Reason in Chivalry

“Revolution,” writes Barthes in Writing Degree Zero, “was, par excellence, one of those great circumstances in which truth, due to the blood it costs, becomes so weighty that it requires, to express itself, the very forms of theatrical amplification. Revolutionary writing was that emphatic gesture that continued the daily scaffold” (Barthes, 1953). Similarly, it could be said that in Cuba, Martí’s “roar of bellows” continued the blaze of the Ten Years’ War—a fire that began with the burning of Bayamo and spread thanks to the insurgents’ devastating weapon, the incendiary torch. In his speech on October 10, 1889, Martí declared: “Yes, those were marvelous times. There are times of wonder, when, to restore the balance disrupted by the violation of the essential rights to the peace of peoples, war appears, which is a saving of time and misery, and consumes the obstacles to human well-being in a purifying and necessary conflagration” (Martí, 1975, p. 236).

The glowing embers also crackle in Manuel de la Cruz’s Episodes of the Cuban Revolution. This great panegyric to the heroes of the 1868 War was written with eyes dazzled by the fire. “It fell to me to be the first to sketch the epic legend, and I did so amidst bursts of glory, as I deliberately composed a book of patriotic devotion, to shake and stir the Cuban heart” (De la Cruz, 1967, p. 12), the author confesses in a letter to Manuel Sanguily. In 1890, with censorship lifted by the colonial government, Manuel de la Cruz’s book served opportunely as separatist propaganda, alongside works like Ramón Roa’s On Foot and Barefoot, published in 1890, and Enrique Collazo’s From Yara to Zanjón, released three years later—prime examples of what Ambrosio Fornet called “campaign literature,” crucial to the ideological debates in the five years leading up to the War of 1895.

While Roa aimed to recount with raw honesty the events he participated in after landing in Trinidad, and Collazo sought to propose, through his testimony, a thesis on the causes leading to the Pact of Zanjón, Manuel de la Cruz pursues something else: to capture, through the narration of singular events, the very spirit of the Revolution. The unity of the Episodes lies not in chronology or characters but in the powerful image of a mythological cavalry: the mambí is a “nimble and spirited centaur, wielding the flaming blade” (De la Cruz, 1967, p. 66). Like the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, the epic scenes recreated here are frankly sublime: “Brigadier González Guerra crowned the height. He stood out on the summit, gigantic and superb, like the symbolic effigy of our cavalry, the living image of the audacity and valor of our centaurs, with the mountain as his pedestal, edged by the abyss and lulled by the river’s murmurs” (De la Cruz, 1967, p. 95).

Thus, alongside Martí’s speeches, it is Manuel de la Cruz’s singular book that forms the fiery core of the independence discourse, its canonical form. If Roa and Collazo are mere “scrivener” —to use Barthes’ well-known distinction—Martí and De la Cruz are writers. Though their writings also serve an instrumental, propagandistic purpose, there is in them, in the characteristic baroque style of Martí’s discourse and the preciosism of Manuel de la Cruz, a “surplus,” an excess that greatly contributes to conveying the “peculiar, distinct, and proper physiognomy of the Revolution.” As if made to be painted on the walls of the future Republic’s buildings, this romantic, lyrical image of the war is markedly different from the more prosaic one of Collazo and Roa, who had fought in the conflict. Far from the syndrome of Fabrizio del Dongo, Martí and Manuel de la Cruz perceive the war from the outside, as a spectacle. In the heroes of 1868, they saw, as Hegel saw in Napoleon’s invincible armies, not men but “reason on horseback.”

Some of this vision is revived decades later in Cavalry (Raúl Corrales, 1960), one of the iconic photographs of the 1959 Revolution. It depicts a group of riders carrying Cuban flags as they entered an American-owned latifundio intervened under the first Agrarian Reform Law. There is an epic aura, a grandiloquence in this image that we do not find, notably, in Ernesto Guevara’s Passages from the Revolutionary War. If this testimonial book does not dwell on scenes of heroism, here the aim is to create a heroic image of the war after the fact. More than a document, the photograph is almost a dramatization: the revolution already turned into a spectacle. The horses evoke the Zapatista army during the Mexican Revolution, but above all, the Cuban mambises.

Revolution creates its precursors; in his speech on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro, who had recently passed through Mangos de Baraguá, “saw those men revive with their sacrifices, sacrifices we too have known closely.” Many works from the 1960s highlight the continuity between the independence wars and the anti-Batista struggle. For example, in the play General Antonio Was Here (1961) by Manuel Reguera and Saumell, the parallel is obvious: during the 1895 war, Antonio Maceo visited Doña Mariana’s estate; to prevent it from falling into Spanish hands, the family decides to set it ablaze; in the revolutionary present, after the Commander’s visit and facing the advance of Batista’s troops, the matriarch’s descendants plan to do the same.

In other writings of the era, the reference to the mambises is less explicit; some return to the texts of Martí and Manuel de la Cruz, not through direct quotation but via paraphrase or even plagiarism. Thus, they shed new light on those canonical texts of the independence discourse, which in turn illuminate, “from a century’s distance,” the anxiety of a writing marked by what René Depestre called “the Sierra Maestra complex.” In the first section of The Silver Damned, a fragment of an unfinished novel titled The Year 59, Alejo Carpentier’s protagonist states:

They had been there. We had not been there, at the summits, the peaks, whose vision, gleaned only through elementary geography treatises or illustrated books, remained for us as notions fit for models of orographic configurations or relief maps. They—those who looked at us without looking—had measured the peaks with their human steps; they had slept, slanted, on the slopes, knew of dawns different from those seen below, in the plains and lands—red lands, black lands—that were our fields […] Sometimes, when boldness was great, they were questioned about their deeds, their memories, their lives. They recounted, amid silences, stringing monosyllables, sparingly—accustomed to speaking little—of battles still recent, exhausting marches under the rain, the deaths of comrades (whose names were mute to us) fallen in action (Carpentier, 1972, p. 12).

Does this passage not recall that famous lecture at Steck Hall where Martí referred to those Cubans for whom “the heroic resistance of the revolutionaries was, like a dream and a legend, a distant marvel”? (Martí, 1975, p. 196). Martí continued there:

They did not have children under huts built by their hands, with lightning crashing above and rifles all around. They did not walk naked through the fields. They did not applaud orators who spoke with both tongue and rifle. They did not make at night the gunpowder with which they would boldly greet the morning. They did not suffer the pains of Job. They were not inflamed by the heroes’ breath. The horses that snatched a soldier fulfilling his duty from the enemy’s grasp did not pass, in a fantastic gallop, before their eyes (Martí, 1975, p. 196).

The image of the horse recurs in these speeches where, every October 10, Martí contrasts action, alongside its auxiliary, the revolutionary word, with the mere word of “paper politicians.” In his harangue at Hardman Hall in 1891, he begins by saying he comes not to speak “as worms” but “on horseback,” pronouncing one of his famous phrases: “Reason, if it wishes to guide, must enter the cavalry!” (Martí, 1975, p. 216). This vindication of revolutionary violence was clearly directed against the autonomists, representatives of that other reason, no longer poetic but essentially critical, which argued the inconvenience of a new war, proposing a slower, less traumatic path to self-government.

“Prudence may restrain, but fire does not know how to die” (Martí, 1975, p. 185), says Martí on October 10, 1887. In his speeches, numerous images with biblical and romantic resonance express the purifying meaning he attributes to revolutionary war. Martí insists that the wealth of heroism and patriotism from “that magnificent decade” is so great that its memories cannot die. “Those who lived in community […] return to live in community. And the dead then take form” (Martí, 1975, p. 189). The dead appear repeatedly in Martí’s writings, from that terrible image in The Spanish Republic Before the Cuban Revolution—the corpses of the war’s fallen filling the abyss between Spain and Cuba—where he already announces what, in many speeches after the end of the Ten Years’ War, will be the great theme of Martí’s propaganda: presenting the “Cuban revolution” as what Michelet saw in the Revolution for the French: a “legend of national unity.”

In Martí’s discourse, the dead must be incarnated anew. “The spirit of the dead passes to inspire the soul of the living. The old heroes, accustomed to glory, return to seek it. […] The iron riders gallop once more” (Martí, 1926, p. 342). This motif, the need to recover the ghosts of the past epic, appears in one of the most singular writings addressing the theme of the Hundred Years of Struggle: Antonio Benítez Rojo’s story “Heroica.” “Why not recount feats by the fire of myth? Why bury so many exemplary ghosts, why not dream and rave them amid leather and guitars until feeling the warmth that delouses the soul, brushes and polishes it after hoisting it from the sewer, enrolling it under gunpowder and the pamphlet of the crusade one has been destined to live?” (Benítez Rojo, 1976, p. 277), the author asks, reviving not only Martí’s idea of incarnating the spirit of glorious dead but also some of Martí’s inflamed rhetoric. This passage appears at the end of the first of the story’s two sections, which contrast contemplative life with revolutionary action.

In “The Man in the Armchair,” addressing the anti-Batista struggle, we learn, through the dense, flashback-laden narration characteristic of Benítez Rojo’s stories, that the protagonist betrayed his comrades by refusing to execute Leónidas María Fowler, a Batista henchman; shortly after, Fowler spots the protagonist’s wife, Mirna, walking down the street, kidnaps and rapes her, resulting in a daughter, now a teenager at the time of the narration in 1971. The Man in the Armchair is always reading in his typically bourgeois apartment: he is a “modern antihero.” “Plagued by the irony of contemporary protagonists, by the stoic and paralyzing cynicism that proclaims the absurdity of the world as creed, he will discard stratagems and attack plans” (Benítez Rojo, 1976, p. 275). In his inaction lies his sin, and in it his penance, the burden he must bear day after day, unable to escape through reading: the presence of the alien daughter, the failure of his marriage. At the end of this part, the author, who has intervened repeatedly in the narration, offers the reader the chance for another story, one choosing the “clamor of the epic,” where the hero appears, no longer seated in his armchair but on a saddle.

The second part is a recreation of Ignacio Agramonte’s life, “The Man Who Rides.” Benítez Rojo cites from Joaquín de Agüero and His Contemporaries by Miguel Rivas Aguirre, the passage about Agüero’s execution on August 12, 1851, which Agramonte witnessed as a child, dipping his handkerchief in the martyr’s blood. Later, Benítez Rojo uses verbatim, though without reference, extensive passages from “The Rescue of a Hero,” one of the Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionnarrating the legendary rescue of Brigadier Sanguily by Agramonte’s troops. But why does Benítez Rojo cite Rivas Aguirre’s book and not Manuel de la Cruz’s, which is not just a source but provides the very material for several pages of his story? Why does he write that “the testimony of the chronicles is indispensable” before including the lengthy quote from Joaquín de Agüero and His Contemporaries (over a page) yet seamlessly transitions to Manuel de la Cruz’s text in the final “tableaux” of “The Man Who Rides”?

Perhaps it is about pushing the identification with those foundational discourses to the limit: not only, as Fidel Castro stated in his October 10, 1968 speech, that “We, then, would have been like them; they, today, would have been like us,” but that we write the same. That is, the continuity between them and us appears not only, as in other classic works about the mambises—Manuel Octavio Gómez’s film The First Machete Charge (1969), Silvio Rodríguez’s song “El Mayor” (1973)—at a thematic level, but in the very body of the writing, in the text itself. Rivas Aguirre’s book, published in 1951, is a work of history, while Manuel de la Cruz’s is a living chronicle of the revolution. Benítez Rojo does not cite it but neither does he plagiarize it in the bourgeois sense; he incarnates it, analogous to how, according to Martí, the dead of 1868 must be incarnated by riding again.

Significantly, “Heroica” and the Episodes share a fundamental aspect of the revolutionary epic discourse: the secondary, problematic place of love. Besides Doña Cirila, an elderly woman who in “The Rescue of a Hero” and “Heroica” aids the insurgents, the only female character in Manuel de la Cruz’s book represents the temptation of the flesh and ultimately causes the mambí’s death. In “Lieutenant Salazar,” a wounded lieutenant is left by his comrade in the care of his wife, the sensual Rosa, who, attracted to him, offers herself. Salazar resists but ultimately succumbs to the temptation of the flesh, then shoots himself, the only way he finds to atone for the affront to his friend and recover his honor.

In “Heroica,” it is made clear that love, like reading, must be relegated by action: “behind remain Espronceda and the jurists, the daily delight of slippers and wicker armchair, the stroll through the sunlit estate. Though he will soon meet the beautiful Amalia, he knows the afternoons carving hearts on Simoni’s trees cannot return: love, too, must remain in the background, an inflamed memory” (Benítez Rojo, 1976, p. 296). In the Antihero section, eroticism is tainted by the protagonist’s inaction, signified by a suggested sexual impotence; in the Hero section, it must remain secondary, “beyond the threshold crossed at a gallop”; there is potency, but it must be invested solely in combat.

Instead of romantic love, what animates the Episodes of the Cuban Revolution is love for the homeland. The thread that strings all the stories is precisely that “patriotism” which, as Manuel de la Cruz says, “provides everything: it gives skill, constancy, unknown strengths, astonishing instincts, replaces genius” (De la Cruz, 1967, p. 73). In the Episodes, the celebration of patriotism is associated, as in Martí’s speeches, with the desire to narrate the Cuban revolution as the origin of the nation. Amid the din of battle and the blood of patriots, the “Cuban family” was born. National unity is represented repeatedly: the camaraderie of blacks and whites, masters and slaves, now Cubans through the community of patriotic sentiment, the fellowship of the manigua, the identification with the landscape.

In this sense, it could be ventured that the Episodes of the Cuban Revolution played the role of what Doris Sommer, in her study of 19th-century Latin American novels, calls “foundational fictions,” those stories written after civil wars where the love of a heterosexual couple symbolizes national unity beyond racial and social differences. Except that, instead of blending love and patriotism, in these war chronicles that are the Episodes of the Cuban Revolution, the latter takes absolute precedence over the former; unity is achieved not in sentimental union but in battlefield coexistence, a community reminiscent of the virile fraternity celebrated by Malraux in the 1930s. Notably, there is a citation from Manuel de la Cruz’s book in another fundamental work of the Hundred Years of Struggle canon, the scene in Lucía where naked mambises on horseback charge against the Spanish, where this fraternity takes on a slight homoerotic tinge (De la Cruz, 1967, p. 144).

If, as Sommer proposes, the literature of the boom questions the 19th-century foundational fictions, revealing the violence behind the supposed sentimental encounter between the nation’s mothers and fathers, contemporary Cuban literature, as exemplified by Benítez Rojo’s story, instead repeats those foundational war romances contained in the works of Martí and Manuel de la Cruz. Far from being critiqued, their romantic spirit and heroic rhetoric are amplified in a discourse that clearly projects past quarrels onto the present: the autonomists, opponents of the 1895 war, are seen as the spiritual forebears of the counterrevolutionaries of the moment. In the unsigned prologue to the Episodes in the “Centennial 1868” Collection, we read:

Manuel de la Cruz, not immune to the eclectic influence of the era, with the predominance of Hegel, Hippolyte Taine, Renan, and others, participates in an essentially intellectualist movement, most of whose members fail to fully grasp the revolution that Martí and Maceo desire; but De la Cruz did not let himself be dragged so blindly by this movement as some of his contemporaries and thus could see the true Martí and the work being forged more clearly. It is true that his trench was not on the battlefield with a rifle in hand, but the rear guard is also often a trench, especially with a living pen between the fingers. Hence, it is not wrong to say that Manuel de la Cruz died a mambí, though not “facing the sun,” radiant with earth. Let us not forget his era, romantic and bourgeois, though these Episodes, at times, veil that thought (De la Cruz, 1967, p. 11).

This is evidently a note typical of those years when Cuban publishers relentlessly subjected the classics—Cuban or universal—they published to strict ideological scrutiny. This anonymous prologuist, however, perhaps unwittingly, points to a blind spot in Manuel de la Cruz’s “testimonial” writing. Like Martí, for him, the Ten Years’ War had been “marvelous times.” How to capture that magnificence in writing? “The dominant idea in the composition,” he writes in the “author’s prologue,” “has been none other than to fix the fact, the scene, or the line, like the flower or the butterfly in the museum’s display case, striving to reproduce the original impression of those who throbbed on the tragic stage” (De la Cruz, 1967, p. 8). A close reading of this simile reveals a certain contradiction: is the butterfly in the museum an apt figure for the intent to “reproduce the original impression of those who throbbed on the tragic stage”? De la Cruz seems to want to bridge the distance separating the preserved butterfly from the living one, the supplement of the original, the “life” of its written representation. This “error,” in a simile where the author authorizes his work, can be read as a sign that the persistence of that distance constitutes the writing.

“Drafted based on authentic data from actors and highly reliable witnesses, also using oral tradition” (De la Cruz, 1967, p. 17), Episodes of the Cuban Revolution can be considered a writing informed by the tension between the manifest desire to “reproduce the original impression of those who throbbed on the tragic stage” and what Lionel Gossman, in his study of romantic historiography, calls the “unrepeatable uniqueness and untranslatability” of the event (Gossman, 1980, pp. 273-274). In this sense, when Martí, in the laudatory letter he sends to De la Cruz after reading the book, states that “Reading this, for anyone with blood, is to mount a horse” (De la Cruz, 1981, p. 482), he not only celebrates the author’s success in writing a book that “stirred the Cuban heart” but, in a deeper sense, recognizes the value of the Episodes in referring to the fullness of the impossible desire that drives writing. Martí, the ideal reader of Manuel de la Cruz, imagines the fusion of representation and the represented; he touches the horizon glimpsed by the romantic chronicler.

Significantly, Manuel Sanguily’s opinion differed, asserting that Manuel de la Cruz’s “visionary and hyperbolic imagination,” which saw everything “through a magnifying glass,” had turned “that human drama” into an “extrahuman epic” (De la Cruz, 1967, p. 12). Precisely, the “idealizing” vision objected to by Sanguily was, for Martí, the key to the work’s exemplarity; the conjunction of what he calls “his patriotic piety and his literary art” made the Episodes a model for writing history. The continuity between the two wars, which Martí saw threatened in Ramón Roa’s book, was fully secured in the Episodes, where the internal contradictions of the Cuban side that contributed to the failure of the 1868 Revolution are set aside to celebrate that sublime epic whose expression, in Barthes’ words, required “the forms of theatrical amplification.” As he himself suffered from that manigua complex, Martí fully grasps the nostalgia for the feat pulsing behind the apologia for the heroes, evoked as a superior model that could hardly be matched: “We who came after can do nothing new. They have taken all the glory.”

The lyrical vision of the Episodes reaches its apotheosis at the moment of the patriot’s death. If Martí ends his speeches evoking that army of the dead to infuse courage and energy into the living or insisting at their graves on the contract signed with them, the image of falling in battle runs through Manuel de la Cruz’s book. “We were on Cuban soil, far from our homes, thinking of the tears that would bathe our mothers’ cheeks, the affections we left behind to go willingly to the sacrifice; soon our blood would stain the gallant flag of the homeland that copies in its colors the blue of our sky and the melancholy star of our twilights” (De la Cruz, 1967, p. 12). Here, death is imagined by the patriots, that “we” who speaks, through a chromatic image that somehow sublimates and aestheticizes it. A series of transpositions figure the group’s cohesion: the blood, which in fact stains the earth, is poured onto the flag’s red, sealing an unbreakable pact between the heroes and the homeland, and among themselves, who become one in the sublime moment. Not by chance is the motivation of the bond uniting the homeland to its icon reaffirmed: the flag copies Cuba’s sky and star. In these moments, the landscape is no longer just a stage, a theater where men act; there is a peculiar eros of the landscape that overlaps with patriotic eros. The man, in the moment of his sacrifice, merges with it, transcending into a total image.

De la Cruz repeatedly seeks an aesthetic effect that can perhaps be understood as a way to capture that ‘other’ that recedes: “the multiple, intense, and vibrant drama of life,” while also achieving the reader’s identification, moving them to mount a horse. Like Martí, for De la Cruz, it was about imitating the heroes. Thus, we can consider the writing of the Episodes, which its author called a “fervent offering,” as an attempt to inscribe the writer’s body into the very substance of the narrated. In the prologue, the author notes that expressing “affections” for the martyrs is to “gain honor,” that “being an idolater in the fetishism of our martyrs elevates and purifies the conscience” (De la Cruz, 1967, p. 12). Honor and conscience: precisely what heroism in combat bestows, albeit to a lesser degree. In some way, the author of the Episodes is not just a writer and scrivener but also a hero mounted on horseback, ready to shed his blood. Writing and feat merge at the limit of the romantic vision.

[Essay published in Malos tiempos para la lírica, Casa Vacía, 2018]

Notes

1. Martí, José. Obras completas, vol. 4, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975, p. 236.

2. Martí, José. Obras completas, tomo 6, Editorial Calleja, Madrid, 1926, p. 342.

3. De la Cruz, Manuel. Episodios de la Revolución Cubana, Instituto del Libro, La Habana, 1967, p. 66.

4. De la Cruz, Manuel. Episodios de la Revolución Cubana, Instituto del Libro, La Habana, 1967, p. 95.

5. De la Cruz, Manuel. Episodios de la Revolución Cubana, Instituto del Libro, La Habana, 1967, p. 12.

6. Carpentier, Alejo. Los convidados de plata, Sandino, Montevideo, 1972, p. 12.

7. Martí, José. Obras completas, vol. 4, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975, p. 196.

8. Martí, José. Obras completas, vol. 4, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975, p. 216.

9. Martí, José. Obras completas, vol. 4, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975, p. 185.

10. Martí, José. Obras completas, vol. 4, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975, p. 189.

11. Benítez Rojo, Antonio. Heroica, Arte y literatura, 1976, p. 277.

12. Benítez Rojo, Antonio. Heroica, Arte y literatura, 1976, p. 275.

13. Benítez Rojo, Antonio. Heroica, Arte y literatura, 1976, p. 296.

14. De la Cruz, Manuel. Episodios de la Revolución Cubana, Instituto del Libro, La Habana, 1967, p. 73.

15. Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America, FCE, 2004, p. 167. In her study of Sab by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Sommer highlights the common elements between this novel and other Latin American romantic novels, suggesting that despite Cuba’s divergence from the general pattern of Latin American independence, there is “a cultural and even political coherence in the literary/political project of reconciling oppositions, embracing the other, that transcends historical differences between countries.” However, the unhappy ending of Sab, as well as the even more tragic Cecilia Valdés, which Sommer analyzes well, seems to me to point more to Cuba’s specificity. In those novels written before the War, when there was no national state, there is not yet a foundational romance but rather a fierce critique of slavery. It is only after the abolition of slavery, proclaimed by the Republic of Cuba in Arms in 1868, that the politics of the foundational romance becomes necessary.

16. De la Cruz, Manuel. Episodios de la Revolución Cubana, Instituto del Libro, La Habana, 1967, p. 144. This is the episode “On Horseback,” where De la Cruz recounts the anecdote of how, surprised by the Spanish while bathing in the river, “the naked knights fell upon the enemy like a gust.” De la Cruz describes the bathing scene thus: “Beside the beasts, the bronzed and muscular backs of the mulatto; next to the polished ebony torso of the vigorous black, the satiny skin of the city’s son, bony and sinewy, facing the tanned and hairy one of the sturdy peasant.”

17. De la Cruz, Manuel. Episodios de la Revolución Cubana, Instituto del Libro, La Habana, 1967, p. 11.

18. Gossman, Lionel. Between History and Literature, Harvard University Press, 1980, pp. 273-274. This is essentially the same dichotomy that, according to Lionel Gossman, informs the romantic historian’s enterprise: “In many respects the tension between veneration of the Other—that is to say, not just the primitive or alien, but the historical particular, the discontinuous act or event in its irreducible uniqueness and untranslatableness, the very energy of ‘life’ which no concept can encompass—and eagerness to repeat it, translate it, represent it, and thus, in a sense, domesticate and appropriate it, can be seen as the very condition of the romantic historian’s enterprise. For the persistence of at least a residual gap between ‘original’ and translation, between ‘Reality’ or the Other and our interpretation of it, is what both generates and sustains the historian’s activity, rather as the condition of history itself.”

19. De la Cruz, Manuel. Episodios de la Revolución Cubana, Instituto del Libro, La Habana, 1967, p. 8.

20. De la Cruz, Manuel. Sobre la literatura cubana, Letras Cubanas, 1981, p. 482.

21. De la Cruz, Manuel. Episodios de la Revolución Cubana, Instituto del Libro, La Habana, 1967, p. 17.

22. De la Cruz, Manuel. Episodios de la Revolución Cubana, Instituto del Libro, La Habana, 1967, p. 12.