Pedro Antonio Santacilia Palacios

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He lived most of his life abroad. He was deported to Spain twice, once as a child accompanying his father, and again when the conspiracy of Narciso López failed. Later he lived in the United States and finally, until the end of his days, in Mexico.

In New York he gave lectures to emigrated compatriots. He was part of the Republican Society of Cuba and Puerto Rico.

In New Orleans he participated in the struggles for Mexican independence and when Benito Juárez triumphed he went to the Aztec country, where he was secretary to the Benemérito and a deputy to the Federal Congress on seven occasions.

During the War of '95 he was a revolutionary agent of the Republic of Cuba in Arms before the Mexican government.

His poems appeared in the poetry collection "El laúd del desterrado".

The Santiago native Pedro Santacilia, a well-known Cuban poet of exile, began his intellectual life in the classroom as a teacher and in the pages of newspapers, weeklies and other publications in Cuba and abroad. He was a consistent servant of Mexican sovereignty, a country in which he took root without forgetting the Cuban cause.

At Santacilia's urging, Mexico became the first country to recognize the belligerency of the Republic of Cuba in Arms, which Carlos Manuel de Céspedes thanked in a letter to President Benito Juárez on June 9, 1869.

First, he promoted a presidential decree on April 3, 1869, to receive ships with Cuban flags in the ports of that country and, later, he presented a bill to the Mexican Congress for recognition of belligerency.

At just 22 years old, José Martí arrives in the Mexican capital on February 10, 1875, to meet with his parents and sisters, bearing the marks in his soul and body of the suffering he endured in prison and deportation. That same day he meets Manuel Mercado, who will be his friend until death and the person who introduces him to Santacilia, already approaching 50 years old, a federal deputy and son-in-law of Benito Juárez (1806-1872), married to his eldest daughter Mañuela Juárez y Maza, since May 1863.

Half of Santacilia's existence took place in Mexico where he defended the independence of his second homeland and of the land that gave him birth. Imagination fails to conceive what young Martí must have asked him about Juárez, of whom he was also a private secretary.

There was some coincidence between them, both sons of Spanish military men, cast into exile at a young age, and patriots who spent most of their time abroad. The Cuban life of both proved brief, but intense.

Pedro Antonio, born on June 24, 1826, in Santiago de Cuba to the Dominican Isabel Palacios and the Catalan Joaquín Santacilia, experienced the tragedy of exile as a child of 10 years. His father, a lieutenant of grenadiers, was expelled from Cuba by Captain General Miguel Tacón when the constitutionalist movement of Field Marshal Manuel Lorenzo, Governor of the Department of Oriente, failed.

In 1845, at 19 years of age, he returned to his native city where he devoted himself to teaching and in a short time began to collaborate with various publications, among them El Redactor, El Orden, Semanario Cubano, El Colibrí, Revista de Cuba, El Artista, El Almendares, La Piragua and La Semana Literaria.

Together with other intellectuals, he founded in Santiago de Cuba the publication Ensayos Literarios and was an Honorary Member of the Scientific, Artistic and Literary Lyceum of Havana. But happiness in his homeland lasted only until he turned 25 years old.

He was tried along with other young men for preventing a dance in El Caney on August 17, 1851 and, convened again for October 10 of that year at the Philharmonic Society of Santiago de Cuba. The basis of the youth protest expressed mourning for the execution in Puerto Príncipe, Camagüey, of Joaquín de Agüero and other patriots on August 12, 1851.

He was deported to the Peninsula in the spring of 1852, after serving time in prison in Santiago de Cuba and in the Castle of the Prince in Havana, accused of being a conspirator.

Months later, in 1853, he escaped from Spain to Gibraltar and then to the United States; there he stayed in New York and in New Orleans where he met Juárez and became a sympathizer of his struggles and united his destiny with the Mexican people. He collaborated with weapons and supplies in 1859 and 1860, the year he went to Mexico.

Santacilia went abroad with the president's family on diplomatic business to seek support, while Juárez led his people's struggle against the foreign intervention that imposed as emperor in 1864 the Austrian Archduke Maximilian (taken prisoner and executed in 1867).

Although he never returned to his homeland, he remained Cuban until the day of his death in Mexico City on March 2, 1910, at the age of 76. For this reason he was the first to claim his citizenship when the Consulate of Cuba in Mexico opened on May 20, 1902. "Is it not pleasant to be a countryman of Heredia and Maceo?", he wrote on December 15, 1901 to fellow Santiago native Francisco Sellén.

By his initiative an anthology called "El Laúd del Desterrado" was published in 1858 in which he includes his own patriotic poems and those of José María Heredia, Miguel Teurbe Tolón, Juan Clemente Zenea and other poets.

He practiced journalism throughout his life. In the United States, he collaborated in El Filibustero, El Guao and La Verdad. In Mexico, among others, in the Diario Oficial, La Chinaca, the Heraldo and El Nuevo Mundo, as well as in El Cura de Tamajún, all written in verse.

It is said that Martí held him in great esteem for his talent and patriotism. With two brushstrokes he characterizes him: "thanks to you I distracted these sorrows with the flavorful Spanish of Santacilia…" "…the poor friend of the faithful Cuban Santacilia…"

Several authors point out that Mercado helped him get work as a proofreader at the newspaper El Federalista and Santacilia introduced him to Vicente Villada, the director of the publication in which Martí became known in Mexico. Others attribute the introduction to the former.

In Mexico Martí cultivated his taste for journalism; he collaborated in the newspaper Revista Universal de Política, Literatura y Comercio (March 1875-November 1876) and upon its closure published some works in El Federalista, among them La Situación and El Extranjero.

In the first paragraph of La Situación he writes: "Without forming a case, without a court order, without time to arrange their affairs, without even an explanation, Messrs. Delfín Sánchez, Manuel Sánchez Mármol, Pedro Santacilia and Felipe Sánchez Solís have been arrested and exiled to Querétaro. (3)

General Porfirio Díaz has overthrown President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada—counselor and minister of Juárez—who succeeded him in office (first temporarily and later by popular election) and continued in the same political line of the Benemérito of the Mexican homeland and of the Americas.

For his dignity and for men like Santacilia, who loved Juárez and his ideals, Martí leaves Mexico on January 2, 1877; he boards in Veracruz, on the steamship Ebro, heading to Havana with the identity of Julián Pérez (his second name and second surname).

Before that he publishes his article El Extranjero in which he asks and answers himself: And you, foreigner, why do you write? It would be the same as asking me why I think. And later he says, "…I felt as if wounded in the chest, the afternoon when in the opaque light of twilight,… I read that unforgettable document in which a man declared himself, by his exclusive will, lord of men; for that reason, with my day of departure now near, I took lovingly the pen of indignation in my hands, and wrote La Situación, and other previous articles…" "…For being it, I rise up against all coercion that compresses me; for being it, what enslaves and shakes me is whatever causes pain to other men". "And thus, there as here, wherever I go as where I am, as long as my pilgrimage lasts across the wide earth,—for flattery, always a foreigner; for danger, always a citizen".