Francisco de Arango Parreño

He was one of the most illustrious Cubans of the late eighteenth century. A century that marks, among other important milestones, the awakening of Cuban national sentiment. An entire ascending process of identity formation, whose seed rests on the intellectual excellence of a group of enlightened men. Men who not only fostered the development of the first cultural and social institutions; but who also inaugurated and contributed prolifically to the first manifestations of Cuban printed journalism.

Francisco de Arango y Parreño studied at the Seminary of San Carlos and San Ambrosio, an institution that since 1773, given the characteristics of its faculty, was a crucible and forge of the best philosophical and social thinking of the era.

Already in 1781, Arango began his law studies at the University of La Habana; studies that he enriched later, in 1787, upon completing his doctorate in Law at the academy of Jurisprudence of Santa Bárbara, in Spain.

From Madrid, he collaborated fervently for the founding of the Economic Society of Friends of the Country (also known as the Patriotic Society). He was its director, and also the creator of the Royal Consulate of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce. Furthermore, he served as Counselor of the Indies and Comptroller of the Treasury.

Notable, given his social standing, his education, and the historical context in which his life unfolded, is his "Discourse on Agriculture in La Habana and Means to Promote It," written in 1792, just two years after the first issue of the Papel Periódico de La Havana appeared, a publication of which he was one of its most prolific contributors.

In that discourse, Arango vehemently defends before the Spanish Crown the importance of caring for and improving the cultivation of land in Cuba; as well as the necessity of applying agricultural methods that had already proven successful in other countries. For that reason, he undertakes an official eleven-month journey through Europe. Upon his return, he not only theoretically recounted his experiences, he also introduced into the country a new variety of sugar cane.

In 1805 he was appointed advisor to the Tobacco Factory. Later, in his Report on the Bad Remedies that the Tobacco Branch has in the Island of Cuba, he would criticize the monopoly that exercised pressure for the tobacco monopoly.

On the Means that Should Be Adopted to Remove Agriculture and Commerce from the Distress in Which They Find Themselves is a plea for freedom of commerce, a tendency and experience that after the taking of La Habana by the English, in 1762, had been strengthening in the thinking of the Creoles.

He was Deputy for La Habana to the Constituent Cortes of 1814. Among other altruistic gestures and recognition of the need for instruction in Cuba, he donated his shelves and books to the Public Library of La Habana.

After his return to Cuba, in 1818, he was able to enjoy the freedom of commerce decreed in 1819, which repealed the monopoly on tobacco.

Francisco de Arango y Parreño died in La Habana, on March 21, 1837. In his fruitful intellectual life, his educational, agrarian, and economic thinking stands out. Along with Tomás Romay and José Agustín Caballero, he led the discourse of the Creole landowners in correspondence with their respective positions. His advocated for a project of development and social and economic progress for the Island.

Some historiographical currents emphasize his initial slaveholding position and his manifest objection to Cuba's independence from the Spanish Crown. Nevertheless, from the perspective of dialectical research, men should be analyzed as inserted in the historical contexts in which they have lived. And Francisco de Arango y Parreño, by his own right, belongs to the group of thinkers who fostered the path for the later consolidation of Cuban nationality in its most beautiful and radical current: independentism.

Although, as a champion of the teaching of natural sciences, he promoted the technical and cultural progress of the social class to which he belonged, with this, he also contributed with functional and propagandistic prose to the development of the first tangible exponent of the Cuban press: the Papel Periódico de la Havana.

His graphic discourse lacks the classicist and mythological elaborateness that flourished in other prose writers of the era. His clear economic and agrarian judgments were always aimed at the progress of his nation of origin. Stylistically, his prose is representative not only of linguistic purity and fluidity; it is also bearer of a marked and fine "criollist" nuance.

The economic and social thinking of Francisco de Arango y Parreño is one of the currents that, united with the philosophical ideology of José Agustín Caballero and the independence brilliance of Félix Varela, enriched the abundant Cubanness of later stages and its presence in our first journalism.