Juan Gualberto Gómez

Juan Gualberto Gómez Ferrer
Juan Gualberto Gómez as a Senator in 1919
Born	(1854-07-12)July 12, 1854 Matanzas, Spanish Cuba
Died	March 5, 1933(1933-03-05) (aged 78) Havana, Cuba

Juan Gualberto Gómez Ferrer (July 12, 1854 – March 5, 1933) was an Afro-Cuban revolutionary leader in the Cuban War of Independence against Spain. He was a "close collaborator of [José] Martí's," and alongside him helped plan the uprising and unite the island's black population behind the rebellion. He was an activist for independence and a journalist who worked on and later founded several pivotal anti-royalist and pro-racial equality newspapers. He authored numerous works on liberty and racial justice in Latin America as well.

In his later years, he was a "journalist-politician." He defended the revolution against racism and U.S. imperialism and upheld Martí's legacy in print (often under the pseudonym "G") as he served the Cuban state; he was a part of the Committee of Consultations that drafted and amended the Constitution of 1901, and was a representative and senator in the Cuban legislature. He is best remembered as "the most conspicuous" Afro-Cuban activist leader of the 1890s independence struggle and "one of the revolution's great ideologues."

Gómez was born on the hacienda "Golden Fleece," a sugar plantation owned by Catalina Gómez. His parents, Fermin Gómez (Yeye) and Serafina Ferrer (Fina) were African slaves but managed to buy the freedom of their child, Juan, before birth, in accordance to the law of the time. His status as a free man allowed him to learn to read and write. Because of his literacy skills, rare for Afro-Cubans growing up on plantations in this era of chattel slavery, his parents sent him to school at Our Lady of the Forsaken in Havana, despite the financial sacrifice it meant.

In 1868, the Ten Years' War broke out. A climate of violence and intimidation prevailed, and after the young Gómez got caught up in a brawl between royalists and independence groups at Villanueva theater, his parents decided to send him to France—with financial help from plantation owner Catalina Gómez—to study the craft of building horse carriages, one of the few trades open to blacks and mestizos in the colonial period. His successes as an apprentice led him to study at engineering school.