Cecilia Valdes: Cirilo Villaverde

Name: Adrian Segundo Medina

Country: Cuba

Language: Spanish

Book title: Cecilia Valdes or Angel’s Hill

Author: Cirilo Villaverde

Year of Publication: 1882 (First publication, New York)
Image Source: Google

SUMMARY:

The events happened at the colonial Havana, in 1830. Cecilia is an attractive and young woman from the poor class. She is Mulatta, and she doesn't know she is a illegitimate daughter of Candido Gamboa; a rich  Spanish that had a romance with a slave woman, her mother. The rich's son, Leonardo, didn't know about that too, and he falls in love of Cecilia. Together, they maintain a secret  relationship. Later, he severs his relation with Cecilia because of the prison from the social classes is in an age where whites were considered superior than other races. Cecilia encourages her friend to kill the rich young woman. He is called Jose Dolores Pimienta. He acknowledged doing that due to the reason that he loved Cecilia. Pimienta killed Leonardo after the victim married another woman that was a rich owner Finally, Cecilia  was pregnant from Leonardo and was hospitalized, where she reunited again with her mother before she died. This is a cruel history with a lot of feelings that the author writes with the purpose to show the hard and inhumane social system of the colonial and pro-slavery age in Cuba.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

The author Cirilo Villaverde was born and raised in a sugar mill in Cuba where he could see how slaves were treated in a cruel slave system imposed by Spain to Cuba. These experiences facilitated him to write  criticism about the lives of wealthy settlers, natives and slaves on the island. This author stood out to belong to the Cuban Movement for Independence. When the Spanish government learned his involvement in this, he escaped to America and settled in New York where he began to write for several magazines. Here, Cirilo published the novel Cecilia Valdes in 1882, which is the most famous Cuban novel of the 19th century. This novel mirrors the social problems of that period, while the author provides a moving story. Up until then, this book has been published on many instances. Moreover, Villaverde embodied the "Cubania" in his writing, which is a mixture of cultures from Spain and Africa (now the culture of Cuba).