José Ramón Betancourt was born in Camagüey, a city that would become a landmark in his literary work. He graduated in law from the Seminary of San Carlos y San Ambrosio and held several public offices. His work, “Una feria de la Caridad en 183…” (A Charity Fair in 183…), was written in the 1940s; it wasn’t published until 1856 in “El Fanal,” the year in which the author returned from exile for having been linked to annexationist activities. He directed the Artistic and Literary Lyceum of Havana for a time.

The work lacks excessive plot complications, narrated in a linear sequence that lends a fluid flow to the events. The crux of the text is the vice of gambling and its negative consequences, not only for those who practiced it but also from a social perspective, as it drained valuable energy that could have been used to promote economic development in the context of the author’s native Camagüey.

The landscape is described with care and skill, with abundant flowers, fruits and elements of nature put to a festive function, as a celebration of nationality but still from the homeland, since perhaps until the outbreak of the Ten Years’ War the island would not be able to fuse into a whole with an identity beyond territories and provinces, the root of the regionalism that so negatively impacted the war effort.

The characterizations of the characters are apt, though not always powerful enough. The female models do not go beyond the simple sum of beauty and honor, combined with passivity, which was considered a virtue for the genre. However, the praise of the beauty of Camagüeyan women can be interpreted in the very differentiation of Cuban culture from Spanish culture, including aesthetic canons.

The character of Fernando embodies the perfect type of judicious young man who opposes gambling and other evils that were silently undermining Camagüey’s prospects for economic prosperity, in the sense of greater industrialization and progress, where the leading role was to be played by the bourgeoisie, whose members were threatened by the spread of vice. The author fails to impress with the reprehensible behaviors he models in the characters; but his effort to highlight banditry and other social ills is still valid.

The author says about the work: “My objective was to remember a truly critical time for Camagüey, a time when the spirit of progress that animated the world reached the heart of its stagnant society and during which the spirit of association initiated great moral and material improvements; a time when everyone awoke from their indifference to fix their eyes on the country and its future, when everyone strove to contribute with their knowledge, their enthusiasm, and their resources to its greatness and happiness.”

Over time, it would become clear, especially to the emerging Creole bourgeoisie, that the fundamental obstacle to progress lay not so much in the ills of society itself—not inherent but engendered by the colonial system—but in the economic subordination to the metropolis and the siege its authorities exercised against Creole initiatives in political and economic matters.