Villaverde first wrote Cecilia Valdés in Havana in 1839, and then rewrote it. He rewrote it several more times in New York. The story became longer and more complicated each time. He did not finally publish it until 1882, and then only in New York. It could not be published in Cuba until after independence, in 1903, and has had more than fifteen editions since then. In the frustrating world of post-revolution Cuban state publishing, where a wide variety of books come out but few stay in print more than a moment if they’re not about Fidel or Che (or both together), Cecilia Valdés is always available.
It has been said that Cecilia Valdés is the Cuban Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it is true that it is a searing condemnation of slavery and slavery’s impact on society. But while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book spearheaded the abolitionist movement and has since become a seldom-read historical artifact, Cecilia Valdés came out at the end of the abolition struggle and has become a centerpiece of the canon of Cuban literature.
Villaverde, like many Cuban exiles after him, spent his life longing for a world he would not see again, and as he revised his book, he moved beyond the issue of slavery to the social ills created by slavery that seemed certain to outlast it—issues such as racism and the unfair treatment of women, issues that, in fact, have remained. He dedicated his novel “To the Women of Cuba.”
There are certain novels—Don Quixote in Spain, Les Misérables in France, War and Peace in Russia, and Huckleberry Finn in the United States—that become central to the cultural identity of a nation. In Cuban literature, it is Cecilia Valdés. José Martí, who is generally considered to be Cuba’s greatest writer, thought Villaverde’s book was an unforgettable masterpiece. As with Huckleberry Finn and all books that achieve national importance, there are constant criticisms of Cecilia Valdés, but if you want to talk about Cuban literature, this book, along with a few poems, essays, and letters of Martí, has to be read.
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Cecilia has become the enduring image of the Havana mulata. Her beauty is breathtaking. Sugar and fire, she melts black, brown, and white men with her warmth. She is not particularly a schemer, but, being an orphan, she does have to look out for herself, which means having a wealthy white suitor. The scion of a sugar-wealthy aristocratic family has fallen in love with her. And she loves him. He, of course, is not supposed to marry a mulata; he is engaged to the white daughter of another aristocratic family.
Cecilia thinks she is an orphan—Valdés was a last name often given to orphans in that era—but actually her mother is a slave and her father is the father of her wealthy lover. So they are half siblings without knowing it. The father has to stop this union without revealing that he has a mulata daughter. Cecilia does not understand that the game is rigged against her.
The mother of the fine young man who loves Cecilia is a lady of apparently refined sensibilities who does not enjoy family vacations at the ingenio, as a sugar mill in Cuba is called, where slaves are worked to death. She does not oppose slavery, and accepts the argument that slaves have to be punished, beaten nearly to death or mutilated because they are too barbarous to comprehend anything else, but she doesn’t like to see it. She is soft. “Enough of your belief that bundles from Africa have a soul and are angels,” her husband says to her.
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As in the rest of the Caribbean, the straightness of hair, the thickness of lips, the shading of fingernails—every possible physical characteristic—were examined as clues to everyone’s exact racial mixture. The coloring of hands or the shape of the nose was often considered to be a certain tip-off.
In the case of Cecilia, the beautiful orphan of unknown parentage, we are told, “A knowing eye could not help noticing that her red lips had a dark border or edging, and that the bright glow of her face ended in a sort of half shadow near her hairline.”
One of the more interesting examples of these kinds of observations—still made of friends, neighbors, employers, and political figures by Habaneros today—is that the face of the dictator Batista indicated to connoisseurs of racism the presence of Taino blood; Taino blood was once considered almost as damning as African blood. Before coming to power, Batista had been excluded from certain clubs for being Taino, even though there were supposedly no more Tainos. “You could see it in his face,” it was said.
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Now that decades have passed since the abolition of slavery in Cuba, the conversation in Havana has shifted, but only slightly. People still joke about one another’s suspect features. “El que no tiene de Congo tiene de Carabalí” is a common Havana expression—“Those who don’t have some Congo in them have some Carabalí.” Both are Cuban terms for African ethnicities.
In the mid-twentieth century, anthropologist Fernando Ortiz observed that Havana men judged Havana women the same way that they judged Havana cigars. Tobacco, he observed, “the product of infinite crossbreeding and mixtures,” came in many different colors. No two cigars were alike, and all smokers had their preferred colors—“claros, colorado-claros, colorados, colorado-maduros,” and so on—a very long list. “The color of the different types of cigar,” Ortiz noted, “like that of women, cannot be simply reduced to blondes and brunettes.” Ortiz analyzed both the racism and sexism (which Cubans prefer to call machismo) in Cuba, but also noted that bantering about race and sex was broadly accepted as a way of speaking and of joking without malice.
Habaneros still enjoy the word game of labeling racial distinctions. They frequently call a friend “negrito,” which, though it can be used as an offensive term, can also be said with humor and without rancor—a term of endearment—at least when said by one person of color about another person of color. In the Spanish language, adding a diminutive to a pejorative detoxifies the word and gives it a humorous and ironic twist. Another term of friendship, now a bit old-fashioned, is chino, which literally means a Chinese man, but in Havana street slang means a person of mixed blood and is used to indicate a friend, like “buddy.” There is also plenty of bantering about blanquitos. Often an Habanero will make up their own term. Poet Virgilio Piñera used to quip that he was an “altísimo mulato blanconozo,” which roughly translates to “a light mulato who is white but not really.”
Should a negrita and a blanquito, or a negrito and a blanquita, decide to get married, the union, which is commonly called “rice and beans,” is generally accepted without controversy. There are more people of mixed blood, and fewer and fewer whites and blacks, with each passing year. Current estimates are that only about 40 percent of the people in Havana are of pure European stock. Some studies show a higher percentage of whites, and some a lower percentage, but few show a white majority.
Racism has certainly not vanished and the weight of history in many ways gives economic advantage to those with lighter skin. For example, since the majority of exiles who send goods and money to relatives in Cuba happen to be white, their white relatives are the recipients of this largess and few black people are getting gifts from Miami. Still, Havana is an increasingly mixed society and racial differences are most often material for humor.
FIVE
Beyond the Wall
Havana is a really big city. That’s what my mother says and she knows a lot about these things. They say that a child can get lost in it forever. That two people can be looking for each other for years and never meet. But I like my city.
—MIRTA YÁÑEZ, La Habana Es una Ciudad Bien Grande (1980)
Havana was, and Habana Vieja still is, a city of narrow streets—laid out for either easier defense or more shade—and of sidewalks so narrow that a pedestrian can barely walk on them. Richard Henry Dana Jr., famous for his exposé on the merchant marine, Two Years Before the Mast, noted in 1859:
The streets are so narrow and the houses built so close upon them that they seem to be rather spaces between the walls of houses than highways for travel. It seems impossible that two vehicles should pass abreast, yet they do so. There are constant blockings of the way. In some places awnings are stretched over the e
ntire street, from house to house, and we are riding under a long tent.
Narrow sidewalk in Habana Vieja. Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, August 1878
Women with their full skirts could never walk on the sidewalks, and the streets were muddy and filled with dangerous traffic. “Real ladies,” that is to say white women, didn’t walk outside in any event. Only women of color were seen on the street, and it is easy to imagine the allure of women of color who could go anywhere, drink, gamble, and even, according to many accounts, smoke cigars. Twentieth-century Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante claimed that cigar bands, which were invented in 1830 by Gustav Bock, a German immigrant, for his Aguila de Oro cigars, were created so that women would not have to touch the tobacco leaf while smoking.
White women stayed home and sat in windows like pretty birds in cages. Windows were tall, situated just slightly above the street, and covered with iron gratings. They didn’t, and still don’t, have any glass, allowing breezes to pass through.
These windows were always a subject of fascination for visitors, not only for the way in which beautiful and finely dressed women carried on courtships with suitors outside in plain view, but also for the way in which, on hot nights, whole families would be on display in their open windows. Anthony Trollope wrote that families “pass their evening seated near the large low open window of their drawing-rooms; and as these windows almost always look into the street, the whole internal arrangement is seen by every one who passes.” Dana wrote, “The windows come to the ground, and, being flush with the street, and mostly without glass, nothing but the grating prevents a passenger from walking into the rooms.”
Meanwhile, people of color were working, out on the street, trying to be resourceful. Travelers such as Trollope, Dana, and nineteenth-century travel writer Samuel Hazard confirm this.
Wealthy young white men busied themselves with empty amusements. “The young men,” wrote Trollope, “and many of those who are no longer young, spend their evenings, and apparently a large portion of their days, in eating ices and playing billiards.”
Courtship at a Havana window. Harper’s Weekly, May 3, 1873
When wealthy young white women wanted to go out, they would go for a ride in a volante. Volantes were conveyances, designed specifically for young women, about which virtually all nineteenth-century visitors to Havana had to comment. A young woman would never descend from a volante until she returned home again, and then she would do so only when the volante pulled into her home’s courtyard—never on the street. If she wanted to go shopping, her volante would stop in front of a store and the shop owner would come out to her.
The volante featured a kind of bucket-seat carriage that rode high on an axle between two enormous spoked wheels. Two extremely long shafts connected the wheels to a driver’s seat far in front and to one or two horses.
The more aristocratic the lady, the greater the distance between her seat and that of the driver, making for unwieldy vehicles navigating narrow streets. U-turns were out of the question. Volantes could barely turn the tight corners of Habana Vieja, and, according to Samuel Hazard, an attempted turn was “the occasion of much hard swearing.” Gentility has always been paper-thin in Havana.
Volantes in Habana Vieja. The Drawing-Room Companion, 1851
It took some skill for two volantes arriving from opposite directions to pass: no wonder the sidewalks were so narrow. The slave who drove a volante, the calesero, was part of the decoration. He would be dressed in a velvet coat of scarlet or another deep color, festooned with gold or silver lace, spotless white breeches and waistcoat, a black silk hat with a silver or gold band, and brilliantly polished knee-high boots as shiny as glass. The horses’ silver stirrups bore the master’s coat of arms. The total effect was that of a fruit bowl of lovely women rolled through the streets in a decorative chariot.
In nineteenth-century Havana, carriages were important status symbols, much like Cadillacs in Havana in the 1950s—an opportunity for the wealthy to show off their standing. In the opening paragraph of Cecilia Valdés, a character asserts his position through the outfit of his driver and the silver ornament of his harnesses.
The passenger compartment was suspended with leather straps that absorbed shocks as the calesero pranced the horses down the bumpy streets at a good pace, forcing pedestrians to scramble out of the way. Many of the people on foot were people of color anyway, so the lack of adequate sidewalk space was considered of little importance.
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By thenineteenth century, the old city wall could no longer hold Havana. This was due not only to a growing population but also to the bustle and drive of that population, who were not to be confined to one small corner sealed off by a wall. The streets were packed with three things Habaneros have always loved: bars, cafés, and casinos. And at night there were dances, because if there was anything that Habaneros loved more than drinking and gambling, it was dancing.
Who could resist such a place? Even in the nineteenth century, Havana was full of tourists. In fact, the city invented Caribbean tourism long before anywhere else, even carving out spacious rooms in the rocks by the sea—their remnants still visible today when the tide and waves are right—where visitors could bathe in ocean water in private spaces with ledges and rock seats to relax on while partially submerged. The rooms’ openings allowed seawater to rush in but, according to Hazard, were small enough to keep out “any voracious monster.” This may have been a reference to sharks, which abound in these waters. Habaneros did not make use of the rooms; they tended to think of them as some crazy thing that foreigners liked.
The city provided high-quality shopping in luxury stores on Calles Obispo and O’Reilly, named for an Irish-born Spanish military officer. China, glass, goods from Europe, silk, and cloth made from pineapple fiber were available under the shade-giving awnings. Today, as tourist shops are just beginning to reemerge, these same streets are a popular location.
At night, in addition to dances, Habaneros went to the opera. When the audience particularly appreciated a visiting singer, they would toss flowers. And then, if the performance had been especially fine, they would throw jewelry—good jewelry—pelting the singer with diamonds in that typical Havana way of overdoing things. The opera was not a place for moderation, but few places in Havana were.
Cockfights, featuring roosters hacking each other to death with the spurs on their feet while betting men screamed and shouted, were a favorite amusement in Havana. At a cockfight, the patina of gentility seen in the shops and theaters and opera houses was quickly peeled away. Hazard warned tourists, “Just pay one visit to a cock-fight, and I guarantee you’ll not go again, but will come away intensely disgusted.” But it was a place to see a cross section of Habanero society—slaves, free blacks, mulatos, poor whites, aristocrats.
The only people you didn’t see were women.
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In 1827, a monument in honor of the founding of the city of Havana was completed in the Plaza de Armas, a prominent central location, in the style of an understated Greek temple with Doric columns. This set off a passion for neoclassical architecture. The wealthy yearned to build new houses with Doric or Ionic or even ornate Corinthian columns. But there was no available space within the walls of Havana. On the east side, the city butted up against the bay, with nowhere to grow. Only to the west, beyond the walls in undeveloped rural areas, was there space to build.
There, the Habaneros went column-mad. Alejo Carpentier wrote in 1982, “One of the most singular constants of Havana style: an incredible profusion of columns, a city that is a warehouse of columns, a jungle of columns, columns to infinity . . .” In strong sunlight, these columns suggested a film noir setting of darkly shaded portales (porticos), in which someone unseen could lurk and suddenly edge into the light.
As the city spread outside of its old walls and the decades passed by, every style of architecture from successive eras became popular—a process that continued into the twentieth century. C
arpentier wrote, “The imposing of styles, the innovation of styles, good and bad, more bad than good, was creating in Havana this style without style.” Today Havana is like a museum of architecture, exhibiting almost every idea from the early 1600s to the 1960s, with some good examples of each.
The westward expansion of Havana had actually already begun decades before the Habaneros went column-mad, in 1772, when the city built a grand boulevard to the west of its walls. Unlike the streets in the rest of Havana, it was broad, spacious, and well paved. It was called the Paseo del Prado, after Madrid’s great tree-lined boulevard. From the far, inland end of the Havana boulevard, through the trees, could be seen the fort, the sea, and the tower of the Morro. In 1877 a park, Parque Central, was built alongside the thoroughfare.
A drawing of the Paseo del Prado with the Morro seen at the end. By Childe Hassam for Harper’s Weekly in 1895
Havana in the second half of the eighteenth century contained more than forty thousand people—more than New York City at that time. The wall had become increasingly irrelevant. By the late eighteenth century, Havana had two parts: intramuros, behind the wall, which became Habana Vieja, and extramuros, outside the wall, which is now known as Centro Habana. In 1863, the demolition of the wall began, but that took almost as long as its construction had. The last of the wall was not torn down until the twentieth century. A fragment is preserved as a monument near the Habana Vieja house where José Martí spent his first four years of life; that house is also a museum.
SIX
The Monster
Viví en el monstruo, y le conozco las entrañas.
I lived in the monster, and I know its entrails.
— JOSÉ MARTÍ, on the United States in 1895
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