José Manuel Cortina

Who was José Manuel Cortina?

José Manuel Cortina y García was a Cuban politician, lawyer and journalist.

Cortina was the son of Constantino de Cortina y Arteaga, an agriculturalist of Basque descent, and María Luisa García y Gutiérrez.

He graduated from the Colegio de Belén and graduated as a lawyer in 1903. He wrote for Democracia, El Mundo, La Lucha, La Revista de Derecho, and La Nación.

Cortina was first elected to public office in 1908 as a member of the Cuban House of Representatives and was later elected to the Cuban Senate. He served as Secretary of the Presidency under Alfredo Zayas y Alfonso. In 1927, he was the Cuban delegate to the League of Nations. He was Cuba's Foreign Minister from 1936–1937 under the presidency of Miguel Mariano Gómez and again from 1940–1942 under the presidency of Fulgencio Batista. Cortina was instrumental in the elimination of the Platt Amendment in the early 1930s and served as President of the coordinating committee under Carlos Márquez Sterling at the convention that created the 1940 Constitution of Cuba. Among his many publications he is best known for his work "Ideales Internacionales de Cuba".