Jorge Ramón Ibarra Cuesta

He was born in the city of Santiago de Cuba. He completed his primary education at La Salle school. Subsequently he traveled to the United States where he studied secondary education at Willinston Academy in Massachusetts and one year of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Upon returning to Cuba in 1951 he enrolled in Law at the University of Oriente and graduated as a lawyer five years later. In 1997 he obtained the degree of Doctor in Historical Sciences from the University of La Habana.

Between 1959 and 1963 he worked as an English teacher and in the National Council of Culture. In the following years until 1967, in the Political Directorate of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR). After that date he has worked in the Cuban Institute of Broadcasting and in the Institutes of History and Social Sciences of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba, as a researcher (Assistant and Senior Researcher).

Jorge Ibarra is a man of Cuban history in two ways: as a protagonist and as a scholar. As a maker of history, in his youth he took part in numerous actions at risk to his life against the dictatorship of president Fulgencio Batista Zaldívar, both on the Island and in Mexico and the United States. In these endeavors he shared with young people (classmates, from the University Student Federation and other organizations), destined to occupy a relevant place during the revolutionary struggle, some of whom lost their lives, such as Frank País, Pepito Tey, José Antonio Echeverría and Jesús Suárez Gayol. And others who after the triumph of 1959 would carry out the realization of the project for which they had fought so hard. As a researcher, he has developed essential work on different aspects, among which it is worth citing his books History of Cuba; A psychosocial analysis of the Cuban: 1898-1925; or Cuba: 1898-1958, structures and social processes, to name only a few.

He is the recipient of a medal for his participation in the clandestine struggle and has been decorated with other distinctions for his contribution to national culture, among which stand out the order For National Culture and the Alejo Carpentier medal.

Jorge Ibarra has written about a dozen books and numerous articles for prestigious specialized magazines, some of which have been translated into other languages. He has taught classes at foreign universities, such as Oxford, and has participated in various congresses, conferences and other academic meetings on the Island and abroad.

He has earned on three occasions the National Prize for Criticism for his books Mambisa Ideology (1969), Cuba: 1898-1921, Political Parties and Social Classes (1993) and Cuba: 1898-1958: structures and social processes (1996). For the excellence of all his work he received in 1996 the National Prize for Social Sciences.