In Paris he became a disciple of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. He returned to Spain in 1837 and was elected a member of the parliament four times (1838, 1840, 1845, 1854) as a representative of the Liberal Party. At the same time he began publishing a thirteen volume history on the political and natural history of Cuba which he would complete in 1857. In 1939 he published "Voyage en Hollande et en Belgique sous le rapport de l’instruction primaire, des établissements de bien faisance et des prisons, dans les deux pays" (published in Paris, 1939 in French and in Spanish in 1844). In 1845 he founded the world's first anarchist journal "El Porvenir", which was closed by Ramón María Narváez, Duke of Galicia. After the French Revolution of 1848, he created with Proudhon the Peoples' Bank of France. In Brussels he met Heinrich Ahrens, disciple of Krause, whose doctrines he proclaimed in Spain before Julian Sanz del Rio. He continued to publish economic, geographic, political, social, and prison reform studies. In 1849 he was expelled from France, because he was spreading Socialist ideas. In 1856 he was expelled from Spain to France by Ramón María Narváez, because he was spreading radical ideas. In Paris he met Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. There he worked as the consul of Uruguay. He returned to Cuba between 1859 and 1860 and published numerous studies and essays there. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 he went to Switzerland, where he died on 23 May 1871 at the age of seventy-three.