Among the plans outlined by the late director of the Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Captain Joaquín Llaverías, was a series of publications making available to scholars in other lands the material in the Archivo concerned with their respective countries. The first such volume appeared in 1955 and was dedicated to Haiti. As 1960 approached the successors of Llaverías proposed to do the same for Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, and Chile, as Cuba’s contribution to the celebration of the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of their independence movements. First to appear was the volume on Venezuela (La Habana, 1960) in which are reproduced valuable papers concerned with the history of that country. Few comparable papers on Argentina are found in the Archivo Nacional de Cuba, so it was decided to publish the writings of José Antonio Miralla, a native of Argentina who moved to Cuba and who became one of the precursors of the island’s independence.
Miralla was born in Córdoba de Tucumán in 1790, went to Buenos Aires in 1805 to study in the Real Colegio de San Carlos, and was present when a British force invested the city in 1807. In 1810 he went with a fellow student to Lima where he completed work for a medical degree (which he seems never to have used), and was for a time suspect by the authorities because of what was happening in Argentina at the time. Becoming the protegé of the Conde de Vista-Florida, Miralla went to Spain with his protector as secretary when the count was chosen councilor of state. When, however, Ferdinand VII upset the constitutional system in Spain, Miralla left for Cuba where he became the head of a prosperous importing firm, a personage of importance in commercial circles, and a member of the highly respected Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, to whose Memorias he became a frequent contributor. With the restoration of the constitutional regime in 1820 Miralla became a captain in the “constitutional militia” and a warm advocate of the principles of the Constitution of 1812. Soon, however, he became involved in the independence conspiracies centering around the “Rayos y Soles de Bolívar,” probably because of his connection with the Masonic lodge in Habana which supported the movement. Accused of plotting an uprising in the interior, Miralla slipped away to New York where he joined the revolutionary committee that was working for Cuban independence. It was while traveling for this committee, first in Colombia and later in Mexico, that Miralla died in the latter country at the age of 35.
The present volume contains a biography of Miralla (155 pages) by Francisco J. Ponte Domínguez of the Cuban Academy of History, and a collection of Miralla’s writings edited by the recent director of the Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Jorge Quintana Rodríguez. The writings are grouped under two heads: literature, consisting of poems and essays; and Asuntos políticos y sociales. Most space is devoted to the first, but the student of Cuban history will profit most by the latter. Particularly valuable is the essay in which Miralla outlined the improvements he thought necessary for Cuba. This was read to the Sociedad Económica in 1816 and became the basis of a program of encouragement of white immigration in Cuba, but which finally turned into the plan under which more than one hundred and twenty-five thousand Chinese coolies were brought in as well as thousands of Indian prisoners of war from Yucatan.
While the volume is dedicated to Argentina, it is the student of Cuban history who will profit most from its publication.
