This chapter examines Cuba’s most renowned nineteenth-century writer, José Martí, also known as the precursory founding figure of the transformative poetic movement Spanish American modernismo and an essayist, fiction writer, playwright, orator, political activist, and national hero. Connecting sequential key moments of Martí’s personal, intellectual, and political biography with his writing, ideas, and emergent social and political consciousness, the chapter considers Martí as a hemispheric figure whose work intertwines Cuba, Latin America, and the US. The chapter focuses particularly on Martí’s extensive body of journalistic crónicas, the majority of which were written outside Cuba, demonstrating his adept use of the genre’s stylistic and thematic malleability for multiple social and political effects and in the creation of his social philosophy and a hemispheric imaginary.