Cirilo Villaverde (1812-1894) has been one of the most prolific narrators within the Cuban literature and has been also the pioneer of the novelistic production in the Island. His work, of irregular quality, is classified within the romanticism and it is contaminated by its excesses, however it shows a human and social context that goes beyond his time and becomes Villaverde an important author of the XIX century. The realistic and folk literature has a laudable antecedent in his novels and stories.

Nevertheless, Cirilo Villaverde belongs to the Parnassus of the Latin-American classical literature, thanks to his novel Cecilia Valdés (1882).

The tragic story of a havanan mulatta would be the excuse to create the fiction work presented first as a brief story and then it was enlarged to become a story of a little bit more of 600 pages. The main character, Cecilia Valdés, is a mulatta and due to her color and beauty she will be called La Virgencita de Bronce (The Little Virgin of Bronze) by gallant havanan men. In the novel she is the illegitimate child of a “gentleman” and a “mulatta”. As time goes by she will represent the criolla woman and will be a paradigm of the Cuban. This sensual mulatta, captivating and coquette, enamored by all men –no matter race or class- and with aspirations to rise socially, frustrated due to her condition and birth, becomes Pandora or Helena.

Antislavery argument, the work describes the colonial environment of Cuba at the beginning of the XIX century, social injustice and specially the slavery ignominy. Abolitionist and then also pro-independence, Cirilo Villaverde builds a romantic plot in which there is a social denunciation and condemnation against the slave’s life in the sugar cane plants, the difference in opportunities for white dominant class and the poor, mulattos, freedmen and slaves classes.

Many readers remember passages of Cecilia Valdés different to the ones narrated by Villaverde. A wide bibliography regarding the work and its appropriation from other arts should be responsible of the upgraded versions of the original text whose most known inspirations would be the homonymous zarzuela written by Gonzalo Roig in 1932; a serial TV and a film by Humberto Solás, Cuban filmmaker, in which actor Imanol Arias plays the role of Leonardo Gamboa, passionate lover that will prove to be Cecilia’s white brother. Who has not been told in Havana about a beautiful and arrogant mulatta that looks like Cecilia Valdés?

Some people assure that, contrary to what the author always declared, Cecilia really existed, that is why Villaverde made such human and full of nuances characterization. The truth is that in Cemetery of Colon, Havana City, there is a tomb with her name and according to the registered dates it may coincide with a modern woman of the novelist. Any anonymous admiring of the “Myth of the Cecilia”, that journalists have not been able to discover yet, leaves flowers on Cirilo Villaverde’s and Cecilia Valdés’tombs in their death anniversary.

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