César Rodríguez Expósito

Journalist, playwright and historian of medicine in Cuba.

Born in Cienfuegos. Author of numerous articles, interviews and reports.

A multifaceted personality in the world of letters was, as his life reveals to us, the man from Villa Clara César Rodríguez Expósito, who traveled extensively through three rich areas of intellectual work: journalism, dramaturgy and history. He stood out for his extraordinary industriousness and dedication, evidenced with crystal clarity by the work he contributed.

At age 17, after completing his high school studies in Havana, he began working in the editorial office of the newspaper Cuba, thus initiating a long journalistic career in several national newspapers, among them El Día, El Imparcial, La Noche, La Lucha, Libertad, Diario de la Marina, Heraldo de Cuba, Avance, El País, Información and Excelsior.

A native of Rodas, he obtained several awards for his work in the press and participated in journalistic congresses in Cuba and other countries. He became President of the Association of Reporters of Havana (1929-31 and 1935-37), belonged to the National College of Journalists, was President of the Federation of the Latin American Press (1937), Vice President of the International Press Club (1931) and Secretary of the Board of the Manuel Márquez Sterling Professional School of Journalism (1945).

A man concerned with the social conflicts of his country, and an enemy of the hypocritical norms and practices prevalent in the Cuba he lived in, he faced those conventions with boldness in his dramatic works, of which there were many.

As a playwright he wrote theatrical pieces such as: Human Before Moral, The Power of Sex, Fleeing from the Truth, Human Overproduction, The Dead Live, Occasional Adultery, Those Who Are to Blame, The Morality of Divorce, Multitudes and Rape.

But, despite his extensive journalistic work and his contribution as a playwright, it is likely that Rodríguez Expósito is better known and remembered as a historian and, particularly, of Cuban public health, although he was not limited to it, as his bibliography shows us.

From 1951 until his death, which occurred in Havana on June 12, 1972, he held the position of Historian of the Ministry of Public Health, an office in which he conducted extensive and tenacious work of research and historical dissemination through the Notebooks of the History of Public Health.

In the year he began to assume the aforementioned responsibility, Rodríguez Expósito, who by that time was already a member of the Academy of the History of Cuba, published his biographical work Finlay, a book that had won in 1949 the "Finlay-Delgado" Prize from the Association of Commerce Employees of Havana.

The awarded author had already addressed the life and work of Doctor Carlos J. Finlay in other writings, such as the one titled Finlay Before History, presented and read by him in a public session of the Academy of the History of Cuba on August 22, 1950, in his capacity as Corresponding Academic Member. Additionally, he disseminated Finlay's scientific work and compiled all of his works, published by the Academy of Sciences of Cuba in two volumes (1966-1967).

He stood out especially in several international congresses on the History of Medicine, in defending Finlay as the sole discoverer of the agent transmitting yellow fever, a condition that the Americans sought to take away from the Cuban scientist, an effort in which they did not succeed.

With Horacio Abascal and Félix Hurtado he was co-author of very serious works on the life and work of Finlay himself. He also wrote Finlay in the History of Medicine (Havana, 1954); It Was Finlay and Not Beaupertbuy Who Discovered the Mosquito as the Agent of Transmission of Yellow Fever (Rome, 1954); Centennial of Dr. Carlos Finlay's Graduation from Jefferson Medical College (Havana, 1957); Carlos J. Finlay and the Hall of Fame (Havana, 1959); Finlay: Permanent Controversy (Havana, 1961); Carlos J. Finlay. Biographical Summary (Havana, 1965), and Finlay Papers (Havana, 1965).

With equal seriousness and dedication he compiled the work Bicentennial of Tomás Romay: 1764-1849, which the Ministry of Public Health of Cuba published in 1964.

His biographical work Finlay has only been surpassed by the book by Doctor José López Sánchez titled Finlay. The Man and the Scientific Truth, published in 1987 by the Scientific-Technical Publishing House and considered the most complete and detailed biography of all those written about the Cuban scientist.

But Rodríguez Expósito's book Finlay was not the author's first foray into the biographical genre, as early as 1944 the Cubanacán Publishing House had published in Havana the work Hatuey. The First Liberator of Cuba, with a preface by the essayist, publicist and university professor Elías Entralgo, who in those introductory notes not only tells us about the intuitive power of the cacique Hatuey, born in Guahába, island of Haiti or Quisqueya, but warns us that the author of the biography "comes from the dramatic arts to history, almost by direct route, with the concept and even with the sense that existence is action. I have observed that his prose improves when he recounts events of great activity. The playwright that is, predominantly, that will always be in César Rodríguez, brings to historical inquiry the special capacity to select and title the fundamental motives, the desire to animate it with dialogues, and the purpose that imagination helps memory, judgment or reasoning, filling with suspicions or suppositions the gaps or documentary deprivations".

Hatuey was not only the first fighter for the freedom of Cuba, but also the first martyr of the struggle against Spanish colonization on the Island and the first foreigner who gave his life for Cuban soil. Rodríguez Expósito says well in Two Words, paragraphs that follow Entralgo's Preface, when he states: "Hatuey is an extraordinary figure—and forgotten by Cubans—, that is why I have wanted to pay a just tribute of remembrance to his memory with this biographical note".

The author of the book on Hatuey, who was also Secretary of the Cuban Society of the History of Medicine, wrote other biographies, among them: Dr. Juan Guiteras; Dr. Ramón L. Miranda, Martí's physician; Francisco de Alvear; Dr. Enrique Núñez Palomino; Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin; Juan Manuel Dihigo, Cuban philologist and linguist; Dr. Juan N. Dávalos: the scientist who dreams with bacteria, and Dr. Oscar Amoedo y Valdés.

César Rodríguez Expósito wrote much more, and from his facet as a playwright, we can mention the monologues or works for a single actor entitled The Lover, Execution, I Killed Him and Light in the Shadow.

With his vast work, this author gained a lasting place in Cuban letters.

As a playwright he has among his works Human Before Moral, Fleeing from the Truth, The Dead Live.

Biographer of Carlos J. Finlay, he was considered in his time the most outstanding historian of medical sciences in Cuba.

He dies in Havana on June 12, 1972.

Source: Cubarte