Public Intellectuals and Politics in Cuba: A Case Study of Cosme de la Torriente y Peraza (1872–1956)

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.7.2.0164
• Pages: 164-199
• Published date: 01 December 2015
• Date: 01 December 2015
• Author: Jorge Renato Ibarra Guitart,Gastón A. Fernández
• Subject Matter: public intellectuals,Cosme de la Torriente,constitutionalism,legitimacy,Society for Friends of the Republic

InternatIonal Journal of Cuban StudIeS 7.2 WInter 2015

ACADEMIC ARTICLES

PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICS IN

CUBA: A CASE STUDY OF COSME DE LA

TORRIENTE Y PERAZA (1872–1956)

Jorge Renato Ibarra Guitart

Institute of History of Cuba, Cuba

Gastón A. Fernández

Indiana State University, USA

Abstract

The dependent character of the Cuban bourgeoisie in the aftermath of the Revolution

of 1895–98, the cycles of economic and political crisis with roots in the Island’s sugar

monoculture and economic dependency on the US and the pattern of US interventions

in Cuban affairs under the Platt Amendment produced a profound crisis of legitimacy of

the Cuban state during the Republic. Public intellectuals, in Antonio Gramsci’s definition,

played an important role in mediating the cyclical crisis with the purpose of maintaining

public consent for Republican institutions, political parties and elites. Cosme de la Torriente

y Peraza was a leading figure among public intellectuals who performed this role on behalf

of Republican democracy beginning with the administration of President Estrada y Palma

(1902–06) and culminating with the Fulgencio Batista regime (1952–58). His political

career provides insights into the root causes of the crisis of confidence in Republican

political institutions and leaders that paved the way for the Revolution of 1958.

Keywords: public intellectuals, Cosme de la Torriente, constitutionalism, legitimacy,

Society for Friends of the Republic

Introduction

Barrington Moore’s classic Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

advances the thesis that the democratic path to modernisation depends on the

PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICS IN CUBA 165

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strategic role played by the bourgeoisie in a country’s development, asserting

that ‘no bourgeoisie, no democracy’ (Moore 1967). According to Moore, the

strategic role of the bourgeois class results from its detachment from feudal class

relations to transform the nature of property relations, the state and society. In

Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of the capitalist state in Intellectuals and the

Organization of Culture (Gramsci 1971), public intellectuals play a crucial role

in legitimising bourgeois democracy by formulating political doctrines and ide-

ologies that analyse the crisis and contradictions of capitalism, by creating

awareness of the long-term interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole in the political

system and by obtaining consensus of the popular classes for bourgeois rule.

This article examines the political thought and career of Cosme de la Torriente y

Peraza, a prominent public intellectual and politician of the Republic (1901–58)

whose career exemplifies the pursuit of hegemony based on moral and intellec-

tual arguments for the Constitutions of 1901 and 1940 and resistance to the

Platt Amendment.

The Cuban bourgeoisie at the turn of the twentieth century was in a precarious

position to play a strategic political role. Its nationalist credentials were threatened

by its dependent ‘comprador’ status functioning as intermediaries for foreign capi-

tal in Cuba (McGillivray 2009: 63–86). Within the Cuban bourgeoisie, the sectors

most dependent on foreign capital and markets, notably the sugar plantation and

mill owners and those relying on trade and imports, were seldom an obstacle to US

expansion. The Cuban industrial bourgeoisie did not gain significance in the

domestic market until the Great Depression and the Second World War when US

imports decreased and US owners of sugar mills were pressured out of the sugar

industry and banking under the regulatory policies of populist governments

(Domínguez 1978). However, few industries created in this period were able to

survive foreign competition. In 1954, craft production still figured prominently in

the Cuban economy, with 45.1 per cent of all factories having fewer than five

workers. According to Jorge Ibarra Cuesta, ‘Domestic industries were far from

being able to cover domestic demand for the production of each of its branches,

thus creating a deficit that would be satisfied by imports’ (Ibarra 1995: 63). In

general, the Cuban industrial bourgeoisie did not lend a nationalist character to

the economy. The legitimation function was complicated further by the neocolo-

nial relations of the country with the US, reflected in the Platt Amendment and US

geopolitical demands on Cuba in order for it to be accepted into the emerging

American global empire.1 The Cuban bourgeoisie after independence had to

address these contradictions to claim their legitimacy to rule.

It was therefore imperative to the hegemony of bourgeois democracy that a

strategic sector of this class constituted of public intellectuals evolved an aware-

ness of its long-term class interests and formulated a nationalist programme that

166 ACADEMIC ARTICLES – JORGE RENATO IBARRA GUITART & GASTÓN A. FERNÁNDEZ

InternatIonal Journal of Cuban StudIeS 7.2 WInter 2015

would appeal to a broad-based alliance of social classes. Hegemony depended

on the capacity to formulate such a nationalist political and economic develop-

ment strategy, mobilising state power to obtain more favourable terms for

Cuban capitalists and labour from the island’s sugar monoculture, diversifying

the economy and resisting foreign interventions in the island’s domestic affairs

under the Platt Amendment.

Historians and political scientists have pointed to the significance of Torriente

y Peraza as a leading public intellectual of the Republic who exemplifies, on the

one hand, a reform-minded nationalist critical of the Platt Amendment and its

effects on Cuban politics, and whose career was dedicated to its abrogation and,

on the other hand, as a prominent figure in the political crisis during the US

occupation of Cuba from 1906 to 1909, and the Gerardo Machado and

Fulgencio Batista regimes that threatened democratic legitimacy. US-based

research on Torriente’s role as a reform-minded nationalist and war veteran of

the Revolution of 1895–98 is found in studies such as James Brown Scott’s ‘The

Platt Amendment: What it is and is not’ (Scott 1926), and in Gastón Fernández

‘El 13 de Marzo de 1925’ (Fernández 2005a) and ‘El Tratado de Extradición

Entre Cuba y España’ (Fernández 2005b), examining the significance of his

diplomacy and political thought with respect to US–Cuba relations under the

Platt Amendment and the development of Cuba’s ‘international personality’

during the Republic.

US scholars have shed greater light on Torriente’s role in the mediation of

political crisis during the first and second Republics. Louis A. Perez’ Army

Politics in Cuba 1898–1958 (Perez 1976) discusses the role of the Unión

Nacionalista in the political mediation between the regime and opposition dur-

ing the Gerardo Machado administration touching on Torriente’s role.2

Torriente’s significance in the political mediation of 1955–56 to end the Batista

dictatorship is discussed in Marifeli Perez-Stable’s The Cuban Revolution:

Origins, Course and Legacy (Perez-Stable 2012), Hugh Thomas’ The Pursuit of

Freedom (Thomas 1971), and Jorge Domínguez’ Cuba: Order and Revolution

(Domínguez 1978). Thomas, for example, writes that Torriente’s mediation rep-

resented the ‘last hope of middle class democracy’ in Cuba.

Cuban historiography on Torriente is more extensive. Cuban scholarship dur-

ing his lifetime includes his biography by Felix Lizaso (Lizaso 1952), works by

Ruy Viña Lugo (Vina Lugo 1924), Emeterio S. Santovenia (Santovenia 1944),

Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring (Leuchsenring 1975), René Lifríu (Lifríu 1945) and

Manuel Márquez Sterling (Sterling 1954), examining his diplomacy and geopoliti-

cal thought, and a compendium of articles published honouring Torriente’s elec-

tion as honorary president of the World Federation of the United Nations in

1951 (Rubio 1951b). This body of work provides valuable data on Torriente as a