Laura de Albizu Campos

Laura Meneses del Carpio de Albizu Campos (Arequipa, Peru, 1894 — Havana, Cuba, 1973) was a biochemist, activist, and firsthand witness to the Puerto Rican independence movement.

She studied at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, earning her doctorate in Natural Sciences in 1918. In 1920 she became the first Latin American woman admitted to Radcliffe College at Harvard University, where she met Pedro Albizu Campos. They married in 1922, and she renounced her Peruvian citizenship to stand alongside him in the struggle for Puerto Rican independence.

A mother of four, she endured decades of FBI harassment, the bombing of her home, and prolonged separation from her husband, who spent twenty-five of their forty-three years of marriage in U.S. prisons. In 1948 her U.S. citizenship was revoked and she was denied reentry visas. After the 1950 Nationalist uprising she went into exile in Cuba with her children, where she continued internationalist advocacy, befriended Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and supported the July 26 Movement. Following the Cuban Revolution’s victory in 1959 she was granted Cuban citizenship and appointed special envoy of the Cuban mission to the United Nations, a post from which she demanded the release of political prisoners and recognition of Puerto Rican sovereignty.

Her book Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos y la Independencia de Puerto Rico (1961, reissued in 2007 by Publicaciones Puertorriqueñas) blends personal memoir with political analysis, documenting her husband’s life and the international dimensions of the Puerto Rican independence movement through the eyes of someone who lived it.