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In 1893, Cuban poet and revolutionary José Martí met for the first time with the exiled general Antonio Maceo Grajales in San José, Costa Rica. Martí, who had spent much of his life in peripatetic exile, had founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party on 10th April, 1892, and Maceo had fought two failed wars fighting against Spain for Cuban independence. The general had been exiled, and granted refuge by Costa Rica, a country that had gained its independence from Spain in 1821 and was sympathetic to the Cuban cause. Maceo and his soldiers were granted land in the Nicoya Province on Costa Rica's Pacific coast and there, with other Cuban exiles, they founded an agricultural colony.
In Margarita Engle's novel Wings in the Wild, the two teenage protagonists, Soleida and Dariel, visit the place where Martí and Maceo met. Soleida is a Cuban refugee and Dariel is Cuban-American; his grandparents having lived in Costa Rica before they were allowed to enter the U...
