Abstract
Trained in Spain in the heart of Spanish institutional life (Francisco Giner, Bernaldo de Quirós, Rafael Salillas, Manuel Sales y Ferré y Pedro Dorado Montero), Fernando Ortiz‘s intellectual personality notably shaped the Cuban cultural world, from his initial posture as a committed Lombrosian, passing through an interesting phase as a "regenerationist", and finally becoming, in his mature period, the oracle of Cuban intellectuals. The study of society, and the searching through history as a means of explaining the formation of the Cuban people and nation, was the primary objective of Fernando Ortiz, a thinker engaged with his country, who with a set of nationalist concerns and ideas tried to achieve, through education and regeneration, the integration of the diverse ethnic and cultural components of Cuban society, an integration which was indispensable in order to attain national sovereignty.