Soycubano has diverse reasons to feast: The island celebrates the National Culture Day with multiple festivities including this year homage to Eduardo Chibás, Raúl Roa and Nicolás Guillén, distinguished figures of the political, social and cultural Cuban life and recalls the creation of the Sociedad Económica Amigos del País (Economic Society Friends of the Country), which arrives to its 205 years. It also appears in October the first number of Papel Periódico de la Habana newspaper and we remember the eminent Cuban writer Cirilo Villaverde on his birth and death anniversaries.
Continuing the celebrations, in this same date, 4 years ago, it is published online, for the first time, this newsletter about cultural topics with the clear mission of giving you, our dear readers, something about our culture, genuine melting pot, way of living and idiosyncrasy. Our sincere gratefulness to all for being with us in this hard and beautiful task during all these years.

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.

Source: www.caribenet.info

Notes about Papel Periódico de la Habana

Papel Periódico de la Habana was the first official newspaper that circulated around the streets of Havana, Cuba, from October 24, 1970 to the year 1805.

It was characterized for being very similar to the ones in other countries at that time, emphasizing a little bit more on cultural events.

Papel Periódico appears due to the close cooperation with the rising criolla bourgeoisie interested in deepening its participation on the government management. Papel Periódico newspaper was from the beginning a necessity of the most advanced sectors of the Cuban society, suggested by wealthy criollos to the government of the island. It burst in a critical moment and traditionally somehow, when the new ideas were still undefined but it assumed the integration of opinions, experiences and thoughts which defended the cultural road that could not be avoided by the inhabitants of the island anymore.

The newspaper had two periods. The first one was under the direction of Don Diego de la Barrera, as director, and later under the auspices of Cuban Society Friends of the Country that found support in outstanding personalities to manage the newspaper at the height of the requirements at those times. The articles that constituted its main content were oriented to a preferential line about agriculture, commerce and the acquisition of scientific natural knowledge on chemistry, botany applicable to the economy without omitting beautiful features: anecdotes, news about science and arts meetings or any other worthy of public knowledge. Prestigious people wrote in its pages like Tomás Romay, prist Caballero, Francisco de Arango y Parreño, Buenaventura Pascual Ferrer and many others under a pseudonym sometimes.

Coming soon at La Bijirita more information about Papel Periódico de la Habana

Nicolás, the poet of the fervid lyre

Always new and lively, Nicolás Guillén goes beyond next to other great personalities of the national and universal literature. Of pure cubania and extraordinary attributes as poet, Nicolás knew since he was very young, to lead his pen along the path of an authentically national poetry in which the cultured and the popular flow with their own accent.

Born on July 10, 1902, in Camagüey, Guillén stands out for the magic of poetry where negroid and folkloric elements as well as social topics, form a mosaic of Caribbean and Latin- American roots waves. Great pupil of Rubén Darío, Nicolás Guillén was also the fighter full of love and self-sacrifice who by means of rebelliousness joined the revolutionary work, after years of absence in the exile.

It is said that Nicolás Guillén never composed a musical sheet but he did not need it to give musical sense to his work. The appearance of Motivos de Son in 1930 was the bridge between our National Poet and the music (in this case the son) which remained forever.

The publication of the eight poems that enlivened Motivos de Son caused a great commotion within the cultural means of those times. In this way the Cuban son entered into the poetry bringing about a revolution around the world in this art.

Hereinafter, Guillén changed from the pages of the book to the stave with the help of famous Cuban musicians like Amadeo Roldán, Alejandro García Caturla, González Allué and Eliseo Grenet. His folklore, aggressive, loving and revolutionary poetry became song, rumba, son…

Article by Marilys Suárez. Read the whole article at nnc.cubaweb.cu