exiled (poetry).

He served as an English teacher at the El Salvador school. He contributed to Cuban Garland, The Canoe, Breezes of Cuba, Cuban Floresta, Review of Havana, The Grumbler, Cuban Album of the Good and the Beautiful, The Jacket, The Century, Offering to the Bazaar, Review of the People, and in the Spanish publications The Republican Federal Illustration and The Americas.

In New York he contributed to The Voice of America and directed the Review of the New World. Invited by Pedro Santacilia he moved to Mexico, where he was editor of the Official Gazette.

When the revolution began in 1868, he moved to the United States. He participated in the failed expeditions of the Catherine Whiting and the Lillian; he edited the newspaper The Revolution, which he founded together with Néstor Ponce de León; he contributed to The New World - Illustrated America.

In 1870 he traveled clandestinely to Cuba with two missions: one of information, entrusted by the Cuban Board of New York, and another from the Spanish government, which proposed to the insurgents autonomy in exchange for capitulation. When he was trying to return to the United States, after a fruitless interview with Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, president of the Republic in Arms, he was surprised by a Spanish column and detained, despite the safe conduct that had been given to him by the Spanish ambassador to the United States. After eight months of solitary confinement in the fortress of La Cabaña, in Havana, he was shot.

He left unpublished Jacqueline and Reginaldo, a novel written in verse; The Lily of the Valley, a legend in verse written in collaboration with José Agustín Quintero and a critical-bibliographic edition of the poems of José María Heredia.

He translated into English the Prayer to God, by Plácido (pseudonym of Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés), and into Spanish the drama Andrea del Sarto, by Musset, Children's Tales, by Laboulaye, and poems by Longfellow, Leopardi, Musset and Lamartine. He has been translated into Russian, English, and French. He used the pseudonyms Adolfo de la Azucena, Mirror of the Heart, Ego quoque, ***, A Friend of Youth, A Havana Woman.

Published Works
1855 Poems
1859 Far from the Homeland. Memoirs of a Young Poet
1860 Songs of the Evening
1861 On the Literature of the United States

Most Recognized Poems
In an Album
Fidelia
To a Swallow
Absence
In Greenwood
Nocturne
The Shadows
Return
East and West
Diary of a Martyr