THE BIRTH OF CUBA’S NATIONAL CONSCIENCE

Por Pedro V Roig, Historian and Attorney

Jose Agustin Caballero Rodriguez de la Barrera, was a leading figure in the philosophical and educational reform of Cuba.  A clergyman and philosophy professor at San Carlos Seminary College, Caballero sowed in its austere and venerable classrooms the seeds of Cuba’s national conscience.

From his academic pulpit, he  stimulated critical debate in a forum of tolerance and enlightenment, while proposing a change in curriculum of the archaic scholastic models. Indifferent to material wealth, the young priest enjoyed research, critical inquiry and teaching. An uncorrupt teacher in a corrupt medium, Caballero called for political reform in Cuba and “never hid his feelings, or feared being alone in his opinions.”(1)

He was the teacher of the venerable Felix Varela who revered his memory. On the need to publish Caballero’s work, Varela wrote: “Let us do what we must so that Caballero lives on, not only in the indelible memory of his virtues, but in the salutary influence of his doctrine.”(2)

Felix Varela was the first Cuban thinker to believe in independence and to conceive of a democratic government in a clear, systematic manner. Following in the path of his mentor Agustin Caballero, Varela was also a professor at the San Carlos Seminary College, where he framed the emerging ideals of Cuban national identity. A saintly priest, he also taught by the example of his dignified life, yet he was a radical teacher in the quest for freedom.  Jose Antonio Saco and Jose de la Luz y Caballero were among his enlightened students. In the classroom, they felt the rumble of a growing nationalism that would eventually shape Cuba’s identity.

In 1821, Varela was elected as a delegate to the Spanish “Cortes” or legislative chamber in Madrid. While there, he witnessed the military rebellion that forced Ferdinand VII to accept the liberal Constitution of Cadiz curtailing the king’s power. At the legislative assembly, Varela proposed the abolition of slavery, defended the independence of Spain’s former South American colonies, and — after Ferdinand VII took back the mantle of absolute power — sided with the legislators who voted for the king’s removal.”(3)

Varela fled to the United States, where he joined the New York Archdioceses. There, Father Varela founded El Habanero, believed to be the first Spanish-Catholic newspaper in the United States. As a priest, he worked with the thousands of immigrants seeking new opportunities and became Vicario General. In 1850, he retired to St. Augustine, Florida, where he died three years later. Of Varela, Jose de la Luz y Caballero wrote, “Whenever one thinks of the island of Cuba, he will think with veneration and affection of he who first taught us to think “(4)

Jose Antonio Saco is one of Cuba’s most influential political writers of the colonial period. Born in Bayamo in 1797, Saco studied at San Carlos college-seminary under Father Varela. A skeptic and pessimist, he differed from his teacher in a belief that Cuba was not yet ready to form an independent government.”(5)  He also doubted that Spain would grant Cuba autonomy and permit it self-government under Spanish sovereignty, writing, “Those who wish Cuba to have a government like Canada’s are chasing a Chimera.”

Saco was a brilliant writer and polemicist, with a sober, concise style. He ran the Cuban Bimonthly Magazine, through which he criticized the colonial regime’s economic, social and political actions while influencing the younger generation of creoles. The government punished him with banishment to Trinidad. Captain-General Miguel Tacon personally told Saco that “the banishment order was due to his enjoying too much influence over Havana’s youth.”(6)

In general, the Creole patrician class to which Saco belonged was conservative and pessimistic about the surrounding society’s high level of ignorance and illiteracy.”(7)  He opposed its annexation by the United States a la Texas (following independence from Mexico), writing, “Annexation…. would eventually cause the destruction and disappearance of Cuban nationality.” In another piece, he wrote, “It’s about closing my heart to all hope and becoming the executioner of my native land.”(8) Nevertheless, the man whose brilliance helped forge Cuba’s national identity did not answer the call to independence of the Ten Years War. Throughout his life, Saco remained unflinching in his profound socio-political pessimism.

Jose de la Luz y Caballero (born in Havana in 1800) studied alongside Saco at San Carlos seminary under Father Varela, whom he succeeded as Philosophy chairman. Luz y Caballero shared with his friend, Saco, an innate pessimism concerning their colonial society’s ability to remake itself into an independent republic. He was greatly influenced by Latin America’s terrible experience vis tyranny, citing the tragic state of excitement and disorder presented by the new republics.”(9)

Luz y Caballero traveled throughout Europe and the United States, associating with such luminaries as Longfellow, Walter Scot and Michelet. He was a prominent figure in the Economic Society of the Friends of the Nation and collaborated with Saco on the Cuban Bimonthly Magazine. But it was his apostolic teaching that. placed him among the Nineteenth Century’s most notable Cuban teachers.

In 1848, Luz y Caballero founded El Salvador school in Havana, where he reaffirmed the reformist thinking of his teachers. His disciples were among the leaders of the Ten Years War: Ignacio Agramonte, Manuel Sanguily, Perucho Figueredo and Rafael Maria de Mendive, the teacher and mentor of Jose Marti. As part of the most distinguished pre-revolutionary generation, Luz y Caballero agreed with Saco that the Cubans of their day were not ready for independence. Schools were needed in a land where only seven percent of children received education. Luz y Caballero considered education a prerequisite of independence. He wrote: “Once we get the education, Cuba will be ours.”(10)

In reviewing the works of Agustin Caballero, Felix Varela and Jose de la Luz y Caballero, Princeton University professor Warner Fite made a comparison of North American and Cuban philosophies of the time. “I doubt if we could show as much interest in abstract philosophy … as these volumes show for Cuba,” Fite wrote. He described Varela as someone who “writes like John Stuart Mill and the English empiricists,” and considered Jose de la Luz y Caballero “ a noble and impressive figure.” (11)

It was this enlightened  interaction of personal involvement and devotion among teachers and students, which planted the seeds of Cuba’s national consciousness transmitted from generation to generation, commencing with Agustin Caballero all the way to Jose Marti. With them. Cuba began thinking about “ Patria y Libertad”.

Bibliography

1) Roberto Agramonte.”José Agustín Caballero y los Origenes de la Conciencia
Cubana” Universidad de La Habana) p. 28.
2) Ibid
3) Calixto Masó. Historia de Cuba (Ediciones Universal, Miami,1976).
4) Raimundo. Menocal. Origenes: Desarrollo Del Pensamiento Cubano
(Editorial LEX, LA Habana, 1945) , Vol I P. 173.
5) Ramiro Guerra, ‘Manual de Historia de Cuba (Madrid. Editorial Playor, 1975 p.409
6) Ibid p. 343
7) Ibid 345
8) Ibid 498
9) Ibid 410
10) Agramonte, op cit, p.121
11) Ibid