Summary of "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior"

Summary of of the First Part of La Novela de Mi Vida (El Mar y Los Regresos), by Leonardo Padura

Main Characters:

• Jose Maria Heredia : Poet Laureate of Cuba (1803-1839)
• Jose de Jesus Heredia: Youngest son of Jose Maria Heredia and Mason.
• Fernando Terry: Cuban intellectual in exile.
• The Socarrones: Group of intellectuals and friends of Fernando Terry(Alvaro, Arcadio, Tomas, Conrado, Miguel Angel).
• Domingo del Monte: Friend of Jose Maria Heredia.
• Lola Junco: Lover of Jose Maria Heredia (she has a son with the poet).

       La Novela De Mi Vida (2002) by Leonardo Padura combines real life facts from the life of Jose Maria Heredia and fictional facts from the Magic Realism to create an incredible narrative. 

The narrative is not consecutive and is divided in three different stories, the story of Jose Maria Heredia, the story of his last son Jose de Jesus Heredia and also the story of Fernando Terry, a Cuban exile who has to come back to la Habana after 18 years. 

 The narrator is Jose Maria Heredia (first person) and the stories of Jose de Jesus Heredia and Fernando Terry are narrated in the third person. Every level of the story also introduces some socio -political realities of life in Cuba. Fernando Terry was working on his doctoral dissertation based on the life of Jose Maria Heredia, but he was missing one document of the poet.  He was not sure even what the document was. Whether it was a novel or memoir. 

     At the time Terry had to leave La Habana , he was in the best position of his life, working as a professor in the University, getting his Phd degree and forming part of a intellectual movement.  Then he was betrayed by one of the members of The Socarrones, apparently. Therefore he was forced to leave La Habana without knowing who did it or why. Two questions haunted Fernando Terry for the last 18 years during his exile: who was that person and what was the reason. 

From the voice of Jose Maria Heredia, we have an idea of Colonial Cuba and its system of slavery which brought a huge population of slaves, and that Cuban society was afraid of them. They were the majority and the consequences of their insurrection could devastate Cuba forever. Most of the friends of the poet Heredia were supporters or their family were wealthy through the practice of this system. One of his friends, Domingo del Monte, was who introduced Heredia to a priest, Varela, who would be his mentor poetically and politically speaking: “ Prostituyase usted mismo si tiene que hacerlo para vivir, porque la vida es un don que Dios nos da y debemos conservarla al precio que sea. Pero la poesia es un milagro y usted ha side elegido for la Providencia para crear belleza”(50). 

       There are also some  parallels here between the story of Fernando Terry and Heredia: the betrayal and the exile. According to Heredia, he was betrayed by Domingo del Monte who denounced the Conspiracy between The Rayos y The Soles de Bolivar in 1823. This is a parallel to Fernando Terry’s insistence that he was betrayed by one member of the Socarrones, his group of intellectual friends. Both went to exile, Heredia had to leave Cuba leaving behind Lola Junco who was expecting his baby who would never meet, and Fernando Terry without finding the missing manuscripts of Heredia. Back in La Habana after a message, Fernando Terry, Alvaro y Arcadio are retracting the story of Heredia’s papers. 

      The life of Jose de Jesus Heredia, the son of the poet Heredia, is represented in his last years of his life. He has the manuscripts of his father’s, but he does not know what to do with them. He decided to keep them secret by leaving them in the possession of the Masonic lodge, of which he was a member. But, also he is questioning what would be the consequences of revealing these  papers to the public. It could damage the image of his father and family. However, Jose de Jesus Heredia does not show any hesitation in destroying SOME papers of his father. Ultimately, for him, the history was written with lies, omissions and manipulations. That was no reason to correct the story of his father: “ los duenos del poder lo hacian contantemente y la verdad historica era la puta was complaciente y peor pagada de cuantas existieran…”(36).

In one of these papers, the poet Heredia takes back his participation with the conspiracy of Bolivar. However, Heredia wrote almost at the same time one of the most famous and patriotic poems ever written in Cuba: “ Que si un pueblo su dura cadena/ No se atreve a romper con sus manos, / Bien le es facil mudar de tiranos / Pero nunca ser libre podra” (179).