Attorney, Journalist, and Diplomat. He also worked as an archivist, newspaper editor, and confidential Confederate agent for President Jefferson Davis in Brownsville, Matamoros, and Monterrey, where he played a significant role in establishing the Matamoros trade. He attended Harvard University, where became friends with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He returned to Cuba around 1848 to enter law practice, but he became involved in the movement for Cuban independence led by Narciso López and was sentenced to death. Quintero escaped from prison and fled to Texas. In 1856 he became editor of the San Antonio Spanish-language newspaper El Ranchero and Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. He studied law under Mirabeau B. Lamar and in 1857 served as assistant clerk of the Texas House of Representatives. Quintero lived briefly in New Orleans, where he was admitted to the bar, but soon moved to New York City as a journalist. With the outbreak of the Civil War, he returned to Texas and enlisted in the Quitman Guards. After his company was sent to Virginia, he was assigned to the diplomatic corps, and President Jefferson Davis appointed him confidential agent of the Confederate government in Mexico. Largely as a result of his efforts, the Matamoros trade was opened up for Texas and the Trans-Mississippi Department. After the Union captured Brownsville in November 1863, Quintero crossed the river to Matamoros and continued his work. Under his careful eye more than 320,000 bales of cotton (about one-fifth of all Confederate cotton exports) were slipped past the Union blockade at the mouth of the Rio Grande and exchanged for valuable war materials in England and Europe. After the end of the war Quintero accepted a position with the Galveston News, but soon moved to New Orleans, where he practiced law and wrote for the New Orleans Daily Picayune. He married Eliza F. Bournos in New Orleans, April 13, 1857, and they had four children. Quintero served as New Orleans consul for Belgium and Costa Rica, and at the time of his death on September 7, 1885, he was editor of the Picayune.