Lydia Cabrera was a Cuban ethnologist and short-story writer noted for both her collections of Afro-Cuban folklore and her works of fiction. She is considered a major figure in Cuban letters.
Background
Cabrera was born May 20, 1900, to an affluent family in Havana, Cuba. Her father, Raimundo Cabrera, was a learned and influential man, an outspoken advocate of Cuban independence, a novelist, and a lawyer. Cabrera's mother, Elisa Bibao Marcaida у Casanova, was a society lady, devoted to her children and her family. Cabrera grew up in a literate, politically active household: in her childhood, she met such important figures as Manuel Sanguili, Enrique Jose Varona, Martin Morua Delgado, Juan Gaulberto Gomez and Zayas Bazan, the widow of Jose Marti. But Cabrera also spent much of her time among the family servants, including her Nana Tula.
Education
Cabrera began to learn many of the Afro-Cuban stories that were to fascinate her throughout her life.
Cabrera's childhood was also spent engaged with literature and the arts. She was educated at home in the works of Lope de Vega, Miguel de Cervantes, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas. She also studied painting, sometimes sneaking into her sister Emma's classes at the Art Academy of San Pedro. Cabrera's father was disinclined to send his daughter to school, but home schooling seemed more than sufficient for the precocious girl: at the age of fourteen, she had published twenty-seven articles in Cuba у America. and then began to publish her drawings as well. In 1930, she took a degree at the Ecole du Louvre.
Career
Cabrera's career as a child prodigy was interrupted when the family went into exile with Cabrera's father, following La Chambelona, Cuba's 1917 revolution.
By 1918, however, she had returned to the literary life, and was writing articles again - this time for the famous Diario de la Marina. In these articles, Cabrera often focused on the preservation of Cuban material culture, a lifelong passion for her. After her father's death - which, painfully, occurred on her twenty-third birthday - Cabrera began to support herself as an antique dealer in Havana. She worked in this way for four years, then sold her portion of her family's business and moved to Paris.
During her university education, she met the Venezuelan poet and novelist Teresa de la Parra, with whom she lived until de la Parra's death in 1936. It was de la Parra who first encouraged Cabrera to write about the Afro-Cuban folklore she learned from her Nana Tula, and in the community of Pogolotti, a black neighborhood in Havana. She did so, though the collection of tales, Contes negres de Cuba ("Black Stories from Cuba") was only published two months before de la Parra died of tuberculosis. The collection, dedicated to de la Parra, contains many collages of African stories in a Cuban mode. In stories such as "El caballo de jicotea" ("Tortoise's Hare") and "El sapo guardiero" ("The Guard Frog"), Cabrera showed not only her grasp of Afro-Cuban lore, but also her ear for the poetic rhythms and skillful timing of her material.
After de la Parra's death, Cabrera returned to Paris, but when the Spanish Civil War broke out later that year, she sought refuge in her Cuban home. There she met Maria Teresa Rojas, an antiquarian who shared Cabrera's love of Cuban cultural heritage. Together, they restored some of Rojas's houses - the Pedroso palace and La Quinta San Jose - and bought a house in Trinidad.
In the 1940s, with the publication of her story collection in Cuba, Cabrera went back to her research into the folklore of the Afro-Cuban community, learning more stories along with ceremonies, rituals, and myths. In 1948, she published her findings in Por que? Cuentos negros de Cuba ("Why? Black Stories from Cuba"). The collection offered a deeper recreation of Afro-Cuban folklore, celebrating the oral traditions and chronicles of the Babas (religious fathers).
After Por que? Cabrera's work became increasingly rigorous in its scholarship. In 1954 she published El monte: Igbo-finda, ewe orisha, vititi nfinda - Notas sobre las religiones, la magia, las superticiones у el folklore de los negros criollos у del pueblo de Cuba ("Mountain, Bushland or Forest: Igbo-Finda. Ewe Orisha, Vititi Nfinda - Notes on the Religion, Magic, Superstitions and Folklore of Black Creoles and Cuban People"). The book focuses on the sacred and mystical lore of the Cuban people, cataloging and carefully translating Afro-Cuban mythologies.
In the following year, Cabrera also published Refranes de negros viejos ("Sayings and Proverbs of Black Elders"): and in the next year, 1956, she published a dictionary of the Yoruba languages of Cuba. In 1957, she published La Sociedad secretci Abakua: Narrada por viejos adeptos ("The Secret Society of the Abakua: Narrated by the Old Adepts"), an explanation of the rites of a society in Cuba derived from the Cameroon area of Africa.
In 1959, after the Cuban revolution, Cabrera and de Rojas left Cuba for Miami. She continued to publish on Afro-Cuban mystical lore, however, and also published more of her own fiction. In 1971 she issued a volume of short stories, Ayapa: Cuentos de Jicotea, a collection of twenty stories following the troubled career of a small land turtle. In that collection, Cabrera finds human foibles in mystical figures; she treats each icon with sly familiarity, encouraging her readers to understand both the majesty and the humanity of these African-spired characters.
Cabrera published steadily through the 1970s and 1980s, mostly drawing on her old notes. But at seventyseven she wrote Itinerario del insomnia: Trinidad de Cuba, about the geographical and philosophical wanderings of a sleepless old woman. The book is part memoir, part novel, part testimony to the cultures she studied so well throughout her life.
She continued to published her work on the mystical culture of Afro-Cubans until her death at the age of ninety-one. Among those books are volumes on Cuban uses of animals, Cuban superstitions, popular Cuban medicine, and dictionaries of Cuban languages.
