Lydia Cabrera Marcaida

Lydia Cabrera, a prominent ethnologist, researcher and narrator, was born in Havana, at Calzada de Galiano, number 79. Daughter of lawyer and historian Raimundo Cabrera y Bosch and Elisa Marcaida y Casanova, both Cuban.

Her father had been one of the young lawyers of the Autonomist Party in the 1880s. Author of the well-known political essay "Cuba y sus jueces", when the 1895 Revolution began, he sided with independence.

Due to health problems she does not attend school and is educated freely by tutors in her own home, where she also studies high school and later takes postgraduate courses. A painter sponsored by Leopoldo Romañach, she grows up surrounded by intellectuals who lead her to become a journalist from her adolescence.

From childhood she felt attracted to the legends and magical beliefs of Black people. Her "tatas", who were part of her household, almost like family members, are those who awaken her interest in these beliefs with tales of the marvelous African world. And it is precisely her elderly tatas who help her enter that world where the white man was normally not accepted and place their trust in the "mundele" (white woman) Lydia, knowing that she would never cause them any harm.

This guarantees the success of her research and her works on the presence of African culture on the Island, which in both their linguistic and anthropological aspects are essential references. Her beginning as a student of Afro-Cuban folklore was at the hand of Fernando Ortiz, the most important ethnologist and anthropologist of Cuba.

In 1913 she begins writing the social chronicle of the magazine "Cuba y América" under the pseudonym Nena. In 1927 she travels to Paris to study at "l'École du Louvre". Residing in Paris she publishes "Contes nègres de Cuba", translated into French by Francis de Miomandre, and based on stories heard during her research. A poetic recreation and a rich contribution to the knowledge of Black folklore.

In 1937 she returns to Cuba, where she will reside until July 24, 1960 in the "Quinta San José", property of María Teresa de Rojas, who provides her with the financial ease that allows her to dedicate herself professionally to research. She abandons literary fiction to dedicate herself definitively to the study of Afro-Cuban culture, expanding her linguistic and anthropological knowledge.

Once the first stage of her training as a researcher was completed, with the economic support of María Teresa Rojas, the financing was resolved, so she was able to have a secretary and could travel in search of informants to towns and cities in the provinces of Havana, Pinar del Río, Matanzas and Las Villas. During Federico García Lorca's visit to Cuba, Lydia would take him to a secret Afro-Cuban ceremony, which would impress him and leave him completely fascinated.

The first Spanish edition of "Cuentos negros de Cuba" is published in 1940, in Havana, at the "La Verónica" printing house. In 1948 her second work of fiction appears, "¿Por qué? Cuentos negros de Cuba", "Colección del Chicherekú", created by the author herself and her friend María Teresa de Rojas.

In the "Revista Bimestre Cubana", directed by Fernando Ortiz, Lydia publishes in 1947 the essay "Eggue o vichichi nfinde" (volume LX), a version of the first chapters of what will be her magnum opus: "El monte".

In issue 36 of the magazine "Orígenes", directed by José Lezama Lima and José Rodríguez Feo, "El sincretismo religioso de Cuba. Santos. Orishas. Ngangas. Lucumís y congos" appears in 1954. In April of that same year the prologue to "El monte" is dated.

In 1954, as a result of many years of patient work, she publishes her greatest creation, "El Monte", which has deserved to be identified as the bible of Afro-Cuban religions and liturgy. It is possible that the first edition of "El monte" exceeded 500 copies, but in reality this number was much smaller, given that the printing was expensive due to the special quality of the paper used, in addition to the fact that the investment was risky, since religious prejudices were openly manifested. The work was not reprinted again until 1968, in Madrid, in an edition financed by her friend Amalia Bacardí.

In the fifties, already fully dedicated to studying the origins of Santería, born from the mixture of Yoruba deities with Catholic saints, she travels throughout the island, developing an in-depth field investigation that led her to move through numerous towns and cities, with her main research centers being Havana, Matanzas, and Trinidad, in the province of Las Villas, where she collects much information about rituals and little-known myths, guarded as a great treasure by Black elders.

It is significant that in her first ethnological books, published between 1954 and 1958, beginning with "El Monte", she gathers the most important anthropological, religious and cultural foundations of the Afro-Cuban legacy. To do this she has to earn the trust of her informants, who jealously guard the secrets of their rituals, myths and customs.

For her, what was important was to unravel "…the profound and living trace left on this island by the magical and religious concepts, the beliefs and practices of the Black people imported from Africa during several centuries of uninterrupted trafficking…". According to the author herself, the merit of the book lies in the fact that it is the Black people themselves who make this book and although with an irregular structure, it is undoubtedly a profound journey through the most rooted customs of the Cuban people.

"El Monte", with more than five hundred pages of knowledge of Cuban matters or, rather, of the hidden Cuban world, is not only a compendium of Afro-Cuban hermeticism, but also a treatise on botany with an extensive account of plants and their medicinal-magical properties. A text consecrated by practitioners and scholars, where it offers a study of more than three hundred plants that appear in the rituals that arrived on the island from Africa.

In 1955, already with knowledge of the Lucumí (Yoruba) language spoken in Cuba, she publishes "Refranes de negros viejos". Two years later her book "Anagó, vocabulario lucumí" appears, where she already shows that she is versed in the sacred language of the orishas (gods).

Just a year later, in 1958, she publishes "La sociedad secreta Abakuá", in which the two cultural legacies of our homeland are reflected: the Spanish and the African. She writes "….'culture is not the highest degree of instruction and refinement that a people can achieve, but rather the sum of its social traditions".

The ñáñigos, so strict in matters of gender and its transgression, determined to allow her to enter the "fambá, sancta sanctorum" chamber of the brotherhood, being the first and possibly the only woman who has done so. Thanks to this she was able to write her "Anaforuana: ritual y símbolos de la iniciación en la sociedad secreta Abakuá", and we can think that the "ecobios" would see in Lydia an equal, because this woman was much of a woman, a complete, total and absolute woman. Without a doubt, even the "ecobios" sworn to secrecy would approve that she, being a woman, would deserve more to enter their "sancta sanctorum" than many of the males, whom the skillful sectarians despise for their diminished manhood, not of the body, but in spirit.

Lydia Cabrera, like José Lezama Lima and Fernando Ortiz, did not strive to leave us a correct literary work, but rather to build an island cosmogony that endows us with a glorious past with which to sustain the heavy and pedestrian present. Her works were also published in the French magazines "Cahiers du Sud", "Revue de Paris" and "Les Nouvelles Litteraires", and in Cuba in the magazine "Orígenes", from 1945 to 1954, in the "Revista Bimestre Cubana" (1947), "Lyceum (1949)", "Bohemia" and even in "Lunes de Revolución".

Upon the triumph of the Revolution she left the country. Her last residence in Cuba was the "Finca San José". The house she shared with María Teresa Rojas. A house on the outskirts of Havana, in Cuban colonial style with half-points, screens, oil lamps, streetlights, railings, doors, old things from Trinidad and other places of colonial Cuba. When one entered, it seemed you were traveling in time. In 1961 it was demolished to make way for a sports field. But her work endures and will endure over time.

Years later, in 1971, already living in Florida, Ediciones Universal publishes "Ayapá: cuentos de Jicotea", her third collection of stories. She died at age 91 in the city of Miami on September 19, 1991.