Lydia Cabrera was one of the first writers to recognize and make public the richness of Afro-Cuban culture. She made valuable contributions in the areas of anthropology and ethnology; she is considered a major figure in Cuban letters. She was born in Havana, Cuba, where at an early age she was exposed by her tatas (nannies) to spiritual practices, rituals, and African stories that awakened in her a special interest for the culture. Due to health issues, she was home tutored from an early age. She completed her studies on her own and earned a college degree, and then did her post-graduate work without attending classes. Her first passion, however, was painting. In 1914, she pursued formal studies at the San Alejandro National School of Fine Arts. Later, after her father’s death, she moved to Paris, France and studied painting for two years at L’Ecole du Louvre. During her stay in Paris, she also began to study eastern cultures and her interest in studying Black culture grew. Cabrera lived in Paris for 11 years, returned home in 1938, and left Cuba again as an exile in 1960. She lived in Spain and the United States, mostly in Miami, where she continued to work for the rest of her long life.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, her writing integrates the folklore and folklife of Afro-Cubans into the broad context of Cuban identity and nationhood. She focused on storytelling, ritual, and speech in cultural context, aiming to honor and give voice to the stories narrated to her, as she recounted, by the “grandsons, great grandsons, and great great grandsons of the Lucumí people, [who] continue to hold on to their ancestral culture and they haven’t stopped speaking the language they learned during their childhoods, and the language they must use on daily basis to communicate with their divinities.”

In the late 1930s, Cabrera made several trips to Cuba. With the help of her former tatas, she was initiated into the black beliefs and won the confidence of the Afro-Cubans so that they eventually revealed secrets and details of their old culture. She received several honorary doctorate degrees, including one from the University of Miami in 1987. Among her acclaimed works are:

El Monte: Igbo Finda, Ewe Orisha, Vititinfinda (1954)

Los Animales en el Folklore y la Magia de Cuba (1988)

Afro-Cuban Tales – Cuentos Negros de Cuba, translated by Alberto Hernández-Chiroldes and Lauren Yoder (2004)

Olivia Cadaval