Félix Varela was ordained at twenty-three and taught philosophy in Havana in a way nobody there had heard before — in Spanish rather than Latin, with experiment as well as syllogism. One of his students said that as long as there was thought in Cuba they would have to remember the man who taught them how to think. In 1821 the island sent him to the Spanish Cortes, where he argued for the independence of Spanish America and for the abolition of slavery in Cuba. When the absolutist restoration came in 1823 he was condemned to death and escaped to the United States.
He never went home. He spent thirty years in New York among Irish immigrants, learning their language and their grievances, founding parishes, running the first Spanish-language newspaper in the United States, and nursing the sick through the cholera epidemics when those who could leave the city had left. He rose to be vicar general of the diocese and had a hand in the Baltimore Catechism. He gave away what he had and was, at the end, almost destitute.
Worn out, he went back to the Florida town where he had been a boy, and died there in February 1853; the sources differ on the day. Cuba brought his remains home in 1911 and laid them in the Aula Magna of the University of Havana, so the priest the Spanish crown sentenced to death lies in the university of the republic he never saw. Benedict XVI declared him Venerable in 2012.