SOURCE: Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. “Cirilo Villaverde, the Seeker of Origins.” In Coded Encounters: Writing, Gender, and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin America, edited by Francisco Javier Cevallos-Candau, Jeffrey A. Cole, Nina M. Scott, and Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz, pp. 255-62. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Benítez-Rojo discusses Villaverde's travel narrative Excursión a Vueltabajo within the context of an emerging Cuban national literature.

Except for his novel Cecilia Valdés, the work of Cirilo Villaverde that interests me most is Excursión a Vueltabajo (Excursion to Vueltabajo). I present my reading of that text, or better said of its first part, since the book crafted by Villaverde in 1861 comprised narratives of two visits he made to that part of Cuba, each of which was published separately. The first narrative appeared in 1838, in El Album, the second in 1842, in the Faro Industrial de la Habana...