Roig de Leuchsenring, Emilio (1889–1964)

Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring (b. 23 August 1889; d. 8 August 1964), Cuban journalist and historian. Roig, a native of Havana, is best known as one of the founders and leaders of the Cuban revisionist school of historians, a group of writers and scholars, some of them Marxists, who distinguished themselves by their negative appraisal of U.S. influence on Cuban affairs. His work began to reflect this view as early as 1922. In 1933 he was appointed historian of the city of Havana, a position that he used to launch the journal Cuadernos de historia habanera. In 1940 he was instrumental in forming the Cuban Society of Historical and International Studies, and two years later he began to promote, with the help of the society, a series of National Historic Congresses, the thirteenth of which met in 1960. Among Roig's favorite theses were that the Cuban struggle for independence was not a series of wars but one continuous war that lasted thirty years, and that U.S. entry into the struggle in 1898 was not necessary for Cuban victory.

See alsoCuba: Cuba Since 1959; Cuba: The Republic (1898–1959).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

See Duvon C. Corbitt, "Cuban Revisionist Interpretations of Cuba's Struggle for Independence," Hispanic American Historical Review 43 (August 1963): 395-404. A list of Roig's considerable literary and historical output and a chronology of his life appear in Araceli García-Carranza, Biobibliografía de Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring (1986).

Additional Bibliography

Pérez, Louis A. The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in Historiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Whitney, Robert. State and Revolution in Cuba: Mass Mobilization and Political Change, 1920–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

                                      JosÉ M. HernÁndez