This chapter traces the rigorous intellectual work of philosopher-pedagogues José de la Luz y Caballero, Félix Varela y Morales, and Enrique José Varona, demonstrating their shared anti-authoritarian pedagogy, exemplified not only in how they transformed the teaching of philosophy and science at the University of Havana, but also in their liberal and republican views of politics and their model roles as public intellectuals engaged in the righting of social ills. The analysis demonstrates that the three men’s philosophical and pedagogical arguments were modernizing and progressive for their time and might therefore appear to challenge the class and racial interests supporting the tyrannical regime imposed by Spain on the island. At the same time, the chapter complicates this view of their contributions to education and philosophy with examples of their periodic blind spots with regard to authoritarian abuses around them or their failures to speak out against such abuses.

Based on Political Essay on the Island of Cuba by Alexander von Humboldt, this chapter scrutinizes the interactive impact of his ideas about Cuba with those of the island’s criollo intellectual elite, in particular Francisco de Arango y Parreño and José de la Luz y Caballero, also noting the assessment of those collaborations by Vidal Morales y Morales and, in the twentieth century’s first half, by Fernando Ortiz. Central to the analysis is how these writers drew on Humboldt’s antislavery and scientific legacies, while silencing the essay’s predictive advocacy for an African confederation in the future free states of the Antilles. The chapter elucidates an abolitionist turn in Arango’s writing and the role of Luz’s extensive journeys to meet with such international figures as Humboldt for modernizing scientific research and education in Cuba. While noting a canonizing halo later surrounding Humboldt’s role in Cuba, the chapter reinforces his indispensability to imaginings of an antislavery, scientific, and even independentist Cuba.