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
Famous quotes containing the words united states, coming, united and/or states:
“I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“When great nations fear to expand, shrink from expansion, it is because their greatness is coming to an end. Are we, still in the prime of our lusty youth, still at the beginning of our glorious manhood, to sit down among the outworn people, to take our place with the weak and the craven? A thousand times no!”
—Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)
“What makes the United States government, on the whole, more tolerable—I mean for us lucky white men—is the fact that there is so much less of government with us.... But in Canada you are reminded of the government every day. It parades itself before you. It is not content to be the servant, but will be the master; and every day it goes out to the Plains of Abraham or to the Champs de Mars and exhibits itself and toots.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Not only [are] our states ... making peace with each other,... you and I, your Majesty, are making peace here, our own peace, the peace of soldiers and the peace of friends.”
—Yitzhak Rabin (b. 1922)