“Immense pain must be the only name on these pages. Immense pain, because the pain of imprisonment is the rudest, the most devastating pain, which kills intelligence, and dries the soul and leaves on it footprints that will never be erased.

It is born with a piece of iron; it drags along this mysterious world that stirs every heart; it grows nourished by all dark penalties and turns, finally, increased with all the scalding tears. Dante was not in prison.”

That´s how José Martí described in his Political Imprisonment in Cuba, his experience after been sentenced to hard labor in the quarries of San Lazaro, when, with only 16 years, he suffered the weight of the arrogance of the Spanish colonial rule, for aspiring to the freedom of the land of his birth.

Several decades after Gonzalo de Quesada and other followers of the Apostle of the ideas of the independence of Cuba, called for preserving part of the quarries, then unused, to pay tribute to Marti and other many patriots who were incarcerated there.

Thus, on January 28, 1952, the Marti Forge was created, the site of extraordinary symbolic value in the national history, and that six decades after its foundation it keeps an important social role.

David Hernandez Duany, director of the center, sees the imprint that place has left on generations of Cubans, and of the many initiatives with university students and the community.

Our purpose is the spreading of Marti ideas, a challenge we assume daily with greater commitment and professionalism, said Hernandez while visiting the place.

He said they have created links with various institutions and entities of the State, Armed Forces and the Ministry of Interior, in particular, education centers at all levels of education.

This is a place of great significance for this country, he said, and not only by the passage of José Martí in the quarries. There objects that belonged to him are kept here, and very important events of national history are associated with it.

In 1952, after the coup led by Fulgencio Batista on March 10, university students gathered there to symbolically bury the Constitution of 1940.

That piece of the old quarries of San Lazaro, witnessed the first march of torches, led by the young Fidel Castro, who paid tribute to Cuba's National Hero on the centenary of his birth.

The exhibition halls show objects like the odor pad Maria Garcia Granados gave the Apostle, the chair and desk used by him in the home of Dr. Ramon Luis Miranda, while in New York, and a revolver that belonged to him when he was the Delegate of the Cuban Revolutionary Party.

But the Forge, explains Hernandez Duany, is also room to honor all those who have sacrificed for the welfare of the nation and its children, as is the case of the five Cuban antiterrorist fighters unjustly incarcerated in the The United States.