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  • 3 - Alexander von Humboldt and the Cultural Invention of Cuba Among Its Nineteenth-Century Intellectual Elite

  • from Part II - Cuban Literature’s Long Nineteenth Century
  • Edited by Vicky Unruh, University of Kansas, Jacqueline Loss, University of Connecticut
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature
    Published online:
    31 August 2024
    Print publication:
    04 July 2024, pp 67-81

  • Summary

    Based on Political Essay on the Island of Cuba by Alexander von Humboldt, this chapter scrutinizes the interactive impact of his ideas about Cuba with those of the island’s criollo intellectual elite, in particular Francisco de Arango y Parreño and José de la Luz y Caballero, also noting the assessment of those collaborations by Vidal Morales y Morales and, in the twentieth century’s first half, by Fernando Ortiz. Central to the analysis is how these writers drew on Humboldt’s antislavery and scientific legacies, while silencing the essay’s predictive advocacy for an African confederation in the future free states of the Antilles. The chapter elucidates an abolitionist turn in Arango’s writing and the role of Luz’s extensive journeys to meet with such international figures as Humboldt for modernizing scientific research and education in Cuba. While noting a canonizing halo later surrounding Humboldt’s role in Cuba, the chapter reinforces his indispensability to imaginings of an antislavery, scientific, and even independentist Cuba.