Cuba 1902 RAFAEL MONTORO Signed PC to Macias y Barraque Manufacturer: N/A SKU: 1826 Price: $125.00 This item is in stock Quantity:

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Date: 1902....RAFAEL MONTORO unsuccessfully ran for the vice presidency of Cuba along side of MARIO MENOCAL against JOSE MIGUEL GOMEZ and ALFREDO ZAYAS....

"14 noviembre, elecciones nacionales; triunfa el Partido Liberal por amplio margen; la candidatura José Miguel Gómez-Alfredo Zayas obtiene 201.199 votos frente a 130.256 alcanzados por la candidatura Mario G. Menocal-Rafael Montoro; los Liberales copan todos los cargos de senadores y eligen 51 representantes contra 32 los Conservadores" (page 67).

En un ambiente de gran entusiasmo depositaron sus votos 331.455 electores, lo que suponía el 71 por 100 de los inscritos, triunfando los Liberales en las seis provincias y alcanzando un total de 201.199 votos, contra 130.256 los Conservadores, permitiendo a los primeros obtener la Presidencia, la totalidad de los 24 cargos de senadores y 51 de los de representantes, con sólo 32 actas de representantes para los Conservadores. En esta oportunidad se aplicó por primera vez para cargos de representantes, consejeros y concejales el sistema de elección llamado de representación proporcional, que estaba dirigido a garantizar los derechos de la minoría, y superaba los inconvenientes ofrecidos por la ley electoral de 25 de diciembre de 1903"....

In the November 14, 1908 national elections "José Miguel Gómez, with Alfredo Zayas standing as his vice-president, won by about 200,000 votes to 130,000 (to General Mario García Menocal and Rafael Montero)".... Among those itinerant liberals were the men who Paul Estrade calls "paradigmatic exponents of ‘historical’ creole autonomism." Rafael Montoro, Antonio Govín, Eliseo Giberga, and Rafael Fernández de Castro constituted the handful of party chiefs and deputies who remained powerful members of the Partido Liberal party even during the 1895-1898 war for independence. Their public speeches, alongside partisan newspapers, constituted the means by which ordinary Cubans educated themselves in colonial politics, and many of the Partido’s founding statements took place in Cienfuegos. Like the parties themselves, expanded rights of association and free press derived from the reforms promised in the Pact of Zanjón.

Not surprisingly, the early statements of Partido Liberal leaders pledged their continued loyalty to Spanish colonial rule, setting a simultaneously oppositional and conciliatory tone. Rafael Montoro inaugurated the Partido Liberal in Cienfuegos on September 22, 1878, declaring that "the base of our politics, as many eloquent orators before me have said, can be nothing other than national unity, and the widest regimen of public freedoms."

He warned of conservatives "who want to monopolize power" and called on cienfuegueros to wage a "legal and peaceful struggle in which the triumphs cost not one tear and are of inexhaustible productivity in public benefits." Antonio Govín affirmed the "national unity" of Spain and Cuba several days later in another meeting in Cienfuegos: "the peninsular has in Cuba his home, his heaven, his patria; the Cuban, at the same time, has in Spain his home, his heaven, his patria [. . .] Together they are the sacred soil of the patria." Liberals thus treaded gingerly between conservative complacency and radical antagonism to present a unified voice for reform.

In contrast to liberal leaders in other provinces, members of the junta of Santa Clara province, which included Cienfuegos, had neither rebelled during the Ten Years’ War nor led earlier reformist efforts. Thus, as Montoro and Govín oversaw the election of Tomás Terry, Aurelio Rodríguez, and Laureano Muñoz as President, Vice-president, and Secretary respectively of the Liberal junta in Cienfuegos, they worried about more unpredictable leadership elsewhere and had good reason to publicize the moderate approach to post-Zanjón reformism that characterized political life in Cienfuegos....

In its policy agenda, the Partido Liberal made top priorities of ending slavery (with compensation for slaveowners) and the establishment of the patronato.

Once that system took effect, liberals championed its early termination in order to end slavery altogether before the end of the eight-year process. From an electoral perspective, this was pure political strategy.

The Pact of Zanjón fixed the number of deputies to be elected to the Cortes according to the number of free men, which discounted the population of former slaves. As Montoro pointed out in his first speech to the Cortes in 1886, the Spanish government reaped significant political benefits by abolishing slavery in 1880.

But the number of Cuban deputies (24) never increased after the law passed.

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