José Cipriano de la Luz Caballero

Pedagogue and philosopher. Considered a teacher par excellence and shaper of consciences who enhanced the sense of Cuban nationality.

He wrote articles in the publications of his time, textbooks, carried out translations, and composed speeches. His most remarkable work was "Aforismos" brief notes that he wrote throughout his life, data and observations related to everything that caught his attention, Religious, patriotic, scientific and human thoughts.

He was born in La Habana. Son of Antonio José María, a functionary and official of the colonial government, and of Manuela Teresa de Jesús. He came from a home of Creole property owners, grew up in an environment dominated by relative economic hardship and strict education.

The family owned the sugar mill San Francisco de Paula and the estate Santa Ana de Aguiar. Nevertheless, these properties caused certain concerns for Mrs. Manuela Teresa upon her husband's death, to the point that she needed the help of an uncle, the presbyter José Agustín Caballero, regarding the education of her children. However, the needs were not so pressing and the family was able to live a life that was to some extent comfortable.

The young Pepe was tutored in his studies by his uncle José Agustín who, together with the religious atmosphere of the home, enabled his nephew to acquire intellectual gifts of high caliber. Thus, José de la Luz, at only twelve years old, was already studying Latin and philosophy at the convent of San Francisco. In 1817 he earned his degree as a bachelor of philosophy from the Royal and Pontifical University of San Gerónimo de La Habana. Some time later, personal inclinations and the desires of his mother and uncle led him to begin a career common to many of the offspring of wealthy Creole homes of the era, the priesthood. He then entered the Seminary College of San Carlos and San Ambrosio.

At the Seminary of San Carlos he earned his degree as a bachelor of Laws. There he met Félix Varela y Morales, from whom he received classes as well as from his uncle José Agustín. It is precisely in these years, and through his experiences at the Seminary and his study of the doctrines of those encyclopedic teachers, that he deepened his connection with the renovating scientific spirit of the European eighteenth century, studying European philosophers such as Locke, Condillac, Rousseau, Newton and Descartes. He likewise joined in the struggles of Varela and Caballero against scholastic philosophy and teaching methods entrenched in the subjects and pedagogical plans of the Seminary and all educational centers in the capital, and linked himself to the cultural, scientific and civic efforts of Bishop Espada.

He came to master languages such as English, French, Italian, German, and in 1821 he translated the work of the comte de Volney. He traveled through Egypt and Syria during the years 1783-1785.

His knowledge of theology and religious life led him to repeatedly speak out against Spanish clergy residing in Cuba. Perhaps these convictions are what distanced him from the religious cloister and already in 1824 we find him as director of the Chair of Philosophy at the Seminary of San Carlos, which he attained through competitive examinations. Previously, this responsibility had fallen to José Antonio Saco, fellow student and intimate friend of Luz, as well as to the teacher Varela, its creator.

From the beginning of his activity as Director of the Chair of Philosophy he was committed to thoroughly applying and carrying to their ultimate consequences the knowledge and ideas of his teacher, Félix Varela. He became famous not only among his admirers, but also among his detractors, for his fidelity to Varela's methodology and doctrines, whom, according to his own words, he cited almost daily and whose texts he followed in teaching his classes.

He used several pseudonyms during his lifetime, among them: "Un Habanero," "El Justiciero," "Un Amante de la Verdad" and "El Amigo de la Juventud."

He traveled to the United States in 1828, and a year later he traveled through several European countries: England, Scotland, France, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Germany and Italy.

These trips allowed him to mature in his training, establish contact with the most advanced ideas of the time and study how to adapt them to the reality of Cuba.

During his stay in the Old Continent he met intellectuals of great renown such as Goethe, Humboldt, Michelet and Walter Scott. He gathered there the most modern developments in Pedagogy and became familiar with the ideas of Pestalozzi and his followers; he opposed, however, the ideas of Victor Cousin, with whom he conducted an intense polemic in the philosophical field, between 1838 and 1840, because he understood that his doctrine served to justify and perpetuate Spain's dominion over Cuba, while also endangering national values.

On his travels he also acquired apparatus and instruments necessary for the Physics Laboratory and Chemical Laboratory of the Seminary of San Carlos.

Upon his return to La Habana he collaborated in the Revista Bimestre Cubana (1831-1834) and in the Memorias de la Sociedad Patriótica (1838-1841), as well as in El Mensajero Semanal, published in Nueva York. In those years he earned his degree as a Lawyer from the Academy of Puerto Príncipe (1836), was Vice-director (1834) and Director (1838 and 1840) of the Royal Patriotic Society of La Habana, and took part in the failed project to establish a Cuban Academy of Literature.

In 1841 he was elected as alternate member of the Board of Population.

He traveled through Nueva York and París in 1843, but the following year he was forced to return to Cuba to respond in person to charges of his alleged participation in the so-called Conspiracy of the Ladder, whose case was dismissed.

He intervened, likewise, in other famous political conflicts during the Colonial period, such as the drafting of a letter addressed to Tacón on the occasion of the exile of José Antonio Saco in 1834. In the same way, his actions succeeded in revoking the expulsion of English Consul David Turnbull from the ranks of the Royal Patriotic Society of La Habana due to his abolitionist ideas in 1842.

As an educator, for many his most outstanding activity, he served as Director of the College of San Cristóbal, in which he requested permission to inaugurate a Chair of Chemistry, and offered a Philosophy course, between 1834 and 1835.

He founded the College of El Salvador in January of 1848, recognized at that time for the implementation of modern teaching methods, in which he made his private library available to students and teachers; special classes in Philosophy, German and Latin were taught there to the most outstanding students, efforts were made to include the most advanced scientific knowledge through the use of modern research methods, and an attempt was made to instill in his disciples a sense of human elevation.

The duty of the Teacher was, for him, to accustom students to think for themselves. In both colleges he published annual pamphlets with the general examinations. He also presented a project for the creation of a Cuban Institute, a kind of practical school of sciences that he was unable to bring into reality.

His pedagogical conception considered that the starting point of knowledge was experience and observation, and that the experimental method, besides being the only productive one, was also the only truly analytical one and could be called scientific.

His conception of the progressive European thought of the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was related in its essence to thinkers of the philosophical stature of Descartes, Bacon, Newton, Locke, French Enlightenment, in general, and Condillac in particular. Several philosophical polemics had him as protagonist, against figures of the stature of Domingo del Monte, the Presbyter Francisco Ruiz, Manuel Costales and the brothers Manuel and José Zacarías González del Valle. With Pedro Alejandro Auber he also engaged in polemics on Mathematics problems (1832-1833).

During the decades of the 1840s and 1850s he collaborated in various periodical publications such as the Faro Industrial de La Habana (1844) and the Revista de La Habana (1853-1854). He was a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Fine Letters of Barcelona, starting in 1841.

News of his death shook all of La Habana. It is said that 500 carriages and more than 6,000 people attended the funeral and that the Captain General decreed a posthumous tribute to the "distinguished director of the college San Salvador." This phrase came from the people with his death "How many poor Black people will search through their trunks tomorrow looking for some black rags to attend the burial of don Pepe!"