Born in San Diego de Núñez on October 28, 1812, he is also the first in chronological order, before any attempt to writers' history in Pinar del Río province.
Villaverde still occupies other primacies for us if we turn to the words of our first intellectual, José Martí, who points out that for a new literature to exist there must be a landscape, circumstances and a peculiar way of being in the men who live there.
Villaverde, at the national level contributed to this concept with his novel, an early years reflection from colonial society of Havana in the nineteenth century, but also laid the foundation with another work of his for the emergence of a literature proper to the most Western region of the country.
Description of nature, surrounding landscape, customs' summary, sample of the most picturesque situations of Vueltabajo, narration of the own circumstances of the zone, admiration of the man who inhabits it; all this together with a very fine affection for our land, we find it in EXCURSION TO VUELTABAJO, work that we do not hesitate to consider as our first local literary manifestation; and not only due to the merely chronological order, but to the already mentioned elements and their artistic values, which have been summarized by our major poet, José Martí, with the following words: “....where Castilian looked like our river, calm and pure, with sparkles of calm light, from between the branches of the trees and the gentle current recharged with fresh flowers and tasty fruits".
It also meets the requirements not only of chronological order and literary quality, but also inscribed among the works of an epic nature in terms of the manner of an odyssey, narrates atwo dimensions journey, one in time, remembering the author childhood, and another in real space, through Sierra de los Órganos, during the first half of the nineteenth century, a journey nuanced true adventures of the time. Epica is also the dimension it reaches as a work in which dramatic elements, intense narratives, synthetic descriptions, poetic fragments, comic scenes and tragic scenes, narrative episodes such as the story of a Guajira family and its encounter with the pirates, or the story of Marcos Guerra are mixed, myths and legends of the guajira families about appeared and dead, about black cimarrones and pirates not so unreal, all this in the tapestry extended over a historical frame, in which the transcendental event is the colonization, the extension of mills and coffee plantations that during those years gained particular impulse in that zone.
Precisely in EXCURSION TO VUELTABAJO we find the first poetic composition of our local literature. It is true that Villaverde states that these "unpublished" verses are "from a friend" but their diffuser is him, (as Silvestre de Balboa was - for finding another coincidence with an initial work - when he inscribes a motet at the end of Espejo de Paciencia).
Nothing in the afternoons is the same
of our Cuban Antilla:
beautiful are marvelous
with its freshness and its gala.
Happy who in pleasant field
enjoy them can, aspiring
the ambers that exhaling
the flowers go from her breast:
where he hears the harmonious son
though confused that it sends
to the earth, when the day dies,
which smoke to God mighty:
where without mystical veils
to sprout life is felt;
where the environment is purest,
the more crystalline the skies...!
This book, with literary dignity and with affection to ours, inaugurated the presence in letters of the cultural ancestors of our province, advanced the sparkles of the artistic dawn that has only been possible to appreciate through the pen of the martian genius in the last century and now for all those who read it, from this noon of love in which we live.