The theater genre appears to have been limited to the realm of performance until the appearance of the play “The Gardener and Pretend Prince Cloridano,” whose author has been proven to be Santiago Pita (1693–1755), who served as a militia captain and became mayor of the city council of Havana, where he was born. The play was first written and published in Seville during the four-year period from 1730 to 1733, and was widely performed in this and other cities in Spain, as well as in the American colonies, although the exact date of its arrival in Cuba is unknown.

The play is inspired by and reworks the theme of Il príncipe giardinero, conceived in the 17th century by the Italian Giacinto Andrea Cicognini, although this does not diminish its originality. The plot revolves around a few characters; Fadrique, Prince of Athens, and Aurora, Infanta, daughter of the King of France, are the main ones. The prince falls in love with the Infanta after killing his brother, and to approach her, he disguises himself as a gardener and takes the name Cloridano.

Its creation falls during the final moments of the Baroque period and is the only example of this movement in Cuban theater. The story itself unfolds placidly and constitutes another example of amorous flirtation and the ultimate triumph of love. The prince’s character is accompanied in many scenes by his servant Lamparón, and from this emerges a linguistic counterpoint that serves to characterize both personalities according to their social origins and also provides a dose of humor, similar to what happens with Sancho Panza and Don Quixote in Miguel de Cervantes’s work.

The artistic value of this work does not lie solely in its contributions to theatre as a genre, as it also contains highly-crafted poetic passages, emulating the best verses of Spanish lyric poetry of the period:

“If I have to die from looking at you,
And not seeing you too,
I say that I choose rather
I’d rather die than leave you.
It is impossible to forget you,
And so, in such severe evil,
Of my fatal destiny
I want to condemn myself to death
For not being absent
Of your heavenly light.”

For centuries, the work “The Gardener Prince…” has been considered alien to Cuban identity, linked only by the fortuitous fact that its author was born on the island. It is true that the recreated setting does not correspond to tropical locations, either in its natural or social aspects, and it was presumably conceived for a Hispanic audience. However, the use of Americanisms and the peculiarities of the rhyme, akin to overseas, indicate something more than the author’s mere origins, coupled with a sense of humor that betrays his Creole origins.

Despite the aforementioned elements, the play had little influence on subsequent theatrical creation, perhaps because its dissemination within the colony was somewhat late. Its importance for Cuban literature lies not only in the fact that it is the earliest known exponent of the theatrical genre, but also in the fact that the text possesses commendable qualities from the perspective of the aesthetic treatment of language and the background in terms of the conception of characters, although it does not point to a renewal in the realm of ideas.

The researcher Rini Leal went so far as to say: “It is the least Spanish work, the most mocking and corrosive of the entire repertoire of its time, because it is precisely already Cuban in its mockery” and this connects with the very origins of this “style” of humor, divergent in many aspects from the Spanish, which would take such root in the literature and cultural life of the country, which is why it constitutes one more element for its inclusion within Cuban literature as one of the most significant works of the period.