Che Guevara predicted that the book El Ingenio (The sugar mill) would become a classic. In Miami, the Cuban exiles tried to steal its author as a war booty. The man who was an anti-dogmatic Marxist had also been a sales manager for a major brewery in Caracas, a city that put him in touch with the “fierce capitalist competition.”

 

The Cuban historian, essayist, writer, and professor Manuel Moreno Fraginals was anything but a boring man. Boring was a condition he detested as much as history books that could ward off against it. In the garden of his house in Havana, he buried pieces belonging to colonial sugar mills; his favorite drink was a satanic concoction of coffee, lemonade, salt, and pepper. He used to talk of feats done with almost Olympic deftness, which everybody accepted as a matter of courtesy, like the time he said he had run one hundred meters in just 10.1 seconds.

 

In class, students were left stupefied, and ladies yearned for this young man of a Homeric stature who wore sandals and carried a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, whose demeanor was given by his constant gasping for air and his boundless erudition. He was a vibrant, rationalist, funny man, a “teenager who knew a lot,” as he would be described by Cuban historian Olga Portuondo.

 

In 1966 he stated: “And to understand life… you needs a passionate spirit”. This is an axiom with which he charges at the alleged bourgeois objectivity. In his article La historia como arma (History as a weapon), about Commander Ernesto Che Guevara, he wrote: “wherever he is, thanking him for so many reasons.” Nine years after his death, Manuel Moreno Fraginals is now ready to be momentarily captured by the reader through works by him and by others about him. The thick volume with almost half a thousand pages that sends one of the most solid, daring, and polemic Spanish American historians and scholars of the 19th century to orbit around himself.

“It is all a matter of following the writing sequence, finding a work succession that may provide, through time, an idea of the evolution of his work as well as its diverse facets”, says Historic Sciences Doctor Oscar Zanetti Lecuona (1946). Zanetti is the compiler and prologue writer of the volume Órbita de Manuel Moreno Fraginals, of the Órbita collection by the local publishing house Union, released during the Cuba 2010 International Book Fair.

 

“We included writings by Moreno of a historical and economic character –he was more well-known as a historian-, but also studies of historical and social, and historical and cultural character, demographic studies, in an effort to cover the whole field of creation. And seeking to provide a more complete perspective, we also collected opinions and viewpoints by other authors about Moreno and his work through the years,” explains Zanetti, who for decades kept an academic and friendly exchange with the author of El Ingenio, the masterpiece of historiography about the sugar industry in the West Indies and its condition as socio-cultural matrix.

 

Órbita de Moreno Fraginals contains “classics like El Ingenio and others such as Cuba España, España Cuba: historia común (Cuba Spain, Spain Cuba: common history), and while we have only taken illustrative excerpts from these works, our intention has been mainly to take advantage of this possibility so that several disperse texts, some articles in magazines, many of them almost ignored, were compiled and made available to the reader”.

 

CN.- Speaking of readers, and thinking of both historians and the non-experts, what kind of legacy would a text like this leave for one or for the other?

OZ.-I think it will leave a very vivid image of an uneasy author like Moreno, who explored different fields, who innovated in some of them, and that sense it will provide a clear vision of his creative vitality, apart from the elements, sometimes contradictory and paradoxical, that can be appreciated in his work.

 

But the greatest paradox, for many, is to be found outside of his books. It is a twist, or rather, a somersault. At 75, he decides to go and live in Miami, the headquarters of the Cuban exile, in the middle of the worst crisis on the island and when many betted against the Cuban Revolution. It was 1994 and nothing was certain.

 

“The exile in Miami was… the natural outcome of Manuel Moreno Fraginals’ intellectual and political biography,” the Mexico-based Cuban historian Rafael Rojas wrote, to make room for the thesis that such a personality could not have followed a different path given his “insatiable appetite for knowledge, the epistemological openness, always at risk of being found heretic by the good academic consciences”.

 

The obituary published on the Cuban newspaper Granma, on May 12th, 2001, did not hesitate to acknowledge such virtues in Moreno Fraginals, but it also added that he had “made humiliating intellectual and political concessions in order to be accepted in an environment that is the very denial of his creation”.

 

Nonetheless, the organ of Cuba’s Communist Party defended the legacy of the researcher, adding him to the list of the island’s top academic thinkers. “Irrespective of sad frivolities during his final years, his work undoubtedly belongs to Cuba’s historiographic heritage, and will continue to be appraised and studied among us.”

 

CN.- Is the Moreno of the last few years in the United States present in Órbita?

OZ.- He is present with historic articles corresponding to that period, very few then, because Moreno was considerably old when he decided to emigrate, and he did not have the chance to come up with a transcendental work, but there are actually three or four pieces pertaining to that last period, inserted within the fundamental lines of his historiographic activity.

 

CN.- There is a Moreno that changes his historiographic, analytic vision with time. Does he outgrow his research models, cast them, re-invent himself in others?

OZ.- I would not say that he outgrows his research models, because he was essentially loyal to certain criteria and points of view about Cuban and Caribbean history. Yes, obviously some of those criteria are modified with the passing of time, some even sadly resulting from a change in his political stand that drove him to review concepts he had upheld and I believe brilliantly stood for, which he gave up. But in general I think there’s a outlook of continuity regarding his line of concern and creation.

 

CN.- Towards the end of his life, did politics prevail over science?

OZ.- This is difficult to establish. I think he gave in to circumstances and this probably led him to issue opinions of scant scientific backing, though sometimes they were actually very imaginative or clever. In this final period of his life he was a man almost in his 80s, whose intellectual vitality could not, in any way, be compared to that he could have exhibited thirty years earlier…

 

CN.- If we compared the Moreno who wrote El Ingenio and the one from his last works in exile, what would they have in common?

OZ.- There is a great work by Moreno that got published after he went into exile, which is Cuba España, España Cuba: historia común, of 1995, that is actually the result of research he had conducted over a lengthy period of time. In it you find elements of his planned but never undertaken history of Cuban culture, which he had announced during his tenure as a professor at Havana’s Higher Institute of Arts, and it’s like the consolidation of a long work experience with very mature ideas, with insightful propositions on different angles of Cuban history. There is a valuable intention, at an advanced age, of still keeping himself fresh, irrespective of the fact that his ability to do so could have diminished to an extent. It is even a book that lacks bibliographic references, because it is developed in a rather essayistic tone.

 

CN.- Would there still be unpublished material by Moreno?

OZ.- We included some unpublished material that we considered to be finished enough so as to take the risk of releasing them. It always implies responsibility to bring to light works by late authors that they might have left unconcluded; you never know whether the author kept them unpublished out of desire or because the circumstances were not the right ones. With help from his daughter Beatriz, we were able to find some unpublished texts that we included in the Órbita and which I think that enrich the scope of the publication.

 

CN.- From a historiographic point of view, how to place Moreno’s work vis-à-vis Cuba and the American continent?

OZ.- Moreno is one of the chief representatives, in Cuba and in the continent, of the historiographic renewal, of distinct Marxist foundations, that came in the late 1960s, in the heat of the social and political developments triggered by the Cuban Revolution, but which goes beyond the very Cuban Revolution. In this regard, Moreno’s work is a supreme example of what in the late 60s and early 70s started being called in Latin America the new history.

 

CN.- This would be a very speculative question, but Would Moreno be happy to see this book or would he have reservations?

OZ.- Any author would be happy to see that his work is being reproduced and that it still arouses intellectual interest. Everybody aspires to keep their legacy alive. Whatever the case, he would feel happy, though he might disagree, perhaps, with some of the views I express in the presentation of the volume.

 

 

*Translated by: Adriana Pinelo Avendaño