Letters to Maria Mantilla

The Letters to María Mantilla are a moving series of epistles written by José Martí to the daughter of the owners of a boarding house in which he stayed in New York. They are a reference text in the literature of Cuba of the nineteenth century.
María was the daughter of Carmen Miyares de Mantilla and her husband Manuel Mantilla Sorzano. María Mantilla de Romero (1880-1962) was born in New York, many historians believe that her real parents were Carmen and José Martí. Martí lived in the Mantilla family’s guest house when Maria was born and was her godfather.
Martí wrote more than 450 letters in the last years of his life. In the five months of 1895 alone, he wrote 156 letters, more than one a day.
The correspondence is extensive: letters with political content (Máximo Gómez, Serafín Sánchez, Juan Gualberto Gómez, Gonzalo de Quesada), letters to close friends (Manuel Mercado, Fermín Valdés Domínguez), those he writes to his mother or correspondence with prominent intellectuals and journalists (José María Vargas Vila and Joseph Pulitzer).
However, from this last stage it is also worth mentioning the Letters to María Mantilla, the beloved girl who left in New York to go to Mexico, on a trip in preparation for her final departure to Cuba. Martí headed the letters to Mary by calling her: “My Mary,” “My Marichusa,” “My Dear Girl.”
In this book Martí instructs, advises, warns and recommends throughout these brief missives. In them he combines the ethical and the aesthetic with a didactic and formative purpose, but always from the tenderness. This is how he writes things like these to María Mantilla:

“Get up, thinking and working.”

“Do something good every day on my behalf.”