Pedro Mir

Pedro Julio Mir Valentín was born in San Pedro de Macorís on June 3, 1913, the son of a Cuban sugar engineer and a Puerto Rican mother. Earning a doctorate in law, Mir was persecuted by the Trujillo dictatorship for his progressive political commitments, fleeing into exile in Cuba in 1947.

In 1949 in Havana, he published his masterpiece Hay un país en el mundo ('There is a country in the world placed in the very path of the sun...'), an epic verse indictment of foreign sugar exploitation. Declared National Poet by Congress in 1984, his sweeping humanistic verse defined 20th-century Dominican literature.