Parque Amigos de José Martí — Tampa, Florida

Parque Amigos de José Martí, the Friends of José Martí Park, is a pocket park at East 8th Avenue and North 13th Street in Ybor City. The Historical Marker Database describes it as a small gated courtyard park enclosed by an iron fence and stone pillars, inside the Ybor City Historic District. It occupies the lot where Ruperto and Paulina Pedroso ran the boardinghouse in which José Martí lodged on his visits to Tampa in the 1890s.

The park is unusual because of its owner. According to the marker database, the lot where the Pedroso House once stood remains officially the property of the Republic of Cuba, and it contains soil brought from each of the island's provinces. A 2016 BBC Mundo report, published in the United States by La Opinión, described roughly 500 square meters behind a low wall and metal fence, with a statue of Martí raising one arm beside the Cuban flag, a mural map of the Cuban provinces, a plaque quoting Martí and a second statue honoring General Antonio Maceo.

The ownership dates to a donation in the 1950s. BBC Mundo reported that after passing through several owners the 8th Avenue property had deteriorated and was nearly forgotten until 1952, when local historian Tony Pizzo, a member of the Ybor City Rotary Club, confirmed it was the historic Pedroso site and proposed a museum. Pizzo urged his friend Manuel Quevedo, a Cuban colonel who owned the airline Aerovias Q, to buy the land to preserve Martí's memory.

The purchase of the Ybor City lot was made in the names of Quevedo and his wife Mercedes, and in 1956 they donated the lot to the Cuban state for its preservation as a tribute to Martí, according to BBC Mundo. Cuba treated the gift as an act of patriotism, and President Fulgencio Batista pledged $25,000 to conserve the house. The money was slow to arrive, and the termite-damaged house burned before it could be repaired. The project then became a park, which opened in February 1960 after five years of fundraising.

Spanish-language reporting by CubaNet in 2022 gives the same sequence in brief: the house where Martí stayed while raising money among the Tampa tabaqueros for the war of 1895 was destroyed by fire, and the park with its statue was then established on the site. BBC Mundo quoted Warren Weathers of the Hillsborough County property records office on the symbolism of a piece of Cuban property in Ybor City after the revolution.

Tampa Historical reports that Paulina and Ruperto Pedroso were Afro-Cubans who moved to Ybor City in 1892 to work in the cigar factories and bought the boardinghouse on 8th and 13th, which became a center of early Afro-Cuban life in the neighborhood. Martí, who first came to Tampa in November 1891 according to CubaNet, made it his lodging. Writing in Anthropology News, Greenbaum and Dworkin y Méndez place the Pedroso house across from the Ybor factory and treat Martí's public friendship with the couple as a statement of Cuban racial solidarity.

The 2001 Spanish-language marker inside the gate, as translated on the marker database, says that the Pedroso House became Martí's refuge, that the flag of the young Cuban Republic flew on the facade whenever he stayed, and that groups of Cubans gathered outside at night to watch him through the windows while Ruperto stood guard. WFTS Tampa Bay 28 reported that Paulina Pedroso returned to Cuba after 18 years in Ybor City and died there a poor woman in 1925; she was inducted into the Florida Women's Hall of Fame in 1993.

The couple's role in Ybor City went beyond hospitality, according to Greenbaum and Dworkin y Méndez. They write that the Pedrosos bought several lots in addition to the boardinghouse and funneled much of their profit into the Cuba Libre cause, and they argue that the local narrative has made Paulina's image the sole reflection of Blackness in the story of Cuban Tampa, while many other Black Cuban activists who worked alongside the Pedrosos went unrecorded.

Two markers named La Casa de Pedroso stand inside the 13th Street gate. The marker database records a 1961 English-language marker and, low to the ground beside it, a granite Spanish-language marker dated May 19, 2001, erected by Frente Cubano Unido de Tampa. It notes that the newer marker is obscured from the street by the park's hedge and fence.

Other markers in Ybor City point back to the lot. The state historical marker for the Afro-Cuban society La Unión Martí-Maceo, placed in 1998 on Seventh Avenue, records that the society's first meetings were held in the parlor of Pedroso's boardinghouse at 13th Street and 8th Avenue, which it identifies as the present site of Martí Park. The marker database lists markers for Antonio Maceo Grajales and José Martí a few steps away, and the Cradle of Cuban Liberty marker within shouting distance.

BBC Mundo reported in March 2016 that in the 1960s the Ybor City park was a scene of disputes between opponents of Castro and opponents of the U.S. embargo, and that each side at times chained the gate to keep the other out. Since then, the report said, Cuban ownership of the lot had stayed low profile and largely off the radar of both governments, and neither the State Department nor the Cuban embassy in Washington answered BBC Mundo's questions about its status.

Official Cuban visitors have still come to 8th Avenue. BBC Mundo, citing The Tampa Tribune, reported that a delegation led by Jesús Pérez of what was then the Cuban Interests Section in Washington visited in 2013, and that in October 2015 Havana city historian Eusebio Leal laid a wreath at the foot of the Martí statue. Rodney Kite-Powell of the Tampa Bay History Center told BBC Mundo that both sides divided by the revolution see Martí as the symbol of Cuban freedom.

Ownership and upkeep are split. BBC Mundo reported in 2016 that the lot, valued at just over $43,000 in public records, is maintained by the Tampa parks department while the Cuban American community of the city looks after it. Kite-Powell described the site to WFTS as literally a piece of Cuba right here in Tampa, and Ybor City Museum Society curator Liz McCoy told BBC Mundo that a step inside the gate puts one foot in Cuba.