As much a storyteller as an ethnographer, Lydia Cabrera was captivated by a strange and magical new world revealed
to her by her Afro-Cuban friends in early twentieth-century Havana. In Afro-Cuban Tales this world comes to teeming
life, introducing English-speaking readers to a realm of tenuous boundaries between the natural and the supernatural,
deities and mortals, the spiritual and the seemingly inanimate.
Here readers will find a vibrant, imaginative record of African culture transplanted to Cuba and transformed over
time, a passionate and subversive alternative to the dominant Western culture of the Americas. In this charmed
realm of myth and legend, imaginative flights, and hard realities, Cabrera shows us a world turned upside down.
In this domain guinea hens can make dour Asturians and the king of Spain dance; little fat cooking pots might prepare
their own meals; the pope can send encyclicals about pumpkins; and officials can be defeated by the shrewdness
of turtles. The first English translation of one of the most important writers on African culture in the Americas,
the collection provides a fascinating view of how African traditions, myths, stories, and religions traveled to
the New World�of how, in their tales, Africans in the Americas created a New World all their own.