Cuba sent her. Madrid could not make her small. She left Puerto Príncipe at twenty-two, signed herself La Peregrina, and took the Spanish Romantics on their own ground: poems that still stop a room, twenty plays, biblical tragedy, a novel of Cuauhtémoc, essays arguing women could govern. The Royal Academy locked the door because she was not a man. Theatres opened it. Baltasar packed the house. Sab was banned in Cuba. Two countries claim her. Neither made her polite.
SabGertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda