May 20, 1900 is the birthday of Lydia Cabrera, considered by contemporaries as the premiere Cuban ethnologist and Cuba’s matriarch of “letters”. (In the 20th century, people wrote thoughtful, lengthy communications by hand with pen and ink on paper, called “letters”.) Cabrera focused on Afro-Cuban history, and wrote scholarly volumes and entertaining fiction, including work… Continue reading Lydia Cabrera, Matriarch of Letters 1900