Mestre Cosme

Mestre Cosme is a capoeira mestre from the lineage of Mestre Roque in Rio de Janeiro. He trained with Roque at the master's final academy in Vilar do Teles, a neighborhood in São João de Meriti in the Baixada Fluminense region of Rio de Janeiro. Cosme continues to live near this location, maintaining a connection to the place where he learned capoeira.

As a student of Mestre Roque, Cosme inherited the Angola tradition of the "line of São Bento" that Roque brought from Bahia to Rio de Janeiro. This style was characterized as faster than other Angola styles, distinguishing it from both the Senzala group's capoeira that dominated Rio's Zona Sul and from the schools established by other Bahian masters like Artur Emídio, Paraná, and Mário Buscapé in Bonsucesso.

Cosme belongs to a generation of Roque's students that includes several notable figures: Adilson (Camisa Preta), who took over the Pavão/Pavãozinho academy in the 1970s; Mestra Sandrinha, recognized as possibly the first female mestra in Brazil; Mestre Paulo Siqueira, who became a pioneer of capoeira in Germany; Mestre Poeira; Mestre Derli; and Mestre Lapinha. Through this lineage, Cosme represents the continuation of one of the four founding lineages of contemporary capoeira in Rio de Janeiro.

Cosme was featured in the documentary "Alunos de M. Roque" (Students of M. Roque), produced by CapoeiraHistory to document Mestre Roque's legacy. In this film, he appears alongside Mestre Paulo Siqueira and Mestre Lapinha—three students who trained with Roque at different periods of his teaching career. While Paulo Siqueira trained at the Morro do Pavão academy in the 1970s and Lapinha accompanied Roque at a later stage, Cosme represents the final period of Roque's teaching at the Vilar do Teles location.

Roque's teaching career spanned multiple decades and locations across Rio de Janeiro: from Catumbi initially, to twelve years at the Neighbourhood Association of Pavão/Pavãozinho, then Praia do Pinto, Praça Mauá, Jacarepaguá, the Petrobras Refinery in Caxias, São João de Meriti, and finally Vilar do Teles. Cosme's connection to this final academy places him as one of the later students in Roque's long teaching lineage.