Rafael María de Labra and Ramón Labra: Two Generations of Revolution and Liberal Reform in Spain and Cuba

Abstract

Rafael María de Labra (Havana 1841–Madrid 1918) was instrumental in the founding and eventual success of the parliamentary campaign to abolish slavery in the Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico (1873) and Cuba (1886). To what extent were his public politics and practices, his moral values, shaped by personal experiences and clan or family loyalties? As will become evident, the influence of his father, Ramón Labra, a military officer, was paramount in his intellectual formation. This is turn poses the question of whether a cross-generational case study might be paradigmatic of the transmission of liberal thought in nineteenth-century Spain. In The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling writes: 'As for the origin of ideas, we ought to remember that an idea is the formulation of a response to a situation'. With this insight in mind, this article focuses on the intellectual and political legacy of the Revolution of 1808, the crisis which prompted an astonishing collective response and a revolutionary ideology.