Cecilia Valdés
Cirilo Villaverde
 Action (in both the novel and the zarzuela) takes place in colonial Cuba about 1830. The young and beautiful light skinned mulatta, Cecilia Valdés, is the illegitimate daughter of powerful land magnate and slave trader, Candido de Gamboa. Leonardo de Gamboa is his legitimate son. Leonardo falls in love with Cecilia not realizing that she is his own half-sister, and they become lovers. At the same time, hopelessly in love with Cecilia is also another man, the poor black musician, José Dolores Pimienta. His advances Cecilia rejects; and she conceives Leonardo's son. Love between Leonardo and Cecilia does not last, however. He abandons her and becomes betrothed to a white upper class woman, a certain Isabel Ilincheta. Cecilia turns to the faithful Pimienta to plan revenge. On the day of his wedding he is assassinated on the steps of the cathedral by Pimienta who acts on the instigation of Cecilia. He is executed, and she is thrown in prison. Cecilia Valdés reveals the intricate problems of race relations in Cuba. There are the elite social circles of Spanish-born and creole whites; the growing number of mulattos, of which Cecilia is one, and the blacks, some slaves, some freed men. The blacks are also divided between those who were born in Africa and those who were born in Cuba, those who worked on the sugar plantation and those who worked in the households of the wealthy in Havana. Cecilia Valdés is a canvas displaying the sexual, social, and racial interaction of the Cubans of the day.