Ramón Meza

Narrator, columnist and essayist. One of the most outstanding voices of Cuban fiction in the nineteenth century in its realist vein and the most prolific novelist of the final stage of colonial Cuba.

His first publication appeared in the Revista de Cuba in 1884. That same year he began to collaborate in La Lotería and in La Habana Elegante, where he came to hold the position of editor.

In 1886, the Sociedad Provincial Catalana Colla de Sant Mus awarded him an honorable mention in the Juegos Florales for his novel Carmela.

In 1889 he received a prize for his novel Don Aniceto el tendero, in a competition of the Liceo de Santa Clara. He graduated in 1891 as a Doctor of Philosophy and Letters from the Universidad de La Habana and served as a professor at the institution. In 1898 he moved to the United States and began to collaborate in the serials of the magazine Cuba y América, where his novel En un pueblo de la Florida appears.

Upon his return to Cuba in 1900 he served as undersecretary of Justice and served as secretary of the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, in which he was also director of its Memorias, published annually during the period 1900-1909. He was elected councilman of La Habana in 1901 and became the first syndic of the City Council.

At the request of that institution he was in charge of the eulogy speech for General Máximo Gómez on the occasion of his death, in 1905. He was secretary of Public Instruction and Fine Arts of La Habana in 1909. Numerous publications of the era featured his collaborations. He died in La Habana on December 5, 1911.

Among his novels worth highlighting are Carmela (1886), compared with Cecilia Valdés, especially because its protagonist is a young mulatto woman, although the work does not achieve the representativeness of that one, the most relevant novel of the Cuban nineteenth century. Likewise, Don Aniceto el tendero (1889) shows a certain thematic relationship with his most meritorious work, Mi tío el empleado, since the author censures merchants obsessed with enriching themselves at all costs and can be defined as the story of an ambition.

With Mi tío el empleado he fictionalizes, from almost grotesque visions, the bitter Cuban colonial reality, by laying bare, through the plot, the crude circumstances of a society subjected to the iron rule of Spain. Both the conception of the main character—the wretched Vicente Cuevas, Spanish emigrant turned Count Coveo through his successive transmutations and by virtue of his murky financial dealings—and the atmosphere of the novel, highly praised by José Martí in brilliant commentary, reveal the deepest social critique of all Cuban fiction of the nineteenth century, by presenting through a narrative rhythm marked by the urgencies of anecdote, the caricaturesque nature of the Cuban world of the era; in a construction where laughter and a smile, focal elements of the two parts in which the work is divided, play a stabilizing role in the development of the plot.

The author gathered in this work the accusations made by Cubans against Spanish emigrants who came to Cuba seeking to enrich themselves even by the most murky means. But in attacking these dealings he does not opt for the accumulation of episodes, but rather for artistic methods capable of achieving the category of expressionist, in the parodic nature of reality or the presentation of characters, which at times seem like true caricaturesque symbols, almost puppets in the hands of the author. Mi tío el empleado is a true satire of Cuban colonial life.

Meza surpasses the novelistic procedures of his time and achieves, on an artistic plane unusual for his era, a work that lays bare, as no other does, the mediocrity, excess and corruption that prevailed in the Spanish colony of the Island. As José Martí expressed it, this novel "seems a grimace made with blood-stained lips," while other scholars have described it as "a rare novel, unclassifiable due to the amalgam of artistic procedures that coexist in it with great effectiveness."

Pages of brilliant prose the author left with his exemplary novel, one of the most original of Cuban prose fiction of all time. Thanks to his narrative work, the Cuban novel acquired, for the first time, a hallucinating, almost phantasmagoric perspective. Ramón Meza also wrote some short stories and the theatrical work Una sesión de hipnotismo, published in 1891.