Considered by several specialists, among them Felipe Poey and Francisco Calcagno, as the first historian of Cuba, José Martín Félix de Arrate Acosta, he died in Havana on April 23, 1765.
His birth had also occurred in Havana on January 14, 1701.
He completed his first studies in his hometown and continued later in Mexico. There he concluded his career in the field of law and law.
From 1734 he was perpetual alderman of the Havana City Council, and in 1752 he was appointed ordinary mayor of the city itself.
Ten years later during the siege of Havana by the English, he stood out for his efficient services to Spain.
After the colonial capital was once again controlled by the Spanish authorities in Cuba, he joined the extraordinary chapter of Havana on July 2, 1763.
But beyond the previously mentioned functions, the notoriety of Arrate was due to the fact that he wrote a work of singular proportions, entitled Key of the New World. Antemural of the West Indies, that constituted a finished sample of criollismo and modernity, although of this work the original manuscript has not been found.
It was not a story or narration of facts and deeds, but the full reflection of eighteenth-century Cuban society.
It covers five fundamental aspects of colonial life: geographical and natural description, economic review, explanation of the functions of the authorities and magistrates, civil chronology, and ecclesiastical as well as cultural chronicle.
In this work Arrate details the existing Havana places in the period he lived and describes with precision its main use.
The first edition of the mentioned work was in charge of the Royal Patriotic Society of Havana, in 1830, on the initiative of Francisco de Arango y Parreño.
It was enriched by a second part with the Notes of the Special Drafting Commission to the History of Arrate.
The second edition dates from 1876, when Rafael Cowley and Andrés Pego included the same introduction to the 1830 edition, in the first volume of the first three historians of the Island of Cuba.
The third and fourth editions correspond to the years 1949 and 1964; the latter was carried out by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, and is considered the most complete, since previous editions were consulted, as well as a manuscript preserved in the archives of the Economic Society of Friends from the country.
Felix de Arrate also wrote poems and tragedies.