Olga Negreira González

Died: November 25, 2013

She was the first professor of Galician language who taught classes to the descendants of emigrants in Cuba and one of the promoters of the refoundation of the Centro Unión Orensano of which she was a board member

At the age of 93, she passed away in the Cuban capital, a prominent figure in the world of emigration, board member of the Society 'Centro Unión Orensana de La Habana', and 'one of the most active Galician nationalists of our times'.

Olga Negreira was born in La Habana on August 23, 1920, daughter of a Coruña father and an Ourense mother, she lived in Orense, Galicia, with her family, from age ten until seventeen, when they returned to Cuba due to the Spanish Civil War. Long before her departure for Spain, she was already a member of the M.I Centro Gallego de La Habana, 'Unión Orensana' and other Galician and Spanish associations, entities with which she always collaborated enthusiastically.

She began her working life in 1940 as a worker in a pharmaceutical products laboratory. Subsequently, and once graduated as a stenographer, in the offices of the 'General Electric de Cuba' Company, and in the Ministry of Domestic Trade (MINCIN) from 1959 onwards, where she retired in 1978.

From 1992, the year the Chair of Galician Culture was created at the University of La Habana —until 1994— she served as a collaborator of the first professor of said Chair. Due to her complete mastery of the language, she was the first professor of Galician language available to natives and descendants of Galicians in La Habana during those years.

She performed meritorious work as a member of the Management Commission that refounded in 1995 the Centro Unión Orensana de La Habana together with the late engineer, José Manuel Docampo López, and other Ourense natives and their descendants, who with great sense of belonging collaborated with the Federations of Galician and Spanish Societies in Cuba. Her physical departure leaves an irreparable void in the Hispanic community of the largest of the Antilles.

Source: España Exterior.com