Wifredo Lam was born in Sagua la Grande, a municipality located in the Cuban province of Villa Clara, the eighth son of a wealthy eighty-four-year-old Chinese trader and a mother of African-European origins. At the beginning of the fall of 1923 he embarked for Spain where he lived for 14 years.
In 1929 he married Eva Piris and had a son. In 1931 Eva and her son died of tuberculosis. In 1938 Lam met Pablo Picasso and got to know the friends of the painter Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Paul Éluard, Georges Braque. In 1941 he left Europe for Cuba with André Breton who wanted to go to New York. But while he was planning to find his native island, he was interned for forty days on a small island in Martinique. In spite of everything he became acquainted with Aime Césaire, whom he became a friend of. After staying for ten years on the island, when he was fifty, he moved permanently to Paris (except for a stay in Italy), where he then died. He is buried at Père Lachaise.
