Expediente Sra Eva Mameli de Calvino, utile e forestiera botanica a Cuba

Abstract: «Expediente Sra Eva Mameli de Calvino», a valuable foreign botanist in Cuba. Cuba still remembers Eva Mameli, Italo Calvino’s mother, as the first woman to hold an executive position in the field of agriculture. Through the recently restored Dossier Eva Mameli, kept in the Cuban archives, you can confirm the agenda of her main activities in the caribeña island. You will find the authorized missions, the undertaking by ministerial decree of the first executive office as the director of the Department of Botany on December 1, 1920, “by virtue of her knowledge” and with an annual fee of 2,400 Cuban pesos, a paid license for “personal issues” lasting one month as asked by Mameli herself on the day of Italo’s birth. During those 5 years in Central America, well as directing the Department of Botany of the Estación Experimental Agronómica di Santiago de las Vegas, together with Mario Calvino, she promotes agricultural schools for the settlers’ children, fosters women’s education in science and agriculture, supports a range of outreach activities for children as the holiday tree, and social as the Día de las Madres and – every October 10 – the commemoration of the beginning of the Cuban independence struggles, thus fully immersing in the cultural life of the place that hosts her.