José Ignacio Rasco Bermúdez

Cuban intellectual and politician.

Rasco was founder in 1959 and first president of the Christian Democratic Party in Cuba, and was currently President of Honor of said party in exile.

He had active participation in Miami's cultural life as founder and president of the Jacques Maritain Institute, an organization dedicated to the study of contemporary problems in light of the thinking of the French philosopher.

He studied at Colegio Belén, and at the University of La Habana in the careers of Law and Philosophy and Letters. On the island he founded with his brother Ramón the law firm Rasco y Bermúdez, and distinguished himself as a journalist for the newspaper Información.

After his departure to exile in 1960, he worked in Washington, D.C. as an economist at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), where he was elected and reelected president of the Employees Association. In Miami he was in charge of the development office of Colegio Belén for many years.

He began his career as an educator in the classrooms of Colegio de Belén in Havana and at Universidad de Villanueva, where he taught Civics. In Miami he taught courses in political science at Biscayne College, now Saint Thomas University.

"He was a man of multifaceted personality, he distinguished himself in many activities, and in all of them he put ethical values, enthusiasm and a sense of Christian humanism," expressed writer Uva de Aragón, who was his student at Saint Thomas University and collaborated with him on many cultural projects such as the Jacques Maritain Institute.

"He used to say that perfection was the enemy of good, and although he was a man of thought he was more a man of action; he always went to the essence rather than the adjective," noted De Aragón.

Rasco's most recent book, Acuerdos, desacuerdos y recuerdos, collects a series of works from 1959 and 1960, which show his beginnings in the public sphere, as well as an extensive biography of Fidel Castro, of whom he was a classmate at Belén and at the University of La Habana.

His articles published in Diario Las Américas are compiled under the title Huellas de mi cubanía. He is also the author of numerous essays, among which stand out Hispanidad y cubanidad and Jacques Maritain y la Democracia Cristiana.

His essay Integración cultural de América Latina was awarded by the Inter-American Development Bank, and later published as a book. A recipient of various journalism awards, such as the Sergio Carbó and José Ignacio "Pepín" Rivero, he was also honored with the order Isabel La Católica for his defense of the Spanish language.

He directed the radio program La Universidad del Aire for several years, founded in Cuba by Jorge Mañach, and later continued by Rasco on the Radio Martí station. He also presided over Editorial Cubana Luis Botifoll.

Together with Estela Pascual de Rasco, who passed away in 2011, with whom he was married for 60 years, he was the center of a home of deep values. Both were frequent attendees of Miami's cultural activities and enjoyed receiving in their home their numerous family and friends, always with generosity and joy.

"The best way to describe my dad is 'god, country and home,'" said his daughter María Rasco Lytle, commenting in turn that her father's public persona was very serious, but with family he was very affectionate. "He was very playful, mischievous, always making jokes with everyone."

Regarding the memories his father had of his classmate Fidel Castro at Colegio de Belén, directed by Jesuit priests, María expressed that her father used to tell her anecdotes about Castro's crazy antics.

"One day Castro made a bet with other students. At Belén there were some very long hallways, Castro took a bicycle at full speed and crashed into the wall of one of those galleries [trying to fulfill the bet]. That story impressed us because of how crazy Fidel was," recalled María, who, on the other hand, also heard her father say that Castro used to memorize his textbooks.

"He said that Castro was a very intelligent man," said De Aragón about the opinion Rasco had of the former Cuban ruler.

For Rasco Lytle, his father was also a constant source of history through his active participation in preparations to free Cuba, especially in the early years of exile when the Bay of Pigs invasion was being organized. Rasco was a member of the Democratic Revolutionary Front, which grouped together different organizations of anti-Castro exiles.

"My house was always open to everyone who came from Cuba who was involved in the struggle against Castro. Everyone cooperated with the dream we had of returning to Cuba," said Rasco Lytle, who remembers that in the duplex they inhabited in what is now Little Havana they welcomed "the boys who were going to the Invasion."

"We would go to bed in one place and wake up in another because people were always arriving," noted Rasco Lytle, who was 8 years old. "My brother and I would ask where the camp [where the expeditionaries were trained] was, but they never told us."

For his part, José Ignacio Rasco Jr., remembers a later period of action of his father, in which "he practically didn't get off a plane" to go speak in international forums about the Cuban issue.

"Despite being an intellectual with skill for words and the written word, he was a man of action, who founded parties and organizations that advocated for Cuba's freedom," said Rasco Jr., mentioning that his father in this work had met numerous presidents and political figures, "from Robert Kennedy to Václav Havel and Lech Walesa." The latter at a time when Rasco was trying to incorporate the experiences of the Czech dissident intellectual, later president, and the president of the Solidarity Movement, respectively, for a possible transition of power in Cuba.

"My father lived an exemplary life, and died completely at peace. He was very calm in this last period, surrounded by his family," said Rasco Jr., reporting that Rasco had suffered a stroke in 2009 that began to weaken him and then two weeks ago another stroke. "We are going to celebrate that he was a great Christian, a lover of democracy," he concluded about the way they will remember his father.

Rasco is survived besides his children María Rasco Lytle and José Ignacio Rasco Jr., his daughter-in-law Ana Rasco, and five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.