Jorge Mañach Robato

An essayist, journalist, cultural promoter and Cuban professor whose work places him among the most outstanding thinkers of his country; he was one of the promoters of the avant-garde movements that emerged in Cuba in the first decades of the twentieth century. Due to the breadth and variety of his work, disseminated through journalistic commentary, essays, criticism and lectures, he is considered one of the great Cuban thinkers of the twentieth century.

He resided in Spain from 1908 to 1913; in 1920 he graduated from Harvard University and worked for a year in the Department of Romance Languages at that institution. He participated in the political Protest of the Thirteen against the government (Havana, 1923), was part of the Minorista group and was one of the founders of the Revista de Avance (1927-1930), the avant-garde organ of those years. He publicly debated against the ideas of the Orígenes group, particularly with its leader, J. Lezama Lima, opposing his baroque and Catholic aestheticism with a more committed and avant-garde literature.

His two fundamental essays are La crisis de la alta cultura (1925) and Indagación del choteo (1928). The first is a review of Cuban culture up to that point, especially of the previous generation. The second is a description of "choteo," according to Mañach, the inherent "evil" of Cuban being: frivolity, wit, grace, humor, and rebellion, synthesized in "choteo," which is the unbridled mockery with which Cubans resolve their problems, both personal and social.

After completing his primary and secondary education in his native island, he moved to Europe to complete his academic training in Spain (1915-1921) and France (1921-1922), and later returned to Cuba to obtain his doctorate in Civil Law from the University of Havana (1924). In those years he began to make public his participation in his country's political life, firmly opposing, from the ranks of the conservative ABC party, the dictatorship imposed by General Gerardo Machado. But he never allowed his political activities to interrupt his ambitious intellectual journey, as became evident in 1928, when, again at the University of Havana, the young Jorge Mañach obtained another doctoral degree, this time in Philosophy and Letters.

Thus integrated into the main cultural and political circles of the beautiful Caribbean capital, the thinker from Sagua la Grande became one of the main figures of Cuban intellectualism, especially thanks to his bustling presence in the so-called Minorista Group, in whose founding he had intervened decisively shortly after returning from Europe. This event took place on March 18, 1923, when a group of fifteen intellectuals who had participated in a testimonial banquet went to the headquarters of the Academy of Sciences to angrily interrupt a lecture and harshly criticize the then secretary of justice of the government of Alfredo Zayas (1921-1925) for his complicity in the embezzlement of state funds, made evident in his authorization of the decree to purchase one of the most precious jewels of colonial architecture, the Santa Clara convent. Soon after, the fifteen intellectuals—among whom was Jorge Mañach—went to the editorial office of the newspaper Heraldo de Cuba, where the poet and essayist Rubén Martínez Villena drafted a spirited manifesto that, ultimately, thirteen of them signed; this document, known as the "Protest of the Thirteen," was later joined by numerous Cuban artists and intellectuals who became part of the aforementioned Minorista Group.

Already established as one of the pillars of Cuban culture, Jorge Mañach y Robato carried out an effective educational and dissemination work through the pages of the Revista de Avance and through the airwaves of the radio program known as "Universidad del Aire," in which he actively collaborated during two stages of his long and fruitful intellectual trajectory (1932-1933 and 1945-1959). Furthermore, he promoted the creation of other cultural radio spaces, and came to participate, late in his life, in the first television programs that aimed to develop the education of his compatriots.

Within these tireless efforts of educational and cultural promotion, Jorge Mañach also distinguished himself, during the brief period in which he held the position of Secretary of Public Instruction (1934), for the creation of the Department of Culture, an organization designed to protect artistic development. But his grand projects at the head of that important public position were frustrated, in that same year of 1934, with the forced abandonment of his country for political reasons, the beginning of an exile in the United States of America that lasted for five years (1934-1939). There, Jorge Mañach taught at Columbia University, where he worked closely with Spanish writer Federico de Onís.

Upon his return to Cuba, the writer from Sagua la Grande once again fully integrated himself into the ranks of the conservative ABC party, from which he achieved a position as delegate in the Constituent Assembly of 1940. He was subsequently elected senator, and from 1947 onwards he continued his political career in the ranks of the Orthodox Party, from which he again expressed his emphatic opposition to a new totalitarian regime, this time established in Cuba by Fulgencio Batista. This stance led him to a new period of exile, this time on Spanish soil, which lasted four years (1955-1959), during which he was unable to teach at the University of Havana, where he had been teaching as Professor of History of Philosophy since 1941.

Back in Cuba, Jorge Mañach y Robato also showed discontent with the approaches of the Revolution that, directed by Fidel Castro, had overthrown Batista, so he undertook the path of exile again, this time to Puerto Rico. Already gravely ill with cancer, he settled in the capital of the island, where he lost his life at the age of sixty-three.

In his role as a cultural journalist, the Cuban writer became known on October 16, 1922 through the pages of the Diario de la Marina, where he inaugurated a successful column that, under the heading "Glosas"—a voluntary tribute to Eugenio D'Ors, whose journalism had captivated him in Spain, as had that of Ortega y Gasset and Azorín—remained in the spotlight of Cuban cultural affairs for a year. Mañach's glosses (which, taken as a whole, can be viewed as a varied and essential essayistic text for the study of twentieth-century Cuban culture) anticipated numerous ideas that would later become central aspects of the debate around Cuban identity and character, thus placing their author at the epicenter of the renewal of cultural journalism in his homeland. Within their great thematic diversity, most of them are characterized by the defense of an educational system conceived as a social right of all citizens; by the importance given to the social sciences as the basic foundation for the exaltation of Cuban historical tradition; and, of course, by contributing decisively to the search for that national identity that constitutes the central theme of Hispanic American thought and literature in the first half of the twentieth century.

As a proper essayist, Jorge Mañach distinguished himself for his historical, artistic, political and philosophical studies, as well as for his cultivation of the biographical genre, in which his examinations of the personalities of the subjects and their respective character sketches (descriptions of the character and customs of individuals) reached great heights. As expected, he paid special tribute to the figure of the patriot José Martí, expressed in three works of universal circulation: Martí, el apóstol (1933), El pensamiento político y social de José Martí (1941), and El espíritu de Martí (1952).

From his extensive literary production, the following titles must be mentioned: Glosario (Havana: Veloso, 1924); La crisis de la alta cultura (Havana: La Universal, 1925); La pintura en Cuba. Desde sus orígenes hasta nuestros días (Havana: Sindicato de Artes Gráficas de La Habana, 1925); Estampas de San Cristóbal (Havana: Minerva, 1926); Indagación del choteo (Havana: Ediciones de la Revista de Avance, 1928); Goya (Havana: Ediciones de la Revista de Avance, 1928); Martí, el apóstol (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1933); Pasado vigente (Havana: Trópico, 1939); El pensamiento político y social de José Martí (Havana: Edición Oficial del Senado, 1941); Historia y estilo (Havana: Minerva, 1944); Examen del quijotismo (Buenos Aires: Suramericana, 1950); Para una filosofía de la vida (Havana: Lex, 1951); El espíritu de Martí (Havana: Cooperativa Estudiantil E. J. Varona, 1952); Significado del centenario martiano (Havana: Revista Lyceum, 1953); "Santayana y D'Ors," article published in the journal CA (Mexico), 14, 5 (1955), pages 77-101; Imagen de Ortega y Gasset (Havana: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1956); Dewey y el pensamiento americano (Madrid: Ed. Taurus, 1959); El sentido trágico de Numancia (Havana: Academia Cubana de la Lengua, 1959); Visitas españolas. Lugares, personas (Madrid: Ediciones de la Revista de Occidente, 1960); and the posthumous work Teoría de la frontera (San Juan de Puerto Rico: Ed. Universitaria, 1970).

In the early stages of his literary career, Jorge Mañach also made an interesting foray into drama, expressed in the comedy Tiempo muerto, which won an important award in 1928.

He died in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the age of 63 from cancer; at the time of his death he was a professor at the University of Río Piedras in Puerto Rico.

Source: MCN Biografias.com