Miguel Antonio de Carrión de Cárdenas

When the War of Independence broke out in 1895, he emigrated to the United States.

Upon his return, he dedicated himself completely to letters and journalism.

He graduated as a physician from the University of La Habana, a profession he practiced throughout his life.

When normal schools for teachers were established in Cuba in 1918, he won by competitive examination the Chair of Anatomy and Physiology at the Normal School of La Habana.

Founding member of the National Academy of Arts and Letters.

He portrayed the Havana underworld in his works, driven by a restless desire to capture social and political reality. Contributing author to El Heraldo de Cuba.

He completed his early studies in his native city. He graduated as a bachelor in 1890. He entered the School of Law, but had to abandon it when the last war of independence broke out due to his revolutionary activities. He emigrated to the United States.

Upon his return, in 1903, he won by competitive examination a position as a primary school teacher. He resigned from it the following year. In 1905 he became part of the Association of Biology. He graduated as a physician in 1908 and joined the Society of Clinical Studies of La Habana.

Two years later, the Board of Directors of our University awarded him the Faculty Assistant position of the X-Ray Department, attached to the School of Medicine, a position he left in 1913.

From then on, he provided services at the Cuban Association of Beneficence, until in 1917 he won by competitive examination the chair of Physical Education, Games and Sports and Anatomy, Physiology and Hygiene at the newly created Normal School of La Habana.

Between 1921 and 1922 he worked directly with the secretary of Public Instruction and Fine Arts. As a member of the Cuban Popular Party, he was a candidate for representative from the province of Oriente (1922).

Returning to his chair in 1923, he was appointed secretary of the school and became part of a commission to study reforms to the General Regulations of Primary Instruction.

Finally, in 1926, he was appointed director of the Normal School. He was a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters. His abundant journalistic work began in 1899 in the short-lived Libertad, of which he was editor.

In 1903 he founded the specialized journal Cuba Pedagógica, in which he remained until April 1905. He created, along with Félix Callejas, the "magazine for children" La Edad de Oro (1904).

He also collaborated in the publications Azul y Rojo (of which he was director in 1904), El Fígaro, Cuba Contemporánea, Letras, Archivos de la Policlínica, Revista de Medicina y Cirugía, El Comercio, La Discusión, La Noche, La Lucha (of which he was named assistant director in 1919), Heraldo de Cuba.

In collaboration with A. M. Aguayo, he published in 1906 the school textbook Estudios de la naturaleza. Within the field of his medical profession, he published Los cálculos renales y su diagnóstico (La Habana, Imp. El Siglo XX, 1912).

His novels Las impuras and La esfinge were translated into Ukrainian under the common title Grishnitsi Sfinks (Per z ispah Kiev, «Dnipro», 1966). He gave lectures on various subjects, scientific and literary. He left unfinished in the serial installments of Azul y Rojo his novel "El principio de autoridad".

Much has been debated about his narrative work regarding the expressive possibilities it might have had if, instead of becoming enthusiastic about European naturalist narrative, he had chosen as literary companions the most tormented narrators of his time, such as Kafka, or those most modern in their work with language, such as Hemingway. However, it should not be overlooked that Carrión was a man of transition between the previous century and the dawn of the twentieth century, for which reason his production, framed within the interests of the first republican generation, had to free itself first from the romantic or modernist remnants that still persisted in Cuban narrative of the early twentieth century.

From his first volume of short stories, titled La última voluntad (1903), Miguel de Carrión began to conceive of the genre with characteristics very different from the novel. This will be important in a transitional narrator like him, since narrative, and fundamentally the short story, was a genre of late development in Cuban literature. However, it would be with his novels that Carrión would achieve greater public success, arrive at his best narrative results to become one of the most important representatives of Cuban naturalist fiction of the early twentieth century.

His novels El Milagro, Las Impuras and Las Honradas are considered the best examples of Cuban realism.

In El Milagro (1913), where some elements of nineteenth-century romantic narrative are still perceived, he explores the sexual passion experienced toward his cousin by a young man who aspires to an ecclesiastical career. Carrión undertakes a critique of religion as an instance that hinders human fulfillment, as well as of morality as a cause of anguish and unhappiness for men. Despite its intense lyrical tone, this work by Carrión was valued by Jesús Castellanos as a scientific novel for the thoroughness with which it explores the most hidden human motivations; likewise Juan José Remos y Rubio valued it as an eclectic novel, where it is argued that the human heart is neither epicurean nor Christian, but simply human.

These same concerns and characteristics would later appear in one of his most renowned novels, Las Honradas (1917), which was reissued only two years after its first publication and then again in 1920, despite some critics recommending that its reading be forbidden to women. In this second novel Carrión delves specifically into feminine psychology through several characters of strong personalities and argues the thesis that happiness is not reached through sin, but through knowledge of human nature, of sex, of love and of the authenticity of feelings. In this way, both El Milagro and Las Honradas will be novels indebted to the European naturalist narrative of Emile Zola and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez.

With Las Impuras, from 1919, he returns to the theme of feminine purity and the confused boundaries of ethics and morality, but this time from a more traditional perspective. Conceived as a continuation of each other, Las Honradas and Las Impuras share some characters and spaces, although the first takes place during the early years of the Republic and the second later, during the Dance of the Millions, a period of economic abundance caused by high sugar prices following the First World War. On the other hand, if the first was characterized by environments and characters of the middle class, in the second the attention will focus on the underworld of society, that is, on the world of vice and the most marginalized neighborhoods.

In 1924 he published the short story "Nochebuena".

Carrión's last narrative work, La Esfinge, appeared among his unpublished papers and was published posthumously in 1961. Although it is a work that repeats the author's interests, it is noteworthy that, in this case, the story is less transgressive than his first novels, and much more pessimistic as to the possibilities of women's emancipation. Amada Jacob is the name of the protagonist of this novel, continuing a general tendency of Carrión's work regarding the choice of symbolic proper names for his characters – Victoria is the name, for example, of the protagonist of Las Honradas, since only through infidelity does she become truly happy, and Teresa is the name of the protagonist of Las Impuras, in evident relation to the sacrificial life of the saint. Amada, who like many of Carrión's women does not love her husband, lives locked in a mansion in Cerro – a residential area characteristic of colonial and republican families, and a symbol of decadence in the face of the modernity of El Vedado – and debates whether to remain faithful to her marriage or accede to an illicit relationship. When she decides on the latter, her plan fails because she has been infected with an epidemic that is ravaging the city. Amada could not consummate the infidelity nor achieve happiness, as the protagonist of Las Honradas did, and her fate is much closer to the final failure of the protagonist of Las Impuras. That is why critics have noted a "violent shift" in Carrión's fiction, since his first works were much more liberal and later become more provincial and conservative.

Miguel de Carrión also left unfinished, in the serial installments of the magazine Azul y Rojo, his novel El principio de autoridad.

Active Bibliography:
El milagro (novel), 1903.
La última voluntad. El doctor Risco. En familia. De la guerra. Inocencia (short stories), 1903.
Las honradas (novel), 1917, 1919, 1920, 1966, 1973.
Las impuras (novel), 1919, 1959, 1972.
Noche Buena (short story), 1924.
La esfinge (novel), 1961.
La última voluntad y otros relatos, 1975.

He dies in La Habana from a lung disease