Jesús Castellanos Villageliú

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Lawyer, journalist, graphic humorist, essayist and Cuban narrator. One of the most relevant and representative figures of the first republican generation.

Son of Dr. Manuel Sabás Castellanos y Arango and Mercedes Villageliú e Iro, he was the third of eight children from this marriage. He was born on Galiano Street in the house of his maternal grandparents. From an early age he showed an inclination for painting and reading.

He studied primary education and high school in Havana, his native city. In 1893 he entered the University of Havana, where he enrolled in Philosophy and Letters, and later in Law. He was a cofounder of the student weeklies La Joven Cuba (1894), La Juventud Cubana (1894) –where he published his first poem– and El Habanero (1895). In 1896, without having completed his studies, he was sent by his parents to Mexico, where he remained until 1898.

There he dedicated himself to the separatist cause and affiliated with the clubs "México y Cuba," "Morelos y Maceo," and "Hijos de Baire." At the Academia de San Carlos of that city he continued the drawing studies he had begun at the Academia de San Alejandro in Havana, and entered as a supernumerary student at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria de México.

Upon his return to Cuba, he began studies in architecture at the University of Havana, which he abandoned to graduate as Doctor in Civil Law in 1904. He was appointed public defender and prosecutor of the Audiencia de La Habana in 1906 and 1908, respectively.

But during the last ten years of his life Castellanos concentrated almost all his work in letters and the arts. He published his first articles and caricatures in the newspaper La Discusión, and collaborated, as a journalist and draftsman, in other Cuban press publications of the early twentieth century, especially in Patria, El Fígaro, Cuba y América, Letras, La Política Cómica and Azul y Rojo, in which he used the pseudonym Scarpia.

With Max Henríquez Ureña he founded the Sociedad de Fomento del Teatro and the Sociedad de Conferencias (1910). He was the first director of the Academia Nacional de Artes y Letras (1910). This led, among other reasons, to this institution publishing three volumes of his works between 1915 and 1916. After his death, other unpublished texts appeared collected by his friend Max Henríquez Ureña and, years later, by critic José Manuel Carbonell.

Jesús Castellanos is a representative of Cuban naturalist narrative of the early twentieth century. His work, of marked essayistic dimension, embodies the feeling of frustration left by the newly inaugurated republic of 1902.

The stories in Castellanos's first book, De tierra adentro (1906), return to a creolism that portrayed the peasantry through elements of the rural world, such as superstition, violence, adultery and revenge. However, rather than reproducing rural reality, Castellanos shows an interest in capturing his artistic image through a language, characters, and conflicts still very distant from that reality. Castellanos was, nevertheless, the first Cuban narrator to free himself from Spanish realism that marked all short story production of the early twentieth century.

His great mastery of short story technique is evident in one of his most frequently anthologized brief narratives, "La agonía de La Garza," a metaphor for failure and the consequences of extreme poverty, in which the sea appears as the hostile environment of a family of humble charcoal workers who perish in their attempts to survive.

In the novella La conjura (1909) –which won first prize in the Juegos Florales of the Ateneo de La Habana–, Castellanos returns to his obsessions, but enters another space and new circumstances: the conflict of an intellectual in a social environment that ends up defeating him. Considered his best work, the spaces in La conjura are closer to the urban and the leading role belongs to the critique of the lack of religiosity, hypocrisy and bourgeois morality.

From a much more polemical stance, Castellanos wrote La manigua sentimental (1910), a picaresque novel framed in the context of the wars of independence. Upon his death, he left incomplete Los argonautas (1916), published after his death.