His older sister was Vincenzina Cusmano, who joined his female religious order and was declared Venerable in May 2017, putting her on the path to beatification.

[4] As a child and adolescent he attended the Jesuit "Collegio Massimo" in Palermo in the midst of anti-clerical civil strife in the 1848 Sicilian revolution.

[5] After graduating he spent most of his time in the continuous care of the poor, not in Palermo, but in San Giuseppe Jato, where commitments multiplied.

In 1859, at the outbreak of the second war of independence, the Resorgimento, the revolutionary Enrico Albanese, a friend of Garibaldi and his family doctor, approached Cusmano, with whom he had woven an excellent relationship throughout the years of study, and asked him to join them to fight in the revolution.

[6] His affection and concern for the poor led him to seek the priesthood and on 22 December 1860,[6] after only one year of study at the theological school of Don Pietro Boccone, canon of the cathedral of Palemo, Cusmano was ordained as a priest in the private chapel of the auxiliary bishop of Palermo by Domenico Ciluffo: this while the church and its clerics were increasingly disenfranchised by the new Italian government.

Over several years, starting with a small effort to provide a "Morsel of the Poor", in the parish house of Palermo's church of the Holy Martyrs, Cusmano proceeded to establish similar but larger institutions in Terre Rosse, Valguarnera, Monreale and Santa Caterina.

On 2 April 1984 he was declared to be Venerable after Pope John Paul II recognized that Cusmano had lived a life of heroic virtue.