Pablo Lafargue: Karl Marx’s Son-in-Law Born in Santiago

When Cuban lauded writer Alejo Carpentier suddenly passed away in his apartment in Paris, on April 24, 1980, he left on his desk the first pages of what would be his next novel: A True Story, based on the life of Pablo Lafargue. His typewriter was surrounded by books and documents related to the main character of Alejo’s future novel. 

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Carpentier had plenty of reasons to be inspired by Lafargue. That illustrious Cuban was an outstanding figure that intensely lived the European revolutionary movement, and an intellectual and politician with avant-garde ideas that, with the energy and courage that characterize his Caribbean origin, stood out among the most progressive thinking of his time.

Pablo Lafargue Armagnac was born in Santiago de Cuba on January 15, 1842. He was a disciple and friend of Karl Marx, his son-in-law, and followed his ideas. That’s the reason why he was pursued and jailed. Lafargue was a descendant of a French Jewish and a Haitian woman that moved to the eastern city to escape from violence in Haiti, in the times of the anticolonialist uprising. His father, Francisco Lafargue, who was born in Lousiana, settled down in that city, got married to Ana Virginia Armagnac and successfully cultivated coffee.

Pablo was the only child of the couple and his genealogy reflects the miscegenation: grandson of a Haitian woman on his father’s side and a Cuban native on his mother’s; his grandparents, Jean Lafargue and Abraham Armagnac, were French.

At his hometown, young Pablo had an excellent education, which was complemented with his trip to France in order to get his bachelor’s degree. He studied medicine at universities of Paris and London. That was when he defined his political tendencies, as he found the positivist ideas of Comte, texts written by Kant, Feuerbach, Darwin, Blanqui, Bakunin, and socialist thinkers Fourier and Proudhon.

At the British capital, he frequently visited Karl Marx’s house. «The kid grew fond of me, but that interest soon targeted the daughter instead of the father », Marx wrote to his friend Federico Engels. The daughter was Laura, and Lafargue married her in 1866.

Karl Marx not only found in the Cuban a son-in-law that would make his daughter happy, but also an intelligent and capable collaborator that accurately understood his work. He was also the first socialist deputy to the French Parliament. After his father-in-law’s passing, in 1883, he kept on playing a leading role as an organizer, propagandist and theoretician of socialism.

During the Congress of the International Socialist, held in 1889, it was his initiative to establish May First as the international workers’ day.

On November 25, 1911, Pablo and Laura were living in Draveil, (near Paris), suffering from the ailments of old age and, convinced that they had lived enough, they committed suicide by mutual consent.

Standing in front of their tombs, during the burial, outstanding figures expressed their feelings; among them Jean Jaurés, a French socialist leader, and an exiled Russian revolutionary named Vladimir Ilich Ulianov, known as Lenin.

Lafargue was a journalist and editor of prestigious publications and wrote several books, such as The Right to the Laziness,one of the most famous in terms of international socialist literature, only surpassed by Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifest.