Romanticism matured in Cuba due to one figure with continental status whose poetic works broke with Spanish-language tradition (including that of classical Greece), dominated then by varying levels of neoclassicism. José María Heredia was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1803 and died in Toluca, Mexico in 1839, and besides being the first great Romantic poet and Cuban exile, he was an essayist and dramaturge. He founded the critical and literary newspaper "El Iris" in 1826 together with the Italians Claudio Linati and Florencio Galli. He also founded two magazines: "Miscelánea" (1829–1832) and "La Minerva" (1834). Among his best known poems are two descriptive-narrative silvas: "En el teocalli de Cholula" (written between 1820 and 1832), which admires the great Aztec ruins of Cholula in Mesoamerica and reproves pre-Hispanic religion, and "Al Niágara" (1824), which covers the imposing and wild waterfalls of Niagara and develops a new voice: the romantic "I" attributed to nature.