Citario. Derived from the Latin citāre (to quote) plus the suffix -ārium (repository), similar to bestiario. A 21st-century neologism, it emerged among Spanish-speaking scholars at Bookish & Co., with roots in ancient anthologies and florilegia. “Citario” is related to medieval books of commonplaces (such as those by Erasmus of Rotterdam) and proto-examples from the 19th century, such as Familiar Quotations. This “Citario Mañach” celebrates the 128th anniversary of his birth and proposes an intellectual map of his critical consciousness: the tension between style and civility, between culture and crisis, between nation and form.
On a more personal level, we can point out that Mañach, who came from a family of the Villaclareña petty bourgeoisie, was able to place himself on a higher rung through marriage, as his father-in-law was a wealthy merchant, which guaranteed him access to Havana circles of great economic solvency and not difficult political recognition. Bringing this up may seem like a simplistic way of explaining Mañach, but in his case it is a factor that cannot be ignored when attempting a first approach to his overall work, which is not without contradictions and conflicts. He had a long association with the most conservative Cuban newspaper, Diario de la Marina, which often bordered on outright reactionaryism. He was the founder and intellectual soul of the political party known as ABC, perfectly pigeonholed within a petty-bourgeois milieu that, while espousing a definite nationalist stance, was nonetheless quite conservative in social and economic terms.
Consistent with these connections, Mañach was a staunch anti-communist, as he proved in some of the numerous debates in which he was involved, since it seems that intellectual controversy was an ideal breeding ground for his ideological work, which he generally tried to maintain at a level of dignity and respect. In the absence of sufficiently comprehensive and rigorous internal studies analyzing his positions and the environment in which he operated, I will not attempt, for obvious reasons, to address this aspect here, but only to note its existence. For some, Jorge Mañach’s great tragedy was that he tried to be the cultured and conscious ideologue of a bourgeoisie that never recognized him as such because he was not up to their standards.
(…)
The margin that Mañach gave the Revolution for its development lasted too short a time. Here, as when he accepted the position of minister in Batista’s government, egotism played its part, albeit in the opposite direction. Not seeing himself recognized as he believed he should be (and largely deserved to be), he entered into early contradiction with the revolutionary government. In fact, there are many indications that there was a settling of scores to resolve old controversies and enmities, and that Mañach was treated unfairly, ignoring his undeniable and sustained contributions to national culture, as well as his position in principle favorable to the Revolution. A letter he wrote to a friend on September 8, 1960, dramatically brings us closer to his dilemmas at the time:
For now, suffice it to say that I am being forced to reorient a life that I had already made for myself. Today, I received the news that I have been forced into retirement, that is, without having requested it or having any reason to do so, as a professor at the University, along with many others of no small prestige. And since I am nothing but a professor and writer, and I cannot carry out either of these activities here today, I find myself in the position of having to seek new horizons. But horizons that represent a modus vivendi, because I am not a man of fortune, nor can I take what little I have out of here.
We must not forget that Mañach was suffering at that time from the final stages of a cruel cancerous disease, and the man who left Cuba to settle in Puerto Rico was already condemned to death and defeated by disappointments and setbacks. He worked as a professor at the University of Río Piedras but died shortly afterwards, on June 25, 1961.
Salvador Arias, foreword to Martí en Jorge Mañach (Cuba, 2014)
◾️
[Mañach] knew that it is not the masses who are the authors of revolutions, but rather a select minority who, busy driving them forward, maintain a necessary dose of reason: “Those who really act within the classes are certain more homogeneous and determined groups.” But there must be a kind of sympathy or at least understanding, in which some trust others who, strictly speaking, are not heroes who seek to be so deliberately in order to then impose themselves and impose their will, at least in a tyrannical manner. The arrival of a new era calls for recipients capable of assessing sacrifice or sacrifices in their proper dimension—and beyond their preferences. In a minor or major conflict between certain hostile positions, what matters initially is not who carried out the action, but its importance for the nation-building project. However, sooner or later, a “primordial” right or a leading role will be claimed.
The masses, by their very nature, have a basic principle that they sometimes (or almost always) do not even stop to think about. It is destruction. For it is a principle that becomes an unconscious method, a primary repetition. The masses are chaotic by nature. What a minority does with the masses with regard to the denial of the past tends to be repeated throughout human history.
Daniel Céspedes Góngora (¿Una verdadera patria? Ensayos para un centenario en ruinas, Editorial Casa Vacía, Richmond, 2025)
◾️
If in Anglo-Saxon essays Hugh Kenner recovered Pound as a “builder of ruins,” Mañach could be thought of in the Cuban tradition as an architect of columns, especially in that Republic. The architect of an archaeological enterprise, he wanted to rescue the moral nerve of the nation through criticism of its stylistic vices. He treated categories such as choteo—that Cuban tendency toward irreverent mockery that eschews seriousness—informality, and national mischief as if they were pathologies of expression. Although he was not entirely unfamiliar with a sense of humor, he believed—and this is perhaps the core of his thinking—that style was a way of living history.
[…]
Mañach never wanted to redeem Cuba through dogma; he thought about the island from the perspective of form, implicitly questioning the categories of “nation” and “culture” through stylistic demands. Like Valéry, he believed that spirit is measured by its resistance to inertia. And in his final exile, teaching in Río Piedras and writing in the melancholy of scholars without a homeland, he understood that his task was not precisely to save Cuba, but to bear witness to its possibility.
Pablo de Cuba Soria, foreword to ¿Una verdadera patria? Ensayos para un centenario en ruinas (2025)
◾️
This distanced interpretation of Negrismo coincides with the rectification of avant-garde extremism—never, in reality, authored by Mañach, nor particularly characteristic of Revista de Avance, which was by no means a strident magazine—in “El estilo de la Revolución” (The Style of the Revolution), some of whose paragraphs Mañach incorporates into his commentary “Vanguardismo: razón y saldo” (Avant-gardism: Reason and Balance), which follows the one dedicated to negrismo. But while Mañach acknowledges the merit of avant-gardism in having dissolved the “official petrification of culture” and opened the way to “a fresher and more creative expression,” he reduces Negrismo to a consequence of Cuban anguish. Does Mañach not imply that “this desperate recourse” had been, as such solutions often are, fruitless? “When it is fully achieved, the nation will have an accent in black, but not a pattern,” he states, from which it can be inferred that for Mañach, the outcome of Negrismo is reduced to a contribution of accent. The mistake, derived from the fact that the formation was not yet complete, had been to take blackness for Cuban identity. At this point, the tendency toward homogenization, which assumes the primacy of the national over any other “particularism,” is once again evident. Does the delegitimization of the full expression of the black element imply its social marginalization? The meaning of the word “resentment” reveals the convergence at this point of Mañach’s synthetic history of styles in Cuba and his vision of the “black problem,” contained in theory in his 1943 speech and expounded in the two articles in Bohemia in 1949. For the notion of resentment has traditionally been used to counteract demands arising from social inequalities. (…) When speaking of resentment, Mañach does not fail to reproduce, albeit subtly, the old argument that blacks should be grateful to whites for having granted them freedom and taught them civilization.
On the other hand, as part of the legacy of avant-gardism, Mañach includes “some youth movements given to the purely aesthetic, rescuing and taking to the extreme certain imaginative and formal licenses, a certain reveling in the prestige of the pure word, which avant-gardism brought as a seed.”
It did not take much insight to notice that he was referring to the magazines that preceded Orígenes and the poetry that poets such as Vitier, Piñera, and Lezama had been publishing. The two central points that Mañach would maintain in his controversy with Lezama in 1949 already appear in this 1944 essay. One is the criticism of hermeticism: “Under the cover of a merely allusive verbalism […] the new youth groups now speculate with plastic or poetic forms that are increasingly detached from any purpose of general communication.” Second, the thesis that this “new poetry,” despite reacting against avant-gardism, derived from “that courageous stridency.” Finally, Mañach is correct in pointing out that they reflect a new form of post-revolutionary disillusionment.
Duanel Díaz (Mañach o la República, 2003)
◾️
Origins was the culmination of previous efforts, in notebooks and small magazines, which finally achieved a certain ecumenism, always avoiding emphasis—a product of what it had become—and also avoiding excessive omnicomprehension, a small republic of letters. Saint John Perse, Santayana, and Eliot authorized the insertion of their manuscripts in its pages, just as they authorized it for very few magazines in the rest of the cultured world. Affiliation and sequence of the Revista de Avance? There were radical discrepancies. Orígenes seemed only interested in the protozoan roots of creation, the very norm that implies the richness of doing and participating. His pronouncements were not reduced to the simplicity of a manifesto or a marble index that, in his humorous style, points to only one path and one path. To say what was said only through his own footsteps, that it was his progression that remained of his arrow. Forgive me, but your fervor for the Revista de Avance is one of longing and retrospection, while mine for Orígenes is one that devours us in a work that still breathes and moves forward, that still demands, like the voracious requirement of an essential surrender, that we pour our most torn intuitions into the controversy of contemporary art.
That lack of affiliation is what, according to you, arouses a certain resentment in you. We could not show affiliation, my dear Mañach, with men and landscapes that no longer held the fascination for subsequent generations of decisive dedication to a work and that floated above the vast demonstrations of journalism or the mundane bargain of positive politics.
José Lezama Lima, Open letter to Jorge Mañach (1949)
◾️
One of the articles in the book Pasado vigente (The Present Past), in which Jorge Mañach collected part of his journalistic work, is entitled “The Crisis of Illusion.”
The crisis was repeated in his life on the path of politics: he left it, as he confesses in one of his letters, living allegorically the parable of José Enrique Rodó, La flor en la copa (The Flower in the Cup).
We all remember the child who played in the garden, rhythmically tapping a crystal cup with a reed. We remember how the child changed his game, filling the cup with sand. And how, when he wanted to start the resonance of the glass again, he discovered that it had fallen silent. Holding back a tear, he looked around. He saw a white flower, made it his own “with the complicity of the wind,” and secured the stem in the same sand that had silenced the soul of the cup. “He raised the flower high and paraded it triumphantly through the garden.”
After one of his crises of disillusionment in Cuba—the failure of his projects in the Ministry of Education—he wrote to me from Columbia University: “I put my enthusiasm into teaching the literature of our America as director of Hispanic American Studies at the Instituto de las Españas. I am living out Rodó’s parable: that of the flower in the cup.”
It was also a crisis of hope, the most painful of all, the last of his life, which forced him to cross the border into exile.
Concha Meléndez, foreword to Teoría de la frontera (1970)
◾️
What happened was this: once in the Isla de Pinos prison, where he was sentenced to fifteen years for military rebellion, with all the patience in the world, Castro wrote a first draft of his speech and, through Melba Hernández, a comrade in arms, he sent it to the brilliant essayist Jorge Mañach—also an opponent of Batista—who organized his ideas and perfected his syntax, enriching the text with erudite quotations, Latinisms, and even pronouns totally foreign to most Cubans, such as the “os” that Don Jorge, who spent his childhood in Spain, was so fond of. The Balzac, Dante, Ingenieros, Milton, Locke, and Saint Thomas who parade through the work do not belong to Castro but to Mañach, as do the long quotations from Miró Argenter and the poems by Martí interspersed throughout the plea.
Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Carlos Alberto Montaner, and Álvaro Vargas Llosa, Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot (2001)
◾️
Jorge Mañach belongs to the highest order of literary chivalry, and I often refer to him as one of the three “Knights of El Greco” born in the Caribbean region of the late Spanish Empire. And I do so thinking of his physical and spiritual bulk—that the soul will also have its own…
There is in him the continence of expression that we imagine in the number one knight of the Greek-Italian-Iberian; none of the drama thrown out; a great repose lying on the chest and a sensitivity of the hand that does not reach the nervous. And only in the center of his eyes—where no one can remain silent—is the fervor of every great-great-grandson of Spain.
All of Jorge Mañach’s friends take great pleasure in enjoying the two forms of neatness that run through his figure and his words.
“Mañach’s expressive instrument,” says essayist Concha Meléndez, “is virile, elegant, and with a certain Castilian austerity.” It should be noted that in this case, the Castilian is influenced by a Catalan ancestry. And this twist of blood is quite evident in his behavior and writing, both of which are free of fever. There is another bias in Mañach’s personality: he studied at Harvard University, which may have instilled in him a slight coldness that helps him cope with the harsh tropical climate and the temptation to heat up his texts…
Mañach, like all Cubans, had to be a squire to Martí. A great honor and at the same time a difficult task arise from this circumstance, because ten or more biographies of the Antillean “Liberator” have already been written. It is therefore a difficult task to take on a subject or a place that is loved and spoken of by many others. But one of Mañach’s triumphs is precisely that he has won the game: this biography of Martí has been celebrated by the best and also by the people…
Gabriela Mistral, foreword to Martí, el Apóstol (1950)
◾️
To understand Mañach’s assessment of Cuban culture as lacking in style, we need to place it in the context of his well-known opinions on choteo, anticipated in La crisis de la alta cultura en Cuba (The Crisis of High Culture in Cuba) and developed three years later in Indagación del choteo (An Inquiry into Choteo). Despite the two decades that separate them, Indagación del choteo and Historia y estilo should be read as complementary pieces, since choteo and style embody opposite qualities and the ubiquity of the former during the early decades of the Republic helps explain the absence of a national style. Choteo is the very antithesis of style, a kind of anti-style that destroys form and formality. When Mañach states that the choteador defends “his absolute freedom of whim and improvisation” (Indagación), the vocabulary anticipates the criteria with which he would define style fifteen years later. If the stylist chooses, the choteador improvises; if the stylist deliberates, the choteador acts on whim; if the stylist is content with the inventive use of conventional forms—what Mañach calls “innovative imitation”—the choteador accepts no restrictions. Unlike the choteador, the stylist does not break forms, but bends them.
Gustavo Pérez Firmat (¿Una verdadera patria? Ensayos para un centenario en ruinas, 2025)
◾️
Havana, December 27, 1942
Mr. Jorge Mañach
City.
Dear Mañach,
The worst thing about things is that we may like them in spite of themselves. A shrewd spirit would say no, that the best thing about things is precisely that we like them in spite of themselves. But we are not concerned with shrewd spirits, only with spirits. For you it is Poeta, nothing more and nothing else, but “somewhat petty polemical reticence” and “quartz and mist.” Whatever else you may add is mere courtesy; it does not count.
And a small miscalculation has been the cause of all this. I mean that I sent Poeta to the Mañach of Revista de Avance, but the reply came from the Mañach about to enter the Academy of Arts and Letters. And since the existence of this latter personage necessarily entails the death of the former, I ask myself melancholically whether the fate of the homme de lettres in Cuba may be that of successive metamorphoses into a specimen of symmetry ever more opposed to that of the pure man of letters. For there is undoubtedly a profound dissociation between the declaration contained in the inaugural issue of Revista de Avance and the judgment you now render upon the declaration made in Poeta. I am certain that that deceased personage would not have been scandalized by reading “Al levar el ancla” or “Terribilia Meditans,” among other fundamental reasons because he would not “carry in his baggage the white flag of capitulation.”
Capitulations! Here is one of the keenest problems contributing to that aforementioned frustration. I do not know for what reason (I leave this to the meticulous sociologist) the Cuban man—the American in general—upon reaching a certain point capitulates; and then there begin those successive men who are no man at all and who sow confusion, who establish the school of confusionism.
Yes, you “are sometimes a little frightened by your own inheritance…” But, Mañach, in matters of fright and terror, ours has ample grounds for alarm in the face of the frank capitulation of the preceding generation. And you know there is nothing more difficult for a generation than to discover that the one before it has capitulated. And we—of whom it is said that we are bristling porcupines, hypercritical of everything—have been called upon to play that difficult role of rebellion; of the methodical and intransigent spirit in a milieu that, after the pseudo-revolution of Machado, wanted only the manger and conformity in every order and every sphere.
This has brought us serious reproaches, with which we are satisfied. For example, those directed at Poeta run the widest gamut; they are the counterpart to the sense of method, ordering, and hierarchy that characterize the notebook. And you simply call this “quartz and mist”! But there is no such quartz or mist if I sincerely warn of certain dangers into which we are on the verge of falling or are already falling; for the worst of lingering delectations is precisely that which originates within kindred groups. And this, if I am not mistaken, would be called crystallization, and crystallization is death.
To save ourselves—insofar as a man in Cuba can save himself—we have had to suppress all amiability, for is it not true, for example, that the complete abandonment of the polemical principle and of hierarchy has caused the literary confusion and disorder in which we move? And could we admit that poetic hierarchy be sullied? That this lax democratization underway flood the domain of upright Cuban poetry? You know very well that today one writes to anyone, dubbed poet just because, an essay of criticism, even if it means confusion. To denounce these facts; to order disorder; not to compromise, not to capitulate; to plunge wholly into the work—this is our mission. Posterity will confirm or refute it.
But before posterity, and so that it may have sufficient material, you, Mañach, must write that “scandalous” essay on “Irresponsible Poeticism” to which—never doubt it—we shall of course pay full heed. Meanwhile, I shall reread your letter, which is a brief treatise in Boeotian irony. I pray to the gods that your next be a finished specimen of Attic irony. You shall decide.
Finally, Mañach, I must not accept your check; I want you to understand my decision fully. Would it be honest on my part to accept this sum if its giver does not at all share the spirit of my review?
I thank you, I greet you loyally.
Virgilio Piñera
S. C. Gervasio 121 altos
Letter from Virgilio Piñera to Jorge Mañach (Virgilio Piñera, De vuelta y vuelta. Correspondencia 1932–1978, Ediciones Unión, Havana, 2011).
◾️
I remember that Jorge Mañach’s illusory voluntarism, after becoming disillusioned with Fidel Castro and the 1959 revolution, led him to his third and final exile, to the University of Río Piedras in Puerto Rico, where he would soon die, on June 25, 1961, at the age of 63.
The dreamer—one of the few Cuban thinkers worth listening to in the 20th century—always had similar hopes that his native country would manage to extirpate the social and economic hindrances inherited from colonialism, from precariousness and foreign dependence, from corruption and deep inequalities coupled with discrimination of various kinds. The lecture on the “Crisis”—written in his youth—proves the longevity of his confidence in improvement, although Mañach does not fail to enunciate and comment on the essential rottenness of Cuba in 1925; this links his vision at that time to that of one of his essential teachers, the talented José Ortega y Gasset; at least until España invertebrada (Invertebrate Spain), published in 1921, four years before Mañach’s text, so the native of Sagua la Grande must have read the Madrid-born author’s essay before writing the one I summarize below; just as the influence of phenomenology on his ways of studying any subject is obvious.
José Prats Sariol (¿Una verdadera patria? Ensayos para un centenario en ruinas, 2025)
◾️
However, after the revolutionary triumph and already acting as organic scholars of power, Cuban Marxists clashed with Republican nationalists (Mañach, Lizaso, Ichaso…) and with the new revolutionary nationalists (Franqui, Cabrera Infante, Padilla…). Roa, for example, who had been part of the government of Carlos Prío Socarrás (1948-1952) as director of culture in the Ministry of Education headed by Aureliano Sánchez Arango, and who had criticized the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, lashed out in 1969 against the “astigmatic optics and hard-necked sensibility” of Indagación del choteo, even though he himself had published a eulogy of that classic essay in Revista de Avance in 1928 and had argued firmly and even angrily with the author of Martí, el Apóstol in the mid-1930s, but never without recognizing Mañach’s honesty and talent. As Duanel Díaz has recalled, at the height of his controversies with Mañach over ABC and the Martí biography, Cuban Marxists—some of whom, such as Marinello and Roca, had shared prominent positions with Ichaso and Mañach himself in the 1940 Constituent Assembly and even in Batista’s first government—always admired and respected the author of Historia y estilo. Although José Antonio Portuondo, Mirta Aguirre, and others in the 1970s spoke of Mañach’s “ideological diversionism,” in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Marinello celebrated, “without brotherly cobas,”
every book by Mañach and Roa referred to the “free judgment of theories, men, and things,” the “exquisite prose,” and the “generous efforts and zeal for a Cuba with a minimum of decency within the colonial status in which it lives” of that important republican intellectual.
The clash between liberal republicans, pre-Fidel communists, and revolutionary nationalists after 1959 took on the characteristics of a generational divide from the outset. In the first three years of the Revolution, publications such as Lunes de Revolución, La Gaceta de Cuba, and El Mundo en Domingo reflected this dispute between the traditional scholars of the Republic and the organic intellectuals of the new revolutionary regime. In Lunes, for example, the young poets Heberto Padilla and Antón Arrufat questioned Mañach’s moderation, his recurring appeal to civic decency as a lack of definition in the face of the revolutionary regime, as “sitting on the fence” and, above all, as a reactionary prejudice against the new. Mañach, who had emerged as an intellectual thirty years earlier, at the forefront of an avant-garde and revolutionary generation, was now seen by the young intellectuals of ’59 as a conservative and even a misoneist.
Rafael Rojas (Tumbas sin sosiego, 2006)
◾️
Why did Mañach not evolve towards Marxism, as did others very close to him, such as Juan Marinello? Anyone knows that this is a question with no definitive answer. We venture the idea of how much the American academia where he was trained may have influenced him; his solid culture in the Western philosophical tradition, which ran through the meanders of anthropological idealism. His class affiliation cannot be left out; raised in a middle-class family, he never thought from the perspective of the proletariat’s interests. He became an ideologue of the national bourgeoisie, and that marked his theoretical and political destiny. The proximity of the 1933 revolution defined him, and he joined ABC. The sectarian dogmatism of the local communists and Stalinist totalitarianism would ultimately turn him away from Marxism, though not from the socializing temptations that shaped his political liberalism.
Mañach’s anti-communism is based, as he himself says, on a philosophical and political-social position, not on the petty economic interests of those who have been affected by the Revolution. His philosophical idealism, which placed the driving forces of history in consciousness, contradicted Marxist determinism, conditioning his social ideal and political stance.
Rigoberto Segreo and Margarita Segura (Más allá del mito. Jorge Mañach y la Revolución cubana, 2012)
◾️
Phenomenology is also the individual himself, enhancing and distorting his biographical profile. Mañach is not a figure in the sense of the mythical Democritus, emerging from fragmentary mentions or witticisms by famous people such as Diogenes Laertius and Simplicio. Mañach is not an academic, nor even a philosopher in the strict sense of the term. Or rather, he is, but he is also so many other things!
I point to two obstacles in defining the subject: the jack-of-all-trades Mañach and the legend Mañach. The topic in question turns out to be one hundredth of others overlapping among thousands upon thousands of pages, stories, and tall tales from contemporaries and later scholars of a seminal figure in Cuban culture in the first half of the 20th century. And what a half!
There are many Mañachs. The revolutionary signatory of the Protest of the Thirteen, head of the Minorista Group—he gave it its name. The avant-garde mentor, soul of the magazine Generación Avance, the journalist of prestigious publications in Bohemia and Diario de la Marina (as well as editor of the newspaper Acción). The politician, founder of the ABC party and author of its manifesto. The respected lecturer and founder of La Universidad del Aire. The distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Havana (a position he won through competitive examination), as well as at Columbia University and Barnard College. The minister of education under General Mendieta’s transition.
Alfredo Triff (¿Una verdadera patria? Ensayos para un centenario en ruinas, 2025)
