Folklore: Cultural input for story?

Subject: Folklore: Cultural input for story?
From: MorwenEdhelwen1
Date: 27 Aug 12 - 01:21 AM

This question is a little weird, but I feel like I know the posters here well enough to ask it.

Right now I'm writing a novel. The story so far is seventeen pages long and is a young adult alternate history set in Cuba, where Batista stayed as president because Operation Verano succeeded. The protagonist is a fourteen-year-old clone of Che Guevara, at a time in the future where clones are used as slaves. He looks like a mulatto Cuban.

His foster parents are Afro-Cuban/ and Cuban "mulatta" (mixed-race) and both are Santeros. The songs of Lord Invader, Lord Kitchener (Kitch) and Lord Melody, as well as "Guantanamera," "Babalu", and various Jamaican and Haitian folk songs, are referred to several times. I know enough about pre-revolutionary Cuba to get the general cultural details right, but I want to be sure that my portrayal of Afro-Cuban culture, especially Santeria, and the folklore associated with it, is accurate.

Since I know that some of you have Afro-Cuban friends and knowledge of Afro-Cuban culture, would it be alright if I asked for cultural input?

Subject: RE: Folklore: Cultural input for story?
From: MorwenEdhelwen1
Date: 27 Aug 12 - 01:31 AM

I'd get someone's email address and send them the pages so that they/someone else can look over them for cultural inaccuracies.

*And anyway I'm desperate*

Subject: RE: Folklore: Cultural input for story?
From: GUEST,.gargoyle
Date: 27 Aug 12 - 01:43 AM

SO   SORRRY

What has happened to your "Song of the Desert" and Bedoiun music based novel??

Sincerely,
Gargoyle

Do not neglect your anthropological studies...a dillatente in academia is seldom awarded more than a bill of reckoning.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Cultural input for story?
From: MorwenEdhelwen1
Date: 27 Aug 12 - 01:50 AM

Why do you always post in these threads?
It's been put on the back burner.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Cultural input for story?
From: GUEST,Stim
Date: 27 Aug 12 - 02:37 AM

One idea would be to check out cuban expat blogs and forums, and look for cultural discussions (not political ones) and try to find people who will answer questions about music and such things in the pre-castro days.

People will be more likely to want to talk to you about their lives than about your writing and you can add and change things in your story based on things they tell you.

Another possibility is that there may be cuban faculty or students at a nearby university who you can hang out with. Also, you might have a drumming group around, and they might be connected to religious celebrations, etc. I know that Santaria rituals are done in a lot of expat communities as a way of keeping in touch with the culture.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Cultural input for story?
From: MorwenEdhelwen1
Date: 27 Aug 12 - 03:10 AM

Stim: The Cuban community in Australia is tiny.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Cultural input for story?
From: MorwenEdhelwen1
Date: 27 Aug 12 - 04:09 AM

Addition: I just found and joined a beta-reading community on LiveJournal.