Pedro Pablo Cazañas


Pedro Pablo Cazañas y Garcia was a prominent Cuban judge and politician.

Early Life

Pedro Pablo Cazañas y García was born December 5, 1902 in Matanzas, Cuba to Francisco E. Cazañas and Enriqueta García Martín. His family was of considerable wealth and he was raised on their Buena Vista estate near Varadero. Cazañas would remain in Cuba for much of his life before emigrating to the United States in the late 1960s as a result of the Cuban Revolution.

Career

Cazañas’ father Francisco was a retired lawyer and Pedro Pablo would pursue the same career path. He attended the University of Havana, earning a doctorate in law, after which Cazañas was often referred to as "Doctor Pedro Cazañas" in official documents, journals, and media.
Cazañas served as a traveling judge, holding court in various locations across Cuba that required a judge on a case-by-case basis before becoming an increasingly prominent politician in the Cuban judiciary as a municipal and then regional judge. In the 1930s he married Raquel Díaz, of another prominent Matanzas-area family. The marriage was also politically significant due to Raquel’s father, José Lorenzo Díaz, being a more highly-ranked judge in the Cuban judicial system, holding the title of Juez de Instrucción. The couple would have three children.
After the coup d'état of 1952, his social and political stature in Cuba's judiciary rose further through the rest of the 1950s, partly due to his close ties with Fulgencio Batista. The Cazañas family, particularly his older brother Enrique, had significant business interests in Havana that benefited from Batista’s vigorously pro-business policies. Batista himself had planned to attend and serve as a witness in the wedding of Cazañas’ eldest child, Raquel, to high-profile psychiatrist and Agrupación Católica Universitaria leader Rene de la Huerta, a friend of the Cazañas family. However Batista was unable to attend due to his required presence in state visit abroad, therefore a top representative was sent to the ceremony in his place. Cazañas’ support of Batista would be a recurring source of generational tension with his children.

Later Life

The Cazañas family opposed Fidel Castro and, following the Cuban Revolution, some were able to leave the island to take refuge in the United States and seek life in democracy there. In 1959 the first of his children to leave was his youngest, Eduardo Cazañas, who later joined the United States Armed Forces. Cazañas' younger daughter, Marta, was deeply politically involved in the counter-revolution against Castro and left to the United States with her future husband Jesús Permuy via Venezuela following the failure of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.
Cazañas, his wife, their eldest daughter, his siblings and several other relatives remained in Cuba and were unable to leave for much of the 1960s. When his son Eduardo died in combat during the Vietnam War, the family sought to attend his funeral, however it was difficult for the remaining family in Cuba to participate due to diplomatic strains with the United States. Cazañas and his wife went to Mexico as a simpler way to reach the United States, however Cazañas contracted tuberculosis and was ultimately unable to attend the services and ceremonies. The couple relocated permanently to Miami by 1968 and their eldest daughter’s family joined them the following year.
After emigrating to the United States, he lived out the rest of his life in retirement. He died in Miami on June 28, 1978 at the age of 75.

Family

Immediate family

Both Pedro Pablo Cazañas’ ancestry and descendants have been a prominent force in Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States. In his immediate family, Cazañas’ grandfather, Francisco José Cazañas y Peraza was directly descendant of the Peraza and Bobadilla families that were influential in the Castilian royal court, ruled the Canary Islands, and participated in the conquest of the New World, including Cuba and Hispaniola. It was this Peraza lineage of the family that traveled from Spain to Cuba and the United States in the nineteenth century. Francisco J. Cazañas Peraza would gain American citizenship and travel frequently between Cuba and the United States. Therefore his son Francisco Eduardo was born in New Rochelle, New York, giving him dual citizenship with the United States and Cuba. Several generations of the Cazañas family would maintain regular business travel to the United States, be educated there, and develop a relationship with the American embassy in Cuba before ultimately migrating back to the United States permanently following the Cuba Revolution.
Cazañas’s mother, Enriqueta García y Martín, was heiress of the García family of Spain. At the age of sixteen, she was the subject of a poem included in the 1878 Jardín Matancero. The publication was a literary collection dedicated to the debutantes of the Matanzas region's most prominent families in which a flower-themed poem was dedicated to each emerging socialite. As an adult she owned the vast Buena Vista property overlooking Varadero, its champion horses, and yacht while her husband Francisco would manage the estate's staff and grounds. The property was damaged in the Spanish-American War and became the center of the couple’s high-profile claims to the Spanish Treaty Claims Commission. The couple, which traveled frequently to the United States and would occasionally reside there, first filed their claims with the commission in 1902, the year Pedro Pablo was born. It took six years to settle their claims, in which Francisco’s legal background and US ties proved useful. Their claims were finally settled in 1908 when the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States awarded the couple total compensation of $13,138, equivalent to over $360,000 in 2020, adjusted for inflation. They received the second highest awards granted by the commission, and the highest among private citizens not representing a corporation.
Pedro Pablo Cazañas was married to Raquel María Díaz Teresa, thereafter Raquel Cazañas Díaz, daughter of another leading judge and whose family was of importance in the San Jose de los Ramos area of Matanzas. The Díaz family was regarded for replacing the small chapel in the town center with a grand church. The couple had two daughters and a son - Raquel, Marta, and Eduardo - all born in Havana.

Extended Ancestry

Pedro Pablo Cazañas’ ancestry is noted for several prominent lines. In addition to the Perazas, Bobadillas, García's and Martín's, he is directly descendant from several other ancient Spanish and other European noble and royal families, including the Guzmán, Haro, Lara, de Luna, Martel, and more distantly, the Plantagenets. He is descendant of the line of the Martel family that migrated from Carolingian France to Spain by way of Aragon and then to Seville during the Reconquista era  and is descendant of the Plantagents through Eleanor of England.

Progeny

His son, Eduardo Enrique Cazañas y Díaz, emigrated to the United States in 1959 and quickly embraced his adopted homeland. He settled in Rhode Island, attending university to become an agricultural engineer and married his girlfriend in 1965. Eduardo is most known for his military service. With the escalation of the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s, he voluntarily enlisted in the United States Army to serve his adopted country and received the rank of SP-4 as an Armor Reconnaissance Specialist.
He died in combat in 1967 at the age of 22, his death was covered in both Spanish and English media, including the Diario Las Americas, which described him as the son of "Doctor Pedro Cazañas." He received the Purple Heart for his actions in battle and is included in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C.
Cazañas’s younger daughter, Marta, married Cuban leader Jesús Permuy. After the couple relocated to the US following the Cuban Revolution, she became an influential fine art dealer, curator, promoter, and collector. She managed and co-founded the historic Permuy Gallery in Coral Gables, one of the first Cuban fine art galleries established in South Florida and credited with helping establish the early Miami Latin art market. Her children and grandchildren have in turn become prominent figures in art, architecture, politics, and finance. Marta's second son, Pedro Pablo Permuy, was named after Cazañas and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration and later as President of the US-Spain Council, where he would host and organize events with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and King Felipe VI of Spain.