ReligiousTraditionsofOrienteCuba

SACRED SPACES:
RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS OF ORIENTE CUBA





by



JOSÉ MILLET BATISTA









copyright 2008/jjmillet

SACRED SPACES:

RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS OF ORIENTE CUBA
By





JOSÉ MILLET BATISTA
Ancient Coordinator International Relations (1982-2007)
Popular Religions Study Team
Casa del Caribe
Santiago de Cuba
CUBA







With some Spanish translation assistance from Laura Kanost











THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THE SPIRITUAL AND HISTORICAL LIVES OF OLGA BATISTA OF HOLGUÍN AND VICENTE PORTUONDO MARTIN OF SANTIAGO DE CUBA.
WE ARE ETERNALLY INDEBTED TO
DR. RUTH SIMMS HAMILTON
OF MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY WHOSE
LIFE AND GROUNDBREAKING CONCEPTUAL WORK GREATLY INFLUENCED THIS BOOK!!!





C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgements
Orthography and Language
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: Sacred Spaces
Chapter 2: Commonalties Among Traditions
Chapter 3: Regla Conga/Palo
Chapter 4: Vodú
Chapter 5: Espiritismo
Chapter 6: Regla de Ocha
Chapter 7: FINDINGS
Glossary
Bibliography
Index




A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S


First we give thanks to those who have gone before
and made it possible for us to be at this moment and time.


There are at least two hundred or more persons whose help was indispensable to the completion of this book. At the same time, there would never have been a book without the cooperation of Oriente practitioners who accepted us into their communities and allowed us to photograph their sacred spaces. We extend our thanks to all of them and especially to the families of Vicente Portunodo Martin and Ibrahim Hechavarria. We share deeply in the lost of these wise men.
Our thanks also go to Raphael; Angelita; Juan Gonzales, “Madelaine;” Don Chino; Ma de los Angeles Felicola “Madridia,” as well as other practitioners such as Eva Fernandez; and Norec Mozo.
We are grateful to everyone at Casa del Caribe: Joel James for providing leadership, Orlando Verges for insuring smooth administration of affairs, Gloria Trincado, Isabel Matos, Manuel Ruiz Villa, Abelardo Larduet, Andres Caldas, Rogelio Meneses, Jorge Luis Hernandez, Pura Luna, Rosayda Zarmura, Rosa Blez, Nora Durán, Raymis Destrades, Alexis Alarcon, Julian Mateo, Juan Bautista Castillo, and Raul Ruiz Miyares.
The majority of work for this book began in the United States at the University of Colorado and we are grateful for the unwavering support of the Department of Ethnic Studies: guidance from Evelyn Hu DeHart, ideas and dialogue with Elisa Facio, Bill King, Lane Hirabyashi, Ward Churchill; and for the trust of Chancellor Byyne when it was necessary to move through political barriers. We know that many are no longer at Boulder but our gratitude reaches you wherever you may be.
It is impossible to consider acknowledgements without including our family members. We are deeply grateful to Olga Batista who passed before we could finish the book; to Rosa Millet, Joseph James Millet, and the household family of Rosa America of Santiago de Cuba. In the United States we extend much appreciation to Flora Gilford, Sheryll White, Diana Lachatenere, Alyce Dodson Emory, and David Primus Luta Dodson. And although they are not listed here, we thank each member of the African Atlantic Research Team for the shared tears, laughter, and joy they brought to our mutual lives. Rashida Harrison and Shanti Ali Zaid not only gave unwavering support but also were exceptionally helpful in including color photographs in the book.
To Sonya Maria Johnson we extend particular appreciation and thanks for the unwavering trust, commitment, and hard work she gave over several years. Sonya stood with us as we conceptualized this project, collected the data for it, analyzed those data, wrote the text, corrected it, and edited our writing into a book manuscript. Even as we take full responsibility for everything that is in this book, we thank all of you for what you have given.
Jualynne E. Dodson & José Millet Batista




ORTHOGRAPHY AND LANGUAGE



It is an understatement to speak of difficulties when working in more than one language and such difficulties are compounded when studying and translating sacred behaviors from their ritual language of religious practice. There is yet an added set of issues when studying more than one religious tradition, each with a different ritual language that is not the national lingua franca. Overarching these problems for our book on sacred spaces of Oriente Cuba has been that we chose to write in English—a language whose epistemological and ontological foundations do not compliment either of the ritual languages or the Spanish of Cubans who practice the rituals. Needless to say, it has been difficult deciding which spellings to use for words, ideas, and religious entities that are intimately sacred to Cuban practitioners but that working familiarity to a variety of national and often international communities whose languages and thought structures may not share practitioners’ intimacy. Our greatest priority is to try and preserve the perspective of Cuban colleagues who shared their joy and love of their faiths without causing too much confusion because of spelling differences. We have been challenged.
In an attempt to meet some of the challenges, we relied heavily on the native strength and fluency each of us has in our first language, Jos é with Cuban Spanish, Jualynne with U.S. English. For those things religious that we identify and do not translate into English, we chose to employ Cuban, preferably Oriente usage and spellings. Usually these words are italicized. In some instances, Oriente religious references are spelled distinctively, even from that of Cuba’s western regions. For example, the tradition known as Regla Congo/Palo is spelled Conga/Palo in Oriente and the regional pronunciation and spelling of other terms also differ.
As the ritual languages of Oriente religions have been orally transmitted for several generations, there are the expected linguistic variations in of Bakongo/Kikongo, Yoruba, Haitian Creole, etc. and we have tried to stay true to the Oriente. However, we do use what we believe to be a Haitian Creole spelling for the religion of that island, Vodou/Vaudou, in order to distinguish it from Cuban Vodú and from various English and other spellings. We also use the Bakongo/Kikongo spelling for this family of people, language, and culture rather than transpose to more colloquial but imposed spellings.
Our decisions on language usage are important on at least three fronts. First, by privileging Oriente usage and spelling we hope to alert the reader to particularities of the region, particularities that have characterized Oriente for centuries: that is a purpose of the book. Second, to find English synonyms for words developed from a very different cultural and linguistic thought process presumes a kind of universality to English articulations of such ideas. This is wholly untrue and would perpetuate the significations established through Western Eurocentric conquest and North American hegemony in the hemisphere. We would rather challenge English readers to comprehend human phenomena that are beyond their worldviews but centered in the commonalities of humankind.
Third, by using Cuban understandings and spelling to discuss aspects of Oriente’s world, we hope to help discontinue the generalized use of existing reified vocabulary that continues to imbue negative stereotypical thinking about Cuba’s religious practices. Our research has informed us that contrary to the Eurocentric significations commonly associated with Cuba’s religions, these practices were conceived through human social networks whose relations and experiences were inscribed by their socio-geographic displacement through power relations not under their control. Nevertheless, the displaced people understood the world and ultimate existence beyond constraints of their European oppressors. The understanding, i.e. the epistemological and ontological comprehensions, gave rise to sets of beliefs and practices that became Cuban religions. Therefore, we propose, Cuban religious activities must be understood from their own cultural perspective and we do not wish to take the linguistic and conceptual standard of our Western European and North American educations and impose it onto the integrity of practitioners’ beliefs, behaviors, and articulations about their sacred constructs.
We know that sometimes our spelling and/or accents for various words will differ from that used in academic and other public literature but we believe the reader will not be confused as we have been consistent in writing what Oriente practitioners shared with us. However, we take full responsibility for errors we may have committed.



P R E F A C E

Jualynne E. Dodson

My exposure to Cuba and Cubans began in 1983 when I was a delegate to a conference sponsored by Casa de las Americas of Havana. The conference gathered racial-ethnic activists and scholars from the United States for a beginning dialogue about racism throughout the Americas. A first impressions was how large the island was and that Cubans were a people of African descent. Immediately, I felt that every African American in the United States could learn much about his or her own heritage from visiting this country and getting to know its people. This was a personally prophetic thought since I have returned to the island every year since 1983 except for two years when difficulties with U.S. travel regulations prohibited a visit but I still believe U.S. African Americans should go to Cuba and engage the people.
In 1984 I was introduced to the Cuban religious sector, one I had presumed did not exist because of the government’s political ideology and, even as I met with Cubans Christians, I was ignorant of the country’s religious diversity and most ignorant of the Africa-based worldview and practices that undergirds Cuban culture. I definitely did not foresee that I would help write a book on sacred spaces of these distinct religious traditions. Despite limitations of beginning, I embarked on a research project based on an assumption that there was comparability between the role of religion in African American struggles for social change in the United States and similar movements for change in Cuba. The assumption proved flawed but the idea led me through several years of solid investigative activities that helped me understand that unlike U.S. African Americans, Cubans of African descent have not had an embedded experience with the North American brand of Protestantism that gave rise to the culturally distinct U.S. African American Christianity. Not with standing an absence of historical contact with Protestantism, the religious influence on Cuba’s struggles for social transformation possesses other important differences.
Generally, Christianity has not been central to social of change in Cuba. Catholicism can even be seen as a hindrance to activities in that direction. I learned of these relationships in the first years of field research when I found that to truly understand religion and Cuban social change, I had to focus on belief systems and practices distinct to people of the country. Practitioners of distinct Cuban religious traditions have consistently been the more numerous in each of the movements for social transformation. As I began to pursue this investigative trail, I was led and instructed by practitioners of the traditions and found myself participating deeper and deeper in Cuban culture.
In 1987 I extended the initial geographic boundaries of contacts with the Havana region to include Oriente. I attended my first gathering of Festival del Caribe in Santiago de Cuba. This established a relationship with the staff of Casa del Caribe that sponsors Festival. International and local participants in this, now more than twenty-five-year-old, annual weeklong series of activities, focus on understanding the significance of popular cultures of the Caribbean. From the initial exposure to Oriente, a long-term professional and familial bond with the region and with Casa ensued. I re-centered my research attention on this eastern region and it was through annual dialogues with staff at Casa del Caribe that I was exposed to religions as practiced in Oriente and introduced to the possibility of this book.
Initially, members of the African Atlantic Research Team (AART) aided the research effort as together we conducted the observations, documentary review, and in-person interviews about Oriente and its religio-cultural practices. Soon we were introduced to José Millet Batista of Casa who did then and continues to direct Casa’s research team that investigates popular religions. He is also an internationally noted expert on topics about these traditions. I already had read some of José’s writings and had heard several of his lectures about African contributions to Cuban culture and about Oriente’s variation of Cuban religious practices.
Continued conversations with Casa staff and with José revealed an overlap in our conceptual and research interests. We decided to collaborate and outlined a research and writing agenda that is yet active. Particularly we wanted to disseminate findings from our investigations to English-speaking, academic, and scholarly audiences that are not regularly aware of facts about Cuban developments, particularly those of Oriente. For some time, we had been impressed with the number and quality of sacred spaces that Oriente practitioners assemble based on beliefs within their faiths. We decided that a visual and descriptive presentation about these spaces could be a strong vehicle for enhancing English academic audiences’ awareness of specifics of the religious presence in another, non-Havana region of Cuba.
José Millet, with his Equípo Estudios de Religiones Populares, Popular Religions Study Team, and I with AART, then based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, set out to systematically conduct interviews with and observations of Oriente religious practitioners and to gather images of their sacred assemblages. Our concept of these sites was adjusted and refined within the rigors of research as we visited different locations, had conversations with practitioners, socialized with communities of believers, and generally deepened our knowledge of the beliefs and customs. This book is the culmination of wisdom derived from those experiences and that investigative phase of our work.
José and I have chosen to discuss four of the seven exceptional Cuban religious traditions as consummated in Oriente. We have included color photographs of sites from the four as the spaces were constructed and are part of normal religious life. Three of the traditions are Africa-based, Regla Conga/Palo, Vodú, Regla de Ocha, and the fourth, Espiritismo, is equally indigenous to the Cuban environment. We believe we are making a significant contribution to the remarkably small quantity of existing literature in English about religions of Oriente. We also feel that our book will expand the general body of literature on Cuban religions because we include color photographs and such images of Oriente sacred spaces have rarely if ever been presented in English publications. More important, we have yet to encounter a scholarly discourse that included Oriente practices in the paradigmatic discussion of the African presence in Cuba or the Americas. We believe our book will help fill this void and we hope our ideas will inspire others to take-up or continue the work.

Casa del Caribe
Our research and this book could never have been completed without help from Casa del Caribe of Santiago de Cuba. This cultural research institution was organized in June 1982 and is probably the most unique of such organizational arrangements in the country. Not only is Casa physically located outside the Havana sphere where other such research institutions are situated but, its endeavors are international and the scope of its activities includes distinct Cuban cultural and religious customs. This institutional organization is also special because its investigative focus is the Caribbean content of Cuban culture and its mission includes promoting the historic and contemporary nature of Oriente’s central location in the formation of the nation as a whole. This specific if not extraordinary emphasis distinguishes Casa del Caribe from similar Cuban organizations.
Each year Casa del Caribe sponsors a series of activities, Festival del Caribe that is held from July 3rd through July 9th. The international festival event is more than twenty-five years old and extols community activities as foundational to Caribbean i.e., Cuban identity. Activities are held in public venues throughout the city of Santiago de Cuba and in some ways resemble the historical community-based activities of Carnival that have their origins in religious celebrations.
However, Festival del Caribe does not replace the Santiago Carnival that has been handed down for generations and is part of Cuba’s creative cultural heritage. Within Festival activities are a series of academic events that link international scholars to an opportunity to exchange findings from their respective studies of topics related to Caribbean cultures. In addition to Festival, Casa del Caribe regularly convenes workshops, symposia, seminars, and conferences; presents professional papers at national and international professional meetings; is responsible for content of radio and television programs; and prepares scripts and specialized advisories for cinematic theatrical productions. Casa faculty and staff continually offer scholarly workshops in other countries and they regularly receive international researchers, academics, and students who journey to Santiago for study.
Investigative specialists associated with Casa del Caribe persist in exploring sacred customs of Oriente inhabitants as well as other cultural expressions prevalent in the region. Findings from their research have allowed the institution to posit that Cuban national consciousness is more a Caribbean than Latin American phenomenon and that Africa-based characteristics distinctively mark that identity. Even more specifically, Casa del Caribe contends that Africa-based ritual customs and religions, whose epistemological core is central to collective consciousness and identity, are distinguishing qualities that denote Cuban people and their culture. Therefore, it is understandable that Casa envisions its work of knowledge production and dissemination as a mission of “dignification” of the country’s exceptional religious traditions. It is a mission of retrieving these sacred ideas and behaviors from the academic margins of folk practices to a more central position that includes the importance of religious belief systems within intellectual, social, and perhaps political discourses. Casa del Caribe is about the business of dignifying Cuba’s popular religious traditions and the cultural expressiveness of the country as a member of the Caribbean community.
Toward this goal, Casa has helped lead the way toward official recognition of religious practices popular among the Cuban, particularly Oriente population. Before Casa del Caribe, there was little acknowledgement of the centrality of Africa-based religions’ contribution to Cuban national consciousness. Now, this aspect of the country’s patrimonial heritage has begun to be included in school curricula, public presentations, academic discourse, professional conferences, official documentation, and published literature. In addition, Africa-based performances and entertainment are part of promoting Cuba’s reactivated tourist industry. Some examples of official inclusion and sites of tourist promotion are:
• The establishment of a Yoruba Culture Center in Havana;

• The annual international conference of Yoruba Traditions also held in Havana;

• The establishment of the Africa House Museum of Havana, devoted to exhibiting material artifacts associated with Cuban religious traditions;

• The Havana opening of the Fernando Ortiz House as associated with the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and;

• The opening of a Fernando Ortiz House in Santiago though without the international linkages or resources.

In the 1980s, only the Africa House Museum of Havana existed and it was not discussed or promoted as a tourist site.
The tourist oriented commodification and presentation of extrapolations from Cuba’s distinct religious practices, a commodification and presentation the government previously thought to be too primitive to be of significance, could become part of an economic rationale for continued inclusion of things religious into State apparatus. This is possible as long as tourism brings hard currency desparately needed by the country and tourists are attracted by the distinctive religious expressions.
For its part, Casa del Caribe has grounded its official endeavors in a process of practitioners’ affirmation and legitimation. This equals a connection to the moral authority of religious believers that stands somewhat outside of governmental apparatus of the State. For example, Casa devotes an entire physical structure, Casa de las Religiones Populares -- House of Popular Religions, to exhibits of installed sacred spaces that represent most of the customs popular among Oriente citizens. Investigators, including me, work collaboratively with practitioners from throughout the region to build the installations. Local citizens view and study exhibitions of their religio-cultural traditions, even as the installations are displayed in official governmental buildings and serve as supplements to professional educational activities offered during Festival and other events. Indeed, this book is but another phase in Casa’s systematic legitimation and diginification program.

Data
José Millet led the combined investigative team that conducted field research for this book. Together we collected data through observational participation in urban and rural areas over a five-year period, 1999–2003. Our collaborative efforts included members of the Popular Religions Study Team of Casa del Caribe and members of the African Atlantic Research Team now of Michigan State University. Ricardo Merino, Casa’s professional photographer, took most but not all of the photographs. Laura Kanost gave invaluable assistance in translating several Spanish essays so that our ideas would be fully integrated in English. And I am Jualynne Dodson, director of AART as we continue a professional academic exchange with Casa del Caribe from our new Michigan State University base.




C H A P T E R 1
SACRED SPACES and MEANINGS




As distinct as Cuba’s religious traditions are they are nevertheless part of a species specific, human motivation to express an understanding of issues related to ultimate existence within our universe: Where did we come from and what happens after our bodies die? Sacred life-styles, and spaces created relative to things religious, are outward representations about this ultimate orientation of a community of people, and the community must be of long life together. Ruth S. Hamilton (198 ) speaks to African descendants living in the America’s Diaspora as such a long-lived community even though they have differing geo-spatial locations. In this instance, African descendants’ shared community has been created through historical remembered consciousness of the horrific and massive dispersement of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean, call the Middle Passage. The embedded memories of that historical tram is coupled with descendants’ shared socio-political experiences in various locations of the Americas. The combination of these factors equal Hamilton’s criteria of disaporal peoplehood formation.
It is through the presence of the combination of these factors, and their complexities, within the history and lives of African descendants in the Americas, particularly those of Cuba that brought forth the building of community whose essential foundation was an Africa-based sacred orientation. Descendants in Cuba produced dynamic patterns of learned values, beliefs, and behaviors that were shared across three centuries and multiple generations. This is our understanding of culture, and African descendants of the Americas and Cuba created it.
In Cuba there are important sites that have been constructed by persons who follow one or more of the sacred tradition that evolved from the distinct cultural milieu of the country and its people. This category of sacred spaces attracted our attention in Oriente. We were specifically interested in sites that represented Regla Conga/Palo, Vodú, Espiritismo, and Regla de Ocha.

Definition and Perspective
Sacred spaces and activities associated with them have been important topics of concern for such academic and scholarly disciplines as Anthropology, Sociology, Geography, History, and Archeology, as well as Religious Studies. There is an abundance of published literature that categorizes the locations as shrines, sanctuaries, temples, or grottos but especially as altars. To do justice to the realities of Oriente, our task was to identify conceptual language that was cross-culturally descriptive for the context of Cuba and that could be of use in academic contexts as well. Our research training was that altar is the dominant term used to identify sacred spaces but our experiential senses from Oriente was that to use the term altar would do a conceptual injustice to phenomena we observed and wanted to discuss. To help us make a decision whether to abbreviate if not eliminate the use of the altar language, we went first to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
The OED defines altar as, “A block, pile, table, stand, or other raised structure, with a plane top, on which to place or sacrifice offerings to a deity.” The dictionary presents five additional definitions, three of which are culturally specific and relegate use of the term to things that fall outside some pre-determined understanding of normal; an outside position seen as Other. That is to say, three of the additional definitions assume a valued perspective about practices of one group regarding what equals an altar and implicitly signifies that practices of outside or Other social groups are abnormal or less valued. The normality of altar in these definitions is associated with Christian traditions and practices of Western Europe and North America values. Other religious traditions are implied, if not fully signified, as negative. However, we probed further into the field of Religious Studies and found a more in-depth definitional presentation of altar, although signification residuals persisted.
The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, as well as An Encyclopedia of Religion, are professional references in the academic fields. In volume 1 of the first, the generalized definition of altar closely resembles the one found in the OED: “a surface, usually elevated, but occasionally level with the ground, or even depressed beneath it, prepared or adapted to receive a sacrifice.” This early reference expands the generalized discussion to comparative proportions by further elaborating on sacrificial acts that can occur by way of altars. Detailed elaborations about the geographic and religious traditions of concern to the Encyclopaedia set boundaries for comparative and contextual assertions about differing types of altars.
The fact that the Encyclopaedia’s definition of altar allows and includes variation by geography and religion would suggest an appropriateness for our study of sacred spaces in Oriente. However, the cultural and racial bias of generalizing Eurocentric conceptualizations rises to the surface when the Encyclopaedia discusses altar as related to the variety of peoples of the African continent. Under the heading “Altar (African)” the full-columned notation is introduced with, “Nowhere, except in South America, is there so general a lack of the altar as in Africa.” From here the essay, written by Louis H. Gray, proceeds to discuss how African peoples’ spaces and actions toward such spaces do not qualify them as altars—from all indications, merely because they are African. This can be seen in the presentation of practices of the Dahomeian people of West Africa and exemplifies the Eurocentric bias. The author says:
in Dahomey a rude form of altar is found in the small piles of earth placed at the foot of trees, the turning of roads, the entrance to houses or villages, and in open spaces, on which are set manioc, maize, palm-oil, and the like, as offering to the spirits. …But neither the stool nor the image [of the Tshi-speaking people] can properly be termed an altar, any more than the elevations on which the idols are set in Dahomey temples, where “the images of the gods are placed inside, usually on a raised rectangular platform of clay; and before them are the earthen pots and vessels, smeared with the blood, eggs, and palm-oil of countless offerings.”

We wonder whether a similarly presented and comparable set of material objects of Eastern Europe or early Israel would have contained the signified notations of “rude form,” “properly,” and “any more than, idols”?
However, the Encyclopeadia series was a reissued 1928 edition of a work originally published in 1908. We must not belabor its shortcomings or transpose contemporary understandings about the hegemonic nature of language as signifier when it carries the disproportionate socio-political power of Western cultural thought and is employed ethnocentrically. It is enough to use the citation as typical of the historical and conceptual depth of the disciplinary, taken-for-granted language of Religious Studies. This taken-for-granted language continues to constrain, if not plague, academic inquiry into the cultural and religious intentionality of people of color, particularly people of African descent.
Much later, in 1945, when Vergilius Ferm edited An Encyclopedia of Religion, the definition for altar did not include geo-specific notations but attempted to provide a conceptual summary of altar types based on their function (e.g., constructed altar, fire altar, altar of incense, ritually prepared sacred place, etc.). The generalized or conceptual definition is presented as, “A place for communicating with a god or the dead by means of sacrifice or offerings.” Theoretically, with the exception of the lower case ‘god’ denoting an entity of lesser significance than God of Eurocentric understandings, we might have considered using the altar language of this definition and its accompanying categorical discussions in our presentation of Oriente spaces. However, as the field research focused on cultural specifics of Cuban religious practices, we want to try and minimize the risk of engaging colloquial or signified connotations associated with the altar language. We will avoid using the term as much as possible and use synonyms like designated assemblages, sacred spaces, special arrangements, sacred sites, and other such combinations. Our choices clearly possess limitations, but their sheer awkwardness may be helpful. The intent is to ask the reader to remain open and allow the cultural context of the Cuban situation, given specifics of a religious tradition, to define and rename the most appropriate categorical terminology and labeling. We propose that this is in keeping with what sociologists call a “grounded theoretical approach”.

Constructed Meanings
The social psychologist Yi-Fu Tuan was not directly focused on explicating spaces constructed from sacred life-styles but his book, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, offers suitable beginning conceptualizations about sites of sacrisity. We agree with his contention that locations and objects “that are held in awe by one people can easily be overlooked by another” and we know that “Culture affects perception.” Physical spaces of Oriente religious practices are reminders of the rich cultural and sacred traditions from which they were assembled. But even as they are constructed and designated, the spiritual locations are part of the everyday, taken-for-granted activity of Cuban cultural life. The especially designated spaces step beyond the normal spirituality of material life of neighborhood communities to become part of an extraordinary sacredness of that routine. Spaces of Cuban sacred life-styles transcend the everyday inclusion of the spiritual and become set-aside places of ritualized activity and supernatural communication. Jonathan Smith offers some insights on this issue.
Smith suggests the idea of “transposition” as central to the change or recomposition process. He and we are speaking of places associated with daily behavior that can involve the spiritual, as well as of sites demarcated for otherworld oriented activities whose meanings are changed by and because of new understandings derived from rituals of that orientation. A collectivity of people who ritually interact from such an orientation, with a place of their everyday environment have reconfigured meanings of the site for their sacred purpose. The sacredness of the new meaning(s) is based on a collective re-understanding of the spiritually normal as having taken on extraordinary or supernatural qualities. The specialized designation is not operative. Everyone who has historical knowledge of the special locations, or those who can recognize the demarcated ritualized symbols, can incorporate the places into the group’s comprehensions about the supernatural and adjust their interactions accordingly. The changed meaning of the space is the transpositioning that Smith sees as pivotal to creating the sacred. In his words:
The activity of transposition is one of the basic building blocks of ritual… The capacity to alter common denotations in order to enlarge potential connotations within the boundaries of ritual is one of the features that marks off its [ritual] space as “sacred.” Transposition is a paradigmatic process set within the larger syntagmatic series of actions which characterize ritual.

As we encountered practitioners in Oriente, we found they were intimately familiar with ritual activities that helped transpose many everyday sites of their neighborhoods into those specialized and sacred. For example, large shade trees are common in Oriente and know as spiritual parts of the taken-for-granted routine of the region. However most Cubans, religious practitioners or not, can explain that small brown bag bundles at the foot of particular large shade trees e.g., the Ceiba at a cross-roads, have transposed the tree location to one directly related to supernatural and other world matters. However, our work in the everyday environs of Oriente focused on details of Smith’s propositions about paradigmatic transpositioning of places that have been intentionally constructed to reflect religious supplicants’ extreme personification of central elements, themes, beliefs, and practices of their faith. In these assembled locations, ontological transpositioning has occurred. The common understandings about even spiritually understood place and things, have been changed and given these a faith-based capacity. Constructed sacred spaces of Oriente have been ontologically set aside, transposed, and generalized integration of sacred and the spiritual secular and supernatural worlds re-understood.
Oriente sites have been built and expressly consecrated to a relationship with the supernatural and are recognized as available for particular ritual activities. The assemblages are mostly located in or near domestic family homes, occupying a full room of a house, a set-aside area of a room, or an area just outside of the house adjacent to or behind the living quarters. Inside rooms are usually closet-like spaces, whether from construction of the house or from movable boundaries erected by practitioners e.g., a curtain. There are usually no windows in or near the space within these contexts. These chosen locations might easily be called shrines, particularly those separated from the house itself, but it is questionable if they hold sacred relics and this appears to be an encyclopedic prerequisite for use of this term. Similarly, we heard no Cubans identify the sites in any fashion consistent with colloquial or academic understandings of shrine as “a fixed site often associated with mountains, rivers, and caves” or a place where sacred objects are held. This does not mean that there are no relics or sacred objects within Oriente spaces, only that locations in the region do not appear to fulfill definitions of the Eurocentric shrine language.
Some composed indoor spaces of Oriente do contain elevated platforms associated with the altar language, and there are a wide variety of material objects in these assemblages. There also are an abundance, sometimes a dominating amount of flowers, branches, leaves, and other living or cut plant materials that have been brought to platforms as well as to other types of constructed spaces. Later, particularly when discussing Regla Conga/Palo, we will clarify items brought from their common material locations into the transposed remarkable and sacred sites. The combination of transposed objects heightens the reconfigurating that converts normally spiritual domestic imagery and usage into an extraordinary space available for ritual activity of the supernatural.
Meanings of the transported items, tree branches, cut flowers, bottles of rum, rocks, shells, tools, chains, and sticks, plus a host of other material, etc. are no longer associated with their normally important relationships to universal order but have been rescripted as additionally significant to the supernatural realm as a particular religious tradition requires. Alterations to and expanded meanings of the ordinarily domestic sacricity have been so changed that the compositioned spaces are their own constructed geographies. They are now defined within an even stronger spiritual material arena that requires ritualized behaviors. As Benjamin Kedar postulates, the sites have become “geography perceived, constructed, invented.”

Sites and Function
There are a variety of ways that spaces of our Oriente research function for practitioners of traditions related to them. In addition to being the physical contexts for ritual activity, the spaces themselves, and their material content, are part of the revered. The sites are participants in ceremonial procedures and, in this fashion, can function in at least five other important ways. Sacred spaces can easily:
Help to set boundaries that demarcate the social context of community;

Serve as stimulus for communion and communication through ritual exchange between humans and supernatural forces as well as with the dead;

Serve to recollect and re-member as well as create meaning and memory for participants of a tradition;

Serve as definitional aesthetics associated with the tradition as well as stimulate and inspire creative acts and actions that are drawn from within meaning-making practices of the religious tradition.

We think this select number of possible functions, though not exhaustive, are sufficiently inclusive to focus our social historical contextual analysis of Oriente sacred spaces. The ideas are an expansion of similar propositions put forth by David Morgan and Sally H. Promey but are in keeping with issues presented by spaces and practitioners of Oriente. We turn now to a few ways the spaces function.

Context and Boundary Setting
For centuries, Las Tunas, Holguín, Guantánamo, Santiago de Cuba and other cities and areas of eastern Cuba have been known as Oriente. Santiago was the first capital of Cuba and the center of many Oriente activities. And one historically significant district in Santiago is Los Hoyos. Much of our research was conducted in Santiago and in Los Hoyos. This neighborhood is an ideal representation of areas wherein sacred spaces can be found with some of the strongest expressions of Cuban religious practices. Los Hoyos has been known as a district where Blacks, particularly poor Blacks, have lived for generations and centuries. Over time and political intent, the neighborhood and its inhabitants have been negatively labeled by racist ideas about skin color and social class status. This has been the case no matter the actual applicability of the characteristic criteria.
The delivery of social services based on the negative perception have also affected the geographic boundaries of Los Hoyos. Potholes created by rain and drainage water, traffic, and neglect create crater-like fissures in the low land area at the foot of Santiago hills. The neglected potholes gave the area its name, Los Hoyos—the holes and they have continued to characterize the neighborhood for generations. These qualities of people and place have been negatively reinforced through the racial inequality of social practices that brought few if any city services to Los Hoyos and rarely repaired the streets’ potholes. Neighborhood residents and others used all of the characteristics and more to first introduce us to Los Hoyos. However, as we continued our contacts in the area, we began to observe important changes as the neighborhood took -on attributes of what Yi-Fu Tuan identifies as ‘place.’
A more positive set of contemporary experiences appear to be altering the sense of place within geographic boundaries of Los Hoyos. This is in keeping with Tuan’s contention that place is established through direct experience with environmental locations and this also seems true for inhabitants of the Santiago district. Groups of Los Hoyos residents have begun to use their Cuban religious practices to enhance and change the sense of place associated with their neighborhood. For example, for many generations the area has been the successful participant in Santiago’s annual Carnival parades. The parading Carnival has been held since long before twenty first-century residents and includes musical, dancing, costumes, and other competitions between the differing city neighborhoods, particularly those with predominantly black inhabitants. The neighborhood groups are known as compasas and their historical roots are interwoven with some three centuries of Cuba’s cabildos wherein many distinct religious practices had their origins. One of the better-known stories of the compasas describes how Haitian Africans would march from the mountains of the Isabellica coffee plantation into Santiago city to participate in Carnival activities with their Tumba Francescas.
During Carnival’s weeklong series of events, compasas from city districts compete and are judged for their refined exhibition of skills associated with the Cuban Conga and Vodú musical traditions of Oriente, specifically Santiago. Local legend asserts that Los Hoyos is the best of these “conga groups” and indeed, they have won Carnival competitions for most of the past several years. They also have represented their neighborhood, their city, and all of Cuba in travel performances throughout Europe. It is their picture, in full performance dress, that appears on an international marketing poster about Carnival and they have recorded a CD. The music of the recording is filled with songs and rhythms derived from the spiritual life-styles of Los Hoyos residents.
The positive nature of this type of visibility allows many Los Hoyos inhabitants to move beyond the negative stereotypes about their neighborhood to experience the area a “place.” They incorporate individualized neighborhood block experiences into the positive reputation about Cuban cultural and religious practices that are now being associated with Los Hoyos. This literally amounts to converting the historical stigma of poor, black, underdeveloped Los Hoyos into a current reputation, positively linked to a quasi-celebrity status, that holds a central position in publicly recognized authentic cultural performances. The transformation accomplishes Tuan’s idea of “place” established through direct experiences. Now inhabitants’ experiences with their neighborhood as a center of renowned cultural performance makes it a/the “place”.
Consciousness of the neighborhood’s boundaries as “place,” with its distinctively Cuban religo-cultural activities, is heightened when political work of individual residents results in physical improvements that affect the quality of life for all in Los Hoyos. For example, street lighting was brighter during evening and nighttime Carnival activities of 2002 compared to the previous year. This is very important because many residents sell small souvenirs, foodstuffs, and other Carnival trinkets to the throngs of people on the streets at night and during the evenings. Streetlights improve the probability of sales and one particularly resident, a highly visible spiritual leader, is know to have influenced improved lighting for Los Hoyos.
Evidence of political influence to improve neighborhood life, coupled with publicized compasas’ success in Carnival continues to designate Los Hoyos as a special place. However, the designation is equally positive within the increasingly economic significance of tourism for Santiago, for Oriente, and even for all Cuba. We consistently encountered international tourists as well as Cubans from other towns and cities who have heard of Los Hoyos though they have never visited the district. We were asked on many occasions to direct these international visitors to ritual ceremonies and spaces. The foreign visitors consistently want to know if it is “safe” to visit the neighborhood during activities of Carnival and Festival del Caribe. They specifically want to see the comparsa performances associated with AfroCuban cultural traditions. Even the brass jazz band of New Orleans in the United States has visited Cuba to engage in cultural exchange with Los Hoyos comparsa. Contemporarily, residents are developing a clear sense of community distinction and Cuban religious practices, with their sacred spaces, are an important contributor to changed understandings about activities that occur within boundaries of this special place.
Until we had had considerable face-to-face, intimate experiences with the people and environment of Los Hoyos, Yi-Fu Tiuan’s proposition about place remained highly abstract. Intellectually and academically, we understood the neighborhood and its identity conversion as a special place but, as Tiuan contends, it was through experiences in the setting that “place” was truly communicated. We had visited Los Hoyos many times and been impressed with how cultural familiarity and foreknowledge about the locations of sacred spaces was needed in order not to overlook the sites: Tiuan’s proposition that perception is affected by cultural exposure. This general rule was proved by an exception that was demonstrated to us as we acquired experience with the place of Los Hoyos.
With the general exception of Catholic edifices, religious structures of Oriente and Santiago are not usually advertised, labeled, or given much public visibility. However, we acquired deeper understanding about Los Hoyos’ sacred nature beyond the Christian facade when a prominent Tata, a leader of Regla Conga/Palo, escorted us through the neighborhood. Within two blocks of the house of his religious community and sacred assemblage, we encountered a well-painted building with large letters in colors of pink and black. The lettering, which read Templo de Shango, was significant but the fact that the structure was constructed of stone and appeared bright and freshly painted in white made it stand out from most other buildings. Most structures on the street and surrounding vicinity are built from worn, wooden clapboard and are rarely painted. An outside sign hardly ever distinguishes buildings that may contain a constructed sacred space, or buildings that themselves serve as a place of worship for Cuban religions. The Templo de Shango of Los Hoyos was distinctive by color and public notation. It was visibly acknowledged as a center of Cuban spiritual practice and stood out as exceptional to the rule of anonymity. Exposure to the Templo gave us encountered experience with Los Hoyos as special, with exceptional spaces of sacred practice. Los Hoyos was becoming place.
Another of our experiences related more to the unobtrusive nature of spiritual sites within the boundaries of Los Hoyos, as well as to the character of the neighborhood as place. It was a warm July evening and streets were filled with children playing ball, men playing dominoes, and resident women and men sitting and talking in front of houses in the densely populated district. This was not our first walk through the community as we regularly frequent the area to visit friends and research sites, as well as to conduct interviews with selected practitioners. On the evening of a second escorted walk, the Tata was identifying locations and resources associated with his spiritual work. As we passed various parts of the urban landscape, he pointed to houses and vacant lots from which he collected herbs, natural foliage, rocks, earth, wood, animals, and other essential materials for his medicinal spiritual work as well as for the sacred spaces themselves. “This is my gardener,” he said as he greeted a medium-built brown-skinned woman with a warm smile on her round face. The Tata embraced her and uttered laughing words of affection as he squeezed. “This woman makes sure to grow the things she knows I need,” he continued to us. We stopped and visited with the woman for a while as she pointed to different plants growing nearby that had initially appeared to us to be weeds erupting through sidewalk cracks or in tiny patches of dirt. The Tata clarified how some of these plants are used spiritually but he did not explain all of them.
We persisted in our walk and on another street were told, “The best Hayaca—an indigenous corn tamale associated with Oriente’s Indian populations—are at this house.” Corn dishes are a regular food offering presented in sacred spaces of some religious practices. As we continued through the area and were made more intimately familiar with other locations, our experience with the neighborhood was markedly expanded. Now we understood Los Hoyos even more as place; a specialized, integrated, and complex community with an even wider infrastructure of religious content. We were beginning to comprehend how an extraordinary supernatural connection between everyday, taken-for-granted spiritual things could easily be overlooked by the uninformed observer but was within normal knowledge of Los Hoyos residents and practitioners. Now we, too, were becoming familiar with the boundaried neighborhood as one that possessed places, things, and people directly linked to Cuban religious practices.
In addition to sacred content within boundaries of various communities and neighborhoods of Oriente, Cuban practices themselves also have internal organization and parameters and sacred spaces are instrumental in establishing these demarcations. Max Weber, an early sociologist, reminds all that power that can be most persuasive is power associated with traditional authority and charismatic authority. As Weber says,
A system of imperative co-ordination will be called ‘traditional’ if legitimacy is claimed on the basis of the sanctity of the order as they have been handed down from the past. The term ‘charisma’ will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he (sic) is set apart from ordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.

Such power of traditional and charismatic authority is combined in Oriente as it is lodged in an individual’s proximity to fantastic occurrences of the supernatural, to their particular dynamic persuasive abilities, and to positions they may occupy in the social arrangement of a religious tradition. As such, Cuban practices are subject to Weber’s sociological propositions as adjusted for the particularities of Oriente.
Persons known to possess certain spiritual qualities or who hold particular religious positions can enter and occupy physical locations within sacred spaces. Others cannot assume the space in the assembled sites without committing major violations. For example, gender restrictions of Abakuá potencias, groups of the highly secretive, all-male Cuban fraternal association do not admit women nor allow them to enter their gathering places. On a field research prior to collaboration for this book, the “Queen” mother of the leader of an Abakuá potencia in Havana’s Marianao district authorized Jualynne to be allowed to view the group’s meeting space. She was not allowed to cross the entrance, however, because she is female.
Other traditions are not this gender-restrictive but do have their own internally boundaried positions of authority. For example, most Cuban traditions require that everyone entering consecrated spaces perform a ritualized cleansing act before crossing the threshold. Symbolic washing with special liquids, prostrating at the entrance, or some other bodily gesture is an obligation of all, practitioners and non-practitioners, who would enter the designated domain. These requirements reflect the setting of internal and external boundaries as well as the establishment of collective consciousness about distinctions between spaces wherein supernatural forces visit historical activities and those spaces that exist only as part of sacred creation. Anyone, believer or non-believer, who would assume physical proximity to the sites of otherworld visitation, must acknowledge the distinction even as many such Oriente boundaries are permeable and not rigid or static. Cuban sacred spaces have internal demarcations just as they are boundaried by the external socio-material area or neighborhood of their existence.

Communication and Communion
It should not be difficult to comprehend that sacred space, materials, objects, and all combinations of these can be and are used ritualistically to communicate with realms of the supernatural. Our cultural familiarity with Western European, North American, as well as Middle East and Asian traditions gives us language with which to symbolically represent the use of sacred space for such communication. For example, we speak of temples, sweat lodges, churches, mosques, synagogues, etc. and know that they refer to specialized places and sites for practitioners of a particular religious tradition. In these locations, believers achieve contact with realms of the other, supernatural world(s). We also expect that such sacred locations are accompanied by material objects and that believers employ these to accomplish goals of their ontological and religious understandings. Generally, the same is true for Cuban traditions in Oriente.
Practitioners of various authority levels of a religious hierarchy have constructed sacred spaces in the region and the sites serve as a place for collective gatherings where spirits are contacted. Persons of higher-authority positions (e.g., Babalawo, Tata, Santero, Spiritualista, Mambo-fei, and others) usually have assembled even more special spaces wherein they lead a community of believers in most of the required liturgical activities of the faith. Everyone understands that these assembled locations, as maintained by initiated authorities, are chiefly but not exclusively where spirits of the supernatural will communicate with humans.
The assembled sites of leaders are also where, in the company of the community, humans can receive as well as initiate messages to the otherworld. Sites constructed by less authoritative practitioners are not usually gathering places for community members and definitely are not locations for most of the required community liturgical rituals. Although otherworld communication in the assemblages erected in individual homes can be spontaneous and unplanned, spirit contacts are more predictably achieved when atmospheric conditions have been made ready in a specifically designated sacred site.
Persons with high levels of authority facilitate such prepared communication, as their wisdom is necessary to alter the normal sacricity of the atmosphere into one receptive to a visitation from the spiritual world. Contact and communication with the spirit world is an animated articulation of the abiding reciprocal phenomenon that unites humans, spirits, and the supernatural realm in an everlasting rhythm of the universe. This is a fundamental ontological understanding of the Africa-based heritage that under girds Cuba’s religious traditions. Humans are required not to forget this rhythmic connection with the universe and regular collective communication with the spiritual world is the important affirmation that the connection remains strong.
Associated spirit forces of the different traditions are expected to respond to believers’ actions of respect, reverence, celebration, and remembrance. Material objects inside sacred spaces are fundamental to the communication with spirit forces as the objects participate in activities. They are intimate members in the demonstrative expressions of ritual although the objects may be almost invisible to an uninformed viewer, even in the restricted confines of the sites. For example, some items are on the floor or a wall—scripted and unscripted, while others are above doors, on shelves, behind doors, hidden under draped cloths, or placed in a piece of household furniture, like a buffet, for example. Visibility of these objects, in their appropriate locations, indicates to the informed that here occurs communion and communication between humans and the supernatural world(s). Practitioners know this and can be seen engaging in brief symbolic gestures with and toward the objects. Non-practicing Cubans may not make special gestures but even they know that certain items have exceptional religious meaning, especially when in designated spaces.
Communion: Not only do ritual communications, with and without objects, occur in sacred sites but general communicating social interactions also take place at them. Practitioners speak specifically of the locations as family meeting places where they can rely on seeing and talking with other members of their spiritual community. For each of our field research experiences we began by spending communicating social time at each space. This was not interview time, and often we were not conducting systematic observations. These were times when we were being re-integrated through reciprocal communication into a community.
Persons who regularly stop to visit at a sacred location are those who share a common understanding about the universe and who usually have been initiated into a particular faith if not two or more. They are members of that practicing community though, as members, they are not obligated to visit during non-ceremonial times. Oriente practitioners visit a sacred assemblage of their religious community some three or more times per week. When asked why they make these visits, we were told, “it is to show respect and love for the spirits and to have conversations with other persons who are here.” The repeated contact with sacred space and believers, human and spirit, forges a bond between all, especially between human and those of the supernatural world. The bonded relationship creates a social network of kin associations whose members give mutual and reciprocal care to each, one and the other.
There are requirements for membership into this kinship network, and common consanguinity genealogy is not a necessity. All who are initiated in a community of a faith are understood to be members but outside of the community, individuals are known by the genealogy of their initiation. Initiated genealogies are intricate, function much like consanguine families and, in most instances, all who are initiated are received in any sacred space of the tradition. We have only met one community leader who told us that only genealogical initiated family members of his community are allowed into his sacred space. That is, persons initiated into the faith, but not of his specific community, are not permitted into his site. Interestingly, he was a Tata from Havana who had moved to Holguín.
Unlike many assembled sites of Western Europe and North America, Cuban sacred internal landscapes are distinct in size, presence of colors, material objects, and the configuration. For example, a variety of material objects from the natural environment can most always be found in abundance in Oriente locations. In addition to flowers, the settings may contain rocks, stones, seeds, tree limbs, large turtles and tortoise shells with and without the animals, earth and sand, seawater, etc. Just this one dissimilarity indicates that Cuban traditions possess alternative meaning systems at their epistemological core and ontological definition of what it means to be, to exist in the universe. The differing set of fundamental ideas dictates the manner in which objects, with their alternative ontological meanings, are to be assembled and understood to assist the communication processes. There also are alternative definitions of who and what equals community and how bonding among and between them is to occur. We will explore these metaphysical considerations in the next chapter.

Recollection/Re–Membering, Meaning, and Memory
We have already proposed that sacred spaces are sites for affiliate members to gather and re-gather, thereby communing with and bonding the community of believers and spirits. In similar fashion, each time members return to the locations they are integrated and re-integrated into the ontological perspective of things significant for their faith. Those not present at a given time, whether separated by geography, life circumstances, or death, are re-called by the assembly. Most traditions of Oriente include, in one form or another, the actual calling of names of persons and spirits not present. For some, this is a ritualized practice of memorized litanies recited each time an activity occurs. Both the physical gathering of members in a space, and the allocation of time to re-call through name-calling of members who are absent, equals a re-membering of the faithful: That is, a bringing members back again into community and communion. It is an actual and a symbolic re-establishing of the community’s membership --re-membering, a putting of bodies, actual and spiritual, back into the ritual processes of the tradition.
All sacred life-styles of our Oriente research included some form of reciting names of ancestors–individually and collectively—and/or the pouring of liquid libations to the earth where ancestors are understood to be interred. We regularly observed this behavior in sacred spaces even as we sometimes saw libations poured in ordinary domestic households. At a minimum, this ritualistic re-collections of the dead, coupled with calling the names of absent members symbolically accomplishes re-membering and bonds those community practitioners who are present, as well as those practitioners of memory, together under the space’s watchful human and spiritual eyes.
Sacred spaces are equally important interior landscapes for organizing and re-gathering the cultural collective consciousness of the Cuban population. All Cubans do not practice the country’s distinct religious traditions but the vast majority are aware that the practices exist and are associated with Cuba’s historical legacy. Stories, myths, songs, dances, and other such reservoirs of collective knowledge contain details from many of the religions. Charles H. Long suggests that myths particularly are to be considered as truth of a conquered and oppressed people. Myths associated with Cuba’s African descendants’ sacred life-styles are surely within this criterion of the historian of religion.
In continuing to retell myths and stories that describe aspects of Cuba’s sacred heritage, Cubans are speaking hemispheric continuations and reconfigurations of similar ancient stories from the African continent. Oriente’s sacred spaces have at least been partially designed and assembled from knowledge about these religious stories. Even the individual dreams, visions, and revealed knowledge of practitioners who construct the spaces are part of traditions that are more than four hundred years old. This is not new or surprising since many who study the African Diaspora acknowledge Africa-based practices that “are connected with … mythology” and cultural collective consciousness.
More directly, spaces of the sacred traditions, including their contents, are physical reminders to all Cubans of a shared historical connection to an African heritage. Practitioners and non-practitioners persistently told us of this connection during our field research. For example, on more than one occasion of our initial entry into a geographic setting, team members were escorted to scenes unknown to us but familiar to our non-practitioner escorts. These persons were not professional tour guides nor were they knowledgeable about things religious. Some were well educated and some were without university education. However, they all regularly gave us precise instructions on how to proceed in the spaces. We were told to “wash yourself at the doorway,” “salute the altar,” “turn yourself three times, counter-clockwise” or given some other detailed instructions. We were impressed and saw the knowledgeable advice as indication that all Cubans, not just religious believers connect space to the distinct practices of their country and are generally familiar with customs of the faiths.
Meaning Generations of Oriente practitioners fought in Cuba’s three wars of national identity, independence, and sovereignty. Their reputations in these armed struggles helped establish important memories and meanings associated with sacred spaces constructed in the region. The women and men who supported various battles of the wars were the same practitioners who attended ritual sites for social interaction and worship before battles began. During and upon their return from military combat, they told stories about events, heroic persons, and pivotal deeds, particularly those wherein supernatural intervention was known to have occurred. Practitioners inevitably interwove these stories of national struggle with the ontological perspective of their religious traditions. The stories were handed down to new generations and now carry combined nationalistic as well as spiritual meanings. Some stories were made into dances, songs, legends, and/or myths about the spiritual nature of historic occurrences. The Cuban particularity was thereby made accessible to the larger national population with emphasis placed on spiritual events of the narratives. These were repeated during ritual chants, invocations, processes, drum rhythms, and the general conversations that occur in sacred spaces.
For example, we have often visited with a grand-descendant of Guillermón Moncada, an AfroCuban military general from Oriente. Guillermón, as our practitioner colleagues referred to him, fought fearlessly in the Ten Year War of 1868 and similarly, but more briefly in the War of Independence in 1895 before receiving a disabling wound. In the home of his Espiritismo practitioner descendant, there is a pilon—a large wooden bowl-like vessel that use to be used with an equally large mortar-like stick for grinding coffee. There also is an iron cauldron, an ñgañga that is much like those used in rituals of Regla Conga/Palo. As is the custom within practice of Conga/Palo, Guillermón’s descendant inherited these artifacts. According to local legend, and confirmed in our interviews with several elder, non-Moncado kin of the Palo tradition, this particular ñgañga was used by General Guillermón Moncada as a leading member of his Regla Conga/Palo community.
Cuba’s public school curricula include General Moncada as an important patriot of national struggles and although most Cubans are familiar with his, he is well known to Oriente residents. Similarly, most all Cubans know about the country’s religious heritages but Oriente citizens are most likely to be knowledgeable of the relationship between the sacred traditions, Guillermón Moncada the military hero and, even the fact that he was a religious practitioner. This knowledge gives added dimension and meaning to Oriente sacred sites as

Picture # 240

This is the ñgañga that local legend tells us was used in the nineteenth-century by Guillermón Moncada, an important hero of Cuba’s firs and second wars of independence. Moncada and Antonio Maceo are known by Los Hoyos neighbors to have been practitioners of Regla Conga/Palo.

the assemblages can stimulate recall of stories, dances, songs, etc. of national heroic people and deeds as these combined with their country’s religious practices. The blending of national heroic ideas with sacred practices doubly imbues the sites of sacrisity and their content. The spaces then become catalysis for memory about these and other particular meanings associated with being Cuban. The spaces and the Cuban meanings they have accrued also help re-gather individual memory about common history and religious traditions. This is especially true in Oriente and the pilon and ñgañga of Moncada are exemplary.
Memory: To Oriente practitioners, sacred spaces are likewise important catalytic memory devices that harkened them to collective experiences in worship rituals that have occurred at the site, chiefly experiences where the supernatural participated: occasions that are exceptionally significant. Practitioners are expressly counseled to remain in touch with such recollections and when assembled arrangements of sacricity are seen or recalled, the memories are prompted. Spaces rekindle the collective ritual experiences that have been committed to memory just as spaces rekindle the individual’s relationship to common ontological perspective of their faith. In these ways, constructed sacred spaces serve as sites where memory is created and as a stimulus for evoking such memories.
Initiation rites, for example, are by necessity collective activities for authorizing new members into a bonded community just as they are ritual activities wherein memories are created. The activities occur in a sacred space and help establish the initiate’s awareness of her/his linkage to customs and authority of the faith. When either new or older members revisit sacred places, actually or figuratively, the sites evoke memory of collective membership as well as memory of the specific initiation process of their experience. In recalling membership, individuals are also re-establishing a shared and experienced meaning of spiritual family. They remember the meaning of belonging to the community and their responsibilities therein.

Creative Acts
Just as sacred sites are the results of creative acts, they are locations for stimulating creation, providing an arena for creative change that affirms that, like most things of the universe, religious practices are not static. Even the most dogmatic traditions retain some flexibility in order to allow for changes that can ensure longevity of the faith’s principle ideas. Creativity and flexibility is exceptionally apparent in spaces of the religious as they tend to be exactly the locations where creative inspiration is expected to occur, since they are designated locales for communicating with the other, supernatural world(s).
Décor of Western European and North American religious arenas contain clear examples of creative expression derived from or through the sacred spaces. In traditions that allow flowers or cloths as adornments, for example, the color, position, supplement, and abundance of these items can be changed depending on the faith and the occasion. Catholic and other Christian cleric attire reflects this creative flexibility and it is significant that African Kente and Mud Cloth designs have recently begun to be incorporated into Christian clergy garments. In a similar interest vane, Protestant clergywomen have also begun to creatively modify their ritual officiating clothing. The creative adornment of Oriente sacred spaces can be seen in photographs of this book.
There are colorful, artistically arranged aspects to spaces of Espiritismo, Vodú, Regla de Ocha and Regla Conga/Palo and most assemblages include iconographic images, symbolic signs, designated artifacts, and other specialty objects significant to the practice. Photo #34 is an excellent example of the creativity and artistic colorfulness among Espiritismo practitioners even as it differs greatly from photo # , which is of a different variety of the Espiritismo faith. Each space is exceptionally attractive as artistic creation and attractive as part of Cuban culture. Within our operational definition of culture –the dynamic patterns of learned values, beliefs, and behaviors (because behaviors come from values and beliefs) exhibited by a people who share geographic and historical (at least four generations or on-hundred years) proximity -- materials, colors, symbols, signs, and graphic arrangements are expressive products of the human spirit. Oriente sacred spaces are part of this cultural montage but, with few exceptions, their culturally artistic nature has rarely been explored. Art as well as academic communities would be well advised to appreciate these constructions within the visual aesthetic exemplary of human religious creation as articulated in Oriente Cuba.
The work of the internationally known Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam (1902-1982) clearly demonstrates the fact that artistic presentations of and within everyday occurrences can contain content from religious practices; thereby affirming the spiritual nature of the everyday. Lam was the son of a Cantonese immigrant and a mulatto woman and his godmother was a well-known leader of Regla de Ocha/Lucumí in Sagua La Grande of western Cuba. Although he was never initiated into a Cuban religious tradition, he grew up in an atmosphere of clear AfroCuban culture. Lam consistently employed stylized images derived from his cultural, if not actual religious knowledge of Cuban practices and has been proposed as “the first plastic artist in all the history of western art to present a vision from the African presence in America.” The sidewalk tiles of La Rampa neighborhood, in Havana’s Vedado district, are replete with Lam’s images and provide an excellent example of spiritual inclusion in the everyday; see photo #220. A young Cuban man brought these mosaic titles to Jualynne’s attention long before she became interested in Cuban religions and before tourism to the island became part of national policy. He was proudly emphatic about the African and religious content of the tiles.
The drawings are derived from Bakongo/Kikongo Regla Conga/Palo and Yoruba Regla de Ocha based sacred imagery. The artistic representations of actual symbols of the traditions are in the sidewalk tiles and are a public display of specifically Cuban traditions associated with the people and their culture. The tiles likewise reflect the incorporation of religio-cultural components into an official, institutional statement that affirms Cuban cultural identity. Such incorporation also bears out our contention that cognition of the religions is widespread among the national population.
Picture #220
One of several sidewalk decorations in La Rampa area of the Vedado neighborhood of Havana and is one of many from the internationally famous Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam. This representation clearly was inspired by the Bakongo/Kikongo scripting that is yet part of Regla Conga/Palo of Oriente and other areas of Cuba.

Concluding Thoughts
It seems almost commonplace that everyday, taken-for-granted comprehensions can be transposed and made to have even more extraordinary spiritual meaning and purpose. As we have talked about the transposition of space in Oriente, we have eluded to practitioners’ ontological perspective that does not fully separate sacred and secular aspects of life, even as their socio-material context contains such definitions. This is an important nuance of transpositioning in Oriente and we will clarify the philosophical platform of the Cuban religious traditions in the next chapter.
In this chapter, we have tried to explore some of the functionalities of sacred spaces and to illustrate these ideas with realities of Oriente. We hope we have established a conceptual context that sacred spaces can function to set boundaries, to stimulate communion and communication, to create, recall, and re-member practices and participants, to establish meaning and memory, to represent artistic aesthetic, and to inspire creative acts. Of course, Cuban assemblages of Oriente are like all human constructions of sacred spaces in this regard. However, it is not in the fact that they are human presentations that distinguishes the Oriente sacred sites. Rather, it is that the locations represent alternative definitions of time and space that make them particular. We turn now to the foundational aspects that establish sacred spaces of Oriente Cuba as alternative offerings.