Mañach y Robato, Jorge (1898–1961)

Jorge Mañach y Robato (b. 14 February 1898; d. 25 June 1961), Cuban writer, born in Sagua la Grande. Mañach was learned in Cuban history and culture and participated in Cuban political life as senator of the Cuban republic (1940–1944) and as minister of state (1944). After studying in Cuba and going to Spain in 1907, where he attended Escuelas Pías in Getafé from 1908 to 1913, he was educated at Harvard, from which he graduated in 1920. In France he studied law at the Sorbonne and experienced the rich cultural and artistic life of Paris during the 1920s. Back in Cuba, Mañach took up a career in journalism (1922) on the famous journal Diario de la Marina. His first book, Glosario (1924), is a collection of the chronicles of his European and Cuban travels. This work comprises three genres: travel chronicles, cuadros costumbristas (works of local color), and essays of literary and art criticism. His essay Indagación del choteo (1928), which brought him recognition, deals with the humorous peculiarities and irreverent spirit of the Cuban personality. In Martí: El apóstol (1933), a biography in novel form, praise for the Cuban patriot José Martí is based on historical facts rather than on the subjective view of Martí given by the first republican generation. Exalting Martí as a hero, Mañach sought to restore political health to Cuba, which was then under the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado (1925–1933). Mañach rejected autocratic systems and considered the individual's inalienable right to freedom to be the foundation necessary for a social and political regime. And though his writings in the magazine Bohemia supported Fidel Castro, Mañach ultimately rejected the tenets of both Castro and Fulgencio Batista. Other important works by Mañach are Examen del quijotismo (1950), a phenomenological study of Don Quijote, and Teoría de la frontera (1970), which synthesizes the values of North American and Latin American culture, and suggests the potential for a good relationship between the two.

See alsoCuba: Cuba Since 1959 .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nicolás Emilio Álvarez, La obra literaria de Jorge Mañach (1979).

Jorge Luis Martí, El periodismo literario de Jorge Mañach (1977).

Rosalyn K. O'Cherony, "The Critical Essays of Jorge Mañach" (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1970).

Additional Bibliography

Argote-Freyre, Frank. Fulgencio Batista. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006.

Díaz Infante, Duanel. Mañach o la Repú blica. La Habana: Letras Cubanas, 2003.

Fuente, Alejandro de la. A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

                                    Juan Carlos Galeano