Filibustering Cuba: Cecilia Valdés and a Memory of Nation in the Americas

In 1883 the New York-based, Spanish-language newspaper El Espejo printed an advertisement promoting Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés o La loma del ángel (Cecilia Valdés or the Angel's Hill), a "novel of Cuban customs" (1882). ¹ El Espejo was an unlikely place to advertise a work that William Luis has called "the most important novel written in nineteenth-century Cuba and perhaps one of the most significant works published in Latin America during the same period." ² The primary focus of El Espejo was not literature but commerce. Circulated in Latin America, El Espejo was a commercial sheet filled with advertisements for U.S.–made export products, such as locomotives, wheelbarrows, and pianos. Appearing alongside ads for washing machines and plastic sacks, the advertisement for Cecilia Valdés describes the book as an "attractive" product—a six-hundred-page octavo volume printed on "good paper," in a new typeface for easy reading, and adorned with several engravings. Classifying it as a "historical" novel that records "true" events and portraits of "public figures" who lived in Cuba between 1812 and 1831, the ad goes on to note that the work is dedicated to "las Cubanas," thus positing a gendered national subject. Buyers are told that they may purchase the book at the offices of El Espejo in New York as well as from booksellers in Madrid, Paris, Key West, and Havana.

This advertisement not only reveals the commodification of Cecilia Valdés as a U.S. export, but it also raises questions about the location of this most national of Cuban novels. El Espejo was one in a long line of newspapers produced by Cubans who lived in the United States in the nineteenth century. Owned and edited by Narciso Villaverde, Cirilo's son, El Espejo was the publisher of Cecilia Valdés; this relationship situates the novel in a transnational print culture, a position that contradicts the novel's own insistence on the Cuban nation as a local formation tied to the island. Coming out of New York, the ad and novel complicate a longtime critical insistence on Cecilia Valdés as a novel not only about but also of Cuba. Since the 1890s, critics have claimed the novel as Cuban, in part because it captures conditions in Havana in the early nineteenth century. ³ What I want to emphasize is that historical perspective in Cecilia Valdés is refracted by Cirilo Villaverde's residence in New York City. Earlier versions of the novel—a short story and a novel, both published in 1839 in Cuba—differ dramatically from the 1882 Cecilia Valdés, which did not appear until Villaverde had lived for more than thirty years in the United States. ⁴

Cecilia Valdés, I will argue, emerges in part from a network of publishing efforts that developed in the United States during the nineteenth century in response to and in conjunction with Cuban anticolonial politics. From the first decades of the century to the outbreak of the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, Cuban exiles published more than seventy newspapers as well as dozens of pamphlets and books in Philadelphia, New York, New Orleans, and Tampa. As Rodolfo Cortina has noted, "Traditionally, Cuban literature has been written both on the island and abroad," the result of political conditions that have sent waves of exiles to the United States and other countries. ⁵ Cuban writers who lived and published in the United States for prolonged periods in the nineteenth century—including Félix Varela (1788–1853), Miguel Teurbe Tolón (1820–57), and José Martí (1853–95)—wrote articles and poems that circulated in Cuba and other parts of the Americas and critiqued the vestiges of Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean. These publications can be situated within Spanish-language print culture in the United States and as part of Cuba's nation-formation process. Newspapers such as...