Ramiro Guerra Sánchez

Pedagogue, journalist, and Cuban historian, considered a promoter of historical studies on the Island.

Ramiro Guerra was born on January 31, 1880 in Batabanó (south of the province of La Habana), where he received his primary education. In 1897 he abandoned his high school studies due to the circumstances of the War of Independence, in which he collaborated in support tasks. In 1900 he became involved in public education—also in Batabanó—and was selected to participate in a special course for Cuban teachers at Harvard University. He had responsibilities in the preparation of teachers for the young republic. In 1911, he was appointed regional president for Cuba of the Bureau International de Documentation Educative, of Belgium. Graduated in 1912 as a doctor in Pedagogy from the University of La Habana, he directed its Attached Practical School between 1912 and 1913. He was provincial superintendent of the Normal Schools for Teachers, and later general superintendent of schools in Cuba. He reformed the curriculum for primary and secondary schools. He also organized the first School of Commerce in La Habana. He was president of the Education Section at the V Pan-American Congress of the Child, in 1927. He founded and collaborated in the most important journals of his specialty in Cuba, such as Cuba Pedagógica.

Due to the influence that student, worker, and intellectual participation had on the life of the country, and because of his advanced nationalist positions, Ramiro Guerra directed his reflection toward national problems, beginning his historiographic work with the study of the colonial centuries and the singularities of Spanish colonization. His research resulted in the works Historia de Cuba (2 volumes, 1921-1925), Azúcar y población en las Antillas (1927), and Introducción al estudio de la historia de la colonización española en el Nuevo Mundo. In these works, Guerra introduced a critical vision of the past that fostered a nationalist response to colonial survival and foreign penetration. In his critical exegesis he incorporated a comparative study of Cuban reality with that of the other Antilles, based on his evaluation of different types of colonization and the effects of the latifundia phenomenon, until he established a differentiation between the native landowner class, non-tax farmer and with a vocation to build a country for itself, on one hand, and foreign latifundism, on the other.

He had to leave the country for having held the position of secretary of the presidency during the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. He went to the United States, where he served in 1935 as an advisor on economic and social affairs for the National Association of Sugar Planters of Cuba. Upon his return to the Island he published En el camino de la independencia, which concluded with an appendix titled "De Monroe a Platt". Among his most representative output from that period, and until 1952, are La expansión territorial de los Estados Unidos a expensas de España y de los países hispanoamericanos (1935), Manual de Historia de Cuba (1938), and Guerra de los Diez Años, 1868-1878 (1950-1952).

Ramiro Guerra was, together with Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring and Fernando Ortiz, one of the most important renovators of historical studies in Cuba, whose projections in research were related to the positions they assumed in the face of the economic difficulties and political changes that Latin America faced in the second decade of the century. The ideas from his work Azúcar y población en las Antillas (1927) were adopted as their own by the young revolutionaries of the 1930s.

He was a profound knower of the tendencies of world historiography, particularly Anglo-Saxon historiography, and recognized the influence he received from English Social History, by George Macaulay Trevelyon. He was also indebted to economic history, based on the conceptions of Henri Pirenne. He was interested in a comprehensive history, in which world tendencies would be present in national reality. For this reason his historiographic work was not alien—just as those of Leuchsenring and Ortiz were not—to the inquiry into national being and culture.

Ramiro Guerra died in La Habana on October 20, 1970.

Source: En Caribe.org