Juan Manuel Planas Saínz

Public figure from Cienfuegos, graduate of Electrical Engineering, founder of the Círculo Hispano Americano in 1904. Considered the Jules Verne of Cuba, pioneer of Cuban science fiction.

He was born in Cienfuegos, graduated from high school in Santa Clara in 1895. Sent by his parents to Belgium once he finished his high school studies, he went to live in the city of Liège. There he founded the Círculo Hispano Americano in 1904, of which he was Secretary and which subsisted until the German occupation.

In 1905 he was appointed member of the Jury of Awards of the Universal Exposition of Liège, and in 1906 he graduated as an Electrical Engineer from the University of that city.

The following year, that is, in 1907, he was appointed Delegate in Cuba of the Association of Electrical Engineers of Montefiore, Liège, an appointment that had to be ratified in 1919, after the Germans evacuated that country.

In this year he incorporated his degree, through revalidation, at the University of La Habana, and also in the same year competed for the position of Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at that educational center. The conduct of the Board and the personnel of the Department of Public Instruction caused him considerable unjustified harm at that time, resolving to take advantage of the first opportunity to obtain revenge, an opportunity that presented itself 5 years later, in 1912, when he destroyed, in a valuable work, the doctoral thesis presented by a student who graduated from that University, and whose thesis was approved by the Faculty of Sciences and Letters, which had it published as something extraordinary.

Juan Manuel Planas's counter thesis was approved among other scientific authorities, by engineers Messrs. Primelles and J.I Corral, by those who had been his professors in Liège and by the illustrious Dean of the Faculty of Sciences at the Sorbonne, in Paris.

In 1908 he married in La Habana and that same year contributed to the founding of the Sociedad Cubana de Ingenieros of which he was appointed Secretary in 1909, a position he held until 1910. In these two years he gave several lectures at different scientific centers in the capital of the Republic.

He founded in 1910 a popular science magazine titled "Cathedra" and in the same year was appointed First Class Auxiliary Engineer, assigned to the dredging of the port of Sagua.

In 1911 he competed for the chair of French at the Institute of Pinar del Río, obtaining it by prevailing over seven competitors who aspired to the same position.

In 1911 and the following year he gave several lectures on Electrical Telegraphy.

In 1913 he graduated as a land surveyor from that Institute, in 1914 he was appointed Member of the Board of Protests, a position he held satisfactorily.

In the Contests of the First Centenary of the Founding of Cienfuegos, held in 1919, he obtained three first prizes for having presented valuable works on the proposed subjects.

In early 1922 the oceanographic yacht "Dana II" visited La Habana, where Professor Johannes Schmidt was aboard. Among those who received the scholar was Eng. Planas who, later, introduced him as one of the characters in his novel El Sargazo del Oro. The latter, for his part, on August 11, presented Albert Einstein's theories for the first time in Cuba, at the Sociedad Cubana de Amigos de la Ciencia.

In 1923 he was admitted to the Academy of Medical, Physical and Natural Sciences of Cuba with the discourse: The Study of the Sea, later published as a pamphlet.

In the same Academy he also presented, successively, the investigations: The Exploitation of the Sea, The Force of the Sea, and Introduction to Oceanography (edited as a book in 1943), in addition to many other studies.

In that same year, 1923, Planas also published his novel of adventure and intrigue La Cruz de Lieja, set in Belgium during the years of World War I.

The veneration of the past continued to be one of the constants of his work. In 1925 he published the story La Gobernadora, about Isabel de Bobadilla, the wife of the Adelantado Hernando de Soto.

In 1926 his regional novel Flor de Manigua appeared, set in his native city.

In 1927 the French physicist Georges Claude visited Cuba at his initiative, and owing to this initiative Cuba became the first nation to apply his brilliant discovery to take advantage of the thermal energy of the Sea. (The experiment was carried out successfully in the bay of Matanzas).

In 1928 he founded the Magazine of the Sociedad Geográfica de Cuba and began a series of explorations of Cuba's cave systems. He began to collaborate, around the same time, in the French publication L´Illustration. From 1932 on he founded and directed the Bulletin of the Sociedad Cubana de Ingenieros and, in 1938, founded the magazine Cátedra.

In that same year he began to publish, as a serial in the newspaper Avance, of Ciudad de La Habana, his scientific anticipation novel El Sargazo del Oro (El Vellocino Verde) whose theme is, once again, the exploitation of the possibilities of the Sea.

Set in Cuban seas (and equally ignored by historians of our science fiction) it describes the adventures of two young people to whom an inventor offers the hand of his daughter in exchange for going to find him the algae from which he wishes to synthesize the golden content... only to discover, in the end, that the marine flora conceals other treasures and constitutes a true wealth. In the years of the forties decade he wrote in the magazines Bimestre Cubana, Bohemia and Carteles. From the pages of the Magazine of the University of La Habana he greeted, in 1945, the realization of an old dream of his, the founding of "El Instituto del Mar". In that same year he graduated from the Professional School of Journalism "Manuel Marqués-Sterling".

In the decade of the nineteen fifties he began to collaborate with the institution and the Magazine of the National Library "José Marti". He delivered to it, on June 28, 1954, an important historical document, the intimate diary of the Cuban educator and feminist María Luisa Dolz y Arango. In 1955 he published there his historical-geographic study Isla de Pinos no es la Isla del Tesoro.

On November 19, 1955 he gave his lecture Los Horizontes de Julio Verne at the Circulo de Amigos de la Cultura Francesa, in Ciudad de La Habana, later edited as a pamphlet.

In 1959 his novel El Sargazo del Oro was finally published in book form, in an edition intended for Cuban libraries.

He was an honorary member of the Círculo Hispano Americano de Lieja, member of the Association des Ingénieurs sortis de I Scola de Liege, delegate in Cuba of the Association des Ingénieurs sortis de I Institut Electrotechnique Montefiore, member of the Sociedad Cubana de Ingenieros, member of the Sociedad Geográfica de Cuba.

By Royal Decree on June 20, 1919 he was appointed by Albert I, King of the Belgians, Knight of the Order of Leopold II, and the Senate of the Republic authorized him to accept this honor, dated December 15 of the same year.

From the age of three, this public figure from Cienfuegos traveled through Cuba, Puerto Rico, the United States, France, England, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Monaco.

He wrote in "La República Cubana de Paris" under the pseudonym K.L, he also wrote in Cuba y América from 1897, in New York until its termination and in La Habana in 1917, and collaborated in various magazines and newspapers of Cuba, mainly in "Fígaro".

He died in 1963, leaving a fruitful literary, scientific and historical production that still awaits adequate study.