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...

First published in Cuba in 1954 and appearing here in English for the first time, Lydia Cabrera's El Monte is a foundational and iconic study of Afro-Cuban religious and cultural tradition that is essential for scholars, activists, and practitioners alike.