José de la Luz y Caballero: forerunner and teacher.
«José de la Luz y Caballero was a pure man, and he was also a precursor. He never dreamed, surely, of disturbing the consciences preparing them for the immediate and devastating action; he longed, on the contrary, to enlighten them in the truth and to serenade them in virtue; but in the end he disturbed them, nevertheless; he watered everywhere sublime and fertile germs of morality and virile greatness…».
(Taken from the book La Oratoria en Cuba, Volume I, compilation directed, prefaced and annotated by José Manuel Carbonell y Rivero).
Manuel Sanguily, spiritual son of José de la Luz y Caballero, tried to draw the complexity of a man who loved Cuba and taught his students from the majesty of thought.
More than two centuries have passed since that July 11, 1800, when he was born in Havana, the same city where his body would also rest forever.
To live, to die for a principle, to defend patriotism from a pure civism, marked the ideas of a man who, although he did not set out to prepare the future towards a certain national orientation, contributed significantly to the courage of the great intellectuals of 1968.
It is said that the speeches of the orator, philosopher and above all teacher, José de la Luz y Caballero, had a biblical solemnity, because his ecclesiastical formation always marked him. His teaching style was didactic and severe, his words, an incipient impulse for the independence of Cuba.
A continuator of Félix Varela, I would say his alter ego, he felt as his own the struggles of the teacher, the same as those of his uncle José Agustín Caballero. Opposed to the philosophies and scholastic teaching methods, he not only defended the methodologies and doctrines of the former, but he even quoted him daily and was guided by his texts to teach his classes.
Of the light that burns and ignites, of that which is contagious and grows, was this man who traveled from 1820 to the United States and Europe, where he drank the new treasures of the Enlightenment and knew how to mold them to the Cuban reality.
Elogio, words pronounced 20 years later in the Havana Cemetery in honor of Dr. Nicolás Manuel Escobedo, is one of the jewels of national oratory, collected in Volume VII of La Oratoria en Cuba; and Aforismos, his most surprising work.
His collaborations with the magazine Bimestre Cubana and Faro Industrial de La Habana, his performance as director of the Colegio de San Cristóbal and his leading role in the foundation of the Colegio del Salvador are other merits that distinguished the life of this excellent teacher.
Those who witnessed his passion for pedagogy saw him put his personal library at the disposal of the latter school, implement modern teaching methods or transmit to his students the breath of faith and rectification emanating from a deep sense of human elevation.
José de la Luz y Caballero remains, 223 years after his birth, in the memory and thought of a people. His name and ideas do not seem distant when we speak of the homeland and of the educators who lived to transmit to the rest that unwavering love for it.
Written by Jeidi Suárez García.
