Coming To The United States
She left the country shortly after the Revolution and never returned. She left in 1960 as an exile following the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro. She went first to Madrid and settled later in Miami, FL. She moved to Miami, Florida, where she remained until the rest of her life. She received several honorary doctorate degrees, including one from the University of Miami in 1987. Cabrera described her stories as "transpositions," but they went much further than a simple retelling. She recreated and altered elements, characters, and themes of African and universal folklores, but she also modified the traditional stories by adding details of Cuban customs of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Toward the last years of her life, Lydia Cabrera worked diligently to edit and publish the many notes she had collected during more than thirty years of research in Cuba
The real reason why she left is still unknown. Some claim that she left because of the lifestyle the Revolution was trying to instill. For many years, Cabrera had stated her dislike for the Revolution and socialist-Marxist ideology. Others claim she left because members of the Abakuás were hunting her down since she had made their secret society public. Although the reason why she left is unknown, she never returned and spent the rest of her life living in Miami until her death in September 19th 1991.
Read more about this topic: Lydia Cabrera
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“So here they are, the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty-cents-a-day professionals riding the outposts of the nation, from Fort Reno to Fort Apache, from Sheridan to Stark. They were all the same. Men in dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing. But wherever they rode and whatever they fought for, that place became the United States.”
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Like that, and it’s true, it has, yet
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“Perhaps anxious politicians may prove that only seventeen white men and five negroes were concerned in the late enterprise; but their very anxiety to prove this might suggest to themselves that all is not told. Why do they still dodge the truth? They are so anxious because of a dim consciousness of the fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the free inhabitants of the United States would have rejoiced if it had succeeded. They at most only criticise the tactics.”
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