Early Life and Education
Born in Havana in 1899, the youngest of eight siblings, she comes from a a family of social and financial privilege in pre-revolutionary Cuba, where her father, Raimundo Cabreras, was also a writer, jurist, lawyer, and a former fighter for Cuba's independence was a prominent man in society.Her father was the owner and editor of the Cuban journal which at the time was, Cuba y America which translates to Cuba and America. This news paper involved politics and her father wanted to become independent from Spain. Her mother, Elisa Marcaida Casanova, was a housewife and respected socialite. The family had many African American servants and child caretaker who, through them a young Lydia learned about African folklore, stories,tradition,religions, and their mystical world. Her father was also the president of the first Cuban corporation, La Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, founded in the eighteenth century. He also owed a popular literary journal, Cuba y America, where Lydia got her first experience as a writer. At the age of thirteen, Cabrera wrote a weekly anonymous column that appeared in her father's journal. She covered topics relevant to her specific community, such as wedding announcements, childbirths, or obituaries.
Like the majority of wealthy Cubans in the early 1900s, private tutors came to the home of the Cabreras to educate the children. For a short period of time, she attended the private school of Maria Luisa Dolz. At this time it was not socially acceptable for a woman to pursue a high school diploma, so Cabrera finished her secondary education on her own.
By 1927 Cabrera found herself wanting to make money on her own and she wanted to become independent from her family. So she moved to Paris to study art and religion at L'Ecole du Louve She studied drawing and painting in Paris with theatrical Russian exile Alexandra Exter. Cabrera lived in Paris for 11 years, returned home in 1938.Once graduated from the art school, she chose not to become an artist like people had expected her to become. Instead she chose to move back to Cuba to study Afro-Cuban culture, especially their traditions and folklore.Lydia Cabrera is a creative writer who writes in order to retell the history of Cuba. She worked closely with Fernando Ortiz even though she was younger than him.
Read more about this topic: Lydia Cabrera
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The nature of women’s oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of class or race; some women have access to significant wealth, but that wealth does not signify power; women are to be found everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children—we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut of the machinery and way of life which is ruinous to us.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)