High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Senator Rafael Martínez Nadal, the third president of the Senate of Puerto Rico, was an orphan from an early age, since his mother, Estebanía Nadal Freyte died hours after his birth, and his father, Rafael Martínez Santana, when he was only five years old. Born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico on April 22, 1877, he was raised in Maricao, Puerto Rico, studied in San Juan, Puerto Rico before travelling to Barcelona, Spain to study law. For several years he lived in Paris, Madrid and Barcelona, where he was a businessman in fields as varied as bull fighting, meat distribution, theater production and coffee importation, before returning to Mayagüez on August 13, 1904, where he became a journalist and joined the Puerto Rico Republican Party founded several years before by doctor José Celso Barbosa. In 1908 he founded the "El Combate" newspaper.