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1 romanCing CECILIA VALDÉS Last spring, on the first day of a return visit to Cuba, I walked the streets of my Havana of happy memory, spending a large part of the time in quest of the subject of a study I had begun two years earlier. Her name was Cecilia Valdés. She was the fictional heroine, I had discovered at the time, of a famous book that bore her name: a book indeed regarded by many Hispanic and Latin American readers as the national novel of Cuba. Further, her presence still seemed to be felt and manifested at many of the Havana locations described in the book. Accordingly, down by the docks, I spent a quiet moment at la Iglesia de Paula, near where she was born. Later, I stood on the summit of la Loma del Ángel, on the steps of the cathedral where her story allegedly ends, gazing out on her Havana. The year was 2012. It was the two hundredth anniversary of her birth, at least in the novel. It was also that of her creator, the exile Cuban novelist Cirilo Villaverde . By now I knew enough of both her and Villaverde, I thought, to understand that for Cuba she truly was in many ways still there, and so was her story. Though many North American and Anglo-European readers have never heard of the text, critics versed in the history of Hispanic literature take it as commonplace to regard Cirilo Villaverde’s 1882 fictional epic Cecilia Valdés; o, la Loma del Ángel (Cecilia Valdés; or, the Angel Hill) as the greatest Cuban novel of the nineteenth century and perhaps a contender for the nineteenth-century Latin American title as a whole. Equally well known to musicologists and other students of twentieth-century Cuban culture is the 1932 zarzuela—or, popular lyric-dramatic opera—of the same name, with a score by Gonzalo Roig and the libretto by Agustin Rodriguez and José Sánchez Avila and now regarded, along with comparable productions by Ernesto Lecuona and Eliseo Grenet, as an enduring classic of the movement in music and the arts called at the time Afrocubanismo . Produced at the centenary, Cecilia, an opulent 1982 epic film re-creation of the novel by the renowned director Humberto Solas, is now Romancing Cecilia Valdés 15 likewise cited frequently as one of the most ambitious historical examples of the post-revolutionary national Cuban cinema. These have been more recently followed by a provocative play in 1998, Parece Blanca (She Looks White) by the exile-writer Abelardo Estorino, and produced by the New York theater group, Reportorio Español, and a 2002 ballet, written for the Ballet Hispanico NYC by the dancer Pedro Ruiz, with music from famous Cuban zarzuela composers including Gonzalvo Roig and Ernesto Lecuona , as well as Leo Brouwer and Jose Maria Vietier. Among academic and scholarly readerships, mainly in Spanish, the work in its various forms has produced a large and sophisticated critical literature. And, as will be seen, two late twentieth-century expatriate Cuban writers—the first, the wellknown gay novelist Reinaldo Arenas, and the second, the equally celebrated science fiction author Daina Chaivano—have made the Villaverde text the basis of new and significant literary experiments for our own time. Such is the cultural history of what itself began as a young author’s relatively modest 1839 attempt at periodical-length popular historical fiction, a melodramatic tale of forbidden love dated 1812–32, though arising out of events of the previous century and thus overtly inscribing conflicts of gender, race, class, and revolutionary nationality rooted in a shadowed colonial past. To this may be further added an extended history of composition and publication, with the 1839 story followed by a considerably longer 1842 novella, and then a full four decades later—nearly all of which the author had spent as a revolutionary expatriate in the United States— by a compendiously rewritten and enlarged 1882 New York edition nearly twice the length of its predecessor. As to overall visions of history, many assessments of the Villaverde text focus on the novel’s mythic depiction of its titular character as the archetype of the tragic mulata and her illomened romance with a young, white, upper-class seducer (secretly, in fact, her half brother), eventuating in the pregnancy, illegitimate motherhood , and imprisonment of the heroine, and climaxing with the murder of the white lover by a vengeful mulato rival. Others emphasize the novel...

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