Latin American Literature Commons^™

Practices Of The Plantation In La Loma Del Ángel, Lanie Millar

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Most analyses of Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas’s 1987 La loma del ángel, a parodical rewriting of Cirilo Villaverde’s 1882 classic Cecilia Valdés, focus on the author’s criticism of racial discrimination inherited from Cuba’s slaving society, on an allegorical condemnation of Castro’s post-revolutionary Cuba, or on the author’s creative, carnivalesque use of language. This article argues that an alternative understanding of La loma del ángel demonstrates Arenas’s circular and fatalistic historical vision, in which the exploitive plantation system reappears in different forms through Cuban history. It places La loma del ángel into the context of Arenas’s other writing about …