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• 03 / 22 / 2009

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To start with he has his own house in Havana, just a few meters from the Cathedral Square in Old Town, where there is also a bust that perpetuates him as well as the tribute it is paid to his legacy. There are libraries, exhibitions halls and class rooms to study French language.

His recent literary marks are the recent editions of his immortal work The Miserables, with Jean Valjean and his wandering soul of a redeemed former convict, who tries to bury his past – an old crime committed due to hunger -, through an exemplary life.

Valjean drag with him a piece of French history and the shudder of a frustrated revolution, the 1848 one, fought shoulder with shoulder in barricades created in the street of an ardent Paris, which was enveloped in smoke and the clamour of the battle.

The seduction and the influence of The Miserable had in the island one of its most fertile outbreaks in the second halve of last century.

The old people who still have a young hart remember with emotion those family gatherings in which someone read for everybody the Valjean saga and their constant anxiety as the night moved one.

In my childhood Havana, indicates Alejo Carpentier, The Miserable was one of the most requested books by the readers in the tobacco factories and it was rare to find a house in which the novel was not in the shelves together with other classic novels, such as Don Quijote, by Cervantes.

In that time, there were a lot of girls who were named Cosette, the orphan Valjean rescued from misery to fulfil the promise he made to a prostitute he had offended and precipitated to death, without pretend it, during his short but happy transit as mayor.

Valjean expiated his guilt and fall in the network of a love both impossible and crazy. If it was not enough, the novel has a description of paintings and customs that, according to Louis Aragon remember the mark of the painter Honorato Daumier.

Valjean made a sculpture of his own height, making a body of the Hugo literature. From that moment on the history of his vicissitudes and misfortunes, together with a time of the history of France, have spread in endless radio and TV series, both Cuban and foreign, such as the broadcasted recently here, with Gerard Depardieu starring the former convict.

The novel also invaded the cinema, the mute and the sound cinema, the white and block and the colour one. All of them preserve the untouched essence of the melodrama.

But the links of Hugo with Cuba are much beeper than that. As Carpentier indicates, the novelist wrote noble proclamations in favour of the Cuban independence and "generously received the Cuban emigrants who arrived to Paris, to tell him their fight".

Now Victor Hugo has his place in Cuba for ever, in a beautiful colonial house that treasures his memory.

The re edition of The Miserable runs out quickly every time it goes out to the libraries. The own Carpentier recommended always to read this book, as an indispensable work to enrich and enlighten the adolescence.

(Cubarte)