José María Chacón Calvo

Notable Cuban hispanist, diplomat, scholar and promoter of Cuban culture through a plurality of professional facets.

Sixth and last Count of Casa Bayona, he was born in the ancient town of Santa María del Rosario.

He studied at the Jesuit school of Fordham, in the United States of America, but completed his primary education in La Habana, at the Colegio de Belén.

He completed his secondary education in 1911 at the Instituto de Segunda Enseñanza de La Habana. That same year he was one of the founders of the Sociedad Filomática, which launched him on the path of research, criticism and, especially, the promotion of culture, an endeavor to which he dedicated his most important professional efforts.

In 1913 he gave a lecture on "The Origins of Poetry in Cuba," which begins his extensive critical bibliography. From then on he showed a preference for that genre and interest in conducting cultural archaeology in relation to Hispanism, a path through which he approached in a foundational way the understanding of Cuban letters and their popular, ballad-based essence.

He graduated as a Doctor of Law (1913) and in Philosophy and Letters (1915) from the University of La Habana. He was legal consultant to the Secretaría de Justicia. In 1918 he became secretary of the Cuban Legation in Madrid.

He gave lectures at the Ateneo of that city and was elected vice president of its Iberoamerican Section. At that time, he gave lectures at the Francisco de Vitoria Chair of the University of Salamanca and, furthermore, collaborated in the Revista de Filología Española and conducted research in the Archives of the Indies and Simancas. He began a fruitful working relationship under the mentorship of Ramón Menéndez Pidal, who influenced his trajectory as a critic.

In his essays Hermanito menor (1919) and Ensayos sentimentales (1922) the influence of Azorín and Gabriel Miró is evident. In general, he had a very fruitful relationship with some of the most important Spanish intellectual figures of the era: Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado, Unamuno, García Lorca, Alberti, Gregorio Marañón, Manuel de Falla, Ortega y Gasset, Eugenio D'Ors…, figures about whom he wrote interesting critiques and recollections; with his intellectual prestige he supported the young people of the Generation of '27.

Upon returning to Cuba, he was elected director of the Sociedad de Conferencias (1923), where he distinguished himself in the dissemination of national literature –especially in its second period. He was co-founder of the Sociedad de Folklore Cubano. His book El documento y la reconstrucción histórica (1929) is credited with notable methodological value. He published valuable studies on outstanding Cuban intellectuals: Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Félix Varela, Juan Clemente Zenea and others. Those dedicated to José María Heredia constitute his most valuable contribution in this regard; on Heredia he studied almost all facets of his work and life and became one of his most important exegetes.

In 1934 he was appointed Director of Culture in the Secretaría de Educación, a position he held, with a brief interruption for a stay in Spain, until 1944; he created the Revista Cubana and the Cuadernos de Cultura, and collaborated in the publication of books by important Cuban intellectuals. He represented Cuba at the XXVI International Congress of Americanists, held in Sevilla (1935), in the capacity of vice president.

He was visiting professor at Middelbury College (1944) and at Columbia University. He held the chair of Cuban literature at the Catholic University of Villanueva (1946-1961). He was also a member of the National Academy of Arts and Letters, whose vice presidency he occupied for some time, and of the Academy of the History of Cuba. He was elected director of the Cuban Academy of Language, in whose Bulletin he published various works, and president of the Literature Section of the Ateneo de La Habana.

Numerous prestigious serial publications of Cuban culture at that time had him as a collaborator: El Fígaro, El Mundo, Diario de la Marina (in this newspaper he had a fixed section in which he made known numerous works expressing his concerns and literary and cultural ideas), Revista Bimestre Cubana, Revista Cubana, Cuba Contemporánea, Universidad de La Habana and Revista Lyceum. He achieved prestige as a compiler and prologue writer; to him are owed Las cien mejores poesías cubanas (Madrid, Editorial Reus, 1922), the selection and prologue of the prose collection by José María Heredia titled Revisiones literarias (La Habana, Publicaciones del Ministerio de Educación. Dirección de Cultura, 1947), and that of poems by José Joaquín Palma, Poesías (La Habana, Ministerio de Educación, Dirección de Cultura, 1951). Under his care and with his prologue, the works of Manuel de la Cruz were published (Madrid, Saturnino Calleja, 1924-1926, 7 v).

He cultivated prose poetry and poetry (on this last point, Félix Lizaso notes that during his youth he had written verses that he would later gather in a volume with the suggestive title De mi fracaso poético, although he would never manage to publish it). Throughout his life he gave numerous lectures in Cuba and abroad.

He was not a creator ascribed to groups or movements. He was not a minorista, although he remained attentive to the work of figures linked to this group that sought to invigorate the letters of the Island and collaborated in the magazine Cuba Contemporánea and Revista de Avance. Neither was he an origenista, but he recognized the important role of José Lezama Lima, Cintio Vitier and the rest of the creators linked to the magazine Orígenes. Criticism and historiography esteem him as one of the most relevant literary researchers in all of Cuban intellectual history. José Antonio Portuondo said of him: "he offers the highest example of diligence and scientific rigor among us."

Emphasis has been placed on Chacón's apoliticism. He was an advocate of "cultural neutrality," and acted consistently with that position, especially during his period as Director of Culture in Cuba, which tested his honest professional commitment, free from the politicking of that time. This led Cintio Vitier to consider that for Chacón, neutrality was the chosen path in accordance with his circumstances for the continuity of culture. Nevertheless, his stay in Spain during the Civil War enabled him to help some renowned intellectuals leave the peninsula bound for Cuba and other places in the Americas; he supported revolutionary combatant Pablo de la Torriente Brau and other compatriots in the midst of the tragic Spanish events.

He died in La Habana on November 7, 1969. Cuban culture owes José María Chacón y Calvo a solid body of work in research and promotion of culture for the development and better knowledge of the Island and its branches and contacts with Spanish culture.