(1903 - 1975)
Pedagogo e historiador. Su obra cumbre, Historia de Cuba, de gran valor didáctico, constituye un texto de obligada consulta para todos los que se acerquen al estudio del proceso de desarrollo económico, político y social de la mayor de las Antillas.
Social Sciences and Humanities
1999 | Rolling the coconut. (Change processes in santeria)
Main executives entity: University of Havana (UH)
Main author: Lazara Menéndez Vázquez.
Summary:

This work constitutes a Doctoral Thesis in Art Sciences, which approaches with a transdisciplinary reach the common sociocultural changes of this religious practice during the nineties and its transcendency in the existential values of the practicing persons.

The author is able to figure out, with a cultural approach, the contradictory problem of the identity-difference complex process, and the survival of prejudices conditioned by the subordinate situation of believers, which makes possible to determine the existential regularities of this universe; she studies her visual and imaginary world, as a part of national culture, which relates herself to her current international projection.

The work represents a significant step forward, as a result of three decades of research and educational experience.

The author expresses that one of the research's objectives was to configure, with the individual that participates in the view of the world of santeria, the environment integrated by diverse scenarios that qualify the groups of relationships that have been used to characterize Ocha Rule, starting from the suggestions and evocations that these make in the practicing persons. She highlights, as one of the results, the presentation of a new repertoire of santeros, that is to say, a group of individuals that, from the cultural point of view, turned out to be qualitatively different from those that were used as a base to precedent studies.