Nicolás Heredia y Mota

Nicolás Heredia y Mota, a poet, novelist, journalist, literary critic, and revolutionary, was born in Baní, Santo Domingo (now, the Dominican Republic), on June 20, 1855. He arrived in Cuba with his parents during his early childhood and spent most of his life in the western province of Matanzas, which was then known for its cultural ferment. He traveled frequently to Havana, where he began to participate in the Cuban independence movement. He graduated with a doctorate in law, philosophy, and letters and later taught modern and foreign literature at the University of Havana. 

In the 1880s, Heredia y Mota founded two newspapers in his native Matanzas: El Diario de Matanzas in 1881 and El Álbum in 1887. Aside from the patriotic ballad “La bandera americana” [The American Flag], written in the 1890s, Heredia y Mota is primarily known for his prose works and has been recognized as one of the best novelists of nineteenth-century Cuba, primarily for Leonela (Imprenta la Moderna, 1893). He also penned the novel Un hombre de negocios [A Businessman] (La Nacional, 1882); several volumes of essays, including Puntos de vista: Artículos y conferencias [Points of View: Articles and Conferences] (Imprenta de A. Alvarez y Compañía, 1892); and La Sensibilidad en la poesía castellana [Sensitivity in Castilian Poetry] (La Compañía Levytype, 1898), a work of literary criticism. 

Heredia y Mota was a key figure in the movement for Cuban independence from Spain. He was a member of the Partido Liberal Autonomista (1878–98) and a friend of Máximo Gómez y Báez, a fellow native of Baní and the commander-in-chief of the Cuban revolutionary forces during both the Ten Years’ War (1868–78), the first uprising for independence, and the Cuban War of Independence (1895–98). Heredia y Mota also achieved fame as a public speaker on behalf of the independence movement and, in 1895, published Crónicas de la Guerra de Cuba [Chronicles of the War in Cuba], his diaries on the wars of independence, which Spanish colonial authorities suspended from circulation on the island for the diaries’ subversive content. The publication of the notebooks, which were reprinted in Havana in 1957, and the ensuing controversy around them, became the impetus for Heredia y Mota’s exile from Cuba. He moved to New York, where he continued his political activities among other exiles from the independence movement and contributed to José Martí’s newspaper Patria. He also served in the Cabinet of Justice and Public Instruction under former Civil War general John R. Brooke, who was then military governor of Puerto Rico. 

Heredia y Mota died of heart disease on July 12, 1901, while aboard a train from New York City en route to Saratoga. He was buried in Havana.