Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba

Sacred Spaces and R e l ig iou s Tr a di t ion s i n O ri ent e Cu ba

a volume in the religions of the americas series Series Editors: davíd carrasco and charles h. long

 Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba Jualynne E. Dodson african atlantic research team michigan state university

In collaboration with josé millet batista casa del caribe santiago de cuba

university of new mexico press

e

albuquerque

© 2008 by the University of New Mexico Press All rights reserved. Published 2008 Printed in the United States of America 13  12  11  10  09  08    1  2  3  4  5  6

Library of C ong ress Catalo g ing -in-Pu blication Data Dodson, Jualynne E. Sacred spaces and religious traditions in Oriente Cuba / Jualynne E. Dodson in collaboration with José Millet Batista. p. cm. — (Religions of the Americas) Includes bibliographical references (p.

) and index.

isbn 978-0-8263-4353-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Holguín (Cuba : Province)—Religious life and customs. 2. Sacred space—Cuba—Holguín (Province) 3. Afro-Caribbean cults—Cuba—Holguín (Province) I. Millet Batista, José. II. Title. bl2566.c9d63 2008 299.6097291´62—dc22 2008024176 Book design and type composition by Melissa Tandysh Composed in 10.5/14 Minion Pro Display type is Incognito

Dedicated to the Spiritual and Historical Lives of Vicente Portuondo Martin of Santiago de Cuba and Olga Batista of Holguín.

Vicente Home Going! Tower of Power! Moves Humbly Home Going Service Calls! Broad of Frame & Shoulder Carries Ancients’ Knowledge Guide Today! Limbs of strength and agility Affected Deep Rituals. Sent Power Messages Rising Beyond. Dancing body, Swift Fluid. Moved to Ancestor Rhythms. All Felt Strong!!! Greater Service Now Beckons Make Ready Our Giant. Serve Between Both Worlds. Gift of Olodumere Received. Prepare Prenda to Release.

Jualynne E. Dodson, 2002

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Contents  List of Illustrations and Maps

viii

Editors’ Foreword

ix

Preface by the African Atlantic Research Team

xi

Acknowledgments Introduction

xiii 1



Part I chapter 1. Contours and Concepts

21



chapter 2. African Cosmic Orientation: Core Commonalities

39



chapter 3. What Sacred Spaces Do

61



Part II chapter 4. Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe

81



chapter 5. Vodú

104



chapter 6. Espiritismo

124



Part III chapter 7. “Land of the Dead” Beginnings: Muertéra Bembé de Sao

147



chapter 8. Findings and Conclusions

160

Notes

177

Glossary of Select Terms

189

Bibliography

192

Index

205

Color plates follow page 18

vii

Illustrations

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Maps Map 1. Cuba within the Caribbean Map 2. Cuba political map with Oriente provinces Map 3. Slave trade era map of West and Central West Africa, including eight principal trade regions and ports of embarkation Map 4. Nineteenth-century Oriente palenque sites Map 5. Proximity of Oriente to Jamaica and Haiti Map 6. Los Hoyos neighborhood in city of Santiago de Cuba

Plates

26 30 31 65

follow page 18

Figure 1. Drummers in Santiago de Cuba Figure 2. Public sacred space visible for community view Figure 3. Moncada nganga of Los Hoyos Figure 4. Espiritismo space, Bayamo Figure 5. Artistic sidewalk ceramic tile by Wilfredo Lam Figure 6. Cosmogram of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe in Oriente Figure 7. Palero in ritual gestures to his nganga Figure 8. Closeup of part of a nganga Figure 9. Image of Native American Indian Figure 10. Tabletop portion of a Las Tunas Vodú community Figure 11. Sacred space of Santiago Vodú community Figure 12. Hunfo Festival del Caribe Figure 13. Vevé-like image showing Haitian and Cuban flags Figure 14. Portion of an Espiritismo Cruzado sacred space Figure 15. Babalú Ayé in a sacred space of El Cobre Figure 16. Cordon ritual of Espiritismo de Cordon Figure 17. Cazuela of Santiago de Cuba Figure 18. Part of a Muertéra Bembé de Sao space viii

4–5 23

Editors’ Foreword

In 1947 Don Fernando Ortiz in his book Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar coined the terms “transcultural” and “transculturation” as expressions of descriptive and methodological orientations to the reality of Cuban culture and religion. The terms were used by Ortiz to describe the dynamic processes produced by the interaction of indigenous, European, and African cultural elements and modes in the history and formation of Cuban culture. Dodson’s work is the result of a long-term research project that she began in 1996. Subsequently she was joined by her graduate students, and during the last phases of research by the African Atlantic Research Team of Michigan State University in collaboration with the Popular Religions Study Team of the Casa del Caribe in Santiago de Cuba. Thus, the very structure of research embodied in a concrete manner the nature and meaning of a “contact zone.” Jualynne Dodson’s book Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba echoes overtones of Ortiz’s initial formulation. Not only has Dodson returned to Cuba, the same site of Ortiz’s original research, but she has also revisited, supplemented, enhanced, and critiqued some of Ortiz’s original assumptions. Ortiz did not limit his study to simply ideas and ideological formulations, but as the subtitle of his book, Tobacco and Sugar indicates, he was interested in the material modes of culture as expressed in the work of agricultural production. Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba represents both a continuity and discontinuity from the work of Ortiz. In the first instance Dodson’s work concentrates on the province of Oriente whereas most studies of Afro-Cuban religions have concentrated on Havana and the areas close by. Dodson’s work also continues this concern for materiality but in so doing, she undertakes a radical critique of Ortiz. Her study, while presupposing the gross economic nature of economic and material productions, is unique in its understanding of the materiality interwoven in the AfroCuban sacred sites of religious spaces. ix

There have already been too many books that have discussed AfroCuban religions as examples of “syncretism” or have simply attempted to outline the “beliefs” of these religions. In undertaking the study of one of the reglas congo, of Vodú of Espiritismo, and of Muertéra Bembé de Sao, Dodson’s work opens us to a new orientation to these religious realities. And she does this by concentrating on what she has called “sacred sites.” From a conventional point of view, one might regard these sites as “altars.” Dodson is careful to avoid the term “altars,” for in common parlance it does not convey the structure, meaning, and depth of the spaces. These spaces are seen by her as sites of transcendence, power, and significance. The transcendent power is present precisely because of the material and sensuous nature of the sites. They carry a meaning of transcendence precisely because they are simultaneously the embodiment of histories, meaning, and values on the mundane level. This study will have the great value of redirecting research on the nature of sacred sites, and more importantly, on the African substratum of Cuban culture and religion.

x

editors’ foreword

Preface

The African Atlantic Research Team (AART) is a mentoring collective that attempts to socialize as well as educate graduate and undergraduate students to the rigors and demands of academic production. AART was founded on the principle of collective and integrated engagement and we have worked to refine practical applications that step beyond normative boundaries of social science research, investigative methods, and the socialization of students. In that regard, Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba is situated within a distinct epistemological posture that we endeavor to practice: one that embraces collective foundations of scholarly as well as everyday knowledge production. The character of this book reflects and speaks to the intellectual development of the entire African Atlantic Research Team. Inspired by the call for serious exchange of ideas and scholastic excellence, team members have worked in Oriente sites for several years. Through collaborative data collection and analysis of those findings, we have grappled with conceptual issues identified by the project and presented from the field. Production of the book has ebbed and flowed into fruition through a dynamic interplay of love and care that transcends demands of rigorous social science research and/ or the requirements of academic writing. Within this atmosphere of AART’s work, members gave the same care and support to Professor Dodson that she has given to us. We have worked with Dodson on Sacred Spaces and Religious Tradi­ tions in Oriente Cuba to challenge her to present the dignity and in­tegrity upheld within sacred practices of Cuban indigenous religions in Oriente. Practitioners of these are authentic in their rituals, not “backwater” articulations to Western Cuba’s lead. We believe we have contributed in highlighting the religious traditions, the devotees, and the region, as the book also raises important questions and conceptual clarities about the construction of African Diaspora knowledge systems in the Caribbean. We hope those who read this book will do so within a mindset that links xi

the collective approach that was foundational for the work that produced it. We feel Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba exemplifies such a focus and represents intentions and goals that are critical to our team. The book explores several issues significantly absent from the cannons of scholarship in our disciplinary arenas. It opens the eastern region of Oriente, an area central to any study of Cuba but one terribly neglected. Equally, this volume situates the island-nation as a significant tributary to the study of African Diaspora in the Caribbean. Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba prioritizes religion in the modality of life-practices of Oriente’s African descended population, and retains that priority in the methodological approaches we took in gathering the research data, as well as in our conceptualization of the spiritual and material lives of Oriente inhabitants. We believe this posture challenges the individualistic approaches of most scholarship. This volume also supports investigative approaches pioneered by colleagues and teachers at Casa del Caribe in Santiago de Cuba. That cultural organization led the way in studying indigenous religious traditions of Oriente. For AART, this entire enterprise has served as a model for book production and the final editing was equally important in that learning process. Rosemary Carstens, the copyeditor, helped refine Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba with superior skill and expertise. She deftly comprehended the subject matter in its context and then proceeded to retool the language to a level of excellence we believe the work deserves. We thank her for helping Dodson, our mentor and teacha’, in the final stages of production. This project has been a labor of love and unwavering dedication. It represents our united blood, sweat, and tears; It is, because we are. —On behalf of the African Atlantic Research Team Sonya Maria Johnson Alexandra P. Gelbard Shanti Ali Zaid Harry Nii Koney Odamtten

xii

preface

Acknowledgments

We give thanks to those who have gone before and made it possible for us to be at this moment and time. Eternal debt to Dr. Ruth Simms Hamilton of Michigan State University, whose intellectual life and groundbreaking conceptual work greatly influenced this book.

There are at least two hundred or more persons whose help was indispensable to this volume’s completion. Indeed, there never would have been a book without the Oriente practitioners who took our research team into their communities and shared their sacred spaces. Among the many we extend special appreciation to are Raphael, Angelita, Juan Gonzales (“Madelaine”), Don Chino, Madre Los Angeles Felicola (“Madridia”), Eva Fernandez, Norec Mozo, and everyone at Casa del Caribe. It is equally impossible to consider acknowledgments without including the Millet and Rosa América households of Santiago de Cuba, Flora Gilford’s family in the United States, and the entire African Atlantic Research Team. I am indebted to Sonya Maria Johnson, Shanti Ali Zaid, and Alexandra Pauline Gelbard for years of steadfast trust, commitment, and hard work. Sonya has been present since the envisioning to the completion of this project and, because it has taken so long, I also dedicate this work to Ceiba and Caoba, the next generation.

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Introduction

Space s c onst ru ct ed b y religiou s pr ac tition e r s of Oriente represent their understanding about the sacredness of their world. They also incorporate ideas about what it means to be human as they express portions of the collective history of a particular religion and its followers. Images in this book show sacred spaces that were built between 1998 and 2007 by contemporary practitioners in Oriente Cuba, and they reflect categories of human religious meaning. The sites also are distinguishable through particularities of the adherents who built them. As director of the African Atlantic Research Team, I guided five team members in the investigation of four religions that are indigenous to Cuba, as they are practiced in Oriente: Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, Vodú, Espiritismo, and Muertéra Bembé de Sao. Many will notice that we do not include the more well-known Cuban religious traditions of Regla de Ocha or Santería. These practices were omitted because our intent was to better understand traditions that have received little if any academic focus and to explore a geographic area of Cuba that is rarely the subject of research projects. With the exception of Espiritismo, the indigenous religions we studied are Africa-based. This means that beyond the complexity of meanings derived from practitioners and their religious activities, the spaces contain customs handed down from colonial African descendants and integrate an alternative, Africa-based



1

epistemology or knowledge system about what it means to be human. Within that epistemological core, the spaces also exemplify an alternative temporal modality; they exist as an alternative model of time. Enslaved colonial Africans transported this other model of time to Oriente as part of an epistemological foundation, a cosmic orientation, and used both understandings to create ritual behaviors that became underpinnings of new religious traditions. Cuban religions vary according to where continental sacred fragments originated, when traditional rituals were established in Oriente, and depending upon materials and ritual activities, when and how these were combined to construct the practices. However throughout the region, the cosmic orientation or epistemology, with its alternative model of timed human possibilities, persisted as the overarching sacred perspective. The images of spaces presented in this book are from each of the four researched religions and symbolize the inherited and shared cosmic orientation, the specification of a tradition, as well as the particularities of individual practitioners. The book offers an interconnected examination of the history and entrenched understandings of the four indigenous religions. It may be the first systematic exploration of these traditions in their Oriente context, and we have taken the opportunity to reflect on what the spaces say about sacredness within regional religious practices. We want to attempt to qualify some of what is unknown about Oriente and indigenous religions as performed there. In addition this volume is equally attentive to examining alternative models of time, space, and other important ideas concerning the meaning of being human as expressed by the traditions. Our presentation is enhanced by color photographs of Oriente spaces.

Literature Most scholarship about Cuba’s religious traditions is concerned with the black population and their Africa-based behaviors. These works have focused on research conducted in western provinces of the island, areas in or near the cities of Havana, Matanzas, Trinidad, and so on. There is an abundance of published work about these regions and it appears in such disciplines as history, anthropology, ethnomusicology, criminology, sociology, ethnology, and psychology.1 Only a small amount of these materials is in English and few, if any of these materials, include research conducted in the five current provinces created from the older region of Oriente (see map 2).2 2

introduction

Definitive research into Cuban religions was made popular in the first half of the twentieth century by the internationally renowned scholar Don Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969). Ortiz was impressed with the black Cuban population’s continued use of Africa-based spiritual customs, ritual dances, musical instruments, song traditions, linguistic variations, plus other ac­­ companying cultural expressions and material objects.3 He was interested in how such a continuation of cultural manifestations affected race relations in his country. Ortiz conducted some of the earliest anthropological research and writing on the topic, in Spanish and English,4 but he barely mentioned Ori­ente and there is no evidence that he collected data or wrote about the eastern region. Rómulo Lachatañeré, another Cuban writer and one who worked with Ortiz, corresponded with the elder scholar and suggested the need for investigating religious practices in Oriente. Lachatañeré contended that procedures in the east could be different because of different historical and cultural factors that influenced and distinguished the region from Cuba’s western areas.5 There are no indications that Ortiz engaged the contention but, despite this methodological omission, Ortiz is primarily responsible for introducing international academic and general reading audiences to the documented presence and continuation of Africa-based practices in Cuba. Ortiz’s ongoing groundbreaking investigations also established a conceptual canon about Cuban cultural customs. He proposed that these were not practices assimilated into existing European definitions of cultural behavior or religious activities but were created from African descendants’ basic understandings about life as they contacted and exchanged with different ethnic groups and with members of other cultural groups on the island. Later, Charles H. Long and Mary Louise Pratt would explore such colonial spaces of inequitable power distribution where this cultural mixing, exchanging, and grappling for social presentation were distinct phenomena, “contact zones.”6 But Ortiz saw that Cuba’s processes of cultural creation were not merely representations of prevailing academic ideas about assimilation and acculturation. He suggested that essential details of the island’s racial composition and historical development were not unilateral processes of cultural acquisition—Africans behaving like Europeans. Rather, Ortiz argued that, to be fully understood, sociocultural changes that took place in Cuba required a more interactive conceptualization. He proposed “transculturation” as the pivotal concept to describe Cuba’s colonial cultural mixing wherein groups grappled, fought, and dynamically combined their ideas of appropriate behaviors for introduction

3

Map 1: Cuba’s location within the Caribbean and its relationship to other land spaces of the region. The island is 750 miles long, approximately 22 miles wide at its western point, and 124 miles wide at its widest point in the east. (From Cuba. Washington DC: United States Central Intelligence Agency, 1994.) 4

introduction

introduction

5

the new society and came to form entirely new ideas, new behaviors, and a new people.7 For the first three decades of the twentieth century, Ortiz’s work was integral to the ongoing debates of E. Franklin Frazier (1894–1962), Melville Herskovits (1895–1963), and their followers. These US researchers held opposing views, to Ortiz and to each other. Frazier hypothesized that Africa-based practices had been lost or assimilated in the Americas, while Herskovits argued that many West African behaviors still existed across the Atlantic among descendants who were born in the Americas.8 Ortiz’s third option was that Africa and the Americas were each present in New World cultural expressions but these were new formations, born from contact and exchange among the multiplicity of cultural inhabitants living under colonial conditions in lands across the Atlantic. At the same time, Ortiz’s research and writing was embedded in the social Darwinism of his education and historical era, and it erroneously encased further study of Cuban religions within the colloquial rubric of “folk practices.” We concur with Christine Ayorinde in her overall assessment that Ortiz viewed the exceptional religious behaviors as primitive, though exotic, expressive holdovers of a backward, uneducated black people who were peripherally related to the progress of Eurocentric modern understandings about human life.9 Others who followed in Ortiz’s footsteps must be positioned as important researchers of Africa-based Cuban customs, but positioned also as researchers who conceptualized them as folk behaviors, not belonging to perceived ideas about regular or serious culture and religion. Rogelio Furé, Lydia Cabrera, Jorge Castellanos and Isabel Castellanos, Miguel Barnet, and others are part of this school of normative, though falsely dichotomizing thought.10 This perspective employs Eurocentric standards and vocabulary that devalue folk traditions as outside a universal, normative model of organized and civilized social structure. Religious traditions that continue to exist outside the model (particularly the Christian model) are then understood and reified as “less than,” even paganistic if not demonic. The dichotomy goes forward to position behaviors of blacks, mulattos, and campesinos—peasant farmers, poor and mostly uneducated Cubans—as “a confusing mess,” “syncretism,” “animalistic,” or the result of “fanatical practitioners.”11 Too much of this paradigm persists even as there are newer research findings about the integrity of Africa-based sacred practices in Cuba, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and other parts of the Americas.12 6

introduction

Late in the 1970s, an abundance of English language material began to be published about two of Cuba’s seven coherent sets of religious activities. This material concerns various practices of the Yoruba-based traditions of Regla de Ocha/Lucumí and Regla Ifá. However, many of these works do not focus on customs in Cuba but on practices that are derived from island origins and performed in other geographic locations. Exemplary literature in this category are Walking With the Night by Raul Canizares; Four Yorúbá Rituals and other books by John Mason; Santería: An African Religion in America and Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora and other volumes by Joseph Murphy; The Way of the Orisa by Philip John Neimark; and Santería by Migene González-Whippler. All of these and more focus on Yoruba practices outside of Cuba and are descriptive considerations of ritual activities rather than findings from systematic field research on the island. Flash of the Spirit by Robert Farris Thompson, Santeria from Africa to the New World by George Brandon, and Afro-Cuban Religious Experience by Eugenio Matibag are equally centered on Regla de Ocha/Lucumí (also known as Santería) as lived outside Cuba, but these authors conducted extensive explorations of the Cuban roots of the traditions.13 In this fashion, David H. Brown’s more recent publication, Santería Enthroned, contains wideranging research on the western Cuban origins of Ocha/Lucumí and Ífa traditions, but he, too, is concerned with contemporary practices outside of the island.14 Santería Enthroned’s first 162, of more than 413 two-columned pages, are replete with historical and field research data gathered in Cuba about ritual beginnings that became the Santería of Brown’s North American study. It is an excellent reference and part of our rationale for omitting the practices from our research. At the same time, literature on other Cuban religions, and literature focused on their performance on the island, is much less copious and much less published in English. Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba is based on research of four non-Yoruba traditions as a way to begin improving academic knowledge about other sacred practices that have Cuban origins. Our research team’s consensus is that concentration on sacred spaces can provide a locus from which to comprehend significant ideas and meanings that are aligned with the four religions because the spaces contain material artifacts of religious meaning for the human beings that assembled them. At the same time, this book explores sacred spaces of the four religions as practiced in Oriente, Cuba’s eastern region. In some small way, we are introduction

7

doing what Rómulo Lachatañeré suggested that Ortiz do: consider Oriente’s religious expressions on their own terms and within their own context. The hope is to produce a baseline of data and exploratory analysis for sacred spaces of the religions that can become foundational understandings for future comparative research. There is so little published English literature about expressions of the religions we studied—Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, Vodú, Espiritismo, and Muertéra Bembé de Sao—that a review of existing materials isn’t too time consuming. Most published work on Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, for ex­­ample, is in Spanish and tends not to give conceptual emphasis but to descriptively explore ritual details in generalized categories or particularized activities. For example, the nganga (cast iron caldron) in which essential sacred elements of the religion are kept is a frequent locus of such discussions, but so far we have not encountered literature that conceptually engages the nganga or Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe in their fullest historical and sociocultural presence in Oriente.15 In this regard, Miguel Barnet is correct to assert that academic research has yet to begin to descriptively delve into particulars of Palo Monte/ Palo Mayombe or other religions derived from Cuba’s Kongo heritage. This means that a large void exists in published materials that consider theoretical significances of these Bantu, Bakongo-based practices, as they are carried out in Oriente, and their relationship to other expressions from the cultural family.16 If nothing else, as Barnet continues, “The symbology among Congo entities . . . warrants more thorough study.”17 More published literature does exist on the Vodou of Haiti, but very little if any materials can be found on the Vodú of Cuba.18 The absence extends to literature in Spanish as even island scholars have failed to give much attention to the tradition in their homeland. This is partially because the strongest communities of Cuban Vodú arrived in eastern portions of the island and continue to remain most active in Oriente. Another reason for the absence is the western, Havana emphasis of much of Cuban scholarship. However, José Millet and Alexis Alarcón of Casa del Caribe in Santiago de Cuba have produced an important volume on the island’s tradition, El vodú en Cuba, which looks at the migration of the religion from Haiti to the Spanish island and then describes several key practices.19 Nevertheless, even this work begs for theoretical considerations and we continue to await a comparison of Haitian and Cuban customs, even as we welcome existing contributions. Published works on Cuban Espiritismo are almost exclusively limited to Spanish. José Millet’s booklet, El Espiritismo: Variantes Cubanas, is a 8

introduction

singular description that examines select varieties of that tradition and does so within Oriente expressions. Millet has also published journal-length articles on the tradition, all in Spanish.20 We have been unable to identify books published in English about Oriente Espiritismo and, if that is a regrettable void, so also is the fact that we found nothing in Spanish or English about Muertéra Bembé de Sao.

Methods For more than ten years, members of the African Atlantic Research Team have been reading English and Spanish literature on Cuban religions as we conducted field research in Oriente. The intent has been to comprehend sacred spaces of the religions from the historical and epistemological foundations that undergird the knowledge practitioners use to construct the sites. We were interested in what the spaces could reveal about the fundamental historical and epistemological origins of the four religions of our investigation, and we wanted to help qualify the unknown regarding Oriente religious practices. The project belongs to a larger body of our academic research regarding African descendants in the Americas based at Michigan State University. This book is an initial, large-scale effort designed to share coherent findings from collective research and to explore how Oriente sacred spaces can be embedded with historical legacy, cosmic orientation, and religious meanings, as well as practitioner particularities. Several major research questions guided the investigation. What do Oriente sacred spaces contain? What are the meanings of this content within practitioners’ cosmic orientation? What historical and sociological forces helped shape knowledge that led to constructing the spaces? To answer these questions and others, the team employed qualitative datagathering techniques of naturalistic field research. The full universal population consisted of all sacred spaces built by Oriente practitioners of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, Vodú, Espiritismo, and Muertéra Bembé de Sao. A sample group of more than two hundred devotees was identified through “snowball” techniques with referrals coming from academics and practitioners, as well as nonpractitioner elders who are familiar with the nation’s culture and religions. We conducted directed individual interviews and focus group conversations with practitioners in such rural and city locations as Las Tunas, Holguín, Guantánamo, Bayamo, El Cobre, and Santiago de Cuba. introduction

9

No less than four research team members consistently lived within Oriente communities for no less than a full month each year for five to nine consecutive years.21 We were participant observers within more than ten specific ritual communities and conducted directed individual and group interviews with more than one hundred of the sample population.22 Obser­ vational data within worship communities overlapped with the interview protocol to cover the complete sample. We also took color photographs of many spaces in order to provide visual data that would enable us to better comprehend the dynamic nature of sites once we were not in Oriente. As previously mentioned, some of these images are included in this book. Sociologically, our respondents were from cities, towns, and countryside locations with the understanding that even urban centers in Oriente are not the densely populated, cosmopolitan arenas of western Havana or other large cities of the Americas. For example the “metropolitan” area of Santiago de Cuba, the largest city in the region, has just over a million inhabitants. There are no more than a dozen apartment or other buildings over twenty stories high in this or other eastern cities, such as Holguín, Guan­tánamo, Las Tunas, and Bayamo. A high degree of personal familiarity characterizes this less than densely populated region and the relative size of cities and towns in the area appears to help create a sense of familiarity among inhabitants. Throughout the island, Cubans repeatedly told us “the east is the region of hospitality and friendliness.” This proved to be true for most of our initial contacts with unfamiliar practitioners and communities of indigenous religions. With but one exception in Holguín, individual adherents, as well as communities of worshippers, received our research team with little hesitancy, though it took time for us to prove our sincerity. Our observation is that Oriente is an interconnected social web or network wherein practitioners have linked relationships that intersect across geographic locations and religious traditions. The intersection was demonstrated as we commonly found individuals in one town, city, or surrounding area who knew of, knew personally, or had shared ritual practice with persons from another city or town. It was equally normal that individual devotees were the godchildren of a mutual religious leader. Many in Oriente, for example, personally knew one Santiago leader of a Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe group, just as several leaders from different traditions knew the work of a female leader and knew her to be “a grand Espiritista (leader of an Espiritismo community).”

10

introduction

The socioeconomic class status of our research group requires more intricate analysis than is the focus of this book. Social scientists from the United States understand that the level of education, amount of income, occupational position, and other such social factors are indicators of individual class status. In Cuba, to the contrary, these indicators are harder to disaggregate and comprehend, if appropriate at all. There is free universal high school education for all Cubans as well as university and/or higher vocational education, and there is a societal ethos that encourages citizens to complete each level. The majority of our respondents had completed a high school education, with the exception of elders over sixty-five, and everyone was literate. Within one worship community, there were several initiates who had completed the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree, several with masters’ degrees, and at least three practitioners with a PhD. Occupationally, the income source for most respondents was related to some type of physical labor. Even those involved in academic, medical, dental, and/or research activities were based in employment or living arrangements where they also were obligated to participate in some sort of physical labor: mopping floors of common usage, building and/or repairing community houses, tending and harvesting crops, providing neighborhood security, and so on. The few respondents who were “directors” of city or regional agencies, and did not regularly participate in such activities, did not gain status based on their position or its accompanying benefits, contrary to those who were actively engaged. As one respondent said to us, the president of the Union of Cuban Artists and Writers was elected and “knows what he’s doin’ better than anybody, plus, he’s a writer too.” Income disparities and/or variations have only recently begun to creep into the general Cuban population since the 1959 revolution, and their impact has yet to make major inroads in Oriente. The greatest income disparities are between those who work in sectors that serve tourists and the general population that lives from income garnered within the country’s limited manufacturing and production sectors. There are only a few tourist resort areas in Oriente, Guadalavaca near Holguín is a good example (see map 2), and these are highly controlled, separated enclaves. Only once, after two years, a practitioner and his performing group were no longer part of our research because they were transferred to provide entertainment at a tourist center. For the most part, the social lives and incomes of Oriente practitioners of indigenous religions are not directly affected by the

introduction

11

nation’s tourist economy, and their daily lives are relatively removed from those activities. We were impressed that although most leaders of religious communities drew part of their survival income from their religious work, at least half of them also held other independent employment. Our research respondents had differing occupations, education, and income status, and lived in different locations, but the practice of indigenous religions was the connecting thrust for and among all. Membership in each of the worship communities included taxi drivers, bartenders, agency directors, carpenters, maintenance personnel, agricultural workers, artists, plumbers, secretaries, and others. And though they lived in different geographic locations in Oriente, they regularly interacted with other practitioners, and many simultaneously practiced more than one religious tradition. This signified Oriente as a region of what we learned to call “integrated religious plurality”; practitioners of multiple traditions, often within the same household, and with little or no sense of conflict or contradiction. We will address this issue later as we discuss the four traditions we focused on and as we summarize our findings. But we were impressed! An additional sociological observation is related to issues of gender and religious practice. There appeared to be a balance in the overall number of women and men practitioners in any given community; disparity between women and men in any one local community was linked to the specific tradition. For example, although there are roles for women in Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, their positions of authority are known to community members and not readily visible to others who observe their religious practice. In most varieties of Espiritismo, on the other hand, women are the largest number of practitioners and make up the majority of leaders. Vodú in Oriente also is rather gender balanced in membership and leadership, and we were in contact with communities where this was the reality, but only one worship community in our research population was led by a woman. Race is as complex a sociological issue in Cuba as is social class. There is no doubt that there are white and light-skinned Cubans just as there are darkskinned ones and that phenotype characteristics have been and are important indicators of some social class distinctions. At the same time, the centuries of institutional racism that perpetuated status by race have been dealt a death blow since the 1959 Revolution. But it would be naive to propose that there are no racial differences in Oriente. In our research population, most practitioners of Muertéra Bembé de Sao and Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe were dark

12

introduction

brown to black-skinned Cubans, most practitioners of Vodú were mediumbrown and light-brown skinned, and practitioners of Espiritismo, except Espiritismo Cruzado, were light brown to white-skinned Cubans. Beyond the patterns of participation in religious traditions, we did not observe that skin color differences and perceived linkages to African heritage derived benefits of social status. Neighborhoods where our Oriente respondents lived, no matter geographic location, tradition of ritual practice, and/or racial or skin difference, were well integrated with black, white, brown, and every possible combination of Cuban phenotype. Similarly, all respondents’ neighborhoods reflected the ravages of deferred maintenance and none could be classified as upper class. We will try to address these sociological issues as we discuss specifics of the traditions. Amidst all of these social complexities, our data collection was guided and supplemented with information from primary documentary materials as well as from secondary literature in Spanish and English. Often the documentary findings helped refine research techniques and the design of our work, but, over the years, the most serious limitation was that we were not able to employ questionnaire procedures and could not acquire reliable demographic or statistical data from Cuban authorities. This type of quantitative data gathering is not permitted beyond a select few Havana-based Cuban investigators; foreigners, particularly those from the United States, are not given access to such processes or information. We utilized a number of categories to provide boundaries for our observations and interviews, and these were also used in coding the data. The three largest were



• The history of populations who practiced a specific religious ritual tradition and, as a part of that tradition, constructed sacred spaces within Oriente; • The presence or absence of Africa-based cosmic orientation within and among such practitioners; • The comparative relationship of practices that undergird spaces as well as of religious groupings of Oriente sacred spaces.

In coding and analyzing information we gathered in the field, we disaggregated these three main groups into subcategories that allowed data from different religions to be better understood and compared. The subgroups were

introduction

13



• Particularities of a religion’s history and geography; • Distinctiveness of a shared relationship to the common Africa-based cosmic orientation; • Any alignment of the spaces with religious tenets of practitioners who assembled the spaces as well as alignments with other religions’ practices.

Genealogy of Thinking As early as the 1970s, when Sidney Mintz and Richard Price read their monograph to the American Anthropological Association and subsequently published The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Per­ spective,23 communities of researchers and scholars were reminded that human beings do not lose their entire repertoire of cultural information, even under the most formidable and horrific of circumstances. Likewise, when Charles Long published Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, he was reminding us that US African Americans and other conquered peoples possess and develop religious traditions that, for fullest comprehension, require alternative analytical perspectives. And when sociologist Ruth Simms Hamilton produced “Toward a Paradigm for African Diaspora Studies,” she was asserting a systematic approach to producing scientific studies of African descendants worldwide.24 In their fashions, these investigators were reminding the academic world, yet again, that human cultural lifestyles are in a perpetual process of building and rebuilding around experiences of cultural groups and developing these into their shared collective meanings concerning the universal cosmos. This cosmic orientation defines where the species and human cultural groups are situated, where they are positioned in the scheme of universal order, and assures the formation of such groups just as it guides group members’ interactions. Similarly, cosmic orientation advises the discernment of basic principles or rules about living and surviving amid the myriad of ever-changing phenomena in the world that humans occupy. Neither the fundamental orientation nor the guiding rules of life that evolve from it are at the surface or conscious level of human thought. Rather, all underlie the perceived larger and more immediate body of personal information that is actively used to make concrete decisions about survival—what food stuffs are edible, how to avoid thirst, how to stay warm or cool, and where to sleep with safety, for example. The cosmic orientation, 14

introduction

the phenomenological principles of life, and the behavioral approaches to survival combine to comprise foundational knowledge components of what it means to be human. We have used these ideas, coupled with those of the above authors, to help place data from our Oriente research into a conceptual family. Stephan Palmié’s work belongs to this conceptual arena, and he, too, studied Cuban religions in Cuba. He did not include Oriente in his investigation, nor was he attentive to sacred spaces. However, Palmié’s works definitively probe salient parallel issues and serve as a small body of Eng­lish literature. For example, an early publication examined the “ethnogensis” of Africa-based religions and correctly proposed that commitment to an initiated religious family can and has functioned as strongly as, if not stronger than, sanguine relations.25 Palmié continued this line of analytical thinking and proposed additional ideas that our Oriente data support. For example, he contends that there is a single, overarching sacred perspective/orientation with differential behavioral customs that were built in Cuba from different African ethnic origins and using contributions from different cultural participants. He recognizes that there are several coherent sets of religious rituals but that these and all other such practices are comparably aligned, including their distinctiveness, within/under the arch of Cuban sacred orientation.26 We concur with these and other conceptual propositions put forth by these researchers and firmly hope that our book will contribute to this and other schools of thought.

Cuban Religions There are at least seven sacred lifestyles or religions of Cuba that evolved indigenously from information absorbed within the island’s early colonial environment. Only one of these traditions is not derived from the Africa-based knowledge of that era. We understand indigenous religions to be those coherent sets of ritual behaviors that, over ancestral history, have developed in a land space and in conjunction with the orientation and practices of cultural groups who originally inhabited the land. The seven Cuban indigenous religions are the reglas congo, consisting of different traditions that adhere to Kongo-derived rules of practice; Regla de Ocha/ Lucumí; Vodú; Espiritismo; Regla Ifá; Abakuá/Ñáñigo; and Regla Arará. The last two, Abakuá (a secret and exclusively male tradition) and Regla Arará, are mostly practiced in western Cuba and neither appears to have introduction

15

migrated as organized ritual practices to, or evolved in, Oriente; thus we did not include either of these in our research population. Regla Ifá is a religious system of communicating with the otherworld of divine spirits and has recently blossomed in eastern Cuba. Several fundamental activities of Regla de Ocha/Lucumí were practiced in Oriente during earlier centuries but the coherent set of religious customs did not arrive in the area until the twentieth century.27 We chose not to include either of these Yoruba-based practices in our investigation. Espiritismo, included in the research, also is a religion indigenous to Cuba and is widely practiced in Oriente, but it is the only such tradition not fully Africa-based in its origins. Of these seven well-known indigenous religions, the reglas congo and Espiritismo are each subdivided into several practice lines with­­in their tradition. An additional set of ritual practices, Muertéra Bembé de Sao, may come to be considered an eighth indigenous Cuban religion, as it appears to contain rituals that can be connected to colonial experiences that were foundational behaviors for most such traditions, and we found that it continues in contemporary Oriente. Muertéra Bembé de Sao is rarely included in public conversations and we have seen no literature on the behaviors associated with it as a coherent set of ritual activities. In one form or another, rituals of this tradition are expressly popular in Oriente and we were able to include a community of practitioners within our research sample.

The Book Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba presents data from our research and thinking about sacred spaces from four of the eight Cuban religions actively practiced in Oriente: Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, Vodú, Espirit­ismo, and Muertéra Bembé de Sao. The book is divided into three parts. Part I, composed of appropriate maps and chapters 1 through 3, serves to delineate the historical and conceptual context through which we view and comprehend Oriente religious practices. Part II, composed of chapters 4 through 6, presents the descriptive data on three of the four religions we investigated. Part III closes the book with chapters 7 and 8 wherein we descriptively discuss Muertéra Bembé de Sao and some images from the tradition as a research anomaly and then conclude our presentation.

16

introduction

Chapter 1 attempts to unravel relevant background and historical circumstances that brought Africans to Cuba. We use existing historical findings to clarify and speculate about the early colonial context in which continental descendants built ritual behaviors and social arrangements that formed the core of what is considered religious perspective and activity in Oriente. We focus on early colonial periods because this was when a variety of African groups were imported to the region and interacted with Indians and various Europeans. Similarly, we know that those earliest colonial patterns of ritual practice have tended to set the foundation for what would become the indigenous religions of Cuba. Oriente is the center of our attention, but we reference Cuba as the overall context in which the eastern area is located. In chapter 2 we are concerned with the cosmic orientation that enslaved Africans and their progeny employed to help create ritual behaviors that evolved to be the spiritual ethos of the region. We examine that spiritual ethos or cosmic orientation as an alternative temporal modality (model of time) for being human and explore its comprehension about time, space, power, revelation, possession, and so on—all significant arenas that define human activity and religiosity. The selected features are important common components of the Africa-based cosmic orientation and, to varying degrees, are shared by the four religions of our investigation. In chapter 3 we turn our attention to the function of sacred spaces. “What do spaces do?” is the focal point as we introduce readers to Oriente specifics within the generalized discussion. Chapter 3 closes Part I of the book. In Part II, we are presenting information and data findings about three researched traditions and sacred spaces built by their practitioners. This section begins with chapter 4, which engages Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe; chapter 5 considers Vodú; and chapter 6 discusses Espiritismo. Part III begins with chapter 7 and entertains the religious tradition of Muertéra Bembé de Sao, but with great caution. We believe this is a fully coherent set of ritual practices that is indigenous to Cuba and Oriente, but the spaces and rituals, as well as the religion, were revealed so late in our research process that we agonized about including them here. We have done so because Muertéra Bembé de Sao behaviors appear to have extraordinary historical and cultural significance for other, if not all, ritual practices in the eastern region. As such, we felt we could not omit it from discussion and have included it as an anomaly or research in progress. In chapter 8 we offer the beginning of an integrated analysis of our explorations into the

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myriad issues and complexities of Oriente sacred spaces and indigenous religions of Cuba. Throughout this text, readers will encounter terms that are spelled differently from what they may have seen in other literature. There are a variety of spellings for many terms associated with the indigenous religions and we make no claim to know what is or is not absolutely accurate for each. An example of generalized Cuban spelling that may not hold true elsewhere is Cuban Vodú. We spell it consistent with usage by Casa del Caribe in Oriente just as, for the most part, we have chosen to use spellings that are common in Oriente despite the fact that some differ from generalized spelling and usage. At the same time, we have tried to maintain consistency throughout and we do not believe our spelling choices will distract from understanding or the sense of meaning for important ideas. It is our hope that Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba will begin a larger scholarly conversation about the variety of indigenous religious practices that exist in Oriente and about the myriad of complexities they embody. We specifically hope that there will be further investigations of what Oriente has contributed, religiously and otherwise, to definitions of what is considered Cuban. It is our goal to help qualify the unknown and we anticipate that resulting conversations will inspire regional comparisons among Cuba’s indigenous religious traditions.

18

introduction

Figure 1: These Oriente practitioner drummers are using their Kongolesetype drums during a Muertéra Bembé de Sao ceremony. Photo by Shanti Ali Zaid, African Atlantic Research Team.

Figure 2 (Above): The one sacred space of an indigenous religion that we observed with a visible, outdoor sign. Photo by Sonya Maria Johnson, African Atlantic Research Team. Figure 3 (Opposite top): Local legend says this is a nineteenth-century nganga used by Guillermón Moncada, an Oriente native and hero of Cuba’s first and second wars for independence. Photo by Shanti Ali Zaid, African Atlantic Research Team.

Figure 4 (Opposite bottom): Located in Bayamo, the first city freed by the 1868 insurgent Cuban army, contemporary practitioners in the city constructed this space that includes images of national heroes. Behind the granddaughter of an officer of the Liberation Army is a photo of her father and his wife; a Cuban flag is above it and a larger flag is to the right; another photo to the left of the couple’s portrait pairs in one image Antonio Maceo Grajales, the Afro-Cuban general of two national wars, and Jose Martí, another significant revolutionary leader. Photo by Ricardo Merlin, Casa del Caribe.

Figure 5: One of several sidewalk ceramic tiles in the La Rampa area of the Vedado neighborhood of Havana. It is one of many by the internationally famous Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam. This representation clearly was inspired by the Kongo-based scripting that is still part of Oriente’s Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe. Photo by Alexandra P. Gelbard, African Atlantic Research Team.

Figure 6: A replication of a cosmogram scripted in a Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe “casa de religion” of Oriente (although this appears as black writing on white, original scripting is in white chalk on a cement background). Replication drawing by Shanti Ali Zaid and Jualynne E. Dodson, African Atlantic Research Team.

Figure 7: A palero, practitioner of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, in a typical salute to his nganga. Photo by Ricardo Merlin, Casa del Caribe.

Figure 8: Nganga space with four visible ngangas—one left with a lion’s head, one partially visible on the right, one center behind the white stuffed object, and one center on the floor to the left of the stuffed object. Photo by Shanti Ali Zaid, African Atlantic Research Team.

Figure 9: It is normal for there to be an image of a Native American Indian in the sacred space of a Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe practitioner. The red headband made of feathers, sitting to the left, is also linked with autochthonous inhabitants, but during certain rituals the headband is placed on the head of a spirit-possessed person. Photo by Jualynne E. Dodson, African Atlantic Research Team.

Figure 10: Tabletop portion of a Vodú sacred space in Las Tunas. The two red drums are typical for Cuban Vodú and Tumbas Francesas. The proper sound is produced by warming the animal skin top of the drums and twisting the wooden pegs to tighten the skin. The three men are blood relatives, and the older man in the hat is a leading elder in the religious family. Photo by Jualynne E. Dodson, African Atlantic Research Team.

Figure 11 (Above): Four ritual drums of the Dahomeian Vodú style in a sacred space of a Haitian neighborhood of Santiago de Cuba. The framed picture (right) is of the Haitian republic’s national symbol. Ceramic figurines (center on three different tiers) are of Loa warrior spirits whose identities are venerated. Photo by Ricardo Merlin, Casa del Caribe. Figure 12 (Opposite top): A hunfo built for an annual Festival del Caribe. Photo by Shanti Ali Zaid, African Atlantic Research Team. Figure 13 (Opposite bottom): A vevé image ritualistically produced on the entrance floor of Teatro Heredia before the beginning of Festival del Caribe. The insignia at upper center is a typical Vodú presentation of the Haitian national emblem; the lower insignia represents the Cuban emblem. Photo by Shanti Ali Zaid, African Atlantic Research Team.

Figure 14: Part of Rafael Melendez’s sacred space. He is wearing collares— necklaces of Cuba’s most revered oricha–spirit forces. Melendez is an actor and director of a children’s theatrical company. For some time he traveled by way of an extensive network of Espiritismo communities and practitioners. Rafael’s space is filled with objects inherited from his spiritual and biological family. Uninformed observers might assume disorder, but the entire room has been converted, making it a composed composition. On the upper shelf, to the right of Rafael, with the golden cloth draped from a white sopera (soup tureen), are symbolic objects from what appear to be contrasting traditions. Note the white and gold plate with an image of Jesus Christ. Just to the right is a star and crescent moon from the Islamic tradition. Below these, under the sopera dressed in gold cloth, is a porcelain figurine with a turban head wrap, most likely representing an Arab. In front of that are a white porcelain cup and saucer as well as a white elephant with its backside facing the viewer. Then there is the familiar Shango/Santa Bárbara, just above Rafael’s head, dressed in her appropriate red and white. When viewed within the transculturated context of Oriente creation, the contrasting and interwoven components of the space are a beautiful collage of spiritual reality. Photo by Ricardo Merlin, Casa del Caribe.

Figure 15: The Africa-derived divine spirit of Babalú Ayé is linked with resistance to physical disease, pain, and death. This papier-mâché construction of the spirit, depicted as the Catholic San Lazaro, including his symbolic crutches and dogs, is the saint aspect of the spirit force. Here the spirit/ saint is in the sacred space of Juan Gonzalez in El Cobre, a town a few miles outside of Santiago. The walls and ceiling of the living room and dining area have been covered with murals. Mural images were revealed during dreams and when spirits came to Juan’s body. Josh Seoane, an artist practitioner, was commissioned (but not paid) to paint the murals. Photo by Ricardo Merlin, Casa del Caribe.

Figure 16: An Espiritismo Cordon ritual. Practitioners raise hands, move in a circle, and chant as part of their work. The leader of this worship house claims there are no Africa-based or Christian elements, but representations on the wall suggest otherwise. Photo by Jualynne E. Dodson, African Atlantic Research Team.

Figure 17: A cazuela of a Muertéra Bembé de Sao community in Santiago de Cuba. It is the very large center object that sits in front of the person in blue. The cazuela is filled with a variety of powerful sacred objects. Photo by Shanti Ali Zaid, African Atlantic Research Team.

Figure 18: A tiered component of the Muertéra Bembé de Sao sacred space we visited. Although the tiers resemble some Espiritismo spaces, objects on the tiers contain much more food than we saw in other Espiritismo geographies of sacrality. Photo by Shanti Ali Zaid, African Atlantic Research Team.

Part I 

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1

Contours and Concepts

To be gi n to c om preh end and ana ly z e s ac re d spac e s constructed by religious practitioners in Oriente it is essential to appreciate the geographic as well as the sociohistoric and religious contours that set in motion the ideas and realities from which today’s sacred locations are built. We should be interested in how practitioners’ sacred activities, including spaces, affected the structuring of their world(s). Where in Cuba did Africans arrive? When, why, and what was their demographic impact? What were the significant geographic features of Oriente that helped regularize early Africans’ ritual practices so they could be passed on to newer members and generations? And were there shared cultural characteristics that allowed early Africans to transcend ethnic and language differences to become self-intentional, Africa-based groups within European colonial structures? Answers to such questions are important because, as human beings, these early enslaved people carried knowledge from their homelands and, given conducive social circumstances, laid the ritual foundations for contemporary religious practices. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to review geographic as well as sociohistoric particulars that were significant to the earliest Africans brought to Oriente during the first years of the more than four hundred years of Spanish colonialism. Mary Turner argues that the earliest linguistic

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practices set the direction of colonial peoples in the Caribbean1 and our intent here is to think through how early particulars of Oriente—people, places, and events—produced ritual foundations that set the stage for contemporary religious practices. In the process, attention will be given to the implications of these activities for colonial social structures. This chapter also will identify and clarify important concepts that are integrated into the identification, description, and analysis of Oriente sacred spaces to be discussed in subsequent chapters.

Geographic and Historic Contours Cuba is the largest among those Caribbean land spaces referred to as the Greater Antilles—the larger islands. It is the westernmost of the Antillean archipelagos and is strategically located at access points to the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, the Florida Keys, the Yucatan peninsula, Haiti, and Jamaica (see map 1). Cuba is 750 miles in length, about 22 miles at its narrowest point in the west, and 124 miles at its widest point in the east. There are more than two hundred harbors, bays, and inlets on the approximately 2,500 miles of coast; Cuba has three distinct mountain ranges, with the highest of these—the Sierra Maestra—located in the eastern, Oriente region. The Ciboney2 are among the Indian people known to have inhabited Cuba long before Europeans arrived, but it was the “sub-Taíno” and Taíno of Arawak origins who remained to encounter the Spanish late in the fifteenth century. Varieties of Arawak migrated from northern areas of South America to the Greater Antilles, the Bahamas, and possibly parts of Florida, but, for the most part, they did not settle beyond Cuba’s eastern region. The Taíno who encountered Europeans lived in villages with up to two thousand inhabitants. They made their livelihood through gathering roots and fruits, agriculture, and fishing.3 Almost immediately, the Spanish began to have sexual contact with Indian women and used members of the population not eliminated in military encounters as slave labor. By the time Africans were authorized for importation as replacement labor, much but not all of this Amerindian population had disappeared through death, physical abuse, assimilation, and/or miscegenation.4 Spanish immigrants began to establish social roots in the Caribbean as early as 1492 when Christopher Columbus founded the settlement of La Navidad on part of the island of Hispaniola that we know today as the 22

Chapter 1

Map 2: The five current provinces of Las Tunas, Holguín, Gramma, Santiago de Cuba, and Guantánamo that comprised the older province of Oriente. Map by Shanti Ali Zaid, African Atlantic Research Team.

Dominican Republic. When he returned in 1493 and 1494, he explored much of the northern and southern coastlines of Cuba even though there were no Spanish settlements there yet. However, authorities in Europe had already begun organizing to administer their colonies in all of the Carib­ bean and by 1508 Spanish immigrants seeking to make their fortune in the New World began viewing Cuba as a new opportunity. Renewed interest in expanding the Spanish presence in Cuba arose due to several factors. Hispaniola was deemed less desirable because of in­­ creased competition for shrinking resources, there was a significant decline in the Indian population there to be used as labor, and there were recurring rumors of gold in Cuba. These circumstances produced a concerted interest in establishing communities on the larger island. Seven settlements resulted: Baracoa (1512), Bayamo (1513), Trinidad (1514), Sancti Spíritus (1514), Havana (1514), Puerto Príncipe (1514), and Santiago de Cuba (1515). Santiago became the commercial and political center of Spanish concerns for the period and later was designated the colony’s capital city.5 In 1501, the dual Kings6 of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, granted permission to the colonial governor to import “negro slaves or other slaves born in the power of Christians,”7 and the first formally recognized enslaved Africans were brought from Spain to the Caribbean in 1502. This initial entry of Africans was suspended then reopened in 1505 after it was clear contours and concepts

23

that Spanish colonists depended on enslaved labor for economic development and prosperity.8 The Spanish slave trade was solidified by 1512, when clergy petitioned authorities of the Roman Catholic Church to stop the inhumane treatment of Amerindians by colonists and to allow the colonies to substitute the labor of captive Africans. The first African laborers were purchased from sixteenth-century Portuguese and other European transAtlantic traders, with the earliest entering Cuba at eastern Oriente ports.9 The structural impact was felt immediately as Africans released settlers from toilsome activities and became the source of economic development. However, it took major advancements in lucrative agricultural and other enterprises before the demographics of Cuba’s African population would become significant. Specifically, it was the advent of the profitable cultivation of sugar cane that caused great numbers of Africans to be imported to the Caribbean in general. Spanish immigrants began experimenting with cultivating sugar cane on Hispaniola as early as 1506 and, by 1516, that island had its first sugar mill. Sugar exportation began in earnest about 1521 and by 1527 Hispaniola had nineteen mills that were expanded to thirty-five by the close of the century.10 But at that time, sugar had not yet taken hold as a productive enterprise in Cuba. Colonists there were still experimenting with ginger, maize, plantains, and ground provisions. They also successfully raised livestock for hides that were exported in sufficient quantities for several Oriente colonists to amass considerable wealth.11 In a small community outside of Santiago de Cuba, Santiago del Prado (currently known as El Cobre), sixteenth-century colonists also found copper mining more lucrative than sugar cane cultivation. Mining would continue to have a foothold in the region even though the Spanish crown confiscated the Prado mine in 1670.12 For these early evolving economic endeavors, Africans were the labor force substituted for the Amerindian population, but, like the number of Spanish settlers, the number of enslaved Africans was small compared to later centuries. Nevertheless Africans and their descendants were a significant part of Oriente’s social order as Cuba began to develop into a fully viable colonial enterprise. In so doing, Africans were seen as a necessary feature and became a demographic reality. Historian Hubert H. S. Aimes uncovered and reported that the King of Spain issued a 1517 contract stipulating that white emigrants to Cuba could each take “about a dozen negroes.”13 Another historian, Rafael Duharte Jiménez, reviewed pre-eighteenth-century historical 24

Chapter 1

records and found that in 1522 Oriente received three hundred bozales (enslaved persons born in Africa).14 In 1599, “the ad­ministrator Francisco Sanchez de Moya began copper mine prospecting with 200 enslaved Africans.” In addition, clandestine European ships, particularly English vessels, entered the island at southeast harbors near Manzanillo and infiltrated Oriente ports with their illegal cargos of enslaved Africans.15 For some time clandestine activities were so developed that the east was notorious for a separate economy based on trade with smugglers, pirates, and other such renegades.16 Africans who ran away to escape enslavement also traveled from Jamaica and St. Domingue (now Haiti, see map 5) to Oriente, which added to the African-descendant population in the region. By 1600, migrations of runaways, unlawful importation of additional Africans, plus the legal introduction of enslaved captives brought the total number of Africans in Oriente to more than one thousand. This is a conservative estimate given that at least seven hundred descendants lived legally in the region during this earliest period.17 At the same time, the entire island remained sparsely populated and was described as “in a wretched condition, bordering on abandonment,” as described and reported by Hugh Thomas: Even the overall density of population was only about three to the square mile . . . Those who did live in the country were escaped slaves, primitive Indians, tobacco farmers with their servants and families; the slaves who worked on the few sugar plantations, their overseers.18 As sparsely populated as the colony was, the presence of African descendants in Oriente was a visible and demographic reality. Histories also indicate that Africans who were imported during the earliest colonial period came mostly through Portuguese traders involved in the cross-Atlantic slave traffic. This means that those who arrived in Oriente were largely from the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Kongo region of West Central Africa (see map 3). The fact is important because, as the first descendants to the island, members of ethnic groups from this kingdom inaugurated the region’s cosmic orientation and ritual foundations. They would help create part of the region’s cultural core that would be transmitted through centuries and come to characterize Oriente’s distinctive spiritual approach.19 contours and concepts

25

Map 3: The west and west central portions of Africa designating ex­­portation points for captive Africans. Note the words “kibombo” and “bembé” that are also active components of the Oriente communication lexicon, and note the city of Benin as well as the Kongo, Oyo, Mandinga, Ashanti, and Dahomey empires. Map by Shanti Ali Zaid, African Atlantic Research Team.

26

Chapter 1

The Bakongo

By 1522, when numbers of bonded Africans were imported to Oriente as substitute labor for the diminishing Amerindian populations, they were from ethnic groups associated with the southwest central expanses of their continent, now known as Gabon, Angola, Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.20 Although the Portuguese brought their human cargo to other parts of the Americas, it was chiefly Bantu-speakers from ethnic communities of this Kongo Kingdom that flowed into Oriente during the sixteenth century.21 When María Elena Díaz wrote about the relationship between the Spanish crown and Africans of El Cobre during this period, for example, she remarked that Most of the first West African slaves in the settlement came from the region of Angola. Of the 138 adult male slaves found in the settlement by 1608, 57 (41.3 percent) were explicitly labeled as “Angola” or “Engols”; and among the whole adult female population, 10 out of 48 female slaves (20.8 percent) were identified as the same origin.22 Copper mining in Oriente was deemed less profitable than gold mining but Europeans did engage in copper mining, as it was used in the production of cannons and military forts throughout Spanish America. The mining, processing, and exportation of copper, as conducted by African laborers, positioned Oriente as an early commercial trading center of the Caribbean. By 1613, Antón Recio had built the first sugar farm in Oriente’s Guantánamo valley and named it “Guaicanamar.”23 Africans of the Kongo Kingdom were laborers in Oriente’s beginning experiments in sugar cultivation just as they had been the labor force for the copper mines.24 Of course there were other African ethnic members who were early colonial laborers in Oriente. The presence of Carabalí and Mandingo has been recorded, but the Carabalí were not truly of an African ethnic family grouping. Rather, the label was given to persons from a diversity of West African societies sent to the Western Hemisphere on trans-Atlantic ships from a common port of departure. In the minds of Europeans, the common collectivizing denominator of the Africans, literally and figuratively, was that they all left from the port city of Calabar. In Cuba, many arrivals who shared those experiences were called Carabalí and the label was reified into a cohesive New World ethnic identity. Even the Mandingo was not a contours and concepts

27

fully ordered African ethnic group in Cuba because their early numerical concentration was small.25 The Bakongo ethnic members of the Kongo Kingdom best represented a community of African descendants in Oriente’s formative colonial years. These were persons from a common set of languages and cultural perspectives, and shared an understanding about what it meant to be human and to exist in the universe. Significant to our work is that much of the Bakongo linguistic system continues to be a language of religious ritual in contemporary Oriente.26 Even as the Kongolese were becoming commonplace in the eastern region, commercial, political, and other colonial responsibilities were moving west, and, in 1607, Havana became the colonial capital of Cuba. As the sixteenth century drew to a close, Santiago de Cuba was still the largest eastern settlement and remained capital of the colony. By about the midpoint of the seventeenth century, Cuba was well on its way to becoming “the gem of the Antilles” for its central role in trade and commerce within the Americas and between Europe and American developments. A social, political, economic, and military divide was also developing between the island’s western and eastern regions, and the divide was more than mere geography. That developing shift is critical to our focus on historic and geographic contours that assist the analyses of religious ritual growth in Oriente because the divide produced an eastern region that, while isolated from the western center of colonial activity, was relatively self-referring in its development. The division between the two regions began as early as 1553, when Span­ ish authorities transferred residence of the colonial governor from Santiago de Cuba to Havana. By 1608, more than half of the twenty thousand island inhabitants lived in Havana and the colonial military, political, commercial, demographic, and attitudinal separation of eastern and western Cuba continued to widen. The absence of effective transportation and communication systems to span the geographic distances of Oriente’s rough mountainous terrain exacerbated the separation. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the demographic shift of the African population continued as many ships arriving with new captive labor disembarked in Havana.27 Subsequent to the transfer of colonial government to the west, officials rarely made eastern visits, particularly to cities outside of coastal areas. Sig­ nificant social events occurred in the west, higher-ranking military officers were based there, as were more government officials, and larger army garrisons were also situated in the west. Eastern regions of Oriente became the 28

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backwater of colonial activity and Cuban development. However, the western repositioning enhanced Oriente as a center of clandestine and illicit trade, including opportunists’ raids and attacks on cities and settlements in the region. The French attacked the cities of Santiago and Bayamo in 1603, in 1628, and again in 1633. The English pillaged Santiago in 1662, and the English privateer Henry Morgan plundered Puerto Príncipe in 1668, while interior Oriente towns became targets for robberies, raids, ransackings, and even the leveling of entire settlements. These activities, combined with western authorities’ reluctance to provide military protection or to respond to needs of the region, reinforced Oriente’s social and political status as an isolated backwater. And the rough terrain of the Sierra Maestra mountains compounded the situation. As a result, eastern inhabitants learned to rely on their own and local resources for survival, development, and cultural affirmation.28 This was equally true for African descendants, as they, too, were isolated from influences of western Cuba’s newly imported bozales.29 This is not to suggest that no new Africans arrived in Oriente. Indeed, clandestine ships brought new captives, but it would be in the eighteenth century that the number of continental African descendants in Oriente would accelerate. However, between 1511 and 1790, the Bakongo, Carabalí, and Mandingo continued to be the three main ethnic groups imported to Oriente, through both authorized and clandestine pathways. Those of the Kongo Kingdom were in the majority, just as they were the more culturally influential amid the ten thousand or so Africans and their descendants at the time.30 All lived in rural areas of plantation life, in small- and medium-sized village settlements, as well as in more heavily populated townships like Guantánamo, Manzanillo, Bayamo, and Santiago de Cuba. It was from these large and small population centers that many enslaved workers, particularly the Kongolese, escaped their bondage and relocated in the numerous liberated zones—palenques de cimarrones—that were scattered in Oriente’s mountainous expanse (see map 4). Palenques de cimarrones were a strong manifestation of African influence in the colonial social structures of Oriente. They were not authorized by Cuban or Spanish officials, but existed with their knowledge. Palenques were settlements of Africans, and some Amerindians, who had escaped bondage as an expression of discontent with the inequity of their status in the colony. From approximately 1533 to at least 1871, the discontented continually sought and established alternative free-living zones from which contours and concepts

29

Map 4: Nineteenth-century map of palenque sites in Oriente. The map shows documented paths of escaped African descendants and their migratory directions in the year 1841. We have inserted some known palenque and rancheadores’ (hired slave catchers) sites. Map adapted by Shanti Ali Zaid, African Atlantic Research Team.

they advocated self-interest. Palenques were also sites where African and Indian descendants waged military-like battles and campaigns against colonial forces hired to return them to a bonded state. These resistance activities were enabled by the Sierra Maestra terrain, which abounds with hills, mountains, and forests, providing excellent individual hiding places, and is also conducive to the establishment of long-term communities.31 Individual cimarrones banded together in settlements, across African ethnic groupings and with some few remaining Indians, to create neo-African, microsocieties.32 The neo-African character of the settlements was determined by the numerical preponderance of African descendants and, within that, ethnic members of Africa’s west central regions; those of the Kongo Kingdom were the most influential. One example that affirms this contention occurred in 1747 when Oriente palenques were well established, as was the Kongo background of the settlements’ inhabitants. El Portillo was such a palenque and colonial authorities had known of it for at least twenty years. In 1747 they raided the 30

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compound and captured eleven people. Records of the captives’ inquisition reported that six were of “Congo ethnic heritage, two were Carabalí, one was Mandinga [sic] and one was Mina. The last (adult) was a Crillo [sic] of Jamaica.” A baby who had been born in the palenque was also captured.33 This experience strengthens María Elena Díaz’s report on descendants in El Cobre and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s discussions of African ethnic clusters in the Americas. Together they identify the numerical and cultural majority presence of Kongolese in colonial Oriente.34 Despite internal activities and development, the eastern region remained an isolated territory of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century growth. In the nineteenth century, as Cuba grew economically, commercially, and politically, the general status of Oriente did not keep pace with gains experienced by western regions of the island, and the transportation problem only made the division worse. As Hugh Thomas describes the state of affairs for transportation, “There were no good roads in Cuba. Communication was mostly by sea, though a postal service went once a month from Havana to Santiago. This journey took the postman fourteen days, changing horses.”35 True,

Map 5: Map showing the close geographic relationship between Oriente and Haiti and Jamaica. Map by Shanti Ali Zaid, African Atlantic Research Team.

contours and concepts

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Santiago de Cuba continued to serve as an important focal city of trade and cultural exchange for Haiti, Jamaica, and other Caribbean settlements (see map 5), but major decisions about Cuba rarely considered the needs of the island’s eastern residents beyond general discussion and debate. Oriente’s remote location resulted in inhabitants increasingly turning inward, strengthening their self-reliance and self-referencing, and taking pride in their independent behaviors, including those of their religious activities.36 Practices of the Bakongo were the strongest of these.

Ewé Fon/Adja Haitians

Challenges to the numerical and cultural primacy of Kongo Kingdom, African ethnic groups in Oriente came from the close proximity of Cuba’s Caribbean neighbor under French colonial rule, St. Domingue. When the French Revolution in Europe spilled over to affect her colonies, the lives of St. Domingue’s inhabitants were permanently altered. African descendants on the island took up the cry for freedom and independence to begin their own revolution and with its success renamed their nation Haiti. Even before the 1804 success, great numbers of colonial planters left the French colony to avoid upheavals associated with revolts. Many of these relocated in eastern Cuba during the last decades of the 1700s and brought their enslaved laborers with them.37 Most of Haiti’s enslaved colonial descendants were of Ewé Fon/Adja African ethnic groups, and they brought their cultural and religious particulars to Cuba at the close of the eighteenth and opening of the nineteenth centuries. The recent migrants successfully contributed to Oriente’s economic sectors through their expertise in coffee, tropical fruit, and, eventually, sugar cultivation. The region’s French Haitian presence transferred needed expert production knowledge as numerous cafetales (small coffee farms) began to spring up under the direction of the new Oriente settlers. Palenques, too, began to reflect the presence of African descendants from Haiti as these enslaved laborers also ran away from bondage. Whether in palenques of African ethnic mixtures or in other locations, the Ewé Fon/Adja of Haiti and the Kongo descendants in Cuba shared many cosmic understandings. They also shared common social status as enslaved workers in a plantation economy, but their mutual conceptions about the priority of spirits as a part of all life, as well as other understandings about the universe, is significantly more important for our consideration. 32

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Most Cuba historians draw attention to the extraordinary number of Africans of Yoruba ethnicity imported to the island during the nineteenth century. The numbers are startling: “the number of Lucumí/Yoruba rose from 8.22 percent (n=354) . . . between 1760 and 1769 to 8.38 percent (n= 453) between 1800 and 1820 and then to 34.52 percent (n=3,161) between 1850 and 1870.”38 Despite their numbers and subsequent cultural influence on Cuban religious life, particularly in the west, these individuals did not arrive in large numbers in Oriente and thus their presence there was not a dominant factor. This does not preclude some Yoruba-based ritual activities in Oriente, or the adherence to spiritual understandings associated with their Africa-derived lifestyle. However, it does reinforce that the first, strongest, and longest lasting reference for Oriente’s spiritual approaches was established by ethnic groups from Africa’s west central Kongo region—those who were in eastern Cuba from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward.39 The region’s geographic circumstances and sociopolitical separation provided conditions that allowed the initial Kongo-based spiritual core to be handed down to subsequent generations. When the Ewé Fon/Adja of Haiti arrived, their practices were well aligned with these Kongolese-derived foundations. There is no doubt that during the four-hundred-plus years of Spanish colonial domination over Cuba’s plantation economy, the system of African enslavement was the larger societal mechanism that influenced how and what these descendants produced, for their masters and for themselves. At the same time, governing social structures did not prevent early practitioners from demonstratively articulating their cosmic orientation through sacred lifestyles and spaces, even if those articulations were not overtly visible to the public eye. Ironically, much content of the ritual practices, and those adjusted from early colonial activities, remained vigorous despite continuous efforts to deny, persecute, and/or impugn ideas related to an African identity. For the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Oriente inhabitants have continued to live out indigenous religions that contain a copious number of behavioral remnants from colonial-era rituals. For the first fifty-nine years of the twentieth century as well, the entire island was a neocolonial but constitutional republic under the direction of United States business investments, religious infiltration, and general influences.40 The absence of bona fide colonialism did not change the legal and extralegal restrictions imposed against African descendant practitioners and their indigenous religious rituals. Sacred work remained mostly clandestine. For contours and concepts

33

example, notification of bembé drum parties to devotees or trusted colleagues was only by word of mouth; names of religious leaders were kept secret; self-identification as a practitioner was rarely acknowledged; animal sacrifices were deeply “underground” events; and public knowledge of any of these could produce a visit by police or other authorities with disruptive penalties assessed.41 Many customs were developed or adjusted and remained intimate to the changing sociopolitical lives of Oriente inhabitants during the twentieth-century era of clandestine existence, as they had during the earlier enigmatic colonial periods.42 Success of the 1959 Revolution brought an end to Cuba’s neocolonial status but did not immediately bring religious freedom that allowed public acknowledgment of indigenous traditions. The new government disdained religious work as “primitive” behaviors, but it found ways to incorporate some practitioners’ activities into the developing social transformation.43 The revolutionary government conceptualized some indigenous traditional activities as part of “Cuban cultural and folk practices” and thereby offered a new veneer—consciously or unconsciously—to such customs. For example, a national dance company was established to study, demonstrate, and publicly perform rhythms, songs, and dances derived from religious heritages. The Folklórico Nacional became the professional organization that carried out the cultural work and instructed students. In cities outside the capital city of Havana, similar provincial folkloric groups were organized and locally performed the same functions.44 Nevertheless, practitioners maintained their customs and, as one respondent explained, “the cultural stuff doesn’t change the religion and we don’t talk to everybody about the religion.” All the same, known practitioners were prohibited from participating in other work of the new government. They could not hold certain categories of jobs and were barred from educational preparation for specific careers, such as university professor. To be “religious” and known as a practitioner, of any tradition, was to experience systematic discrimination in Cuba’s political and economic sectors. One family interviewed reported how the father and at least two sons were denied professional advancement because the elder would not deny his beliefs or even pretend not to be a religious practitioner. The father said, “I just couldn’t pretend to be somebody I wasn’t even though I support the revolution and fought at Playa Gíron.”45 Major changes began to occur for religious devotees of all varieties after efforts by organizations such as the Council of Baptist Workers and Students 34

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of Cuba, the 1984 national “rectification” processes, and the historic 1984 dialogue symposium between Cuban Marxists and US Christians. Subsequent to these events a Protestant pastor was even elected to the Cuban National Assembly.46 A series of social expansions allowed more participatory flexibility for all religious believers, and followers of indigenous traditions were among them. However, full freedom to practice traditions indigenous to the island was not yet a full reality. Even with changes in the revolutionary government’s attitudes, it was difficult to overcome the more than four centuries of public prejudice and bigotry that impacted the daily lives of these Cuban devotees. It was during the closing decades of the twentieth century that the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba lost most of its economic trading partners. The island’s economy experienced a major downturn and ushered in the “Special Period” of economic hardship during a time of peace. Every­ one’s life was negatively affected and the government took drastic action on all fronts, including opening the country to visiting tourists. This had not occurred since before the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Among the things visitors most wanted to experience were those activities derived from and related to the island’s indigenous religious traditions. Tourists were willing to pay to see dances from indigenous practices, to talk with religious leaders, to hear and participate in the sacred music, to attend workshops that clarified the traditions’ history and distinctive activities, and they anxiously lined up to purchase souvenirs that they thought were a part of these practices. The government took notice and began authorizing and certifying indigenous religious activities. Bembé drum parties became easier to convene as police no longer raided but passed by to ensure that safety codes were maintained; even those held late into the night or in early morning were tolerated. Animal sacrifices could occur with only a required authorization. Religious leaders were increasingly included in state-sponsored educational and some diplomatic activities. The government supported publications that discussed how indigenous traditions were in concert with ideas of the revolutionary government.47 All of these changes and more became part of early twenty-first century social reality for Oriente and its practitioners of indigenous traditions. On a regional level, practitioners of indigenous religions experienced their most socially inclusive encounters with authorities, but only time will determine the consequences of these changes. Given these relations to social structures, and before moving forward with a description of the salient functions of sacred spaces, the shared contours and concepts

35

cosmic orientation that undergirds the four religious traditions, and a basic description of each, it is important to briefly clarify important concepts that guided our research.

Concepts Important to our investigation were conceptual considerations with which we approached the topic and the research site. Together, these concepts do not yet comprise a theoretical construct, but they do allow our findings to be incorporated into existing systematic investigations of religion and Afri­ can descendants in the Americas, particularly those of the Caribbean. Four concepts are key—religion in general, indigenous religion, intentionality, and transculturation. Religion

As social scientists committed to interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary understandings of our findings, we view religion as systematic beliefs and practices exhibited by a group of people regarding issues of ultimate human existence. The social nature of human group behavior is pivotal to our conceptualization, as it is through shared experiences and interactions in a cultural group that orientation and beliefs about the universe are formed. From such collective perspectives about life, groups develop systematic practices and behaviors concerning what it means to exist, what is their relationship to the universe, what behaviors must be enacted to carry out the relationship, and so on. Human groups develop religion. Indigenous Religion

Prior to encountering the origins and practices of Cuban religions in Ori­ ente, we had defined an indigenous religion as one where the cosmic orientation and practices of a group of human beings were related spiritually and/or genealogically connected to original inhabitants of a land space. Spiritual customs of settlers who brought their religious traditions to a foreign land but who do not unite those practices with those of the original inhabitants were not considered indigenous. The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spanish explorers and settlers who arrived in Oriente encountered autochthonous inhabitants and their spiritual practices, but the Europeans did not engage, adopt, nor respect the sacred customs of the island’s Indians. The newcomers were settlers to the 36

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land who would not integrate themselves into existing cosmic orientation and would disassociate from the inherent values of ancestors interred on the island. On the other hand, Africans arrived involuntarily as enslaved workers, not as settlers. Their contact and exchanges with Indians revealed a common ground wherein both groups were excluded from access to the dominant colonial power. They shared the inequities of enslaved status but, more importantly, the two groups shared overlapping appreciation for spirits and ancestors, and an active reverence for both. These commonalities eased contact and exchange that introduced into the collaborative existence new, transculturated behavioral forms. The interaction produced acceptance, respect, and communal rituals for interring the dead of both groups in the shared landscape, respecting the wisdom of these island-based ancestors, and many other consequences. A pattern of ritual customs developed and evolved to characterize sacred ceremonies and spaces. We call these shared sacred rituals, as well as the religious activities that resulted from them, “indigenous,” that is, indigenous to Cuba. Intentionality

In discussing the lives and history of oppressed people, and particularly those of African descendants in the Americas, our research team noted that such discussions inevitably revolve around the nature of oppression and/or how oppressors have or have not been successful in achieving their goals. We attempted to put the oppressed at the center of our investigation, to give priority to their goals and actions whether or not these were directly related to the constraints of their situation or to the techniques of those who oppressed. Resistance is an obvious conceptual category for understanding such behaviors, but we also struggled to comprehend intentionality, especially that of African descendants in Oriente. Toward this end, we defined intentionality as purposeful acts of a people, individually and collectively, that invoked their shared historical and cultural memory and were focused on their partial or full liberation. This idea is not focused on the individuality of intention but the shared values and understandings a people have produced for themselves that are concerned with where they, as a group, belong in the larger universal scheme of human activity. Our understanding of intentionality is inextricably linked to the fact that, as a species, humans are collective in their existence. We will reconsider this concept later on in this volume, with emphasis on what we learned about it during our field research. contours and concepts

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Transculturation

The concept of transculturation came into academic usage through the Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz as he began his investigations into descendants’ continued use of Africa-based cultural expressions. According to this concept, in colonial situations a process of exchange and sharing occurs—most times through grappling and contesting—in those longterm arrangements and locations where there are or have been different cultural groups living in relative permanent proximity of each other and where there is an inequitable distribution of power and social resources. These locations, called contact zones, are mostly associated with imbalanced social and political power where multiple groups from different cultural backgrounds are struggling to establish their group’s social space in the whole. Power imbalance gives some groups a disadvantage but does not prevent them from inserting their cultural ideas and preferences into the new social arrangements. The ensuing grappling, struggles, sharing, and exchanges constitute a process that produces new ideas, new social and cultural behaviors, and new societal structures. The new constructions become normative for the contact zone and can evolve into new identities. The process is what Fernando Ortiz labeled transculturation and what he contends occurred in Cuba’s long colonial era.48 We employ the idea as an analytical tool for probing historical events and circumstances that encased the lives of African descendants in Oriente and led them to create sacred rituals that they conveyed to their progeny. There are other important terms and concepts that our Oriente research employed, for example, ethnogensis. However, definitions and clarifications of these usually will be provided as they are introduced in the text. Our work is exploratory above all. We do not propose, espouse, or attempt to elaborate a particular set of theoretical ideas above another. Nevertheless, the Oriente research was rigorous and systematic, as solid investigations should be. We were geographically focused in the process, we gathered information from a specific population, and we gave consideration to investigative methods and relevant literature that engaged our issues and population. In the end, however, we have only explored sacred spaces of Oriente and await others to correct and/or expand our thinking about them.

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2

African Cosmic Orientation Core Commonalties

You Africans don’t know time You don’t even know who invented the clock —Besieged, film by Bernardo Bertolucci, 1998 Thi s chap t er i s devot ed to exa min ing the sha re d cosmic orientation that permeates indigenous religions as we investigated them in Oriente and as that sensibility originally arrived with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Africans who landed in Cuba’s eastern region. These individuals brought conscious and unconscious appreciations about what it meant to be part of the universe, a world into which they had been born. Much of this was remembered, as opposed to cognitive continental knowledge, since most of the Africans were older than ten when they were captured.1 The captives also had behavioral experiences with their homeland orientation and certainly remembered, for example, societal rules about how to interpret and evaluate natural phenomena, even in a new landscape.2 From this base of phenomenological knowledge, they went about the business of adapting, reconstructing, and constructing behaviors appropriate to the new Cuban environment. Africans were not empty vessels into which whole new definitions of what it meant to be human or to exist in the universe was poured.



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We examine noteworthy aspects of the overarching cosmic orientation and some shared phenomenological principles that colonial Africans used to create ritual behaviors in Oriente, behaviors that were regularized and passed on as religious practices to new members and generations who shared their cultural and sociopolitical world. We also examine Africa-based understandings of such concepts as being, time, spirits, space, power, revelation, possession, and ritual, as well as forms of reverence. We propose that with distinct comprehensions about these phenomena, colonial Africans produced a symbolic universe, and that some of these components continue in contemporary Oriente practices. The symbolic world they constructed also continues to be influenced, if not directed, by Africabased cosmic orientation. As such, the emblematic body of perceptions and knowledge is central to sacred spaces they build. However, we must begin the discussion of common cosmic orientation with the briefest review of conceptual understandings about the interactive nature of human knowledge production as the foundation of the social construction of reality, reality that includes organizational arrangements and institutions. With the clarification of these complex interrelationships as a reference, we will proceed to explore salient components of the Africa-based orientation that Oriente practitioners employ in their interactive world.

Human Interaction and Knowledge Knowledge that human beings acquire or possess is a direct product of the social nature of their species. From what foods to eat to why they are alive, humans comprehend who they are in the world through their interactions. Religious practices are equally a social product of what human beings understand about themselves and the world in which they live. Like many behavioral creations, such sacred practices also are embedded within humans’ understandings about what it means to exist and what is existence. These comprehensions are generalized just as they are specific and the knowledge includes a multiplicity of ideas and behavioral characteristics. Knowledge about existence is built into religious practice and in Oriente sacred spaces reflect practitioners’ understandings of their religion with all of its inherent components. Human beings, including Oriente inhabitants, acquire their sense of self and eventual identity in interactive and reciprocal-behavioral groups 40

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where they produce patterns of habitualized activities: particular greetings to others on a first encounter, specific clothing to wear for special occasions, and so on. Group participants recognize and respond to many of the patterns as part of everyday life categories, such as hugging, talking, eating, sleeping, praying, and laughing. The habitualized patterns of social interaction become expected, ordinary, and taken for granted by members of a common group or cultural community. In cultural communities, many such patterns are classified and further linked into definitive group subtypes, if not stereotypes. These are typifications (i.e., categories) of interactive behavioral patterns commonly associated with groups of humans who share the characteristics. Typifications develop to help organize the myriad of complexities and unpredictabilities in human life. Typifications are passed on to new members and generations who also then share experiences in the cultural community. The typified interactions are not personalized or individualized per se but are expectations of behaviors by individuals who have common relations in the group and in society; they are categories of social roles. As such, typifications mark the beginning of organizations that help form social institutions. Organizations are formal and informal, well integrated, regularized patterns of interactive relationships where individuals from different local groups and sometime different cultural communities intersect. Behaviors in organizations include the entire body of interactive relationships existing within the structural arrangements of a society. Similarly, social institutions are those relatively stable and organized roles, norms, and behavioral associations that are sufficiently widespread to affect all society members, including distributing them in space and time. Social institutions are mandatory to ensure the survival of society. For the first five centuries of Cuba’s existence, African descendants of Oriente lived within the institutional arrangements of a colonial slave economy; they lived minimally within social organizational arrangements of small cities, plantations, and farms. They also lived within interactive and reciprocal exchanges with other continental descendants as well as with individuals from differing ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The African descendants developed, and continue to develop, understandings about self and their world within these collectivities of Oriente exchanges. Whether enslaved or free, they were not fully integrated into the colonial social order of shared resources. Their shared experiences of discrimination, oppression, and enslavement became the body of knowledge around which they built religious practices. The shared cosmic orientation of the african cosmic orientation

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cultural communities, individuals and collectives, was central to their creation of such customs. Understandings about cosmic orientation are contained within symbolic representations produced by human communities in their dance, art, music, languages, and vocabularies. Language and vocabulary may be oral, written, gestural, characters (e.g., Chinese symbols), and so on. These symbolic representations contain appreciations about reality, and the cosmic orientation is rooted deep within the shared linguistic system. When expressed, the orientation is an appreciation of what it means to exist or “to be,” just as it indicates basic rules about behavior with natural phenomena. These are critical understandings for all humans and foretell their existence in Oriente practices of indigenous religions. Eventually, our field observations and understanding of the core components of cosmic orientation and principles or rules of natural phenomena led us to propose that Africa-based knowledge remains a part of the cosmic core that practitioners continue to use to adapt and create their symbolic world. At the same time, cosmic orientation is pivotal to the complete body of knowledge shared by human cultural communities and it is used interactively in members’ daily living experiences with time and space.3 Their orientation is also used to construct fundamental social relations, like family, religious affiliates, educational relations, and so on. Over mutual time and experiences, the collective knowledge defines the group members’ world and becomes a significant part of their reality. For enslaved Africans in Oriente, cross-cultural contact and exchange had been a reality for most of their ethnic groups even before their trans-Atlantic passages and these were an important beginning for the body of knowledge shared, created, and transmitted to African descendants in the new world. The Ewé Fon/Adja people of contemporary Benin, the peoples of Yorubaland (now known as Nigeria), the Bantu-speaking peoples of the Kongo Kingdom of modern Angola and Gabon, and peoples of other areas in western and southwest central Africa had had mutual, interactive migration and trade long before trans-Atlantic crossings as captives.4 These contacts and exchanges were partially facilitated by reciprocal relationships and/ or warfare, but the ease of African cross-ethnic cultural exchange was also due to the common cosmic orientation of the ethnic groups. Each African societal cluster, with a variety of ethnic and subcultural groupings, comprehended their world as part of a divinely created, universal order, and they understood human beings as part of that order but not the most important 42

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part. The rhythm that maintains the order is not under the control of human beings and does not necessarily respond to human desires. In addition, many African societies had several overlapping and/or similar rituals, ceremonies, rites, and other behaviors of life that evolved from that shared orientation.5 John Mbiti’s book, African Religions and Philosophy, is an important early reference that helps clarify assertions about cosmic orientation and other commonalities among African societal groups. Since its publication in 1969, Mbiti and other authors have expanded academic thinking about the shared body of foundational knowledge of those raised on the African continent, particularly those from West Africa. This was the enculturated or primary socialization foundation that captive Africans brought to colonial Oriente and other parts of the Americas.6 Amid the various ethnic communities within West African societies, most had a mutual understanding about what Western Europeans and North Americans might comprehend as religion. These cultural communities were intimately aware that



• Religion permeates all departments of life so fully that it is not always easy or possible to isolate. • There is no formal distinction between the sacred and the secular, between the religious and non-religious, between the spiritual and the material arenas of life. • There are no creeds to be recited; instead, any equivalent of creeds are written in the heart . . . and each one [person] is . . . a living creed. Where the individual is, [so] is his religion because he is a religious being.7

From the basics of their mutual cosmic understanding, various African ethnic and societal groups developed interactive patterns and typifications for ritual practice, what we would call religious activity. Enslaved persons transported to Oriente carried their homeland ideas to the Americas and we contend that such conceptions remained active in the regional environment throughout the colonial eras and beyond. A contributing factor to the continuation was that Oriente received legal and clandestine shiploads of Africa-born captives throughout all of the colonial centuries.8 We observed contemporary material and nonmaterial objects within regional sacred spaces that practitioners reported were part of what had been handed down to them through history and adapted to contemporary circumstances. african cosmic orientation

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The understanding of reality articulated by contemporary practitioners confirms Mbiti’s findings on Africa-based ideas about religion. For example, when our research team first asked what religion an individual practiced, many responded that they lived “an African life” or “an African way” rather than speak about “religion.” Their statements and body language conveyed a dislike for the use of religious language and a preference for the Africa-related descriptors. Initially we also tried to delineate between sacred or religious activities and those we presumed to be secular, to distinguish between spiritual and material arenas of life. Again, practitioners consistently converted our language of separate categories into words that blurred linguistic difference. This is consistent with Mbiti’s discussions about African conceptualizations of religion. An example of the interconnection between cosmic orientation and language can be seen in how practitioners spoke of the president of Cuba. Fidel Ruiz Castro was regularly referred to as president of their country, but respondents also spoke of him as a participant in indigenous religious reality—actual, envisioned, or symbolic. In this fashion, they used words that coincided with spiritual understandings of the man and his actions even as he is the political leader of the island. They were so persistent in linguistically connecting what we separated into two categories of life—the sacred and the secular—that we became convinced we could not faithfully portray their symbolic world if we maintained our categorized perspective. Therefore, we began to analyze information from their viewpoint of an integrated, African way of life. This is yet another way in which indigenous religions impact life in Oriente. Changes or adaptations to twentieth- and twenty-first-century life do seem to be occurring in Oriente, at least in one area of Africa-based religious practice. This concerns the existence of a creed or regularly articulated statement of beliefs. We observed that, during some rituals, communities of practitioners recited the same sets of statements to express religious beliefs or basic understandings about the cosmos. The creed-like litanies were recited during ceremonies of Oriente’s Regla de Ocha/Lucumí and Espiritismo traditions, but we also heard such a litany in one community of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe adherents. This was a surprise because up to that point we had known the Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe spiritual practice to be particularly without a creed. When coding individual and focus-group interviews, we could not clarify if practitioners felt the content of the recitation was integral to sacred comprehensions, or if the creed was merely rote, a valued exercise 44

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learned from ancestors, not necessarily reflective of ideas incorporated into ritual meanings of their lives. There is a clear need for further research on this aspect of indigenous religions in Oriente. However, recitations do not appear to have compromised practitioners’ visions of themselves as beings that “carry their religious creed within their hearts, and where they are is where their religion is.” This introductory presentation of Africa-based ideas concerning the nature of religion, as well as an exemplary discussion about Oriente practitioners’ alignment with those ideas, is a backdrop to our descriptions of the four religions and their sacred spaces. All of this is inherently integrated into the social nature of human knowledge we presented earlier and equally embedded within Africa-based cosmic orientation as it has been reformulated in the Oriente environment of Cuba. We now shift to explore salient components of the shared cosmic orientation that helped colonial Africans develop principles about phenomena in their new social and natural surroundings.

Cosmic Orientation In concert with the above interactionist approach to human activities and their foundations to societal organizational formations, the work of anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Richard Price also appears to be grounded in an interactionist posture regarding the arrival of enslaved Africans in the Americas. These investigators propose that Africans who survived the trans-Atlantic Middle Passage carried with them their homeland-based cosmic orientation, “phenomenological principles,” and fragmented behavioral details about how life was suppose to be enacted. The two anthropologists contend that these principles concerning natural phenomena, coupled with remembered behavioral fragments, guided enslaved Africans toward adaptations and/or facsimile re-creations of Africa-based activities in their new environments.9 We concur with Mintz and Price and further assert that although social, political, and natural environments were different across the Atlantic, captive Africans were led by their imported, Africa-based cosmic orientation and phenomenological principles, principles that directed behavior about such things as the phases of the moon, the rise of the sun, the flash of lightning, the crash of thunder, burial of the dead, and the consecration of new babies, even when these phenomena occurred far from their homelands. african cosmic orientation

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Their understandings were a baseline body of unspoken and subconscious knowledge that did not disappear just because life for the captives was in­­ terrupted by horrific displacement and laborious lives. In Oriente, colonial Africans adjusted their phenomenological responses to be survival behaviors appropriate for interaction with new humans, new things, new lands, and new social ideas. Among the tenacious cosmic ideas they sustained was that the world still included spirits, ethereal beings. This became an important common idea as early Africans encountered autochthonous inhabitants of the region. The Indians and Africans shared basic beliefs about the cosmic world as well as a mutual, sociopolitical condition of enslavement.10 In addition to knowing that humans are part of, located within, and intimately linked to the universe, colonial Africans knew that the world existed within a basic order, had fundamental organization and rhythm, and that humans did not control the organization, rhythm, or world. They knew one ultimate supernatural or Supreme Creator of all things and understood that the essence of life was contained in all things created by that being. The ultimate supernatural Creator entity had different names, stories, and attributes based on specific traditions and practices of African cultural groups, but the shared understanding of a Supreme Creator remained even as the Europeans they came in contact with misunderstood or disparaged Africans’ different representations.11 Over time and in response to European contact on their homeland continent, some African cultural communities shifted their understandings of an ultimate supernatural being, an emphasis not previously highlighted, as a means of establishing religious legitimacy and political cachet in the eyes of powerful European intruders.12 African cosmic orientation appreciates that nonmaterial spirits exist and often share the universe as well as the historical world with humans. The distinction is between a universal order that goes beyond human knowledge and the world that is part of human historical awareness. In both instances, Africa-based orientation comprehends that the universe consists of living beings, including humans, created by the ultimate supernatural Creator; ethereal beings, spirits who will soon enter life form and participate in the historical material world; and spirits of people no longer living in a physical body—the dead. In addition, the world of humans includes other life forms—fish, animals, and plants—as well as objects and phenomena seemingly without life—dirt, water, air, and rocks. All contain spiritual essence that was provided by the ultimate supernatural Creator. There also is a category of supernatural or divine spirits who are part of the universe 46

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but who do not necessarily live in the world with humans, and who can be called upon to visit. A summation of this African cosmic orientation can be stated as follows:



• An ultimate supernatural entity or Creator is ultimately responsible for creation of the totality of the universal order and all phenomena therein not made by humans. • The essence of creative existence, material, spiritual, and otherwise, is integrated, overlapping, and permeates one to the other. • Humans share spiritual essence with biological/animate and nonbiological/inanimate phenomena. • Some spirits of the supernatural phenomena share worldly existence with humans, some do not, but spirits may be distinguished by categorical types.

Such an orientation clearly generates essential knowledge about the world and how it is ordered. Colonial Africans possessed this body of shared cognitive and unconscious knowledge and used it in their Oriente interactions. Their shared knowledge served to inform the development of an assemblage of ritual activities and their transmission to others such distinct spiritual customs.

Phenomenological Principles Contemporary practitioners say that their ritual lives lie within the Africabased orientation we discussed. Our observations of their activities also reveal that Africa-based principles or rules about naturally occurring phenomena are still actively employed in Oriente. Respondents reported that the principles are as handed down from their ancestors, and that they organize their understanding and life based on them. The sum of ideas from practitioners’ ritual traditions informs the building of their sacred spaces just as they build sacred spaces in conjunction with ideas about natural phenomena. We identified the following five natural phenomena as salient to practitioner communities and for which they employ an Africa-based understanding:

• The nature of being in the universe; • The concept of time; • The nature of space and the spirit world; african cosmic orientation

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• Understandings about the nature of power in the universe; • Acceptance of spiritual revelation and possession as events that are normal occurrences in the material world.

Our field research revealed that, within venerational activities, rituals and other forms of reverence, such as rhythms and dance, are equally important components of the Africa-based cosmic knowledge Oriente practitioners use. When expressed in religious practice, the components convey an understanding of devotees’ lives, and sacred spaces are constructed from these categories and experiences. Each component is discussed in more detail below. The Nature of Being

The idea of “being” is a complex understanding about what it means for humans to be part of and within the totality of the world in which they live; what it means to exist, to be. Understandings about “beingness” are derived from cosmic orientation. Within Africa-based orientation, “to be” is possible because all created things—those not made by animate beings—were ultimately given their original life form by the supernatural force of the Supreme Creator, the ultimate entity. This ultimate creative force is the core essence of all beingness as well as the distributed portions of that life-giving essence. Some of the sacred spiritual essence or power from the Supreme Creator was instilled within everything in the created, universal order. The single source of core spiritual power is the one shared relationship of all creation. This appreciation is a fundamental part of indigenous traditions’ comprehension that the universe is an integrated phenomenon wherein all things are interrelated and connected; no thing stands wholly independent or alone. The supernatural force, the ultimate entity, is also transcendent across life and imminent in daily encounters.13 Oriente ritual practices continue to mirror their Africa-based origins and reflect beingness as belonging to all that has been created, including humans, animals, insects, fish, rocks, trees, plants, mountains, oceans, rivers, lakes, and so forth. This consciousness means that rocks, plants, trees, mountains, animals, and all created things possess some of the supernatural essence of the Supreme Creator force and should be revered. Most indigenous religions give reverence priority to a select number of created material things in accordance with instructions from their specific tradition. Practitioners in Oriente also revere specific nonmaterial entities that share universal space and time 48

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with animate material beings, just as they give sacred attention to spirits even though these ethereal beings may be invisible to most humans. The Concept of Time

The Africa-based idea of “time” is distinct, minimally as related to Western European and North American understandings, and this orientation informs behavioral principles that directly link the time phenomenon to events.14 Time is event based. The Creator gave time but it is episodic and discontinuous, not connected to abstract consequences. Time is neither linear nor a thing, nor a commodity. Within Africa-based orientation, time does not move forward toward an inevitable end of the world, nor does it unfold continuously to a better or worse stage of development. It has no beginning and is considered unending, even though creation marks a beginning of the material universe that humans know. Time takes multiple forms, and each form has a variety of durations and qualities. For example, there is mythical time, historical time, ritual time, seasonal time, solar time, and lunar time, and all are coordinated in different yet integrated ways. The phases of time include a long past, the present, and a short-to-nonexistent future, all of which are part of the various rhythmic time forms of the universe. Within Africa-based cosmic orientation, emphasis is placed on past and present time, producing a more two-dimensional rendering that directly links to events that have happened, are happening now, and will happen rather immediately.15 The past—time phases with events that have already happened—is of long duration because a multitude and complexity of events have previously occurred. Those who exist in the present know of the past because stories have been told about past events, not about abstract time. When things, events, and persons of the present complete their time as material entities and their material selves die, their spirit selves proceed into past time to become part of the living dead—if those who occupy the present continue to honor their memory. The present is right now and the future is almost without substance because events from the future have yet to happen and when they do, it will be in present time. No one has existed in the future and told stories of what happens there. For time to be real requires that someone experience events and pass that understanding to others. Humans produce reality through interactions in their groups. This bears selected resemblance to our earlier discussion of the social construction of reality in that reality is built by humans’ social interactions that create events. african cosmic orientation

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Material as well as spiritual experiences in time happen through one’s life and through the lives of people in one’s cultural community. No single individual can experience a longer present or past time and space than the collective members of a cultural community. This is because individuals in a community are familiar with varying aspects of the same events and no individual life can amass the sum of the group’s experiences. The collective experiences expand the breadth and depth of single-event time while increasing the body of knowledge about the present and past. The knowledge can be transmitted to additional individuals of a community through stories, poems, songs, chants, art, dance, parades, theater, pageants, and so on. These expose humans to knowledge of past and present events whether or not the individual was actually present. For example, few if any contemporary African descendants in Oriente were ever enslaved and none ever crossed the Atlantic Ocean in ships to be enslaved workers. However, generalized if not specific knowledge of those past events has been passed to many descendants as part of their historical memory and identity. This body of knowledge, and the memory and identity it helps to create, is produced through the telling and retelling of details about the Atlantic crossing and the centuries of ancestors’ enslavement. Single individuals, therefore, have a larger understanding of themselves as African descendants than each personal life can entail; each can envision or vicariously experience details about members of their cultural community. Africa-based cosmic orientation circumscribes principles about the time phenomenon and intimates its relationship to a socially unified understanding of historical, past time. The nature of the relationship is found in a community’s cultural values and socioreligious conditions and is intertwined with complex references to the past. Knowledge is transmitted to contemporary generations and incorporated into the present through particulars of events and past things that may never have been known by present-day persons. Knowledge of the past, as well as past knowledge, is imparted through roles and responsibilities of social structures, of formal and informal education, but also through other social networks and processes. Portions of a community’s transmitted cosmic knowledge can be reflected in memorial activities staged for those who have died, or in parades, pageants, or other performance productions prepared for significant events. The cosmic awareness is also reflected in stories, poems, songs, dances, and other means embedded in a group’s memory communications. Sacred spaces of Oriente belong to this arena of memory communication as they present, express, 50

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and embody a special appreciation of Africa-based orientation and its ac­­ companying understandings of past time as well as understandings about knowledge and being. Like other methods and processes of human knowledge transmission, Oriente sacred spaces envelope a community’s moral principles and their contents convey information about past-time values. Ancestors transmitted the information, as well as methods and processes for using it, and are the conveyors of the community’s inherent values. Sacred spaces, therefore, reflect important parts of what a human group values, and material objects assembled in those spaces are memory items. Objects can reflect deeds of practitioners’ ancestors as well as past knowledge. For example, see the photograph of two Cuban heroes on the wall in figure 4. Placed inside sacred sites, such material objects can bring the past into the present, and thereby include spirits as a constant. In so doing, the material objects articulate Africa-based comprehensions of time in the sacred geographies. The Nature of Space and the Spirit World

Each indigenous tradition possesses creation stories that include an ultimate supernatural entity or Creator, as well as other divine beings and spirits. The stories describe how the forces of these ethereal entities function, both before and after creation, and each tradition gives differentiated emphases to the Creator and divine spirits, including their responsibilities in the cosmic universal order. In our study, the religions’ common Africabased orientation informs the understanding that creation included bringing the universe into existence, but it also posits that supernatural forces influence some human-made things and their relationships. Oriente practitioners appreciate that the human world of historical and material things—including galaxies and other known and unknown parts of the totality of the universe—is not the only world. This comprehension acknowledges a world of benevolent and malevolent spirit forces that participate in the historical world of humans and in the otherworld of spirits. However, the perception should not be equated with Western civilization’s ideas about heaven and hell. On the other hand, the indigenous religions have dissimilar customs re­­ garding how humans interact with, respond, and react to divine spirits. The variations are a result of beliefs rooted in the African-ethnic backgrounds of the different religions and in their differential evolution within circumstances of Oriente’s historical development. The shared understanding that african cosmic orientation

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traverses each tradition is that divine spirits occupied or filled space long before a material, cosmic world appeared and they remained present and active even as the world known by humans was created. Divine spirits are intimately related to the ultimate supernatural entity (the Supreme Creator), to creation, to other supernatural forces of the cosmic world, and to humans and other spirits. Divine spirits possess an astonishing amount of supernatural essence that is the power of creation. The integrated relationships of these spirits to nature and to the process of creation exemplify the monotheistic and polytheistic linkage of Africa-based cosmic orientation. Said another way, the cosmic perspective of Africa-based religions integrates belief in a singular entity of ultimate supernatural nature with an appreciation of multiple, supernatural spirit forces.16 Such a comprehension overlaps with the cosmic appreciation about time and coincides with the nature of spirits of the dead. The latter category is a separate but related group of spirits whose differences are demarcated by the time phenomenon. The first group of spirits of the dead is composed of those whose bodies have recently died and who occupy present time in a category known as the “living dead.” The second category comprises the spirits of human ancestors, those who died a long time ago. Members of each category can have distinct characteristics just as humans can be differentiated by gender, hair color, eyes, height, weight, food preferences, and so on. Ancestors and the living dead spirits continue to interact with the material world as long as living family members, friends, and others remember the spirits and call upon them. Family members, friends, acquaintances, and others who remember and call upon ancestors and the living dead may never actually have known the individuals in life. Remembered ancestor spirits, known and unknown, are another category of the dead. They occupy a more distant past time from the living dead and from those in the generalized category of recent or unremembered ancestors. This group of spirits inhabits the spirit world of a far distant past. However, all groups of spirits can temporarily visit and participate in the material world of humans. Spirits, usually those of either ancestor category, can be part of future time and space. Their participation in future time is through the yet-to-be-born, babies who will come into human form soon and/or are still in the womb or conception process. Oriente practitioners place enhanced value on visitations by spirits, as they know spirits who visit can share with humans the wisdom gained from participating in past time and in present time, as well as have access to the near future. 52

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Oriente practitioners further propose that some humans are allowed or are given an ability to see some spirits, particularly spirits of the living dead. These respondents reported, “You know, long long time ago, in ancient human times, [long before contact between Europe, Africa, and the Ameri­ cas], lots of people could see spirits. So if they could see spirits, these people would paint themselves the color of these spirits. This was usually that white color you can see through [translucent].”17 Practitioners also agreed that the living dead and divine spirits are the ones more regularly persuaded to participate temporarily with humans in present time. No one suggested why this was the case. With the exception of the ultimate supernatural power, the Supreme Creator, almost all natural forces and all spirits of all categories can be activated or invoked to assist living members of the material world, for good or not. Ancient divine spirits, as well as particular ancestral spirits, may possess a human body, usually during ritual time. This exemplifies the transworld process of spirit communication. Oriente devotees name divine spirits according to their religious tradition and collectively and individually, each tradition has a variety of practices associated with categories of spirits. An interesting occurrence to be discussed further later is our observation that, in the east, there is overlap in the function of spirits across religions as well as overlap in some of their characteristics, even though names for spirits differ. As we have generally delineated, Africa-based cosmic orientation about spirits continues to inform each religion’s development of ritual customs, shared or different. The Nature of Power

In concert with their African heritage, practitioners in Oriente view the ultimate supernatural entity—the Supreme Creator—as the actualization of total power, as the force of creation and more. This power transcends forces of nature to produce all that is natural, part of the cosmic world humans know, and beyond. Generalized power is the ability to make things happen within the creative rhythm of the universe but beyond patterns understood by most humans. That is to say, general power is the ability to make things happen even when there is total opposition. This idea resonates with sociologist Max Weber’s basic definition of the power phenomenon but goes beyond it to include an ability that transcends natural relationships, more in line with what Weber considered “charismatic” power.18 A fraction of the universe-derived power, or an ability to make things african cosmic orientation

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happen, was distributed to everything at the time of creation but not in equal portions. In order to participate in the extraordinarily efficacious power that transcends patterns of humans and other beings, an individual’s partial power must combine with the partial power of other created things. That is to say, to make things happen, one must collaborate with the power of other natural and supernatural entities to access powers that transcend opposition.19 Collaboration can be with the power of particular spirits of either category of the dead, with the power of divine spirits, or with the power of the natural forces of the world—including thunder, rain, lightning, water, fire, and so on. Oriente practitioners agree that to approach comprehension of the creative power in the natural rhythm of the cosmic world, humans can monitor such forces as thunder, the ocean, stars, fire, wind, earth, and love, as well as the cycles of life, death, and life again. Practitioners of all indigenous religions revere and respect universal order, although each tradition approaches powers of the universe and powers of creation in different ways. Likewise, each tradition uses the power phenomenon differently. Some emphasize its use for revealing spiritual messages for the living, while others employ power to make things happen based on adherents’ requests. Revelation and Possession

In Cuba’s eastern region, the dynamic phenomena of revelation and possession are connected, though revelation can occur without possession, but both most often happen in sacred spaces. This makes the spaces themselves geographies of spirit engagement. Revelation is an accepted aspect of most religions and serves as a mechanism for receiving otherworld knowledge. The historian John Thornton correctly proposes that revelation is the apparatus through which all religions are formed and changed and that it is an important phenomenological principle of African consciousness. He further explains that revelation is an expected means by which Africans and their descendants are regularly prepared to receive disclosure from the supernatural world. Colonial Africans of Oriente would normally have expressed their awareness and readiness for revelation and passed the phenomenological principle on to their progeny.20 This suggests that those who live within an Africa-based orientation and lifestyle will provide time and space in their activities for revelation to occur. To allow space is an additional phenomenological principle that has human behavioral consequences and may be perceived better in the arena 54

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of Western civilization known as art. Many artists, such as jazz musicians, develop abilities to respond creatively to revealed inspiration. We call this improvisation and the definitive role of syncopated rhythms in Cuban music might well be a creative musical consequence of the culturally expressed phenomenological idea of revelation. The musical forms and people who have mastered them are anticipating disclosures from the spiritual world and they allow space inside the timing of their compositions for such an event.21 Likewise, the expectation of revelation is recognized and expressed by Oriente religious practitioners who assemble sacred spaces. They make room in ritual time and their spaces for spirits, and they socialize new members to expect spirit contact. An event that demonstrates how revelation of ritual time and space changed plans for scheduled activities occurred with our research team at the worship house of a religious community. We were sitting with a family when the tata (leader of a Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe community) entered the room and announced, “Vicente just came to me while I was washin’. He wants us to be ready to receive him at the next work. You all gotta be sure to be here when he comes.” However, as community members gathered later that day for a sacred event designed for purposes not related to the visit from Vicente, several worshipers who had not heard the tata’s earlier statement revealed that the spirit of the previous leader, Vicente, had been in the room. Neither of the practitioners were expecting the visit at this event because it was not designed to (and had not) summoned spirits. The occurrence demonstrates that those with consciousness about spirits are regularly open for contact and revelation. Indigenous traditions practiced in Oriente hold that revelation happens through contact with or by spirits. Devotees told us that rather than a sighting or embodied event, they also experienced such inspirational contact through dreams. The provocative quotation that opens the next part encapsulates spirit inspiration rather than embodiment. “Spirits that come in dreams, with no words to walk on” refers to the idea that spirits need human receptacles who hear and can speak messages from the otherworld. At the same time, humans must have knowledge and ability to recognize the symbols when and however they happen, just as they must remain open to receive the revelations. Spirit possession is intimately linked with revelation and represents the process of entering a condition of amazing perceptive consciousness: a state of altered awareness caused by the presence of an ethereal being, a spirit african cosmic orientation

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temporarily occupying a human’s body. We feel that Rachel Harding’s findings about this phenomenon, which she encountered in Brazil, accurately represent the significance of spirit possession as understood by practitioners in Oriente. Harding proposes that spirit possession “is a relationship of exchange, of mutuality, of shared responsibility, and above all of accompaniment.” The possessing spiritual entity can be a divine spirit, an ancient ancestor spirit, a recent ancestor spirit, or a spirit of the living dead. While sharing the body of a human, each type of spirit can impart knowledge and images from the historical world as well as from the otherworld of supernatural beings. In this way, the person(s) possessed, and those who witness the event, are reminded that the material, historical conditions of their present world are not the ultimate statement of existence. This knowledge can be empowering for individuals and collectives whose lives and beings have been signified as powerless. Harding affirms this when she says that “possession is particularly significant because the occupation of black bodies by divine beings is a stunning contestation” by the oppressed of inhumane positions imposed on colonial and contemporary African descendants.22 Possession by a spirit of any category happens most regularly when some portion of space in the human material world has been temporarily reordered to permit these forces to enter present time. This spatial and temporal rearranging is usually achieved through appropriate rituals and other sacred procedures. The rearrangement uses liturgical and venerational devices, such as spatial adornment, prayers, chants, songs, drumming, and dance, as well as food, drink, and other offerings known to please and facilitate contact with spirits of the otherworld. Although efforts at atmospheric alterations can and often do lead to spirit visits, there is no guarantee that the beings will possess humans or that the contacted spirits will be the ones to visit. Nevertheless, all of our respondents expressed the understanding that spirits are available to help humans lead better lives, lives that are more in balance with the created universal order. Ritual

Rituals, by definition, repeat, reiterate, and reinforce shared knowledge just as they reinforce sacred and creative acts from past and recent present time.23 Rituals are prescribed activities through which humans can unite with the historical and thereby generate special time flexibility within the present. The time flexibility allows practitioners to transcend present time. This is the episodic discontinuity of the Africa-based concept of the 56

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time phenomenon. During ritual time, humans reestablish contact with inspired historical events in which those attending a ritual may not have participated. Members of our team experienced the coming of a spirit who, when he was alive had been well known by many in Santiago de Cuba. This spirit had been known as a popular “ladies’ man” but his downfall was the use of cocaine. When he came to a practitioner’s body during the ritual we attended, none of our team recognized him and had to be told his story as well as receive translation of his linguistic dialect. Rituals also allow practitioners of several indigenous religions to access healing knowledge during the transcendence of present time and to guide those in need toward healthier lifestyles with the received information. We experienced an exceptionally elaborate healing ritual, one that included sacrifice and fire, but instructions for such procedures are normally received during smaller, simpler sets of ritual procedures. Practitioners may be given specific regimes from the knowledge gained and instructions for the person seeking help may be accompanied by directives to see a medical doctor. Ultimately, however, those who seek spiritual rituals for healing are responsible to follow all instructions, and if they choose to disregard imparted information it is at their own risk. In Oriente, indigenous religious practices also instill a range of ritual behaviors into ordinary, everyday, taken-for-granted life, and thereby infuse the sacred throughout the lives of adherents. Respondents reported and we observed that devotees’ lives are filled with such ritualized activities, from the first thing done after waking in the morning to the last thing done before sleeping. Some rituals are overt and distinguishable while others are almost invisible. For example, those unfamiliar with indigenous religiosity in the region may not notice that people entering a practitioner’s home will tap the front door frame or knock on a small cabinet sitting at the entrance. As we moved throughout cities and rural towns of the region, we observed devotees of all descriptions doing this quick, almost invisible action. Of course, not everyone entering a house performs the ritual, but it is such a common action that practitioners take it for granted and the uninformed rarely notice. This also is true for practitioners, who when walking across railroad tracks pause, bend, and tap the iron three times. This behavior is well blended into ordinary actions of everyday life and reiterates the cosmic orientation that life is part of the sacred and living life is sacred. These are but a few characteristic conducts that are prevalent within the phenomenon of ritual as experienced in the lives of most Oriente african cosmic orientation

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practitioners. To expand beyond these generalized descriptions would violate particularities not shared across religious traditions. Other Forms of Reverence

There are other forms of reverence derived from Africa-based cosmic orientation and phenomenological principles, but we have identified a select few as significant and wish to explore them as additions to the above major categories. Such activities as chanting, singing, drumbeats, and dancing are intimate and integral parts of Oriente reverent behaviors and they characterize religious traditions as practiced in the region. Some of these forms of reverence are more prominent, energetic, and visible in one or more traditions, but, at some time or another, one or more appeared in ritual work done in sacred spaces we researched. The activities were never observed as mere ambiance or supplements to sacred work but were perceptibly essential components of the totality of symbolic language contained in ceremonial behaviors of a religious practice. Activities of reverence are a form of prayer as well as a means of preparing for entrance into the perceptive consciousness of spirit possession. Drum rhythms, dance gestures, formulaic chants, some songs, and even spatial adornment—as well as interactions among and between these—are coded to identities of divine spirits, ancestral spirits, and spirits of the living dead. The coded presentations help to change the material world’s atmospheric space of sacred work in order to create a charged ambiance that encourages visitation from the supernatural world. The goal of the changes is to invite spirits to present time so that practitioners might receive an embodied experience, a possession, or an altered consciousness. These allow humans to be included more deeply in the insightful knowledge and rhythms of creative power, if only temporarily. Rhythms, chants, drumbeats, songs, and dance also function as mechanisms that transmit historical information. These linguistic religious and ritual utterances incorporate descriptive messages of events that mark a community’s connection to ancestral history and more recent past events. The articulations also can include events about other practitioner groups and worshipers who share the same sacred tradition but within a different community. For example, chants and some drum rhythms contain stories and proverbs about continental beginnings, while many invocational songs and chants that begin ceremonies are regularly played, sung, or spoken in languages of a religion’s African origins or transculturated linguistic creation.24 58

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Oriente’s Cuban Spanish may be used for the names of significant personalities, activities, and places, but other aspects of the sung and performed prayers may also be in the language of a tradition’s African origins. A ritual event of the Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe tradition will be useful to demonstrate some of these points. In Oriente, Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe is noted to convene special chanting or singing “battles.” The battles are planned ritual occasions as well as spontaneous gatherings in which designated reputed singers from different worship communities come together competitively to learn and demonstrate detailed knowledge of significant ancestral episodes of their religion and respective practicing communities. If there are resources, the battles include drumming and rhythmic chants. The songs of storytelling that accompany the rhythmic drums and chants are coded expressions traceable to streams of knowledge about African origins and ancestry of the religion and/or a specific community. There can be dancing at the battles but whatever the components, there are precise rules for how the events are to proceed. There are rules for interrupting a battler’s verbal performance in order to respond or change the direction of the storytelling; rules for how to exclude battlers who are telling a story incorrectly and/or are exceptionally weak; and there are rules for who is eligible to compete or be a battler. Furthermore, there are specifications to determine when the social event has ended and who was the most successful. Successful competitors are collectively determined and individual as well as community reputations are vested in the competitions. Battlers are trained within their worshiping groups and require years of preparation as well as an appropriate voice and spiritual designation. However, the most important aspect of battle occasions is not the competition but the fact that the ritual introduces, corrects, and/or affirms at­­ tendees in their knowledge of historical personalities and occurrences of their tradition. The gatherings also confirm the valued aesthetic of song, drumming, chants, rhythms, and collective participation as important forms of sacred behavior. These and other ritualized occasions are activities of reverence even as they are oral records of events and revitalize a tradition’s historical chronologies, including genealogies.25 When all components of some rituals are appropriately performed, including the coded forms of reverence in drums, chants, songs, and dance, the atmosphere surrounding the activities is reordered. A spiritual current can be established and under these rearranged conditions, revelation, possession, or another embodied experience is more likely to african cosmic orientation

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occur. Each religion acknowledges that rhythms, chants, drumbeats, and/ or dance are normal parts of sacred reality and are central to invoking a personified spiritual occurrence.

Summary Thoughts In this chapter we have presented our interactionist perspective about the social construction of reality, a perspective that confirms that human beings gain identity and their ability to survive through group interactions. We then discussed salient core elements of the shared Africa-based cosmic orientation employed in Oriente. The interactionist clarifications were the reference point for presenting fuller details about the Africa-based cosmic orientation. Our focus was on concepts of being, time, spirits and space, power, revelation and possession, as well as ritual and other forms of reverence as understood and practiced in Oriente. These examinations of shared orientation, elements of phenomenological principles, and other forms of reverence are all derived from that cosmic knowledge and provide solid groundwork for the discussions in following chapters. We move now to explore some purposes of sacred spaces and how they generally function in Oriente.

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What Sacred Spaces Do

Academic fields of religious studies, anthropology, geography, sociology, and others have persistently investigated religious activities as a product of human group interactions. Sacred spaces that result from religious activities also have received considerable attention as scholars and researchers study them and apply an array of methods and theories. For example, David Morgan and Sally H. Promey’s anthology, The Visual Culture of American Religions, explores spaces as visual culture. Sandra Greene took her examination of spaces to Ghana and produced the volume Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana. And the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan centers his interest in space on how “place,” composed of spaces, is an experienced, human phenomenon created through habitual interactions of ordinary daily life. Tuan contends that “the concept of place refers not simply to geographic location but to a dialectical relationship between environment and human narrative.”1 Sacred spaces, too, can take on this complexity. Most investigators will agree that human interactions produce knowledge that is indispensable to the construction of a society in a given environment, and sacred spaces can be significant parts of the knowledge produced. In chapter 1, we set forth the geographic and historical parameters that examined colonial Africans as intimate participants in building

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Oriente. In chapter 2, we reviewed the interactive nature of human knowledge production as the foundation for constructing reality, and we examined the shared Africa-based cosmic orientation brought to Oriente by colonial enslaved workers. We also presented salient elements of phenomenological knowledge derived from that orientation as contemporarily used among Oriente practitioners. Now we turn our attention to the idea of sacred spaces themselves. The purpose is to clarify important functions and particular responsibilities of these geographies in the context of indigenous religions practiced in Oriente. At no time do we purport to be exhaustive in the functions attributed to sacred spaces but we believe that important functions will be considered and that they resonate in the eastern environment of Cuba. Sacred spaces—locations or geographies of sacrality—are visual representations of a common, collective body of knowledge that has been accumulated and transmitted by religious practitioners over several, if not hundreds or thousands, of years. Sacred spaces are constructed assemblages of shared awareness that articulate a three-dimensional symbolic expression of the body of knowledge that undergirds practitioners’ comprehensions about life and being in the world. This is a pool of cultural information produced through commonly understood interactions with beings, ideas, things, entities, and activities of the historical and cosmic world—a world that existed long before humans appeared. Sacred spaces of Oriente’s indigenous religions exist within the general complexity of collective cosmic orientation and knowing. Contemporary practitioners’ specific appreciations about the cosmos are mostly derived from the continental heritage passed to them by colonial enslaved Africans.2 These regional inhabitants also understand that interaction in sacred spaces is charged with dynamic and sometimes explosive cosmic energy. Most have experienced and/or know of occurrences in the spaces that are unlike the dynamics or action performed in other, outside locations. This suggests that in addition to having specific functions, sacred spaces of Oriente possess a charismatic character.3 We will return to the topic of charisma shortly.

Roles of Spaces Generally, sacred spaces of all varieties and religious traditions are part of the world of humans and have roles in that reality. They accomplish certain

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purposeful goals and objectives and are arenas of ritual behavior. They can be small, personalized locations where individuals perform particular acts related to a personal understanding of the cosmic order, just as they can be large, massive settings, where a community of supplicants regularly gathers to perform and reenact activities related to principles of their cosmic orientation and religious tradition. We want to review salient functions of both large and small spaces and will do so by using ideas put forth by David Morgan and Sally H. Promey.4 These are not the only authors to suggest functions of spaces but their discussions proved useful for our work in qualifying the unknown of Oriente assemblages. Morgan and Promey propose that sacred spaces have an assortment of important, though not exhaustive, roles and we have expanded their propositions to incorporate general observations of spaces in Oriente. Our thinking combines with these authors to suggest that sacred spaces can

• help set boundaries to demarcate the social context of a community; • serve as stimulus for communication and communion between hu­mans and others through ritual exchange; • serve to re-member participants of a tradition as well as to create meaning and memory; • serve as a defining aesthetic foundation that is associated with a tradition; and • serve to stimulate and inspire creative acts and actions that are drawn from within the meaning-making practices of a tradition.

Context and Boundary Setting

A first responsibility of sacred spaces is that of setting boundaries within which context-particularized human activity occurs. A series of sacred spaces can designate the boundaries for specialized content and behavior within the enclosure. Spaces as boundaries can separate internal locations, like city districts, that emphasize religious activity from locations that have other emphases, even locations that may be in close proximity. For some time, this was an abstract idea for members of our research team. We knew that Oriente was nationally recognized as the region where the largest number of enslaved workers ran away from their island captivity.5 We also knew that Cuba’s three armed struggles for independence originated in the eastern region, and we were aware that Oriente has always been noted

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for having a high percentage of African-descendant citizens. We had even been advised in Havana that, “Santiagueros (those who live in the city of Santiago de Cuba) are a different breed.”6 However, it was only after we had spent time in the region that our research respondents introduced us to their generalized understanding that Santiago is filled with city neighborhoods where indigenous religious practices are pervasive and that sacred spaces within such vicinities help demarcate identity of the neighborhoods and prescribe boundaries between and among them. For example, there is a portion of Santiago that is noted on official documents and by some citizens as Los Olmos. This is a large urban section sitting northeast, at the bottom of the hill area where the city was first organized (see map 6). Early in our investigation, we were introduced to Los Olmos but not by civil or geographic specifications. Rather, a respondent agreed to take us to “Los Hoyos” and explained that, “You’ll see. You’ll be able to know Los Hoyos inside of Los Olmos ’cause there’s a special house that tells you. The house is a mark.” He was right. The outside of the marker house was colorfully painted with a mural, and inside, visible even to an outsider passing by, was a sacred space built in honor of a spirit force of an indigenous religion. We were told further that Los Hoyos has an extraordinary number of such indoor sacred spaces because a large number, if not the majority, of neighborhood inhabitants are practitioners of one or more traditions. As our guide respondent said, “There’re lots of spaces like these. They’re everywhere. Everybody’s got one somewhere in their house ’cause almost everybody around here is a godchild [practitioner].” Now we had been introduced to an entire city district, Los Olmos, where a specified house served as boundary marker for an internal neighborhood, Los Hoyos, which was known for its religious emphasis and sacred spaces. Los Hoyos became an important center of our Santiago research, but we needed considerable more face-to-face encounters before we began to fully comprehend the neighborhood as a specialized sacred “place” as conceptualized by Yi-Fu Tuan.7 He contends that perception is affected by cultural exposure, and early in our work we lacked that exposure to indigenous religions. An expanded guided tour of Los Hoyos helped to improve our understanding of content, context, and boundaries of the pervasive religious nature of Los Hoyos, Los Olmos, Santiago de Cuba, and Oriente. We were escorted on the exploration by a prominent tata, leader of a reglas congo (rules of congo) community. He walked us through Los Hoyos where 64

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Map 6: Map of Los Hoyos neighborhood in Santiago de Cuba showing several significant street names, as well as the location of family homes of military heroes, Oriente natives, and African descendants General Guillermón Moncada and General Antonio Maceo Grajales. Map enhanced by Shanti Ali Zaid, African Atlantic Research Team.

his temple house and sacred spaces were situated. We were told that this was an historical city site of Cuban religious rituals because the neighborhood had been the home of the leader credited with introducing Oriente to coherent practices of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe and of Regla de Ocha.8 One block beyond the tata’s house, we encountered a small unobtrusive building, well painted, with large pink and black letters that read Templo San Benito de Palermo (see figure 2). what sacred spaces do

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We had seen the building before but never perceived it as a site containing indigenous religious sacred spaces and activities. We had understood that buildings that served as centers for such religious practices or that contain sacred spaces of these traditions did not have outdoor signs. The absence of outside notifications is connected to the fact that colonial and twentieth-century authorities vigorously persecuted practitioners of the traditions. This forced many, if not most, practices to be conducted clandestinely.9 We knew this and initially perceived Templo San Benito de Palermo to be part of Cuban Catholic reality; a religious tradition sanctioned for centuries by island authorities.10 For those whose cultural knowledge was greater, the building was a focal point of religious life and customs that evolved from particular historical experiences of Los Hoyos and Oriente. The tata explained this to us and we finally understood that the building stood as monument to our cultural misunderstandings about the anonymity of worship centers of these traditions. The entire escorted exploration helped to expand our cultural perceptions as there are general, abstract, or academic rules about human phenomena, and there is the actual lived experience within these generalities. We were beginning to know Los Hoyos as a specialized place, a place with content of indigenous religion, and a place bound externally and internally with worship locations of the practices. We continued to have experiences that enhanced our cultural perceptions, but these examples demonstrate that spaces can and do set boundaries and context, even within city neighborhoods. At the same time, many Oriente geographies of sacrality are bounded within domestic residences or other family buildings. No matter how tiny the family’s living arrangement, most practitioners will have at least one or more sacred spaces in their homes, and boundaries of the different assemblages demarcate what does or does not belong. In some homes, a sacred site is larger and better appointed than the area where the family lives. However, when leaders are responsible for building and maintaining the sites, they become specialized gathering locations for practitioners to collectively contact spirits of the otherworld. Leaders’ sites are then often referred to as “Casas de Templo” (temple houses) and though they are rarely bounded with outward signs or notations as the San Benito de Palermo location was, spaces of religious leaders are exceptional.

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Communication and Communion

Sacred spaces, the stationary materials in them, and the movable objects used in the settings can and do function ritualistically to communicate with the supernatural world. This positions the sites as geographies of spiritual engagement and practitioners come to the sites to “talk” with spirits of their religious tradition. We consistently observed that whenever community members arrived at a space after a period of absence, they immediately went to the place where the concentration of ritual objects was assembled. They performed several prescribed behaviors in front of the objects and made petitions, gave thanks, or made an offering to the spirits—flowers, rum, sweets, money, or otherwise. This reflects their immediate and clear understanding that the space is a center for communicating with spirits. Religious adherents share ideas and desires with all categories of spirits, the living dead and ancestor spirits as well as divine spirits. They do so with the knowledge and expectation that the spirits will reciprocate in response to human reverence and communication. Such comprehensions and activities within the spaces also denote the sites as geographies of spiritual engagement; that is, practitioners communicate with spirits in sacred spaces and, according to our respondents, the spirits act in response. In addition, the locations are charismatic because practitioners understand that, in and of themselves, sacred spaces activate the collaborative dynamism of human, natural, and supernatural powers. The combination of the collaborative interaction can produce efficacious action. Respondents reported that “doin’ ritual in spaces is the way you get spirits to help in your life.” Sacred spaces are an axis of spiritual engagement that can be charismatic in character. We had several experiences that confirmed the charismatic character of the geographies of spiritual engagement but one was exemplary. During ritual activities of a particular celebration, a glass of water fell from a shelf, leaves fell from tree branches in the space, pictures fell from walls, and the amount of liquid in bottles never lessened even after several practitioners drank from them. When the glass of water fell, it spilled on a worshiper who began to shake and tremble but not from cold or saturation. This was not a celebration that had drums, dancing, or dramatic movements, so we found no logical reason for items in the space to move. When asked why things were moving around, practitioners who were present responded, “The space helps make things happen, even when we don’t ask. But we’re always ready.”

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Such happenings are spectacular but they are not considered spectacles, or interacted with as though they were a spectacle. All worshipers in our research expressed the understanding that the spirit world is available and participates with humans when humans act in accord with cosmic knowledge. Sacred spaces are the predictable locations for ritualistic communication of this knowledge, and, for Oriente inhabitants who practice indigenous religions, their relationship with spirits is a pattern of reciprocal behavior that produces interactive exchanges. The three-way collaborative connection—practitioners, spaces, and spirits—evolved from the common Africa-based orientation that identifies the world as inhabited by material objects, beings, and spirits. The sacred sites are dynamic and can “make things happen” without human power. In that way the spaces are charismatic; spirits align their participation inside them and their activity is unpredictable, not controlled by humans. Religious followers fulfill part of their reciprocal responsibility by remaining in communication with spirits and by receiving wisdom transmitted from the otherworld when a spirit enters a human body.11 Spiritwisdom is derived from an understanding of the past and the present and from a spiritual vision about the immediate future. Part of the giveand-take relationship with humans occurs regularly in places of spirit engagement and is a manifestation that affirms the Africa-based cosmic orientation of religious life. The relationship also affirms that spaces themselves are understood to help make things happen, even against the will of practitioners.12 Whether or not spirits visit when Oriente worshippers perform rituals in sacred spaces, the reciprocal character of the relationahip requires that adherents’ regularly contact them within the spaces. Our research team found that visitations and transworld communication was an ordinary occurrence and we noted that practitioners were in the spaces two or three times a week, individually or in groups of two, three, or more. We were told that “it’s in the spaces that we can be sure the spirits will contact us.” Sacred spaces also include a variety of indispensable material objects that are important communication elements in indigenous traditions. Flowers, leaves, rocks, stones, seeds, tree limbs, large turtles or their shells, earth and sand, seawater, stuffed animals, and various animal skeletonal parts are typical objects and this held true for each of the religions we investigated. The objects were reported as substantive essentials “helping us get in touch with the spirits. We use them to ask spirits to visit.” The 68

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objects help establish ritual time as an interrupter of historical time so that communication with the spirit world can occur. Objects are symbolic representations of the Africa-based alternative time model, the alternative temporal modality contained within the cosmic orientation. For Oriente practitioners, these objects in their spaces contain and are manifestations of the divine power of creation. Their incorporation in the spaces exemplifies practitioners’ intentional continuation of their inherited customs and cultural identity. The objects say all things of creation have inherent value. While material objects in spaces continue to evoke this characteristic, they also are grounded in the world of humans. Many can be considered as “spiritual capital,” an expansion of Pierre Bourdieu’s exploration of theoretical ideas about “capital.” He proposed that while the concept is normally associated with economics, it could also be understood as “various species of symbolic capital.”13 This opened an analytical avenue in the study of religion wherein Bradford Verter expanded upon Bourdieu for applicability in the field and proposed a notion of spiritual capital we feel is useful for understanding material objects employed in Oriente religious practice.14 Verter contends, and we agree, that some spiritual themes, ideas, and/or objects can be understood to acquire a materiality and value that transcends their inherent composition or religious function. This extended understanding objectifies spiritual items, and their objectified appreciation, while still connected to religious participation, has additional value: they are spiritual capital. This is precisely the nature of several categories of material objects within spaces of Oriente; some objects are transformed into “form[s] of material and symbolic commodities” of spiritual significance. The material transformation is in addition to the sacrality of objects and their function as participants in communication with spirits. Sometimes the pieces are also appropriated and made available for distribution and consumption, as some select, small, portable objects become spiritual capital that is sold to international tourists willing to pay to own materials associated with indigenous religious practices.15 Such visitors seem to be attracted to necklaces, bracelets, stones, seeds, and other small objects they presume hold spiritual power and are part of Oriente religiosity. In addition to the spiritual power they may possess, objects are valued as capital because of their ability to garner financial return in the country’s strained economy. Later in our discussion, we will return to the concept of spiritual capital in Oriente. what sacred spaces do

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Within the sacred nature of their function, material objects are necessary participants in processes of atmospheric change that allow the entry of spirits into sacred spaces. The materials are the special rocks, feathers, tree branches, cloths, and so on, that must accompany drum rhythms, chants, special decor, dance, and other forms of reverence needed to change the atmosphere so that spirits might visit with practitioners. Objects’ assistance in spiritual communication is almost always invisible to uninformed observers or those who do not share an understanding of practitioners’ symbolic universe. To the informed, however, observing an object’s position in a space activates a body of shared knowledge and can elicit a cultural and/or religious perception about communication between humans and spirits in that space. The objects are internal boundary markers of symbolic sacredness and, as such, must be acted upon and interacted with. Just as sacred sites function in a variety of ways to communicate with spirits, they also are locations of generalized, varied, and frequent communing between and among humans. Practitioners contend that the locations are “family meeting places,” settings where adherents can rely upon seeing and talking with people who share their cosmic orientation, if not their actual religious lifestyle. To test this proposition, we carefully began each data-gathering encounter by spending time in the family house and/ or neighborhood of a sacred space. We first entered the house, went to the location of sacrality, made appropriate gestures to acknowledge the site’s spiritual essence, and then sat wherever other visitors or family members were seated—inside or outside the house, often facing the street. Sometimes we sat for hours, talking with neighbors and family members, helping comb hair (male and female), playing with children, joking with teenagers, or generally visiting with passersby. This was not a formal interview time, but a time when we were conducting prescribed observations to determine if the spaces were truly settings of human communing. We also were reintegrating ourselves into the rhythm of the particular house, neighborhood, and the religious community, even as our presence was proactive participation in reciprocal interactions of everyday life and conversations. We, too, were communing with practitioners, with the sacred geographies, and with all those familiar with one, the other, or both. We found that although tourists did visit some sacred spaces, they rarely involved themselves in the communing. This was unlike visits by worshipcommunity members, or visitors who were initiates of a different religious tradition, and/or members of a different worship community. No one was 70

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obligated to be at the spaces during nonceremonial times, and tourists were not regular visitors. But practitioners could be observed making such visits three or more times a week as a means “to show respect and love for the spirits and to talk with others who’re here.” They came to commune.16 Functionally, repeated communing visits forge a bond among the people, between people and the space, and between people and spirits who visit the space. The created bond reinforces the social network of associates who give mutual and reciprocal care to each other. “Re-member-ing” and Memory

Another important role of sacred spaces is to provide practitioners with locations that guarantee they will remember those of the spiritworld. To remember spirits is an important and required phenomenological principle derived from Africa-based orientation. However, re-member-ing is not merely the mental recall of people or events but includes the cognitive returning of an absent community member to the consciousness of those present in ritual space, as well as the returning of the absent members, if only by visual memory. Each time a member practitioner actually or figuratively returns to locations of sacrality, they are integrated and reintegrated into the body of religious knowledge that bonds the practicing collective; they are re-member-ed. When members have long periods of absence, because of geography, life circumstances, or physical death, sacred spaces themselves become the locational ritual instrument for recalling and re-member-ing those not present. This is achieved during ceremonial gatherings and through verbal or symbolic articulations that intone names of the absent. Also intoned are the names of special spirits of the living dead, as well as titles of significant events of ancestors and divine spirits. A litany of names of absent members and spirits of all categories can be recited during the allocated invocational time. The intoning and recalling is putting the entire religious collective back together for the ritual work to be done. The complete body of believers is thereby symbolically re-member-ed, returned together into present time of the human community and communion ritual. The re-membering accentuates practitioners’ physical participation in ritual activities and sacred spaces are the context. The result is a concrete and symbolic reestablishment of human, spiritual, and religious linkages—the putting of actual and spiritual bodies back into the ritual time of the community’s cosmic orientation.17 In Oriente, this is an important role of sacred spaces. what sacred spaces do

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The shared Africa-based cosmic orientation necessitates re-membering because, at a minimum, spirits of the living dead are understood to exist within current human life reality and thereby are available to assist in difficulties of living family members, if living persons remember them. Ritual re–member-ing helps accomplish this obligation but there are other ordinary, taken-for-granted, everyday life behaviors of Oriente practitioners that demonstrate the importance of keeping the memory of those who have died. For example, inhabitants habitually pour a small amount of a newly opened bottle of beverage, particularly rum, on the ground as a spiritual libation. When we asked about this behavior, we were consistently told, “It’s for those who’ve gone before, for the departed, for the ancestors. We pour libations for the ancestors.” The action occurred in sacred as well as in everyday places, that is, street corners, parks, parties, front doorsteps, and so on. The pouring of libations to the earth is understood as a gesture of reverence to all foreparents and ancestors because all are interred in the earth as a universal place, no matter where they were buried. Respondents insisted that “the earth is one,” all of it is sacred because it was divinely created and holds the bodies of those who have died. Therefore, before drinking from a new bottle of liquid—whether in sacred spaces or otherwise—humans should pour libations as reverence to the creative relationship of the earth and to those whose bodies have gone before. The repertoire of religious knowledge that undergirds libation behavior is derived from the same cosmic orientation that informs ceremonial re-member-ing. That knowledge and those actions help to reinforce the orientation as well as to maintain the union of sacred and secular that Oriente practitioners operationalize in their Africa-based lifestyle. The coming together of sacred and secular within life is but one representation of an alternative model of time—an alternative temporal modality contained within the orientation. Rituals performed in sacred spaces enhance the significance of religious reality as part of this alternative concept of time. Locations of sacrality also serve to stimulate collective memory of the general Cuban population since the vast majority has working familiarity with practices associated with the nation’s African heritage and with its indigenous religions. Cubans know that thousands of sacred spaces are constructed by way of religious knowledge transmitted through the history of their country. Minimally this consciousness is created through basic information imparted in the nation’s educational curriculum, and the government maintains Casas de Cultura (cultural houses) in every municipality, 72

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city, and most towns, where an abundance of extracurricular activities designed to familiarize citizens with this national heritage are performed.18 Neighborhood performance events convened by Santiago’s Festival del Caribe introduced us to an example of how the religiosity of Cuba’s African heritage is disseminated to become generalized national awareness. Our team accompanied an annual neighborhood celebration for young children, a street festival. Three blocks of the street had been blocked off and children comprised the majority of performers and audience. There was the expected high energy, loud talking, and laughter of children’s normal play, but there also was structured dancing, drumming, and singing choreographed from rituals of indigenous religions. When the young audience was asked to identify the spirits represented in a particular performance, or to sing a chant associated with ritual coding, the school-aged children simultaneously and enthusiastically recited the correct names and sang out appropriate coded chants.19 Throughout the larger, citywide festival activities, we also heard a multitude of stories, myths, songs, poems, dances, proverbs, and other content from the reservoir of Cuban cultural knowledge. Within these were details about and from indigenous religions of the nation’s heritage. Therefore, whether or not they are practitioners, Cubans are informed about the country’s religious inheritance and familiar with stories and myths associated with many such traditions. Citizens also know that the traditions have sacred spaces and the spaces, as well as knowledge of them, are memory markers for nonpractitioners’ shared historical and active contemporary relationship with their African heritage.20 In addition, sacred spaces serve as memory devices to hearken practitioners’ imagination back to collective ritual experiences that occurred at the sites. Experiences that included supernatural participation are especially significant and memories associated with them are activated by sacred spaces. Ritual processes of initiation are outstanding in this regard and include socialization instructions to adherents about their duty to remember the experiences. The rites are collective activities in sacred spaces that incorporate new members into a community. Practitioners reported vivid memories associated with sacred spaces and their initiation experiences. They recounted in great detail the ritual bath that everyone must take for initiation and acknowledged recalling such details when encountering a sacred space. An initiation usually occurs in a worship community leader’s geography of spirit engagement. The impressionable rituals that occur in the what sacred spaces do

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site usually establish initiates’ awareness of their linkage to dynamic, spiritrelated customs and authority of the tradition. It is therefore not surprising that respondents reported memories of their initiation process are evoked when they actually or figuratively revisit that site of sacrality or even visit other sacred spaces. “My head is just filled with pictures and images of that time when I was scratched (initiated).” As such, a role of sacred spaces is to reestablish the special meanings of individual’s shared experiences and reaffirm their belonging to a ritual family. Individuals also can momentarily reflect on completed or incomplete religious responsibilities when they encounter sacred spaces. Thus, the sites are locations of communication and communing, places where whole communities are re-member-ed literally and figuratively. Sacred spaces serve to create strong memories of significant ritual events, to stimulate the evocation of such powerful recollections, and they are reminders of individual and collective relationship to a religious tradition. Meaning

Another sure role of sacred spaces is their influence in establishing meaning for a religious community/family. These are the places where members regularly and predictably acquire knowledge of their shared cosmic understanding and learn their tradition’s interpretations of life and the universe. Members teach and share common meanings about the world as understood through their practice, and most of these customs are taught in sacred spaces, not in schools; there are no private schools in Cuba. Practitioners’ collective meanings about reality are created through shared interactive historical experiences as well as through linkages to those experiences in which they did not participate. Language is indispensable in the development of this interpretative commonality. It is important to remember that ritual language of some indigenous religions in Oriente is directly linked to the African and Cuban historical heritage of the traditions. These languages serve to assist in creating and sustaining historically forged identity and interpretative commonality among practitioners. As well, Oriente spaces draw meaning from devotees’ shared experiences in the social and political realities of their eastern environment. This is especially true because generations of regional practitioners were active in colonial Africans’ palenques, the liberated zones of neo-African social reality. More recent generations fought in Cuba’s three nineteenthcentury wars of national identity, independence, and sovereignty. Regional 74

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participants helped create memories, reputations, and historical authority that carry contemporary significance for Oriente ritual customs. Many women and men who supported the liberation efforts were religious devotees who gathered for sacred activities before, during, and after going into combat.21 Veterans returning from these fields narrated their account of the events and thereby handed down stories of activities, heroic people, and pivotal deeds of their military experiences. Particularly important were events where supernatural intervention occurred. Combatant practitioners inevitably wove into their war stories supernatural beings’ battle participation where that was the case; their interpretive reporting was fraught with nationalistic as well as spiritual meanings. The stories were passed on to new generations—practitioners, neighbors, and family members alike. Some accurate historical accounts were made into popular poems and songs about the cosmic nature of military occurrences but many reports became legends and myths that took their place in the Oriente expressive repertoire. In this way, historical details that contained a spiritual emphasis were made accessible to the larger public. Throughout Oriente, ritual songs, chants, invocations, sacred drum rhythms, re-member-ing litanies, and general conversations continue to re­­ peat many of these stories.22 Sacred spaces can encapsulate these historically significant meanings linked to spiritual, national, and regional identity. The pilon and nganga of the national hero Guillermón Moncada are exemplary. The pilon is a large wooden, cylinder-shaped, bowl-like vessel used in earlier generations with an equally large mortar-like grinding stick. The nganga is the cast-iron kettle used to hold the sacred elements for the religious tradition of Palo Monte/ Palo Mayombe (see figure 8). We were able to conduct interviews with descendants of Moncada, a military general of African descent. Guillermón, as our practitioner colleagues affectionately called him, fought fearlessly in the Ten Years’ War of 1868 but received a disabling wound and could only fight briefly in the 1895 War of Independence.23 The home of one Moncada descendant, an Espiritismo practitioner, contains a pilon and nganga as inherited family artifacts (see figure 3). As is the custom in families who practice indigenous religions, Moncada’s descendant inherited these artifacts from ancestors and elders. Local legend contends that General Moncada used this nganga in his work as a leading member of his practitioner community. We verified this story through interviews with several nonfamily elders of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe and see it as part of Oriente reality. what sacred spaces do

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Cuban school curricula include General Moncada as an important patriot of national liberation struggles. This makes him familiar to most citizens, but Oriente inhabitants are more personally involved with Guillermón as a regional favorite son and national hero who is revered in school curricula. Regional children learn a great deal more about Guillermón’s relationship to indigenous religions through chants, songs, rhymes, poems, dances, and legends that they hear while visiting and playing near the numerous sacred spaces of their neighborhoods. We recorded and were consistently impressed with the pervasive presence of large numbers of young children in and about locations of sacrality. We were equally impressed that children, some as young as two years, were a constant presence at rituals and they were given special instructional care. Older children, five years and up, were active and knowledgeable participants in the activities.24 Defining Aesthetic and Creative Acts

Cuban sacred spaces are the result of creative, constructive actions taken by those who assemble them, but the locations also serve to stimulate creativity. They are three-dimensional public expressions of sacred meanings of an aesthetic derived from the Africa-based orientation with its alternative ideas about time, power, revelation, and so on. In real-life human terms, the geographies of sacrality also help define that aesthetic, outwardly expressed in dynamic color, texture, volume, and variety. There are basic religious parameters concerning what a space must contain but content and structure of the sites are ever changing based on differences in practitioners’ inspirations, revelations, and available resources. Many spaces are colorful, artistic cornucopia arrangements that attract the eye and elicit comments. Most assemblages include flowers, iconographic images, symbolic objects, statues, designated artifacts, and symbolic script. Most all of this content is coded to meanings as understood through the artistic lens of a religious tradition. For example, figure 4 and figure 14 represent a range of artistic variety that can occur in two sacred spaces of a single religious family, Espiritismo. Both are attractive expressions of meaning from particulars of their practice but each space presents a dramatically different use of color, objects, style, and space. The space in figure 4 includes a photographed portrait of Antonio Maceo Grajales and José Martí, two Cuban national heroes who represent important otherworld Espiritismo spirits, known as “light spirits” in one

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tradition. The spirits are reported to frequently participate in contemporary rituals.25 In figure 14, the number of objects probably cannot be accurately counted even as the assemblage is profoundly colorful. This space contains such a wide variety of objects as to suggest contradiction. However, both spaces are actively used in Oriente for ritual activities, both are within the same family of religious tradition, both are eye-catching artistic arrangements, and they are also different, one from the other. Another example of sacred spaces inspiring artistic expression is the work of the internationally known artist Wilfredo Lam (1902–1982). Lam was the son of a Cantonese immigrant and a Cuban mulatto woman. His “godmother” was a well-known leader of a religious community in the island’s Sagua la Grande area. Although we cannot verify that he was initiated into any tradition, we do know that he grew up and was socialized with an intimate relationship to the country’s indigenous religious environment and his artistic creations were inspired by exposure to and experiences with that atmosphere. His creations contain representations from identifiable religious practice, and he is said to be “the first plastic artist in all the history of western art to present a vision from the African presence in America.”26 Sidewalk tiles of the La Rampa neighborhood in Havana’s Vedado district are showcases of Lam’s images and provide an example of spiritual inclusions in the contemporary, ordinary life of urban Cuba (see figure 5).27 The ceramic tiles are derived from cosmograms or sacred scripting of the reglas congo, as well as from practices of other indigenous religions. The tiles publicly display the inclusive nature of religious ideas through art in the nation’s cultural customs.

Summary Thoughts In this chapter, we explored some important yet general roles of sacred spaces in Oriente religious practice. We clarified how the sites

• set context and boundaries, • stimulate communication and communion, • re-member participants and practices and create meaning and memory, • define aesthetics and inspire creative acts.

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We integrated the discussion with particulars of Oriente practitioners’ ex­­ pressions of these roles, as well as how sacred spaces of the region are sites of dynamic interaction between humans and all categories of spirits. The latter exploration allowed us to site Oriente spaces as charismatic phenomena and detail how the sites contain material objects instrumental in spirit communication while the objects simultaneously exist as spiritual capital. Significantly, we devoted considerable discussion to clarifying how sacred localities serve to re-member absent members, humans, and spirits, and how the sites create meaning and memory. All of this exploration lodges particularities of Oriente sacred spaces within the human family of expressed religious knowledge and practice.

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Part II 

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Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe

Spirits that come in dreams With no words to walk on. —African proverb Mor e than an y other landscape in Cuba, Or iente is known as “land of the dead.” This is largely due to the historical presence of enslaved descendants from Africa’s west central region of Kongo Kingdom ethnic groups. Spiritual life among this group of peoples is personally interconnected with the dead and with spirits of the dead.1 Captives from the kingdom arrived in Oriente (see map 2) as early as the sixteenth century and established the African presence as an intimate and ongoing factor in social structures that would become Cuban: people, nation, culture, and religion. Oriente was the first island location of contact between Africans, the autochthonous population, and Europeans, as well as the site of the first European settlements and importation of enslaved Africans in the sixteenth century.2 The region has recorded regular earthquakes since 1551 and is home to very active seaports near two of its larger cities, Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo (see map 2). A considerable share of Cuba’s more than two hundred other harbors, bays, and inlets are also in Oriente.3 The coastal

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sites of Guantánamo, Santiago, and Manzanillo, as well as other smaller harbors (see map 2), allowed the region to become the site of a flourishing contraband economy during the four colonial centuries. Clandestine trade and smuggling with foreign and Spanish ships was a normal pattern and fashioned Oriente into a separate economic arena from the island’s official commercial and trading center in western Cuba. The illicit enterprises also helped maintain the region as an internally well-organized and integrated economy, based on the underground exchanges.4 The absence of transportation across the Sierra Maestra mountains, as well as wind and ocean currents that were more convenient to trans-Atlantic trade in western harbors to serve Spanish colonies of Mexico and Latin America, operated to reinforce Oriente as an isolated and insulated backwater of the island colony. The region has continued to have a rather diverse, though now legal, economic base, including cattle ranching that came with Spanish settlers, centuries of mining, full-scale coffee cultivation arriving from Haiti, and other tropical agricultural crops such as bananas, citrus, and cacao, as well as sugar production.5 Even though most of the original inhabitants and their descendants would not survive as a distinguishable group, spiritual behaviors developed from contact between autochthonous inhabitants and Africans would become indigenous. The behaviors are indigenous because they evolved from remembered practices of West Central Africans who shared and merged their spiritual approaches with similar ones of the remaining Amerindians. The transculturated ritual behaviors expressed mutual spiritual identity and were used to bury each group’s dead with common cosmic comprehensions. Early emphasis on rituals and activities related to the dead has been passed on to later generations of Oriente practitioners as well as to other inhabitants. Remnants of these earliest behaviors appear to be part of coherent practices of the reglas congo.6 The reglas consist of a variety of established ritual lineages, particularly Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, Balongo, Kimbisa, and Briyumba, and are known to be derived from different regions in West Central Africa associated with Kongo Kingdom ethnic groups. The differing names for the reglas seem to correspond with various regions of ethnic groups in that area. Several Oriente practitioners shared their assertion that the names are associated with Kongo ethnic groups and maps of the region (see map 3); the work of William MacGaffety and that of John Thornton would support the idea.7 82

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We found practices of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe in Oriente to be the most prevalent given that we encountered no devotees of other reglas congo. We first thought this tradition represented two distinct sets of ritual customs, Palo Monte and Palo Mayombe. However, when we interviewed practitioners about differences, they comprehended only one set of practices with two names. This contrasts with some Spanish language literature that discusses two separate sets of traditions,8 but we acknowledge respondents’ understandings as these guide their lives and published literature has rarely if ever included insights from Oriente. Although most historical research indicates that a variety of ethnically Kongo Africans were captured and transported to locations in Cuba, Arwin Schwegler and other linguists have found that much of the ritual language of Oriente’s Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe continues to be that of the Kikongo speakers among these Bantu-speaking ethnic groups.9 This is significant because it reinforces our research findings about ideas, ritual behaviors, languages, and religious understandings in the region. Examples of this occurred early in our work when we told practitioners we were having difficulty grasping some of what was being said during ceremonies, even though we understood Spanish. They repeatedly said that we were confused because “you just don’t know the language of the spirits. The spirits speak the Cuban-Creole-Congo language.” Clearly, these contemporary devotees continue to use their special language as a cognitive and linguistic affirmation of connections to their African heritage and religious practices; it is an intentional activity, their intentionality. The practice of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe in Oriente emphasizes contact with elements of nature and contact with spirits: mfundi/nfumbe, generalized spirits of the dead; mpongo/npungo, specialty spirits in or of forces of nature; and recent remains of the living dead. This importance of spirits is a marker for cultural customs and generalized attitudes of the region, not merely those of religious practitioners. When we spoke with practitioners from all social arenas, they considered religious traditions that work with spirits and remnants of the dead as the most complex, powerful, and efficacious. This was the response even as many acknowledged fear of such traditions. The greatest hesitancy and respect, if not fear, was for Palo Monte/ Palo Mayombe. From this brief introduction, we now proceed to review the arrival and settlement of the Kongolese in Oriente. This chapter will discuss salient details of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe or “Palo” and sacred spaces palo monte/palo mayombe

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as expressed in the region. We begin with the arrival and formation of re­­ gional rituals and then proceed to engage foundational knowledge of the tradition, continuing on to consider sacred spaces created by Palo Monte/ Palo Mayombe Oriente practitioners.

Arrival and Formation As an organized and coherent set of ritual behaviors, Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe arrived in Oriente at the turn of the twentieth century with migrants from western Cuba’s Matanzas area.10 However, this is only true for the “organized, coherent” set of ritual practices. We contend that knowledge and ideas from Kongo Kingdom ethnic groups arrived in the region much sooner—in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of Spanish colonial occupation. It was in 1522 that the Spanish colonial empire began to exchange autochthonous labor in Cuba for that of enslaved Africans. The Kongo Kingdom families of Bantu people were the largest number of persons of a single ethnic group imported between that time and the end of the seventeenth century.11 The relationship was not coincidental as the Spanish purchased Africans from the Portuguese whose trade had been established with Africa’s Kongo peoples since the mid-fifteenth century. The Portuguese’ human cargo was imported to Cuba as cheap, reliable labor for copper and other ore mining and for the development of small agricultural enterprises.12 The city of Santiago de Cuba, organized in 1515, was the colony’s capital until 1607 and was the main port of entry for the first generations of African descendants.13 Those Africans who survived Atlantic Ocean crossings experienced inordinate pain and suffering but nevertheless brought with them their cosmic orientation as an important body of knowledge about what it means to be human. Their understandings about the cosmos and the principles or rules of nature were enculturated comprehensions learned from birth and childhood in African time, space, and social orders. The earliest and initial entrance into Oriente of the Africa-based cosmic orientation and phenomenological knowledge provided an alternative to that of colonial Europeans. It was not a dominant alternative, nor was there social or political equity between the alternatives. However, it was an additional model for understanding what it means to exist and, given the nature of human interaction, the population of Africans shared their perspective. There were at least two oppressed cultural groups in colonial Cuba, 84

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Africans and the Native Indians. Europeans enslaved both and, despite differences in customs and language, the two suppressed groups engaged in reciprocal, interactive relationships. Enslaved Africans found that many of their comprehensions about being human and how to effectively operationalize that humanity was shared with their new relations. For example, Amerindians and Kongo descendants each understood the significance of ancestors, the interconnection of ancestors and the land, and the necessity to revere ancestors and communicate with spirits, and they each understood that spirits could and did inhabit the world of humans. These conceptual commonalities became part of Oriente’s spiritual foundation as the two groups continued to interact and conduct new combined ritual activities. Local legends contend that the Indians shared the ritual use of tobacco with the early Africans and Kongo Kingdom descendants introduced Indians to the use of drum rhythms to invoke a spiritual atmosphere.14 Hence, the use of tobacco15 and Africa-derived drum rhythms, as well as the common cosmic orientation and shared phenomenological principles took root in Oriente. The two groups of enslaved people were linked by spiritual affinity, by sociopolitical status, and by mutually constructed rituals. In 1533, the linkage expanded as together Africans and Indians attacked the colonial town of Baracoa. The purpose of the raid was to capture food and other consumer resources.16 Significantly, European settlement in the region had only begun in 1514 and enslaved Africans began arriving in notable numbers in 1522. In less than twenty years the two bonded groups had connected sufficiently to implement an attack. This suggests that the creation of new behavioral forms, the transculturation process, began immediately and did not require generations to be productive. Spiritual focus was not omitted from the process. What has become Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe ritual practices would have been part of the transculturated emphasis on communication with spirits and specifically working with spirits of the living dead. Contempo­ rary practitioners refer to these spirits as muertos (the dead) and understand that they are active in the material world of humans’ present time. Muertos can be invoked to help humans accomplish goals when adherents maintain spiritual contact, but humans are obligated to maintain a relationship, particularly with ancestral spirits who when called upon can be active in the present. Practitioners also are to remain in communication with divine spirits. In return, invoked spirits will contact, if not embody, devotees in order to transmit knowledge, wisdom, and power that can help palo monte/palo mayombe

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guide life in the present, historical space. Neither spirits nor receivers of communications from these are given categorical gender-specific designations. Women are eligible to receive spirit wisdom just as the female aspect of spirits can be invoked.17 Oriente’s early ritual activities were passed on to new generations to some extent by way of life in palenques de cimarrones—settlement communities of Africans and Indians who escaped enslavement. Within palenques and other rebel locations, the role of muertos remained of primary ritual importance because these spirits were available to help.

Palenques It is impossible to envision the development and continuation of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe or any Africa-based practices without discussing palenques. As early as the second half of the sixteenth century, if not before, enslaved Africans and those remaining Indians began running away from bondage and forming settlements in the mountains of Oriente. These palenques operated from the mid-1500s through approximately 1886 when slavery in Cuba was outlawed.18 Some mountainous towns of the region are the result of or built around old settlement sites.19 Palenques were neo-African zones of liberation and epitomized resistance to the system of colonial slavery, but they were also domestic, economic, military, and spiritual survival centers for the oppressed. Such locations existed in various parts of the island, from western Pinar del Rio to eastern areas of Guantánamo.20 However, palenques of the east were distinct in their size, longevity, and social functioning. The Sierra Maestra mountains provided isolated forested spaces for hiding after runaways escaped from a plantation or other work center. The mountains also helped separate Oriente from official colonial control based in western Cuba. The separation included palenques. When in 1607 the island capital was moved to Havana, the mountainous geography exacerbated the separation and produced Oriente’s isolation. There was increased difficulty (if not reluctance) in providing the east with military and other authorized protections, as well as economic support. At best, coastal cities such as Baracoa, Guantánamo, Santiago, and Manzanillo might have contact with the west, but even these relations were not dependable. Consequently, Oriente was politically, militarily, and socially isolated in its geographic separation from western centers of colonial activity.21 86

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The absence of support from colonial authorities made eastern inhabitants more vulnerable to increasing attacks from foreign pirates and privateers, especially the English. Oriente residents, including palenque in­­ habitants, became self-reliant for material survival and self-referencing in social behaviors. Palenque members fought, worked, procreated, and died in their well-organized, neo-African communities, and records show that the communities participated in the clandestine trade relations that helped characterize the region’s colonial economy.22 Within the settlements, crossethnic African group interactions brought forth new, transculturated ritual behaviors that referenced inhabitants’ African background. This aided the continued use of Kongolese Africa-based ritual knowledge, as these ethnic members were the strongest residential participants. Even as Kongo groups were culturally dominant, Mandingo, Carabalí, and members of other African ethnic communities also found Oriente’s mountainous geography ideal for participating in liberated communities. When nineteenth-century Chinese were brought to Cuba, some of them also joined palenques.23 Members cultivated food products, hunted small animals, and conducted raids on nearby plantations, villages, and towns, as well as traded with clandestine supply ships for needed provisions. The mountains and foothills facilitated thicket and forest retreats and, over time, palenques took on complex social organizations. The liberated zones perpetuated themselves and were known by colonial authorities to exist through generations, despite military attacks to close them down.24 There were famous or “infamous” palenque captains in charge of strategic planning for the collectives and whose reputations were well known by Oriente establishments. There were separate settlements designated for women and children, such as Maluala, and members from different palenques coordinated regular and successful raids on nearby plantations in a fashion resembling military operations of local authorities.25 The social order of palenques was aligned with Africa-based structural arrangements if by no other evidence than the existence of a chief or captain and the inclusion of gender-separated arenas.26 As palenque residents retreated into forested areas to perform sacred customs, their Africabased cosmic orientation and principles about phenomena of the universe informed ritual behaviors that addressed spiritual needs of members. The early patterns were the foundations upon which indigenous religions would evolve through centuries of such Africa-based activities. The bembé (drum party), for example, is one such ritual attributable to the forested circumstances of palenque life.27 palo monte/palo mayombe

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Responses from contemporary practitioners and current re­­search findings of Casa del Caribe investigators describe colonial bembé as a grand celebration event that invoked ancestral and other spirits to visit the world of gathered descendants.28 Along with the voice, drums were the definitive instrument of the events and the character of bembé drums was based on Kongolese construction, Kongolese rhythms, and other heritages of these African people. The large, cylinder-shaped, wooden constructions with animal skin stretched across the top or head, played a central role in the colonial gatherings. The top of the drum is larger in circumference than the bottom, with the whole instrument standing about two and a half to three and a half feet tall. Sounds that come from Kongo-type drums are deep in tone though there is a tonal range. Indications are that early colonial activities continued late into nights of dancing, drumming, and chanting/singing under the trees and stars.29 Drums in many contemporary Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe celebrations are similar in shape and function to their colonial predecessors. They are usually played in groups of three, although we participated in events where only one or two were used and, on at least one occasion, we observed more than three drums participating in a celebration. Figure 1 shows these Kongo-type instruments after the middle drummer emphatically took his position to demonstrate to the others. The middle drummer is an elder practitioner whose drumming and ritual knowledge is well known in the region. On two successive occasions during the activities, he had chastised the three younger drummers to “stop playing those batá rhythms.” After the second call for corrections, the elder signaled for the middle drummer to move and replaced him. As the elder took-up the middle drum he insisted that the drummers “go back to playin’ rhythms of our Congo ancestors.” In addition to Kongo-type drums, dancing, and singing, the cazuela was a transculturated ritual object that appears to have been incorporated into early ritual behaviors of colonial Oriente and transmitted to new generations. The cazuela, a large, shallow pan or bowl-like container, was used for such domestic tasks as food preparation, cooking, washing, and so on. At the same time, a specially designated cazuela was set aside for exclusive use in Oriente’s Africa-based ritual life, to hold important sacred objects. Cazuelas were material objects whose symbolic representation often violated colonial authorities’ definitions of religious normality (see figure 17). The containers held rocks, dirt, twigs, chains, nails, pieces of animal and human bones, hair, skin, and other items that religious historian Charles Long identifies 88

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as associated with “intimacy and obligation, actualities and potentials, and habits and conduct” regarding spiritual influence in humans’ lives.30 The designated cazuela was available for use in spiritual communication and it continues to be a central part of ritual life for Oriente practitioners. Early colonial palenque residents used the cazuela as a spiritual instrument to hold and represent the symbolic incorporation of the Kongolese idea of nkisi, the power and ability that is beyond individual human powers and sometimes beyond natural abilities.31 The cultural and linguistic concept of nkisi concerns spiritual power that is used systematically by contemporary Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe practitioners who identify it as supernatural power of material objects that is used to work with mfundi/ nfumbe (generalized spirits of the dead) and mpongo/mpungo (specialty spirits), as well as to work with divine spirits.32 The nganga is another ritual idea and material as well as a human instrument handed down from Oriente’s colonial Kongolese practitioners. Like the cazuela, the nganga is invested with nkisi. Physically, the nganga was and is a three-legged iron cauldron in which a variety of material objects are placed, similar to those used with the cazuela—only those of the nganga are more powerful. We could not determine when the nganga became a central necessity to colonial Kongolese ritual activities, but we did note the clear physical resemblance of the sacred instrument and the iron cauldrons used to process sugar cane syrup during the period. The continental sacrality of material objects like the nganga and the cazuela persisted as spiritual work of colonial and more recent practitioners remained aligned with Kongolese traditions. In addition, the nganga was and is comprehended to be a spirit and a powerful practitioner of Kongo-based customs. That is to say, the term nganga can be used to identify a material object, a nonmaterial spirit, and a powerful devotee of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe. We aren’t sure how these functioned or were manifested in palenque ritual life, but customs associated with use of the material objects, as well as their spiritual understandings, have been handed down to Palo initiates of a practitioner community and the ideas continue to be included in today’s Oriente practices.33 Anthropologist Stephan Palmié suggests that ethnogensis is a key to the fact that Cuban ritual communities are associated with one particular African ethnic group but that practitioners are from various heritages. For example, Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe practitioners have rarely been composed chiefly of descendants of Kongo ethnic groups but have included palo monte/palo mayombe

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many of Oriente’s other African ethnic groups, as well as criollos, European descendants born in Cuba, and even foreigners. In attempting to understand this cross-ethnic membership, Palmié contends that the cross-ethnic practices are not based on sanguine genealogy of practitioners but on their ritual initiation into a group. Oriente’s social, political, and geographic landscape facilitated this symbolic, if not real, blurring of ethnic identities and the merging of ethnic practices within groups bound by ritual initiation.34 In other words, the transculturation process took place and we would further say that the shared cosmic orientation facilitated this. Not withstanding the stronger Kongolese influence, Oriente’s early palenques were populated with smaller subgroup admixtures of informal ritual clusters of practitioners. The ritual subgroups provided African ethnic descendant members with familiar emotional, psychological, and spiritual comfort that was related, but not exclusive to, specifics of their ethnic backgrounds. At the same time, the evolving ethnogenic, affinity ritual groups were not exclusive or exhaustive in the east but appeared elsewhere. They and their activities served as a type of moral and social organizer for members and existed inside and outside of neo-African social formations like palenques. Europeans controlled which ethnic groups would arrive in any given location but within the liberated formations, members controlled behaviors as they had social and spiritual commonality. Multi- and crossethnic membership in ritual affinity groups as well as in palenques became the pattern. By the close of the seventeenth century colonial officials were so well acquainted with the informal, ritual affinity relationships, and they were so well organized in their activities, that authorities felt compelled to align them within existing social arrangements of colonial Spanish authority. The colonial government authorized the existence of the neo-African groupings and labeled them as cofradias. Authorities envisioned that cofradias would function as separate African civil organizations and thereby increase contentment with the existing social and political colonial order. The assumption was that cofradias would function much as such European groups had in Spain.35 However, benevolence was not the motivation for the colonial shift. The enslaved population had engaged in resistance activities since the beginning of the trans-Atlantic trade and, in so doing, constantly caused large and small economic disruptions. As rebellions continued throughout colonies of the Americas, and grew larger in sites in Brazil and Haiti, Cuban colonists feared further uprisings and full-fledged revolution on 90

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their island. They searched for ways to thwart such developments.36 To hold back Africans’ rebellious ideas and behaviors, officials sanctioned social space for the informal neo-African arrangements to participate in colonial social order; cofradias became marginally part of the social structure. The approved cofradias were modeled after European civil groups that emphasized spiritual content, but among Oriente neo-African cofradias, there was little if any obligation to replicate the European model. Rebellious activities of all types continued in the region throughout the eighteenth century and cofradias employed official sanction as social space for further implementation of members’ preferred transculturated customs, including ritual practices. In form, function, and now with colonial approval, the ritual affinity groups were neo-African cofradía societies. In the latter parts of the eighteenth century, there was a shift in African ethnic membership in Oriente’s palenque liberated zones, as well as in the ethnic affinity cofradía groups. The successful Haitian Revolution of 1791 produced the world’s first independent nation of African descendants and caused a major exodus of French colonial planters, many of whom brought their enslaved laborers with them to Oriente. The migration from the French colony had begun earlier in the century as small farmers were pushed from their lands by competition from large successful sugar plantations. The movement of farmers and their laborers was exacerbated as rebellion and the Haitian Revolution unfolded. By the close of the historical revolutionary event and the establishment of the Haitian Republic, the international sugar capital shifted from Haiti to Cuba and gave the Spanish island a tremendous need for large numbers of enslaved Africans. The mid-eighteenth-century presence of increased numbers of Haitian Africans in Oriente provided an additional African cultural influence to that of descendants from the Kongo Kingdom, though it did not displace the earlier effect. The cosmic orientation of Haitian Africans was aligned with that of Oriente’s existing Kongolese foundations. The newest arrivals understood Africa-based time, space, and power. They knew that spirits were present in the material world, they worked with the dead, they used drums and drum rhythms in their spiritual work, and for them, too, animal sacrifice was an important ritual activity. Africa-based sacred practices had already been transculturated in the French colony and Haitian Africans brought these and other customs to Oriente. This meant that although Haitians settled and established their own religious tradition and communities in the region, they did so upon Kongolese foundations and shared palo monte/palo mayombe

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perspectives. In palenques and cofradias, on sugar and coffee plantations, and in rural and city areas, new groups of enslaved men and women who worked side-by-side produced further transculturated, neo-African ritual activities and religious traditions. We will consider the Haitian African in Oriente shortly, but the foundation for ritual behaviors for the region continued to be the cultural heritage and ritual behaviors of the Kongo Kingdom Africans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This influence also characterizes contemporary Oriente, and Palo Mayombe is the tradition that reflects that influence in a coherent fashion.

Foundational Knowledge Central to the Oriente practice of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe is the knowledge that the world of humans contains at least four elemental categories: (1) divine spirits; (2) spirits of the dead (ancestors and more); (3) animate things; and (4) inanimate material. The supernatural Supreme Creator of all is known as Nsambe and comprehensions about the four categories include knowledge that entities in each possess some of the cosmic energy dispensed at the time the universe was brought into existence. This does not mean that there are equal amounts of energy in each of the four categories or in each entity within a category. Rather, as it was brought into existence through the essential creative essence of Nsambe, each entity in a category was given some portion. Although practitioners do not normally envision the following in this way, Nsambe, or Sambia-Mpungo, can be recognized as the singular, omnipresent, ultimate supernatural Supreme Being and Creator of all ex­istence. Everyone is grateful to Nsambe because humans and everything else were brought into the world, as humans know it, through the power of this supernatural force or being. At the same time, humans were created with sufficient capacity to attend to their own subsistence in a rational life cycle and have no need for further contact with the ultimate supernatural. Individually, devotees of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe do not even call the name of Nsambe, although the power force is conceived in all things that humans need. The leader of a practicing community and possessor of the powerful nganga spirit of the community, the tata, may utter a brief invocation with Nsambe’s name at the beginning of a special ritual, but this is as often as the name is uttered; and one must have a well-developed ear to hear and recognize the calling. 92

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Another comprehension of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe is its naturalistic and scripting focus as reflected in its sacred spaces. The naturalistic emphasis understands that the convergence of supernatural creative energies is best found in uncultivated settings in forested areas. To affirm the significance of the forest, practitioners often build sacred spaces that replicate those areas; they bring the forest into domesticated places such as homes, gardens, patios, auditorium, and so on. Outdoor greenery is placed near other sacred objects in the spaces and the outdoor materials are especially added for major ceremonies, such as the animal sacrifice that is part of “feeding” the nganga. Greenery is also part of an embelé (initiation) of a new practitioner. Sacred spaces of the tradition can include other components of forested areas as well. We observed a dried taxidermic snake wrapped around a stick, placed near the nganga. We saw similarly preserved forest animals, including an iguana, the head of a lion, the stuffed head of a monkey, a dried muskrat, and a turtle, some or all of which were ordinary inclusions in Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe spaces. These are natural, uncultivated materials of a forested environment brought into sacred spaces to represent the concentration of the creative life force that the religion holds in sacred esteem. The presence of consecrated scripting is also found in locations of sacrality and is an important component of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe knowledge and practice. These are Africa-based cosmograms that are scripted sign complexes, written as symbols and pictures that communicate meaning. They are a language of their own. This is consistent with Palo Monte/ Palo Mayombe as one of the island’s reglas congo cultural family of religions. Oriente scripts are part of the sacred and cultural vocabulary that exemplifies shared knowledge and can inform practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic about the religious identity of the signature. Those who know the symbol system can read Oriente’s cosmograms. Communities of this tradition that were part of our research always began certain rituals by writing a cosmogram on the floor of the sacred space where activities were to occur. Physically the symbols mark the ritual beginning as they communicate to those present that, “We understand our relationship to the earth, the sky, and all that is in creation.” The symbols and scripting are a “flash of the spirit,” visibly notating practitioners’ orientation about their world and affirming their cosmic perspective at the start of circumscribed activities. For example, as part of the initiation ritual, a straw mat, large green leaves, or another natural fiber completely covers palo monte/palo mayombe

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the cosmogram and uninitiated participants never see the written symbols. Figure 6 is a simulated representation of an Oriente cosmogram. We say representation because practitioners are exceptionally protective about publicizing their sacred and symbolic work. The symbolic writings contain the spiritual signature of a community’s tata who will orchestrate a particular activity, just as the scripts carry information about the spiritual initiation and genealogy of specific community groups.37 For example, the hereditary spirit of a practicing Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe community, called the prenda, is in each nganga and is known to be exceptionally powerful. The name of a community’s nganga is also the name of the prenda. When identifying themselves via their religious affiliation, practitioners (called paleros) recite a genealogical litany of their nganga community that includes this hereditary name. The genealogical identity is exceptionally important for it establishes and maintains the active reputation of a practicing group. Scripting that contains the community’s name, identity, and history, if widely known, can be negatively used by others. Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe requires work or engagement with spirits and material matter from the deceased. Practitioners understand that this ritual prerequisite is the core of efficacious power in the religion even as there is a large repertoire of objects that contain some of the power of creation. The objects and their power are brought into geographies of sacrality and the objects must be from each of the religion’s four essential categories. The three-legged, cast-iron cauldron or pot, the nganga, is the heart of ritual life for the tradition and is a prerequisite instrument that sits in the center of sacred spaces. The nganga, like spaces themselves, contains objects from the four elemental categories. The word nganga and other language used in Oriente Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe rituals are consistent with language of ethnic groups of Kongo Kingdom people.38 The linguistic and continental connection clarifies the nomination of nganga, but practitioners understand that etymologically the term refers to continental usage as “the wise man who is material and knowledge.”39 The prefix nga connotes the title of a leader and emphasizes nobility and dignity. As antecedent, nga adds a superlative character to the meaning of any word; therefore, nganga refers to an extraordinary leader whose knowledge, nobility, dignity, and wisdom are superlative in their nature.40 Although nganga may be embodied in a human, in Oriente it is dually understood to be the power concentrated within the iron caldron. The 94

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container does not merely hold the powerful objects but the nganga is the power; nganga is being. The instrument symbolically represents and is knowledge, nobility, dignity, wisdom, and the superior power of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe. The nganga is the universal world, it is all life, and it is an indispensable cosmic element of the tradition’s practice in Oriente. Initiated individuals who own and/or work with the nganga conduct spiritual work through it. These practitioners are known as paleros and/or ngangaleros, while the leader of a community of paleros is a tata. Nganga work is a vigorous, interactive, energetic exchange between spirits of the caldron, forces and spirits of initiated practitioners, between any generalized spirits of the living dead, and between the extraordinary spiritual powers of the tata. The collaboration usually includes ngangaleros who, by definition, possess the ability for a spirit to come to their bodies, possess the strength for spirit embodiment, and may achieve the extraordinary state of consciousness or trance. It is the tata, along with knowledgeable and well-experienced paleros/ngangaleros who identify individuals with this potential spiritual strength. However, spirits must confirm the human identification; a spirit must actually come to the body of a person before that person is confirmed as possessing the strength of spirit. The coming of a Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe spirit, or a human’s crossing the threshold to extraordinary consciousness, is not often accomplished even as adherents call on the nganga daily with questions and petitions. Neither responses of the nganga to human petitions nor the coming of a spirit to a palero are predictable phenomena but practitioners know it always happens. The most ordinary location for the coming of a spirit is in a sacred space and during ritual activities. However, spirits are known to come to the tata or a palero in a sacred space whether or not a ritual is in progress. Human communication with Nsambe, the ultimate supernatural spirit, is through work with the nganga and work with the dead of all categories. As one tata nganga reported, “The dead lived together with us in flesh, and now they’re with the otherworld of spirits. They can show us how to live better and join them in that world.” The dead are usually called upon to help humans solve problems and receive understandings about a doubtful future because they are powerful actors in the universal order. A tata consults spirits of the dead who, in turn, give symbolic clarifications through mythological messages related to the historic past. The tata is responsible for translating and interpreting these messages as devotees rely on the interpretations palo monte/palo mayombe

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as wise messages from the dead who, in this manner, help resolve issues of the present.41 While power of the dead can be called upon to do good, that power also can be activated to do negative things in humans’ historical world. In either case, humans must live with consequences of their requests and the resulting actions. This is an important, foundational comprehension of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, coupled with a reputation for exceptionally efficacious spiritual work. Africa-based understandings of time and space are another Palo Monte/ Palo Mayombe foundational appreciation that intersects with ritual work with spirits. Energies from elements in human time and space must interact with those from supernatural space and time if a given issue is to be resolved with spirit assistance. Ordinarily this occurs during the sacrality of ritual activity when humans can more easily facilitate spirits crossing into the historical realm. It is in the intensive actions and interactions of ritual time that humans may also have limited and temporary access to the supernatural realm. Knowledge of how to participate in rituals of cross-realm experiences represents practitioners’ comprehension of an alternative model of time; an alternative temporal modality that is beyond the linear historical understanding of Western religions. Animal sacrifice is yet another foundational understanding of this religious tradition and it, too, is directly linked to the nganga and work with that sacred instrument. In Oriente, ritualized sacrifice of animals is normal community work. These sacred activities are understood within the cosmic context of humans’ responsibility to seek right relations in and with everything that Nsambe brought into existence.42 Imbalance is common, normal, and predictable among the interwoven and complex varieties of universal components. When these relationships become particularly skewed, a ritual sacrifice may be needed to return to a more balanced state of affairs. The sacrifice is an offering to the nganga, a feeding of essential energy essence, the blood of an animal or fowl. The concept of family is an important foundational aspect of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe lifestyle as practiced in Oriente. It extends beyond blood relations to include the totality of initiated members of a religious community as well as to encompass all spiritual beings of that group. Socio­ logically, Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe provides an organizational model of family based on the tradition’s understandings about the ordered nature of the spirit world. Humans implement the model with the tata nganga as head of the structure. He is assisted by the female Yayi and both are guided by the 96

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powerful spirit instrument, the nganga. This leads to additional structural components that are equally hierarchal in the historical world. However, the tradition does not separate social organization of humans from that of the spiritual world. The whole is a symbolic universe. Nsambe is at the apex of all that is in the universal world and is the head of the human family. The father of a given worshiping community is the tata nganga, but spirits of the sacred cauldron share responsibilities as leader of the human family. Usually, the tata has, by spiritual genealogy and social relations, inherited the community’s nganga cauldron and its powers have been passed to him by the previous tata nganga. The transfer occurs at a ritually designated time after the death of the original leader and requires that ritualistically all decision-making members of the community come to consensus as to who will actually assume leadership work. This role is expected to be transferred to a genealogical family member of the dead tata who was identified early in life, if not at birth, and who has been trained throughout adulthood to assume the position if he has been designated and there is ritual consensus. Designation of the potential new leader is expected to be made just before the previous tata dies, as it is assumed that a tata will know when he is going to die and will name his successor close to that date. After the death, if the decision-making community members ritually agree to accept the designated person, a new leader becomes tata, father of the entire extended religious family. One respondent reported that at the death of a tata nganga, spiritual elders of a community, who themselves may possess a nganga, have the option to form their own community and/or to connect with another worshiping family, whether or not they remain with the original group. In other words, Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe practitioners may have memberships in more than one worship family. All persons initiated into the religion by a community’s successive tata ngangas are included as members of the extended family. This indicates that a community will include more than one tata nganga and more than one set of initiates. Noninitiated but consanguine family members are also considered part of the family and the number of members in a single religious community/family can be in the hundreds, if not thousands. “I guess I have about four thousand godchildren” is what one tata told us. Initiated members can reside oceans away from the sacred space and leader who initiated them. We know of an Oriente family/community that includes members who live in Spain, the Netherlands, Venezuela, and the United States. palo monte/palo mayombe

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To achieve the level of tata nganga, a man must have been identified as strong enough to receive spirits, must have acquired a requisite secret body of ritual and religious knowledge, and must have inherited a nganga that he directs and is reciprocally directed by. The nganga resides in the tata’s sacred space and, between the leader and the nganga, they coordinate affairs of the extended religious family. The muerto is a most critical component of the nganga as it is the spirit of a specific dead person known to visit the historical world, particularly through the nganga and the tata. Each sacred caldron possesses such a designated muerto, but when we asked practitioners about the definition, meaning, and characteristics of the muerto of an nganga, there was no general consistency in their responses. However, the one characteristic about which respondents did agree was that the nganga is and does contain the prenda. The prenda is an extraordinarily powerful, divine spirit designated to communicate with humans with specific messages from the spirit world. We could not determine how paleros in Oriente understand the relationship or difference between the prenda and the muerto, but in some locations we were told that they are equal, while in other places it was said that a muerto is too young to be a prenda. Our posture is that, until there is further research, we accept that Oriente devotees of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe engage their nganga as the holder and personification of “el muerto” and “prenda” as extraordinarily powerful spirits available to assist humans. The Yayi, mother of the practicing community, accompanies the tata in managing spiritual affairs of the family through the nganga. All initiated members experience symbolic, spiritual “birth through the nganga” by way of the embelé/initiation, and this is usually conducted by the Yayi and tata. In Oriente, the tata and Yayi are godparents to all members of a given community of practitioners and they are in charge of helping to resolve members’ spiritual problems and difficulties. And despite the fact that humans exist in a material world, the Africa-based orientation of the religions sees most all problems and difficulties as spiritual. Initiated women may also hold positions, though there is disagreement and inordinate hesitancy to discuss what these are. Respondents reported that “Madre de Agua” (mother of water), “Madre Nkisi” (mother with power that makes things happen), and “Madre nganga” are titles of such positions. When we presented our discussion of these as “positions,” none of the practitioners attending the annual meeting on religions disputed, questioned, or corrected our report from the field, although they had done so on other 98

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of our databased reports about Oriente religions.43 Women who hold these positions may possess a nganga, but this fact is rarely discussed and only shared with a few people for public consideration.44 Some of women’s ritual responsibilities in Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe include dressing ceremonial animals after a sacrifice and preparing foodstuffs during and after rites, rituals, and celebrations. At the same time, these responsibilities are not gender specific. We observed men and women preparing ritual foodstuffs just as we observed men who prepared animals after sacrifice. We also found men and women cleaning the floor of sacred spaces after specific ceremonial sacrifices, even as men more normally maintained the regular cleanliness of sacred sites. We also observed that the gender fluidity noted in Palo communities extended to women participating, but not competing, in chanting and battle events. Although these are important elements of the foundational knowledge from which Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe practitioners live out their Africabased lifestyle in Oriente, this is not a complete discussion. We have chosen to present the more salient comprehensions that are rarely omitted when practitioners speak of their tradition.

Sacred Spaces Constructed spaces of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe are designed to replicate outdoor forest areas. In forests, a sacred center is a location wherein descending cosmic power is known to have previously intersected with other energies from elements in the four essential categories of the human realm. The outdoor sacred geographies are sites where it is known that energy from each of the four essential categories has focused power and where power of the otherworld of spirits has united with the four to equal an authoritative juncture. This combination is acknowledged as existing in an alternative modality of time and space. Palo practitioners understand that the conversion creates an arena of cosmic energy, a dynamic flowing of highly articulated reciprocal spiritual communication that is spectacular, but not a spectacle. The cosmic arena also characterizes sacred spaces built by devotees and, when special ritual work is done appropriately, the sensually explosive potential of convergence can be felt if not observed. Rituals of initiation, rituals to eliminate negative situations, memorial rituals for the dead, rituals to return balance to earthly matters, or rituals to celebrate the day of a palo monte/palo mayombe

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divine spirit are exemplary occasions when cosmic energy convergence can occur. Conceptually, it is this characteristic of reciprocal cosmic communication and dynamic energy transmission that positions Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe spaces as charismatic centers. The spaces make things happen even against opposition. As a mandatory religious instrument, the nganga sits in sacred spaces and contributes to their charisma. Palo practitioners understand that cosmic forces are more likely to visit and consult with elemental energies of an assembled space when it and the nganga are prepared in a ritualistically appropriate manner. It takes well-developed religious knowledge to assemble a nganga within a sacred location. There can be dirt from farreaching corners of the earth; sticks from an assortment of specialty trees and bushes; and expressly empowered rocks from oceans, rivers, mountains, and valleys, as well as skeletal fragments from a wide selection of dead sacred humans and animals. To know where to find and how to select any and all of these requires decades of training and experience. Some material objects of a nganga can be seen in figure 7, and the image includes the ngangalero/palero saluting the sacred cauldron of his space. According to the tradition, the green tree leaves and branches are inserted natural elements that help transpose the small room into a location of sacrality and a space for strong effective ritual activity. The lighted candle designates the space as one where practitioners know who they are spiritually and that they belong to a cosmic order. Respondents also report that “The candle lights the way for visiting spirits.” A glass of clear water helps spirits cross from the otherworld and arrive in the human realm. The nganga, with all of its characteristic elements, each with its own cosmic energy, sits in the center of the space to receive offerings and to actively participate in all Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe work. On the left in figure 7, just behind or above the green, red, and white can, is a cazuela, a characteristic marker of Oriente sacred spaces. Initiated practitioners are required to salute the nganga whenever they enter its presence and before sacrificial rituals. The salute has several forms but usually begins with the ngangalero/palero kneeling before the nganga and sacred objects centered in the space. Crossed fists touch the floor, first one over the other and then the reverse. While knocking three times, the practitioner says, “Salaam alaakem, malkem salaam.” The forehead gently touches the floor and the practitioner, still bending, lifts the upper body to offer personal words of thanks and petition. Often the practitioner takes a 100

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mouthful of malafa (clear rum) and, while crossing one hand to the opposite shoulder, sprays the liquid across all items in the space. Then, with the same gesture of the opposite hand and shoulder, sprays another mouthful of the liquid in the same manner. Before turning his or her back to the space, the practitioner’s hands usually touch the nganga and then his or her own forehead or lips. A similar or variation of this type of salute is required of everyone before the beginning of “feeding of the nganga” or a ritual with blood sacrifice. Sacrifice is one of the more important rituals to occur in sacred spaces of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, and the tata nganga is the person with sufficient religious knowledge and spiritual authority to determine what type of sacrifice must be done—a change in human behavior and/or animal blood offerings, for example. Before a sacrificial ceremony, a cosmogram is scripted on the floor (see figure 6). This is accompanied by singing or chanting, and drumming if resources permit. The scripting signifies that only initiated practitioners should be inside the sacred space. When proper congo-style drums are not available for the ceremony, some community member will beat the appropriate rhythms on some other surface or on their bodies. Doors to the sacred space are opened when the specialized activities are over and just before it is time for the sacrificial animal to be brought inside. All practitioners and any visitors begin singing, chanting, and drumming again, as the animal enters. A designated and trained religious authority, another tata, holds the animal during the presentation. Individually everyone bows and presents their body to the held animal. After all have bid farewell, the tata nganga or a designated tata places a special knife to the animal’s throat and everyone present pinches their throats, vibrating the pinched skin, and says ceremonial words that ask for a smooth and quick cut. Participants are also asking that the sacrifice be acceptable. The animal’s blood flows in a straight line, down the knife blade that points to the nganga below (the assembled group is “feeding the nganga”). The knife and blood are then directed toward covering other sacred objects of the ceremony that were designated to be “fed,” such as a cazuela. When all required animals have been sacrificed, the fed nganga and other objects are ritualistically returned to their regular places in the sacred space and the floor is cleaned and sanitized. There is a sequential and procedural pause before generalized celebration resumes with singing, chanting, and dancing. Drums and drummers can be an integral part of this festive phase and, based on the nature of the ritual, a collective meal is shared by palo monte/palo mayombe

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individuals for whom the sacrifice was performed. Every effort is made for everyone in attendance to receive some of the sacrificial food. Practitioners understand that eating cooked flesh of appropriately designated and sacrificed animals gives strength to all who consume it. When one enters a Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe sacred space, the most visible and striking aspects are the sensuality of material objects. The dried blood of sacrificed animals, the skeletal head of a lion or other being, the femur or other bone of a human, the taxidermic character of a large turtle, a dried snake skin, links of a large chain, spikes from railroads, large axes, and more are all dramatically and unavoidably attractive to human senses. Figure 8 is a close-up of a Palo sacred space including the variety of material objects associated with ritual work of the tradition. Among these is a ceramic representation of an Indian and a red headband with feathers (see figure 9). These are symbolic inclusions from the cultural traditions of Cuban Indians. The ceramic image is not what we believe Cuban Indians looked like but practitioners’ focus on the category of Indians, not authentic characteristic replicas. During certain rituals, the tata nganga and/or other paleros/ngangaleros can receive a special Indian spirit and respondents reported that this is a particularly special and powerful spirit. When the Indian spirit crosses over and comes to a tata or a palero, the red headband is ritualistically placed on the person and the spirit imparts knowledge to practicing members who are present.

Summary Thoughts Religious customs associated with Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe were brought into Oriente with captives from ethnic families of Africa’s Kongo Kingdom. These were the early and initial enslaved workers who delivered the continental cosmic orientation that became foundational in the Oriente practice of indigenous religions. The Africa-based pool of knowledge included rules for adjusting to a new natural environment and the full body of comprehensions was adapted, concretized, and used in contact with other cultural groups of the eastern region’s colonial circumstances. Ritual customs were equally stabilized within hundreds of palenques de cimarrones that were scattered throughout Oriente’s Sierra Maestra mountains, as well as in informal ethnic affinity groupings that could be found on plantations, farms, towns, villages, and cities of the region. Eventually, colonial authorities sanctioned the informal groupings as cofradias. 102

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Sacred spaces of the Kongo-based tradition are replications of outdoor forest areas where cosmic energies of created essence from four essential categories are known to converge. In Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe locations of sacrality, the nganga is the central ritual instrument and contains a plethora of other powerful objects from the essential categories. The cazuela also has become an important ritual device whose use developed among colonial African descendants. The region’s generalized spiritual reputation as the “land of the dead” is linked to the content of these containers. A Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe community of practitioners is a family composed of all persons initiated by the religious leader plus all spirits associated with the community’s performance of the tradition. Females have intimate roles in ritual life as well as a direct relationship with its requisite knowledge, wisdom, and experiences. Women hold leadership positions and designated female leaders assist in coordinating affairs for the community. In Oriente, Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe practices do not appear to be exceptionally dogmatic, although there is clear hesitancy to reveal most knowledge and activities to noninitiated and unfamiliar visitors, even though noninitiated persons may be allowed to participate in some activities. In the next chapter, we turn to the religious tradition brought to Oriente by Haitian Africans.

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5

Vodú

Approximately thirty-five miles of sea separate eastern Cuba from the nation of Haiti. On a clear evening, from shores of the former French colony, one can see the lights of Santiago de Cuba, the second largest city in Cuba (see map 5). It is no wonder, therefore, that Haiti, where at least 66 percent of the contemporary population is of African descent, has influenced religious traditions in Oriente.1 Haiti is internationally known as the seat of Vodou religious practice in the Americas; ritual behaviors were adapted from their African origins and transculturated within colonial activities of cultural populations that inhabited the French colony then known as St. Domingue.2 The Ewé Fon/Adja ethnic group of West Africa was the most dominant continental population in the colony as they had been captured and brought to the Caribbean from areas now known as the People’s Republic of Benin. Although religious traditions from the Ewé Fon/Adja arrived directly from Africa in colonial Cuba before the close of the eighteenth century, these early Fon practices were not as widespread as in St. Domingue. Africabased practices from the tradition, known as Arará, have been mostly confined to western and central parts of Cuba. Some small numbers of Arará groups continue, but based on our literature and field research, Oriente does not seem to have Arará societies, although it does have active Vodú

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communities.3 The Cuban tradition of Vodú permeates Oriente but it was brought from Haiti, not directly from the African continent. Customs and procedures of the tradition are so prevalent in the eastern region, particularly in mountain communities of the Sierra Maestra, that many academics mistakenly consider it an exclusively Oriente phenomenon.4 Despite this perception, on a visit to Ciego de Avila, a city not in Oriente, we interviewed Cuban Haitian descendants who emphatically identified themselves as members of a practicing Vodú community and we were introduced to others who belonged.5 This suggests that the tradition is not exclusive to Oriente but probably follows a pattern of Haitian migration to Cuba that occurred during different historical epochs. Oriente sacred spaces of the tradition mirror the Haitian origins just as they express content from their African beginnings and their eastern sociopolitical environment. We turn now to important specifics that brought Haitian Africans and their Vodou practices to Oriente.

Coming to Cuba The African starting point of Haitian Vodou is the Ewé Fon/Adja ethnic communities of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century areas we know as Dahomey or Benin. Religious practices of these continental groups provided foundational orientation and phenomenological principles, but, like others from Africa imported to the Caribbean, the Fon had already incorporated ideas and customs developed through contact and exchange with other African cultural groups. The contact had occurred long before Europeans arrived. Groups from the Ewé Fon/Adja, the Fulani, the Kongolese, those of Yorubaland, and other neighboring kingdoms and empires participated in cultural exchanges that accompanied trade, war, political alliances, and other such contacts. When Europeans began transporting Africans across the Atlantic Ocean, captured members of the intersecting communities had already incorporated, adapted, substituted, and/or woven compatible features into new spiritual practices. These merged behaviors were part of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ewé Fon/Adja knowledge as these captives first arrived in the Caribbean. As they made the involuntary voyages, persons introduced into the French colonial system of enslavement brought the reformulated sacred knowledge in their minds and hearts, and scripted in their bodies. The enslaved reformulated, yet again, the new religious practices from their remembrances of the African traditions. In this regard, vodú

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Robert Farris Thompson has the following to say about the multiethnic African inclusion of content in the African and New World process: The cultures of the conquered—Mahi to the north, Kewtu and Anago Yoruba to the east—were fairly close to the Dahomean way of life. . . . Fusion and refusion of Yoruba spirits, first in Dahomey and then all over again in Haiti, go a long way toward explaining the phenomenon of multiple avatars of the same DahomeanYoruba god.6 Sacred customs of Dahomey’s Ewé Fon/Adja people were dominant among early practices in St. Domingue, and through fifteenth- and sixteenth-century encounters the religious tradition of Haitian Vodou was produced. Everyone on the French colonial island developed new behaviors appropriate for the Caribbean environment, whether they chose to or not. The multicultural nature of populations and exchanges in the Americas, coupled with the inequitable distribution of power in the sociopolitical colonial structures, ensured that new behaviors would evolve. Africans’ Haitian religion was one of a multitude of such new creations that included language, food, clothing, political structures, and so on. And it was the transculturated Haitian Vodou that Haitian Africans brought to Oriente when French planters moved themselves and their bonded persons to Oriente. The large number of enslaved workers they brought to the east diversified the region’s existing African-descendant population and its religious practices. However, migration to Oriente from Haiti had begun before this late eighteenth-century movement. Gold, sugar, and other profitable enterprises initially brought French settlers to the Americas just as such economic opportunity had lured other Europeans, including Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch. By the mid-1600s, indigo, coffee, and tobacco farmers of St. Domingue began to reduce the production of these crops for that of sugar. Profitable sugar cultivation demanded larger and larger land spaces and infinitely more human labor. The crop conversion and the demand for the cheap labor of enslaved African workers pushed small farmers out of the French colony. As the eighteenth century moved into its second decade, French farmers could not compete with the large agribusiness of sugar cultivation, resulting in a first French migration to Oriente, bringing their slave labor with them.7 Similarly, during this period and before, some African descendants who ran away to escape the horrific conditions of St. Domingue’s enslavement 106

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fled to Oriente where the Sierra Maestra and its palenques offered them liberated zones.8 These migrations, prior to the Haitian Revolution, were small compared to the large numbers of Haitian Africans who arrived in the region as a result of turmoil surrounding that revolution.9 The social and political changes brought about economic upheavals that forever interrupted the island’s sugar production. French planters fled the disorder by the thousands and again migrated to Oriente, a region that proved ideal for their agricultural projects. French Haitian farmers and slave masters viewed the eastern region as an opportunity to capitalize on the international sugar trade now that Haiti’s production was in disarray. Planters brought enslaved laborers of Ewé Fon/Adja background and these became the second definitive African ethnic group in Oriente. Mountains and foothills of the Sierra Maestra were also conducive to the successful production of coffee and tropical fruits, such as mangos, bananas, and pineapples. The cool, sun-soaked growing environment allowed migrants to quickly adapt their agricultural skills as well as technological and administrative expertise to the eastern region. They were particularly helpful in mechanizing Cuba’s coffee and sugar production and transforming those enterprises into internationally profitable commodities. However, for enslaved Haitian Africans now relocated in Oriente, there was special familiarity, familiarity related to our interest in sacred spaces. The name of Oriente’s largest city, Santiago de Cuba, is also the name of the Catholic counterpart of Haitians’ transculturated religious warrior spirit, Oggún Fai. Africans from the French colony, renamed Haiti after the success of the 1804 revolution, were intimately familiar with Oggún and knew of his similarities to the Catholic warring saint of Santiago de Compostella. Ewé Fon/Adja descendants had transculturated Oggún and Santiago through contact and exchanges with Europeans in St. Domingue, if not before. Robert Farris Thompson says the following about this process: In the course of supposed Westernization, Haitians actually transformed the meaning of the Catholic icons by observing their similarities to African spirits. Haitians restructured the identity of the saints to the Catholic Church in terms of their own religious language.10 Oggún Fai/Santiago was one such divine spirit who was restructured through European contact and was the force invoked by Boukman’s vodú

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soldiers of the Haitian Revolution. An old song about another Haitian rebel leader, Mackandal, had been handed down from earlier freedom fights and helped strengthen the comparative understandings between French and Spanish island realities. The song said, “Santiago, I’m the war’s son, Santiago. Can’t you see that I’m the war’s son?” According to legend, Mackandal was a fugitive slave who escaped burning at the stake after poisoning several French as well as Haitian colonists. He reportedly proclaimed that he would change his form before his execution. He was burned at the stake, but as no one saw the punishment or Mackandal’s body thereafter, he became part of legend about supernatural forces; remember, he dared poison whites. Similarly, the connection between revolutionary warriors of Mackandal, Boukman, and Oggún Fai/Santiago became interconnected for most Haitian Africans. Those arriving in Oriente were surely familiar with the association.11 Shared cultural and spiritual familiarity did not alter conditions of enslavement, but common sights in the capital city of Santiago can not be ignored. Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier evoked the familiarity Haitian Africans would have felt in Oriente’s sights and situations as he speculated on their religious comprehensions when first encountering churches. Carpentier describes what the Haitians would have seen: Baroque gold, human hair on the Christ, the confessional . . . overloaded with mysterious moldings, . . . dragons being smashed by Holy feet, Saint Anton’s pig, black Virgins, Saint Jorge with buckskin and doublet. They all had an enveloping force, a seductive power, by presence, symbolism, attributes and signs. All similar to those that emanated from altars consecrated to Damballa, the serpent god in Haitian hunfos [temples].12 Such eighteenth-century images and realities in the Oriente environment contained cosmic truths already known by Haitian Africans. They were in new geographic territory but the visual aesthetic was well understood. Haitian religious practitioners, called serviteurs, also recognized several patterns of their spiritual customs in the already-established Kongobased practices of Oriente sacred lifestyles. The recognition went beyond, but included, shared orientation about the supernatural world, practices of ritual initiation, animal sacrifice, and iconic parallels in sacred spaces— and each group of African descendants understood the coming of spirits to 108

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human bodies. Kongo-based traditions’ emphasis on spiritual work with the dead was equally well known to African Haitians. They had rituals that revered and worked with remnants of dead ancestors, and they, too, called upon these spirits to help humans confront the precarious circumstances of the historical world. Haitians also shared economic and social status with African descendants in Oriente as both were Africans in a land that enslaved and brutally exploited descendants of their continental homeland. Existing and familiar patterns of Africa-based organized social life was also recognizable to the immigrating Haitian Africans, and those patterns gave structural order to their transition in the colonial land space. These social patterns helped them become Cuban.

Becoming Cuban Societal similarities between the French and Spanish plantation economies were a factor in facilitating eighteenth-century Haitian Africans’ adjustments in Oriente. Central to the arena of religion and religious organization were similarities of civil society groups in the two locations—French Haitian societé and Cuban cabildo.13 The colony of St. Domingue was noted for its variety of cultural and ethnic inhabitants as well as for its racially separated social groupings. Independent voluntary associations of the public sector were mechanisms used by free persons of color, free blacks, and even some enslaved blacks to participate in the colony’s civil order. There were several militias and police units of African descendants early in the French colony’s history,14 and rituals derived from Ewé Fon/Adja heritage gave spiritual foundation and cohesion to many of the black groups. Vodou, the religious tradition constructed by African descendants in the colony, was instrumental in inspiring activities that led to the Haitian Revolution. One such ritual event is repeatedly cited as an important catalyst.15 It was from their history and/or experience as part of such social ar­­ rangements that Haitian Africans in Oriente found familiarity in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cabildo arrangements. Cuban authorities initially had sanctioned as cofradía associations Africans’ informal affinity groups, but by the close of the eighteenth and opening of the nineteenth century, these had been restructured into more formal cabildos. The intent of cabildos for sanctioning authorities was to integrate independent affinity groups, from palenques and elsewhere, into a more functional relationship with colonial social structures. Such integration, it was thought, would vodú

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prevent rebellious activities in Cuba.16 Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitian Africans arrived at this point of conversion and found that cabildos functioned much like similar organizations in their island homeland. Unlike in the French colony, however, entire cabildos did not serve as military units, not even during Cuba’s 1868–1878 Ten Years’ War when large numbers of African descendants voluntarily fought with insurgent criollo Cubans.17 Still, despite differences in purpose and some functions, the fact of sanctioned cabildos in Oriente permitted Haitian Africans to adapt to social organizing in their new homeland. African Haitian organizations included members from other ethnic families, but the cultural definition was clearly Haitian and the groups named themselves Tumba Francesas or Tajones.18 The groups de­­veloped as permeable but relatively closed communities for no other reason than that Haitians arrived in Oriente as a group during roughly the same time period. They worked on geographically self-contained coffee and other farms, called cafateles or fincas, which were surrounded by mountainous areas with extremely limited transportation. These factors helped to strengthen tumbas and tajones in their Ewé Fon/Adja Haitian identity and were reinforced by the numbers of descendants who continued to arrive from Haiti. At the same time, the groups were religious associations and mutual-aid organizations, and many were performing collectives for civic and religious holiday activities. One archeologically restored finca or cafetale, the Isabelica Plantation, lies deep within the Sierra Maestra and is a strong example of earlier areas where enslaved Haitian Africans lived and worked. Isabelica was saved from fires set by insurgents during the 1895 War of Independence and now serves as a visible reference for the contained nature of Africans who cultivated coffee and other products in the mountain region. The cafetales and fincas of Oriente were successful production centers, and Judith Bettelheim proposes that the “Afro-Haitian” population was infinitely significant. She says, “When considering that 32 percent of the total immigrant ‘French’ population were slaves, one can realize that the Afro-Haitian culture has grown in eastern Cuba.”19 In remote areas of the mountains, enslaved Haitian Africans maintained their traditional ritual songs, dances, and drumming practices within their Tajona/Tumba Francesa associations. Research of Casa del Caribe field investigators found that Haitians rehearsed their routines on flat-stoned terraces used to dry coffee beans.20 These musical preparations 110

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were in advance of carnival or other festive occasions and included versions of staid dances that referenced those their foreparents had observed French colonists carry out. The preparations also included drumming and dancing from the spiritual heritages of Africa and Haiti. The groups participated so extensively in Oriente festive activities that they became well known for the distinct nature of their performances. For example, the Haitian groups were one of many that joined Santiago’s annual Carnival parades. The parade-performing groups, called congas and comparsas (carnival parade band), were organized along lines of neighborhood inhabitance, including mountain groups with their cabildo or tumba memberships. Each group paraded for prizes before a judging panel. The competitive activities continue today and performing Tumbas Francesas can be seen in such cities as Guantánamo, Santiago, and Las Tunas as they fuse colonial religious ideas with public presentation.21 Individual Haitians also are known to have escaped Cuban bondage, joined existing palenques de cimarrones, and formed their own in the Sierra Maestra. By 1815, a “small army organized by a group of runaways” was successful in “attacking coffee and sugar estates, freeing and taking” some of the enslaved forces of ranches of the Partido de Limones. The palenque army launched this particularly deadly and well-known insurrection against Limón. Located just outside the Oriente town of El Cobre. “Several children were killed and Spanish authorities” argued that the Africans were “brujos,” the Spanish word given to Africans who worked with spirits. The insurrection and the army became known as “Brujos de Limón.”22 By the 1860s, when Oriente descendants were restless and focused on freedom and the elimination of the enslavement system, Guillermón Moncada, an African Cuban of Haitian ancestry, had organized a comparsa named Brujos de Limón. Moncada chose to serve as the comparsa’s bastonero (stick fighter), as this position gave him the “customary license to use his baton [symbolically] against whomever he desired.” Moncada used his “Palo de Limones” (stick of Limones) against Spanish soldiers, and is said to have chanted “Chinchirin se va pal monte, cogelo con quien se van” (You dark-skinned one, go to the mountain, take with you whomever will go). Contemporary Oriente respondents reported that the legendary Palo de Limones waved by Moncada, coupled with the equally legendary chant, were signals that it was time for listeners to join the mountain palenques and resist Spanish rule. We found that the chant continues to be used in local congas’ songs during Carnival and is intentionally maintained as a connection between vodú

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contemporary African descendants and their palenque ancestry. Members of the Santiago conga group Foco Cultura Congo de Los Hoyos directly informed us that they use the chant and claim to have organizational origins in the Tumba Francesa organized by Moncada.23 Before a carnival or festival event in cities and towns below the Sierra Maestra, Tajona/Tumba Francesa members marched with their drums, costumes, and sticks down the roads from their fincas and cafetales to the celebrations, singing and chanting rhythms from Haitian African—now Cuban—traditions. The groups used special Haitian-style drums (see figure 11), danced in distinctive manners, and sang in Haitian French patois.24 The ethnic-based groups had created social space for themselves in Oriente life and were contributing to transculturated expressions that signaled being Cuban. Results of their contributions can still be seen in the disproportionate number of Oriente apellidos (surnames) of Haitian French origin. Names like Valiente, Lescay, Martín, Crombet, and Millet are reminders of this special involvement and are an equally strong remnant of Haitian influence in the region. Haitian Vodou was also recomposed in Oriente where eighteenth- and nineteenth-century religious practices of other African descendants were already participating in the Cuban transculturation process. However, unlike most other African ethnic groups, elements of Haitian regional customs were renewed and reaffirmed by an uninterrupted inflow of additional Haitian migrants that persisted even after legalized slavery ended in Cuba in 1886. This continuous in-migration was precipitated by the need for cheap labor, which Haitians provided far into the twentieth century. This and other continuous movements of large numbers of African descendants, over more than four hundred years, is what sociologist Ruth Simms Hamilton called the “geo-circularity” of African descendants—from their continental homelands to the Americas, from homes in the western hemisphere to other locations in the Americas, as well as similar patterns of movement in Europe.25 It was/is a migration pattern generated by capitalist needs for cheap labor or other cost reductions. Between 1912 and 1916, for example, Haitian immigration to Cuba grew from 8,784 people to 79,274, and most went to areas in Oriente. Like their ancestors of earlier years, Haitians brought ideas and familiarity, if not active experiences, with Haitian Vodou.26 Over centuries, successive Oriente relocation of Haitians as a specific ethnic group has reinforced ritual customs and strengthened the region’s Haitian-African character. 112

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Belief Foundations The Vodú tradition of Oriente contains the characteristic Dahomean-type pantheonic lineages of Loa, or divine spirit forces. These are the primary spirits venerated by traditions in Haiti as well as in Oriente. Cuban Haitian Loa are a reblending of African Ewé Fon/Adja continental knowledge with cultural contacts, in St. Domingue where they became Haitian, and yet another articulation of the tradition in Oriente. In Haiti and in Oriente, Loa lineages are Rada and Petro. Robert Farris Thompson describes their presence in the Americas: Rada, after the slaving designation for persons abducted from Arada, on the coast of Dahomey, itself derived from the name of the holy city of the Dahomeans, Allada; and the other called PetroLemba, or simply Petro, after a messianic figure, Don Pedro, from the south peninsula of what is now Haiti and the northern Kongo trading and healing society, Lemba.27 Beyond and above each of the Rada and Petro divine spirit lines is the Bon Dieu or Grand Met, the Supreme Creator power. Absolutely fundamental to practice of Vodú in Oriente is the reverence of Damballa. Damballa is the lead spirit within the Rada class of Loa and is represented as a serpent. Rada Loa are exceptionally powerful. They are responsible for and have dominion over the soul, the sky, the earth, the seas, and the universe. These Loa only perform good works and, as strong as they are, their power is limited. The triumvirate of Baron Samedi, Baron Cimetiere, and Baron Crois lead the Petro class of spirits, and they are even stronger. Petro Loa are ancestors whose bodies have departed the human historical world beyond the living dead; they are spirits of the dead who have moved beyond phenomena of humans’ material time, beyond the time of the living dead, and into macrotime of the long past as discussed in chapter 2. Petro spirits are even able to intervene in Rada activities on behalf of human beings who serve the Petro Loa through Vodú ritual practices. Another important foundation to this religious tradition in the east is the linkage of ritual and sanguine family relations. For the most part, Oriente’s early Vodú groups and their ritual activities were closely aligned with consanguine family relations and included any additional kin related to the female and male leaders, called mambo and hungán respectively. The genealogical family of the mambo or hungán provides the closest internal vodú

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linkage of a ritualistically bonded Vodú family. That is to say, blood family members of the leading hungán or mambo marry, have children, and are all ritually bonded into a full worship community. This kin-based social organization continues to be active in Oriente, as demonstrated in figure 10, for example, where the three male members span three generations and are blood relatives as well as members of a Las Tunas group of Vodú practitioners. In each collective of our sample population, all members had a genealogical spiritual relationship to the group leader, no matter how far removed they were from direct blood lineage. The pattern appears normative and was further confirmed through interviews with family descendants of two prominent Cuban military heroes. Family offspring of military brothers Antonio and José Maceo Grajales continue to reside in Oriente. Our respondents were the great-grand and grand relatives to the Maceo Grajales brothers and each independently reported that their family ancestors were intimately familiar with, if not actual practitioners of, Vodú customs. Two descendants reported, “I learned how to do the [spiritual] work from my grandmother and her grandmother taught her.” The latter relative was not known by other respondents but minimally would have been a great-grand relative to the Maceo Grajales military men. These respondents acknowledged that even some contemporary men in their immediate families are practitioners.28 In addition to blood and ritual linkages, another foundational practice of Vodú in contemporary Oriente is the predominant devotion to the family of Loa associated with warrior spirits. Emphasis on warrior Loa is consistent with the battle lore of African Dahomeian and Haitian historical events and religious practices. The transculturated Oggún spirit force is shown in figure 11 and presents the warrior as a Haitian expression within a ceramic figurine, a warrior astride a horse in motion on the battlefield.29 Another major Vodú supernatural warrior spirit is Leggba and several Oriente communities continue to venerate both Oggún and Leggba. They are the spirits on whom public performances of musical extravaganzas of Guantánamo’s Tumba Francesa performing group are based. Most members of the group comprise a worshiping Vodú community and their performances are built from ritual stories and dances of the two Loa. We interviewed the director of this group after observing their performance at the Guantánamo Hotel and were told that the variety shows were produced in Cuba, presented throughout the island as well as in Europe, and reflect clear reference and representations of Oggún and Leggba.30 Significant to 114

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our exploration is that Oriente Vodú communities also can be performing Tajona/Tumba Francesa, just as they are centers of Haitian ritual practices. Ritual practice of possession and revelation is another important foundational understanding in the region. Serviteurs understand that the most basic access to the supernatural otherworld occurs through the act of spirit mounting or possession. This coincides with cosmic ideas held by members of other indigenous religions and most regularly occurs during Vodú rituals in sacred spaces as Loa “borrow” a practitioner’s body. However, the term possession is not conceptually positioned in Africa-based cosmic orientation, nor derived from knowledge foundations of the continent. We prefer the more accurate descriptor suggested by Rachel Harding from her research in Brazil. Harding contends that the phenomenon of a spirit coming and mounting a human body is a relationship of exchange, of mutuality, of shared responsibility, and above all of accompaniment . . . Possession is particularly significant because the occupation of black bodies by a divine being is a stunning contestation of subalternity.31 This more accurately reflects how Oriente respondents communicated their experiences with the phenomenon. An older representation of experiences expressed by our respondents was presented by Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, the seventeenth-century Kongolese revolutionary leader. She reported on experience with the spirit and body phenomenon that was based on encounters with a visiting spirit significant in Kongo history. Beatriz’s account represents yet another manner in which spirits speak, visit, and inform humans through embodied communication as we observed with our research groups: A clear vision appeared. It was a man dressed in the simple blue hooded habit of a Capuchin monk, so real that he seemed to be standing in the room. “I am Saint Anthony, firstborn son of the Faith and of Saint Francis. I have been sent from God to your head . . . First I had gone into the head of a woman who was in Nseto, but I had to leave as the people there did not revere me well. Then I left Nseto and went to Soyo where I entered the head of an old man. But there was a Reverend Father stationed there, and the people wanted to beat me, so again I fled. Then I went to Bula, and vodú

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the same thing happened again. I am trying once more this time in Kibangu, and I have chosen you.”32 Dona Beatriz’s report is pointedly significant because she was a member of the Kongo ethnic family of Africans who were ancestors to the enslaved Bakongo captives imported to Oriente. Beatriz and her people were also ancestors to Kongo groups that exchanged religious knowledge with Dahomey ethnic groups on the continent and in Oriente. The overlapping but distinct African ethnic communities had knowledge and experiential familiarity with spirit mounting and revelation. Both Dona Beatriz and Harding’s descriptions of the phenomena are conceptually closer to statements of Oriente practitioners regarding spirits who revealed knowledge to them about how, where, and with what to build sacred spaces. Oriente Vodú serviteurs understand that as a spirit accompanies the human body, the human person is able to enter a temporary state of exaltation and move into the time and space of the spiritual otherworld. This profound and honored process is made possible through ritual activities performed in assembled geographies of sacrality, sacred spaces of the tradition. That most serviteurs hope to experience this spirit embodiment is because the Africa-based cosmic orientation of their religious tradition informs them about the priority of the phenomenon, as well as about other aspects of the world in which they live. The orientation identifies humans’ historical material world as one that includes spirits and is a world that is periodically visited by spirits, particularly divine spirits who can appear at ritual times.33 This is an especially important foundational aspect of Vodú comprehensions that also expresses an alternative model of time. Vodú serviteurs reported that as a spirit enters their bodies, they experience an extraordinary force moving into/onto their being. From the perspective of our observations, “being mounted” by the spirit evokes a trance-like state of awareness. Practitioners understand that divine spirits of the supernatural world must own the body if serviteurs are to participate in the phenomenon of macro, cosmic time and acquire knowledge that can aide in human life. Serviteurs surrender their bodies in service to divine spirits. Joan Dayan, author of Haiti, History, and the Gods, contends that for those who serve the Loa, to surrender individual will, body, and become a vessel for use by the Loa is the best, if not the highest, type of spiritual submission.34 Faithful submission to divine will, and being entered or mounted, is the aspiration of most Vodú serviteurs. 116

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At the same time, Vodú in Oriente is much more than an organizational structure or an exchange relationship with spirits who accompany the human body. It is a lifestyle that encompasses everything that might concern practitioners; Vodú is part of all aspects of their existence. This, too, is a fundamental aspect of the tradition. O. R. Dathorne described how intimate and all encompassing the religious practice is. Of serviteurs he said, They turn to it to consult the most adequate alternatives they must pursue in life related to crop and harvest, birth, marriage, death, and everything else connected to the whole existence structure. Vodú is nation, music, and death; knowledge of gods; the right type of sacrifice; and the observance of the proper behavioral course. It is also an instance laced with Bon Dieu [Good God]; as this lace occurs during the possession, the venerator is able to obtain the knowledge of the sense and significance of life itself.35 Another foundational understanding of Vodú in Oriente is the ritual sacrifice of animals. Practitioners reported that animal sacrifice is intimately linked to their Africa-based understanding of the cycle of life. The shared cosmic orientation informs them that all things created have the essence or power of Bon Dieu/Grand Met, the Supreme Creator. Blood is the material manifestation of this essential power because with it there is life and without it there is no life. During designated ritual events, animal blood must be offered as an indicator to the Loa that humans are living within the cosmic rhythm of creation. We have never seen a house pet sacrificed, but chickens, birds, goats, and pigs—chiefly pigs—are a normal sacrificial offering in Oriente Vodú rituals.

Spaces Oriente colonial Vodú sacred spaces usually were in wooded areas of the Sierra Maestra mountains, flatland communities of llano canero (areas of sugarcane production) that were sprinkled throughout the mountain range. Today, ideal spaces of sacrality are still in forested areas where the sky, mountains, rivers, trees, and animals are natural parts of the Vodú tradition’s sacred scenery. Many Oriente worshiping communities continue to live, work, and carry out their ritual practices in such areas. At the same time, historic as well as contemporary spaces can be found in more visible vodú

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vicinities of cities like Santiago, Guantánamo, and Las Tunas. We were told of communities in every locale—in the hills, suburbs, and cities—but our most active contact was with sacred spaces and serviteurs from areas of Las Tunas, Santiago, Guantánamo, and Palma Soriano. Some spaces are built within domestic settings: the interior of a bedroom or a specified room of the principal official’s residence might be dedicated to ritual activities. Other spaces were completely separated from the leader’s domestic household. From one community to the next, sacred sites do not appear to be built according to dogma or exact standard. Their size, shape, materials, and contents vary depending on spirit communication received. Rituals that incorporate a large number of practitioners will require more space than the inside of a typically small room of an Oriente house. This variety based on spirit communication is consistent with the foundational understanding that rituals are more often than not organized by leaders and are based on a leader’s ability to receive and interpret messages from Loa. Yet and still, the most valued of all sacred geographies are in forested areas of Oriente’s mountains and an extraordinary number are known to be there. When not outdoors in forested places, and sometimes when in these locations, the hunfo is the site of a common Vodú geography of sacrality.36 These are assembled edifices but not the finished or refined structures we associate with most constructed buildings. Hunfos are erected specifically for particular Vodú occasions and can remain or be disassembled after the events. The semipermanent buildings are situated in patio-like areas where members of a community gather, individually and collectively, to engage in time-honored activities. Hunfos usually have four poles that circumscribe a building’s perimeters, and a thatch roof is preferable. Some may remain upright and not be dismantled, but they are usually secured to prevent outsiders from entering. One Vodú community in our research regularly erects a hunfo at the beginning of the annual Festival del Caribe, a weeklong event (see figure 12). To uninformed visitors, the configuration is an artistic inclusion of activities that celebrate popular Caribbean religious cultures. The structure is made of animal skin, processed and stretched around poles to resemble an octagon shape. There is one entrance where two pieces of skin come together. We were informed that as a functioning part of the religious community that builds this structure, it serves to define and construct as sacred the space that members will use throughout the myriad of activities associated 118

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with the festival. The hunfo becomes the center around and in which ritual Vodú customs are enacted during the international events. Members of the worship group can reconnect with their tradition, even as they participate in larger more general events. After seven days of Festival del Caribe, this hunfo is dismantled. However, whether in a temporary or permanent location, or even when the sacred sites are in domestic places, the floor of a Vodú space is an ex­­ ceptionally important focal point of spiritual activities. Before most ceremonial events, a Vodú vevé is drawn on the floor. The vevé is an intricately shaped symbolic representation that is scripted by drizzling flour, meal, colored dust, chalk, ground eggshells, or other designated materials on the ground or floor surface. The precise configuration of a vevé is based on serviteurs’ knowledge about Loa and Vodú cosmic matters. An authoritative leader for the activity for which the community gathers usually constructs and/or instructs the drawing before ritual events. Additional ritual acts are then performed on and around the vevé. Oriente practitioners and artists have created beautiful and expansive aesthetic art works based on the concept and process of the vevé. During one Festival del Caribe, the creation in figure 13 was assembled at the entrance of Santiago de Cuba’s main conference center, Teatro Heredia. This specific vevé was scripted in front of the constructed hunfo and contained the Haitian national emblem at the upper center and the flag of Cuba at the bottom. Sand for the scripting was made from grinding colored rocks that are a natural formation in eastern Cuba. The vevé itself was built to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Haitian Revolution and Haitian contributions to the people, culture, and religious landscape of Oriente. This vevé also demonstrates our contention about the inclusion of nationalistic ideas in ritual work as well as the integrated nature of sacred and secular activities. Like the vevé, a place for fire is significant in Vodú consciousness and sacred spaces. Most rituals take place in front of a fire, usually a very large fire that has been built in front of the space. However, the poteau-mitan (wooden pole that sets a midpoint of an entire geography of sacrality) is an indispensable component for rituals and spaces of the tradition. This pole is anchored in the earth of the peristyle dance area that is the hunfo. The poteau-mitan, which reaches from the ground toward the sky, or through a hole in the roof if the site is indoors, functions as a symbolic centering device that connects the earthly world with the realm of the supernatural. The pole is the site of vodú

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Loa entry into ritual arenas and into human historical time.37 The poteaumitan often includes a carved representation of Damballa the serpent, or an actual reptile is wrapped around the pole with its head facing upward. A Vodú ceremony cannot begin without four critical components: a leader (mambo or hungán), a fire, a poteau-mitan centering pole, and a vevé. The actual location of the sacred space is less significant, though most practitioners reported that designated, constructed hunfos in outdoor forested areas are the most spiritually powerful. The color red dominates Oriente Vodú sacred sites, but these special locations also contain a variety of material objects in other colors. On a low shelf, or on the floor near the poteau-mitan pole, is a large, darkened bottle or jug containing aguardiente (unrefined clear rum) or another strong clear alcoholic liquid. Included within the liquid can be distinguishable amounts of vinegar, small sticks or twigs, rocks, fermented herbs, an abundance of hot peppers, leaves, a gun bullet or two, small pieces of metal, and other materials. The jug immediately catches the eye of a person entering an Oriente Vodú space because this bottle is ritualistically passed to every person who crosses the threshold. Each person is expected to take at least one mouthful of the liquid. The first mouthful, by those who are knowledgeable, is to be sprayed at the table or other location of the room where there are sacred objects. After that, when the jug is passed, one is expected to swallow some of the peppery mixture. Sacred spaces of Vodú rituals also contain broken tree branches hung on a wall or placed on the floor, as well as noticeable other material objects that include seashells, large seeds, sticks, animal skins, bones, rocks, animal tusks or horns, and small animals themselves. A variety of photographs and other iconic images of humans and Catholic saints are on the floor and walls of a hunfo. The variety of rocks, stones, and other objects represent and embody the spiritual presence of Loa and are numerous, noticeable, and symbolically significant in all Oriente Vodú spaces. These objects help serviteurs’ transcend historical boundaries associated with contemporary human time and space to that of ritual spirit time and space. The colorful hand-sewn banners that regularly appear in Haitian Vodú sites are much less common in Oriente sacred spaces of Vodú.38 Objects in these spaces are known to be part of divine creation and to interact with bodies of humans as they both participate in time and space of otherworld knowledge. This comprehension infuses sacredness into all life by not separating conceptions of subject and object. Material things of 120

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Vodú and other indigenous religions are regularly understood to be sacred subjects, not merely objects of no inherent value. It is a clear reformulating of the material world of humans as integrated with the spiritual otherworld. Here again, we are confronted with the alternative temporal modality, the alternative model of time operationalized by indigenous traditions. The Africa-based cosmic orientation gives birth to this awareness though it has sat inside colonial, postcolonial, modern, and postmodern constructions of reality for centuries. Accordingly, individuals of the orientation reset time and space to one that values and empowers the spirit-consciousness of practitioners. Vodú serviteurs know and live this alternative vision of being in the world. They know that their sacred spaces contain material things that represent and exist simultaneously as Loa and other spirits of the super­ natural world. Sacrifice is equally an intimate part of Vodú practices that occurs in sacred spaces. The specific sacrificial sequence, the selected animals, and other ritual acts of Vodú sacrifice may vary from other indigenous religions, but the overlap of animal sacrifice is operative and normal for all. Serviteurs comprehend the shedding of animal blood not merely as important, but as a mandatory, powerful, and efficacious ritual conducted in geographies of sacrality. One respondent reported a Vodú event wherein sacrificial blood was directed by the Loa to indicate the next leader of the community. This leader had not yet been born but, during the designated sequence of the rite, flow from a specified animal fell upon one pregnant woman. The community understood that the baby would be a boy and that they would need to prepare him to lead the group. A short time later, the woman gave birth to a baby boy though no one had prior scientific knowledge of its gender. The ritualistic surrendering of the blood of an animal is the sharing of the sacred essential liquid of life. It is a sacrifice offered to the cosmic order of creation, which, when done and received appropriately, returns some balance to that order that has been disrupted. However, shedding of animal blood is not the only type of sacrifice that can and may occur. Humans can be instructed to change their behavior in favor of that preferred by divine spirits or be called to sacrifice their resources, energies, and/or time to help return their world to a more balanced set of relationships. Just as Oriente Vodú sacred spaces and their accompanying ritual practices are religious endeavors, they also serve to maintain consciousness of a distinct Haitian cultural identity. We consistently found that each location vodú

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of sacrality contained a discerning metaphor, a repetitive, and symbolic cultural representation within other portrayals of the religious tradition. The locations depicted a saber on top of a mountain, guarding a bonfire under a silent sky, or under a sky crossed by ferocious lightning. The representation can be found on a flag, a banner, or a picture inside sacred sites. The metaphoric presentations supply serviteurs with a memory device for the Haitian heritage of their Cuban ethnic identity, even for those born on the island and who have no experience in the Haitian homeland. The image is also a consistent presentation of religious understanding because the symbols of Haitian ethnic identity are also symbols within religious knowledge of Vodú spirits. Oriente Vodú serviteurs are Cuban even as they remain religiously and culturally linked to a transculturated Haitian symbolic universe.

Summary Thoughts Vodú of Oriente is a direct derivative of religious lifestyles that evolved in the French colony of St. Domingue even as these were reconstructions of previously fused African practices of the Ewé Fon/Adja and others of Dahomey regions of West Africa. There were earlier and smaller movements of Haitian Africans to Oriente but the major thrust of Haitian Vodou arrived with enslaved workers of French colonial planters who were fleeing the Haitian Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Oriente, as in their previous Caribbean homeland, Haitian Africans encountered a sociopolitical environment that disempowered dark-skinned people, above all the enslaved, even as the cultural and religious environment seemed familiar. Haitian migrants found familiar signs, symbols, and meanings, as well as cabildo social arrangements that resembled similar organization in their island homeland. Haitians could not escape the slave system but they were able to organize and appropriate a modicum of social flexibility wherein they practiced their religious customs. Within the cosmic orientation of their continental heritage, Oriente Vodú practitioners identify their spirits as Loa and conduct rituals that are centered on knowledge about these supernatural beings. Sacred spaces of the tradition are semipermanent, wooden structures with a center pole reaching upward that symbolically and realistically connects the world of humans with the spirit world. A plethora of material things, as well as small animals that represent and embody Loa spirits, are always in Vodú sacred 122

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geographies. The spaces contain photo images of deceased community members as well as iconic representations of Loa spirits whose transculturated images may be presented in the veneer of Catholic saints. Like many sacred spaces of other indigenous religions in Oriente, Vodú sites are a colorful montage of images, things, and beings.

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6

Espiritismo

Cuban Espiritismo is a varied set of religious practices that are exceptionally popular in Oriente. Although it is not an Africa-based tradition, it does include marker characteristics from the nation’s African heritage. Espiritismo originates from practices in the United States and from the spiritual work of the Frenchman Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (1804–1869), better known as Allan Kardec. Kardec focused his work on cosmic ideas about spirits and their ability to visit the historical world of humans. He was concerned with demonstrating the scientific veracity of spirits and their capacity to communicate. Kardec held gatherings, called séances, to demonstrate that spirits of the dead did visit the living world, and in 1857 he published Spiritualist Philosophy:The Spirits’ Book.1 The practice he developed was known as Kardecian Spiritism, and its fundamental beliefs centered on such understandings about spirits. Kardecian doctrine drew from Christianity, including an articulated interpretation of the Ten Commandments, but his main idea was that spirits of the dead could be put into different groups or categories and that they communicate and visit the living. His séances were designed to converse with select spirits in particular categories, and principles of the tradition also contended that spirits reincarnate in another human body. The

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doctrine became an international phenomenon, but it was more akin to philosophy than a religion with systematic ritual practices.2 Kardecian ideas and séance customs traveled to the Americas sometime in the decades before the 1860s, following the development of spiritualism in the United States. The North American movement materialized earlier in the nineteenth century and enjoyed popularity as the United States underwent geographic shifts in its expanding population, as well as significant social and cultural changes. Scientific and technological transformations also affected US family and work life and all of these factors joined forces with those of the hundreds of thousands of European immigrants arriving in never-ending waves at the nation’s ports. The mounting sense of social change and instability was equally affected by the increasing probability of civil war. The potential of war’s dire consequences served to heighten a focus on death and life thereafter; creating a ripe environment for Kardecian ideas. Residents of colonial Cuba were familiar with events within their northern neighbor’s borders. The two countries were more than geographic neighbors because of close relations between many of their leaders and intellectuals. Several Protestant principals from the island had studied in nineteenth-century US seminaries3 and the confluence of social relations brought US Spiritualism, influenced by Kardecian Spiritism, to Cuba sometime in the 1860s. As island insurgents of the Spanish colony prepared to enter their Ten Years’ War of 1868–1878, Spiritualism/Spiritism as well as US-style Protestantism entered once Catholic-dominated Cuba.4 Cuba’s eastern region was particularly receptive to ideas of Kardecian Spiritism as influenced by US Spiritualism. Religious practices based on cosmic ideas about working with spirits of the dead were already deeply embedded in Oriente ritual life, and ideas about spirits resonated with inhabitants there. Many had working knowledge and behavioral familiarity with the Africa-based orientation that had arrived some three to four hundred years earlier with Africans from the Kongo Kingdom. Thus, ideas about and the practice of working with spirits was normal in Oriente, but with the arrival of Spiritualism/Spiritism, Oriente Cuban ideas could be aligned with a certain scientific and modern legitimacy. The search for legitimacy was important to populations of European descendants on the island. Many who had been born in Cuba but without distinguishable connection to European status and privilege were intent upon demonstrating their allegiance to their island and their opposition to espiritismo

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the colonial monarchy. This could be done partially by aligning themselves with the new scientifically legitimate Spiritualism/Spiritism and distancing themselves from Africa-based traditions or descendants. Things African were negatively associated with slavery, ignorance, and primitive underdevelopment. The goal of many light-brown to white-skinned Cubans, and some African descendants as well, was to have an independently recognized and respected Cuban identity whose cultural foundations were endorsed by or resembled customs of Europe and North America.5 Religious legitimacy was noteworthy as part of this vision. It was a quest that intersected with growing nineteenth-century sentiment toward scientific development and nationalistic support for an independent Cuba, free from Spanish colonial rule.6 Spiritualism/Spiritism presented an alternative set of ritual practices because it allowed Oriente progeny of campesinos (peasants) and other island-born descendants to continue their eastern perspective regarding spirits and everyday life without directly linking them to an African heritage. Many intellectuals, landowners, and shop owners, as well as campesinos and others of the period, were poised to break away from Spanish control of the colony’s social structure. Only a few island-born Cubans held deep loyalty to Spanish colonialism, to the Catholic Church, or to its equally elitist colonial clergy. But neither were many white-skinned European descendants enamored with Africa-based ritual practices. A spiritual and religious alternative to well-established Africa-based customs, and an alternative not aligned with Spanish colonialism, was an acceptable religious and political choice. Therefore, Oriente was amenable when Kardecian-influenced spiritualism arrived. Adherence to the new religiosity became an important signifier of patriotism; to be a Spiritualist identified one as a Cuban patriot. This convergence of religion and politics further characterized Oriente as an independently strong and nationalistically Cuban region with distinctive spiritual patriotism. Today, several varieties or families of Espiritismo can be found in western areas of the island, but the widest variety and the largest number of practicing communities is in the east, in the contemporary provinces of Guantánamo, Santiago, Holguín, Las Tunas, and Gramma. The tradition has at lease four distinct families or pathways that reflect contact, exchange, and transculturation between ideas of Kardecian-influenced spiritualism in Oriente’s multicultural and multireligious population and their established orientation. The interactive contact brought forth new behaviors in most all ritual practices and gave birth to Espiritismo. Each of the four families 126

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contains a rich, dynamic, and coherent set of particularized, yet linked and sometimes overlapping, customary practices. The popular denominationlike varieties can be summarized as follows: Espiritismo Cruzado Practices of this family of Espiritismo are characteristically filled with transculturated and reconstructed components of the island’s Africabased religions, Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, Vodú, Regla de Ocha/ Lucumí, as well as with practices from Cuban folk Catholi­cism. Cruzado appears in many forms because it was born in the island’s multicultural and multireligious environment. Of this tendency to multifaceted expression, Don Fernando Ortiz once wrote, “When the Cuban African men practice a religion, whichever this may be, they tend to add: ‘according to my way.’”7 He was acknowledging the reality that practitioners adapted religious traditions to the particularities of their Cuban-African lifestyles and cosmic orientation. Cruzado is just such a constructed sacred tradition that represents the “Cuban way.” Espiritismo de Cordon This variety of Espiritismo is set apart by the richness of dance and songs that accompany its rituals. With the leadership of spiritual mediums, practitioners carry out spiritual work by forming a cordon (human chain or cord). This ritual practice is particularly prevalent in Oriente but rarely found in Cuba’s western or middle regions. Espiritismo de Mesa o Científico Followers of this family of Espiritismo self-identify their practice as science, not religion. Fundamentally, their central ritual consists of believers sitting around a mesa (table) and entering a state of trance after making invocations that establish communication with cosmic spiritual forces. Despite this activity, followers do not consider themselves ritualistic. Espiritismo de Caridad Similar in beliefs to those of Mesa, Espiritismo de Caridad gives more emphasis to the practice of despojo8 (charitable gifts) and santiguación (sacred pilgrimages). Practitioners strongly contend that by so doing they garner benefits to themselves and/or to others in need. espiritismo

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Several of our Espiritismo-practicing respondents contended that there is a fifth variety of their tradition, Muertéra Bembé de Sao. They even referred to leaders of these practices as “spiritistas”; this linguistic labeling initially caused confusion in our investigative efforts, a confusion that we are not yet sure has been resolved. Most practitioners insisted that “Oriente está la tierra de muertéras” (Oriente is the land of the dead ones), and that the drumming party events known as “bembé” are linked to this alleged fifth variety of Espiritismo, “Muertéra,” if not to a sixth variety itself, “Bembé de Sao.” In all, this would have increased the number of indigenous traditions by two. It was not until the last weeks of our final third and fourth rounds of directed interviews that we began to get a clearer picture, if not a complete resolution, of the situation. We had searched documents and literature but none revealed a set of ritual practices by the name(s) respondents used. We had additional discussions with religious leaders, other practitioners, and many of the general Oriente population. Many spoke of rituals from separated “Muertéra, Bembé, or Bembé de Sao” traditions, but those who knew about the practices thought that Muertéra Bembé de Sao was a variety of Espiritismo because its leaders are called “spiritistas” and many of the practices resembled elements contained in other Espiritismo varieties. More significant in helping us reach some clarity was respondents’ emphatic insistence that rituals of this tradition were “as old as the first Congo slaves in Oriente.” This was a clue because, if nothing else, families of Espiritismo did not arrive in Oriente with “the first Congo slaves” but came during the nineteenth century. As we conducted more interviews and observations with members of a Muertéra Bembé de Sao community, participated in additional rituals, and linked the field information to historical reports we found on the development of religions in Oriente, we were able to piece together parts of the picture. We do not believe the tradition is a variety of Espiritismo and so we have not included it in this chapter. We see Muertéra Bembé de Sao as a research anomaly, identified by our empirical experiences, and it will be examined in a chapter by itself. Meanwhile, we turn to a discussion of Oriente’s two most popular varieties of Espiritismo: Cruzado and Cordon.

Espiritismo Cruzado Specifically speaking, Espiritismo Cruzado crosses Kardecian Spiritism with ideas and customs of several other religious practices found in Oriente when 128

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the nineteenth-century Euro–North American–based tradition arrived. The older practices were Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, Vodú, and Muertéra Bembé de Sao. However, contemporary Cruzado practitioners adamantly contend that fundamental comprehensions of their religion are not related to the older customs even though observation of their rituals revealed that they are similarly focused on working with spirits to actualize effective results for the living. The emphasis on efficacy for the living constitutes the essential operational, rather than doctrinal, axis of the tradition. Cruzado practitioners were also resolute in distinguishing their tradition as one where supernatural spirits are collectivized, not given individual identities. Officials reminded us that individualizing rather than collectivizing spirits is a negative “material” practice—“It’s not a real spiritual practice.” From our interview and observational experiences, we discern that such articulations are designed to position the religious practices in a differentiated if not higher moral posture compared to other regional religious activities. This was further demonstrated as Cruzado devotees repeatedly spoke negatively and expressed similar opinions about the totality of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe and Vodú customs. As we continued the review and analyses of interview and observational experiences with Cruzado, we found that respondents’ ongoing linguistic use of such phrases as “material practices” versus “real spiritual work” seem to function as idiomatic codes when placed next to Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe or Vodú, for example. At the same time, the latter two traditions were well established in the region and permeated much of spiritual life for some three centuries prior to the arrival of any form of Espiritismo. Belief Foundations

A first foundation of Espiritismo Cruzado is that work of the tradition is divided into two major categories of practitioners: celebrants and believers. Celebrants are persons who work directly with spiritual currents, those collective energy transmissions that flow from otherworld spirits who are in communication with humans. Believers are persons who are faithful devotees of Cruzado but who do not personally work with such spiritual currents or the spirits themselves. Each type of practitioner may construct sacred spaces but believers have little understanding about what should be assembled or why, except as positive mimicry or beauty. Celebrants, on the other hand, are fully knowledgeable about the tradition and purposefully place objects in assembled spaces based on their awareness of how to work with the power of espiritismo

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the spiritual currents and commissions, that is, specific groupings of spirits whose combined power manifests itself to Cruzado celebrants. In each of the six Cruzado houses, called temples, that we investigated, celebrants worked with three fundamental spirit currents:

• One properly understood as spiritual; • One that notices the presence of Regla de Ocha/Lucumí; • One that is the spiritual current of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe.

Espiritismo Cruzado derives its name from the crossing of these currents; that crossing is in two directions, one external, and the other internal. External crossings are produced through the incorporation, interchange, and conscious borrowing of elemental practices and/or materials from other religious traditions. For example, Cruzado uses ritual containers such as a caldera and a cazuela. Each container possesses a different set of objects, called obras materi­ ales (material works). These objects, and the spiritual elements with which they are associated, are well known in Oriente to have been derived from rituals associated with Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe of the reglas congo. Another external crossing of Cruzado modifies, but nevertheless includes, representations of Elegguá, the divine spirit associated with the Yorubabased tradition of Regla de Ocha/Lucumí. This divine spirit is known by most all Cubans, practitioners or not, to be responsible for crossroads of all types. These externally crossed customs are nevertheless grounded in the overarching Africa-based cosmic orientation of Oriente practices of indigenous religions. One such custom is the offering of fruits and sweets to divine spirits. Animal sacrifice is an additional externally imported practice, as is the custom of offering fruits and sweets to divine spirits. The visual portrayal of spirits through capabilities that parallel practices recognized as associated with Catholic saints is yet another external importation of the tradition. However, adoration of spirits/saints is not directly related to practices of Catholicism. Transmissions, or vocal chanting, performed during Cruzado rituals are additional external crossings derived from Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe and Espiritismo de Cordon. Cruzado devotees understand that internal crossings are determined and informed by contact with spirits who communicate with celebrants. These crossings are based on episodic needs of the moment and the necessity for a specific type of work as determined by spirits based on the type 130

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and complexity of problems presented by individuals seeking charity—ritual work requested by gathered Cruzado adherents. More than a few celebrants and believers reported that if a problem is large and/or complex, the spirit who responds to the community’s charity will change the nature of that work so that it is located in fields of greater spiritual strength. Such fields could be Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, Vodú, or Regla de Ocha/Lucumí. A Cruzado celebrant’s first ritual responsibility is to call upon the “protector spirit” of their community of believers and to conduct the work as that spirit instructs. “But many times, something happens inside the spiritual work and the protector leaves us but makes an opening for work to go on with help from another current,” that is, a spirit from a tradition other than that of the celebrants. This, too, is understood as an internal crossing because a spirit has indicated the change to a non-Cruzado tradition during ritual activities. Respondents reported that in the changed circumstance, the new spiritual current is an African one and clarification must be received from it if the original problem is to be resolved and the charity is to be completed. Within the idea and processes of external and internal crossings of Cruzado, we began to observe slippage in devotees’ verbalized position that there were religious distinctions between their practices and those of other traditions in Oriente. On one hand, we were told that Cruzado Espiritismo excluded “material, not spiritual practice” but we observed ritual behaviors that structurally included material and spiritual activities of practices from other traditions, including those claimed to be negative. None of our research produced a Cruzado doctrinal document that authorized such religious separations. However, almost half of the celebrant respondents with whom we worked did verbally refer to a “doctrine” as the basis of the crossing beliefs. Kardec’s book about Spiritism was proudly proclaimed as doctrinal justification for practices, but we could find nothing in Kardecian writings that referenced Cruzado inclusions. The spiritual work of the tradition appears as a distinct Cuban phenomenon. Spaces

Based on resources available to celebrants, a sacred space of Espiritismo Cruzado is built by assembling material objects associated with supernatural powers as informed by the religion. The geographies of sacrality are embedded with markers that indicate spiritual crossings and signify the practices and the tradition as indigenous to Cuba. For example, a representation of espiritismo

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Elegguá is placed in a corner or behind the main access door of assembled Cruzado sites: a common image is one made with the shell of a coconut and placed inside a small bowl with a special stone. The bowl is known as Elegguá’s cabildo casita (little house), and other included objects are known to assistant this divine spirit: offerings of sweets, candy, whistles, coins, a nearby candle in a small plate, and so on. Celebrants understand the spirit Elegguá to be a child, transculturated with the Niño de Praga (Baby Jesus of Prague), and the assistants with the representation of the spirit are there to attend to this nature.9 Elegguá is an externally crossed Cruzado spirit and was prominently placed in all sacred spaces of the tradition that we observed. However, although we are aware that this form of Espiritismo can be found in Puerto Rico and other locations, these incorporations marking the tradition in Oriente appear to be indigenous to Cuba.10 Sacred sites constructed for Cruzado spiritual work contain other diverse items: candles, vases, cups and glasses of water, boilers, and pans, among others. Celebrants reported that some items are meant to decorate, embellish, or raise the religious aesthetic of the space to a level of magnificence. For example, vases with flowers are understood to give an entire assemblage a “picturesque look,” and the perfume of flowers strengthens and nourishes the spirits. On the other hand, some flowers are directly associated with individual spirits: the flor del sol (sunflower), for example, is consecrated to Santa Bárbara; the white lily to Las Mercedes; and the radiante to the Virgin de la Caridad. A light bulb is yet another aesthetic attribute often kept lit in Cruzado locations of sacrality. These and other objects are used in many sacred spaces and for special rituals—for example, a despojo (cleansing or dispossession), a consultation with spirits, or for a rite of sacrifice. In general, there is a profusion of material objects presented in Cruzado sacred spaces, and they are differentially employed in spiritual charity work to help obtain well-being for persons requesting assistance. However, included in almost every space is a rack or shelf (sometimes laddered shelves) that holds depictions or external presentations of spirits. Many of these are small statues, cast in plaster, of iconic Catholic saints, however, the iconic presentations may also be photographs. Such symbolic representations occupy designated places on Cruzado shelving, depending on adherents’ understandings of the significance of a likeness presented and based on devotees’ experiences when working with the represented spirits. A white dove, a crucifix, or a portrait of the Christian Jesus also might hold a visible position on a shelf. 132

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Centrally positioned on shelving, spaces will always have the graphic image of a spirit that has demonstrated itself to be particularly important within a community of celebrants. This spirit is referred to as “owner of the space” and practitioners see themselves as the genealogical offspring of the entity. Generally, the most popular spirits/saints among Oriente followers of Cruzado are Shango/Santa Bárbara, Ochún/La Caridad, Obatala/La Mercedes, Babalú Ayé/San Lázaro, Yemaya/Virgin de Regla, Oggún/Santiago de Apostle, and Elegguá/Baby Jesus. Although those in this listing of spirits transculturated with Catholic representations are known to be exceptionally popular, celebrants reported that “all spirits are important in our religion and all of them have their miracle in the work.” Similarly, the iconic Catholic understandings and names associated with transculturated spirits are most prominently derived from the Yoruba-based Regla de Ocha. All of the Cruzado sacred spaces we observed had a great number of glasses and cups filled with water. These containers are a generalized signature or marker characteristic of the tradition and are usually made of crystal or of a material as close to crystal as practitioners can afford. We were told that the glasses of water function to assist spirits in their search for clarity when working with celebrants. During a ritual of individualized consultation, for example, a glass of water is understood to be the element of transmission or communication. Practitioners reported that the water will reflect what spirits wish to transmit. Like most sacred geographies of all varieties of indigenous religions in Oriente, spaces of Espiritismo Cruzado also contain the symbolic representation of an Amerindian. Spaces without an actual Amerindian image possessed such allegorical objects as arrows, bows, feathered headbands, and beads. Cruzado practitioners reported that the presence of representations of Amerindian spirits, and the spiritual work with them, reflects participation of the original owners of the Cuba landscape. This sustained one of our indicators of Cuban religions as indigenous; the new rituals accepted and were accepted into the interred ancestral land space and spiritual orientation of the island’s autochthonous population. Cruzado celebrants pointed out that the appearance of Amerindian spirits during their rituals is an indication of particularly laborious and powerful spiritual work.11 Another image that appears in Cruzado sacred assemblages is that of “Africana or the African Queen.” The depiction is a doll and is not crossed with spirits of any other religious tradition, Christian or otherwise. She does not carry a spirit/saint name and Cruzado adherents know her as an espiritismo

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exceptionally powerful spirit force. Africana functions to keep “bad influences” from penetrating the entire arena and to protect the domestic house from intrusive dangers. She is usually represented as a black-skinned doll dressed in white, blue, red, or other colors, depending on religious particulars of the celebrant’s constructed site. The doll and her name indicate that she and the spirit she represents are of African descent. We noted the African and other non-European phenotypical characteristics of objects and references in Cruzado and other indigenous religions, but we tried to accept the veracity and integrity of respondents’ clarification of their meaning without overly imposing a racialized judgment based on outward appearances.12 Some celebrants claimed that they could do spiritual work without constructing a sacred space and that they could work with a desired spirit even if its image were not present in a space. Some practitioners even contended that they could invoke, speak with, and work with spirits without the mediation of a celebrant. Yet others proposed that the sacred geography is an actual representation of the tradition and is in homage to spirits they revere. Despite these variations, all agreed that the creation of sacred spaces is influenced and inspired by spirits and that spirits actually indicate how a site should be constructed and what is to be included. Therefore, Cruzado spaces have common characteristics but also carry a certain individuality. When a celebrant dies, his or her space must be transferred by “indication of the spirits” to an adherent who, preferably, is biologically related to the deceased. This person should be someone with comparable spiritual abilities or “un hermano de obra” (a brother of the work). Images from the space are conferred to this person who is supposed to know how to attend to them according to dictates of religious custom. We found that this transfer occurred when a celebrant, foreseeing death, prepared the designated person with the particulars about caring for the specialized contents. On some occasions, spirits have indicated that all contents of a sacred assemblage should be collected and thrown into the sea. Although these discussions about basic and fundamental understandings, and about sacred spaces of Espiritismo Cruzado, represent clarifications about the tradition that have not been readily available to readers of English, they are not an exhaustive set of clarifications of what practitioners of the tradition believe or how they build sacred spaces. At the same

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time, such clarifications integrate well into our attempt to introduce the reader to sacred spaces of Espiritismo Cruzado. We turn now to another tradition among the families of Espiritismo.

Espiritismo de Cordon Espiritismo de Cordon is an exceptional set of practices in the spectrum of popular indigenous religions. It epitomizes Espiritismo’s rise to extreme popularity in Oriente in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its strong association with Cubans’ struggles against Spanish colonialism. Cordon’s characteristics and rituals also deeply incorporate understandings of national identity as lived in the region. Some customs reflect a relationship to Africabased cosmic orientation, but this is not immediately recognizable since the tradition is not directly grounded in the island’s African heritage. Rather, the overlap in orientation and practice characteristics is linked to the nineteenthcentury arrival of Spiritism and Spiritualism to the region. For more than three centuries, Oriente inhabitants lived as a selfreferent society even though they were part of Cuba as a Spanish colony. Geographic, social, political, and economic differences isolated the eastern region from Cuba’s center of governance in western areas of Havana. The cosmic orientation brought to Oriente by imported Africans during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries formed much of inhabitants’ spiritual core, no matter their particular religious practices. This was even true of regional Christian practices as local colonial Catholic customs that guided European descendants’ practices contained similarities with spiritual understandings of African descendants.13 An example is that there is an overlap between both perspectives in their pantheonic approach to otherworld entities. The two approaches also contain compatibility in attitudes and customs concerning the figurative use of the cross, a symbol used extensively in sacred spaces of indigenous religions as well as in Christian practices on the island.14 In Oriente’s nineteenth-century colonial environment, commonalities of the two perspectives served as a type of conduit through which the recent entry of Spiritualism and Spiritism joined existing Africabased cultural streams to form a transculturated, new religious tradition, Espiritismo. Inhabitants employed their existing perspectives to construct original behaviors from the newly imported Euro–North American religious practices.15

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When Spiritism and Spiritualism arrived in Oriente during the nineteenth century, inhabitants were the initiating participants in the island’s first independence struggles against Spain and the Catholic clergy. Many of these insurgents gravitated toward the new religious practices as deemed compatible with their existing cosmic orientation and expressive of their anticolonial postures; the practices were not Spanish or Catholic and they were not linked to colonialism. As ritual behaviors for the new tradition evolved, many became expressly anticolonial, oriented toward gaining independence, and important elements within a matrix of a developing distinct Cuban identity. The new shapes of active sacrality were clearly indigenous to the island. Spirit communications and other ritual practices that became Espiritismo de Cordon were an active, anticolonialist, indigenous religious mode of selfassertion that became the preference for many nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Oriente patriots of all social classes. Those with European ancestry who rejected the Catholic clergy’s interventions into their spiritual lives were particularly attracted to Espiritismo. These insurgent patriots preferred behaviors more reflective of their regional homeland experiences. The Cuban historian Joel James reviewed events related to the 1895 War of Independence and identified the incorporation of such ritual behaviors that became significant to Cordon rituals. James uncovered reports of soldiers from various social classes who fought for the common goal of independence, and he located events within those struggles that reflected the cohesive role played by an emerging Espiritismo de Cordon. We will summarize some of James’s historical breakthroughs because Cordon mirrors political, as well as spiritual, nationalism in Oriente.16 Civil populations of Oriente were the first to rise in insurrection for a second time at the close of the nineteenth century. Inhabitants had fought unsuccessfully in the 1868–1878 Ten Years’ War, but they had not lost their zeal for an independent, anticolonial Cuba, where there would be neither legal enslavement nor de facto bondage. This was above all true in Oriente and many were displeased with the closure of the Ten Years’ War because these aspirations were not met in a treaty with Spain. Some forms of enslavement were outlawed at that time, but the plantation economic system remained, as did the de facto enslavement of African descendants. Oriente inhabitants were again first to be involved in insurrection against Spain and participated enthusiastically in the 1895 movement.

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As those before them had done in 1868, great numbers of African descendants and their Chinese compatriots came down from Oriente mountains and palenques to join the 1895 insurgent army. These dark-skinned rebels were also called Mambi, like the earlier fighters, and again their intent was a “Cuba Libre” (free Cuba), one that eliminated the enslavement system. Women and men came to fight though they had few military weapons except machetes used in agricultural work or armaments they could fashion from resources of the battlefield. Nevertheless, the Mambi were notoriously courageous fighters and created a reputation of legendary bravery and patriotism.17 There were normal internal contradictions and conflicts among the rebel ranks and race was just one. The Spanish had successfully exploited the issue of black leaders in the Ten Years’ War, for example, and attempted to do the same at the close of the nineteenth century. A favorite divisionary tactic was to assassinate black military leaders and the Creciente de Valmaseda (Torments of Valmaseda) was one of the more horrific of such collective assassinations. The massacres created generalized intimidation and fear among Mambi and other freedom fighters, particularly when their militarily armed troops were occupied in separated combat areas. Frustration and insecurity reigned and black and white combatants often reached a level of collective hysteria. At these times, celebration of the Cordon ritual dissipated emotional stresses and reconnected freedom fighters to their nationalistic goal. The ritual, familiar to Oriente Cubans of African and European descent, was led by those of Kongo ethnic backgrounds as blacks and whites held hands and formed the human cord (cordon) that invoked spirits near and far. Together, the frightened freedom warriors petitioned spirits for guidance and success, and asked for the safety of their families and friends. In the context of his presentation of these historical events, Joel James proposes that the common struggle for independence and the use of transculturated Africa-based spiritual orientation in collective rituals permitted Espiritismo de Cordon to become a uniquely Cuban creation. From his investigation of details about the activities of the 1895 war, James says, I have proposed on more than one occasion that the Espiritismo de Cordon occurs precisely in Cuba and not in other parts of the world because of the very differentiated factors that occur here.18

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James is even more emphatic that it was the Kongo heritage that nineteenthcentury Cubans employed in the Cordon practice: The mechanics in the funeral rituals of the first Congo people [of Cuba], were for those who have just died. They were invoked in a collective and circular form in order for the dead person to manifest himself. The purpose was to find out if such a person had left any unresolved affairs on earth. Dead relatives were also invoked to request that they help the deceased to take their first steps in the other world.19 The Cordon tradition traces its exceptional long-lasting strength in Oriente to the fact that each war for independence began in the region; that in each of the military events, Mambi came out of Oriente mountains to fight for a free Cuba; and that in Oriente, black and white Cubans shared common religious ideas and rituals. Belief Foundations

An important foundational belief of Espiritismo de Cordon is that the religion is expressly intended to reconcile lives of the living through contact and work with spirits of those whose bodies have passed beyond the world of the living, who have crossed over to the otherworld. The fundamental purpose of practitioners’ work is to cure diseases, particularly mental illness, but they also believe their work can solve any human difficulty— issues of love, economics, employment, finance, and housing. Problems are resolved through contacting spiritual currents, commissions of spirits, or specific spirits. Cordon believers maintain that spiritual strength multiplies when many spirits join together, that is, when they become a commission. Contacting a commission, or even a spirit, is achieved by a trained individual transcending to the otherworld without any mediating force except that of the spirits. The transcendence is accomplished through possession or trance and must be done in a collective format, generally by holding hands in a line that resembles a cord. Member practitioners are called cordoneros. They firmly believe in the doctrine of Allan Kardec, the Frenchman responsible for codifying Spiritism into a belief system. However, Cordon was constructed as a coherent set of religious practices through interaction with the abundance of existing nineteenth-century Oriente beliefs and practices; beliefs that were part of 138

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popular African heritages and colonial Catholicism. Cordon ritual behaviors do not draw extensively from Kardecian articulations, even as practitioners consistently invoke Kardecian origins when explaining their beliefs. Neither has Espiritismo de Cordon codified the distinctiveness of its complex of principles into a world vision or articulations that serve as its documentary text(s). Cordoneros reported that daily practice, not written doctrine, is the religion’s main feature. The stress on “doing” appears to have evolved from earlier devotees’ search for sacred work that was antithetical to the doctrinaire colonial Catholicism. This emphasis on doing also reflects some of Charles H. Long’s definitional understandings of religions. He says, “religion as orientation—orientation in the ultimate sense, that is, how one comes to terms with the ultimate significance of one’s place in the world.”20 Cordon practitioners see their place in the world as one to “do” their sacred work. Healing is a special concern of this religious tradition as devotees employ the Cordon ritual and events of ritual time within the cosmic perspective of their heritage to accomplish a healing of some sort. Each instance of the Cordon ritual in which we participated was always focused on specific conditions presented by participants that needed and/or wanted healing. Often these were emotional and/or mental conditions and practitioners readily told us of how these individuals were improving. We had no comparison information, however. Cordoneros do not avoid other religious or nonreligious curative forms; they merely believe that their spiritual healing processes must garner their attention. In one community, adherents acknowledged that many of their members had been unable to be helped by medical authorities but were now experiencing more healthy lifestyles through the work of the Cordon ritual. The reports of healings and the healing rituals we observed were equally reminiscent of Charles Long’s consideration of the significance of religious work for oppressed people who are regularly excluded from other structural forms of attention. For oppressed people [including Cubans], a religious tradition that focuses on healing is a mechanism that affirms their relation in the oppressive situation to which they were born while they are [simultaneously] re-creating a situation not of that oppression.21 The latter part of this consideration is exceptionally pertinent to our exposure to Espiritismo de Cordon. The tradition and its rituals have evolved espiritismo

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as alternative temporal modalities, or alternative models of time and ways of being human. They are systematic ritual practices concerning ultimate issues about the universe and divine relationships. They express the creation of situational alternatives to the imposed oppression of colonial and neocolonial powers. Espiritismo de Cordon belongs to Cubans from the heritage of this alternative creation of ritual behaviors, not to the heritage of those who oppressed them. For the most part, activities of Espiritismo de Cordon occur in temple houses specifically designated for the religious work and where fundamental communication with spirits is most probable. Such communication occurs through mediums, people who guide the rituals and who are known to have physically received spirits in the past. Mediums are essential to Cordon practice and these persons regularly arrive for ceremonies dressed in white. Responsibilities associated with mediums are defined and performed based on a temple house’s specificities. However, general roles and responsibilities of the tradition are carried out by principal mediums, strong mediums, and simple, or common, mediums. Principal mediums (cabeceros) include the person in charge of the temple who leads the spiritual work. He or she gives instructions. Strong mediums are persons who possess special gifts or whose spiritual guides have reached a high degree of development for self-revelation. Simple or common mediums are the larger number of practitioners in the work of temples in Oriente. They are Cordon obreros, cord workers who officiate in the specialized charity work of the collective. Mediums, along with general practitioners, gather weekly and engage in the religion’s charity work. Espiritismo de Cordon is open to all who wish to participate, and there is no initiation ritual or process required to become an active member. Anyone can attend and partake freely in the Cordon ritual. This is not true of other traditions, such as Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, or Vodú. Each time our team attended activities, Cordoneros seemed to warmly welcome everyone to the charity work, regardless of gender, race, social status, or skin color. Space and Ritual

Most temples of Espiritismo de Cordon have a dedicated entrance that opens to a larger space devoted to a focal table where rites and ceremonies unfold. The entrance has a basin filled with water resting on a chair at its right side. This represents the specialized “protected entrance” of Cordon 140

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sacred spaces and each person entering is required to wash her or his hands before coming into the temple. In interviews, practitioners reported that washing hands prohibits harmful and evil elements or substances from crossing the threshold. A Cordon leader also reported that members must be cautious about the harm other traditions can cause. The focal table of Espiritismo de Cordon is obviously an important part of an assembled geography as it is where Cordoneros invoke spirits to participate with them in rituals of the earthly plane. The table has shelves above and at least one shelf below its main level, and this combination is normally the principal axis of a sacred space. A white tablecloth covers the tabletop and a large goblet devoted to all spiritual guides is placed in the center. Two glasses filled with water are placed on each side of the goblet and the Kardecian prayers that begin each session are read at the focal table. In one space we observed that this type of table occupied all of the living and dining room areas of the owner’s house, as the entire space was dedicated exclusively to the Cordon ritual. Also on the main platform of the focal table are symbolic representations of spirits and spiritual currents, as well as a plaster image of an Amerindian accompanied by a sunflower. This was true for each Cordon community, and we were told that the plaster Amerindian recalls/re-members spirits of the Amerindian commission that works with the particular community. The sunflower symbolizes the commission itself. In the middle of the shelf above the table is an electric light bulb that is perpetually on. A portrait of San Hilarión is underneath the bulb, and a medium reported that the light bulb is “the light of San Hilarión.” Respondents reported that the table represents “El Santisimo, the holy sacrament of Christianity.” A metal cross may also be on the wall or sit above all the shelves. Other shelves of the Cordon focal table contain a variety of objects and images: bottles, pictures of deceased family members or friends, photos of Catholic virgins and other saints, chromolithographs, and glasses with clear water, as well as offerings of flowers that are associated with specific spirits. Cordoneros told us that the flowers provide strength, while the water gives clarity, and that the espíritus (spirits of deceased persons depicted in pictures and other objects) unite in working with Cordon mediums in the religion’s characteristic ritual. The cordon ritual is conducted in the sacred space and starts with a preparatory or invocational phase of reading from the book Chosen Prayers by Allan Kardec, and consisting of prayers of “love to the Celestial Father.”22 espiritismo

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After prayers, the book is ritualistically closed with solemn and slow reverence. Cordoneros now understand that spiritual communication has been established and the Celestial Father has granted consent to form the Cordon, or cord. As the central work of this Espiritismo, the cordon ritual actually begins when mediums, in communication with the spirits, stand and hold hands with each other and all others in the temple do likewise. This forms a horseshoe configuration that is opened at the site of the focal table. The principal medium and guide begins to chant, to call forth spirits to join the membership in the work. Members respond to the chant with a rhythmic chorus repeated over and over. At the end of each refrain, and before repeating it, members make guttural sounds that punctuate the chanting rhythm. While continuing to hold hands, they move their arms— first up into the air then down toward the floor (see figure 16). Their feet slide in unison in a counterclockwise direction, first one foot then the next. A vigorous foot stomp completes each sideways slide. Often the guiding medium will interrupt the Cordon obreros on the downward movement and instruct members to slightly touch the floor with their joined hands. On their upward motion, they are instructed to separate their hands and elevate them to heaven in a “self-blessing” gesture. Occasionally the principal medium will ask all mediums to concentrate their thoughts “in” God. This usually indicates that work of the Cordon is not going well or not strong enough and the concentration must precede additional rounds of sliding and chanting. At least one person comes to a Cordon charity work session seeking healing or “spiritual charity” from the group. At a designated time in the ritual, such persons are led to face the centralized focal table. The membership concentrates its work on eliciting an “anointing of spiritual wellbeing” for all persons present but particularly for the seekers. During the process, some mediums and members enter a trance, will have spirits come to them, or will be possessed. In their altered state of consciousness, these persons receive knowledge from the otherworld that is interpreted and shared with everyone present, including those seeking charity. Conclusion of the entire Cordon service is the “deliverance.” Mediums proceed around the inside of the cord configuration and separate practitioners’ joined hands. With hands separated, each person leans forward and slightly touches the floor with the tips of their fingers and turns in personal circles. Participants then raise their hands above their heads and shake them upward. This last act is executed as the deliverance, and mediums 142

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instruct all participants to “unfold” in the same fashion to deliver themselves. There are then closing chants and a special song, giving thanks to God and the spirits who have allowed the session to be successful. The Cordon is now finished.

Summary Thoughts Espiritismo Cruzado and Espiritismo de Cordon are each a set of coherent practices that are part of one lineage within a single indigenous religious tradition. Espiritismo de Cordon is intimately linked to nineteenth-century Cuban nationalism and many behaviors of Espiritismo Cruzado are similarly embedded within the nation’s cultural consciousness. Oftentimes the two religious varieties share attitudes about non-Espiritismo practices and they have differing ritual activities. Sacred spaces of the two sets of customs highlight the internal dissimilarities that can and do exist among Espiritismo practices just as the two traditions share arenas of contestation about other religions. Internal distinctions between the two begin with basic understandings about divine spirits. Cruzado spirits are presented as transculturated entities, united through images and representations by way of Christian and Africa-based understandings. Espiritismo de Cordon spaces, on the other hand, present spirits’ images as associated with Catholic Christianity, not as transculturated sprits. At the same time, the two sets of sacred practices disagree about the nature and naming of images in sacred spaces. Cordoneros contend that practitioners of “cross-Spiritism,” that is, Cruzado, perform “dirty works to do evil.” These attitudes appear to indicate a struggle for moral superiority of one set of religious practices over another. However, we propose that Cordoneros’ adamant objection to and dismissal of Cruzado’s Africa-based practices, and their apparent subconscious desire to show spiritual superiority, affirm a perceived awareness of power, strength, and efficaciousness of the Africa-based customs. We propose this to be true as well of Cruzado practitioners who show similar disdain for Africa-based religions while including many of those practices in their spiritual work. The geographies of sacrality constructed by practitioners of the two lineages also contain internal differences. Espiritismo Cruzado spaces are indoor, elaborate, colorful, mosaic-like assemblages of multiple objects: images, flowers, and other items. Figure 14 shows the compacted fullness espiritismo

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of an exemplary Cruzado space. By comparison, objects and visual representations in the sacred site of Espiritismo de Cordon (figure 16) may seem less adorned. We offer the comparisons with care, however, as we believe definitions of the sacred belong to aesthetics of practitioners. Too often, comparisons across cultures and traditions lead to ethnocentric mendacity rather than human understanding.

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“Land of the Dead” Beginnings Muertéra Bembé de Sao

Thus far we have outlined historical parameters of the African presence in Oriente, discussed some conceptual roles of sacred spaces, clarified important commonalities of an Africa-based cosmic orientation, and examined salient issues related to three of four indigenous religions that are popular in Oriente. Ordinarily, these full-blown descriptions coupled with some analyses would be sufficient for a respectable volume on sacred spaces of Cuba’s eastern region. However, before we finished our final phases of data collection, in one of our last research sites, a highly reliable Oriente practitioner and colleague approached to ask if we wanted to meet a renowned and powerful leader of “the oldest African religion in Oriente.” Team members conferred and agreed that we couldn’t afford not to accept even if it meant oversampling our population. After all, he had said “the oldest” religion. Not only did we meet this female leader, but she and other members of her group agreed to our interviews. In the process, we were able to expand our knowledge about Africa-based sacred lifestyles and include Muertéra Bembé de Sao as the fourth religious tradition in the investigative project. It also allows us to present this chapter as a distillation of experiences, a report from the field, and as anecdotal information that corresponds with documentary and other investigative results about the earliest African

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presence in Oriente. That is to say, our best research knowledge tells us that ritual behaviors that evolved into habitual patterns to become Muertéra Bembé de Sao originated among the earliest enslaved colonial Africans, more specifically those from Kongo ethnic groups. Rituals distinct to Muertéra are extremely widespread in Cuba’s eastern region, if for no other reason than that many of its behaviors have been incorporated into other religious practices. Therefore, if our summations about origins are correct, this sacred tradition contains some of the island’s oldest customs and this chapter connects those pre–nineteenth-century social and sacred patterns even as it is a field report that needs further exploration. Our late encounter with Muertéra, while not a coincidence, was a surprise. Over the years, the research team had lived in local neighborhoods of the region and garnered a strong reputation for the authentic and meticulous way we conducted our work, but no one had directed us to practitioner communities of Muertéra Bembé de Sao until one of our last visits. The timing did not amaze us, but it was disconcerting that we had failed to recognize and connect earlier observations. We should have known, or at least raised questions earlier, because respondents had consistently described the spiritual character of Oriente as the “land of the dead” and when they did, they used such wording as “Tierra de Muertéras” or “Tierra de Muertos.” But neither descriptor jarred our thinking. We interpreted the words muertos or muertéra as types of creolized Cuban idiomatic Spanish terms that referred to individuals who had died or to spirits of those who had died in the Oriente landscape. We knew the region was a first landing site for enslaved Africans and that the land held physical remains of hundred of thousands of Amerindian and African ancestors who have been respectfully interred and revered for some five centuries. We therefore found it logical that there would be a colloquial understanding about such Oriente history. It was equally logical to assume that the region would be referred to in a transculturated linguistic idiom such as Tierra de Muertéras and that the taken-for-granted public language for regional spirits would be muertos. Practitioners often linked some of these phrases, that is, “Tierra de Muertéra or Bembé de Muertos,” and this further confused our ability to depend on language to clarify cultural realities. Again, that did not attract our attention, though it should have. In addition, we experientially understood the Cuban translation for bembé to be “a drumming party for spirit(s),” which it is. So we assumed that Muertéra Bembé de Sao referred to a drumming party either for spirits of the living 148

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dead or for specific divine spirits. We even asked island social scientists about the possibility that Bembé de Sao might be a Portuguese derivative. They were not sure about the Portuguese but proposed the words were Cuban, though not of Spanish origins. We never considered that Muertéra Bembé de Sao might be a religious tradition to be included in our investigation. We made an error. Even now, as we describe understandings assembled from practitioners of Muertéra, we are prepared for future research to clarify our mistakes. We surmise that Muertéra Bembé de Sao originated among colonial enslaved Africans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and we turn now to the briefest review of how these ancestors arrived in Oriente. We remind readers that some of the details will sound familiar because the historical foundations and some of the behavioral practices overlap with the tradition of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe discussed in chapter 4. We proceed to examine the case study data of Muertéra Bembé de Sao, the research anomaly or anecdotal ritual practices of our investigative project.

Oriente Relationship As the Caribbean’s largest island, Cuba has historically been divided into its western, Occidental region and that of the eastern, Oriente land spaces. Indigenous Amerindians first encountered European conquistadores in the east at the close of the fifteenth century. Spanish settlements were authorized for the region and Baracoa was one of the first in 1511. By 1515, Santiago de Cuba was organized as an eastern settlement and became the capital city of the island’s colonial operations.1 Native Indians were enslaved, massacred, and inbred with Spanish men until, by the middle of the sixteenth century, the Amerindian population possessed few if any distinct cultural communities.2 Cuba’s widest land portion also is in Oriente, and in 1522 the island’s first enslaved Africans were imported there.3 The Africans were the forced labor substituted for a depleted Amerindian population and the Africans’ numbers included a variety of ethnic groups. However, the largest faction was composed of persons from ethnic groups of the Kongo Kingdom now known as areas of West Central Africa.4 The Kongo had been a vast and powerful kingdom with fifteenth-century diplomatic and trade relations with Portuguese maritime enterprises. These European traders dominated the earliest years of the cross-Atlantic trade in captured Africans, and their “land of the dead” beginnings

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consignments of human cargo came mostly from Kongo ethnic groups. From 1501, Spanish colonials in Cuba received royal authorization to substitute captive Africans for the island’s exhausted Amerindian labor force.5 These earliest historical realities circumscribed the context for Bantuspeakers of West Central Africa earliest arrival and presence in Oriente, a presence that stamped Kongo cultural markings on regional behavior. This is not to suggest that the cultural markings were definitive for all Oriente life, including all sacred lifestyles. Rather, as with linguistic influences, we propose that the region’s Kongo influence was marked and remains to such an extent that it characterizes the core of Oriente religious practices. Linguistic research suggests that essential elements of “languages were defined by the first generation of slave workers who [socialized] subsequent newcomers to the . . . way of life.” Similarly, we contend that “fundamentals of religious” ritual practices were set forth “with equal rapidity at the same time” by the first generations of enslaved workers in Oriente.6 Our proposition is built upon the fact that Oriente was the initial landing location for the earliest Africans of the the Spanish colony, the majority of those Africans were from Kongo ethnic groups, and that Kongo presence continued in the region.7 Kongo-based rituals were at the core of customs that gave birth to behavioral patterns associated with several contemporary traditions, including Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe and Muertéra Bembé de Sao. By the middle of the sixteenth century, persons from ethnic groups of the Kongo were the majority of those entering Oriente and best represented an ethnic collectivity during the first years and century. These Africans shared a generalized Kongo culture and language system, common cosmic orientations, and phenomenological principles about life in the universe, and, as all humans do, they used these as guides to establish their spiritual foundation in eastern Cuba. They understood “that the individual and the community are dependent upon powers of being outside the human arena.”8 Even when words or postures can’t express it, there is “an attitude, an orientation, the initial deciphering of a way to be in the world.”9 These Africans shared and exchanged their remembered homeland ideas and rituals with one another, and with those remaining Amerindians. Encounters with colonial Indians were some of the first opportunities for Africa-based behaviors and ideas to be combined and become part of Cuba’s processes of transculturation. The contacts were not as random as might be expected as Amerindians and Africans collaborated in joint campaigns to attack 150

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Spanish settlements as early as 1530, and relationships between descendants of the two struggling groups shared time and space within palenques, a trademark social pattern of Oriente.10 Oriente palenques were an alternative social living arrangement to colonial enslaved life. They were vibrant, though poor and rough, settlements of collective housing and living for African and remaining Amerindian descendants who escaped enslavement. Within the communities, inhabitants cared for each other through the life cycle; engaged in economic trade with local, national, and international contacts; and conducted defensive and offensive campaigns against colonial authorities. Before their numbers were radically reduced, Amerindians were particularly known to form mountain settlements near the northeastern town of Baracoa, but they, too, were part of the neo-African palenques that existed throughout the region.11 Collaborative relations in the settlements and in rebellious attacks against Spanish colonialists provided the foundation for what Vincent Harding called “outlier” communities.12 Outliers are created when individuals and collectives of individuals take actions outside boundaries of existent structures of exploitation. They challenge the model(s) of normality but, more importantly, the actions are radical enough to expand the vision of possibilities for freedom for others living under similar conditions.13 Oriente palenques were just such outliers for enslaved colonial Africans and their descendants. Specific for our focus on Kongo foundations of contemporary sacred behaviors, palenques were an important arena for the development of customs that became marker characteristics of their African heritage and of the region. For those who fled enslavement, the settlements were liberated zones of alternative social arrangements and a model of freedom’s possibility—a model even for those who remained within the bondage system. From within the neo-African settlements, palenque members retreated into forested areas to articulate remembered fragments of sacred behaviors that expressed their humanity. In those separate arenas, members’ activities were beyond the overt constraints of colonial control. They engaged in ritual behaviors recalled from African homelands and called upon known spirits from those realities. The results became a body of regularized actions that embraced elements from several different ethnic groups but that retained the character of the larger group of Kongolese Africans. Understandings from these Oriente-constructed ritual practices were transmitted to new generations of regional residents not only in palenques, but also to those African “land of the dead” beginnings

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descendants not living in the liberated arrangements.14 Respondents in our sample population regularly made statements like “We do our work in the old way, like they did in the forest.” Such responses accompanied several observed rituals, and participants expressed that many aspects of their practices were derived from the colonial history of their tradition; this was particularly so for Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe practitioners and Muertéra Bembé de Sao devotees. Likewise, there is a reasonable association between customs identified as Muertéra Bembé de Sao and the Portuguese relationship to Kongo ethnic groups of Africans brought to the region in the earliest years. For example, the name of the tradition combines the important Oriente idea of working with “the dead” (muertera) that is central to Kongo traditions.15 The name of the tradition, as shared with us, also includes the central ritual practice of a “drumming party” (bembé). And lastly, the use of the “de Sao” portion of the name is also a prima facie reference to Portuguese contact with the homeland Kongo ethnic groups of many Oriente Africans. The Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz researched Cuban transculturated linguistic creations and defined Sao as “a small savannah with some thickets of insulating groups of trees.”16 These do not comprise overwhelming evidence to link Muertéra Bembé de Sao as we propose, but we anticipate further investigations to identify what truly happened.

Foundational Knowledge It is not possible for us to write about knowledge that is foundational to the practice of Muertéra Bembé de Sao as we have not seen sufficient verifiable reports on the tradition. We also are not sure to what extent local legends and one community’s customs can be relied upon as historical, sociological, or religious fact. We have seen that many Muertéra customs contain Kongo-based elements, and we assume that these and other practices of the tradition were inherited from colonial Africans of the Kongo Kingdom ethnic groups. For example, within Muertéra practices we identified Africabased orientation as categorically part of this indigenous religious practice, and we observed the use of Kongo if not Bakongo rules about natural phenomena. Together these were an important part of the body of knowledge upon which colonial Africans constructed, adapted, and particularized behavioral patterns in the region. We experienced this body of knowledge and our respondents articulated practices that represented it. At the same 152

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time, we have not found adequate historical information that focuses on religions in Oriente or the differentiated African presence in the region for us to envision Muertéra as a cohesive body of foundational knowledge that undergirds its contemporary behaviors. Similarly, we have experiential occasions with but one community of practitioners and no additional observational data about the tradition and its practices. We will discuss what we saw and what we heard as sacred characteristics of the tradition, but we cannot yet profess the experience to speak about the religion’s foundational knowledge.

Characteristics Muertéra Bembé de Sao shares the Africa-based orientation that is a general underpinning of indigenous religions in Oriente. This means that unconsciously, yet quite intentionally, Muertéra practitioners:



• Understand the nature of general and ritual time as multidimensional, event-based, and dynamic phenomenon; • Understand the existence of spirits; • Recognize that spirits share space in the universal world with humans; • Comprehend that divine spirits and spirits of ancestors are available to assist human life if revered; • Appreciate the sacrality of drum rhythms, songs, and dance as mediums through which the historic atmosphere of humans is reconstructed to allow spirits’ predictable participation in rituals; • Know that spirits’ coming and the possession of human bodies is normal and can reveal wisdom.

This cosmic orientation gave rise to behavioral practices and customs that have been known since the island’s colonial periods and both have been transmitted to contemporary generations to form characteristic behaviors that minimally are part of Muertéra Bembé de Sao. When we talked and interviewed Muertéra practitioners, not to mention adherents of other indigenous traditions, they spoke repeatedly within the orientation. They said, “Our ancestor spirits must be consulted so that we know how to live our lives,” and “If the spirits don’t agree with the things we want to do, then we must avoid that pathway.” In discussing the need to respond to drums, we were regularly told, “You must listen to what “land of the dead” beginnings

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the drums say and respond. The drums talk for the spirits and the songs remind of us of how our ancestors lived.” These articulations, coupled with observations of the content of sacred spaces kept us aware of the Africabased orientation that undergirds Muertéra Bembé de Sao and other indigenous religious of the region. Palenques of Oriente’s Sierra Maestra mountains were havens for Kongolese and others of their continent to transmit this orientation and construct their transculturated, neo-African behaviors. Such exemplary behaviors happened in bembé—drum parties convened by palenque members in the “small savannahs with some thickets of insulating groups of trees,”17 in the sao where they could actively revere divine and other spirits. This was collective action that was part of the cultural imperative of Kongolese tradition. It was aligned with their cosmic orientation and was an aspect of the phenomenological principles of the West Central African people. Minimally, Kongo ethnic groups are known to have required such a collective response for victory in battles, days of remembrance for deeds of special spirits (muertos), actual or religious birth of new community members, and for the transition of the spirit of a physical body to the otherworld.18 Whenever such situations occurred in colonial Oriente and called for communal observance, the bembé drum party was a predictable result.19 Despite the predominance of Kongo influences, a palenque’s bembé was a collective social arena wherein members from differing ethnic backgrounds gathered and combined particulars of their remembered behaviors with other articulations of cultural lexicons. Drumming, singing, dancing, chanting, and other exchanges among participants of the collective event evolved into a sacred and secular, cultural manifestation of bembé.20 The happenings became regularized for African descendants in and out of palenque settlements, and the regularized, transculturated activity was transmitted to other generations and/or to new inhabitants. The neo–African Cuban music, song, dance, and bembé itself became well known in Oriente and continues into the present day. However, while several indigenous religions employ such components of Kongolese marker characteristics from the colonialera bembé, a fuller array of such signature features became centralized into the Muertéra Bembé de Sao sacred lifestyle and was transmitted to contemporary practitioners. As one respondent told us, “My grandmother was enslaved and taught my family how to sing and dance at bembé.” Research findings of investigators of Santiago’s Casa del Caribe and 154

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other elder interview respondents reported that the older, collective bembé was usually held under a large tree in a cleared forest area—the “Sao.” A large tree is phenomenologically important because an Africa-based orientation understands that this universal entity has a life span that is longer than most humans; it lives in past and present time and therefore carries much wisdom. Rituals conducted under such a tree contain enhanced sacrality and are felt to have special efficacious potential. In addition to receiving increased sacrality from the location, colonial bembé held under a large tree or trees in a cleared forest area also possessed the marker characteristics of Kongolese drums and rhythms (see figure 1), chants, singing, and dancing. The presence of these attributes heightened the Kongolese nature and consecrated disposition of the events. As with the contemporary Muertéra Bembé de Sao rituals we ob­­ served, colonial bembé altered the regular atmosphere of everyday life to such an extent that visitations and possessions from muertos—specific spirits—became a customary part of the sacred activity. Bembé was then understood, as it is understood today, to be an activity that was part of humans’ responsibilities in the reciprocal revered relationship with the world of spirits. It was an activity that altered the atmosphere and called upon spirits of the otherworld to visit with humans. Successful visits and possession by spirits was an astonishing manifestation that divine forces were and continued to be with African descendants, a supernatural companionship infinitely more powerful than colonial or present-day sociohistorical circumstances. The ritual and celebratory events were repeated and recounted with such satisfaction and accuracy that contemporary elder respondents reported that older bembé was “more real and like it’s supposed to be.” At the same time, we do not see early bembé activities as a coherent set of religious practices, although they were habitualized into interactive patterns of sacred behavior. We do however, contend that Muertéra Bembé de Sao became a coherent set of sacred customs because sufficient numbers of African descendants continued to engage in and extend colonial practices and to socialize others to ritualized particulars of the celebratory forest events. Insurgents of the 1895 Independence War who encountered African descendants coming from the mountains to join the war observed the ritualized customs that stemmed from bembé. Reports state that these black rebels sang, chanted, drummed, and danced while moving counterclockwise: marker attributes of sacrality within Kongo tradition and a “land of the dead” beginnings

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combination of activities aligned with ritual life of colonial forest bembé occasions, occasions designed to invoke spirits of the dead.21 At the same time, the characteristics were neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive of Muertéra practices. Several additional Kongo-influenced marker behaviors can be observed in Oriente religious practices and can signal Muertéra tradition as opposed to, for example, Vodú or Espiritismo. Among these is the elaborated and accentuated performance of sacred behaviors coupled with the following additional markers of Muertéra Bembé de Sao:





• The use of Kongo-type drum rhythms (figure 1); • Songs and/or parts of special songs that were known and intentionally remembered from colonial experiences because they actually spoke to otherworld spirits; • Spirit-communicating body movements that reflect the combining of Kongo Kingdom Bakongo, Carabalí, and Mandingo influences, as each was part of the Oriente colonial experience; • Spirits coming to and/or possession of practitioners’ bodies as a reciprocated response to adherents’ ritualized work.

We observed that one or more of these characteristics were part of several religious traditions in Oriente. However, we saw all of the characteristics within practices of the Muertéra Bembé de Sao community that we observed. This was specifically true in their use of Kongo-style drums, rhythms, and the elaborated and accentuated performance of sacred behaviors. Another characteristic of the tradition we experienced is the inclusion of a highly elaborated cazuela. We were informed that this type of ritual instrument, including its abundance, is an essential part of all sacred spaces. In addition to our other hypotheses about Muertéra Bembé de Sao, we contend that ritual use of the cazuela also evolved from colonial experiences, including those of palenques where Africans were more self-determining in spiritual work. The sacred apparatus is a large, shallow, round earthen pan or bowl that serves several domestic purposes: washing clothes, mixing foods, preparing meats, and so on. However, Oriente households have maintained at least one such vessel to hold objects revered as part of practitioners’ spiritual lifestyle.22 The ritual cazuela holds special sticks of differing types of wood, specialty rocks, skeletal remains of animals and humans,

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earth from various geographic locations, pieces of iron and metal, and a host of other material objects that transform it from a mere physical container into a sacred instrument of religious usage. Respondent practitioners described the vessel’s contents as “things that are powerful and effective for use in helping us to bring spiritual well being” to them and their community members. Although we propose the cazuela as vital for palenque rituals, within the contemporary Muertéra Bembé de Sao community of our research the instrument was the absolute center or heart of ceremonial activities. We were told that “muertos who come to visit the world of humans stay asleep inside the cazuela until our work activates them.” Like with other Oriente traditions we observed, when a muerto mounts the body and/or comes to the head of a Muertéra devotee, it gives advice on activities of the community (see figure 18), gives instructions about specific individuals, and/ or directs practitioners about sacred work they are currently conducting. For example, one spirit who held the body of the Muertéra leader where we participated informed us that the “writing you’re doing about this work will make you famous.” No matter the details in the messages, practitioners understand contemporary spirit visits, just as such visits were understood in colonial times, as affirmation of the reciprocal, sacred relationship between humans and spirits, even in a technological world. The cazuela is the requisite instrument in the invocational process of Muertéra Bembé de Sao reciprocity and sits central to the sacred space. It is a salient marker characteristic of the tradition. In its central physical and spiritual position in sacred spaces, the cazuela is also a vigorous participant in rituals and a device of memory and re-membering for practitioners. The vessel holds memory objects as memories of the religion’s origins and its founding ancestors. It is a physical and symbolic representation, overflowing with such historical memory indicators of African descendants who lived one, three, or five centuries ago.23 As the container through which spirits of the dead are activated, ritual interactions with the cazuela are dramatic and known to return ancient and more recent spirits to participate in the world with humans, if only temporarily. Informants reported that “you can see the spirits coming from the cazuela and dancin’ with us.” They understand the instrument as a dynamic and charismatic sacred object. We were also told that Muertéra spirits belong to three major categories:

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• Generalized, nonspecific spirits of all those who have died; • Designated spirits of the ancient dead who work with specific living individuals; • Divine spirits of ancient, supernatural beings.

These categories correlate with a shared Africa-based orientation and generalized understandings about spirits that is part of indigenous religious practices in Oriente. The last of these three, however, has a particularized Muertéra variation. Ordinarily, divine and ancient supernatural spirits are known to be a normal presence in the world of humans, and designated spirits and/or spirits of the living dead are usually those that visit during special ritual ceremonies. The divine and ancient supernatural ethereal beings do not normally make such visits. However, Muertéra respondents reported that during the ceremony of one of our data-gathering visits, spirits from all three categories participated in the ritual work and that, in their tradition, visitations from all spiritual categories is a normal occurrence, though not necessarily a regular one. We were tempted to speculate that our presence may have caused the special presence, but, without further research, we can’t comment on why so many spirits can and do visit a ritual community at any one time. No matter the category or number of spirits that visit a Muertéra Bembé de Sao ceremony, the cazuela is central in the sacred space—at least that is our conclusion based on observations and listening to respondents. In continuing to speak about this sacred instrument, respondents repeatedly reported that “other Cuban religious people use cazuela for work with muertos,” and we did see cazuelas in sacred geographies of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe and Espiritismo de Cruzado. However, in our Muertéra experience, we saw an especially massive example of the ritual instrument, one that we had never seen in any other ritual activity of any other tradition. This cazuela (see figure 17) was overflowing with sticks, bones, skeletal parts, rocks, chains, nails, axes, remains of several sacrificial activities, and so on. This cazuela was more than two feet high and at least three feet in diameter. It was noteworthy for the central and elaborated place it held during the more than eight hours of spiritual work done by the community. No cazuela in sacred spaces of other religious traditions even came close in size or content to the one at our Muertéra observation.

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Summary Thoughts This chapter presented descriptions from a limited amount of historical and other documentation on Muertéra Bembé de Sao. Field research about this tradition in Oriente is also presented as a report from the field, rather than as data from systematic and fully verified research findings. The integrity of the report is grounded in its linkage of Muertéra to Oriente historical origins, to ritual characteristics that signal African Kongo beginnings of the region, and to contemporary practices that local legends describe and that can be connected to the linkages. We are intensely aware that much in these brief discussions are educated guesses, speculations, and hypotheses about the logical nexus of what happened to produce relationships that gave birth to Muertéra Bembé de Sao. We know that our educated guesses suffer from an absence of sufficient historical findings and for want of more research, field and otherwise. Indeed, we have speculated beyond what might ordinarily occur in reliable research and scholarship, but none of our contentions and propositions is made in a vacuum. There are prima facia foundations to the hypotheses, that most practitioner observations and interviews correlated and vice versa. The cazuela is just such an example. We eagerly await future research on Muertéra Bembé de Sao, as well as other Oriente religious practices. However, we are confident that reports from our respondents and field experience will prove instructional if not fully valid.

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Findings and Conclusions

To be indifferent to the past is breaking faith with the people who had to tolerate oppression, indignity, and much unhappiness. —Remarks during “Living Room Conversations” of the African Atlantic Research Team Much before the opening of the twenty-first century, the historian of religions, Charles H. Long was writing and speaking about human orientation, knowledge, religion, time, space, and related phenomena.1 One essential proposition of his work is that “it is the misinterpretations” of the promise of wealth and riches from the Americas that “constitute the problem of interpretation” regarding those who were exploited by that promise. “It is by going through the misinterpretations that a new awareness of the problem will take shape.”2 This proposition proved pertinent to our research of sacred spaces in Oriente because we took the charge seriously and attempted to construct and reconstruct an interpretation of socioreligious historical events relative to the creation of indigenous religions in the region. Significantly, we tried to do this from the perspective of those colonial enslaved persons who first joined in ritual behaviors not grounded in the Spanish Christian model. Long was likewise interested in how, as part of the “promise” of cross-

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Atlantic European expansion and colonization, individuals from enslaved and oppressed groups survived their exploitive ordeals as they related to the European promise. His emphasis is on the interpretive, but the interpretive of those not included in the promise. He entreats scholars and researchers to report on oppressed communities as active and creative participants that built societies in the Americas while simultaneously creating a symbolic reality of their own vision, a symbolic reality that was also embedded within the material and political world of their oppressors. We found Long’s propositions particularly appropriate as guides for our task of understanding Oriente indigenous practices. This concluding discussion is designed to reveal some of the salient conceptual findings from the research, and we begin by discussing how our working definitions for key concepts were expanded through the field investigation. In chapter 1 we put forth basic working parameters for these definitions, but now we turn to fuller exploration of the key concepts as the research refined their applicability. At the same time, this chapter will engage findings about some important meanings inherent in religious lifestyles and sacred space realities we encountered in Oriente. The naturalistic field research in which our team engaged is well suited to reveal meanings and motivations within and behind human behavior and that is engrained within the sociological enterprise. Field research and its methodological techniques are indispensable to an interpretive endeavor, for helping to explain the how’s and why’s of human activity. Our work on Oriente’s sacred spaces fits well into this perspective and may make a few significant contributions to academic and general understandings about African descendants in Cuba, indigenous traditions of the island, the use and significance of sacred spaces, and several other arenas of knowledge about human religious life. Knowledge contributions of this nature are even more noteworthy when surrounded by historical and social conditions that affected the descendants. We believe that the preceding chapters represent the necessary sociohistorical background and so now turn to clarifying conceptual issues as these were revealed to our team as we proceeded through the Oriente investigation.

What We Learned Conceptually Defining Indigenous

Our working definition of “indigenous” deepened after several years of living with and observing African-descendant devotees using ritual activities findings and conclusions

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that contained behaviors influenced by their continental ancestry as well as influences from early autochthonous Cuban inhabitants. We observed that merged, habitualized sacred behaviors had materialized within the region as part of colonial Cuba as a “contact zone.” The island and its regions were a colonial location where multiple cultural communities contacted and engaged each other within a social environment of dramatic power inequities, where they struggled and grappled for social space within those power arrangements, where neither group could leave with ease, and where new behavioral forms particular to the situation were created.3 In the shared physical reality of Oriente, the earliest colonial Indians and Africans created combined ritual customs that included but were not limited to using tobacco, importing material objects into sacred notations of spiritual work, and incorporating Africa-based drum rhythms into the work, as well as the presence and visitation of spirits in the historical world of humans. New joint behaviors also expressed their acknowledgment of spirits’ existence in the human world, reverence for ancestors, respectful interment of their dead to become mutual ancestors, and deference for the materials of spiritual work. The outcome of this cultural interaction and exchange now became “indigenous” to the land. The new valued behaviors were adjusted to changing historical periods and transmitted to subsequent practitioners in the area. These transculturated, indigenous customs, including the valued knowledge that undergirded their practice, were reported as foundational to Oriente rituals we observed, and they were proposed as distinctively characteristic of the region. Coherent sets of religions that evolved from these indigenous elements contain important knowledge about life, survival, and human dignity within the cosmic universe. In chapter 2 we presented salient aspects of the corpus of sacred knowledge and that cosmic orientation, but a significant finding of the Oriente research was that there is an alternative understanding of the concept of indigenous. Based on our experiences, we have reconceptualized a definition that varies from that generally considered for indigenous religion. Our understanding is that indigenous religions evolve when there is respectful sharing of autochthonous understandings with migrant understandings, when a blending of practices evolve, when the dead are buried within these sacred comprehensions to create joint ancestors, and when ancestors of the shared land space are respectfully revered. Contemporary Oriente sacred spaces reflect such understandings and employ indigenous ritual practices. This was a first important revelation or finding of our investigation. 162

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Orientation and Transculturation

Another finding from our research relates to orientation and transculturation. We found that the Africa-based cosmic orientation continues to inform contemporary devotees in the selection of materials and activities to be included in their sacred performances, including sacred spaces. This was made clear despite the fact that transculturated and other adjustments in practice have been made. For example, on one occasion a religious leader took us to an outdoor site where water flows naturally into the Caribbean Sea and where particular rituals are regularly performed. We were told that the use of areas on the specific site had changed through history because a private, racially segregated club stood on the site for many year and practitioners had to move with care around the buildings to gain access to the water. The club is no longer on the location and practitioners move freely in all areas near the water to retrieve sacred materials and to conduct sacred rites. We were also informed that water from that particular location, even when it was difficult to reach, had to be gathered because it was part of the religion’s understanding about the natural environment. That is to say, the cosmic orientation of the tradition dictated water from that particular site, no matter the danger. Emeritus professor of history and anthropology, Jan Vansina, would salute our emphasis on following the Africa-based cosmic orientation that undergirds contemporary behaviors. Our findings from such an approach support his propositions about the importance of orientation for understanding the oral history of African-descendant people. He examined the relationship between oral traditions and history among African groups and contended “the importance of orientation . . . can scarcely be exaggerated.”4 Interviews and observations in Oriente reveal that the ancestral cosmic orientation of African descendant practitioners continues to be foundational to the transculturated performances of their indigenous religions. The customs and orientation are also important as these are used to enculturate, socialize, and acculturate new inhabitants to the sacred actions of local practitioners’ patterns. The ability to sustain, adapt, and reinforce distinctive sacred reality is linked to the region’s geographic and sociopolitical isolation from authorized and other activities of Cuba’s locus of power.5 The relative isolation ensured that developing transculturated behaviors would be authenticated by Oriente influences rather than rely upon affirmation from populations in other parts of the island. The region’s ritual practices were self-referring. findings and conclusions

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In this regard, our research found that practitioners’ consciousness of beauty, models of time, and celebration exemplify their Africa-based orientation as well as the historical, regional self-referencing sacred life. Contemporary devotees maintain daily lives within two time realities but prioritize the reality of their religious practices. On the one hand, they exist in a Cuban society guided by Eurocentric ideas and a linear approach to time. While on the other hand, they actualize a significant portion of their lives within the event-based time of ritual practices and cosmic perspective that has been tested and handed down through generations. The latter time concept has informed them about principles of natural phenomena and guided them on how and with what to celebrate sacred occasions. For example, colonial Europeans held the majority of political and social resources and wielded most power derived from those. They reconstructed organizations and institutional relations to support their idea/ ideal religious holidays as dictated by understandings of Christian and Cuban Catholic liturgical practices.6 These settlers and their progeny created public holidays and organized celebratory activities with little consideration or respect for Cuban Indian or African descendants’ ideas about sacred celebration. Secular, nonsacred behaviors were ordered to cease on such “holy” days, as all colonial inhabitants were expected to take part in designated activities. For those excluded from decision-making power, the mainstream holiday meant social space away from the laborious drudgery of their work and an opportunity to release some of their overwhelming frustrations. It was a temporary public celebration opportunity for the bonded and oppressed people of the island.7 The European elite and upper classes considered African involvement in social celebrations as exotic entertainment, but the descendants of “darker hue” soon appropriated the allocated times, reinterpreted and restructured them yet again into Africa-based occasions. They publicly dressed, sang, drummed, danced, and paraded in “African” ways and inserted their meanings of the celebrations into the Europeanstructured holiday events.8 Nineteenth-century literary persons of African descent are even reported to have employed and inserted expressions from their sacred heritage into what appeared to be purely “Hispanic” written forms of artistic cultural representation.9 Although they held alternative conceptualizations about being human, African descendants lived within and acknowledged Spanish Catholic ideas in Cuba; some of the latter overlapped or paralleled Africa-based 164

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notions. For example, ideas about the veneration of sacred entities and the shared understanding that spiritual forces/saints could be called upon for assistance were particularly compatible with Africa-based comprehensions about the universe. However, the recognized compatibility of cosmic ideas and some ritual practices did not erase or replace the Africa-based cosmic core. Rather, the new thoughts served as labels within a Catholic veneer that gave the appearance of compliance with colonial and postcolonial power structures, while holding Africa-based ideas central. As well, the appearance of the Eurocentric veneer curtailed some social repudiation and persecution of the Africa-based center and thereby brought a modicum of social space to these oppressed people. The result was that African descendants’ participation in celebratory activities was within their own ideas about time as these supposedly powerless people changed the nature and character of Cuban holidays. In Oriente, many such occasions became associated with and named for Africa-based commemorations. Shango and Babalú Ayé are strong examples.10 Over centuries, even as celebrations for Santa Bárbara and San Lazaro were official Catholic holidays, activities associated with the festivities were stylistically altered and not wholly associated with European or African cultural ideas. Figure 15 is a papier-mâché representation of the transculturated image of Babalú Ayé that symbolizes the spirit/saint in the religio-cultural commemoration. The image demonstrates that elements of the holiday celebrations were changed yet again to the African descendants’ orientation of veneration, sacred things, and merriment. Within indigenous customs of Oriente, our research found that many such new concepts about “holiness” and celebration were infused with Africa-based knowledge. For example, animal sacrifice might be needed. All night drumming, singing, and dancing also could be required and such new practices were grounded in an alternative temporal modality. All became part of island tradition in purpose, focus, and stylistic performance. Contemporary Oriente inhabitants, and those who share their perspective, express this distinct understanding when they ritualistically refer to island sites and when they return to the region for Shango and Babalú Ayé celebrations, not the Catholic ones.11 The historical processes of transculturation and the continuation of celebrations that are infused with cosmic orientation and ritual practice that distinguish Cuba’s indigenous religions was an impressive finding of our investigation of sacred spaces in Oriente. findings and conclusions

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Temporal Modality We also found that Oriente practitioners’ sacred spaces reflect colonialinitiated processes of appropriating material, space, and ideas from an Africa-based model of time. This occurred within sociohistorical realities of regional religious practices and is exemplified by scheduling ritual activities according to modern world definitions of societal obligations, but beginning and ending such rituals within indigenous religion’s time concepts. We found that devotees communicated time frames of ritual activities as Eurocentric, but made their arrival, participation, and departure from the work within the time definition parametered by Africa-based cosmic orientation. This was true even across different religions where customs varied. From the perspective of practitioners’ alternative temporal modality, ritual work is a constant, demonstrated contestation, if not conflict with the larger society’s prevailing time model about being human. Their national membership compels participation in the sociopolitical reality of Cuba and Oriente, but as Fredrik Barth would say, like most humans, practitioners “participate in multiple, more or less discrepant, universes of discourse; they construct different, partial, and simultaneous worlds in which they move; their cultural construction of reality springs not from one source and is not of one piece.”12 At the same time, we were not convinced that the contestation and conflict of temporalities is necessarily a negative one that has potential for social schism. We found that Oriente devotees maintain their societal responsibilities and functioning but conjointly do not abdicate sacred responsibilities and required activities. Devotees make daily adjustments to sustain the integrity and priority of Africa-based sacred lifestyles, lifestyles that for centuries provided their ancestors and them with a sense of ultimate meaning and purpose as well as a direct relationship to cosmic creation and power. This power, too, is understood to transcend the human-constructed, sociopolitical world of inequities and oppression. We found that the symbolic universe created by Oriente devotees across religious traditions was not formed from a single source or from a solitary wellspring. Rather, the sacred world was practitioners’ selfpresentation aimed at signifying their place in a socially constructed world that had left them out. As such, their adherence to the alternative temporal modality is part of the core Africa-based cosmic orientation. Their devotion may be as David Brown sees the continuation of alternatives, “a consciously cultivated style of subversion of values;” a subversion of values, time, place, 166

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and performance that is grounded in the spiritual temporality of indigenous practitioners’ cosmic and religious frame of reference.13 This became clear when our team arrived at several ritual activities based on the clock hour that had been stated for sacred work. We found no one ready for our arrival, no others present for the event, and we waited hours for activities to convene. We also participated in ritual occurrences from early morning of one day until beyond midday the next. In each example, none of those gathered were even slightly uncomfortable or distressed that things did not begin or end at some appointed hour of the clock. The time alterations, to those concerned about such matters, was explained as necessary to allow spirits to anoint the event; “we have to wait til the spirits are ready for us, not begin when we’re ready for them.” Neither did anyone ever hint that, without notification, “clock time” for spiritual work was extended or adjusted to ritual event time. It was a taken-for-granted reality and everybody spoke about the fact that “things really depend on knowin’ how things are supposed to happen,” that is, cosmically oriented knowledge that is not the agenda of societal time. We were amazed to find all practitioners adhering to this model of time, temporal modality that exists outside of society’s overarching arrangements and is associated and performed from ritual time of their alternative cosmic orientation.14

Counter/Re-signification in Practice Like much of cross-cultural research conducted on issues of religion, one finding of our work was that “what you get is not always what you saw, or, you didn’t get what you saw because you only thought you saw it.” This reminds us that, with cross-cultural investigations, too often we bring unnecessary interpretive baggage for comprehending the investigative sites. In Oriente, we were reminded that practitioners constantly counter/re-signify meanings in many of their actions in their world, and too often what we think of as “superstitions” are merely behaviors labeled by those who do not understand and/or share comprehensions about the symbolic universe with those doing the actions. This was true for sacred spaces built by Oriente practitioners and it is true for images presented in this book. All incorporate a myriad of material articles that can appear almost anywhere on the globe. However, when placed in Oriente sacred spaces, they are counter/re-signified from meanings not associated with the cosmic orientation of Cuban indigenous religions into sacred objects of ritual work. findings and conclusions

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For those who do not share practitioners’ understanding of the symbolic world, such spaces and activities within them can be misunderstood and labeled as superstitions. The situation usually arises from a plethora of negative significations that have been imposed upon religious traditions that differ from Eurocentric civilizations’ Christian core. Many who hold such a core automatically and unconsciously assume that most things African or Africa related, particularly religious ritual workings, are dark, dirty, demonic, and/or inferior. This signifying of a whole continent and its people is a product of European expansion and theft in the western hemisphere.15 It involves five centuries of dependency on enslaved and African labor for development, the consistent creation and imposition of stereotypical rationales to justify the race-based exploitative relationships, and the implementation of formal and informal social structures that ensured permanence of white supremacy. At the same time, these impositions have not been unilaterally accepted and neither have Oriente practitioners yielded to all such significations. Sacred spaces speak loudly of continued resistance to a world circumscribed by white hegemonic ideas of humanity, sacrality, and religion. They are active representations of an alternative understanding, are consciously cultivated styles of subversion and re-signification, and include objects and activities that continue to be antithetical to Eurocentric understandings of the sacred. The spaces contain preserved dead animals; remains of sacred and ritualistic animal sacrifice; water and earth from a variety of global spaces; special rocks, sticks, and other objects also from diverse settings; experiences with spirit visitations and comings to human bodies; and much more. Oriente geographies of sacrality, their contents, and the practitioners who use them belong to religious realities whose meanings are far from Eurocentric core designations; they present a visual image that conflates and confounds, if not confuses, many such designations. Consequently, many of us who assume Eurocentric approaches regularly dismiss as superstition the content and behaviors that occur in Oriente spaces. In fact, the spaces, their content, and activities are a consistent counter/re-signification to hegemonic imposition. They are intimate parts of a lifestyle wherein participants employ alternative definitions and interactional requirements for spiritual work even as that work must be performed within mainstream societal understandings not demarcated by their cosmic orientation; the spaces and actions are counter/re-significations of what the larger social reality might dictate. 168

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These counter/re-signified comprehensions are not individual or temporary but are found in each Oriente sacred space and within each set of regional practices of a religious tradition. They are historical long-term patterns of generations of practitioners’ intentional collective behavior. They are counter/re-significations because the cosmic core from which the understandings and behaviors are derived has been successful in helping new generations adjust and adapt behaviors while not fully yielding to alternative or imposed orientations. Contemporary ritual work, though not the same as that conducted by practitioners’ colonial foreparents, continues with critical elements that have persisted beyond the lifetime of originators of any singular ritual arrangement.16 Our research found that this was the case for Oriente sacred spaces constructed for ritual work, spaces and work that are essential counter/re-significations of colonial, postcolonial, modern, and postmodern realities even as they were constructed and propagated as normative within the symbolic world of devotees. Equally, the traditions, their customs, and spaces are counter/re-significations because they continue to be the lived reality for a significant number of nonpractitioners in that some 80 percent of all island inhabitants practice one or more of the religious lines.17 These alternative sets of customs are full lifestyles, not mere temporary representations of individual idiosyncrasies. They are patterns of beliefs and behaviors that are daily and weekly put into practice by collectivities of members. Our research found that these observable patterns of counter/re-signification are intimately woven into lives of adherents. In addition, the sacred customs are not exclusive to a particular Oriente town or city, and many have been shared beyond regional and national borders.18

Integrated Religious Plurality Another finding arising from the Oriente research is that a single practicing community can incorporate behavioral customs from two, or even several different religious traditions. These differing activities can and do occur within any one community, within any one family, and/or they can occur with any one individual.19 We call this phenomenon “integrated religious plurality.” It is plural because there is more than one set of coherent religious practices within a given community, family, and/or individual. However, the plurality is not random or idiosyncratic in expression but is an intentional incorporation of select customs associated with efficacious findings and conclusions

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results from specific and different religious traditions. This intentional in­­ corporation surely contributes to the sustainability of indigenous traditions in Oriente as the permeability of internal practice boundaries can make adjustments for sociohistorical intrusions without compromising the vital core of orientation, beliefs and values. The integrated plurality phenomenon is equally religious because, within the combination of customs employed from differing traditions, the knowledge and rituals that undergird the customs incorporate answers to issues and questions about ultimate existence, human and otherwise. In addition, the knowledge and rituals are systematic in their organization and are social occurrences; it is difficult, if not impossible, for single individuals to maintain the religions. The integrated plurality finding held true as behaviors associated with any one religious tradition had historical experiences that proved mutually beneficial to other, different sets of practices. This means that coherent collections of sacred rituals live side by side and thrive on their continued interaction and exchanges. The ability of this integrated reality to survive and prosper begins with the fact that most Oriente practitioners of any one tradition have working familiarity with and can articulate, if not demonstrate, many customs of the other religions. They appear to have little or no conflict with sharing or integrating such customs. We found more than a few different types of sacred spaces in individual homes of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, Espiritismo Cruzado, and Muertéra Bembé de Sao practitioners. Each home proudly displayed at least two—and sometimes as many as five—designated locations of sacrality and devotees informed us that each space was for distinct “spiritual work” of a specific tradition. For example, the leader of a Cruzado community allowed us to videotape an interview as she reported, “I keep this nganga space too because sometimes the work needs more power than I have.” She also said she calls in a palero, an initiated member of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe on such occasions. We also observed the tata nganga of a Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe community actively participating in a special ceremony of an Espiritismo, one not part of our research work. And in a similar fashion, a Muertéra Bembé de Sao respondent was an active participant in a Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe “Memorial Feed” that we observed. Not only did this young man warmly acknowledge our presence at the feed, but he also asked if we were coming to the ceremony of his community that was scheduled in two days. When we said we could not, he registered disappointment 170

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but no sense of competition or animosity. Indeed, he enthusiastically proceeded with his Palo activities, including participation in time-honored chants and dances. From our outside position as Western-trained researchers, what ap­­ peared as practices of single individual religions were actually procedures drawn from several traditions integrated within a single set. This seems to be the Oriente way. Some practitioners did express a slight sense of conflict, discomfort, and irregularity with some customs of the various regional religions. They articulated a perception that their religious lifestyle was of a higher moral plane than some other tradition or traditions. However, they also continued to conduct ritual behaviors that incorporated customs from other traditions, even those they had disdained. Through systematic observations, we found that respondents’ behaviors mitigated their spoken ideas and that was particularly true for each religion, with the exception of Vodú. We found that Vodú practitioners, including mambo and hungán leaders, consistently attended rituals in sacred spaces of other religious traditions, but they did not actively participate in central rituals as they remained engaged on the periphery of the spiritual work. We have no interview data to help explain this occurrence and will withhold speculation for the time being. However, it seems clear that neither religious distinctions nor apparent cross-religious tensions deter even Vodú practitioners from maintaining and interacting with sacred spaces, objects, and devotees of differing traditions. Again, the integrated plurality of religious practice was a strong finding from our research. We cannot avoid the fact that our investigation also found this regional phenomenon was influenced by a religion we did not study. This was the Yoruba-based tradition of Regla de Ocha/Lucumí. Regional practitioners consistently spoke of Ocha as a religion that offered “stability and tranquility,” but they also indicated it was a religion into which most Oriente inhabitants were not initiated because of the prohibitive costs. As one demonstrative respondent said, “It can cost thousands of pesos to ‘make saint’ in Ocha. I prefer Muertéra. The saints are free.” We also found that Regla de Ocha/Lucumí arrived in the east much later than other indigenous religions and only took hold in the twentieth century.20 A strong example of Ocha’s integration into Oriente religiosity is the use of primary names for spirit forces when traditions have their own names for corresponding spirits—names like Elegguá, Babalú Ayé, Shango, Yemaya, and so on. Such substitution resembles the Catholic “veneering” findings and conclusions

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of the region’s colonial periods. This seems to suggest that, like Catholicism in earlier periods, Regla de Ocha enjoys more visibility throughout Cuba and the world than do more popular traditions practiced in Oriente. The name recognition of Yoruba-based spirits, when employed for comparable spirits of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, Vodú, Espiritismo, and Muertéra Bembé de Sao provides an ease of translation for regional customs that are already integrated pluralities. The use of familiar nomenclature and less well-known practices also helps Oriente devotees participate in the Cuban tourist economy where certain religious practices have developed valuable spiritual capital. Practi­ tioners can encourage tourists to visit their sacred sites and/or take part in public ceremonies by using names familiar to foreign travelers, names like a bembé for Shango or Ochún. Though tourists may not know what the event is or its religious significance, they have heard the words as associated with Cuba’s indigenous religions and are interested in seeing them. This provides Oriente inhabitants with opportunities to garner dollars, which are more valued than the peso currency of their country. The economic supplement enhances the survival of participating religious adherents. An example of material that functions as spiritual capital within the integrated religious plurality is a figurine regularly purchased by tourists— that of Elegguá, the spirit force responsible for all crossroads and named within the lexicon of Regla de Ocha/Lucumí. Tourists purchase replicas of the figurines used by practitioners or those produced by government-operated factories. At the same time, such figurines are found behind doorways in homes of nearly all practitioners of our research, no matter the religious tradition they followed. Our finding on Oriente religious practice as integrated pluralities follows a trajectory set by David Brown in his book Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion and by Stephen Palmié in his volume Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition. Each author is concerned with interpreting the “spiritembodying and spirit-directing” materials of Cuban-derived religious expressions, respectively the ritual content of Regla de Ocha and the “heterogeneous objects, bilongo” of reglas congo.21 Each shares a focus on how products of the indigenous customs are distinct expressions that incorporate but do not singularly represent either of the base cultures from which they were historically formed. The intersection with our idea about Oriente’s integrated religious plurality occurs because the various Cuban indigenous 172

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religions are part of “an ongoing process” whereby all are “working off each other.”22 That any one set of Oriente practices may appropriately incorporate practices from another religion is exactly what Palmié puts forth: The bridging of disparate universes of discourse and aesthetic traditions does not occur randomly, nor can it be divorced from the agency of actors whose historical positioning enables them to unproblematically adopt, strategically appropriate, or forcefully wrest the cultural resources variously distributed in a given ecology of representations or continuum of discourse from their forebears, from similarly positioned contemporaries, or from those who wield power over them.23 We concur with Palmié on the question of “agency of actors” if his emphasis is on the plural nature of “actors” rather than an academic individualized view of “agency.” Our distinction is that indigenous religions practiced in Oriente, within the process of transculturation, are each products of the collective intentionality of cultural groups tossed into the historical and sociopolitical mixture of the island as a contact zone. In the region’s resulting inequitable distribution of power and other resources of sociopolitical life, groups of actors constructed new behavioral expressions, that is, religions, art, language, food, music, and so on. These expressive behaviors, though marked with Africa-based cultural origins, no longer belonged singularly to those beginnings and they definitely were not singularly part of European cultural or religious traditions. Therefore, it is not surprising that our research found that Oriente ritual practices are distinct sacred customs adopted, adapted, appropriated, and integrated within regional pluralities.

Christian Periphery One finding of our research began before our work with religious activities in the region. We spoke with Reverend Raúl Suárez, a Protestant pastor and Christian leader in Cuba, about religion in his country before we set our investigation in motion. He informed us that there are two major Christian streams in Cuban history: one of the Catholic Church and its relationship to colonial and neocolonial situations, and a second stream of Protestants’ reliance on United States’ policies. Both streams, he said, produced conflicts after the 1959 revolution and the post-1960s findings and conclusions

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period of development. Suárez also acknowledged that only Africa-based religions of his country responded to citizens’ needs in their changing circumstances before and after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. The indigenous religions, he said, have permeated the entire country. Our research findings confirm Reverend Suárez’s contentions to be particularly true in Oriente.24 At the same time, we found residuals of Catholicism to be a continuing element of life in Oriente, but only in so far as it has been cojoined with indigenous ritual practices. There are Catholic churches in most all regional cities, towns, villages, and some smaller settlements, but the number of Catholic practitioners seen in any of these is small given the size of the structures. The exception is among those churches where the patron saint corresponds with a spirit force of an indigenous tradition. Interview respondents informed us of the Christian nature of these Oriente structures and simultaneously instructed us about the fixtures’ participation in their indigenous religious lifestyles. For example, the Cathedral at Cobre in Oriente that is dedicated to the Catholic Virgin of Charity is known by most as an iconic sacred space of the Africa-based divine spirit of Ochún. This cathedral is well populated with devotees and receives hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. This also is the Oriente space that the pope of the Roman Catholic Church visited, likely preferring to understand it only as representing the Christian tradition. We found that in Oriente religious life, at any given moment in history, an entity or activity rarely belongs to a single representation. Local neighborhood communities maintain Catholic physical structures to the best of their ability and available resources, and practitioners of indigenous religions use the buildings within certain rituals and rites of their tradition. Material residue from cleansing rituals of several indigenous sacred procedures, for example, is regularly deposited just outside of select churches. Individuals are instructed to place the accumulated remains from their ritual acts in front or just to the side, in the shade of a nearby Catholic church. As with Reverend Suárez’s proposition, our research found Catholic churches to be peripheral to indigenous traditions, their sacred spaces, and their spiritual activities. But we do not view Oriente’s integrated relationships as associated with conventional notions of “syncretism or as a colloquially understood hybrid of originally separate elements.”25 As Fernando Ortiz advised, we found that Oriente inhabitants make and do things in “their Cuban way.”26 174

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Summation All religions are dynamic; they constantly change. Indigenous religious practices of Oriente are no different, and over the five hundred years of their presence in the region, they have adjusted to particularities of their sociopolitical and historical circumstances. No matter how much information we uncover about beliefs, rituals, ceremonies, rites, boundaries, parameters, rules, objects, spirits, and other specifics of religiosity in Oriente, the practice of traditions that equal a phenomenon live because of and within movements and changes of humans’ social, political, economic, and historical lives. Those, too, are not static, they change. Our exploration of the sacred spaces of Cuba’s indigenous religious practices in the eastern region of Oriente was meant to open this area and its activities for inclusion into the larger academic arena of systematic research. For the most part, academic knowledge has been accumulated almost exclusively from data and information gathered from practitioners of the western regions of Havana, Matanzas, Trinidad, Cienfuegos, and others. By choosing to focus on Oriente locations of sacrality, rather than on those of the west, we were able to identify four sets of religious practices that have previously been underinvestigated yet are actively performed in the region and within which sacred spaces are constructed. We have photographed these spaces as they appeared at the time of our visits. However, because we know that humans, religions, and sacred spaces are always changing, those who follow us to investigate Oriente will most likely find that sacred spaces and those who construct them will only include remnants of what we found. Future researchers will need to adjust their tools, their concepts, and their analysis when compared to the work we’ve completed. This is the inherent nature of the study of human phenomena, religion, and sacred spaces. This endeavor was not meant to be all encompassing but does put forth a plausible historical narrative for which there is clear circumstantial evidence that can provide a starting point for future investigations. Additional interrogation of colonial Oriente places, material culture, and historical documents is necessary. We plea for additional archaeological, anthropological, sociological, ethnographic, field, and quantitative survey research, as well as other types of investigations. No matter the type of work that follows ours, or the realities of human religious change, we feel confident that, with adjustments and corrections, the core of our explorations and findings will be substantiated.27 We await! findings and conclusions

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Notes

introduction



1. See, for example, Ortiz, 1965; Simpson, 1978; Castellanos, 1988; Bolívar, 1998, 1996; and Brown 2003. 2. Ferrer, 1999, and Scott, 1985, are examples of full English volumes. 3. In Havana, there is an entire museum of Ortiz’s collections of artifacts. 4. Ortiz, 1947:97–103. 5. Lachatañeré, 2001. 6. Long, 2005; Pratt, 2000. 7. Ortiz, 1947. 8. Frazier, 1957 [1949]:7–9; Herskovits, 1941. 9. Ayorinde, 2004. 10. Furé, 1979; Cabrera, 1983, 1986; Castellanos and Castellanos, 1988; Barnet, 1997. 11. Barnet, 2001:88–97. 12. See Schwegler, 1998a; Palmié, 2002; Brown, 2003; Ayorinde, 2004. 13. Thompson, 1983; Brandon, 1993; Matibag, 1996. 14. Brown, 2003: Preface. 15. Works by Bolívar Arostegui and Gonzalez Díaz, 1998, and Cabrera, 1983, on the subject may have reached broader visibility, but all of their materials have not yet been translated into English. 16. Bettelheim, 2001, does begin considerations of Palo Mayombe but by way of its contributions to art. 17. Barnet, 1997:131. 177

18. Our spelling of the religion will be as it is spelled in Oriente—Vodú—except when we refer to the Haitian practices, which we will spell Vodou. 19. Millet and Alarcón, 1998. 20. Millet, 1993, 1996a, 1996b. 21. It is exceptionally difficult to get a long-term visa to work in Cuba and the US government’s continuing blockade of the island prohibits freedom to travel. I often resided in Oriente for two to three months and returned as many as three times a year during the nine consecutive years. 22. Timing and political issues interfered with us conducting interviews with the entire sample group. 23. Mintz and Price, 1976. 24. Long, 1995, but specifically 171–98; Hamilton, 1990: 15–26. 25. Palmié, 1995. 26. Palmié, 2002. 27. Brown, 2003:140, 291; Zaid, 2007.

chapter 1 1. Turner, 1997:288; Hall, 2005:57–65 also develops this line of reasoning. 2. We’ve seen this spelling in academic and professional writings but have observed the Siboney spelling in Oriente. 3. Pérez, 1995:14–18; Sued-Badillo, 1999:259–91. 4. Andrews, 2004:17; Thomas, 1971:21–22, 1511. 5. Pérez, 1995:25–27; Duharte, 2001:15. 6. Spain became a single nation only after it was agreed that Isabella would be co-king with Ferdinand. Colloquial gender usage has lost that fact. 7. Palmer, 1997:13. 8. Ibid. 9. Thomas, 1971:1511; Turner, 1997:289–90; Duharte Jiménez, 2001:15; Hall, 2005: 42–45 and chapter 3 wherein she fully discusses the “Clustering of African Ethnicities in the Americas.” 10. Price, 1996; Palmer, 1997:36. 11. Palmer, 1997:36. 12. Díaz, 2000:9. 13. Aimes, 1967:5–8. 14. Duharte Jiménez, 2001:15–16. 15. Bosch Ferrer, 2003; Duharte Jiménez, 2001; Cremé Ramos and Duharte Jiménez, 1994; and Franco, 1973. 16. Pérez, 1995:38–41. 17. Duharte Jiménez, 2001:15–18. 18. Thomas, 1971:19. 19. Turner, 1997:288, 290–91, 300–301. 20. Thornton, 1992:96–97. 21. Lopéz Valdes, 1985; Hall, 2005; Heywood and Thornton, 2007:9. 22. Díaz, 2000:42–43. 178

notes to pages 8–27







23. Duharte Jiménez, 1986:3. 24. Price, 1996; Díaz, 2000; Andrews, 2004:14; Hall, 2005:67–68. 25. Palmié, 1993:346–47; Hall, 2005:34–37. 26. Schwegler, 1998; 2002. Also see Fick, 1990:56–57 for a discussion of Africans’ use of homeland languages in Haiti. 27. Pérez, 1995. 28. Pérez, 1995:39–42. 29. Respondents told us that even the western city of Matanza has the reputation of being “the Athens of Cuba.” 30. Our calculations are based on figures provided by Franco, 1973; Duharte Jiménez, 1986:5; Ferrer, 1999:96; Andrews, 2004:17–19, 41; La Rosa Corzo, 2003; Bosch Ferrer, 2003. Also see Thomas, 1971:69. 31. Several contemporary Oriente villages and towns were palenque sites. Our research team visited the town of Palenque as just such a contemporary continuation. 32. See Franco (1973) for one of the first discussions of palenques after O’Kelly (1874) mentions them. 33. La Rosa Corzo, 2003:60. 34. María Elena Díaz’s report on descendants in El Cobre and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s discussions of African ethnic clusters. 35. Thomas, 1971:18. 36. Pérez, 1995:9, 29–30. 37. Aimes, 1967:56–60. 38. Hall, 2005:163. Her statistics are drawn from Manuel Moreno Fraginals, 1977. 39. Turner, 1997:288. Hall (2005:57–65) also develops this line of reasoning. 40. See Ayala, 1999: chapter 6. 41. de la Fuente, 2001:204–6. 42. Respondents tell the story of the Cuban band leader, Desi Arnaz, whose father was mayor of Santiago de Cuba in early decades of the twentieth century. Arnaz’s father forbade him to visit bembé activities of the city, but the boy found a way to participate and later became well known for incorporating many rhythms from his clandestine activities into his US music career. 43. This action was an effort to consolidate state power and began when Cuban authorities observed the participation of “liberation theology” and its subscribers in struggles of Nicaragua. The more earnest efforts in this direction, however, occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the removal of economic subsidies to the island. Ayorinde, 2004. 44. Wirth, 2003; Martínez Furé, 1979. 45. The fight at Playa Gíron was the battle against US supported invaders of the island that was won by the Cubans. The United States refers to the event as the battle at the “Bay of Pigs.” 46. Dodson, 1999. The pastor was Rev. Raul Suarez. 47. For the most part, these are activities and events we observed or in which we participated. 48. Ortiz, 1947. notes to pages 27–38

179

chapter 2





1. Walvin, 2000. We know that human beings begin the process of enculturating knowledge from birth forward but most of the information, behaviors, and values of that process are foundations for consciousness and cognitive understanding that usually begin to form after ten years of age. 2. Equiáno, 1996. 3. It could be argued that cosmic orientation of a cultural community circumscribes rather than gives direction to interactive patterns that become part of daily living and the taken-for-granted, typified categories. 4. Peel, 2003; Thornton, 1992; Parrinder, 1961. 5. See Thompson, 1983 and 1993; MacGaffey and Barnett, 1970. 6. Mbiti, 1969. 7. Mbiti, 1969:1–3. 8. Several interview sources report the late nineteenth-century arrival to Cuba of new Africans born on the continent. See Hall, 2005:34–36, 161–64. However, we only have local legends and oral traditions that there were such twentiethcentury debarkations. 9. Mintz and Price, 1976:38–41. 10. Mintz and Price, 1976, 1996; Hall, 2005:85; Franco, 1973:49; Thomas, 1971: Appendix iii. 11. Hall (2005:42, 52) discusses the multilingual nature of captive Africans as well as European and other efforts to sever the internal ethnic ties among the various peoples. 12. Matibag, 1996; Matory, 1999; Peel, 2003. 13. See Hord and Lee, 1995. 14. McKenzie, 1973. 15. Ray, 1976; Mbiti, 1969 and 1991. 16. Matibag, 1996:11. 17. Dodson, 2002b. 18. As discussed in Gerth and Mills, 1946. 19. Thompson, 1983; Abimbola, 1989; Bockie, 1993; Palmié, 2002. 20. Thornton, 1992:238–40, Thompson, 1983, and Brown, 1991 also make these contentions. 21. Dodson, 1988. 22. Harding, 2000:156. 23. See Cheal (1992) and Smith (1987) for examples on ritual. 24. Schwegler, 1998a, 2006. 25. See Wirtz, 2003; Johnson, 2002: chapter 2; and Matibag, 1996:15.

chapter 3 1. Tuan, 1977:18, 162. 2. It must be remembered that legal enslavement in Cuba ended in 1886 and, as late as the 1960s, there were Cubans who had lived through that era. See Barnet, 1968. 3. See Gerth and Mills (1946) for Max Weber’s classic exploration of charisma. 180

notes to pages 39–62

4. Morgan and Promey, 2001:2–3. 5. Price, 1996: chapters 2–3. 6. This was said to us specifically at the Annual Conference of North American and Cuban Philosophers and Social Scientists, Havana, Cuba, July 13–29, 2002. 7. Tuan, 1977. 8. Brown, 2003:140. Also see Zaid (2007) for an honors thesis that used extensive oral history field methods to gather data on this topic. 9. Ayorinde, 2004. 10. Thomas, 1971: chapter VIII; Pérez, 1991. 11. Mbiti, 1969, 1991; p’Bitek 1970; Opoku, 1978. 12. Interview conversation with Andriol Portuondo, July 2002, Santiago de Cuba. Lecture of Abelardo Larduet Luaces, Religion Workshop, Festival del Caribe, Santiago de Cuba, July 2003. 13. Bourdieu, 1993. 14. Verter, 2003:151–59. 15. Pérez, 1991. 16. Dodson, 2002b. 17. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes and I discussed this idea in a 1995 article. See Dodson and Gilkes, 1995. 18. Our research team visited hundreds of Casas in large, small, and middlesized cities. We also participated in activities that were part of Cuba’s African heritage. 19. Activities of the children’s street festival are an annual part of Festival del Caribe. We participated in no fewer than five of them. See Dodson, 2002b; 2003; or 2004, for example. 20. During each phase of the research, members of our team conducted spontaneous informal interviews with random citizens of Oriente and asked what they knew about religious traditions practiced in their area. Although we spoke with young and old, students, hospital workers, military personnel, taxi drivers, hotel workers, cooks, teachers, housewives, and other categories of citizenry, our interviews cannot be categorized as survey or questionnaire data as the Cuban government does not permit foreigners to do those types of investigations. Nevertheless, each person with whom we spoke told us what they knew about the traditions, including some details. 21. James, 1974. 22. The song “Choncholi” is a good example of this. It is still part of annual Carnival parades of Oriente and says, “Choncholi se va pal monte, cojelo con quien te va” (Choncholi [the name of a Cimarron, no one in particular] will go to the mountains; he will take with him, whomever will go). 23. Howard, 1998:113. 24. We observed children as young as two years patiently integrated into ritual activities of more than one Cuban religious tradition. 25. Millet, 1996a. 26. Mosquera, 1996:228–29. notes to pages 63–77

181

27. These tiles were introduced and their sacred significance explained by a Cuban youth who was not a member of an indigenous religious community. It is one of the few images we’ve included that did not originate in Oriente, but the international significance of the artist led us to include them.

chapter 4





1. MacGaffey, 2000. 2. Sued-Badillo, 2003:283–86. 3. Pérez, 1995:3–14. 4. Pérez, 1995:40–41. 5. Pérez, 1995:9. 6. The spelling of Kongo with a “K” is used when referring to the African land spaces from which are derived a series of indigenous religions. Otherwise the spelling is as our research practitioners informed. 7. See Heywood and Thornton, 2007; MacGaffey, 2000; Thornton, 1998. 8. See for example Bolívar Arostegui and Gonzalez Diaz de Villegas, 1998. 9. Schwegler, 1998. 10. Brown, 2003; Zaid, 2007. 11. Duharte, 1988; Walvin, 2000. 12. Pérez, 1995:10–12. 13. Aimes, 1967; Thomas, 1971. 14. Dodson, 1999. Casa Cultura in Baracoa presents a historical pageant that reenacts the earliest encounter between autochthonous inhabitants and African descendants. The pageant includes indigenous inhabitants sharing the smoking of tobacco (cigars) to ensure messages are received in the spirit world. It also includes African descendants sharing their coded drum rhythms. 15. In the Cuban ritual context, “tobacco” refers to cigars, not to cigarettes or other forms we associate it with in the United States. 16. Bosch Ferrer, 2003. Also see Price, 1996: chapters 2 and 3. 17. Ferrer, 1999:35. 18. See Franco, 1973; 1996; and Pérez, 1996. There is some debate as to whether palenque members vacated their settlements in the 1870s or 1880s. See Barnet, 1968. 19. In 2005 our research team visited the Oriente palenque region and the small town also named Palenque. 20. La Rosa Corzo, 2003; Bosch Ferrer, 2003. Our research team also visited palenque areas of western Cuba and found that they were structurally and functionally established for transitory inhabitants. The historical guide reported that western palenque members used the sites as a stopover in their journey to eastern settlements. 21. Pérez, 1995:39–48. 22. See Price, 1996. 23. HuDehart, 2007. 24. Philalethes, 1996.

182

notes to pages 77–87

25. Bosch Ferrer, 2003; La Rosa Corzo, 2003. Oriente practitioners reported that events of one successful raid on a plantation, Límon, were passed to contemporary generations and are re-membered through rituals and Carnival celebrations. Also see Bettleheim, 2001:147. 26. See Yai, 1996. Asafo social structures of Ghana are in keeping with this idea also. 27. Here we note that “bembé” is contemporarily associated with batá drumming of Yoruba ritual traditions. However, this is not the exclusive relationship of the drumming parties and our investigation suggests that bembés were part of Oriente traditions before the large numbers of Yoruba arrived in western Cuba in the nineteenth century. 28. This finding was reported at the Workshop on Religion of Casa del Caribe, 1999, Santiago de Cuba. The panel was composed of José Millet, Abelardo Larduet Luaces, and Vicente Portoundo Martin. 29. Interviews with Juan Batista, supervising coordinator for music and dance performance of Kokoyé, the premier folk performing troupe of Santiago de Cuba, July 2006. Batista is a senior research associate for Casa del Caribe of the same city. See Dodson, 2006. 30. Long, 1995:37. 31. For a fuller clarification of this concept, see Thompson, 1983; MacGaffey, 1991. 32. Thornton, 1998. 33. Interviews with Vicente Portoundo Martin, Andriol Martin, and Juan Martin, July 2002, August 2004, and August 2005 respectively. 34. Palmié, 1995. 35. Howard, 1998. 36. Genovese, 1979. 37. So far, we have found Robert Farris Thompson’s English volume (1983), and Natalia Bolívar Arostegui and Gonzalez Diaz de Villegas’s Spanish one (1998) to contain the best clarifications of the complexities of cosmograms in the reglas congo traditions. 38. Schwegler, 2002. 39. James, 2001:22–31. 40. Thornton, 1998. 41. Personal conversation with Abelardo Larduet Luaces and Andriol Martin in Santiago de Cuba, July 2003 and July 2004 respectively. See also Larduet Luaces, 2002. 42. See Larduet Luaces, 2002; Abimbola, 1997. 43. Dodson, 2006. 44. Personal interview with Louis “Fran” Figueredo, July 2004, Santiago de Cuba.

chapter 5 1. Koslow, 1999:108, 116. 2. See Ferm, 1945. notes to pages 87–104

183

3. Again remember that our spelling of the Oriente religion will be as it is spelled in Oriente, that is, Vodú. When we refer to Haitian practices of the tradition, we will spell it Vodou. 4. On more than one occasion, professors of the University of Havana reported this to us. Personal conversations with faculty members during the Annual Meeting of Cuban and North American Philosophers, June 2002 and 2003, Havana, Cuba. 5. Personal interview with Vodú practitioner and dancer of Ciego de Avila (Dodson, 1989). 6. Thompson, 1993:166. 7. Knight, 1970:19. 8. Korngold, 1944; Franco, 1996:39, 43; Duharte Jiménez, 2001. 9. Thomas, 1971; Knight, 1997. 10. Thompson, 1993:169, 172. 11. Dubois, 2004:51–52. 12. Carpentier, 1974, translated by José Millet. 13. A cabildo was the local Spanish governing unit by way of which community members through group participation were consulted and contributed to the civil make-up of a city/town. Initially in the colonial periods, when African descendants of Cuba could not have cabildos, they organized their social arrangements outside Spanish authority. Early in the eighteenth century, Cuban authorities began to recognize the informal groupings as cofradias, and as the century closed, after the revolution in St. Domingue, cofradía activities were acknowledged as cabildos. Among African descendants, these organizations were named after continental ethnicities and became formal arrangements of neo-African life and activity. See Howard, 1998. 14. Dubois, 2004:65–68. 15. See Korngold (1944) and James (1963) for a solid discussion of how the various racial groups functioned during the Haitian Revolution. 16. Howard, 1998. 17. O’Kelly, 1874. 18. See Philip Howard (1998) for a full discussion of cabildos; Millet and Brea (1989) for a similar discussion, including Tumbas Francesas; and see Bettelheim, 2001a. 19. Bettelheim, 2001a:144. 20. See Bettelheim, 2001a. Our team also had personal conversations with José Millet, Casa del Caribe’s leader of the research group on popular religions. 21. Millet and Alarcon, 1998. 22. See Bettelheim, 2001a:146–47; and also Bosch Ferrer, 2003; Duharte Jiménez, 1986; Franco, 1973. 23. See Bettelheim, 2001a:147; Ferrer, 1999:84. The director of Foco Cultura Congo de Los Hoyos also reported details of the legend. Foco claims descendance from one of Santiago’s original cabildos de nación and maintains that Moncada organized their original comparsa as a Tumba Francesa and that it was later converted into the Conga de Los Hoyos. Annual conversations with Antonío Bandera, director of Foco Cultura Congo de Los Hoyos, July 2003, 2004, and 2005. 184

notes to pages 105–12





24. Millet, Brea, and Vila, 1997. 25. Hamilton, 1990. 26. Ayala, 1999:166–74; Howard, 1998:7; Andrews, 2004. 27. Thompson, 1993:164. 28. Dodson, 2004. We conducted no fewer than four interviews with different family members, of two older generations. They each confirmed that there were religious practitioners in their family history, specifically the grandmother of the military brothers, and that the practices were definitely of Haitian origins. These family members also said that there were practitioners of Palo Monte/ Palo Mayombe within their family. We continue to probe this issue. 29. Thompson, 1983:169. 30. Dodson, 1999. 31. Harding, 2000:154–56. 32. Thornton, 1998:10. 33. This is not to deny or replace the fact, as respondents told us, that spirits can and do appear at nonritual times and in nonsacred spaces. 34. Dayan, 1995. 35. Dathorne, 1994:2–5. 36. We encountered several spellings for the structure, for example, houmforts (Thompson, 1983:181) and oufó (Hurbon, n.d.). We are using the Oriente spelling as put forth by Casa del Caribe. 37. Matibag, 1996:37. 38. A collection of these Haitian banners have traveled the United States on exhibition at various museums; for example, the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibition “Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou,” Washington, DC, October 1998–January 1999.

chapter 6

1. The bibliographic citation lists 1875 as its publication date, though the original volume was first released in 1857 and translated in 1875. 2. Glazier, 2001. 3. Ramos, 1989:22–23. 4. Pérez, 1995:24–26; Ramos, 1989:22. 5. See Thomas 1971:515–18. For an ability to assume this position, see Ayorinde, 2004; de la Fuente, 2001; Ramos, 1989. 6. See Thomas, 1971. 7. See Ayorinde (2004:56–60) for a fuller discussion of Ortiz’s position. 8. We are familiar with the use of this term to describe ritual cleansing or purification. Such usage is not incompatible with the Espiritismo understanding of doing charitable acts. 9. It should be remembered that in Catholic iconography the Baby Jesus of Prague, Czechoslovakia, is in the arms of a Virgin Mary whose skin color is black. 10. Espiritismo can be found in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, see, for example, Román, 2007. notes to pages 112–32

185

11. Dodson, 1995. 12. In assessing the racial nature of Cuban religious practice, Christine Ayorinde (2004:21) contends that some images “reflect ethnic stereotypes, including gypsies, indios, Arabs, and negro bozales [newly imported Africans].” 13. This idea is held by Brandon (1993), as well as Mintz and Price (1976). 14. Thompson, 1983. 15. See Brandon, 1993; James, 1989; as well as Mintz and Price, 1976; Palmié, 2002. 16. James, 1989. 17. Ferrer, 1999; O’Kelly, 1874; Barnet, 1968. It is equally important to note that women were among participants of the struggles and played significant roles. 18. James, 1989. 19. Ibid. 20. Long, 1999:7. 21. Personal conversation with Charles Long, September 25, 2002, Michigan State University. 22. Reference to this book was made by practitioners, but we were not allowed to see their edition to verify publication data. See Kardec, 1976, 1994 for other writings on his concepts.

chapter 7

1. See Thomas, 1971; Pérez, 1988. 2. Thomas, 1971; Pérez, 1995. 3. Duharte, 2001:15. 4. See Díaz, 2000, and Price, 1996:126. 5. Thomas, 1997:96; Palmer, 1997:13. 6. Turner, 1997:288. 7. Pérez, 1988; Thomas, 1971. 8. Long, 1999:11. 9. Ibid. 10. De Groot, 1998:171; Pérez de la Riva, 1996; Jordán, 1998. 11. La Rosa Corzo, 1986; Price, 1996: chapters 1–3; Bosch Ferrer, 2003. 12. Harding, 1981. 13. Harding, 1981. 14. Pérez de la Riva (1996) reminds us that palenque members were in contact with enslaved persons still living in bondage and that the runaways often returned to plantations themselves. 15. See MacGaffey, 1970, 1991. 16. Ortiz, 1974:445. This citation was brought to our attention by a Cuban who works on issues of the longevity of Haitian descendants in the country. 17. Ibid. 18. See MacGaffey, 1970, 1991; Thornton, 1992; James, 1999. 19. See MacGaffey, 1970, 1991; Thornton 1998 for how Kongo ethnic groups’ members approached community activities and celebrations.

186

notes to pages 133–54

20. This was not an exclusive development of Oriente or of palenques. Throughout Cuba, where African descendants and members from other cultural groups gathered to celebrate and/or recreate, various behavioral expressions were combined that became normal new island expressions in the island’s transculturation process. 21. James, 1989, 1999; Ferrer, 1999:34–35. 22. Interviews with historical guides at Isabelica coffee plantation, an archeological restoration guided by UNESCO. Dodson, 2004, 2005, and 2006. 23. See Thornton, 1998.

chapter 8



1. Long, 1995, 1999. 2. Long, 1995:154. 3. Pratt, 2004:4–6. 4. Vansina, 1985:126. 5. Pérez, 1995:45. 6. See Brandon (1993) to understand that Cuban Catholicism was not a “replication” of religious practices in Europe. 7. Pérez, 1995; Barnet, 1993. Also see the film The Last Supper for an excellent visual example of how this worked for enslaved Africans. 8. See image of Africans participating in holiday parades in Ortiz, 1986, and Nunley and Bettelheim, 1988. 9. See discussion and propositions about two well-known nineteenth-century Cuban poets, Placido and Mansano, in Pettway, 2009. 10. See Bettelheim, 2001a. 11. We have an academic colleague who consistently contacts our team to determine if we are “traveling to Santiago de Cuba for Shango or San Lazaro” because he will be doing so. 12. Barth, 1989:130. 13. Brown, 1989:34–39. 14. We draw a parallel between this time perspective and well-known academic knowledge that US African-American Protestant congregations’ worship can and does extend far beyond worship times of their European-American brethren. This resonates with Charles Long, 1999. 15. We are not oblivious to the signification of Africa and its descendants that was carried out by Islamic contact, but our focus is the Atlantic world. See Lewis (1999) for a treatment of the Islamic issue. 16. We are indebted to Charles Long for our ability to articulate ideas based on his original conceptual thinking. See Long, 1995. 17. Ramos, 1989:16. 18. We are familiar with communities in Venezuela, Spain, the United States, Argentina, and France who carry out activities based on Oriente practices of indigenous religious alternatives about being human, the counter/re-signified alternatives. Our team shared Oriente ritual experiences with representatives from practice communities in these locations who had returned in 2005 to renew, re-member their religious affiliation and commitment. notes to pages 154–69

187

19. See Zaid (2007) for an interesting presentation of one Oriente spiritual leader whose practice incorporated knowledge and customs from two, if not three, coherent sets of indigenous religious traditions. Mr. Zaid is a member of our research team. 20. Brown, 2003:140; Zaid, 2007. 21. Brown (1989) is concerned with art and ritual content; Palmié (2002:168) considers the objects in the bilongo category of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe and other reglas congo; and Thompson (1983:117) also speaks of the materials in this manner. 22. Palmié, 2002:143. 23. Ibid.:155. 24. Dodson, 1998b, 1999. Reverend Suarez was the first religious believer elected to the National Assembly after the 1994 change in the Cuban constitution. 25. Palmié, 2002:163. 26. Ortiz, 1947:99–100. 27. We have been preliminarily affirmed by an interview with Jorge Ulloa Hung, licensed archaeologist of Casa del Caribe.

188

notes to pages 169–75

Glossary of Select Terms

Portions adapted and edited with permission from José Millet, Glosario mágico religioso cubano (Barquisimeto, Venezuela: Ediciones Gaby, 1996). Abakuá: In Cuba, these social arrangements constitute a secret society for men that originated in Cuba around 1830, organized by enslaved Africans from the Calabar and southern Nigeria regions. The society, with many of the same rituals, beliefs, languages, songs, instruments, music, and purposes of their continental origins, was transplanted to Cuba and persists vigorously today. abobo: The exclamation in Vodú ceremonies that marks the end of singing or of songs. It can also indicate a ceremony or song. arbe reposua: The sacred tree where the Vodú Loa rest. The tree is generally found in the patio or an exterior location near the residence of the Vodú leader, the hungán. barracones: The long, rectangular shaped houses for enslaved Africans and their descendants who worked Cuban sugar and other plantations. bautizo: Vodú initiation. bembé: A drumming party/celebration that in Oriente is used by a variety of religious traditions, for example for Muertéra Bembé de Sao, Vodú, and/or Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe. Bon Dieu: God in Vodú. cabildo: The nineteenth-century designation given by Spanish colonial authorities to associations of Cuban African descendants when these were registered as formal organizational arrangements within their official localities. 189

cascarilla: Powder obtained by crushing eggshells and used in many religious purification activities. charity: The name given to spiritual work done in some varieties of Espiritismo. cimarrones: The name used for those enslaved persons who ran away from their bondage. cofradía: The first official title given by the eighteenth-century colonial Spanish government to the informal associations of enslaved and other African descendants of Cuba. commission: The term belongs to the religious tradition of Espiritismo de Cordon and refers to a group of similar spirits. Commissions are numerable; some are enormous, strong, and powerful. current, spiritual: The flow of energy from spirits of the otherworld that can be received and felt by humans. The concept is understood across Oriente religious traditions. derecho: Ritual obligation, in cash or in kind, to be given to a spiritual leader as acknowledgment of work done with spirits. The amount and/or type of derecho will fluctuate based on the strength and/or complexity of spirit work executed. Elegbara, Elegguá, Elegua, or Eleguá: These are the various names and/or spellings for a religious “warrior spirit” who is responsible for opening all crossroads: spiritual, material, and/or life. This spirit is known in all Oriente religious practices, although names differ. fundamento: Secret ingredients of any of the religious initiations. Gaga: A festive cultural celebration closely associated with the Vodú of Oriente. Lively singing, dancing, and parading mark the celebration that is derived from ritual ceremonies of the tradition. hunfo or hounfort: A Vodú sanctuary that is usually built for ceremonial purposes and understood to be inhabited by the Loa, not by any human practitioner. Usually, the structure is near the domestic dwelling of the hungán or mambo, community leaders. hungán or houngán: Two spelling variations on the name for the principle male leader of a Vodú community; a high priest. jícara: Half of a dried gourd used as a ritual vessel. Kikongo: The ritual language of Palo Mayombe in Oriente. Leggba: Name used by Oriente Vodú practitioners for the Africa-based spirit responsible for all crossroads. Loa: The major spirits of Vodú in Oriente. Lucumí or Lukumí: The name associated with enslaved colonial Africans imported through the port city of Calabar. These people were not necessarily from the same geographic or cultural ethnic communities but were labeled as if they were. In Cuba, the name attached to Yoruba-based religious practices that evolved to be synonymous with the name Ocha. malassaa: A major, disruptive, and horrific historical event in the lives of a society or culture that remains in the memory of its generations for years. mambo: The female leader of a Vodú community and family; a high priestess. madre nkisi: Ordained high female leader of Palo Mayombe. 190

glossary of select terms

munanso: The space designated for religious work of reglas conga. It may be one domestic room or a specially built room in a courtyard/patio. muerto(s): The spirit(s) of special dead person(s). The term also is used to collectively denote spirits of those who have recently died as in “the living dead.” nganga: The iron caldron–like object in each Oriente sacred space, as well as a practitioner of Palo Mayombe of Oriente who has the power and ability to intercede with ancestral spirits, divine spirits, and the dead. In the Kongo Kingdom, nganga referred to the person. padrino: The male who initiated an individual into a religious tradition and is responsible for their spiritual guidance. Literally translated as “godfather,” but, based on the religious tradition, its connotations extend beyond the translation. palenque: Liberated zones or communities of escaped persons who fled their en­­ slavement. The largest numbers of palenques were in Oriente, and they existed for more than two and a half centuries. palero: The name of an initiated practitioner of Palo Mayombe, and one who may possess a nganga. spiritual field: Designates the space in which spirits of Espiritismo move. It is the dwelling place of the highest spirits or those with greatest power to resolve human problems. talanquera: The door to the munanso (sacred space) of Palo Mayombe. This door marks the physical boundary between ritual activities of the religion and most socioeconomic activities of the society. However, the boundary should not be misunderstood as a strict divide between the sacred and the secular. tata: Ordained highest male leader of Palo Mayombe. transmissions: Transmissions are messages sent to humans by spirits from the otherworld. Transmissions generally take place in the context of a ritual activity in a sacred space when practitioners invoke the presence of spirits. Yayi: Female coleader of a Palo Mayombe community.

glossary of select terms

191

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Index

The letter f followed by a number refers to a figure in the Plates section. The letter m following a page number refers to a map. The letter n following a page number refers to a note. The number following the n indicates the number of the note on that page. Abakuá, 15–16 Africa, 25, 26; epistemology and, 1–2. See also Africans; Kongo Kingdom African Atlantic Research Team, xi, 9 African Religions and Philosophy (Mbiti), 43–44 Africans, 3; Amerindians and, 37, 84–85;concept of power and, 53–54; concept of time and, 49–51; cosmic orientation and, 45–47; cosmic orientations and, 39–40; Cuban public holidays and, 164–65; Cuban social order and, 24–25; cultural interactions and, 42–43; geo-circularity and, 112; migrations to Oriente from Haiti and, 106–7; natural phenomena and, 46–48; nature of being and, 48–49; Oriente and, 25; religion and, 43–44; revelation and

possession and, 54–56; ritual and, 56–58; shared foundational knowledge and, 43; Spanish Catholicism and, 164–65 Afro-Cuban Religious Experience (Matibag), 7 Aimes, Hubert H. S., 24 Alarcón, Alexis, 8 Amerindians, Africans and, 37, 84–85 Angola, 27 animal sacrifice: Espiritismo Cruzado and, 130; Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe tradition and, 96; Vodú and, 117, 121 Arará, 104 Arawak, 22 Arnaz, Desi, 179n42 Ayorinde, Christine, 6 Babalú Ayé, f15, 165 Bakongo, 27–32; culture of, 28, 183n26; in Oriente, 29 Baracoa, attack on, 85 Barnet, Miguel, 6, 8 Barth, Fredrik, 166 being, nature of, 48–49 205

bembé drum parties, 148–49, 152, 154, 179n42; Muertéra Bembé de Sao and, 154–55; palenques and, 87–88 Bettelheim, Judith, 110 Birth of African American Culture (Mintz, Price), 14 Bourdieu, Pierre, 69 Brandon, George: Santeria from Africa to the New World, 7 Brown, David H., 166–67; Santería Enthroned, 7, 172–73 Brujos de Limón, 111–12 cabildo, 109, 122, 184n13 Cabrera, Lydia, 6 Canizares, Raul: Walking with the Night, 7 Carabalí, 27, 29, 87 Carpentier, Alejo, 108 Casa del Caribe, 88 Casas de Cultura, 72–73, 182n14; in Baracoa, 85, 182n14 Casas de Templo, 66 Castellanos, Isabel, 6 Castellanos, Jorge, 6 Castro, Fidel Ruiz, 44 Cathedral at Cobre, 174 Catholicism, 174; Africans and, 164–65 cazuela, f17, 88–89; Espiritismo Cruzado and, 130, 158; Muertéra Bembé de Sao and, f17, 156–58; Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe tradition and, f7, 100, 103, 158 Chosen Prayers (Kardec), 141–42 Ciboney, 22 Ciego de Avila, 105 cofradias, palenques and, 90–91, 102, 109–10 Columbus, Christopher, 22–23 concepts: indigenous religion, 36–37; intentionality, 37; religion, 36; transculturation, 38 contact zones, 3, 38, 162 cosmic orientation, 14–15, 45–47, 163–65; Africans and, 43, 45–47; language and, 44; symbolic representations and, 41–42 Council of Baptist Workers and Students, 34–35 206

index

counter/re-signification in practice, 167–69, 187n18 Creciente de Valmaseda, 137 creeds, 44–45. See also specific traditions Cuba: 1959 Revolution and, 34, 179n43; economy of, 24; geographic and historic contours of, 22–36; geography of, 22, 23; Haitian immigrants and, 112; indigenous religions in, 15–16; slavery and, 33; social order of, 24–25; Spanish immigration and, 22–23; “Special Period” and, 33–35; Ten Years’ War and, 125, 136; United States and, 33–34; western and eastern regions of, 28–29. See also Oriente Dathorne, O. R., 117 Dayan, Joan: Haiti, History, and the Gods, 116 Díaz, María Elena, 27, 31 Duharte Jiménez, Rafael, 24–25 Elegguá, 130, 132, 172 Espiritismo, 1–2, 8–9, 44–45; Africa and, 124–25; African customs and, 126; families of, 126–28; Muertéra Bembé de Sao tradition and, 128; race and, 13; religious legitimacy and, 125–26; women in, 12 Espiritismo Cruzado, f14, 127, 128–35, 143–44; Africana and, 133–34; animal sacrifice and, 130; belief foundations of, 129–31; cazuela and, 158; celebrants and believers and, 129–30; doctrine and, 131; Elegguá and, 130, 132; Espiritismo de Cordon and, 143–44; Indian images and, 133; name derivation of, 130; Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe and, 130; plurality and, 170; Regla de Ocha/Lucumí and, 130, 133; sacred spaces and, 131–35; spirit images and, 132–33; uniqueness of, 131; water and, 133 Espiritismo de Caridad, 127 Espiritismo de Cordon, 127, 135–43; belief foundations of, 138–40; charity work and, 140; doctrine

and, 139; Espiritismo Cruzado and, 143–44; focal table and, 141; healing and, 139; Kardec and, 138–39; mediums and, 140; national identity and, 135–38; otherworld importance and, 138; protected entrance and, 140–41; rituals of, f16, 141–43; sacred spaces, ritual and, 140–43; sacred spaces and, f16; symbolic representations and, 141; as uniquely Cuban, 137–38; water and, 141 Espiritismo de Mesa o Científico, 127 Espiritismo (Millet), 8–9 ethnogensis, 89–90 Ewé Fon/Adja people: African interactions and, 42–43; Haiti and, 32–36, 104; Vodou and, 105–6 Festival del Caribe, f12, 73, 118–19; vevé and, f13 festivals, 72–73 Flash of the Spirit (Thompson), 7 Foco Cultura Congo de Los Hoyos, 112 Folklórico Nacional, 34 Four Yorúbá Rituals (Mason), 7 Frazier, E. Franklin, 6 Furé, Rogelio, 6 gender, religious practice and, 12. See also women González-Whippler, Migene: Santería, 7 Greene, Sandra: Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter, 61 Haiti (St. Domingue), 31; Cuban social order and, 109; immigration to Cuba and, 112; Oriente and, 31, 32; Revolution of 1791 and, 91; sugar and, 91 Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo, 31 Hamilton, Ruth Simms, 112; “Toward a Paradigm for African Diaspora Studies”, 14 Harding, Rachel, 56, 115–16 Harding, Vincent, 151 Havana, 28, 86 Herskovits, Melville, 6 Hispaniola, 22–23

Ífa traditions, 7 indigenous religions, 15; concept of time and, 49–51; definition of, 161–62; nature of being and, 48–49; nature of power and, 53–54; nature of space and the spirit world and, 51–53; possession and, 55–56; revelation and possession and, 54–56; ritual and, 56–58 initiation, 73–74 integrated religious plurality, 169–73 Isabelica Plantation, 110 Islam, 187n15 James, Joel, 136 Kardec, Allan, 124; Chosen Prayers, 141–42; Kardecian Spiritism, 124–25, 128, 138–39; Spiritualist Philosophy, 124 Kimpa Vita, Beatriz, 115–16 knowledge, human interaction and, 40–45; habitualized activities and, 40–41; typifications and, 41 Kongo Kingdom, 25, 26m, 27; Cuba and, 8; Ewé Fon/Adja Haitians and, 32–33; Haitian Africans and, 108–9; Muertéra Bembé de Sao and, 149– 50, 152, 155–56; Muertéra practices and, 152–53, 154–55; Oriente and, 29; palenques and, 29–30; reglas congo and, 82 Lachatañeré, Rómulo, 3, 8 Lam, Wilfredo, f5, 70 Long, Charles H., 3, 88–89, 139, 160– 61; Significations, 14 Los Hoyos, 64–66, B Los Olmos, 64 Lucumí/Yoruba, 33 Maceo Grajales, Antonio, 76–77, 114 Maceo Grajales, José, 114 MacGaffety, William, 82 Mackandal, 108 Mandingo, 27–28, 29, 87, 156 Martí, José, 76–77 Mason, John: Four Yorúbá Rituals, 7 Matibag, Eugenio: Afro-Cuban Religious Experience, 7 index

207

Mbiti, John: African Religions and Philosophy, 43–44 Millet, José: El vodú en Cuba, 8; Espiritismo, 8–9 Mintz, Sidney, 45; Birth of African American Culture, 14 Moncada, Guillermón, 76–77, 111–12 Morgan, David: Visual Culture of American Religions, 61, 63 Morgan, Henry, 29 Muertéra Bembé de Sao, 9, 16, f18, 152–53; cazuela and, f17, 156–58; characteristics of, 153–58; coherence of, 155–56; cosmic orientation, 153–54; Espiritismo and, 128; foundational knowledge of, 152–53; Kongo Kingdom and, 149–50, 152, 154–55, 155–56; Oriente relationship and, 149–52; plurality and, 170–71; Portuguese traders and, 152; race and, 12–13; report from the field and, 147–49; spirits and, 155, 157–58; trees and, 155 Murphy, Joseph: Santería, 7; Working the Spirit, 7 Navidad, La, 22–23 neighborhoods, sacred spaces and, 64–66 Neimark, Philip John: Way of the Orisa, 7 nganga, 8, 75, 89; Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe tradition and, 94–95 nkisi, 89 Nsambe (Sambia-Mpungo), 92; communication with, 95–96; human family and, 97 Oggún Fai/Santiago, 107–8, 114–15 Oriente, 23m; Africans in, 25, 27–28, 41–42, 81; Bakongo in, 29; Carabalí in, 27; economy of, 27, 82; Haiti and, 31, 32; Haitian migrations and, 106–7; Haitians and, 91–92; Haitian Vodou and, 106; illicit trade and, 29, 82; indigenous religions and, 33–34, 82; integrated religious plurality and, 12; as isolated backwater, 28–29, 31–32, 86–87, 163; as “land of the dead”, 81; Mandingo in, 27–28; 208

index

map of, 4–5; modern adaptations in, 44–45; slave economy and, 41, 136; Spiritism and Spiritualism in, 136 Ortiz, Fernando, 3, 38, 127, 152, 174; on Cuban cultural customs, 3; on “folk practices”, 6; on transculturation, 3, 6 outlier communities, 151–52 palenques (de cimarrones), 29–31, 86–92, 151–52; bembé and, 87–88, 153–54; colonial forces and, 30–31; El Portillo, 30–31; Haitian immigrants and, 111–12; Kongo Kingdom and, 29–30; population of, 90; social organization and, 87; Spanish authorities and, 90–91 Palmié, Stephan, 15, 89–90; Wizards and Scientists, 172–73 Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, 8, 9, 44–45, 65; animal sacrifice and, 96; cazuela and, 158; chanting or singing battles and, 59; cosmograms and, f6, 93–94, 101; drums/ drumming, f1, 88, 101; Espiritismo Cruzado and, 130; family and, 96–97, 103; foundational knowledge of, 92–99; Kikongo language and, 83; naturalistic and scripting focus of, 93–94; nganga and, f7, 94–95, 100–101; Oriente origins of, 84–86, 102; palenques and, 86–92; pilon and nganga and, 75–76; prenda and, 98; prevalence of, 83; race and, 12–13; sacred spaces and, f8, f9, 99–102, 103; spirits and, 83, 85–86, 98; tata and, 92; tata nganga and, 94, 97–98; time and space understandings and, 96; women and, 12, 86, 98–99; Yayi and, 98 phenomenological principles, 47–60 pilon, 75 Playa Gíron, 34, 179n45 poteau-mitan, 119–20, 122 Pratt, Mary Louise, 3 Price, Richard, 14, 45 Promey, Sally H., 61, 63

race, 12–13 reality, social construction of, 40–45 Recio, Antón, 27 Regla Arará, 15–16 Regla de Ocha/Lucumí, 1, 7, 44–45, 65; costs and, 171; Espiritismo Cruzado and, 130, 133; spirit names and, 171–72 Regla Ifá, 7, 16 reglas congo, 82 re-member-ing, memory and, 71–74 research methods, 181n20 revelation, 54–55; art and, 54–55; openness to, 55 reverence, forms of, 58–60, 70 ritual practices, 56–58; everyday life and, 57; healing and, 57; suppression of, 33–35; time flexibility and, 56–57; tourism and, 35, 69, 70–71 Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter (Greene), 61 sacred spaces, 1; aesthetic and creative acts and, f4, f14, 76–77; charisma and, 67–68; communication and communion and, 67–71; context and boundary setting and, 63–66; Cuban collective memory and, 72–73; definition of, 62; Espiritismo Cruzado and, 131–34; Espiritismo de Cordon and, 140–43; Eurocentricity and, 168–69; as family meeting places, 70; identity and, 74–76; material objects and, 68–70; meaning and, 74–76; neighborhoods and, 64–66; Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe tradition and, 99–102; past-time values and, f4, 51; re-member-ing and, 71–74; as ritual memory devices, 73; roles of, 62–63, 77–78; Vodú and, 117–22 Sanchez de Moya, Francisco, 25 San Hilarión, 141 Santería. See Regla de Ocha/Lucumí Santería Enthroned (Brown), 7, 172–73 Santeria from Africa to the New World (Brandon), 7 Santería (González), 7 Santería (Murphy), 7

Santiago de Cuba, 31–32, 84, 183n26; Carnival parades in, 111 Schwegler, Arwin, 83 Significations (Long), 14 slavery, 23–24; Cuba and, 33; Ferdinand and Isabella and, 23, 178n6; Oriente and, 27; Portuguese traders and, 25, 84; runaways and, 25; sugar and, 24–25, 27, 91. See also Africans; palenques (de cimarrones) space and the spirit world, nature of, 51–53 spirits, 46–47; communication and communion with, 67–71; Espiritismo Cruzado and, 130–31; Espiritismo de Cordon and, 138–40; Muertéra Bembé de Sao and, 155, 157–58; Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe and, 94–95; possession by, 56; Regla Ifá and, 16; Vodú and, 115–17. See also specific traditions spirits, ancestral, 53, 58, 67, 71 spirits, divine, 16, 46–47, 51–54, 58, 67; re-member-ing and, 71 spirits, living dead, 49, 52, 53, 56, 58, 67; Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe tradition and, 83; re-member-ing and, 71–72 spirits, nonmaterial, Africans and, 46–47 spirits, warrior: Vodú and, f11, 114–15 spiritual capital, 69 study methods, 9–14; boundary categories and, 13–14; procedures, 8–9, 178n21; research questions and, 9; socioeconomic class status and, 11–12; sources and, 13 Suárez, Raúl, 173–74 sugar: Haiti and, 91; Oriente and, 32, 82, 106; slavery and, 24–25, 27, 91 superstition, 167–68 Supreme Creator, 48, 49, 53; Nsambe as, 92 Tajona/Tumba Francesa, 112; drums and, f11 Templo San Benito de Palermo, 65–66 temporal modality, 166–67 terminology, spellings of, 18 index

209

Thomas, Hugh, 25, 31–32 Thompson, Robert Farris, 106, 107, 113; Flash of the Spirit, 7 Thornton, John, 54, 82 time, 2; concept of, 49–51; sacred work and, 167, 187n14 tobacco, 85 tourism, ritual practices and, 35, 69, 172 “Toward a Paradigm for African Diaspora Studies” (Hamilton), 14 transculturation, f15, 150–51, 165; Ortiz on, 3, 6 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 61 Tumba Francesas (Tajones), 110–11 Turner, Mary, 21–22 typifications: organizations and, 41; ritual practice and, 43–44 Vansina, Jan, 163 Verter, Bradford, 69 Visual Culture of American Religions (Morgan, Promey), 61, 63 Vodou: African origins of, 105–9; Oriente and, 106 Vodú, 8, 9, 178n18; animal sacrifice and, 117, 121; belief foundations of, 113–17; Bon Dieu/Grand Met

210

index

and, 113, 117; Damballa and, 113; domestic settings and, 118; fire and, 119–20; forests and, 117–18; Haitian cultural identity and, 121–22; Haiti and, 104–5; hunfo and, 118; Leggba and, 114–15; as lifestyle, 117; Loa and, 113, 122; material objects and, 120–21, 122–23; plurality and, 171; possession and revelation and, 115– 17; race and, 13; ritual and sanguine families and, f10, 113–14; sacred spaces and, 117–23; spirits, Petro class of, 113; vevé and, 119; warrior spirits and, 114–15; women in, 12 vodú en Cuba, El (Alarcón, Millet), 8 Walking with the Night (Canizares), 7 Way of the Orisa (Neimark), 7 Weber, Max, 53 Wizards and Scientists (Palmié), 172–73 women: in Espiritismo, 12; in Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, 12, 86, 98–99; in Vodú, 12 Working the Spirit (Murphy), 7 Yoruba. See Lucumí/Yoruba