CABRERA, LYDIA

born May 20, 1900, Havana, Cuba died Sept. 25, 1991, Miami, Fla., U.S. Cuban ethnologist and short-story author noted for her collections of Afro-Cuban folklore. The daughter of Cuban historian Raimundo Cabrera, Lydia Cabrera was told African folk legends by her nanny and the household servants during her childhood. In 1927 she went to Paris to study at L'cole du Louvre, and there she wrote Cuentos negros de Cuba (1940; originally published in French, 1936; Black Stories from Cuba), a collection of 22 folk tales. Back in Cuba after 1938, she wrote the 28 stories collected in Por Qu? (1948; Why?). She collected folklore from ex-slaves and from rural and urban Cubans. Personified animals and objects, supernatural beings, magic, and good and wicked Yoruba gods fill her stories, which nevertheless present distinctively Cuban landscapes and attitudes. El Monte (1954; The Bush) is her noted study of the Santera religion, including its merging of Yoruban deities with Roman Catholic saints and its herbal pharmacopoeia, while Anag: vocabulario lucum (1957; Anag: Lucum Vocabulary) studies the Lucum language and its adaptation into Cuban Spanish. During the 1959 Cuban revolution, Cabrera was forced to flee the country. Thereafter she lived in Spain and the United States.