Afro-Cuban Tales
  1. 169 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access Afro-Cuban Tales by Lydia Cabrera, J. Alberto Hernandez-chiroldes,Lauren Yoder in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Introduction to the English Edition
  2. Introduction to the Spanish Edition
  3. Bregantino Bregantín
  4. Chéggue
  5. Eyá
  6. Walo-Wila
  7. Two Queens
  8. Papa Turtle and Papa Tiger
  9. Los Compadres
  10. Mambiala Hill
  11. The Easy Life
  12. Apopoito Miamá
  13. Tatabisaco
  14. Arere Marekén
  15. The Green Mud of the Almendares
  16. Suandende
  17. Sokuando!
  18. Ñoguma
  19. Hicotea’s Horse
  20. One-Legged-Osain
  21. The Amazing Guinea
  22. The Letter of Emancipation
  23. The Mutes
  24. The Watchful Toad