María Collado Romero

María Collado Romero (19 March 1885 – c. 1968) was a Cuban journalist, poet, and feminist. She was the first female news reporter and parliamentary reporter in Cuba. She was the creator and president of the Democratic Suffragist Party of Cuba.

Biography María Josefa de la Santísima Trinidad Collado Romero was born in central Cimmarones (now the municipality Carlos Rojas) in Matanzas Province, which was formerly part of La Habana Province. She was part of an upper-class family.

Parliamentary reporter María Collado worked as a parliamentary reporter for various radio stations and print media for the better part of the Republic's neocolonial period.

In 1940, under the government of dictator Fulgencio Batista, Collado was banned from the group of reporters covering news at the Presidential Palace. Between 1944 and 1948, during the presidency of Ramón Grau, the press spokesman at the Presidential Palace denied her accreditation. In her complaint she explained that the discrimination was due to "my being a woman, and perhaps a decent woman." On another occasion, the Minister of Public Works invited reporters to visit specific sites in his sector, but when María Collado was about to take the vehicle to leave the ministry, he blocked her, saying, "This trip is not for women."

Once, an invitation was extended to journalists to cover a lunch session of the Senate, but Collado was excluded. The next day she asked for an explanation and the journalist Cabús, director of Diario de Sesiones del Senado, told her that it had been a relaxing party which women could not attend, and that she should realize that women in journalism got in the way and were a disaster.

She supported the Law of the Chair , which forced businesses to let women sit. She also presented a request for businesses to close at noon for employees to have lunch.

She advised many women starting in journalism before the creation of the Manuel Márquez Sterling school. Her magazine La Mujer (Havana) helped to prepare many young female journalists of the 1930s.

Collado won the Varona and Víctor Muñoz journalism prizes. At the end of the Cuban Revolution, María Collado had retired from journalism, but she still joined the ranks of the Federation of Cuban Women (; FMC), founded in 1960 as part of the Communist Party of Cuba, where she witnessed the full incorporation of women into society which she had struggled for all her life.

Death She died as a resident of the municipality Diez de Octubre in the second half of the 1960s.