Cecilia Valdes
By
Cirilo Villaverde
Though it may be Cuba's counterpart to Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
Cecilia Valdes nonetheless stands apart as its own work with its own agendas. More than forty years after publishing
Cecilia Valdes as a short story, Cirilo Villaverde, in 1882, published it as a novel - a very large novel. Villaverde confesses that the length of time it took to finish the novel, including how little he could dedicate to it at extended periods of time, accounts for the novel's unevenness, which includes long stretches of unnecessary detail and other such disruptive passages. Most disruptive of all is the one hundred page trip to a Cuban slave plantation, which damages the novel beyond repair. One has to wonder how much better the novel could have been, had Villaverde had the chance to write this novel without interruption (he faced many political conflicts, which led to his exile to the United States). This isn't to say it's not a great novel, in many ways it is, but it's not, in the end, a successful novel. The fatal flaw, as I've already said, is the lengthy scene, three hundred pages in, at the plantation. The novel never recovers from it. Wikipedia describes the ending accurately: "as if [the] author h[ad] lost interest in his story and wanted to finish it as fast as possible." For scholars on slavery and race,
Cecilia Valdes is a crucial read, but for the rest of us, it just breaks our hearts to see the novel crumble before our eyes.
Does that mean you shouldn't read it? No. As a matter of fact this novel does many things very well. You could even say that an excellent book was ruined by one hundred pages of poor writing, but those first three hundred pages aren't any worse for it. The book's downfall, it seems, can easily be explained by Villaverde's politics. While the book is essentially an anti-slavery novel, it is only in a very complicated way. For one, the novel provides hints that, though Villaverde may have truly been against slavery, he was nonetheless a racist. His stance against slavery was owing to the fact that abolishing slavery would abolish Spanish rule in Cuba, which is what Villaverde wanted. There is evidence that he was pro-slavery up until he learned that slavery was what kept Spain in Cuba, and it is at this point I imagine he decided to take the anti-slavery route that Stowe made very popular. Three hundred pages into the writing of his book he decides to insert an agenda that turns out to be ruinous.
But first I want to show why these ruinous pages are so heartbreaking.
