Mrs. Leonor Perez, the mother of the Apostle of Independence and National Hero Jose Marti, perhaps never imagined that she would become an archetype of irrevocable motherhood, by lavishing immense love on her only son.
With all responsibility and feelings, this noble woman, trained in hard work and honesty, became the essence of greatness, since her arrival in Cuba at the age of 15 to marry Mariano Martí and form a family of eight children, seven females and her first son José Julián.
The emblematic Paula Street in Old Havana, today feels the absence of the mother who put her knee on the ground to bequeath us the Martí of Cuba, of Latin America, the Martí of the world.
It is in that same street, where the suffering of Doña Leonor Perez is remembered, who suffered like no one else to see her Martí grow up far from home, with a future very different from the one she thought, with a life of sacrifice that, as she foresaw, would end with her death.
She was an impetuous woman, strong in the face of life’s grievances, with a firm character, the essence of maternal virtuosity. Although she was almost illiterate, she expressed her ideas with clarity and intelligence of infinite consecration to her family.
To the mother of the Apostle she deserves to be the example of a woman who contributed with more than enough to the formation of many of the moral virtues of her Martí, of squandering the immense love that so many times mediated to lessen the paternal severity, beyond her own.
117 years after the last goodbye of José Martí’s mother, Cuba does not forget the imperishable dedication written in verse on the back of an image captured on April 5, 1870 in the Departmental Prison of Havana: “Look at me mother, and for your love do not cry, if you are a slave of my age and my doctrines,
your martyr heart I filled with thorns, think that flowers are born among thorns”.
