The University of Puerto Rico and the Republican exiles

Puerto Rico did not take in Republican refugees at the end of the war. On 7 June 1939, however, the people of Puerto Rico witnessed a unique event when the ship Sinaia, en route to Mexico with thousands of refugees, made a stop at the port of San Juan. Dozens of boats bearing the flag of the Spanish Republic welcomed it at the entrance to the harbor. The crowd handed baskets of tropical fruit to the refugees while an orchestra played local music. The welcome was so moving that one of the refugees later remarked, “What happened in Puerto Rico is something that will remain in our hearts forever.”

A few years later, in the 1940s and 1950s, the president of the University of Puerto Rico, Jaime Benítez Rexach, invited just over fifty Republican exiles—mostly professors, intellectuals, writers, musicians, artists, and scientists—to teach at the University. The Republican exiles became a cornerstone in the project to strengthen and elevate academic disciplines at the university, rethinking questions of cultural identity, language, and the new demands of higher education with a vision focused on research.

These Spanish professors and scientists created and built up the departments of Hispanic Studies, General Studies, Social Sciences, Medicine, Architecture, and Fine Arts. They also founded journals and publishing houses, leaving their mark on the country. Notable among them were Juan Ramón Jiménez, winner of the 1956 Nobel Prize for Literature, Pedro Salinas, Tomás Navarro, Francisco Ayala, María Zambrano, Zenobia Camprubí, Carlos and Juan Marichal, Javier Malagón, Jorge Guillén, Federico de Onís, Jorge Enjuto, Joaquín and María Rodrigo, Alfredo Matilla, and Francisco Vázquez (Compostela).

In 1955, the government of Puerto Rico paid tribute to Pablo Casals Defilló, the distinguished Catalan musician whose mother was Puerto Rican. The visit led to his settling on the island, where he remained until his death in 1973. Casals founded the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music and the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra, both key institutions in the country’s musical education. In 1957, he inaugurated the Casals Festival of Puerto Rico (second only to Prades in France), which has been held annually ever since, featuring world-class musicians and establishing Puerto Rico as an international destination for classical music. One of the main performance halls in the country’s leading music center bears Pablo Casals’s name.

In 1989, the University of Puerto Rico held the conference “The Spanish Civil War and Exile in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean” to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the Spanish educators and their contribution to the country's education and culture.

TTR