Cuba

Cuba appears in Lorca’s life and in the world of The House of Bernarda Alba: he travelled there in 1930, while the play invokes the island in a character’s account of a family’s concealed past. These distinct references place Cuba both on the author’s itinerary and inside a village history shaped by violence, secrecy, and men protecting one another.

Lorca’s Visit

Lorca left New York for Cuba in 1930 and arrived in Havana on 7 March. While there, he worked on The Public and Ode to Walt Whitman. He returned to Spain at the end of June, making the Cuban visit a short but productive interval in his travels and writing.

Cuba in the Family History

In The House of Bernarda Alba, Martirio explains to Amelia why people fear Adelaida’s mother: she is the only person who knows the story of Adelaida’s father and the origins of his lands. Martirio recounts that the father killed the husband of his first wife in Cuba so that he could marry her. The island enters the play through reported family history, not as a staged setting.

Martirio continues the account beyond Cuba. The father later abandoned his first wife and left with another woman who had a daughter; after that second wife died, he had a relationship with the girl who became Adelaida’s mother and married her. Amelia asks why he is not in prison. Martirio answers that men cover up such matters for one another and that no one is willing to report them. The story therefore connects the father’s actions abroad to a wider pattern of concealment and impunity in the village.

Place and Narrative Significance

The two references serve different purposes. The biographical account records a dated journey and the work Lorca pursued in Havana; the play uses Cuba as the location attached to one episode in a complicated family history. In the dramatic conversation, knowledge of that history gives Adelaida’s mother a particular standing: she knows the father’s past and the origins of his property, and others fear what she can expose.

The island is not developed as a portrait of Cuban society. Its significance here comes from the events Martirio associates with it and from the play’s emphasis on how a family’s past is guarded. The exchange shifts attention from the father’s conduct to the protection he receives, making secrecy itself part of the social order the conversation reveals.