Obituary of Manuel R. Moreno Fraginals

With the death of the Cuban Historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals at 80 years of age this past May 2001, the profession has lost one of its unique voices. Businessman, scholar, lawyer and revolutionary, Moreno Fraginals's career spanned a wide range of professions and countries. At the age of 22 he completed a degree in Law from the University of Havana, and a short time later studied history at the Colegio de México where he graduated in 1948. He returned to the island in 1949 and worked for a time at the Biblioteca Nacional. During this period he began publishing on national history. Of these earlier works the most outstanding is his essay on José Antonio Saco, Estudio y Bibliografía (1953). He eventually left in the early 1950s to became a businessman in Venezuela. With the triumph of Fidel Castro in 1959 he returned to Cuba and dedicated himself full time to the historical research. In the chaos of the first months of the new regime, he was able to organize semi-official expeditions to all the old plantations where he obtained their invaluable records for the national archives. Given his personality and rather independent nationalist politics, Moreno Fraginals never obtained a major position within the Cuban historical establishment, though he was able to work uninterruptedly in his major area of interest, the economic history of the island. In a period when history became part of the official state culture and the writing of manuales the prime historical activity, Moreno Fraginals went his own way doing fundamental archival research. After years of such research he finally published the first volume of his classic study, El Ingenio, in 1964. Though there was some resistance to his research, the support of Che Guevara was fundamental in getting his work published. He always told the story of Che Guevarra, who when challenged about why Fraginals was using supposedly a non-marxian methods to do his work, pulled out his North American made pistol and said that if this product of yanque manufacture could be used to oppose his enemies it was a good instrument no matter who made it. With the publication of El Ingenio, the most important economic study of the rise and functioning of the sugar estate in 19^th century Cuba, Moreno Fraginals archived international fame. He was soon being invited to lecture in universities in Europe and North America and always obtained a major following wherever he went, as he was an extraordinary charismatic lecturer. In the following years he worked steadily on completing his monumental work, whose last two volumes appeared in 1978. For the next several decades he worked on supplementing his monumental study with additional materials. With myself and Stanley Engerman he published his complete set of slave prices (1983). In 1974 appeared his El token acucarero and there followed numerous articles on slavery and the slave labor force, some of which appeared in his his recent book La historia como arma y otros estudios sobre esclavos, ingenios y plantaciones (1999). By the late 1980s he began to turn his attention to the period of the Cuban Wars of independence. Because of his long periods of residence in Spain, he was particularly interested in the 19^th century Spanish experience on the island. The result of this research were two recent books: Guerra, migracón y muerte (1993) and Cuba/España. España/Cuba. Historia Comun (1995). There is little question that the work and ideas of Moreno Fraginals have come to dominate the economic history of Cuba. El Ingenio remains the point of departure for anyone studying the economy and society of the island and has inspired a host of works on this vital theme. Though he left Cuba in 1994, Moreno Fraginals remained active in historical research and a defender of national culture until his untimely death.

Herbert S. Klein
Professor of History
History Department
Columbia University