José Agustín Caballero was educated at the Royal Seminary College of San Carlos and San Ambrosio and the Royal and Pontifical University of Havana. His intellectual work was not limited solely to philosophy and politics; he also wrote some elegiac poems, such as “Epigram on the Death of Bishop Espada,” and cultivated almost all facets of oratory: sacred, forensic, and academic.

In terms of teaching, he promoted reforms in university courses and initiated the subversion of the dogmatic understanding of the phenomena of reality, a trend that Félix Varela, his most audacious disciple, would successfully bring to fruition. He also participated in the editorial staff of the Papel Periódico de la Havana, from which he disseminated his ideas, most of which were aligned with the ideology of the so-called “sacarocracy.”

However, in the background of his thought there was a rich ethical and axiological content that led him to assume positions not so consistent with his class conditioning, this is more evident in his position with respect to slavery, because although he does not expressly pronounce himself in favor of abolition, he does insist on the need to improve the living conditions of the slave mass and goes so far as to state that this form of subjection constituted “the greatest civil evil that men have committed.”

Politically, he penned the first project for an autonomous government for the island, which was presented to the Spanish parliament in 1812. Unlike Francisco de Arango y Parreño, he opposed monarchical absolutism, without radicalizing his thinking to the point of republicanism, adopting a more intermediate position. His autonomist aspirations adequately reflect the evolution taking place in collective thought and how these aspirations would later coalesce into the ideological foundation of the independence movement.

His prose is defined by its clear organization of content and the linguistic forms he adopts, in keeping with his communicative and didactic intentions. As with almost all thinkers of this period, the literary nuances of his verbal expressions appear subordinated to other purposes, and his foray into artistic forms for art’s sake, which would have to wait a few more years, is not evident.

Elements that were already latent in his thinking on philosophy and politics would be taken up by Félix Varela and other Cuban thinkers, in the slow connection of patriotic sentiment towards the consciousness of the nation, as a territory naturally, socially and morally distinct from that of the metropolis, and from there to the need for this distinction to be taken to its ultimate consequences in independence.