Lydia Cabrera

Cuban-born anthropologist and writer

• Born: May 20, 1899
• Birthplace: Havana, Cuba
• Died: September 19, 1991
• Place of death: Miami, Florida

Cabrera, a pioneering ethnologist, focused on the assimilation of African traditions into Cuban culture, producing many written works combining anthropology and literature, and she continued her studies after moving to the United States.

Early Life

Lydia Cabrera (LIHD-ee-yah cah-BREHR-ah) was the youngest of eight children. Her father was Raimundo Cabrera y Bosch, a wealthy intellectual, lawyer, writer, publisher, and advocate for Cuban independence. Her mother was socialite Elisa Bilbao Marcaida y Casanova. Cabrera briefly attended a private girl’s school and spent six months at the Academy of San Alejandro, but she was primarily tutored at home because at this time young Cuban women were not allowed to receive public secondary education. As a girl Cabrera was raised under the care of servants and nannies of African heritage, the descendants of slaves, who entertained their young charge with folktales. Bright, well read, and insatiably curious, Cabrera as a teenager began writing an anonymous gossip column, “Young Women in Society,” for her father’s journal, Cuba and America.

Cabrera was initially interested in an artistic career. Her paintings were successfully exhibited in a 1922 show in Havana. Soon afterward, she opened a store that sold imported artworks, antiques, and handcrafted objects. She also cofounded the Association of Retrospective Arts, which instituted a festival, “Old Havana,” to celebrate Cuba’s diverse artistic traditions. In 1923, she became associated with the Society of Cuban Folklore, for which her brother-in-law, anthropologist Fernando Ortíz, served as president. That same year, her father died. Seeking financial independence, Cabrera saved the money earned from her various enterprises with the intention of moving abroad to continue her education.

In 1927, Cabrera traveled to France. She studied painting at L’Ecole du Louvre, earning a degree in 1930. During a decade when she lived primarily in the Montmartre section of Paris, Cabrera enthusiastically embraced a bohemian lifestyle. Enamored of American jazz, she associated freely with a multitude of intellectuals from a variety of social and artistic movements, including negritude, avant-garde, cubism, and surrealism, and her early interest in Afro-Cuban folklore, inspired by her childhood caregivers and Ortíz, was reawakened. She began a romantic relationship with German-born Venezuelan novelist Teresa de la Parra. The two women often traveled together throughout Europe and back and forth to Cuba as Cabrera began collecting information on the Afro-Cuban community. When Parra fell ill with tuberculosis, Cabrera entertained her sick friend by writing and reciting new versions of African stories she had heard as a young child. A collection of these stories was published as Cuentos Negros de Cuba (Black Cuban Tales) in Paris in 1936, the year Parra died in a Swiss sanitarium.

Life’s Work

Cabrera returned to Cuba in the late 1930’s to immerse herself in the study of her native country’s African heritage. She found a new companion, María Teresa de Rojas, nicknamed “Titina,” who would remain with Cabrera for the rest of her life. The two women resided in a refurbished mansion called La Quinta San José in Marianao, a hilly suburb of Havana alongside the working-class Barrio Pogolotti, where Cabrera undertook much of her research. She also explored the province of Matanzas, an hour away, where there was a strong concentration of Afro-Cubans. In venturing into the barrios, Cabrera broke local taboos of gender, class, and race; an upper-class white woman, she freely mingled with poor blacks of both sexes in tracing the African origins of language, religion, traditions, and rituals that permeated Cuban society.

As Cabrera gained the trust of her subjects through her interest, enthusiasm, and nonjudgmental acceptance of their culture, they opened up to her, providing a rich source of material she drew upon for half a century. Alternating between fiction and nonfiction, Cabrera regularly published books on various aspects of the Afro-Cuban community that might otherwise have vanished over time. In 1948, she released a second collection of folktales entitled Why Black Stories from Cuba. After years of firsthand research, she released her best-known work, El Monte, a study of the secret Santería religion, in 1954. Other books soon followed, demonstrating the full range of Cabrera’s scholarship. Sayings from Old Blacks (1955) was a collection of pithy and philosophical remarks. Amagó, Lucumí Vocabulary: The Yoruba Spoken in Cuba (1957) was a remarkable study of words transposed from Africa centuries before and still in use on the island. The Abakuá Secret Society: Narrated by Old Followers (1959) was, like her earlier El Monte, an intimate look at another African-based religion that had survived transplantation to Cuba.

In 1960, soon after Fidel Castro ousted Fulgencio Batista and intellectuals were no longer welcome in Cuba, Cabrera and Rojas were among the first to voluntarily become exiles from their homeland. The two women moved briefly to Spain before relocating permanently in Miami, Florida, where there was a large Cuban community. After a decadelong hiatus from writing, Cabrera again took up the Afro-Cuban cause. For the last thirty years of her life she released new works on an almost annual basis, capturing and preserving facets of traditions originating on the African continent that had survived and evolved in the New World. These publications included new short-story collections, Ayapá: Turtle Stories (1971) and Stories for the Adult Child and the Mentally Retarded (1983); religious studies, Anaforuana: Ritual and Symbols of Initiation to the Abakuá Secret Society (1975) and The Kimbisa Cult of the Holy Christ of Good Travels (1977); and a lexicon, Congo Vocabulary: The Bantú Spoken in Cuba (1984). Cabrera’s last of more than twenty books, published the year after Rojas’s death, was The Animals in the Folklore and Magic of Cuba (1988). Cabrera died in 1991, at the age of ninety-two.

Significance

With little formal training in the discipline, Lydia Cabrera became a respected anthropologist and ethnologist, specializing in the Afro-Cuban community from the late 1920’s until the end of her long life. She refused to be influenced by the writings of other social scientists, instead working directly with people who were the descendants of slaves to document long oral traditions that were on the point of disappearing. By preserving folktales, religious rituals, natural medicinal cures, superstitions, and native wisdom handed down over generations, she demonstrated how African themes had merged with the dominant Spanish presence for self-preservation. The combination of cultures produced a vibrant hybrid society that has contributed in a multitude of ways—in art, music, dance, literature, beliefs, and language—to the unique national character of Cuba.

Bibliography

Arnedo-Gómez, Miguel. Writing Rumba: The Afrocubanista Movement in Poetry. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. An annotated study showing how Cabrera and other intellectuals worked to incorporate black themes and rhythms into the national literature of Cuba.

Betancourt, Madeleine Cámara. Cuban Women Writers: Imagining a Matria. Translated by David Frye. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. This scholarly work studies the writings of four women, including Cabrera, who contributed to an understanding of the importance of race, gender, and language in modern Cuba.

Quiroga, José. Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America. New York: NYU Press, 2000. An examination of how gay Latinos and lesbian Latinas, like Cabrera, influenced Hispanic literature, art, music, and film.

Rodríguez-Mangual, Edna M. Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. A well-researched study of Cabrera’s life and work that demonstrates how her approach to information gathering differed from, and improved upon, traditional academic methods.