Manuel Márquez Sterling

Cuban writer, journalist, and diplomat. In 1934 he was president of the Republic of Cuba for six hours.

He was born at the diplomatic headquarters of the Republic of Cuba in Armas in Lima, Peru, where his father served as a mambi delegate, on August 28, 1872; therefore, legally, he was Cuban by birth.

At age ten he moved to Puerto Príncipe (today Camagüey, in Cuba), where he completed his primary education. In 1889 he graduated as a bachelor from the Instituto de Segunda Enseñaza of Puerto Príncipe. Due to health problems, his parents sent him to Mexico to recover for a year. He returned to Camagüey, and in 1891 enrolled in the University of La Habana to study law. Back in Mexico, he worked as a bank employee and collaborated in various publications.

In 1894 he met José Martí and became involved in the preparations for the War of Independence, but his poor health prevented him from participating in the conflict. In New York he worked as secretary to Gonzalo de Quesada, who entrusted him with organizing José Martí's archives. He departed for Paris on a propaganda mission, and later did the same in Madrid. After the war ended, he returned to Cuba and held a position in Camagüey in the census inspection.

From a young age he was involved in journalism. At fifteen years old he founded the magazine El Estudiante, and a year later began collaborating in El Pueblo. In 1889 he joined the editorial staff of El Camagüeyano, a newspaper created by his father. During his first stay in Mexico he published articles in El Eco del Comercio and in La Revista de Mérida. Later he published articles in La Habana, in the newspaper La Lucha. During his second stay in Mexico he wrote chess chronicles for the Diario del Hogar and published the magazine El Arte de Philidor (1894). He also founded the weekly La Lucha, of revolutionary activism, and was correspondent for La Discusión. In Spain he collaborated in the Revista Internacional de Ajedrez.

During the First military occupation of the United States in Cuba he collaborated in La Verdad. In La Habana he wrote for Patria, Cuba libre and El Fígaro (1900 - 1926), which elected him as "the best young Cuban writer" in 1903. He also collaborated in El Heraldo and in El País. In 1901 he was among the founders of the newspaper El Mundo, in which he served as head of editorial. As political correspondent for that newspaper, he was one of two reporters who accompanied the commission of the Constitutional Convention of 1901 that traveled to the United States to discuss with the president of that country, William McKinley, the imposition of the Platt Amendment.

He was founder in 1913 of the newspaper Heraldo de Cuba, which he abandoned to found La Nación three years later. In this he participated intensely in political matters, and in opposition to the campaign for the reelection of president Mario García Menocal. The volume Doctrina de la República compiled some of the texts he wrote during that period. For his intense and brilliant career, Márquez Sterling has been considered one of the most important figures in Cuban journalism. In 1943, the Escuela Profesional de Periodismo, the first of its kind in Cuba and fourth in Latin America, adopted his name.

His diplomatic career ran parallel to his journalistic one. His first appointment as secretary of the Legation of Cuba in Mexico had no effect as he was declared persona non grata by Mexico's Secretary of Foreign Affairs, because of an article he wrote about president Porfirio Díaz. In 1907 he was appointed consul general of Cuba in Buenos Aires. From that year until the end of his life he held diplomatic positions in Latin America and the United States.

In 1913 he presented credentials to president Francisco I. Madero of Mexico, who was arrested in February of that same year as a result of a coup d'état. Márquez Sterling denounced the complicity in these events of the American ambassador Henry Lane Wilson, with whom he finally met to plead for Madero's freedom. However, on February 22 of that year Madero was assassinated on the side of the Palacio de Lucumberri, in Mexico City. Once he was dead, he accompanied his family to Cuba. He wrote articles about the Mexican Revolution, among which stood out the report that served as a source for his book Los últimos días del presidente Madero.

In 1924 he was appointed director of the Pan-American Office of the Ministry of State. In 1929, during the government of Gerardo Machado, he accepted his appointment as ambassador to Mexico, which earned him the criticism of many revolutionaries. However, and despite that, he maintained a position of opposition to Machado's dictatorship.

In 1934, when president Carlos Hevia was forced by Fulgencio Batista to resign, Márquez Sterling, then Secretary of State, accepted the presidency from six in the morning until noon, when he transferred power to Carlos Mendieta.

Márquez Sterling coined the phrase "Against foreign interference, domestic virtue," which would characterize his political position against the colonial ambitions of the United States toward Cuba and was his motto. In an article published in La Nación on February 13, 1917 he expressed: "the highest proof of patriotism that in our view a Cuban Government can give is to prevent, by its own conduct (…) that those warnings from the powerful foreigner be based on arbitrary acts committed in the exercise of power."

As ambassador to Washington, it fell to him, on May 29, 1934, to sign the Treaty of Commercial Reciprocity of 1903 between Cuba and the United States, with which the Platt Amendment was repealed. After initialing that document, he said to his personal secretary: "Now I can die in peace." He died on December 9 of that same year.

The National University of Mexico conferred upon him in 1921 the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa. He was Full Professor at the Instituto del Servicio Exterior of the University of La Habana, member of the literature section of the National Academy of Arts and Letters since 1910 and, since 1929, member of the Academy of History.

He could not finish his last work, Proceso histórico de la Enmienda Platt, which was completed by his nephew Carlos Márquez Sterling. He used the pseudonyms Tresemes, Manuel Márquez Mola, Carlos Loysel and XXX.

Opinions about Manuel Márquez Sterling

Max Henríquez Ureña considered him "the elder brother of the prose writers of the first republican generation." He was author of fifteen books on various subjects such as chess, history and politics. He was also author of the prologue to Pláticas agridulces (1906), by Sergio Cuevas Zequeira, and of the prologue to Episodios de la revolución cubana, by Manuel de la Cruz y Fernández, in its second edition, of 1911.