José Luciano Franco Ferrán

He was born in La Habana, grew up in a humble family environment, where his mother was his teacher.

He obtained in 1942 the degree from the Escuela Profesional de Periodismo Manuel Sterling. Additionally, he completed studies in Municipal Science and Urbanism, and in historical research.

Thanks to this, he wrote Las Cooperativas de Consumo y los Municipios (1932) and Coloniales (1933). He had a strong involvement in the Sociedad Cubana de Estudios Históricos e Internacionales and in the Sociedad de Estudios Africanos.

Considered a master of historians, he was an expert for UNESCO, within the International Scientific Committee for the writing of a general history of Africa.

He was also a professor at the Universidad de La Habana, teaching History of America and Cuba. His most important publications on African history are Los palenques de los negros cimarrones en Cuba and La diáspora africana en el Nuevo Mundo. He died on January 4, 1989.

For his three-volume work alone Antonio Maceo. Apuntes para una historia de su vida—first published in 1951 by the Sociedad Cubana de Estudios Históricos e Internacionales, and re-edited by the Editorial de Ciencias Sociales in 1973—the Cuban historian, biographer, researcher, folklorist, ethnologist, professor and journalist José Luciano Franco Ferrán deserves the highest recognition. But his work is much more comprehensive and comprises more than sixty titles of active bibliography, forty-three of them printed from 1959 onwards.

That book was a successful expression of the work of an author who knew Cuban history minutely, who was capable of detecting with good judgment the relationship between man and the social and historical environment in which he lived, and who knew how to narrate facts in a meticulously documented manner.

With good reason, the distinguished Cuban intellectual José Antonio Portuondo, in his Prologue to the 1973 edition of Franco's work, warns us: "Maceo emerges from these pages in all his authentic greatness, without need for adjectives to adorn him or apologetic garlands or showy epithets. The biographer, wisely, has allowed the simple account of an extraordinary life and the sober exposition of a thought characterized by its laconic and energetic expression, to impose themselves by themselves on the reader who, before these notes, feels pulsing in all its greatness an exemplary existence…"

The talent of José Luciano Franco sprang from a humble environment. He was the grandson of a slave and a landowner, and the son of a Spaniard and an African woman, and that mixture did not lack a touch of Asian blood. He was born in the Havana neighborhood of Cayo Hueso, on December 13, 1891, now 120 years ago. His first lessons came from a maternal aunt, who instructed him at home. Later he would take some grades in public education, when it was established in 1900. He studied commerce and obtained a diploma from the Escuela de Periodismo Manuel Márquez Sterling. The economic precariousness of his home led him to work as a cigar maker, at barely fourteen years old, and he was also a port worker and, from 1910 to 1912, a street cleaner. From 1913 to 1944 he held a position in the Accounting and Cadastral Office of the La Habana municipal government. He participated in labor struggles and strikes, and his yearning for knowledge led him to a life devoted to self-improvement. The struggle of the dispossessed was always a matter of particular interest to him.

Under the auspices of then City Historian, Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, and of who was director of the Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Joaquín Llaverías, he studied Municipal Science and Urbanism, and historical research. Nevertheless, his culture was, essentially, the fruit of self-taught formation. He read tirelessly, reviewed thousands of documents and served others selflessly with his writings and investigations.

To his extensive active bibliography would have to be added his collaborations for more than fifty years in countless publications, including Carteles, Social, El Mundo, Hoy, Mediodía, Islas, Vida Habanera, Orientación Social, Granma, La Gaceta de Cuba and Casa de las Américas.

Those who knew him have highlighted from his long and fruitful life his simplicity, tenderness, extraordinary tenacity, capacity for work, lucidity, erudition, energy and great modesty. Of this last quality speaks for itself the note he wrote on the back cover of the book Hombradía de Antonio Maceo, with which Raúl Aparicio won the UNEAC Biography Prize, 1966, fifteen years after the appearance of Antonio Maceo. Apuntes para una historia de su vida. In it, José Luciano expressed about Aparicio's work: "It is almost impossible to gather more skillfully and with such exquisite perfection, countless events, feelings and emotions, to trace in vigorous objective pictures the historical panorama of the era and reveal to the reader the depths of character and revolutionary sense in the heroic and exemplary life of Antonio Maceo."

Such expressions were uttered by one who had already written that three-volume biographical work, which is a landmark in Cuban historiography and in studies of the Titán de Bronce.

In evoking José Luciano Franco we must remember his astute pages on Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido), the poet victim of the savagery of Spanish colonialism slavery, and those related to Juan Francisco Manzano, the poet, painter and writer born a slave, and who in 1836 achieved his freedom thanks to a collection organized by his friends. Also his studies on the Haiti Revolution, Spanish policy in Cuba, the Cuban political and cultural process, Caribbean customs and traditions, the influence in the formation of values of American independence wars in the first half of the nineteenth century, maroons and palenque settlements, and the rebellion of copper mine workers in eastern Cuba (1530-1800).

He also investigated the role of battalions of pardos and morenos in the military scene of colonial Cuba, African religion and its influence on the island's culture, the Aponte conspiracy and the clandestine slave trade. He and Fernando Ortiz undertook the rescue of the traditions of Havana comparsas and the customs characteristic of the time of the old cabildos. His conception of multiculturalism allowed knowledge of the African heritage left to Cuba and America by the presence of enslaved Blacks.

He was a member of the Academia de la Historia de Cuba and directed the Cuadernos del Instituto Interamericano de Historia Municipal. As a teacher, his work from 1959 onwards was notable at the Instituto Pedagógico of the Universidad de La Habana, in which he taught classes in History of America, History of the Antilles, African Contributions to the History of the Antilles and History of Africa. In the classroom he taught his students to relate dialectically man with his time, with his historical and social circumstances.

In those years his work stood out in archival research and in compilations of documents treasured by the Archivo Nacional de Cuba related to the histories of Haiti, Venezuela and Mexico. Many who saw him work in that valuable institution say that daily he could be found among documents, files and notebooks. But his desk also served as a place to which many came seeking advice or help, always finding the historian's helping hand, who possessed great mastery of the Archive's sources.

As a historian, not only did he bring to light relevant and unknown details of our history, but he set guidelines on the path to be followed by researchers, demonstrating, through his teaching and example, that dedication and persistent work can open the way to the sources of historical knowledge. His criteria were always esteemed among the most authoritative in Cuban historiography, and he was one of the best knowers of the framework that gives body to a nation's identity, its history and character. Furthermore, he set guidelines for subsequent research on Cuba and Afro-America.

From 1962 onwards, Franco was a researcher at the Instituto de Historia, later the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales of the Academia de Ciencias de Cuba. Additionally, he was Vice President of the Grupo Bolivariano de Cuba, member of the Sociedad de Estudios Afrocubanos and of the Junta Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología, General Secretary of the Instituto de Historia Municipal, member of the Sociedad de Geografía e Historia de Honduras and of the Sociedad Arqueológica de Bolivia.

UNESCO chose him to participate in the International Scientific Committee in charge of writing a general history of Africa, and was entrusted to him in particular the study of diaspora and maroonage in America. In 1970 he attended, both in Europe and in American countries, congresses on urbanism, anthropology, municipalities and History.

His books have been translated into several languages and, among them, may be mentioned El eco de la primera revolución rusa en Cuba; Pushkin, el gran poeta mulato; Las cooperativas de consumo y los municipios; Las ciudades y sus problemas; La revolución de Yara y la constituyente de Guáimaro; Antonio Maceo en Honduras; Folklore criollo y afrocubano, and Ruta de Antonio Maceo en el Caribe. His work Política continental americana de España en Cuba, 1812-1830, earned him the Municipal History Prize, of 1947.

His country, in recognition of his great contributions and dedication, granted José Luciano Franco the title of Héroe del Trabajo of the República de Cuba, as well as the orders Félix Varela, Frank País and Carlos J. Finlay, and the distinctions Raúl Gómez García and Rafael María de Mendive.

The humble environment in which he was born could not prevent him from reaching the summit of knowledge and, with it, leaving behind a colossal work that his immense modesty could not conceal. He worked until the end of his days, and his productive life concluded on January 5, 1989, in La Habana. But his admirable example as a paradigmatic historian remained forever.