At the time of her death, Lydia Cabrera was widely considered a world authority on Afro-Cuban cultures, religion, and folklore. Her prolific production, which includes short stories and detailed and extensive ethnological research on the presence and practices of African traditions in Cuban society, combines documentation on Afro-Cuban folklore and religions with her own fiction. Her work is a clever interweaving of nonfiction and poetry, the fantastic and the real, and unique characteristics of Cuban society and universal aspects of the human condition. 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. Some of her later work--especially her dictionaries of Spanish and African languages spoken in Cuba as well as the multitude of anecdotes, legends, and personal testimony from informants reproduced in "their voices"--today constitutes an...