Acclaimed for her poetry and her feminist stance, Lola Rodríguez de Tió, with her journalist husband, Bonocio Tió Segarra, hosted salons for separatists in their home in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. At one of these events, she authored and read the militant verses that called on her compatriots to take up arms for independence. The verses became the Puerto Rican revolutionary anthem and were reportedly sung at the 1868 Grito de Lares, the botched armed anticolonial insurrection co-organized by Ramón Emeterio Betances. 

Throughout her life and exile in Cuba, New York, and Venezuela, Rodríguez de Tió denounced Spanish colonial abuses and wrote about patriotic love. Her most famous verse reads: 

Cuba and Puerto Rico are 

two wings of a bird. 

With these words, Rodríguez de Tió embodies the intertwined anticolonial struggles of Puerto Rico and Cuba in the last decades of the nineteenth century, evoking the strong bonds between exiled revolutionaries.