• Submitted by: lena campos
• Literature
• 10 / 20 / 2012

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The popular encounter Sábado del Libro will celebrate on October 20 the National Culture Day and the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the writer Cirilo Villaverde with the presentation of that monument of Cuban literature that is the novel “Cecilia Valdés o La Loma del Ángel”.

“Cecilia Valdés” is Cuba’s social history, according to the opinion of the Cuban scholar Enrique José Varona, which brought together through this phrase the huge contribution of this novel, as no other, for the knowledge of Cuba and Cubans from the 19th century.

This month is celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Villaverde on October 28, in the Santiago sugar plantation from San Diego de Núñez in Pinar del Río, as well as his death, which occurred on October 24, 1984 in New York. October 20 is also the 164th anniversary of the day in which the patriot writer was imprisoned in Havana and sent to a public prison, following an order of the Captain-General of the island, Don Federico Roncali, accused of conspiring against the Spanish crown.

“I was imprisoned as an animal is a dark and humid cell, where I remained for six straight months,” says the writer in the prologue to the novel dated in New York in 1879. Afterwards, he was judged and condemned to imprisonment, but he managed to escape on April 4, 1849 before going into a “voluntary exile” to the United States.

The first volume of “Cecilia Valdés o La Loma del Ángel” was published in mid-1839. The complete work was published in New York in 1879 and its definitive version in that same city in 1882. In the above mentioned prologue, Villaverde states talking about his work that it is set between 1812 and 1831, “those who are not aware of the customs or the time period of Cuban history that I have tried to portrait, may believe that I chose the darkest colors and placed too many shadows in the painting just to cause a Rembrandt or a Gustave Doré effect. This is very far away from my mind. I consider myself, above everything else, a realistic writer, taking this word in the artistic sense that it is given nowadays.”

He then goes on by pointing out that “rather than inventing or making up phantasy or unbelievable characters or scenes, I have taken realism, as I believe, to the point of presenting the main characters in the novel with all of their characteristics, as it is commonly said, dressed with the clothes they wore in life, most of them under their true names and surnames, talking the same language they spoke in the historic moments in which they took part, copying as much as it was possible d´après nature, in their physical and moral physonomy, so that they might be recognized without difficulties and may declare: the similitude is undeniable.”

The present edition is the product of the effort of the Letras Cubanas Editorial House that has aimed to offer a special gift for the Cuban readers in the National Culture Day.

Source: Cubarte