Cecilia Valdes, one of the jewels of nineteenth-century Latin American fiction, displays a thematic complexity that is unique among the novels of its time. Cecilia, the alluring mulata, has come to represent the survival strategies of women of color in a racist society. The novel occupies a prominent place in post-colonial studies about social stratification according to skin color in plantation societies. Villaverde's novel shows the process of modernization that resulted from the boom in the sugar industry, and the transformation of Havana and its social dynamics. The spaces through which the narrator leads us are the same spaces where the story of Cecilia and the history of Havana unfold in parallel lines. A close reading of the novel corroborates the often reiterated perception that Cecilia -alluring, hybrid, complex and tempestuous- is Havana, and is Cuba.

Cecilia Valdes o la loma del Angel es considerada como una de las novelas mas representativas de la cubania tanto por sus temas como por su argumento; asimismo, se puede considerar la primera novela cubana. Su argumento es dramatico e inolvidable, lo que ha permitido que la obra sea adaptada tanto al teatro como a la zarzuela y el cine.

Cecilia Valdes es la gran novela antiesclavista de Cirilo Villaverde. La historia esta centrada en el mundo de los mulatos libres de La Habana, contrapuesto y en lucha con el mundo de los blancos ricos. Pero es, sobre todo, una obra fundadora de lo nacional y su protagonista, el simbolo de la mujer cubana.

Cecilia Valdes is arguably the most important novel of 19th century Cuba. Originally published in New York City in 1882, Cirilo Villaverde's novel has fascinated readers inside and outside Cuba since the late 19th century. In this new English translation, a vast landscape emerges of the moral, political, and sexual depravity caused by slavery and colonialism. Set in the Havana of the 1830s, the novel introduces us to Cecilia, a beautiful light-skinned mulatta, who is being pursued by the son of a Spanish slave trader, named Leonardo. Unbeknownst to the two, they are the children of the same father. Eventually Cecilia gives in to Leonardo's advances; she becomes pregnant and gives birth to a baby girl. When Leonardo, who gets bored with Cecilia after a while, agrees to marry a white upper class woman, Cecilia vows revenge. A mulatto friend and suitor of hers kills Leonardo, and Cecilia is thrown into prison as an accessory to the crime.
For the contemporary reader Helen Lane's masterful translation of Cecilia Valdes opens a new window into the intricate problems of race relations in Cuba and the Caribbean. There are the elite social circles of European and New World Whites, the rich culture of the free people of color, the class to which Cecilia herself belonged, and then the slaves, divided among themselves between those who were born in Africa and those who were born in the New World, and those who worked on the sugar plantation and those who worked in the households of the rich people in Havana. Cecilia Valdes thus presents a vast portrait of sexual, social, and racial oppression, and the lived experience of Spanish colonialism in Cuba.