QUINTERO Y WOODVILLE, José Augustin
b. 1829, Cuba; d. December, 1885, New Orleans.
Poet, translator.

Son of a Cuban father and English mother, Quintero grew up bi-lingual. After study in the Colegio de San Cristóbal, he went to the United States for further schooling at Harvard University. He became a good friend of the American poet Longfellow and later translated much of his work and that of such poets as Tennyson and the Germans, Schiller, Uhland and others. Returned to Cuba in 1848, just in time to take part in a revolt, he was captured and imprisoned, but succeeded in escaping, and fled to the U.S. An American citizen, by 1861, Quintero lived in Louisiana and Texas, and having become a friend of Jefferson Davis, President of the Southern Confederacy, he accepted a mission to Mexico for the South. In Mexico he fought for Benito Juárez and married a local woman. Once again in Havana in 1868, Quintero edited the Boletin Comercial for a short period. When Carlos Manuel de Céspedes led a new revolt, Quintero's revolutionary past made him suspect to the authorities and he decided to leave for the U. S., this time never to return.