Dreaming Mother Earth: The Life and Wisdom of Native Cuban Cacique Francisco "Panchito" RamÃrez Rojas

In this revealing and deeply researched book, José Barreiro (author, activist, and retired director, Office for Latin America, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian) distills over a decade of interviews with Francisco Panchito Ramírez Rojas, a true cacique, or chief, in the tradition of the original Native ancestors of the Caribbean. In the track of an uninterrupted lineage reaching back to before the late 15th century European invasion, Panchito speaks with the simple yet powerful voice of one who understands and communicates with nature, humans included, in ways that the western world has long forgotten. Dreaming Mother Earth offers the reader perhaps the first authentic testimony of a man who retains, and lives, many of the ancient traditions of his people. Panchito and his community of several thousand in the eastern Cuban mountains leave no doubt that the Tainos, as the Spanish invaders called his ancestors in the Greater Antilles, are still with us, and that the news of their extinction by historians and scholars has been, in the words of Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated. Combining ancestral knowledge of the land with newer European and African beliefs and technologies, today s Cuban Indian people offer no "lost tribe" romanticism. They are contemporary guajiros as mountain and country people are called in Cuba, but who, in their strong Native kinship culture, still carry a deep practical and spiritual knowledge in the power and sacredness of the natural world. Thanks to José Barreiro for bringing this extraordinary leader, his family, and his community to all of us. And thank you, Panchito, and all the people who never relinquished their Native Caribbean identity for resisting, and for preserving a way of life that just may signal our path to survival in this 21st century.