This chapter shows the long novel’s drastic correction of the earlier Cecilia narratives. An escalated thematic and descriptive purview now encompasses the Cuban countryside as well as Havana. Centered on the theme of slaveryslavery’s destructive impact on Cuban society and economy, the narrative expands the cast of characters, including Afro-Cubans, in order to reveal the horrific plantation reality supporting the slavery system and its dominant slavery-dependent elite. Blending Hugo’s harsh realism and Zola’s Darwinist naturalism, Villaverde exposes the tangled, fatally dysfunctional Cuban reality epitomized by Cecilia’s unwittingly incestuous relationship with Leonardo, with the latter’s murder exemplifying an inevitably calamitous cycle grounded in slavery’s ruinous contradictions.