Cirilo Villaverde
1812–1894
Biography
Cirilo Villaverde was a Cuban novelist, poet, journalist and campaigner for independence from Spain. He was born on a sugar estate, where his family lived beside a sugar mill, and as a boy he saw slavery at close quarters. In 1820 the family moved to Havana. He studied law, worked briefly for a law firm, and then turned to teaching and literature. He is credited with helping to settle the design of the Cuban flag.
From 1840 he worked for Cuban independence and served as secretary to General Narciso López, whose invasions of Cuba failed. In 1848 Spanish soldiers arrested him, and the following year he escaped to the United States. He spent most of his later life in New York, where he edited exile journals and kept writing, with short visits back to Cuba near the end of his life. He died in 1894.
His best-known book is Cecilia Valdés, a novel about a story of forbidden love across the colour and class lines of colonial Cuba. It is generally regarded as one of the most important Cuban novels of the nineteenth century. The site holds Cecilia Valdés, so readers can judge this portrait of colonial Havana for themselves.
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Books
Cecilia Valdés o la Loma del Ángel
by Cirilo Villaverde
In colonial Havana in the 1830s, the beautiful mixed-race Cecilia Valdés catches the eye of Leonardo Gamboa, son of a rich slave-trading family. Their romance unfolds against a society built on slavery and the colour line, which Villaverde paints in great detail. This book uses…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.