The novel as a genre, inserted within the narrative and still associated with the short story, the tale, the anecdote, and other modalities of narrative prose that would become progressively more complex, did not emerge in Cuba until very late, between the approximate period of 1830 – 1840. At the same time as the phenomenon arose and acquired body in some pieces of a rather mediocre character but of undoubted foundational value, texts that took the nascent phenomenon as an object of study also began to proliferate, in an attempt to decipher its keys and to use the appropriate instruments to create fictional literature.

Among scholars, an interesting arc opens up between Domingo del Monte and Ramón de Palma, the former interested in the novel, but from an exteriorist perspective that sought to decipher the functions it was meant to fulfill; Palma, on the other hand, was already writing as a creator, and the problems that concerned him were associated with the narrative elements themselves, seeking a kind of theoretical panopticon in which all the interstices of the genre could be visualized.

The novel as a genre is anchored in reality, however this is mutated and transformed into literary substance, at the same time that this substance imitates with more or less faithful molds the already digested reality itself, it offers a copy of itself, which constitutes a mode of the possible, and then we speak of verisimilitude, which alludes to a surprising resemblance to reality, even when the novel uses fictional resources to initiate or develop its plot areas.

Some authors report that the Island was gaining in variety and even variegation; one could say that the types of human characters and the modes of social relations became more complex, while a certain economic development, although totally unequal as it was a society divided into classes, configured an area from which novels could draw.

Regarding this social context in which the first germs of the novel emerged, Antón Arrufat states: “Situated in the 1930s, in the years in which the Cuban novel was born, could such a medium nourish a novelistic genre that aspired, proud of its function, to be a lively panorama of all classes of society and all branches of human knowledge, to be a luminous representation of life? Undoubtedly, the novel emerged at a certain moment and not at another, because at that moment life had reached a certain density. Since the 18th century, Cuban life had been progressively becoming denser. So dense as to allow the birth of a novelistic genre.”

It’s worth considering, or intuiting, that poetry is a rather introspective art, whose springs the poet draws from within, without the external world having any relevance except through his own subjectivity. The novel, on the other hand, requires this external universe rich in content and action, from which the author draws plots and characters, even if these are transmuted for specific literary purposes.

Although a number of attempts arose, many of which could be reviewed and constitute, if not relevant pieces of literature, much-needed testimony to colonial life, inaccessible today; it wasn’t until the publication of Cecilia Valdés by Cirilo Villaverde in 1839 that one could speak of true novels in Cuba. The genre would allow for the representation of both the social situation resulting from colonial rule and the most cherished desires of Cubans, in a healthy interaction between what was desired and what existed, which would progressively give the national novel a distinctive face.