Of African descent, Georgina Herrera was born in 1936, in Jovellanos, the capital of Matanzas, to a family with great pride in its racial pedigree. From an uneducated background, she was brought up in an environment lacking in basic material resources, let alone books. This home was controlled by a repressive patriarchal hand with rules of obedience that discouraged thinking, and therefore, by extension, incomprehensive of this daughter's rebellious spirited and poetic inclination. Georgina never considered submission a viable alternative and her irrepressible cimarron rebelliousness led her to express an overflowing creativity. Her writing revolves around themes of gender, Afro-Cuban history, and the African legacy. Her work has been translated to various languages and has won much recognition abroad and in Cuba.
