Remembering Cuba: Memory and Loss in Lydia Cabrera's Writings

FAIN: HR-50215-05

Licia Fiol-Matta
CUNY Research Foundation, Lehman College (Bronx, NY 10468-1527)

This essay interweaves Lydia Cabrera's ethnographic books during the Cuban Republic (El Monte, La sociedad secreta abacua), and the 1956 set of recordings entitled Musica de los cultos afrocubanos en Cuba (reissued in three CDs, 2001, 2003 by the Smithsonian Institution), with four exile works written in Miami in the 1970's and 1980's (La Laguna sagrada de San Joaquin; Yemaya y Ochun; Reglas de congo. Palo Monte Mayombe; and Itinerarios del insomnio: Trinidad de Cuba). I combine ethnography, memoirs. photography, sound reproduction, interviews, and Cabrera's correspondence and personal papers, to investigate the racial split that is constitutive of Cuban memory and loss, in and out of the island, before and after the Revolution.