José Victoriano Betancourt Gallardo

Cuban journalist and customs writer, born in Guanajay, Pinar del Río and died in Córdova (Mexico).

Father of another brilliant journalist who also excelled in the customs article genre, the Havanan Luis Victoriano Betancourt, he performed brilliantly in the media of his time and contributed, with his splendid articles and stories, to define the specific Cuban character when his nation was still a Spanish colony. He was, moreover, the first Cuban to obtain, in his native land, the official title of Bachelor of Laws.

His early inclination toward writing and humanistic knowledge led him to publish his first journalistic contributions at the precocious age of sixteen. It was then, in fact, when he began his brilliant professional career on the pages of the prestigious Diario de La Habana, where he signed his name for six years (1829-1835); he then went on to collaborate with the newspaper La Aurora de Matanzas (1835), and definitively consolidated his journalistic career in La Cartera Cubana (1837).

Already with some renown as a journalist of distinction, at the end of the 1830s José Victoriano Betancourt decided to integrate himself even more into the media business and founded, in collaboration with other colleagues, the publication La Siempreviva (1838). From then on, his name was to remain inseparably linked to the history of nineteenth-century Cuban press, as he took an active part in the founding of many other media throughout his career, such as La Aurora de Yumurí (1839) and El Aguinaldo Matanzero (1840).

Happily settled, during that fruitful period of his life, in the city of Matanzas, Betancourt sent his journalistic writings from there to numerous newspapers and magazines of the nearby city of Havana, in which he definitively established himself as one of the most singular and representative voices not only of journalism, but also of the customs literature of his time.

He indeed published his articles and customs pieces in El Faro Industrial de la Habana, Flores del Siglo, Aguinaldo Habanero, Revista de la Habana and —among many other media in the Cuban capital— Flores de Mayo; and he was one of the most read journalists among those who collaborated with El Duende, a celebrated Sunday circulation periodical, whose festive and satirical character was reinforced by multiple rebuses and caricatures that delighted readers.

In the 1860s, José Victoriano Betancourt was one of the most relevant figures in Cuban intellectual life, in which, in addition to having acquired well-deserved literary recognition for his customs writings, he was loved and admired by all due to the role he played as a cultural promoter and patron of young writers and journalists.

Through the lively soirées he held then in his home frequently passed some figures of the stature of the great Romantic poet Juan Clemente Zenea —who would be executed by order of Spanish authorities, in retaliation for his fervent defense of a possible adhesion of Cuba to the United States of America—, the poet and playwright Joaquín Lorenzo Luaces, the indigenist José Fornaris, the poetess and narrator Luisa Pérez de Zambrana, the then young journalist and essayist Rafael María Merchán, etc.

But this enviable position he enjoyed in the social and cultural life of Cuba in the second half of the nineteenth century was suddenly cut short on October 10, 1868, the date on which the independence leader Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed the slaves he owned in his sugar mill at La Demajagua (Manzanillo) and declared war on Spain. Due to the political agitation stemming from this uprising —which has gone down in history as the Grito de Yara—, José Victoriano Betancourt was forced to abandon his native island to settle in the Mexican city of Córdova, where he lost his life in 1875, at the age of sixty-two.

Work
The journalist and narrator of Guanajay himself left written an interesting declaration of the purposes and intentions that moved him to write his customs articles: "My pretension is very humble: to paint, though with a rough brush and muted colors, some customs, whether rustic or urban, sometimes with the desire to indicate a reform, sometimes with that of entertaining a page jointly."

But, beyond this false modesty and the necessary jocular dimension that is imposed as a distinctive trait of the customs genre, Betancourt achieves the supreme accomplishment of penetrating into the various ideological levels of the society in which he lives, which he knows how to endow with certain external features, of universal validity, that give his characters and situations a general typifying rank, although provided with an undeniable local flavor and colorfulness. See, by way of example, with what meticulous precision he traces the profile of a human type of undoubted presence throughout the world, though perfectly assimilated to the social reality of the Caribbean island by means of the flavorful Cubanism "cazuelero":

"With this name [that of 'The cazuelero man,' which gives title to the article] I have heard designated in society those individuals who, by a spirit of bothersome intervention, want to know and meddle in all the incidents, even the most insignificant of their house [...]. He is a piece of furniture as accessory to his house as the cobwebs he removes daily from behind the doors; he walks little, travels much through the interior of his dwelling, and works all day with tireless effort, now dusting the chairs in the living room, now picking up some paper that the wind blew into it [...]; his eye is keen, nothing escapes him; it is that of omnipotence. He knows the price of every item of consumption that exists [...]".

His approach to the reality he reflects in his texts is —as in so many other nineteenth-century authors— of clear positivist affiliation. Based on an orderly and meticulous observation —one might almost say "scientific"— of the various human types, linguistic usages, ways of life and collective habits that populate his environment, José Victoriano Betancourt traces a superb fresco of the genuine physiognomy of his land and his people. That is why some of his best articles go beyond the customs anecdote to anticipate certain traits of Naturalism that, in the sharp, attentive and sensitive pen of the writer of Guanajay, allow glimpses of the first attempts to define a specifically Cuban national identity (that is, already foreign to the Spanishness imposed by the metropolis).

Apart from this sum of indigenous traits that go tracing a bold sketch of the forging of Cuban nationality, in Betancourt's customs articles there are other very marked characteristics that define his style to perfection, such as the perfect reproduction of colloquial language, the simplicity of characters and situations, and the constant presence of a powerful sense of humor that seeks to provoke not only a smile, but hilarity in the reader. All this is evident in his most fortunate pieces, among which it is obligatory to recall those titled "Los primos" (1838), "Velar un mondongo" (1838), "Chucho Matalobo" (1840), "Los curros del manglar" (1848), "El negro José del Rosario" (1848), "El hombre cazuelero" (1852), "Del fondo de la pipa" (1858) and "El testigo falso" (1860).

In the mid-twentieth century, much of these customs writings by Betancourt, until then scattered through Cuban newspaper libraries that preserved the old newspapers and magazines of his time, were compiled in a valuable volume, published —with an interesting prologue by Mario Sánchez Roig and Mario Cabrera Saqui— under the generic title Artículos de costumbres (Havana: Ministry of Education, Department of Culture, 1941).

Source: MCNBiografias.com