Cirilo Villaverde de la Paz

One of the most important Cuban novelists of the nineteenth century; journalist, teacher, and translator.

He was born in Pinar del Río. In 1823 he moved to La Habana, where he completed his primary education at the school of Antonio Vázquez. From an early age he developed a friendship with José Victoriano Betancourt.

He studied Philosophy at the Seminario de San Carlos and Drawing at the Academia San Alejandro. In 1834 he received the degree of Bachelor of Laws.

He worked in law offices, but soon abandoned those duties to dedicate himself to teaching and literature. He was a teacher at the Colegio Real Cubano and at the Colegio Buenavista in La Habana, and at the Colegio La Empresa in Matanzas. During his time in Matanzas he attended the literary gatherings of Domingo del Monte.

His first narratives and critical works appeared in different periodicals: Recreo de las Damas, Aguinaldo Habanero, La Cartera Cubana, Flores del Siglo, La Siempreviva, El Álbum, La Aurora, El Artista, and Revista de La Habana.

His separatist ideas made him suspect to the Spanish government, for which he was detained in 1848 and sentenced to prison. The following year he was able to escape and travel to New York, where he worked as secretary to Narciso López until the latter's death.

In New York he was a contributor, and later director, of the separatist newspaper La Verdad. Meanwhile, he published El Independiente in New Orleans. In 1854 he established his residence in Philadelphia, where he would dedicate himself to teaching Spanish. In 1855 he married Emilia Casanova.

In 1858, under the protection of an amnesty granted by the Spanish government, he returned to La Habana, where he directed the printing press La Antilla, was co-director and editor of the literary newspaper La Habana (1858-1860), collaborated in Cuba Literaria, and promoted the publication of Artículos by Anselmo Suárez y Romero.

In 1860 he returned to New York, where he worked as an editor at La América (1861-1862) and at Frank Leslie's Magazine. In 1864 he founded, with the collaboration of his wife, a school in Weehawken. The following year he was part of the Sociedad Republicana de Cuba y Puerto Rico, in whose Publications he collaborated. From 1865 to 1869 he directed La Ilustración Americana. When the Cuban War of Independence broke out in 1868, he joined the revolutionary Junta established in New York. He directed El Espejo from 1874, and collaborated in La Familia, El Avisador Hispanoamericano, El Fígaro, and Revista Cubana.

He made brief trips to Cuba in 1888 and 1894. He wrote "Advertencia" and "Notas" to the pamphlet Cuestión de Cuba by José Antonio Saco, and wrote a prologue to the Colección de artículos satíricos y de costumbres by José María de Cárdenas. He translated into Spanish the Autobiography of David Copperfield (1857) by Charles Dickens, and other works (including, it has been said, Les Misérables by Víctor Hugo). He used the pseudonyms El ambulante del Oeste, Un contemporáneo, Simón Judas de la Paz, and Sansueñas; he also signed works with the initial of his surname.

Criticism generally identifies two major periods in the work of Cirilo Villaverde: the first, from his initial narratives, from 1837 to 1847; the second would have its culminating point in 1882, when, after a slow creative process, the definitive version of his novel Cecilia Valdés was published. His four first narratives were published in the initial volumes of Miscelánea de útil y agradable recreo, corresponding to August and September of 1837. The reception his prose achieved established him from then on as one of the most important Cuban writers—an idea sustained in our day by scholar Roberto Friol, for whom the fundamental lines of the development of Cuban narrative appear in Villaverde's first work.

His four initial works (El ave muerta, La peña blanca, El perjurio, and La cueva de Taganana) are written with the codes of the romantic legend, although with the manifest intention of adapting them to Cuban reality. El ave muerta takes place in the neighborhood of Jesús María in La Habana, around 1802; La cueva de Taganana takes us to the eighteenth century, with scenes in the same city and its surroundings; El perjurio is set in a rural environment, contemporary to the writer; La peña blanca unfolds in the author's native town, San Diego de Núñez—as he himself explains in his Excursión a Vueltabajo. Villaverde approached, from narrative to narrative, the settings he knew best, and in almost all of those first works the themes are anonymous sexual passions, incestuous or fratricidal, as well as the nightmare of necrophilia. All suffer from a motley accumulation of conventional romantic elements, which makes his language rhetorical and not very fluid.

The first part of Excursión a Vueltabajo, a travel narrative, appeared in El Álbum in August of 1838, and was complemented with a second part, published in the Faro Industrial de la Habana in 1842. Although they can be unified under the same title, each of the parts possesses particular characteristics, and relate closely both with Villaverde's works of novelistic fiction—which he was writing at the same time—and with the socioeconomic concerns of the delmontino circle.

His narrative development is notable in the works published in El Álbum in 1838: Engañar con la verdad and El espetón de oro. With the first, set in an urban context, the author approached the modern sense of the short story. The second was the first Cuban novel published as a volume, and meant for the author a great triumph, to which he owed the nickname "The author of El espetón de oro." From 1841 he collaborated in Faro Industrial de la Habana, where he knew how to take advantage of the serialized format, publishing the twenty chapters of "El guajiro"—a narrative that is part of the Excursión a Vueltabajo—between December 5 and 31, 1842. Of particular importance from that period is Dos amores (1843), unanimously considered by critics as the best example of his first narrative period.

The first version of Cecilia Valdés or La Loma del Ángel, in three segments, appeared in the second volume of the magazine La Siempreviva in 1839. These segments addressed diverse and interrelated issues. In the first, the moral responsibility of the writer in characterizing customs was explained; in the second, the vicissitudes of orphans were discussed; and in the third, a sketch of the plot was presented: Leocadio, a Philosophy student at the Seminario de San Carlos, is impressed by the beauty of a ten-year-old girl. Villaverde immediately undertook the second version—in eight chapters—which was published in Imprenta Literaria. As a novel of customs, this version combined two objectives: to tell the peripeties of a love triangle and to recreate how the Feria de San Rafael, a now-disappeared annual popular entertainment, had been in the surroundings of the Iglesia del Santo Ángel Custodio. But only in 1882 did the final version of Cecilia Valdés appear, one of the narrative monuments of the Spanish language in the nineteenth century, and the most important anti-slavery mosaic, and revealer of the essences of Cuban culture of that century.

Cirilo Villaverde died in New York on October 23, 1894.