The contribution of contextualizing elements nourishes the timely and better understanding of this novel, which constitutes a powerful anti-colonialist and anti-racist plea and on Cuban Book Day it demonstrates the value of fiction to instruct from our history
To read, reread and study the text in depth Cecilia Valdés or La loma del Ángelby Cirilo Villaverde (1812-1894), motivates the Annotated Edition by Reynaldo González and Cira Romero of the emblematic novel of the Cuban 19th century and one of the most significant works in Latin America in that period.
Both essayists carry out enlightening, timely, and useful analyzes by providing contextualizing elements of the volume published by the author in 1882. Through arduous investigative work of notable cultural, social, political, and aesthetic significance, they reveal data, details of facts, real people, and of imagination that coincide in the novel and Villaverde’s remarkable ability to build a credible story without betraying the circumstances of the time.
Through a task of disassembling and disarticulating meaning, they examine the local and specific connections, the intersections between social discursivities, cultural symbols, power formations and subjectivity constructions. From this transdisciplinary vision, they elaborate a valuable document that is mandatory to consult on violence and crime in force in a given period, without losing the condition of sentimental history.
One must carefully examine each of the 505 pages of the volume -including the notes and the novel- to understand the essence of a romantic plot that leads to tragedy following addressing the extreme conditions of racial hatred, the greed of the masters and the misfortune of the captives.
According to the narrator and journalist Reynaldo González: “Along with the characteristics given to the characters and a detailed description of life in Havana, it delves into the collective imagination and the institutions whose cruelty and intolerance motivated the plot.”
Scientifically, she unfolds the anthropological substrate of her analytical gaze by acknowledging: “The definitive version of Cecilia Valdés highlighted her anti-slavery character, not only for showing a way of governing the free as if they were serfs and exploiting captive labor to exhaustion extreme, but because of the possibility of knowing how much slavery sowed in the customs of those who lived through it. There were scholars who denied its anti-slavery condition, calculating the dates of its publication and the end of the infamous regime, even four years away. In an arithmetic reasoning they compared abolitionism, officially fulfilled in 1886, with anti-slavery, which in its extended radius of action scrutinizes the evils engendered during the colonial period. Evidencing it was equivalent to fighting them.
“The difference can be understood if we observe that even in the 21st century, in some areas of the world the demand for decolonization is still alive. Villaverde marked the injustice in passages of his novel and gave force to denounce the subtitle angel’s hilla maritime neighborhood where blacks and mulattoes – free or slaves – met, landowners and slavers whose conception of life did not die with the overvaluation of a date”.
Among the merits of the Annotated Edition, published by Ediciones Boloña, in the Raíces collection, stand out the temporal locations of events, the study of linguistic language, the intelligent syntax of narrative discourse, the point of view by emphasizing that like no other writer of In his time, Villaverde observed the social and racial divisions, the life of the slave on the plantations, he sacrificed romantic taste to favor criticism of customs and realistic description.
For her part, literary researcher Cira Romero acknowledges that the best definition of Cecilia Valdés or La Loma del Ángel It was given by its author: novel of customs. “It is because it is marked by a tenacious search for objectification and, unlike Meza’s, it does not scrutinize irony, nor does it wallow in the ultimate conflict of the plot – the incest between Cecilia and Leonardo’s half-siblings -, but instead develops a drama that imposes a maximum reading level, Havana society as a whole, and several minimum levels, meanders of a great river, only one, that he is interested in highlighting”.
Undoubtedly, the solid imprint of Cecilia… and of the Annotated Edition recognizes the plurality of knowledge that is essential in the construction of cultural thought and an enriching dialogue with readers of several generations for the benefit of the indispensable act of thinking.
