Jorge Mañach

Jorge Mañach y Robato (born February 14, 1898 in Sagua la Grande , Villa Clara , Cuba ; † June 25, 1961 in San Juan , Puerto Rico ) was a Cuban writer , lawyer , politician and foreign minister who criticized Fidel Castro's government had to go into exile .

biography

Mañach, son of a Spaniard and a Cuban, was raised in Cuba, Spain, the United States, and France. In 1920 he graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in philosophy . He then continued his education at the Université du Droit et de la Santé in Lille and the University of Havana . Around 1939 he taught at Columbia University in New York and until 1960 at the University of Havana.

In 1927 he founded the magazine Revista de Avance in Havana , which was published until 1930. In 1932 and 1933 he was involved in the revolution against the dictator Gerardo Machado as the author of the political program of the ABC underground group, which he co-founded . When the ABC then openly appeared as a political party, Mañach was first elected to the House of Representatives and later to the Senate and was Vice-President of the Constituent Assembly that passed the 1940 constitution . In 1933 he published his biography of the Cuban independence hero José Martí , whose political ideas he defended as still relevant and topical. In 1934 he won the highly endowed "Justo de Lara" national journalism prize, which was awarded for the first time that year. In 1944 he served as Cuban Foreign Minister for a few months. In 1945 he gathered 37 authors in his home to found the Cuban PEN Club , of which he was elected president. From 1947 to 1955 he was a leading member of the social democratic Partido del Pueblo Cubano (Ortodoxos) . For drafted by Ortodoxos Party Member Fidel Castro in captivity pamphlet " History will absolve me " , he wrote in 1954 a preface. During the authoritarian and undemocratic rule of Fulgencio Batista (since 1952), which he opposed , he went into exile in Spain in 1957. In Madrid he worked as an author for the daily ABC until he returned to Cuba in February 1959. First he supported the revolutionary government led by Castro and defended it against criticism. Later he turned against the increasing anti-liberal measures such as the dismantling of press freedom and university autonomy and the increasingly visible influence of the pro-Soviet communists on the political course of the republic. In September 1960, Mañach was forced to retire as a university professor together with many colleagues in the course of the harmonization of the education system. As an intellectual who was critical of the government of Fidel Castro, he was unable to teach or publish, and in the same year he was forced to leave the country. He lived with his family in Puerto Rico, where he taught at the University of Río Piedras . He died in San Juan on June 25, 1961.

Jorge Mañach was married to Margot Baños, the marriage resulted in a son, Jorge Mañach-Baños. His cousin (first degree) Edelmira Sampedro-Robato married Prince Alfons Pius de Borbón , eldest son of the Spanish King Alfonso XIII in 1933 .

Literature on Jorge Mañach

• Rigoberto Segreo and Margarita Segura: Más allá del mito: Jorge Mañach y la Revolución Cubana. Oriente, Santiago de Cuba 2012 (Spanish)

Web links

• Jorge Mañach in the official Cuban online encyclopedia EcuRed (Spanish)
• Jorge Mañach Robato 1898-1961 in: Proyecto Filosofía en español (Spanish)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Javier Ortiz: Jorge Mañach, medio siglo después , in: Cubadebate of July 29, 2013 (Spanish)
2. ↑ Jorge Domingo Cuadriello: El PEN Club de Cuba (PDF; 139 kB), in: Espacio Laical 2/2010, accessed on July 30, 2013 (Spanish)
3. ↑ Jorge Mañach: Breve introducción a La Historia me absolverá , republished in: La Jiribilla of December 5, 2009, accessed on July 30, 2013 (Spanish)
4. ↑ Jorge Mañach o el desencanto político, obituary in: ABC of June 28, 1961, accessed on January 18, 2018 (Spanish)
5. ↑ Salvador Arias: Jorge Mañach y la Revolución cubana de 1959, ( Memento of the original of July 19, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in: Cubarte from June 25, 2011, accessed on June 18, 2014 (Spanish)