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

Abstract

IntroductionBarrington Moore's classic Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy advances the thesis that the democratic path to modernisation depends on the 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 ideologies 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 intellectual 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 capital 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 (Dominguez 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 neocolonial 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 awareness of its long-term class interests and formulated a nationalist programme that would appeal to a broad-based alliance of social classes. Hegemony depended on the capacity to formulate such a nationalist political and economic development 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. …