Sacred Sapaces and Religious Traditions of Oriente Cuba 1

Cover: This is the sculptured monument to the Cuban Cimarrones of the El Cobre Copper mine located just outside of Santiago de Cuba. The artwork was done by Aldeberto Lescay and was dedicated in the summer 2000. It represents an Oriente people rising from the inspiration of their African heritage in a struggle for freedom.




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, José 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.[1] 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.[2] 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[3] 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.[4] 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,[5] 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.[6] 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.[7] 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.[8]
For its part, Casa del Caribe has grounded its official endeavors in a process of practitioners’ affirmation and legitimation.[9] 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.[10]
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.[11] 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.”[12] 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.”[13] 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.”[14]

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.”[15] 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”.[16]

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.”[17] 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.[18]

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.[19] 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 also an abundance, sometimes a dominating amount of flowers, branches, leaves, and other living or cut plant materials that have been cut and brought to platforms as well as to other types of constructed spaces. Later, particularly when discussing Regla Conga/Palo, we will clarifydiscuss items brought from their common material locations into the transposed remarkable and sacred sites.[*1] Such materials help characterize the sites as special. The combination of transposed objects heightens the reconfigurating that converts normally spiritual domestic imagery and usage into an extraordinary sacred 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.”[20]

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[21] 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.[22]

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.[23] 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.[24]
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.[25]
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.[26] 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.[27]
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. [28]

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.[29]
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.[30] 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[31] 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.[32]
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.”[33] 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.[34]
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.[35] 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.[36]
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.[37] 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.[38] Oriente sacred spaces are part of this cultural montage but, with few exceptions, their culturally artistic nature has rarely been explored.[39] 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.”[40] 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.[41]
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.












Jualynne Elizabeth Dodson
Director, African Atlantic Research Team
Michigan State University



C H A P T E R 2

Commonalties among the Traditions



We already have suggested that there are differences between Cuban religious traditions practiced in Oriente and practice of the same systems throughout the country, but the commonalities in beliefs are even more important than differences in practice. The first and perhaps most significant of these shared characteristics is the fact that each of the sacred life-styles traces its epistemological core to western, central, and/or south-central areas of the African continent. This is true of Espiritismo even though that practice is not directly derived from Africa. The purpose of this chapter is to probe some of the more salient commonalities among beliefs of Cuba’s distinct religious traditions. In doing this, it is important to remember that although there is a special Oriente character to most things Cuban, Oriente is Cuban and this goes double for its religious expression.
We begin this chapter with a review of how the foundations of Cuban practices arrived on the island. From there we trace how African descendants who possessed the foundations became Cuban, took-on the new identity. The next, perhaps most important section explores the Africa-derived epistemological and ontological perspectives that equaled the transported foundations. Within this consideration, we examine of common principles of natural phenomena; being, time, spirits and space, power, revelation, and possession. These are commonly interwoven with in the differing sacred life-styles as they express they express the Africa-derived epistemological and ontological core. We close the chapter with the briefest descriptions of the three Cuban traditions not examined in this volume. This is a mere grounding of the reader in the reality that there is more to Cuban religions, practices, and sacred spaces than our small book considers.

Coming to Cuba:
Millions of inhabitants from western areas of Africa were consumed in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries cross-Atlantic slave trade, called the Middle Passage. This involuntary movement of human cargo was an atrocious episode in the global history of humankind and it left as many Africans dead on their continent and on ships during the ocean voyage as arrived in the Americas. Just as the Middle Passage experience carried human beings across the Atlantic Ocean, it also brought their Africa-based “rules of life,;” not written in books or tablets, of course, but scripted in the minds, bodies, and souls of the shackled bodies of transported humanity.
Africans arrived in Oriente and other locations of the Americas with an experiential comprehension that they were members of organized societies and part of a created, sacred world. Although their behavior and cognitive understandings would shift and be altered by enslavement, their memories and subconscious knowledges of their African ancestry would prove difficult if not impossible for colonial European influences to erase. Africans used the memories, collective and individual, to adjust to the Americas’ new landscapes and to regulate their self-interests as they adapted to imposed social and political conditions of colonial enslavement. They also used memories, conscious and subconscious to discern parallel aspects of their cultural practices with those of other cultural communities in the new environment.[42] The Africans juxtaposed ideas and customs from Europeans, practices from the few remaining Indians, and later, some features from the Chinese, and they integrated appropriate ones with similar ideas from their African homeland.[43]
Even as generations of Africans observed and incorporated useful cultural traits from those with whom they shared space, their daily interactions were circumscribed by enslavement. In Cuba, interactions between Africans from differing ethnic communities, and between them and members of other non-African cultural groups, evolved into stable patterns of predictable social behaviors that were deemed feasible for the situation. Important among these social patterns were those that gave birth to generations of mixed-race or interracial descendants. The enslavement system associated with agriculture, mining, and other production did not prevent cross-racial sexual contacts and the island’s cultural menagerie combined in such a fashion to develop a new Cuban criollo, a person with European heritage yet born in the colony.
For descendants whose African heritage could not be hidden, and for the enslaved and their descendants, an African worldview was a central element to spiritual survival as well as preservation of human dignity and identity in the new land.
The plantation system of Cuba’s enslavement, like those in other parts of the Americas, privileged European whiteness at the full expense of Africans and generalized blackness. The ethnically differentiated ways of being African had little flexibility within the power of the colonial island’s social structures of power and privilege. Neither was there social space for any one ethnic group to fully develop its African rites, rituals, ceremonies, or other socio-cultural activities. This system that amalgamated the enslaved population with little differentiation among Africans, contributed to the significance of Africa-based commonalities in the adaptation to restrictive circumstances of Cuban colonialism.
However, it was the African epistemological and ontological view of the world that proved to be a philosophical foundational instrument for resisting the dominating control forces imposed on all things equated with African identity. New and compounded Cuban African complexes of physical beings and social behaviors were produced through maintaining the Africa-based philosophical foundation while adjusting to behavioral practices from other ethnic groups who shared the enslavement barracones housing. The Cuban African was not part of the Eurocentric Cuban criollo, and was different from new Africans, called brozales, who were imported into the enslavement system.[44] The initial cross-Atlantic social construct of Cuban African occurred between and among members of differing African ethnic groups and would develop into informal networks of mutual aide that helped to replace ethnic homogeneity known on the continent. The cross-ethnic groups were formalized by intervention from colonial church and government authorities and for centuries the networks provided physical as well as spiritual support for Cuban Africans and their descendants.
Those who were bound to the system of enslavement lived most of their lives in close proximity to other Africans and descendants of Africans rather than with mixed-race mulattoes or free persons of color. When not at work—in fields, mines, houses, sugar refineries, or other such places of servitude—the majority of the African population lived in crowded barracónes or barracks. These rectangular structures were built with a single door on each end that was locked after workers returned from the fields. Although the quarters were hot, dirty, and very uncomfortable, they did allow relative independence for organizing cultural and religious activities. The 1960s testimony of Estevan Montejo, an ex-slave, described these living conditions. He said:
All the slaves lived in barracoons (sic). The masters, of course, said they were as clean as new pins (sic). The slaves disliked living under those conditions: being locked up stifled them. The barracoons (sic) were large, though some plantations had smaller ones, it depended on the number of slaves in the settlement. Around two hundred slaves of all colours lived in Flor de Sagua barracoon. This was laid out in rows; two rows facing each other with a door in the middle and a massive padlock to shut the slaves in at night. There were barracoons of wood and barracones of masonry with titled roofs. Both types had mud floors and were dirty as hell. And there was no modern ventilation there! Just a hole in the wall or a small barred window. The result was that the place swarmed with fleas and ticks, which made the inmates ill with infections and evil spells...

Strange as it may seem, the Negroes were able to keep themselves amused in the barracoons. They had their games and pastimes. The favorite game in the barracoons was tejo.

The game of Mayombe was connected with religion. The overseers themselves used to get involved, hoping to benefit. They believe…too, so no one today need be surprised that whites believe in such things. Drumming was part of the Mayombe. [45]

Montejo was describing his experiences in the nineteenth century living quarters for enslaved Cuban Africans AfroCubans had not changed from earlier centuries.[46]
Significant to our exploration is that the Africanity or Africa-based dynamics of the informal associations formed early in the baracones affirmed and reinforced the core aspects of homeland customs even as new Cuban expressions were developing. Religious practices were central to the process of change, as well as to stabilizing the social associations. Members ate, danced, chanted, and drummed together, and thereby shared remembrances of a wealth of behavioral elements from their African origins. Individuals from the same or similar ethnic communities gravitated to particular Cuban associations and began the re-gathering of bodies that hearkens the re-membering discussed in chapter 1. Although it is of a much later period, nineteenth-century Cuba, Montejo again speaks clearly of Africanity in religious practices for most enslaved persons. He said,
I knew (of two) African religions in the barracoons: the Lucumi and the Congolese. The Congolese was the more important. The difference between the Congolese and the Lucumi was that the former solved problems while the latter told the future. This they did with diloggunes, which are round, white shells from Africa with mystery inside.

The other religion was the Catholic one. The household slaves…being so refined and well treated, they all made out they were Christian.[47]

Cuban Africans’ early informal associations had membership boundaries, that were both exact and permeable as African ethnic inclusivity was more the rule than not. This was true for no other reason than that there were few if any formal social structures that reinforced African ethnicity.[48] The groups were mutual aid, recreational, and cultural alliances that served to socialize the Cuban ways of being whole, healthy, and African despite enslavement realities. The associations were equally religious formations wherein distinguishable Africa-based rituals were practiced and the arrangements self-identified themselves by Africa-based idiomatic names such as Conga, Lucumí, Carabalí, and Arará. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the importation of new enslaved Africans was a continuous reinforcement to Cuban associations’ Africanity. The new women and men brought fresh knowledge of homeland beliefs and rituals.
It was a slow and difficult process to transplant, translate, and sustain Africa-based identity. It was often an unconscious but always intentional process that continues today. Robert Farris Thompson refers to the intentional self-identification of Bakongo/Kikongo Africans in the Americas.[49] This is particularly exemplary for Cuba where even today Oriente practitioners assume a position of pride when referring to themselves as “African” or “Conga.” The Oriente ‘a’ in Conga may be a regionalized conversion but the Africa reference remains.
As we interacted with several leaders of practicing communities in Oriente, Jualynne was regularly told that her Spanish was “okay” but that she, “really needed to learn our Cuban Conga language.”[50] Also of interest is that soldiers from Oriente who fought in Angola in 197 told us that they returned home with a heightened sense of self-identification as descendants of Africa’s Bakongo/Kikongo people. This was true for those whose phenotype did not even vaguely resemble physical characteristics of most people associated with an African heritage of any ethnic group.[51]
The Cuban African groups were greatly influenced by supports and constraints from the larger colonial structure as governmental and Catholic authorities begrudgingly sanctioned the informal associations. The official assumption was that endorsing and sanctioning the creation of social groups among the enslaved population would provide cohesion and help eliminate rebellion and unrest. The resulting stability would ensure white control of the economic system of black enslavement and maintain the Spanish economic colonial relationship. Blacks were therefore, authorized to form cofradias and cabildos that were modeled after the pre-colonial, lay religious, Iberian cofradias of Andalusia, Spain.[52] Later we will see how Cuban Africans capitalized on the official groups and converted them to their own intentions.
Today, Oriente residents continue to adhere to lifestyles based on contours, if not actual activities, developed during the early historical periods. Ancestral practitioners laid the underpinnings of Africa-based epistemological and ontological view of the world and contemporary practitioners continue to subscribe to this philosophical approach. The ancestral practitioners also constructed physical and social relations that were available to be institutionalized with the help of colonial structures. Sacred spaces of Oriente are erected from the inherited the groundwork of colonial fore bearers. The knowledge and customs continue to inform representations in Oriente assembled spaces. And, just as the sacred life-styles share generalized and common socio-historical development, they also share in the nature of being Cuban. We turn now to details of the socio-historical nature of being Cuban African and AfroCuban.

Becoming Cuban
There are seven definitively Cuban religious traditions that enjoy popularity throughout the country. Each of the seven is equally a social construct of the Americas and a Cuban creation. All but Espiritismo are rooted in Africa-based orientations about the universe and retain idiomatic signifiers of that continental influence. Espiritismo is likewise an indigenously Cuban set of practices and many of its marker customs are closely associated with the African heritage but its origin is not from that continent.
The seven religions are Regla de Ocha/Lucumí, Regla Conga/Palo, Vodú, Abakuá/Ñañigo, Ifá, Regla Arará, and Espiritismo. Among these, Abakuá and Regla Arará are mostly practiced in Cuba’s western regions of the Havana and Matanzas area. Abakuá is a highly secretive, exclusively male tradition but we have observed male leaders from two other religious traditions wearing an identifying Abakuá finger ring. This leads us to speculate that Abakuá members also reside in Oriente.[53] Ifá, a Yoruba-based system of communicating with the other spirit world, is practiced in Oriente as well. However, out of the sheer necessity for manageability, neither our research nor this book systematically explores Abakuá, Regla Arará or Ifá.
All of the distinctively Cuban religions are formations of the Americas, constructed into existence through a variety of social interactions between cultural communities and within the socio-political landscape of the island. The religions were originally built from customs and practices forged during Cuba’s Spanish colonial period wherein social power associated with race and class was disproportionately in favor of white Europeans and some of their descendants.[54] The unequal distribution of power gave privilege and priority to persons of clear European ancestry, expressly individuals of Spanish heritage if their socio-economic class status did not mitigate white privilege.
The fact that blacks, free persons of color, and enslaved persons did not possess or share equitably in access to structural power does not mean that the groups were powerless or unable to accomplish some of their self-intended goals. These populations were fully active participants in the dynamics of Cuban colonial relations even though civic, state, church, and plantation owning whites often dictated rules of the society. The intentionality of enslaved and other people without power of authority could prevail, no matter how temporary.[55]
For the first two centuries, Africans, Cuban Africans, European whites of all classes, and some few remaining Indigenous Indians were part of a dynamically reciprocal system of social interaction . Given that everyone had to adjust to specifics of the colonial setting, power dynamics within the situation brought about vibrant new beliefs, behavioral patterns, and people. The religious historian Charles H. Long uses the language of ‘contact zone’ to refer to a social order where multiple cultural groups are forced to interact together under structures of power that are disproportionately in the hands of one group. Everyone is forced to change their behavior from their homeland familiarities and new patterns are constructed from the multi-cultural mixture. The Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz labeled that country’s process of socio-cultural creation as transculturation.[56] Categories of behavior associated with persons from the contact zone that was the island became typified into a Cuban cultural identity. New language was developed, new music, dance, food, and a host of other behavioral ways of being Cuban. Cuban Africans were central contributors in the building of that larger construct of cultural consciousness.
The social process of constructing a new Cuban identity took long periods of time but included at its core Africa-based understandings about knowledge and knowing i.e., epistemological perspective. Earlier fusions of religious beliefs and behaviors had occurred in western regions of Africa. The overlap in epistemological comprehensions helped the earlier ethnic fusions to occur. Many if not most Cuban ancestors had been imported from these region where, for example, the Fon people of Dahomey had incorporated several religious elements from Yoruba people of Nigeria; the Yoruba and the Fon had blended elements of Bakongo/Kikongo peoples’ spiritual practices with their own and; practices of the Bakongo/Kikongo had been fused and re-fused by the Fon and Yoruba long before the cross-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans.[57]
In the Americas, remembered fragments of overlapping Africa-based principles concerning natural phenomena were equally important to the development of Cuban religious systems. It was phenomenological principles, derived from an orientation toward the universe i.e., ontological perspective that guided the selection of appropriate leaves, plants, rocks, earth, water, sticks, animals, fowl, and a host of other resources to be used in ritual activity. Together the shared epistemological and ontological foundations were a core from the continent that allowed for new behaviors in a new land, and a new Cuban persona whose affirmation lay in the Africa-based life of religions created on the island. The core gave deep structure cultural understandings about the universe that were then socialized and re-socialized to all who would assume the life-style; descendants and others in the Cuban landscape. The cabildo social groupings, authorized by Spanish authorities for the black population, were pivotal to the transfer of the knowledge and the life-style.[58]
Cuban cabildos were modeled after the confradias of Andalucia and Sevilla, Spain where the voluntary religious lay groups functioned as part of Spanish civil society. Cofradias were racially segregated but the black Spanish groupings had religious as well as civic responsibilities in fourteenth and fifteenth-century European Catholicism. In contrast, Spanish colonial cabildos originated as segregated legal mechanisms, intended to aide Cuban authorities in maintaining social stability among the enslaved and free black populations on the island.[59]
However, Cuban cabildos were familiar social formations to the transported African consciousness. On the continent among all the various nations and ethnic groups, secret societies were active sub-groupings of larger communities and they possessed prerequisite ritual responsibilities in the societies as well. The Bakongo/Kikongo, the Fon, the Yoruba, the Dahomey, the Ashanti, and other peoples of West Africa were intimately knowledgeable of secret societies, for women and for men. Duties and obligations of the societies ensured a certain social cohesion and creativity in the various African nations just as they could be the source of friction and change.[60]
Where possible, Africans in Cuba gravitated to cabildos of their ethnic kin and the collectivity idiomatically designated the groupings as naciónes or nations i.e., Cabildo nación de Lucumí, Cabildo nación de Carabalí, Cabildo nación de Conga etc. If the ethnic character of individuals could not be determined but they were willing to live the initiated life of the cabildo nation, membership occurred. It was not a difficult transition from African consciousness of secret societies to Cuban naciónes de cabildo, although it did not occur instantly. Eventually the cabildo groupings also included free persons of color, initiated mulattos, and even white-skinned Cubans. Cabildos were formed on plantations, in villages, in rural areas, and in cities. Religious ritual activities were central to their survival as Estevan Montejo reported in his testimony about religions of the sugar plantations where he worked.[61]
Religious traditions established through the cabildo formations continue today and are the bases for the sacred spaces we visited in Oriente. However, there is an additional piece to the developing complex mosaic that has come to equal Cuban religions and an important part of Cuban cultural consciousness. Catholicism of the island can never be underestimated as a important element in the sacred life-styles constructed by African descendants or to the fact that aspects of those practices have become part of Cuban cultural awareness.
Localized Catholic practices of colonial Cuba were less restrictive and responded to specific needs of European Catholics and their descendants living on the island colony rather than to the more dogmatic edits of Spain or Rome. Cuba was an ocean away from Spain and even further from the spiritual guidance and supervision of the Church of Rome. Many island Catholic practices regularly included ideas and approaches considered superstitious by visiting European travelers.[62] George Brandon described particulars of colonial Cuba’s Catholicism in the following way:
[there] is a cult of personages. These are the specialized cults of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. From the cult of personages arises a vast array of religious phenomena: legends and miracle stories elaborated into folk dramas, the yearly cycle of feast days, the festivals of patron saints. …the cult of personages (especially Mary and the saints) were open to folk interpretations. There were some experiences and meanings … which could not be expressed in terms of the official teachings …they were lived out and practiced on the basis of a residual form of culture.[63]

Colonial Catholic personage group practice was a behavioral characteristic relatively compatible with the spiritual orientation of enslaved Africans and familiar to their practice secret societies. They and Cuban Africans were highly acquainted with a universe orientation that included spirits and spiritual activity in the material world just as they knew spiritual personage secret societies. The overlap of these compatible characteristics and the physically close interactive relationship with Cuban catholic practices brought forth stabilized behaviors in a variety of normative categories, typified behaviors. The categorically predictable, typified behaviors became components of re-constituted Africa-based religious customs.
In addition to the compatibility with some European-based ways, African descendants adjusted and adapted to the overlap with Cuban catholic behaviors for important political reasons. Catholicism was the dominating religious power in Cuba and it had major secular governmental influence as well. For Africa-based practices to have a veneer of commonality with the reigning colonial religious authority meant that African descendants could continue the intent of their own customs without revealing the non-European origins. The surface addition of Catholic compatibilities with underlying and deep structure Africa-based intentions ensured that the cabildo African way of life could survive.
An additional contribution to the continuation of the reformulated Africa-based traditions was the fact that the Cuban Catholic Church agreed with Spanish governing authorities and encouraged cabildos as a means of facilitating doctrinal education of the black population, particularly the enslaved.[64] The relative independence of the yet informal arrangements of Africa-based ethnic groupings in the barracones became legal cabildos created by the colonial government and sanctioned by the Catholic Church. Church approval further allowed cabildo members to integrate re-articulations of some compatible local Catholic ideas, symbols, and iconographic images with their parallel and appropriate Africa-based understandings. The result was that Africanity was not lost even as the integrations and re-articulations were implemented.[65]
Although there were rigid restrictions against overtly expressed African practices, re-constructed articulations of overlapping religious ideas served to solidly disguise African and Cuban African traditions. This made them more tolerable to colonial authorities. As a result during Catholic holidays, members of cabildos dressed, marched, sang, and played homeland drums in ways reminiscent of African ethnic celebrations but behind a veneer of Catholic representation. An important example was the Cuban fiesta day celebrating the catholic saint St. James. This European warrior saint was the equally warring African spirit force of Ogún. The transpositioning was easily accomplished as Cuban African descendants understood and celebrated Ogún on the fiesta day of St. James.[66] Among mulattoes, Cuban-born criollos, whites, and many foreign visitors, the cabildo events were colorful, public, and popularly entertaining affairs. More important, under colonial authoritative approval, the cabildos’ public appearances further affirmed the Africa-based identity now living within a Cuban configuration; it had become Cuban.
Participation in public rites on Catholic holidays did not lessen governmental and ecclesiastic social controls. As cabildos became more self-defining and continued to affirm the Africanity of their cultural and religious base, both church and colonial authorities exerted repressive measures in an attempt to bring the activities in line with European definitions of acceptability. The consistent shortage of European priests, the difficulty of transportation on the island, the disproportionate number of blacks to Europeans, and the distain of priests to visit the barracones mitigated many of these efforts, however. Estevan Montejo also contends that Catholic priest resisted exposing themselves to living conditions of the enslaved. As he said: “but nothing in the world would induce them [priests] to enter the slaves’ quarters. They were fastidious people, with a solemn air which did not fit the barracoons…”[67]
Among members in cabildos, Africanity was a defining reality that coupled with an awareness of group belonging. Together, these reinforced the collectivities. In addition to the mutual aide function that cabildos provided, they surely helped maintain a sense of individual personal dignity. Cabildos were intentional voluntary associations of black self-governed social, political, economic and sacred life, even if they had to exist under colonial enslavement and oppression. Cabildos were also instrumental in institutionalizing many such practices as Africa-based devotional ceremonies, naming and initiation rituals, rites of passage, calendaric celebrations, and other sacred events. The Africanity of these activities were enhanced through the sustained cimportation of new enslaved Africans that continued to occur into the later parts of the nineteenth-century.[68]
Cabildos de naciónes functioned even after Cuba eliminated legal enslavement in 1886 and the arrangements persist today by way of religious life and performing comparsa groups for Carnival, a community-based holiday celebration historically associated with spirit/saints’ festival days that occur throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.[69] In Oriente, the customs are returning to be associated with religious traditions as cabildos de naciónes are successful competitors in Carnival comparsas and continue to be wellsprings of Cuban religiosity.

Epistemological & Ontological Perspectives[70]
All human cultural communities have an understanding of being—what it means to exist, in which their definition of knowledge is embedded. This is the epistemological center of the culture. As simple as understanding beingness may appear, it is simple and more. The legitimacy of knowledge or acts of creating knowledge is determined based on how a culture understands being. If the epistemological foundation comprehends being as associated with the rational intellectual component of humankind e.g., “I think therefore I am, because I am, I think,” less value will be placed on information and knowledge derived from spiritual revelation. A culture whose epistemological core defines being as belonging to an integrated interdependent whole of human existence e.g. “I am because we are, because we are therefore I am,” not only will value revealed knowledge but cultural practices that strengthen reciprocal connectedness will be cultivated. This defining aspect of knowledge is the group’s epistemological platform.
From this platform, the shared interactions of members of a culture develops into an orientation toward the universe as well as a collective/shared approach to the details for living within the orientation and the universe. That is to say, human cultural groups achieve an ontological perspective. The ontological perspective informs creation of parameters of the learned patterns of values, beliefs, and behaviors exhibited by a group that shares historical and/or geographic proximity for some four generations or more, the group’s culture. That is, ontological perspective informs the foundation for the creation of culture. Like the anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, we see that Cuban cultural and religious accomplishment has been undergirded by Africa-based epistemological and ontological principles[71] and these comprehensions are a philosophical reservoir that allows the construction of religious practices as well as sacred spaces in Oriente.
A cultural community’s shared awareness about what is in the world and how they are related to that world is derived from their ontological view of the world with its epistemological platform. Worldview will incorporate knowledge about beingness, orientation toward the universe, as it also will manifest that knowledge and orientation in aesthetics, art, religion, rituals, ceremonies, celebrations, festivals, and other cultural categories that reflect values of a community, including a variety of everyday activities.
Members of a culture may not always cognitively or even consciously articulate ideas about these philosophical arenas but this does not mean that such comprehensions are unconsciously held and not expressed. Among African descendants in the Americas, an Africa-based ontological approach circumscribes and directs principles of everyday behavior, particularly as related to natural phenomena of the universe.
Africa-based worldview and its principles about natural phenomena were what enslaved persons possessed and used as nucleus for the spiritual traditions they created in colonial Cuba. The customs were built from knowledge of what it means to be in the universe and included understandings about spirits and space, about time, power, revelation, and physical possession, to name a few categories significant to religious life. Ideas and meanings about such universal phenomena were directly linked to homeland knowledge and became ensconced in Cuba during the colonial period. The comprehensions were interpreted and reinterpreted in the island’s natural, political as well as multi-cultural landscape. Amid complexities of those daily realities, Africa-based epistemological and ontological knowledge was continually referenced to give direction to the construction of ritual behaviors. The behaviors have been passed down through generations of kinship and initiation cabildo and religious group members.[72]
Persons of Africa’s Bakongo/Kikongo family of ethnic groups were the numerical majority among groups brought to Cuba during the first centuries of the enslavement holocaust. The Bakongo/Kikongo are those ethnic groups we associate with regions of Gabon, Angola, and the Congo. Individuals from this network of cultural communities laid the epistemological groundwork for what would lead to new Cuban religious traditions. Of course specific Bakongo/Kikongo practices were also established on the island, and many of these became core components of Oriente’s contemporary Regla Conga/Palo life-style. More important to our focus on common components is that it was Bakongo/Kikongo epistemological ideas, rather than particular practices, that were infused across the full-spectrum of Oriente’s religious systems. This was so because, as presented earlier, ethnic groups from this family of people share common spiritual themes with many cultural communities of the West African areas.[73]
In addition to the Bakongo/Kikongo, spiritual comprehensions of the Fon were prominent in Oriente. This influence arrived by way of French planters who brought their Haitian servants to Cuba as they fled the Haitian Revolution. These African Haitians were Fon descendants of present-day Benin/Dahomey areas of Western Africa. From their homeland’s religious ideas and practices that had been re-formulated into Haitian traditions, the migrants to Cuba introduced Haitian VodouVodou/Vaudou/Vaudou to Oriente. They also brought technological expertise in coffee production.
The mid-eighteenth-century struggle between West Africa’s Fon and Yoruba peoples saw the eventual defeat of the Yoruba Empire and pushed enslaved captives from the latter family of ethnic groups into the exploitative labor relationships of the Americas and to Cuba.[74] By the middle of the nineteenth-century, toward the 1895 beginning of Cuba’s first war of independence, the Yoruba accounted for the largest number of African ethnic groups imported to the island.[75] This timely and phenomenal movement of Yoruba to Cuba contributed to the establishment of Regla de Ocha and Ifá traditions as the latest and most recognized of Africa-based practices on the island.[76] Coupled with the Fon and Bakongo/Kikongo, the Yoruba descendants brought with them the Africa-base epistemological and ontological perspectives that they shared with these West African cultural communities.

Commonalities Via Principles Of Natural Phenomena[*2]

In their groundbreaking review of how African American cultures were created across the Atlantic, Sidney Mintz and Richard Price proposed that research scholars focus on the underlining phenomenological principles that enslaved Africans would have used to adjust, adapt, and fashion their behavior in the Americas.[77] This is consistent with Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s sociological treatise on how human social interaction is the bases for the establishment of collective knowledge that in turn informs the construction of reality.[78] We have drawn upon each of these approaches in this exploration of philosophical underpinnings of Cuban religions.
Beyond belonging to demographic categories related to enslavement in the Americas, West African ethnic groups possessed epistemological and ontological commonalities that were helpful underpinnings to their ability to function in the Atlantic world. Perhaps the most important among the shared ideas were those concerning:
· the nature of being in the universe,

· their orientation about time,

· their ideas about the nature of space and the spirit world,

· some overlap in comprehensions about creation and the nature of power in the universe and,

· their shared agreement that revelation and possession happen and are normal supernatural occurrences.

In addition, the distinctive sacred life-styles of Cuba also share common ideas about rituals, divination, and the participation of music and dance within worship. We turn to the commonalities.

Being: An important component of the commonly shared Africa-based epistemological perspective is an awareness about what it means to be part and within the universe i.e., comprehensions about beingness. To be is to know and knowing is possible because all created things, that is those not made by animate beings, were given life by a singular supernatural Creator force. The Creator force is the essence of beingness and has shared part of that essence with creations of the universe. Therefore all created things contain some of the sacred spiritual essence or power bestowed by the supernatural Creator. Africa-based epistemological perspective is one that understands being as derived from and continually part of the spiritual essence given to creation by the single Creator force.
Although it is difficult to capture epistemological perspective within examples from everyday life, earlier we began exploring a saying that goes to the heart or core of the epistemological platform of most African people on the continent and in the Diaspora. The saying lodges beingness, identity, and knowing within a collective sphere and differs from an individualistic foundational platform. The Africa-derived saying, I am Because We Are; We Are, Therefore I Am, compares to a similar core understanding about knowing within the West, I Think Therefore I Am, because I am I Think. The collective root of Africa-based knowledge allows that individuals, while existing within their specific particularities, are intimately and inter-dependently linked to all that is and exists in the created universe. This allows individuals to be, without predetermining a fragmentation of separateness. Africa-based ontological posture, that is worldview or orientation toward the universe, evolves from this epistemological core and has equally evolved into a variety of guiding principles about natural phenomena of the material world. The ontological perspective is a collective, cultural consequential and integrated understanding about creation, the universe, and self.[79]
The supernatural Creator force is called by different names within different sacred practices in Oriente but most reinforce a paramount respect and reverence for creation in general and recognize that beingness belongs to all that has been created: humans, animals, rocks, plants, mountains, oceans, rivers, and all others. This consciousness means that each tradition has reverence for special rocks, plants, trees, mountains, animals, etc. because created beings—as even “things” are in a state-of-being—possess some of the supernatural essence of creation. Some limited number of created material beings/things have extra portions of supernatural essence and all share universal space with non-material beings, spirits.

Time: Africa-based ontological perspective orients time quite differently from that of Western European and North American understandings.[80] Orientation to time is founded on a phenomenological principle derived from Africa-based ontological approach. Time is directly linked to events not to abstract consequence and it is episodic as well as discontinuous. Time is not linear, nor a thing or a commodity, and it does not move forward toward an end of the world or a golden age. Time has multiple forms that are coordinated in different ways. Each form and way of time has a variety of durations and qualities. There is, for example, mythical time, historical time, ritual time, seasonal time, solar time, lunar time, etc.
However, Africa-based time phases include a long past, the present, and a short-to-nonexistent future, which are collectively linked to a more two-dimensional phenomenon of time that is directly linked to events: events that have happened, those happening now, and those that will happen rather immediately.[81] Past time is of quite long duration because of the multitude and complexity of events that have occurred. Things, events, and persons of the present, upon their completion in the material world, proceed into past time as part of the living dead if their memory is honored by those who occupy the present. The present is of now, and the future is almost without substance because no events from it have yet happened and when they do it will be present time.
This event-based idea of time requires that one must experience events within time in order for time to be an actual reality. Such experience comes through one’s life and through the lives of one’s cultural community. Collectively, members of a cultural community comprise a larger space of actual present and past time than the individual because there are more who have experienced varying aspects of the same events. We experience the lives of our cultural community members by way of stories, songs, art, dance, etc. that expands our singular experience with the world because community members’ experiences are linked to actual event time that extends farther back through the past, farther than any one individual’s experience with event time.
Although creation may mark a beginning of a material universal presence, time has no beginning and is considered unending. Africa-based ontological perspective that circumscribes principles of the time phenomenon is also oriented to a united understanding of historical or past time. This is so because a community’s cultural values and socio-religious conditions are intertwined with complex presentations of the past. The particularities of a people’s things and events that may never have been known by present-day persons are incorporated through myths, stories, songs, and other means of communicating memory. These elements recount past time to envelope the moral principles of a community. This is true of material objects assembled in the sacred spaces of Oriente.
The far-reaching nature of past time expands it into a type of macro time. Humans can join macro time of the long past through rituals that repeat knowledge and creative acts that span the dimensions of time. During ritual time humans are able to re-establish contact with creative events of the universe, events of which they were not participants. Rituals re-call the mythical macro past in memory and membership, they re-member past and present. The connection, the re-membering, is possible because ritual time is cyclical and disrupts regular historical progression. In this qualitative turn to the past, individuals of Africa-based perspectives gather healing and redemptive power.[82]

Spirits and Space: All of the Cuban traditions of Oriente have creation stories that include the singular supernatural Creator force as well as other supernatural beings or spirits. The creation stories describe the function of spirits in divergent ways, with contrary emphases, and they often have dissimilar customs regarding spirits. No little part of the variety comes from the fact that the traditions have different historical particulars as well as different African ethnic heritages. However, it is commonly understood that spirits can and do occupy human historical time and space. The spiritual life-styles of Oriente equally agree that spirits were part of the universe long before the singular supernatural Creator force made all of the material entities. That creation included all that has not been made by human and other animate beings but with an understanding that even some being-made things are the result of supernatural creation.
Practitioners appreciate that there are worlds other than the phenomenal human one of historical and material things, including all of its galaxies. This appreciation knows the world of benevolent spirit forces as well as the underworld of malevolent forces, but none of this equals Christian understandings about heaven and hell. Generally, the traditions understand that all of the universe was initially occupied or filled by spirits long before a material world appeared. Spirits remained present and active even as the material universe and humans were placed in the space of the world of phenomena. Although most humans find it difficult if not impossible to imagine universal composition without material essence, some humans have been allowed, or given an ability to see spirits. Contemporary Oriente practitioners tell us that in ancient human time, long before contact between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, those who were able to see spirits often painted themselves the color of these beings, usually the white of translucentness.[83]
After their bodies have died, some spirits remain in the material world for as long as their living family members and friends continue to remember and revere them. These spirits are the living dead and occupy present time. There also are spirits of the departed who continue to have family members and friends in the present material world who recall the memory of the departed though no one knew the spirit as a material being. These remembered spirits have moved on to occupy past time and are no longer among the living dead of present time. However, those departed who have been gone for many generations are truly ancestors whether or not familial, and are spirits of the long past. From that space of time, these ancestral spirits can visit the historical material world and can occupy the space of the yet-to-be-born, present future time. Even though this is a simplistic explication of spirits and space, there is an obvious overlap between comprehensions about these spirit phenomena and Africa-based appreciation of time with its extended past, short past, present, and the least emphasized future.
In addition, there are superhuman ancient spirits who are understood to have existed before the historical world of phenomena but who came into that space at its creation. These spirits were at the creation but not responsible for it though they possess an astonishing amount of supernatural power. They are strong ancient spirits who are intimately related to the single supernatural Creator force, to creation, and to other supernatural forces of the universe. The relationship exemplifies the monotheistic and polytheistic linkage of an Africa-based ontological perspective. That is, this ontological comprehension integrates belief in a singular supernatural Creator force and an appreciation of multiple superhuman spirit forces.
Almost all spirits but the single Creator force can be activated or invoked to assist living members of the material world, for good or not. Ancient, ancestor supernatural spirits may also possess a human body, usually during ritual time, as part of the communication process between humans and the supernatural. The sacred life-styles of Oriente name the various spirits of the universe differently and each tradition has a variety of practices associated with spirits, collectively and individually. However, each shares in the general categorical delineations we have presented.

Power: In Africa-based ontological tradition, power is the ability to make things happen beyond the natural rhythm of the universe. Total power actualized is the force of creation that both epitomizes and transcends nature. Portions of the ability to make things happen in this transcending way were given to all creation by the single supernatural Creator force. This partial power was distributed to everything at the time of creation but not in equal proportions. The partial power available to humans must be combined with other universal transcending powers in order to participate in the extraordinary power that goes beyond natural rhythms.[84]
Humans can approach a comprehension of the creative power of the universe through monitoring thunder, the ocean, fire, wind, earth, love, or the cycle of life, death, and life again. The rhythms of the universe are also contained in these phenomena of nature. Although all the religious life-styles of Oriente revere and respect universal order, each approaches power differently and uses the phenomenon in equally different ways, so much so that this brief summation is probably a best expression of the commonalities they share.

Revelation: This is the process by which all religious traditions receive knowledge and images from their understanding of a superhuman world. John Thornton’s discussion of African understanding of this spiritual phenomenon is most appropriate when he begins by acknowledging that it is through revelations that all religions are formed and changed. Thornton further contends that Africa-based expectation of constant disclosure from the supernatural world is an important phenomenological principal commonly expressed in the Atlantic Diaspora.[85] This fundamental principle holds that revelations are a normal and regular occurrence in the historical material world and that humans should always be prepared to receive them by leaving space in their lives for revelations.
We suggest that this phenomenological principle is a source of what musicians and others attribute to the inspiration involved in the improvisational aspect of creative musical abilities. It may even be proposed that the syncopated rhythms that permeate African and African Diaspora music, as well as other cultural expressions, is the built-in cultural-pause that can allow participation from the otherworld into the world of humans. Jazz is acutely noted for improvisation and syncopation and is a genre of music most attributable to African descendants. We believe that jazz and African descendants who help create it draw upon phenomenological principles of Africa-based ontological understanding concerning time, space and revelation. These creative persons are expecting constant disclosure and revelation from the other, supernatural world and they leave space in their music for it. It is a phenomenological principle equally understood and expressed by religious practitioners of Oriente.
Beyond the supernatural forces that may enter into the material world with humans, directive revelations may also occur. Informational revelations affirm or amend existing sacred beliefs and customs as well as inform humans concerning their righteous relationship to the universal order. Revelations occur through dreams, visions, and/or voices and are not directly tied to community rituals. Many of the sacred spaces of Orient were constructed from information and directing instructions received in dreams.

Possession: Spirit possession is intimately linked to ideas about revelation, as possession is the condition of amazing perceptive consciousness and represents the process of entering that perceptive state. During the altered consciousness, informing knowledge and images from the otherworld are revealed to humans. Possession by supernatural spirits occurs most regularly when the atmospheric space of the material world has been re-ordered to permit spirit forces to enter present time from otherworld time. Such re-arranging is usually achieved through appropriate rituals and processes that use liturgical and veneration devices such as spatial adornment, chants, drumming, dance, as well as food, drink, and other offerings known to please the spirits. Although atmospheric re-arranging can lead to spirit possession, there is no guarantee that spirits will visit humans or that spirits of their choosing will visit humans. These forces are not under the full control of humans.

Ritual Rituals are numerous and complex within each of the Cuban religions. This is true even for the varieties of Espiritismo whose origins are not based on Cuban African heritage. It would be erroneously presumptuous for us to say more than that each of the traditions of our research has an abundance of complex rituals. We can further say that while many rituals are performed in sacred spaces, each set of religious practices also has rituals that are part of everyday, taken-for-granted activities.

Music and Dance In Cuban sacred life-styles, music and dance are themselves part of the worship ritual, not merely ambiance or supplement to ritual activity. They are part of a symbolic language, a form of prayer as well as a means of preparing for entrance into the perceptive consciousness of spirit possession. Drum rhythms, dance gestures, spatial adornment, and formulaic chants, as well as the interactions among and between these, are all coded to identities of the spirits. The coded presentations change material atmospheric space to encourage participation from the supernatural world. The objective is to produce an embodied ritual experience, a spiritual possession that allows humans to be more deeply included with the wisdomed knowledge and rhythms of the universe.
When the full ritual process achieves re-ordering or transposing of the atmosphere, a human’s embodied experience can be spirit possession and can include revelation from the otherworld. Each tradition of Oriente perceives possession with different characteristics and features but all agree that spirit possession is part of reality. The Africa-based understandings about these natural phenomena—spirit possession and revelation—are central to sacred lifestyles that have grown in Oriente.[86]

Other Religious Family Members
There are three other sacred traditions within Cuba’s reservoir of religious families; Ifá, Arará, and Abakuá. These sacred life-styles were not a focus of our research for reasons of manageability. However, we feel it appropriate to at least provide brief descriptions of these three practices in order to round out readers’ awareness of the array of distinct practices in Cuba. In addition, the three added religions share the commonalities we have just discussed.

Ifá The set of practices associated with Ifá that are found in Cuba are derived from Yoruba culture we associate with contemporary Nigeria. Ifá customs are centered on communicating with the spirit world and specifically the tripartite yet singular Creator force known in Yoruba cultural traditions as Olodumere, Olofin, and Orula. Several practices of the Ifá system are also used in non-Yoruba-derived activities, again to communicate with the spirit world though not necessarily with the three entities of the singular Creator force.
Cubans of all walks of life and varieties of religious beliefs regularly engage the services of Ifá priest, called Babalawo, as well as the services of individuals whose practices resemble those of Ifá. The aim is to obtain a spirit-guided signal for petitioners on how best to arrange or re-arrange their lives for compatibility with supernatural balances of the universe. In Yoruba cultures, Ifá is directly linked with the worship tradition, in Cuba called Regla de Ocha/Lucumí.
During the early twentieth-century, when Cuba’s Africa-based activities began to be noticed and recorded by research scholars, and during the mid-twentieth-century when large numbers of Cuban nationals migrated to the United States and elsewhere, Yoruba practices of Ifá and Regla de Ocha became popularly recognized by the name Santería. Our review of historical events that brought this name to the practices shows that it was imposed from Eurocentric perspectives, retained -- perhaps willingly, and reified as non-differentiated descriptor that gave the unfamiliar customs familiarity to the recording researchers. Since that time, Regla de Ocha/Lucumí, Ifá, and other distinct Cuban practices have traveled beyond the island borders and have become even more conflated under the Santería heading.
We believe that conditions outside of Cuba have the nation where they probably produced a new constructed reality for the Yoruba Cuba-derived sets of sacred ways. Perhaps the term is an appropriate descriptor for customs practiced outside of Cuba. For Yoruba-based religious behaviors in Cuba, however, particularly those of Oriente, we chose the nominations used by practitioners— Regla de Ocha/Lucumí, and Ifá.[87]

Abakuá Abakuá or Ñañigo is a secret, exclusively male network association whose rituals and practices are rooted in the heritage that enslaved persons brought from western regions of the African continent. It traveled to Cuba from the Calibar region of West Africa that we associate with land spaces of southern Nigeria and Cameroon.[88] Although Abakuá has it own rites and rituals, it also incorporates elements from Regla de Ocha/Lucumí and Regla Conga/Palo. During field studies with practitioners, one of our authors encountered a number of male Ocha and Palo leaders who identified themselves as Abakuá members.[89] Individual societies of Abakuá, called potencias, are exceptionally protective of organizational secrets, which makes it difficult to gain a fuller understanding of the societies. We are fairly certain that there are individual Abakuá members in Oriente, but we feel that their numbers are relatively small and we doubt that there is an active potencia in the region.[90]

Arará This religious tradition has its African roots among the Fon people whom we associate with Dahomey or Benin of West Africa. It is this community of enslaved Africans that transplanted their sacred practices in Haiti and from which the Vodou/Vaudou was constructed. In Cuba, most Regla Arará practices can be found in the west and west central regions of the island. Given the common African origins, Arará does have similarities to the Vodú of Oriente but in the east the tradition is more associated with Haitian Vodou/Vaudou. We will clarify this later.
[*3]

SummaryConcluding Thoughts
In this chapter we have discussed severalpresented commonly shared factors that existunderstandings among Cuban religious traditions, especially as they are practiced in Oriente. It is significant that even as there were a wide variety of African ethnic groups among those enslaved in Cuba, most all were from Africa’s mid-west families of nations. Pre-colonial contact had already seen cross-group sharing and incorporation of religio-cultural features among these communities of people.[91] Both the ability to adapt to change from cultural contact, as well as the previously adopted sacred practices traveled to Cuba and the Americas. For our interest in Oriente sacred spaces constructed from Cuban traditions, it is even more significant that shared epistemological and ontological perspective was among the facilitators of the ability of enslaved Africans and their descendants to adjust and adopt without totally loosing the Africa-based center of their beliefs.
This chapter has also discussed how social interactions with various aspects of Cuban socio-political and historical situations saw African descendants become part of the Cuban cultural environment while retaining their Africanity. Together, these comprehensions should help organize the descriptive information about the four popular practices of Oriente that follows in the following chapters. For each tradition, we will clarify salient features of the historical background and brief summations about some beliefs but the major focus of the next chapters will be the sacred spaces of Regla Conga/Palo, Vodú, Espiritismo, and Regla de Ocha/Lucumí as presented in Oriente.







C H A P T E R 3

REGLA CONGA/PALO



Aside from Native Indian traditions that may yet remain in Cuba, Regla Conga/Palo, also known as Palo Monte, Regla Palo, and Mayombe, is the oldest indigenous religion on the island. It is indigenous because although its foundations were imported, the adaptation and restructuring from those African details that created a new set of practices, occurred in the Cuban landscape, and belonged to Cubans.
Regla Conga/Palo is the oldest Africa-based tradition created on the island because Bakongo/Kikongo captives were the largest enslaved ethnic group imported to Cuba during the formative years of colonialism.[92] Comprehensions associated with Regla Conga/Palo arrived in the fifteenth-century with the enslaved peoples whose cultures we associate with today’s regions of Gabon, the Congo, and Angola. Regla Conga/Palo is commonly understood to be the more complex and powerful of the distinct AfroCuban practices, perhaps because it emphasizes contact with elements of the natural environment, particularly the dead and their remains. The ritual language of the tradition comes from its Bakongo/Kikongo heritage or, as practitioners said to us, “We speak Cuban Creole Conga.”

Coming To Cuba and Oriente: In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the Spanish began to exchange indigenous Indian labor in their Cuban colony for that of enslaved Africans, the Africans were mostly though not exclusively from the Bakongo/Kikongo family of people. These groupings of peoples are from parts of south central West Africa and were imported for the colonial plantation economy of western regions of Havana and Matanzas. However, the plantation system also had roots in Oriente. Until 1607, the city of Santiago de Cuba was capital of the colony and the majority of its enslaved population of that time was from Bakongo/Kikongo ethnic groups.
As activities of the late-seventeenth-century began the French Revolution in Europe, waves of social disruption also migrated to the Americas, particularly to the French colony we now know as Haiti. Eventually, enslaved Africans in that French colony revolted and began their own struggle for independence.[93] Planters fled to Cuba in order to escape disarray and violence of the revolting island. They carried enslaved workers with them. Both groups of migrants arrived in Oriente, specifically areas of Santiago de Cuba, and the Haitian descendants brought another ethnic African influence to the region. The Fon descendants, also of West Africa, were now also a visible presence in Oriente but it was the early Bakongo/Kikongo that established ontological roots from which was built Cuba’s religious tradition of Regla Conga/Palo.
Africa-based rituals and practices that were reconstructed in Oriente belonged to beliefs and practices that are naturalist, cosmic, and scripting in their orientation. There is a pantheon of spirit forces that somewhat parallels that of Regla de Ocha, but the emphasis on actively working with spirits of the dead helps to set Regla Palo/Conga apart from most other customs in the region. Until the first half of the twentieth century, it was presumed that dark-skinned black Cubans, whose ancestors had been enslaved, were almost the exclusive practitioners of Regla Conga/Palo.[94] Because skin coloration in Cuba was an important signifier of social class status, it is important to understand this phenomenon in Oriente as it relates to Regla Conga/Palo.
For example, Holguín is one of Oriente’s larger cities and its racial history is as a haven for white and very light-brown skinned Cubans.[95] As late as the 1960s, children of the city have been socialized to believe that dark-skinned people, particularly men, were practitioners of Regla Conga/Palo and that these men searched for children during the night in order to eat them. The negative judgment and view about dark-skinned Cubans is co-joined with similar ideas about the religion. Such ideas can still be heard in Holguín though very quietly among trusted acquaintances, and not openly.[96] The tradition’s negative reputation persists even though there are no truths to substantiate the attitudes and perceptions and many light-brown and white skinned Cubans practice Regla Conga/Palo, as do Europeans and North Americans.[97]
The historical predominance of dark-skinned followers of Regla Conga/Palo is embedded in Oriente’s experience with African enslavement. Through a variety of conscious and unconscious efforts to whiten its population, the overall skin coloration of Cubans drifted away from the dark-skinned tones of most Africans and their descendants. At the same time, persistent practices of rape of African descendant women, prostitution, and miscegenation, as well as interracial marriages browned the Cuban population away from whiter skin color associated with Spanish and European heritage. As Verena Martinez-Alier says in Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba:
By the nineteenth century it had become well established that African origin implied slavery. Yet with progressive miscegenation and the appearance of a free coloured group, colour as a distinguishing mark of a person’s occupational status became increasingly equivocal and unreliable.

Given the affect of these trends on the skin color of the Cuban population, Africans imported for enslavement on the island during any time period would have been darker than many Cubans. Recently imported African descendants, and those enslaved would surely have gravitated to communities of African religious practices, particularly Regla Conga/Palo.
The status of Africans as enslaved labor “perpetuated colour prejudice as a conventional device to justify” the country’s economic system and one that ensured that race-color discrimination would carry-over into newer centuries, including the twentieth.[98] There are many Oriente communities and neighborhoods that were organized based on Cuba’s patterns of racism and racial segregation. Tivoli, Chicarrón, and Los Hoyos of Santiago de Cuba are prime examples and these neighborhoods continue into the twenty-first century, even though they are less homogeneous by skin color. Negative attitudes about Regla Conga/Palo practices appear to have lessened and seem strongest outside the historically black neighborhoods. In the Vista Alegre neighborhood of lighter-skinned, middle class persons of Santiago, darker-skinned U.S. investigators of our research team were told that Los Hoyos was “where all those blacks are. I don’t like all that black stuff.”[99]
Initially, Regla Conga/Palo does not enter Oriente as an interconnected network of religious communities whose leaders meet regularly to confer on matters of practice. This was more the situation in western, Havana areas. In Oriente there were individual Conga/Palo practitioners and/or communities but no mechanism that united them. In1912, Reynerio Pérez moved from Matanzas to the Santiago area. He traveled to support organized protests that contested patterns of racial discrimination that followed the 1895 Independence War and established a Cuban Republic thereafter. The Partido Independiente de Color was the organizational center of protest activities and in 1912 the Republic responded to the protest, fully supported by U.S. economic and military pressures, by massacring the dissenting black and mulatto Cubans. Some 3,000 persons were gunned down.[100]
Reynerio Pérez was most likely an independista but he also came to Oriente to organize the disjointed communities of religious believers into supportive networks of the faithful. Prior to this, Regla Conga/Palo and other Africa-based rituals had existed within individual communities of believers but they were not organized, interconnected networks of practitioners of any of the faiths.[101]

Belief Foundations: Ontologically, the Bakongo/Kikongo people of the African continent are a scripting cultural community who have a complex system of cosmograms related to their understanding of the universe. Robert Farris Thompson proposes that over the centuries, this group of African people has built “The Sign of the Four Moments of the Sun.”[102]
Every Regla Conga/Palo ritual in which we participated began with the scripting of cosmograms on the floor where activities were to take place. These cosmic scripts are affirmations of practitioners’ orientation toward the universe and also contain the spiritual signature of the Tata(s)—community leaders involved with the ritual. Often a straw mat, large green leaves, or another such natural fiber completely covered the scripting and the writing was never seen by uninitiated. The signature cosmograms used in ritual activities are particular to each TaTa and carry spiritual genealogical information. Robert Farris Thompson’s English volume, as well as Natalia Bolivar Arostegui’s Spanish one, are yet the best clarifications about the complexities of cosmograms in Cuba’s Regla Conga/Palo tradition.[103]
The Bakongo/Kikongo African communities also have a pantheon of spirit forces that have some overlap with the orisha associated with Cuba’s Yoruba-derived traditions. However, unlike the latter practices Bakongo/Kikongo ontological perspective mandates ritual behaviors that have multifaceted relationships with elements from categories of spirits, the dead, humans, and material.
Recent linguistic research suggests that the ritual language of Cuba’s Regla Conga/Palo remains consistent with that of Africa’s Bakongo/Kikongo peoples[104] and central to this religious language is the nomination ñgañga. The term is used on the continent to refer to “the wise man who is material and knowledge.”[105] The prefix ñga, which connotes a title given to a leader to emphasize nobility and dignity, gives this understanding to the term. As antecedent, ñga adds a superlative character to the meaning of a word. Therefore the ñgañga refers to the extraordinary leader whose knowledge, nobility, dignity, and wisdom is in categories of the superlative. Although ñgañga may be embodied in a human, in Oriente it is dually understood to be the power concentrated within the iron caldron container that is in every sacred space of Regla Conga/Palo. The container, by the meaning of its name is not merely holding power known to the tradition. Rather, the ñgañga is, and symbolically represents the knowledge, nobility, dignity, and wisdom, with a superlative nature, that is the universe and all life. The ñgañga is a central ontological element of Bakongo/Kikongo-derived traditions.
Ritual blood sacrifice of animals is a normal practice of Regla Conga/Palo, which is true for other Oriente traditions included in our research, especially Vodú, Regla de Ocha, and some varieties of Espiritismo. The practice is comprehended within the ontological context of humans’ responsibility to strive for right relations in/with the universe.[106] As humans and spirits exist together in the universe, and there are negative forces, beings, and actions just as there are positive ones, an imbalance can occur among the complex varieties of components. Malevolent and good spirits, as well as similar elements and humans, have the ability to make singular and collective decisions. All such decisions do not necessarily consider the consequence to balance in the universe. In addition, the living dead is composed of good and bad and these too can create an imbalance in the universal world of humans. As relationships become skewed or out of balance, a ritual sacrifice can be needed. The return to a more balanced state may be achieved by sacrificially offering the essential energy essence i.e., the blood of an animal or fowl. A wise and knowledgeable leader of the tradition defines the circumstances of the sacrifice, and its type after communication with the otherworld. A change in human behavior may also be the nature of the prescribed sacrifice. The TaTa Ñgañga, revered high leader of Regla Conga/Palo, in concert with the active ñgañga of the sacred space, makes the determination that ritual sacrifice is necessary and what type must be done.
Elements in each of the fundamental categories of spirits, the dead, humans, and material are known to possess some of the cosmic energy dispensed by the supernatural Creator at the time the universe was made. This does not necessarily mean that the amounts are equal as some categories have a stronger quality and quantity of the essential energy. Neither is the concentration of various energies located in a spiritual yet domesticated arena i.e., a house, an auditorium, a garden, patio, etc. Rather, the convergence of supernatural force is usually found in the uncultivated spaces of a forested area.

Space: Constructed spaces of Regla Conga/Palo are designed to be replications of outdoor forests areas wherein the descending cosmic power center has been previously identified as intersecting with other essential elements in the human realm. The assembled arrangements also are spaces where energy elements from each essential category are focusing their contribution and where various other contributions are coming together to equal
PICTURE # 82

In this photo, we see elements that replicate the Regla Conga/Palo sacricity of outdoor forest areas. The palero, a practitioner of the tradition, is using one of several appropriate gestures as he sprays malago or aguardiente (a rum) and, from the cigar in his left hand, he will also blow smoke toward the ñgañga.


an impactful junction of otherworld power. A quasi-electromagnetic cosmic field is created where the full complex of elements and creative essence converge. The field is a dynamic flow of elemental Conga/Palo cosmic energies in a highly articulated state of reciprocal communication. The energy field characterizes sacred sites and one can sensually observe an explosive potential of this convergence of cosmic energy, particularly during rituals designed to attend to specific situations e.g., initiation of new members, elimination of negatives operating in human lives, returning balance to earthly matters etc.
The ñgañga is a requirement for Regla Conga/Palo practices, in Cuba as well as on the continent, as this is where cosmic forces are assured to encounter the other powerful energetic elements that assist in creating an electromagnetic field. The ñgañga is usually an iron pot or caldron wherein an array of material items has been assembled from the equally varied categories of the natural environment. Materials in the ñgañga each possess a portion of the creative energy that, when activated, can combine to comprise the electromagnetic power center. For example, the ñgañga might contain dirt from far-reaching corners of the earth; sticks from an assortment of specialty trees and bushes; special empowered rocks from oceans, rivers, mountains, valleys, etc.; and skeletal remains from a wide selection of sacred animals, including human bones from persons known to have been powerful but who are now dead.
Some material objects are visible in photographs of this book. For example, in photo 82 the practitioner, called a palero, is saluting the ñgañga of his assembled space. The green leaves and branches from a tree, as well as the tree limbs themselves, are critical to replicating the forest of Conga/Palo cosmic energies and they participate in rituals that occur in the space. The ñgañga, with all of its characteristic elements—each with its cosmic energy—is also an active participant in sacred spaces of the tradition and we must remember that ñgañga can be personified in a human
To appreciate the probability that ñgañga is embodied in a human, we must assume an Africa-based understanding of a spirit-filled universe and a similar understanding of family. That humans can embody spirits, including that of the ñgañga, is an irreplaceable ontological position of Bakongo/Kikongo and other Africa-based epistemological contexts. Similarly, the Africa-based concept of extended family is vital to sacred life-styles constructed in Oriente and throughout Cuba. Family is paramount. Within Regla Congo/Palo communities, it is hierarchically structured and begins with the understanding that Ñsambe, or Sambia-Mpungo is the singular, omnipresent, supernatural being, and Creator of all existence. Ñsambe, or Sambia-Mpungo is at the apex of family, universal and specific. Humans are grateful to Ñsambe because the supernatural Creator brought them and everything else into the universe. Humans were created with sufficient capacity to attend to their own subsistence in a rational lifecycle and have no need for further contact with Ñsambe. Individually, humans do not even call the name of Ñsambe although the Creator is conceived in all things that humans need. The Tata Ñgañga, leader of a Regla Conga/Palo family may utter a brief invocation of the name at the beginning of special rituals but this is as often as the name of the supernatural Creator need be called.
The father of a given Regla Conga/Palo worship family community is the Tata Ñgañga. The family is an extended one that includes all persons initiated by the Tata into the faith. Non-initiated but consanguine family members are also considered part of the worship community. The number of family members can be hundreds and their residents can be oceans away from the Tata’s sacred space. To achieve the level of Tata Ñgañga, a man must have acquired a requisite body of ritual and religious knowledge to inherit and direct an ñgañga. The Tata possesses the ñgañga and directs affairs of the extended family community with the help of the ñgañga’s muerto – person who has crossed from the material phenomena world to the world of spirits, a dead person. The Yayi is the symbolic mother of the worship community and accompanies the Tata in managing spiritual affairs of the family through the ñgañga. The Tata and Yayi are padrinos, godparents to all members of a given Regla Conga/Palo community and they are in charge of resolving members’ spiritual problems and difficulties. All responsibilities of Regla Conga/Palo are fulfilled with assistance from the ñgañga. The symbolic, spiritual “birth through the ñgañga” that all initiated members experience is equally assisted by the padrinos.
We have never seen a woman Tata Ñgañga although we heard rumors about such. The Tata Ñgañga is an indispensable position in the patriarchal practice of Regla Conga/Palo and we doubt that women serve in the role. However, women are responsible for dressing ceremonial animals after a sacrifice and preparing foodstuffs during and after rites, rituals, and celebrations. We have also seen some but not a majority number of women serving as the consecrated chanters required to accompany some ritual activities. Women do participate in cleaning sacred spaces, but it is normal for men to clean the floor after ceremonial sacrifices and to be active participants in generally cleaning of sites as well. Initiated female and male members have always been those who participated in the post-sacrificial or general cleaning activities of sacred spaces.
In the complicated network of relationships that comprise an Oriente sacred site of Conga/Palo, energy from elements of each essential category (i.e., spirits, the dead, humans, and material) can be mobilized around the unknown and elusive cosmic center of the supernatural world. One practitioner colleague told us that the energy of these component parts “requires a Conga person to set it in motion, a person with an African point of view.” This does not mean that the person must be visibly or phenotypically of African ancestry, but it does mean that activation requires intimate familiarity with Regla Conga/Palo knowledge and a practice of its lifestyle.[107]
The person capable of mobilizing the relationship between all of the complex constituent cosmic elements, toward the concentrated yet undefined center, must transpose their thinking from Western European or other underpinnings of universal time, and acquire an alternative time dimension that is Africa-based in its conception. This is not easy and requires years of participation and training. Still, the mere ability to act within Africa-based time space does not guarantee that all components of the electromagnetic cosmic field will converge. The person activating the energies must also have deep knowledge of and experience in actually setting in motion the complex relationship. This means that the person must live the Regla Conga/Palo life even if her or his material reality is contemporary.
Calling upon the spiritual energies of the dead, the supernatural spirits, energies of humans, and those of materials is normally carried out in celebrations or remembrances and in response to situations that need resolving in the historical world of humans. But we must not forget that supernatural spirits, as well as spirits of the dead also occupy the historical world. Therefore, their involvement in Regla Conga/Palo rituals can help resolve situations just as that involvement can initiate a situation needing resolution. This concedes Regla Conga/Palo’s comprehension and actualization of the significant Africa-based interconnection between time and space. If a given issue is to be resolved, energies from elements in human time and space must necessarily interact with those from supernatural space and time. In this regard, we recall from chapter 2 that it is through ritual activities that otherworld time and space is accessible to humans, which allows them to participate in the realm of the supernatural.
When one enters a sacred space of Regla Conga/Palo, the most visibly striking aspects are the material objects. The dried blood of a sacrificed animal, the skeletal head of a lion, the femur or other bone of a human, the taxidermial-like character of a large turtle, all are dramatically and unavoidable attracted to human senses. In many ways, it is the presence of these dramatically arresting components that have contributed to negative stereotypes that outsiders, particularly European Americans’ and Eurocentric others, have about the religious tradition. The distaining attitudes take on added weight of

Picture # 251

This is a photo of the ñgañga of a well-known and powerful Tata ñgañga of Oriente. Note that there are three ñgañga caldrons, one left, one center , and one right. The lighter colored object at the top of the center ñgañga is the head of a lion.

signifying Regla Conga/Palo because for more than half a millennium, Christianity dominated Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas and such Eurocentric thinking colloquially and academically labeled Cuba’s distinct religious traditions, particularly Regla Conga/Palo, as brujeria—witchcraft.[108] The label was derived from comparative assessments of activities not understood from Christian perspectives and then interpreted as superstition, evil, and demonic. The signified understanding about Africa-based and Cuban sacred practices also informed the powerful social structures of African hemispheric subjugation. Many of these have not yet completely disappeared.
Regla de Conga/Palo is doubly signified for its work with relics of previously living things and with spirits of the dead, despite the ontological integrity of the religious rituals. The work continues to be thought by many non-practitioners as outright evil, devilish, and debased. The lexicon of demonic language that remains, embedded in Western European and North American cultures, is used to describe the tradition into the twenty-first-century biases[*4] .[109]
The sacred spaces of Oriente’s Regla Conga/Palo rituals may be distinctive as compared with counterpart customs in western Cuba. For example, it is not uncommon for uninitiated persons in Oriente to be allowed to participate in select ceremonial activities. On an occasion when a Tata Ñgañga was presenting aspects of the tradition to a public group gathered at his official space, activities reached a point where all non-initiates were asked to step out of the room. As our Team’s uninitiated members stood to leave, the Tata, who had come to know Team members during their research, touched their shoulders and specifically asked, “Where’re you going? You’re one of us. Get’n here!!” After they stepped back inside the room, and other non-initiates had stepped out, the doors were closed and the ceremony continued. When we inquired how this could be allowed, we were told that uninitiated persons are allowed to participate once their spirits have been revealed to already belong to the tradition, even if the individual does not believe this to be so and may know little about Regla Conga/Palo. It is the Tata Ñgañga who discerns the spiritual energy of the uninitiated and intervenes to direct it accordingly.[110]
In Oriente, the positive energy of a non-practitioner blood relation is also allowed to participate in select Regla Conga/Palo activities. On more than one occasion, in more than one sacred space, we observed that uninitiated blood relations of a community, specifically children, were allowed to enter and take part in some but not all activities. On the other hand, we have encountered a Tata Ñgañga who had moved to Oriente from Havana who acknowledged that he would not allow uninitiated persons, relatives or not, to join his religious activities or to enter into his sacred space.[111]
We believe that there is an additional characteristic that distinguishes Oriente Regla Conga/Palo practices. The overlap between and among Oriente practices that occurs regarding material objects in sacred spaces is this characteristic. It is common to see sacred objects of Regla Conga/Palo companioned with items associated with Regla de Ocha or Espiritismo. This is true even of relics from the dead that are deemed exceptionally significant and powerful in Regla Conga/Palo. For example, images in our photos #82 and 85 are from a single sacred space of the tradition. In photo #82 there are thin, light-colored objects (center and left within the ñgañga caldron that is raised from the floor). These are bones of dead animals. Such physical remains of the dead are essential elements of the tradition and are required to be part of assembled spaces.
In photo #85, a different angle of the same Regla Conga/Palo space, we can identify items associated with non-Conga/Palo practices. There is a glass of clear water with cut leaves, as well as a large stone centered in the photo. The clear glass of water, with the cut leaves, as well as the large stone are common objects for sacred sites of the tradition but they are also material objects typically connected with Espiritismo spaces. This photo also has a ceramic image of a Native American Indian and a red headband with feathers that is equally known to be part of indigenous cultural traditions. However, during certain Regla Conga/Palo rituals, when the Tata or other paleros are in trance, the headband is ritualistically placed on the head of a trancing person. Clearly objects related to Native American Indians were not derived from the African heritage of this religious practice. In Oriente however, the cross-religious inclusion of material objects is common and done so without an apparent strong sense of contradiction. It has been suggested to us that western portions of Cuba, material elements of Regla Conga/Palo, particularly those of the dead, are known not to share space with elements of other sacred life-styles.

PICTURE #85

It may seem unusual that there is an image of a Native American Indian in this munanso, sacred room of a Regla Conga/Palo practitioners. The red headband made of feathers, sitting to the left, is also linked with indigenous inhabitants but during certain Palo rituals, when the palero while he is in trance, he puts on it on his head.

Summary Thoughts
Regla Conga/Palo was among the first set of religious customs to arrive in Orient with enslaved members of Africa’s Bakongo/Kikongo people. This cultural community of sacred believers not only gave Cuba many practices encompassed in Regla Conga/Palo but they imparted Africa-based epistemological and ontological roots as foundational aspects for much of Cuban cultural consciousness. The consolidation of Regla Conga/Palo in Oriente into a network of worshiping communities does not actually occur until the early twentieth-century though practicing individuals and separated groups had existed centuries earlier.
Sacred spaces of Regla Conga/Palo are constructed replications of forest areas where the electro-magnet energies of spirit, human, and material are known to converge. The ñgañga is the central element in constructed spaces and it contains elements from the powerful sites of the universe, including remains of beings also known to be powerful. The Regla Conga/Palo worship society is a family of all persons initiated by the male leader of the group. Females have intimate roles in ritual activities and, with the requisite knowledge, wisdom, and experience, can become the community’s companion, with the Tata Ñgañga, of initiates’ spiritual affairs. All spiritual work is done with the leader of the worshipping collective, the Tata Ñgañga and/or the physical element of the ñgañga of the sacred space.
In Oriente, Regla Conga/Palo appears to be less dogmatic in practice as even non-initiated persons can be allowed to participate in some ritual activities, based on the determination of the Tata Ñgañga. Similarly, this religious tradition does not appear to have major conficts with incorporating material elements from other Cuban practices. Regla Conga/Palo spaces, for example, can and do include material objects that are known to be characteristic markers for practitioners of Espiritismo as well as for objects normally associated with Native American Indian cultural communities.





























C H A P T E R 4

V O D Ú



In Oriente, sacred spaces of Vodú differ from sites associated with other Cuban religions of the region. As a first difference, Vodú spaces are only indirectly linked to the history and practice of this sacred life-style derived from the Dahomey, now Benin communities of West Africa. As it arrived to Cuba directly from the continent, the religion is known as Arará and there are still some few Arará communities in western areas of the island. However, practices of the Africa-based tradition, as they were adapted to Cuba from Africa, do not appear to have worshiping societies in Oriente. The Vodú of the eastern region is active and vibrant presence but it is a product of migration from Haiti.

Coming to Cuba and Oriente
The journey of Vodú to Oriente was through Haiti where, as early as the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries, sacred practices of Vodou/Vaudou were constructed on that the second largest island of colonial Caribbean. The Vodou/Vaudou created in Haiti was a re-blending of religious customs from the Fon people of areas of Benin and western Nigeria. Enslaved Africans, who lived under French domination on the western end of the colonial island then called Hispaniola, knew well religious practices of their ancestral homeland.[112] Customs were transported across the Atlantic as re-composed behaviors garnered from contact with neighboring African cultural groups and they arrived with enslaved persons to the Americas. On the French colony, captured Africans used homeland epistemological and ontological foundations for another reconstruction of their sacred practices in new circumstances. The result was an additional re-blending of religious activities that became Vodou/Vaudou.
French-dominated St. Domingue was noted for the varieties of mixed race inhabitants as well as for the racially separated social organizations called societé. These were organized as independent sectors of the colonial social order and were mechanisms for blacks, mulattos, free blacks, free persons of color, and others to participate in civil society.[113] Members of black societé performed military duties as early as the eighteenth century and were intimately linked to the Haitian Revolution and the formation of an independent nation. Vodou/Vaudou was the spiritual foundation of these.
A similar arrangement for African descendants existed in Cuba, called cabildos but these organizations were formed later and by the Spanish colonial government and were only marginally related to Cuban civil society.[114] Cabildos did not comprise military units until the Ten Year War of 1868 and even then black soldiers were not generally known by their cabildo affiliations as “mambi”. Great numbers of cabildo members, as mambi and otherwise, did participate in Cuba’s 1895 Independence War but not as actual military units.[115] Both societé and cabildo organizations were secret, mostly ethnic-related, social networks of African descendants. Both functioned as associations where religious practices were fundamental for helping to cultivate, sustain, and innovate Africa-based homeland customs in the Caribbean situations.[116] Societé were centers of Vodou/Vaudou activity for African descendants of St Domingue, later to be Haiti, and Haitian Africans carried their experiences to Oriente.
A first phase of Haitian migration to Cuba occurred at the close of the eighteenth-century when French colonial planters and plantation owners fled to avoid the Haitian Revolution. The fleeing planters arrived in Oriente and brought their enslaved African descendants with them. The black and white migrants also brought technical and administrative experiences developed from work on coffee and sugar plantations. This allowed the economic transformation of Cuban sugar, coffee, and tobacco production into international profitability. Almost immediately, the African Haitians encountered familiar practices, including those of the Cuban cabildos. These social formations clearly resembled societé brotherhoods and, based on what the early Haitian Africans observed in Spanish churches of Santiago de Cuba, they knew they had re-encountered their religious heritage.
The Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier captured sights seen by these migrants and how they most likely understood the Santiago churches as they accompanied their French masters from the convulsed St. Domingue. Carpentier said what the Africans saw was:
Baroque gold, human hair on the Christ’s[*5] , the confessional was 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.[117]

Adding to all of this was the fact that the name of the Cuban city was Santiago, name of the Catholic counterpart to the Haitians’ own warrior spirit Ogún. Haitians knew Santiago as the powerful Africa-based spirit, Ogún Fai who was the force invoked by Boukman's soldiers of the Revolution. An old song, “Mackandal,” handed down from an earlier revolutionary freedom fighter, strengthened the connection between the two island realities. The song said,
Santiago, I’m the war’s son, Santiago.
Can’t you see that I’m the war’s son?

Clearly, the new situation contained truth already known by the Haitians. They were in familiar spiritual territories.
Beyond the informed approval with which they viewed iconic parallels to their homeland of Haiti, the arriving Vodou/Vaudou practitioners, called serviteurs, would also have recognized religious practices of the Cuban Africans, those of Bakongo/Kikongo heritage. they observed. We must remember that the Vodou/Vaudou of Haiti had been adjusted to the colonial situation from blended and re-constructed sacred customs first achieved on
PICTURE #4

Here we see Vodú ritual drums of the Dahomeian style (front center and left) in a household space of a Haitian French barrio of Santiago de Cuba. To the right is a framed picture of the national symbol of the Haitian Republic as well as ceramic figures (center on three different tiers) of reconstructed Loa warrior spirits/ Catholic saints whose identities are venerated in Vodú and other Cuban religious traditions.

the African continent.[118] For example, Haitians were knowledgeable of truths about the Bakongo/Kikongo reverence for the dead. This knowledge had first become part of their sacred reservoir through contacts in Africa with peoples from this cultural family. Another Cuban encountered familiarity would have been the Bakongo/Kikongo tradition’s emphasis on the dead. Vodou/Vaudou itself maintained ritualized inclusion of the dead in its sacred practices. These and other overlaps from the African-base of their tradition, coupled with similarities with their Haitian practice experiences, gave the new migrants to Cuba a strong foundation of religious connections. The shared knowledge with the new location was in ontological approach, in deity recognition, and in ritual practices, to name a few common arenas.
As additional Haitians continued to arrive in Oriente Cuba at the opening of the nineteenth-century, they too had little difficulty understanding the Bakongo/Kikongo based life-style, including its epistemological root and bio-metaphysics orientation. Nor were Cuban Yoruba practices new to the Haitians. Cuban Ifá diviners, for example, employed “both hands” just as Haitian Fon descendant diviners served their Loa/spirits with “both hands.” Even the Vodou/Vaudou system of spirit communication, called Fa, had linguistic and other similarities with Yoruba Ifá, all reflecting earlier contact and cultural sharing between the two West African people. Such deep structure religious commonalities facilitated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitian Vodou/Vaudou serviteurs’ in re-establishing their sacred life-style in the Cuban landscape. And of course, the presence of cabildo/cofradia organizations also eased the transition and provided a forum for adjusting societé to the Spanish social system of Oriente.
Today, Oriente’s Tumba Francesca is a lasting reminder of Haitian African contribution to Cuban religion and culture. These are cabildo-societé type associations that, over the years, have maintained ritual songs, dances, and drumming to become comparsas in Carnival parades. The Orient legend is that Haitian Africans who worked in the mountain coffee plantations of the region rehearsed their routines to participate in city festivals of Santiago. Their productions also included an impersonated version of the staid dances they observed French colonialist perform. Just prior to a festival event, these groups, with their drums, costumes, and other attire, would march down the mountain into Santiago while drumming and chanting songs from their Haitian-French African tradition. The Haitians danced and reveled as “Tumba Francescas.[119] Today, the Isabellica coffee plantation is being reconstructed as an historical site of Cuban Haitian influence (see photo #333).
In Oriente, the Haitian Vodou/Vaudou was re-composed yet again in adapting to Cuba. The product was Vodú and it was consistently affirmed and renewed by the unremitting migration to the region of additional Haitians and by the general importation of new Africans, called brozales, of Fon heritage. However, by the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, the pattern of Haitian migration took on a different dynamic. Large agricultural enterprises were established in Oriente as the United States retained military occupancy of Cuba after the 1895 Independence War. The U. S. then exercised political and economic veto power over much of Cuban affairs into the twentieth-century. The new capitalist economic enterprises created a tremendous demand for cheap labor to harvest coffee, sugar cane, and other crops that began to refill international markets under U.S. influence.
All of this brought forth another major increase in the migration and importation of Haitian farm laborers who worked for low wages in Cuba. The new workforce also brought their Vodou/Vaudou tradition and the Haiti to Cuba migratory stream from was repeated through the first four decades of the twentieth-century. In the closing decades of that century, the migratory pattern of movement persisted as Haitians fled a modern series of political and economic hardships at home.

Belief Foundations: The Vodú tradition of Oriente maintains the pantheonic lineages of great supernatural spirit forces, called Loa, derived from the Haitian re-blending of a previously re-formulated African religious tradition. The lineages are the Rada and Petro and Robert and Farris Thompson clearly describes them as follows:
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 Petro-Lemba, 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. [120]

Beyond and above each of these spirit lineages is the Bon Dieu or Grand Met, the supreme Creator power.
Within the Rada class of Loa, Damballa is the lead spirit and is represented as the serpent. Rada spirits are exceptionally powerful and have dominion over/responsible for the soul, the sky, the earth, the seas, and the universe. These Loa only perform good works and, as powerful as they are, have limited power. The triumvirate of Baron Samedi, Baron Cimetiere, and Baron Crois lead the Petro class of Loa and they are even stronger spirits whose bodies have departed human time and the historical material world. The Petro Loa are ancestors who have moved beyond material phenomena time of humans, beyond the time of the living dead, and into macro time of the long past as discussed in chapter 2. Petro spirits are capable of intervening into Rada activities on behalf of human beings who serve the Petro Loa within ritual practices of the Vodú tradition.
For the most, Oriente’s early Vodú collectivities, and their ritual activities were closely aligned with family membership relations and those connections to the mambo or hougan, female and male community leaders. This continues to be true for today, see photo #226, as bonds of ritual practice and family relations include a link to the closest genealogical family of the mambo or hougan, female and male leaders.
The predominant devotion to the Haitian Loa of the warrior Ogún family also persists in contemporary Oriente Vodú communities. Oriente’s emphasis on Papa Ogún is a strong example. This Loa is associated with Dahomeian lore of war first united with the Yoruba orisha of iron, and in-turn aligned in the Americas with the warrior saints of the Catholic pantheon.[121]
Picture #226

This is the tabletop portion of part of a Vodú sacred space in Las Tunas. The two red drums, one against the back wall the other being played by the man standing, are typical of Cuba’s Vodú tradition. They are not made with metal but are tuned by warming the animal skin top over heat and twisting the wooden pegs to tighten the skin to the proper sound.


In photograph #4 of this book, the reconstructed spirit is presented in a ceramic figurine and a picture as a warrior astride a horse in motion as on a battlefield.
In metaphoric fashion, a profound and repetitive symbolic representation of Vodú will contain a saber on top of a mountain, guarding a bonfire under a silent ski, or of a sky crossed by ferocious lightning. This representation can be found in most every assembled Vodú space, usually as a colorful flag or banner. Even for generations of Cuban serviteurs who have no Haitian experience, this imagery serves as a memory device. Not only is it a consistent visual component of critical beliefs of their faith but the representation is also a reminder of Vodú’s important role in historical struggles for Haitian independence. Just as Oriente Vodú practices are ritual religious endeavors, they and their sacred spaces serve to maintain distinct Haitian consciousness. Cuban serviteurs remain Haitian no matter how else they self-identify.
Like practitioners of other Cuban religious traditions, Vodú serviteurs hold that the most basic access to the non-material supernatural world occurs through the act of possession and it is in sacred spaces that Loa’s usually borrow a serviteurs’ body. Serviteurs are able to enter a temporary exaltation of sacred time—to be possessed, through ritual activities in such spaces. But, even the language of possession is inadequate to describe what serviteurs experience.
The language of possession is not conceptually grounded in an ontological perspective derived from an Africa-based epistemological place. More accurately, the language of possession has been imposed on Vodú- Vodou/Vaudou practices as constructed and reified terms of Western European and North American linguistic hegemony. The understandings associated with the language construct were mostly derived from Hollywood style stories, films and television that described the tradition as practices of ignorant superstitious blacks, ‘devil worshipers,’ primitive African peoples, and a variety of combinations from these. Without these significations of the media and other such articulations about the sacred joining of spirit with body, we might have been more receptive to hearing serviteurs’ awareness and understandings of the Loa in/on their bodies. These practitioners say they experience an extra-ordinary presence of spirit(s) force moving into/onto their bodies and that presence(s) evokes a “trance” as they are being “mounted.”
We agree with Joan Dayan who contends that for those who serve the Loa, to surrender will and body and to become a vessel for use by the Loa is the best, if not the highest type of spiritual submission.[122] Those of the otherworld must own the body if human servants are to participate in the phenomena of macro, cosmic time. Vodú life-style is much more than a superstructure or reference system with regard to spirits within the body and otherwise. Vodú lifestyle encompasses all that serviteurs might be about. It is part of every aspect of their existence. As O Dathorne says of practitioners;
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 lace 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.[123]

Spaces: In the earlier historical presence of Vodú in Oriente, constructed spaces were in the thickest areas of the Sierra Maestra mountains, in the many flatland sugar cane (llano canero) communities surrounding the mountains, and in some visible vicinities of populous Santiago de Cuba. Today, the ideal spaces are still known to be those of the natural forested environment. The sky, mountains, rivers, trees, animals, etc., all comprise the sacred scenery of this religious tradition.
During our research, we have encountered Vodú collectivities in every locale of Oriente—in the hills, the suburbs, and in cities—but our most active contact was with members of communities in areas of Las Tunas, Santiago, Guantánamo, and Palmas. Some sacred spaces in these locations were constructed within domestic settings—the interior of a bedroom dedicated to worship activities or in a specified room of the principal official’s residence. Other assemblages were completely separated from the leader’s domestic household. There is no inconsistency in the variety of locations for Vodú sacred spaces. Most rituals are organized by way of individual leaders and their particular interpretation of communications from/with Loa of the otherworld. This means that from one area to the next, constructed sites are not necessarily built according to an exact standard but will vary depending on the leadership of a particular membership community. The most sacred of all places, however, are those in a forest area of eastern Cuba’s mountains.
The hunfos/houngans[124] are the semi-constructed buildings erected specifically for special Vodú rituals. These semi-permanent buildings are situated in patio-like areas where members of a community gather to perform ritual activities, individually and collectively. Hunfo/houngan structures have four poles that circumscribe the building and are optimally made from wood by experienced carpenters who have included refined decorative embellishments in the woodwork. Some of these sacred sites are rather temporary constructions, erected for specific worship, festival, or celebration occasions and broken down afterward. But whether temporary or permanent, or even when the sacred assemblages are in a domestic location, the Vodú floor is always a focal point of the arena.
The floor is where the veve is drawn before each ritual event. The veve is an intricately shaped chalk-like dust drawing scripted on the floor. It is formed by dribbling flour, meal, colored dust, chalk, ground egg-shells, or another such material in shapes significant to understandings of the Loa and other Vodú spirits. A leader of the particular activity ritualistically constructs the symbolic drawing just prior to the beginning of that event. Additional ritual actions are then performed on and around the veve.
A place for fire, which is part of all Vodú rituals, is central to sacred spaces. The poteau-mitan, the wooden pole that sets a midpoint of the entire space is equally important and indispensable. This pole is usually anchored in the earth of the peristyle dance area that is the hunfo/houngan. The poteau-mitan functions as a centering device that connects the earthly world with the supernatural realm and is understood as the site of Loa entry into ritual space and human historical time.[125] The poteau-mitan 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 unless there is a leader—mambo or houngan—a fire, a poteau-mitan centering pole, and a veve. The particular site of the ceremony is less significant, though most serviteurs prefer designated constructed hunfos in an outdoor-forested area.
Sacred spaces of Vodú in Oriente are dominated by the color of red and contain a wide variety of material objects, many dissimilar by standards of non-practitioners. The poteau-mitan of the serpent or its representation is a beginning focal point of these tangible items within the hunfo/houngan. On a low shelf near the pole is a darkened bottle or jug filled with sticks, herbs, peppers, rocks, and other materials, as well as aguardiente rum or other strong alcoholic liquid. This too is a point of attraction when one enters the space because the bottle is passed to everyone to take a drink.
Vodú sites contain broken tree branches hung on the wall or placed on the floor. Seashells, large seeds, animal skins, animal tusks or horns, not to mention that a few small animals can be seen inside but, these are just a few objects that catch the eye in Vodú spaces. The floor and walls of the hunfo will contain a wide variety of photographs and other images of humans as well as Christian saints. It is not uncommon either to find colorful hand-sewn banners in the spaces, although these are less common in Oriente than in spaces of Haitian Vodou/Vaudou.


Picture # 227

In this photo of a Vodú sacred space in Oriente we can see the larger bottle just to the left of center. It is filled with rocks, twigs, peppers, and is passed to everyone in the room to take a drink.

The variety of rocks and stones in all Vodú spaces are significant as they represent and embody Loa spiritual presences. They are known to transcend historical reality. The assumed materiality of the stones and other objects often misleads uninformed observers into not acknowledging spiritual forces at work in Vodú sacred spaces. What some non-religious observers see as “things,” serviteurs know as spirits. The material objects and the physical space are all part of the larger frame of sacred human relations. The entire assemblage is part of the complex of transcendental forces that is the universe —part of the interconnected, multifaceted, supreme creative essence that unites humans and historical reality with the universal “All.” This epistemological understanding and ontological orientation causes enormous, sometimes irremediable difficulty for most outsiders who come to admire and be amazed by the Vodú tradition, whether in Oriente or elsewhere. The ability to know that stones and other objects of sacred spaces represent, while simultaneously existing as Loa and other spirits breaks with Western European and North American traditions that define a world of matter.
The shedding of animal blood, as a sacrificial sharing of the sacred liquid of creation, is mandatory of Vodú practice in Oriente and this holy ritual occurs in sacred spaces. It is not uncommon for a pig to be sacrificed in Vodú rituals of Oriente. This appears distinct to this tradition, as we have not seen a pig sacrificed during ritual activities of another set of sacred practices in the region.

Summary Thoughts
The Vodú of Orient is a direct derivative of religious life-styles of Haiti even as the latter are re-constructions of previously blended African practices of the Ewe-Fon people. The Vodou/Vaudou arrived in Oriente as French planters brought their enslaved workers to flee the erupting Haitian Revolution of the late eighteenth-century.
In Oriente, African descendants of Haiti encountered familiar signs and symbols in a city of Santiago whose very name evoked the revered name of a primary spirit force in their sacred consciousness. Adjustment to the Cuban situation was made additionally easier by the existence of black cabildo associations that resembled black societé of their Haitian home.
Constructed sacred spaces of Vodú in Oriente are semi-permanent wooden structures with a center pole that serves to symbolically and realistically connect the world of humans with that of the spirit world as the pole reaches upward. In various locations of the open construction are a number of material objects as well as small animals. The rocks and stones in Vodú sacred spaces are representations and the actual embodiment of Loa spirits. Photo images of significant but deceased community members are an important presence among the assemblages as are iconic representations of Loa spirits within the images of Catholic saints. When compared to some sacred spaces of some Espiritismo traditions, as we will discuss next, Vodú sites are a colorful montage of images, things, and beings.





































C H A P T E R 5

E S P I R I T I S M O



Espiritismo is distinctively rooted in the historical and cultural particularities of Cuba and is one of the most widely practiced sacred traditions in Oriente. The success of the 1959 Cuban Revolution brought new provincial divisions to the eastern region of Oriente where five provinces, Guantánamo, Camaguey, Holguín, Las Tunes, and Gramma, were created from one historical geographic unit. Espiritismo is most prevalent in these provinces though it is practiced throughout the nation. Today there are at least five distinct varieties of Espiritismo and each contains a rich and dynamic set of particularized but sometimes overlapping customs. The more popular denomination-like varieties can be summarized as follows.
El Bembé de Sao
The origins of this variety of Espiritismo are those ritualized activities that preceded nineteenth-century migration and acceptance of Espiritismo in Cuba. Bembé de Sao practices can be traced to the barracones (barracks) where enslaved Bakongo/Kikongo Africans of the earliest colonial periods were housed. The practices have a strong emphasis on behavioral elements from this African origin.

Espiritismo Cruzado
Practices of this Espiritismo are particularly filled with blended and re-constructed components of the island’s Africa-based religions i.e., Regla de Ocha/Lucumi, Regla Conga/Palo, Abakuá/Ñañiguismo, Vodú, as well as Cuban folk Catholicism. Because it is created from re-built blendings, Cruzado appears in many forms. Don Fernando Ortiz described the distinct African way in which Cuban practitioners adapted religious traditions to the particularities of their lifestyles and ontological intentionality when he said: “When the Cuban African men practice a religion, whichever this may be, they tend to add: ‘according to my way.’”[find quote]

Espiritismo de Cordon
This variety of Espiritismo is characterized by the richness of dances and songs that accompany its rituals. Practitioners form a human chain or cord (cordon), with the leadership of spiritual mediums, and chant as they carry out the spiritual work. This type of ritual practice is prevalent in Oriente but rarely found in Cuba’s western or middle areas.

Espiritismo de Mesa o Cientifico
Followers of this Espiritismo self-identify their practice as science not religion. Fundamentally, the ritual consists of believers sitting around a table (mesa) and entering a state of trance after making invocations that establish communication with spiritual forces of the cosmos. Nevertheless, followers do not consider themselves ritualistic.

Espiritismo de Caridad
This variety of Espiritismo is similar in beliefs to that of Mesa but Caridad gives more emphasis to the practice of charitable gifts (despojo) and pilgrimages (santiguacion). Practitioners strongly contend that by so doing they garner benefits to themselves and/or others in need.

Of these five, Cruzado and Cordon are the most widely known in Oriente but aspects of Bembé de Sao have been so incorporated into Cuban popular culture that it too must be considered among the wide spread varieties of Espiritismo. Bembé de Sao is also the oldest of the Espiritismo practices though contemporarily it is rarely seen as a distinct and separate set of rituals, neither have we found spaces devoted to de Sao. Despite the absence of sacred spaces, however, we include a discussion of this ancestral tradition because it is a platform of customs whose aspects, though rarely conducted as an entire set of rituals, are part and parcel of several Cuban sacred life-styles and are signature characteristics of Cuban cultural consciousness. This chapter will focus on the Bembé de Sao, Cruzado, and Cordon varieties of Espiritismo as expressed in Oriente but first we must explore how Espiritismo arrived in Cuba and Oriente.

Coming to Cuba: The organizational beginnings of Espiritismo arrived in Cuba at the middle of the nineteenth century from the Spiritism of the United States by way of French Kardecian Spiritualism that was popular among Europeans and European Americans. However, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century enslaved Africans laid the ontological and epistemological foundations that received Spiritualism in Cuba. To understand how this occurred, it is useful to recall Chapter 2 where we discussed commonalities among the Africa-based traditions and their shared epistemological and ontological perspectives. The commonalities included an understanding that the entire universe was occupied or filled by spirits long before a material world appeared.[126] After the material world was placed into what we know as the universe—each faith has its own Creation story, a few select beings were able to see the spirits, many of whom continued to exist in historical time.[127] Humans who possessed this visionary ability often painted their bodies colors they saw in/of the spirits, usually a translucent white. Long before the first Europeans appeared in Africa or in the Americas, sightings and expressions of spirits were a normal occurrence. Comprehensions about spirits and their presence in the phenomenal world of humans were well understood when spiritualism arrived in Cuba.
Enslaved Africans had carried their commonly shared epistemological knowledge, and ontological orientation about the order of the world, with them across the Atlantic Ocean to the Western Hemisphere. It was in their minds, their hearts, their bodies, as well as in their soulful spirits. It was in the drum rhythms they beat on hand drums; in the chants they intoned, and in the movements of their bodies during dance. The Africa-based ontological perspective became integrated with some aspects of European colonial spiritual and religious knowledge even as the first Cuban settlements were established in Oriente. The Africa-based ontological approach would persist and become an important root on which Espiritismo would be planted evolve.
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century varieties of Espiritismo were able to emerge as strong practices patterns in eastern Cuba partly because of positions taken by the Cuban Catholic Church. The Church hierarchy was particularly disapproving of sacred activities of Regla Conga/Palo and Vodú practitioners who had well established themselves in the early nineteenth-century and were normative in Oriente. Spiritualism and Spiritism began to appear in Cuba in the 1840s and offered an alternative to the rigidity of the Catholic Church. The Church disallowed and de-legitimized re-constructed and Cuban born religious practices. The position created a schism between Spanish authority and Cuban citizens, a schism that included Cuban animosity about their dependent, colonial relation to Spain as well as animosity regarding dictates about Cuban spiritual matters.
Nevertheless, Cuban religious practices included compatibilities between their African-based roots and various Cuban Catholic customs. These helped diffuse some of the Church’s onslaught of control. The island’s social and political space was permeated with an institutional racism whose impact was strongest against enslaved persons, descendants of the enslaved, and darker brown-skinned persons no matter free of enslaved.[128] Governmental authorities enforced strict controls of the enslavement system, and Catholic authorities insisted that their traditions were superior and all other should be abandoned.[129] By their behavior, Cuban Africans were unwilling to abdicate their re-composed homeland truths for those proposed by their enslavers. The contradictions were irreconcilable. A seemingly workable resolution developed by way of overlapping sensibilities and practices of Cuban Catholicism. Behind the veneer of Christian rites, rituals, and celebrations, Africa-based religious expressions could be carried forth. The blended, re-constructed understandings were strongly in place, particularly in Oriente, as Espiritismo began to take root in the nineteenth-century.
Espiritismo was molded from the Africa-based philosophical understandings about spirits, the prevalence of re-configured Regla Conga/Palo and Vodú practices in Oriente, and the migration of spiritualism and Spiritism from Europe and the United States into Cuba in the nineteenth century. Spiritual ideas were modified and constructed yet again for Cuban needs. The results were a series of different Espiritismo traditions that became emphasized into ritualized varieties of the religion.

EL BEMBÉ DE SAO
El Bembé de Sao was well developed as cultural and spiritual behavior prior to the integration of Spiritism and Spiritualism into Cuban life-style. Bembé de Sao was established in rural areas before it moved into urban centers and Cuban governmental and Church officials regarded the practices as deviance and persecuted practitioners because of their expression of its strongly African components. Consequently, Bembé de Sao was not publicly discussed or mentioned, even by those who clandestinely practiced. Its ritual music, chants, body movements, and dances developed a distinct African virtuosity and stylization from the sense of obligation to preserve the persecuted sacred rituals. Ritual music and dance of is a highly elaborated form of sacred African rhythmic components reconstructed in the Cuban reality.
Migration of de Sao from rural fields to suburbs and then to Oriente cities is comparable to the development of Cuban popular culture. Of course, cultural expressions existed in cities before the migration of de Sao but these cultural articulations represented the colonial elite rather than the majority of Cuba’s farmers, workers, peasants, and enslaved. From its practice in rural fields, Bembé de Sao moved first into properly designated towns like San Luis, Ti Arriba, Ramón de las Yaguas, El Cobre, and Palma Soriano. Such rural settlements border the mountains while maintaining communication links with urban centers like Guantánamo, Manzanillo, Bayamo, and Santiago, the nucleus of Oriente. Bembé de Sao moved out of the rural zones where populations of clandestine ritual practitioners had come together in a sacred mixture of music and dance. A relatively weaker colonial authority structure in these areas allowed activities to flourish and from rural areas, de Sao migrated to the periphery of Oriente’s central municipality and then moved directly into that city of Santiago de Cuba.
Although it was modified to accommodate prevalent and more predominant religious practices and local particularities, component parts of the once holistic Bembé de Sao are yet identifiable in existing Cuban religious traditions, especially those practiced in Santiago. Full ceremonial celebrations no longer occur, and toques, or drum parties, are no longer held in old cabildo conga locations. These practices disappeared once brought into the complexities of city life. Nevertheless, it is the qualitative essence of de Sao toques that one sees in the musical instruments, chants, and dances, as well as the overall characteristic and quality of music used in ritual ceremonies of Regla de Ocha/Lucumi, Espiritismo de Cruzado, Regla Conga/Palo and others.
Espiritismo Bembé de Sao is equally the root from which Cuba’s varied ethno-cultural and social class groupings have constructed a national popular culture. All strata of the population participate in bembé, the name for musical drum parties derived from the religious tradition. In addition, the chanting invocations that begin rituals of de Sao are in Haitian Creole, signifying influence from French-Haitian and Haitian African immigrants who arrived in Oriente no later than the eighteenth century. Chants themselves also have fragments of Yoruba and Bakongo/Kikongo languages, indicating and paralleling Cuba’s different African ethno-cultural components. The Catholic European content is equally present.
It is imperative to note that the iconic national celebrations of Shango and Babaluyae are socially constructed extensions of Bembé de Sao from its territorial origins in Oriente to nationwide expression. The constructs are by way of overlapping Africa-based ontological aspects with some from Catholic characteristics of Santa Bárbara and San Lazaro. Within Cuba’s traditional popular culture, ritual activities that honor these religious personalities are carried-out by most everyone and even those who may not participate are aware of the activities and their intention. We know of many people for the U.S., for example, who travel to Cuba in December in order to celebrate Shango and/or Babalú Ayé. Although formal or public national recognition of the celebrations with Bembé de Sao constructed elements has yet to occur, residuals from this sacred tradition are ever present.

Spaces Because Bembé de Sao is not actively carried out with any regularity, we have not encountered sacred spaces. Historically, we know that the spaces would have been wooded or forest locations. We speculate that because of the drumming and dancing associated with de Sao, the spaces would have been in a clearing of trees where there was a dirt of roughly constructed floor. We perceive that there would have been a fire near the space but we are uncertain which material assemblages would have been placed in the site or where and why they were so placed. We call for more archeological research to reclaim this important Cuban heritage.
We also suggest the obvious parallel of Bembé de Sao with the ‘hush arbors’ of the invisible institution of eighteenth-century African Americans in the United States. Al Raboteau speaks extensively of these North American events and we contend there is a linkage with similar Cuban occurrences of Bembé de Sao.

ESPIRITISMO CRUZADO
In an overly simplified fashion, Espiritismo Cruzado is a literal crossing of Spiritism with ideas and practices of several other popular Cuban faiths i.e., Regla de Ocha/Lucumí, Regla Conga/Palo, and Vodú. Unlike the essential concentration of Bembé de Sao in Oriente, Cruzado is more widespread throughout Cuba and it too reflects the dynamic incorporation of Africa-based sacred ideas. Foundational comprehensions of Cruzado are lodged in the act of working with spirits to actualize results for the living. This in turn constitutes the tradition’s fundamental doctrinal and operational axis. In Espiritismo Cruzado, supernatural and spirit forces are collectivized, not given particular identities as in Regla de Ocha/Lucumí or Vodú. We believe this is part of Cruzado’s conscious or unconscious attempt to distinguish itself from other religions that have similar ideas and activities. Cruzado, for example, views the individualizing, rather than collectivizing of spirit forces as a negative “material” practice, not a spiritual one. At the same time, by the mere fact that Cruzado shares understanding of spirits with other sacred traditions, seems to establish a closer identification with the perceived power of the other Africa-based sacred life-styles.

Basic Foundations There are two categories of Cruzado practitioners, celebrants and believers. Celebrants are persons who work directly with the spiritual currents while believers are persons who are faithful in the tradition but who do not personally work with the spirits. Each type of practitioner may construct a scared space but believers have little cognition about what belongs in a space or why. Celebrants, on the other hand, are fully knowledgeable in the tradition and purposefully place objects in assembled spaces based on their awareness of how to work with power of the spiritual currents.
In each of the Temple Houses we studied, celebrants worked with three fundamental spirit currents: a current properly understood as spiritual, a current where the presence of Regla de Ocha/Lucumí is notable, and the spiritual current of Regla Conga/Palo. The crossing of these currents, from which Espiritismo Cruzado, “crossed Spiritism,” derives its name, is in two directions, one external and the other internal.
External crossings are produced through the incorporation, interchange, and conscious borrowing of elements from other religious traditions. Cruzado uses such elements as calderas or caldrons, cazuelas pans or boilers, crocks, etc., each of which possess a difference of material works or obras materiales. These elements are well known to be derived from the rituals of Regla Conga/Palo. Cruzado modifies but nevertheless includes representation of Elegguá as another indication of external crossing. The incorporation is comparable to practices of Regla de Ocha/Lucumí. Blood sacrifice of animals is yet another imported element from Africa-based religions as is the offering of fruits and sweets to the spirits. The visual portrayal of the spirits, through their parallel abilities with Catholic spirits/saints, is also an external crossing, though the adoration of these is not related to Catholicism. The blood sacrifices of animals and other offerings made to spirits, as well as how offerings are placed in sacred spaces, are typical of Regla de Ocha/Lucumí. Similarly, the transmissions chanted during Cruzado rituals are generally external crossings derived from Regla Conga/Palo and Espiritismo de Cordon.
Cruzado celebrants engage in internal crossings too and understand these to be determined by the spirits/saints based on the particular needs of the moment. The need for a particular type of internally crossed work is determined by the type and complexity of problems that are presented by the person seeking charity work of the community. If the problem is complex, then the spirit who responds to the work will determine that a change to fields of greater spiritual strength is necessary. These fields could be Regla Conga/Palo, Regla de Ocha/Lucumí, or Vodú. One celebrant described the internal crossing in the following way:
What is the first step we take? We call upon the protector spirit, [he] passes through us; we work out the manifestations given by him then a crossing arises and the guide goes by.

PICTURE #45

This is a portion of Rafael Melendez’s sacred space. He is wearing necklaces -collares- of the best-known and most revered oricha in Cuba. Melendez is both an actor and director of a children’s theatrical company in Santiago and for some time, traveled throughout the area by way of an Espiritismo network.

Rafael’s ritual space is filled with images and objects inherited from his spiritual and biological family. An uninformed observer might assume disorder but nothing is further from the truth. The entire room has been converted, making it almost impossible to detail any one of the pieces and elements that compose the complex.

Minimally, 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 could be thought of as contrasting traditions. Note the white and gold plate with Christ’s face. Just to its’ right is a star and crescent moon from the Islamic tradition. Below these, under the sopera dressed in gold cloth, is a porcelain figure with a turban head wrap, most likely representing an Arab. In front of that is a white porcelain cup and saucer as well as a white elephant with its’ backside facing the reader. And then there is the familiar Santa Bárbara, just above Rafael’s head, dressed in her appropriate red and white.

When viewed within the cultural context of Cuban creation, the contrasting and interwoven components of the space are a beautiful collage of spiritual reality.


When the guide departs, [he] leaves the African current by our side to work, but I am feeling the current of the African and must seek their transmission to call upon them, to secure them to work.

The celebrant was telling us that the first act/responsibility is to call upon the “protector spirit” of their faith tradition and to conduct the work as that spirit instructs. Something occurs spiritually and their protector spirit departs but leaves an opening for the work to continue with the assistance of another current, a spirit from a tradition other than that of the celebrant. This is an internal crossing because the necessity to do spiritual work from a non-Espiritismo tradition has been indicated during sacred activities. In this instance, the spiritual current with which the celebrant will work is an African one and clarification must be received from them if the original problem or charity is to be completed.

Spaces: Spiritual crossings can be visible in constructed spaces of Espiritismo de Cruzado. Space is built by assembling material objects associated with supernatural power as understood by the tradition and Based on resources available to celebrants. Elegguá is one of the Cruzado crossed spirits whose representation is borrowed from Regla de Ocha/Lucumí. Elegguá is placed in Cruzado spaces but not with images of other spirits/saints, Africa-based or Catholic. Elegguá is in a corner or behind the main access door, and this image is made with a coconut and a stone placed inside a small bowl that is known as Elegguá’s house/casita or cabildo. Objects, known as Elegguá’s assistants, are also near for example, a candle in a small plate, offerings, of sweets, candy, whistles, coins, and others. As a spirit/saint celebrants understand Elegguá to be a child identified with the Niño de Praga or the Baby Jesus of Prague and objects with Elegguá are attending to this nature.[130]
The sites constructed for Cruzado spiritual work contain other diverse items such as candles, vases, cups and glasses of water, boilers, and pans. Some are merely to decorate, embellish, or raise the aesthetic level of the space’s religiosity to that of magnificence. For example, vases with flowers give the entire assemblage a more picturesque look but many practitioners contend that the flowers’ perfume strengthen and nourish the spirits. Some flowers are particularly associated with individual spirits like the sunflower—Flor del Sol consecrated to Santa Bárbara, the white lily to Las Mercedes, and the radiante to the Virgin de la Caridad. A light bulb is often kept lit as another aesthetic attribute. Other objects are used in various types of rites and rituals such as for a despojo renouncement, a consultation, a sacrifice, a cleansing, etc. In general, objects are used to help obtain the well being of persons requesting work.
Included in every Cruzado space is a rack or shelf, sometimes-laddered shelves that holds depictions of spirits via their external presentation. These iconic presentations are usually small statues cast in plaster, though they may be photographic images. The representations occupy designated places on the
PICTURE #135

Cubans associate the Africa-derived spirit of resistance to physical pain and death, Babaloú Ayé of the pantheon of Regla de Ocha/Lucumí, with this paper mache construction of the Catholic San Lazaro, including his symbolic crutches and dogs. Here San Lazaro is in the house temple of Juan Gonzalez, known as Madelaine, and with typical characteristics of Espiritismo. Madelaine’s Temple is in the small town of El Cobre, a few miles outside of Santiago de Cuba. The walls and ceiling of the small house’s living room and dining room are covered with murals. Images on the murals were revealed to Madelaine during dreams and when spirits came to his body. An artist practitioner of their community, Josh Seoane was then commissioned but not a paid to paint the murals.


shelving based on their significance as understood by practitioners’ experience. A white dove, a crucifix, or a portrait of the Christian Jesus can also be centrally positioned. A graphic image of the spirit with which celebrants of a particular community identify most is also centrally located. This spirit is referred to as owner of the space in that practitioners see themselves as offspring of the entity. Generally, Shango/Santa Bárbara, Ochun/La Caridad, Obatalá/Las Mercedes, Babalú Ayé/San Lázaro, Yemayá/Virgin de Regla, Ogún, and Elegguá/Baby Jesus are the most popular spirits among Cruzado believers and their images will occupy preferential shelf places in most sacred sites. Although this listing of spirits/saints is known to have great national popularity for Cruzado practitioners, all spirits/saints are considered important and all “have their miracle” in Cruzado work.
There are a great number of glasses and cups with water in each Cruzado sacred space. This is almost a signature or marker characteristic of the tradition. The containers of water are usually crystal, or as close as practitioners can afford, and they function to assist the spirits/saints in their search for clarity when working with celebrants. During a consultation ritual, a glass of water is the element of transmission and/or communication. The water is said to reflect what the spirit/saint wants to communicate or transmit to the celebrant.
It is particularly interesting to note that Cruzado spaces, as well as most all of the spaces we visited from each of the Cuban religious traditions, contain visual representations of at least one Native American Indian. Where an actual Indian image is not in the space, there are allegorical objects of their presence such as arrows, bows, feathered headbands, beads, etc. We were told on several occasions that work with and the presence of Indian spirits reflects the participation of those who occupied the Cuban/American land first and when they appear to a celebrant, it indicates a particularly laborious work.[131]
One image that also appears in most all spaces of Cuban religions, and definitely in those of Espiritismo Cruzado, is that of the Africana or African Queen. This depiction is not presented as combined with a saint but is understood as its own powerful spirit. A function of the Africana or “African Queen” is to protect the house from intrusive dangers and to keep “bad influences” from penetrating the entire area. The Africana is represented by a black-skinned doll dressed according to particulars of the celebrant’s assembled space, in white, blue, red, or other colors.
Some Cruzado celebrants claim that they can do spiritual work without constructing a sacred space and that they can work with the desired spirit even if the image is not represented. Such persons contend that they can invoke, speak with, and work with spirits without mediation. Other celebrants pose that the sacred space is a representation of Cruzado faith and homage to those spirits in whom they believe. All agree that the creation of assembled locations is an act influenced and inspired by the spirits who indicate how the site should be constructed and what is to be Included. Consequently, there is a certain individuality to sacred spaces of Cruzado.
When a celebrant dies, their sacred space must be transferred by “indication of the spirits” to a person related to the deceased who has faith. It is preferable that this person be someone with comparable spiritual abilities, called “un hermano de obra, a brother of work.” On some occasions the spirits will indicate that all the contents of the space are to be collected and thrown into the sea. Images depicting spirits are conferred to a family member of the departed or are person who can attend to them according to dictates of the faith. We were told that a situation might arise where a celebrant, foreseeing death, will prepare the person who will inherit and care for the sacred contents.

ESPIRITISMO DE CORDON
Espiritismo de Cordon is one of the most exceptional of the spectrum of active Cuban religious traditions. It began in the nineteenth-century in territories of the older provinces of Oriente and Camaguey. Like each of the Espiritismo varieties, Cordon is distinct in that its origins are traceable to Cuban’s Africa-based predisposition to act upon relationships between the historical world of humans and the otherworld of spirits. We have discussed that a major factor in preparing Cuba as birthplace of Espiritismo were the prevailing comprehensions of a dynamic relationship between humans and spirits as participants in the historical material world. Like George Brandon, Joel James (1989) proposes similarities between Cuba’s Africa-based principles about natural phenomenon and principles of the country’s Catholic folk practices.[132] There was equally a significant linkage between attitudes and customs about such things as the symbolic use of the cross, a symbol used extensively by Africa-based religions and Christianity, and sacred spaces.[133] These overlappings were conduits through which human interactions on the island merged practices from the two streams of religion and culture. Espiritismo and other traditions were produced from the interaction and we have discussed the intersections throughout this book.[134]
Cuban constructed religious forms became a foundational component of a matrix of nationalism that characterized the population into the nineteenth-century. New forms of practice were indigenous to the island and not related to the imported and increasingly oppressive structures of the Catholic Church. Espiritismo, and other indigenous Cuban religious forms were seen as a statement of resistance to Spanish colonialism and increasingly aligned with the struggle for independence and sovereignty. Nationalistic and anti-colonial attitudes heightened contradictions with the Catholic hierarchy, a hierarchy that had become more harsh and oppressive about practicing Cuba’s blended and re-constructed religious traditions. Increasingly, nineteenth-century patriots of all social classes rejected the Spanish clergy’s spiritual intervention and leaned toward Cuban practices, particularly Espiritismo.
Joel James reviews events of the century and verifies the significance of Espiritismo in the historical 1868-1878 Ten Year War. He identifies soldiers from various social classes fighting for the common goal of independence and events within that struggle reflect the cohesive role of an emerging Espiritismo; a religiosity and practice that incorporated and mirrored Cuban political as well as spiritual nationalism.
Civil populations from Oriente were the first to rise in insurrection during the initial years of the Ten Year conflict with Spain. They were led by land-owning criollos[135] who had freed their enslaved populations as a first act of an independent nation. Some former enslaved persons continued to serve their old owners, despite a decree that abolished the bondage system. Nevertheless, both enslaved and master served the independence cause. In battles of the struggle, the army of African descendants was called ‘mambisa’ and they are legendary for extreme bravery and patriotism though they had military weapons, only weapons they could fashion from available resources and the machetes of their work in sugar cane fields.[136]
A Spanish war tactic against successes of the mambisa was to assassinate black military leaders and the “Creciente de Valmeseda” (Torment of Valmeseda) was one of the more horrific massacres of this tactic. The intimidation caused by such massacres caused generalized fear among the mambisa and other freedom fighters, particularly at times when armed Cuban troops were preoccupied in local combat areas a remote distance from mambisa mountain camps. The encamped atmosphere was one of great insecurity and frustrations of black and whites combatants often reached a
PICTURE # 74

The sacred space of this picture, located in Bayamo, the first city freed by the 1868 army, belongs to the daughter of an officer of that Liberation Army. Behind her and a fellow leader of their Espiritismo community is a photograph of her father and his wife. Cuban flags are above the black and white photo and a larger one to the right of the photo. To the left of the couple’s portrait is another photo where we see Antonio Maceo, the AfroCuban general in two national wars, and Jose Martí, another significant revolutionary leader, paired in one image and framed on the wall. These two national heroes are considered as “light spirits” in Espiritismo religious tradition and are often present in contemporary rituals.


level of collective hysteria. At these times, celebration of the ‘cordon’ ritual served to dissipate the emotional stress.
Criollo as well as Cubans of African descent were familiar with the ritual led by Congo servants. Blacks and whites held hands as everyone formed the human cord that invoked spirits near and far. Together the frightened freedom fighters petitioned the spirits about their family and friends involved in combat or who were in the forest seeking refuge from battles. Joel James proposes that it was the common and collaborative effort for independence, coupled with the use of re-constructed Africa-based spirituality blended in collective rituals that permitted Espiritismo de Cordon to become a uniquely Cuban creation. The following full length quote captures our summation of James’ propositions.
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 such as:

1) The mechanics in the funeral rituals of the first Congo people [of Cuba], where those who have just died were invoked in a collective and circular form in order for the dead person to manifest him/herself. 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.

2) The similarity among beliefs that produced celebrations of altars of the cross became more popular and freer. These were more capable of [blending] as the contradiction between Cuban independence and the Catholic hierarchy, forced Cuban Catholics to turn away from the Spanish clergy, their temples and liturgy.

3) Origins of the social situation were in the initial years of the 1868-1878 War in the mambisa military chiefs. The civil population had insurrected but was unarmed. They had been allied by older slave owners and their former slaves who were cowardly assassinated by the Spanish offensive; particularly the aggression sadly known as “Creciente de Valmaseda” (Torments of Valmaseda).[137]

James’ propositions provide a detailed and perhaps first understanding for English speaking communities of the relationship between Cuban nationalism and the origins and popularity of Espiritismo de Cordon. The exceptional long-lasting strength of the tradition in Oriente is equally due to the fact that it was in this region that the Ten Years War began, in Oriente that the Mambisa were active, and in Oriente that the black and white Cubans shared the spiritual ritual.

Basic Foundations Espiritismo de Cordon is expressly intended to reconcile lives of the living through contact and work with spirits of those who bodies have passed beyond the historical world of the living. The fundamental purpose of their work is to cure disease, particularly mental illness but they also believe their work can solve any difficulty; issues of love, economics, employment, financial, housing, etc. Such resolutions are achieved through contacting spirits or the spiritual currents. This is achieved by spiritual transcendence but without any mediating force except that of the spirits. The transcendence is accomplished through possession or trance that must be done collectively, generally holding hands in a ‘cord’ like line. This is a practice that is at variance with influences from European Spiritism or U.S. spiritualism.
Cordoneros, as members are called, firmly believe in the doctrine of Allan Kardec, the Frenchman responsible for codifying Spiritualism as a belief system. However, as we have discussed, the Cuban tradition has been constructed through interaction with an abundance of belief and practices from popular African heritages as well as Catholicism. Espiritismo de Cordon has not yet produced a codified complex of beliefs that equal a vision of the world or that serves as foundation for such a vision. Practitioners do not generally theorize about their beliefs because they feel daily practice, not written doctrine is the religion’s main feature. This stress on ‘doing’ coincides with Charles H. Long’s contention of “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” (1999:7).
We further suggest that this Cuban religion that emphasizes daily practice is the actualization of the country’s Africa-based concept of event time. The orientation also heightens the significance Cordoneros place on healing, which they believe can occur through the rituals of their tradition. Here again we are reminded of Long’s idea that,
[F]or 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 re-creating a situation not of that oppression.[138]

Espiritismo de Cordon is open to all who wish to take part. There is no initiation ritual or process to become an active member. Any person can attend rituals and participate freely. This is not true for other Cuban traditions e.g., Regla de Conga/Palo, Regla de Ocha/Lucumí, or Vodú. For the most, Cordon activities occur in Temple Houses. These are structures specifically designated for work of the tradition and where the fundamental communication with the spirits is possible. Such communication occurs through mediums who are persons that guide ritual activities and who are known to have previously physically received the spirits’ presence. Mediums are essential to practices of the tradition and regularly arrive for ceremonies dressed in white.
Responsibilities associated with mediums are defined and performed within and related to particularities of a Temple House but general responsibilities are as follows.
Principal Mediums or “cabecero” includes the person in charge of the temple who conducts the spiritual works. He or she gives instructions.

Strong Mediums are persons who possess special gifts or their 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 a kind of cordon obreros or cord workers who officiate in this specialized charity work of the collective.

Mediums, along with Cordon practitioners gather weekly and engage in the cordon or “charity work.”
During our participation with several communities, we observed more women than men in the dance and songs of the cordon activity. Women tended to be younger than thirty-five years with skin coloration more of mestizo or mixed-race. There were always white-skinned participants but dark-skinned Cubans were consistently the numerical minority. However, we observed no overt restrictions as cordonera or cord sessions of charity work welcomed all persons, no matter gender, race, social status or skin color.

Space and Ritual: Most rites and ceremonies of Espiritismo Cordon unfold around the focal-table with the cordon ritual session beginning with a preparatory phase that consists of prayers of “love to the Celestial Father”
Picture #224

This image is from a cordon ritual of Espiritismo de Cordon. Practitioners are engaged in the cordon wherein they raise their hands, move around in a circle, and chant as part of the charity work of their faith. Although the leader of this house claims that their tradition shares nothing with Africa-based religions or with Christianity, representations on the back wall might suggest differently.


that are read from the Allan Kardec book Chosen Prayers, then the book is ritualistically closed. Now, it is believed that communication has been established and the Celestial Father has granted consent to form the cordon.
The cordon ritual is the central work of this variety of Espiritismo. It begins after prayers when mediums, in communication with the spirits, stand and hold hands with each other and the temple membership. This physically forms a circular or horseshoe configuration opened at the site of the focal-table. The principle medium and guide begins to sing a chorused chant that is a call to spirits to join the membership in the work. Members respond to the chanted call with a rhythmic chorus repeated over and over. At the end of each chorus’ refrain, and before beginning to repeat it, members make guttural sounds that punctuate the chanting rhythm. While continuing to hold hand, they are moving their arms, first up into the air then lowered toward the floor. Their feet are sliding in a counter clockwise direction, first one foot then the next. A vigorous foot-stomp completes each sideward sliding.
Often the guide medium will interrupt the cordon’s work on the downward movement and instruct members that they should 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 principle medium will ask all mediums to concentrate their thoughts “in” God. This usually indicates that the work of the cordon is not going well or is not strong enough.
There is always at least one person who has come to these cordon work sessions seeking healing or “spiritual charity” from the group. At a designated time in the cordon work these person proceed to face the table that is a focal point of Cordon sacred spaces. From here the membership concentrates their work on eliciting an anointing of “spiritual well-being” on all persons present. Many mediums and members have entered a trance or been possessed by spirits and their received knowledge is interpreted for those seeking charity and others.
The conclusion of the ritual is the “deliverance.” All participants turn themselves in personal circles while mediums separate their hands. Each person leans forward and slightly touches the floor with the tip of their fingers and everyone raises their hands above their heads and shakes them upward. This last act is executed three times as the mediums ask all cordon participants to “unfold” likewise and “deliver” themselves. “Closing” chants are made and a special song is added, giving thanks to God and the Spirits who have allowed the session to be successful.
Most Cordon temples have a special entrance and a large space is dedicated to the focal-table. At an area just at the door of each site there is a basin filled with water resting on a chair. This affects a kind of “protected entrance.” Each person is required to wash her/his hands before entering the temple. We were told this is done to prohibit harmful or evil elements or substances from entering. We believe the precaution is related to conflicts between the Cordon tradition and Regla de Ocha/Lucumí or Regla de Conga/Palo.
The focal-table of Espiritismo Cordon is an important part of sacred sites and is where prayers invoke the spirits to participate with activities of the “earthy plane.” The focal-table has shelves above and at least one shelf below its main level. In one sacred space that we visited, the table occupied the entire living and dining rooms, which were dedicated entirely to the cordon ritual. The table and its shelves are the principal axis of the space and a white tablecloth covers the tabletop on which a large goblet is placed in the center and it is dedicated to all the spiritual guides. Two glasses filled with water are on each side of the goblet. The focal-table is where the Kardecian prayers that begin each session are read.
On the main platform if the table also are representations of spirits and spiritual currents and a plaster image of a Native American Indian accompanied by a sunflower. This represents spirits of the “Indian Commission” that work with this Cordon community and the sunflower symbolizes the commission. In the middle of the shelf, above the table is an electric light bulb that is on permanently. There is also a portrait of San Hilarión under the bulb and celebrants reported that the light bulb “is the light of San Hilarión.” The metal cross that sits above all shelves and table represents El Santismio, the Holy Sacrament of Christianity.
Other shelves of the Cordon focal-table contain a variety of objects and images; bottles, images of Virgins and other saints, pictures of deceased family members or friends, chromolithographs, glasses with clear water, as well as offerings of flowers that represent the spirits. The flowers are felt to provide strength while the water gives clarity. Cordon Espiritismo understands the “espíritus” or spirits of deceased persons depicted in pictures and other objects unite in work with Cordon médiums in the characteristic ritual.

Summary Thoughts
Espiritismo Bembé de Sao, de Cruzado, and de Cordon are each within one Cuban religious tradition. Sacred spaces of Bembé de Sao have disappeared from the practice arena of Cuban religions for the most but, many of its elements are yet within the cultural behaviors of the Cuban population, just as Espiritismo is intimately linked to nationalistic ideas of Cuban consciousness. During the unofficial yet annual national celebrations of Santa Bárbara, December 4th and San Lázaro, December 17th, many builders of sacred spaces of Cruzado assemble their most grandiose and picturesque decorations. Every year they gather and re-gather components of the sites and re-assemble them in a distinct manner to express their devotion to these sacred spirits. We could find no constructed spaces of the older and somewhat invisible Bembé de Sao, leaving us only to speculate that they were in forested areas.
By contrast, Espiritismo de Cruzado and de Cordon are dissimilar and often times contesting sets of practice and their sacred spaces highlight the dissimilarities as well as the arenas of contestation. The differences begin with understandings about spirit force(s). Images and representations of Cruzado spirit forces are blended and intimately re-constructed with Christian as well as Africa-based understandings e.g., Elegguá/Baby Jesus and Shango/Santa Bárbara. Images of Cordon are not blended or reconstructed as spirit/saints but retain names associated with Christianity. The nature and naming of images in sacred spaces of the two traditions is a point of faith disagreement. Cordoneros contend that those who practice “cross-Spiritism”—Cruzado, perform “dirty works to do evil.” The attitudes indicate a struggle to demonstrate the superiority of one religious practice over another. However, we propose that the Cordoneros’ adamant objection and dismissal of the consistently Africa-based practices, and a subconscious desire to show superiority could easily be an affirmation of the power and strength of such Africa-based customs and traditions.
Sacred spaces of Espiritismo de Cruzado are indoors and elaborate, colorful, mosaic-like assemblages of multiple objects, images, flowers, and others. Photo #45 shows the compacted fullness of a Cruzado space. On the other hand, the locations of Espiritismo de Cordon have comparative economy and efficiency of objects and visual representations of supernatural forces. These spaces might even be considered sober or bare when compared to Cruzado sites. However, we wish to be careful because “the sacred” belong to the aesthetic of believers. Cross-cultural or cross-tradition comparison can serve ethnocentric falsities not human understanding.



C H A P T E R 6

Regla de Ocha/Lucumí



It is impossible to discuss Cuba’s distinct religious traditions without including Regla de Ocha/Lucumí. Customs of this variety of sacred life-styles are undoubtedly the most familiar and widely known practices throughout the island as well as beyond its borders. We have already considered that Regla de Ocha/Lucumí ritual practices are principally derived from the Yoruba people of west Africa, the landscape that currently includes Nigeria, parts of Benin, Togo, and Ghana. It is important to say also that although most non-Cubans and a large number of Cubans refer to this tradition as santería, we withdraw from using the term.
Our analysis of how the label came to exist suggests that it was most likely given to the customs, or interpreted of them, by Don Fernando Ortiz. However, Ortiz’s interpretation of how practitioners’ self-identified themselves was probably not the labeling language they shared with the white-skinned criollo, scientific researcher. For example, Ortiz might easily not have known the word ‘orisha’ used during clandestine Africa-based rituals. He could have stumbled over the new term, requiring the dark-skinned practitioner to translate their ritual language into a Spanish familiar to their middle-class and white-skinned visitor. ‘Santo’ would have been the term used by practitioners as it was a label associated with Cuban Catholic saints, some who shared characteristics with Africa known spirit forces, orisha. Santo was familiar to Ortiz and could have been interpreted by him as ‘santeria,’ the worship of santos, saints.
We believe that the socio-economic and racial differences of information sharing as well as cultural meanings during the early 20th century would not have facilitated Ortiz comprehending sacred customs of African descendants whose lineages were directly linked to enslavement. Terms that Ortiz developed and employed became the interpretive lexicon within Eurocentric, negative significations for referring to things black and/or African from Cuba. The labels and most of the entire vocabulary about Cuban religions— e.g., magic, cults, syncretism, demigods, sects, brujeria (witchcraft), etc. would be reified to the present day.[139] We withdraw from the santería term and much of the signified vocabulary as more reflective research brings forth less loaded descriptors of Regla de Ocha/Lucumí and other traditions.

Coming to Cuba and Oriente: After the weakening of the Yoruba Oyo Empire in the late 18th century, and it’s eventual defeat by the British in 1835, large numbers of Yoruba ethnic people became included in the cross Atlantic holocaust of the Middle Passage and were brought to the Americas.[140] Cuba received massive numbers of Yoruba speaking people from the Bight of Benin region. Some scholars and demographers have proposed that although “an average of three hundred” enslave Africans were brought to Cuba each year prior to 1761, “the number grew spectacularly starting in 1790, reaching annual averages of more than twenty thousands” into the 19th century. The majority of these persons belonged to Yoruba ethnic groups of people.[141]
The rapid and massive increase in the number of trans-Atlantic importations of Africans was in response to Cuba’s increased demand for cheap labor. Successful Haitian Revolution that replaced Cuba for Haiti as the new world leader in sugar production had fueled the demand fueled the demand.[142] The continued European demand for sugar and sugar products mandated amplified agricultural production that itself required increased labor in the nineteenth-century Cuban colony. The series of Haiti to Cuba shifts in the international sugar economy engorged the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans. Yoruba speaking people were the ethnic groups that significantly helped solve some of Cuba’s labor needs in the late 18th and 19th century. However, within the egregious systems of Cuban enslavement, the Yoruba sustained an intentionality to continue their cultural practices and sustain elements of their distinct identity.[143]
Whether by cultural intentionality or the historical timing of their arrival on the Caribbean island, it was the Yoruba who were the largest and latest African ethnic group to arrive in Cuba throughout the nineteenth-century. It was also Yoruba sacred practices that comprised the most recent body of Africa-derived knowledge available in Cuba in the century, mostly in western regions of Matanzas and Havana. The practices, knowledge, and people interacted with older, more established Africa-based knowledge, people, and religious customs. For example, Cuban practitioners of Arará, the Benin-based rituals and organizations active in western regions, interacted with members of Yoruba groupings as did Bakongo/Kikongo descendants.[144] Over time, the individual and inter-organizational contacts produced exchanges and adaptations in all traditions. The re-structured customs in turn became new distinct Cuban constructions of the old.
Persons imported from the Bight of Benin, whether or not they were of Yoruba ethnic groups, were referred to as Lucumí. The label referred to African descendants imported from the region, but to particular cultural and religious customs they practiced; known as Regla de Lucumí. Interaction between Lucumí practitioners and those of Regla Conga/Palo and Arará helped solidify the nascent socio-religious associations of cabildos into nineteenth-century institutionalized ethnically oriented groupings. Many of the cabildos became cabildos de naçiones de Lucumí. The name of Lucumí more properly belongs to cabildos and Yoruba-derived ritual practices that occurred for pre-emancipation African descendant practitioners. Regla de Ocha is the more appropriate language as used by the faithful for the Cuban re-constructed practices derived from Lucumí, having proceeded through nineteenth-century and twentieth-century activities.[145]
Much like Regal Conga/Palo, Regla de Ocha/Lucumí was not organized into an interconnected network of practicing communities until the early twentieth-century. There had been individual practitioners, and some scattered family communities but the linkage of these was not achieved until Reynerio Pérez arrived in Santiago from Mantanzas in about 1912. José Millet has conducted field research that demonstrates the local legend of initiated, religious genealogical links between Regla de Ocha/Lucumí in Oriente and parent groupings of Matanzas regions. The genealogical chart of the practicing families of Santiago is most helpful. Our subsequent interviews with Santiago leaders of Regla de Ocha/Lucumí further substantiates Millet’s earlier investigations.[146]
José Millet, 2000

Basic Foundations: Perhaps the most basic belief within the Regla de Ocha tradition is that practitioners understand themselves to intergratively co-exist with superhuman and supernatural spiritual, non-human creations of the universe. Together with these co- inhabitants of the universe, Regla de Ocha/Lucumí practitioners form a profound and permanently bonded familial relationship. It is a highly interactive connection between those of the material historical world and the multitude of others in the supernatural other world. With the exception of the supreme, High Creator spirit force, oricha are the superhuman spirits of the otherworld who are of African origin and known to have traveled with enslaved Yoruba and others across the trans-Atlantic Middle Passage. Africans and their descendants adapted oricha understanding to the new Cuban geographic and social conditions. Together, oricha, humans, and all of their sacred networks built a new living relationship.
The High Creator spirit force of Regla de Ocha/Lucumí is a trinity complex comprised of Olodumare, Olorun, and Olofin/Olofí. The alternate names of the complex are how the Creator is understood. Practitioners also comprehend that the metaforce Creator brought forth the world through self-extension and appearance as the Oricha Odudúa and Obatalá. Odudúa is known to have created the earth and Obatalá created the heads and bodies that humans of the earth occupy. The head or orí of all humans is considered to exist in the spiritual world long before the material and historical forthcoming as a universe entity.
Obatalá is also known as the great mediating connection between spirit and matter that is, between the sky and historical worlds.[147] A reigning Obá-oriaté, master orchestrater of Ocha ceremonies, “formulated a clearly subordinated list of spiritual beings beneath” the High Creator during David Brown’s contemporary research conducted in Havana. This Ocha leader’s list is a vertical hierarchal chain of otherworld entities and a normal comprehension that gives rise to contentions of an Ocha pantheon. The Oriaté proposed to Brown that:
Each oricha’s seniority is based upon its relative “closeness” to the Creation and its principal elements (e.g., sky, earth, water) on the one hand, and the quotidian, material, human lifeworld, on the other hand. Ascendant is “Oloddumare,” the “All-Powerful” or High Being. Next come the great … meta-orichas that embody the elements of the Creation and have the most “intimate relation to Oloddumare” (Brown, 125).

In Oriente, the Oricha more closely connected to humans in the historical material world of Regla de Ocha followers are, Elegguá, Ogún, Ochosi, Agayú, Changó, Ibeyi, Obba, Oyá, Yemayá, Ochún, Obatalá, Babaluyaie, etc.
A familial kinship bond also characterizes Regla de Ocha and it consists of the relationship among Oricha, the relationship between Oricha and all humans, as well as in the relationship between and among Oricha and Ocha practitioners. A beginning of this familial kinship bond is found in the sacred genealogical principles that establish lineage and tributary connections for ritual families. The connections are between priestess and priests who have been initiated by an Ocha elder, called Iyaloricha and Babaloricha. The kinship connection overlaps with and is shared by the family of initiated male elders of Ifá, who are called Babalawo. Although Cuban practices manifest an overlap between Ifá and Regla de Ocha/Lucumí, we understand that the Yoruba origins of both sets of customs do not formulate a separation and returning overlap. Ifá and Orisha veneration are part of a single, wholistic cultural practice.[148]
The emphasis of this book does not allow us to expand upon Cuban and Americas-based distinctions between, and contestation among, Babalawo, Babaloricha, Iyaloricha, and Obá-oriaté.[149] For the most, Babalawo are sacred leaders and diviners of the Ifá tradition, Babaloricha and Iyaloricha are the elder priest and priestess of Regla de Ocha. The Obá-oriaté is the “master of ceremonies” or the one with sufficient sacred knowledge to orchestrate the various rituals of Regla de Ocha.
Members of Ocha communities in Oriente firmly believe that an Oricha presents itself to the orí or head of an individual at the moment of the individual’s historical birth, whether in a hospital, a home, car, forest, or elsewhere. But we must remember that the orí has always been with and part of the spiritual otherworld long before a material birth. This corresponds with our discussion in chapter 2 regarding future time and the yet unborn. The manifested Oricha takes an active part in the delivery of the person and thus names itself ‘father or mother’ of the newborn. Throughout the remainder of the newborn’s historical material existence, this Oricha invisibly accompanies them as guide and guardian. However, it is not until the ritual initiation of the Regla de Ocha religious ceremony, called the asiento or “making saint,” that the Oricha is crowned on the head of the aleyo, uninitiated person. Prior to that, knowledgeable Ocha practitioners and leaders may recognize the aleyo’s Oricha but it is only during the asiento that Ocha officiates “put the Oricha on the head,” or crown the head of the human individual.[150]

Picture #239

This is a picture of an iniate who is in the process of “making saint.”

The initiation ceremony is the religious re-birthing process and Oricha, as well as participating Ocha officials, called santeras/os, assist through the procedure. The involved officiates become the godparents or padrinos of the new initiate who is now an iyawo. In addition to the Oricha of a person’s religious re=birth, their head is also crowned with the Oricha of the officiating santero/a and in actuality, it is the padrino’s Oricha who figuratively ‘gives birth’ to the new Oricha of the iyawo as there can be no crowing of humans’ head, they can not “make saint” without the consent and help of the Oricha. The padrino, male or female, has responsibility and authority for educating and socializing the iyawo to beliefs and practices of the faith. If there is a pair of padrinos, they do not have to be husband and wife or of opposite sexes.
The iyawo and their crowned Oricha are now members of a grand spiritual and historical family, one of the material world and one of the supernatural world. Practitioners are children, omó of the Oricha and godchildren, ahijado or ahijada, of their padrinos, who themselves have Oricha and padrinos. Spiritual children now have parents, godparents, grandparents, as well as cousins, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, etc. within the Ocha family. The connection or genealogy of family lies in the godparents’ lineage as an impressive extended family and has great strength in Oriente as well as throughout Cuba. Obligations and responsibilities within this bonded network are serious and not to be violated, though there is flexibility for the fallibility of human behavior.
For Oriente practitioner, each Oricha has a functional domain of action, a set of highly decipherable attributes, and a corpus of mythological legends that help to guide worship activity. The combination of the legends, action domain, and attributes equal an Oricha’s avatars. Preferences in colors, foods, drinks, dress attire, dance movements, drum rhythms, etc. are particularize and similar to the way each Oricha is symbolically represented in sacred spaces and otherwise.
Animal sacrifice is an important component of Regla de Ocha in Oriente as in Cuba. According to Dr. Wande Abimbola, Awíse Awo Ní Agbáyé or spokesperson of Yoruba Babalawo in the world, this is unlike among the Yoruba of Nigeria.[151] However, practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic appreciate that there is an integrated co-existence between all in the historical material world and those superhuman entities in the world of supernatural beings. The co-existence is profound, permanent, and locked in an interactive, living dynamic. The blood or essence of animal beings offered during Regla de Ocha sacrifices serve to nourish, revitalize, and maintain the universal familial bond of spiritual lineage. It is understood that without the created essence of consanguinity, the animal’s live-given essence, there can be no ancestral continuation, no family. In other words, the physicality of all created things must move beyond present time of their historical experience to become part of the living dead and hopefully, part of the long-past of the ancestral time before the yet-to-be-born can arrive. The sacrificial blood of animals is ritualistically poured over sacred objects and thereby, symbolically and naturalistically, unites the different elements and practitioners. The process restates, in a physical way, the connectedness of the Ocha family and of all things of the universe.
There are infinitely more categories, activities, functions, and aspects of Regla de Ocha beliefs but our focus is not on these. This presentation is intended to be one of basic understandings about the tradition. We think this will be sufficient to contextualize practitioners’ construction of sacred spaces within their religious tradition
Spaces: Among religious constructions in Oriente, the sacred spaces of Regla de Ocha compare favorably with spaces of some Espiritismo varieties with regard to elaborate and colorful iconic representations. This appears to be consistent with Ocha spaces constructed in other regions of Cuba and elsewhere.[152] Oriente sacred sites are usually assembled in the home of a religious practitioner and/or leader with the area designated but not exclusive for Ocha practice. It is not extraordinary for an entire room of domestic lodgings to be given over as a space for the Oricha, even if humans of the house reside in a crowded fashion.
The colorful character of Ocha spaces is derived from the avatar colors associated with each Oricha and the fact that sites are constructed to pay tribute to more than one Oricha. The colors for Elegguá are red and black, Ogún’s colors are green and black, Changó’s are red and white, Yemayá blue and transparent white, while colors for Ochun are yellow and amber and any single sacred assemblage will easily have cloth, beads –called collares, flowers, etc. representations for these Oricha. With the appropriate items and colors for each Oricha honored in a single space, the site becomes quite colorful and elaborate (see photo # ). At times, sacred spaces of Regla de Ocha can be quite ornate and illustrations in books by David Brown (2003), Yasmur Flores Peña (1994), and Robert Farris Thompson (1993) provide a comparison with Oriente spaces of this book.
Each Oriente assemblage centers around a armoire or china closet-like piece of furniture – called a canastillero containing at least three shelves and closing doors. We have seen these cabinets with glassed-in closing doors but in Oriente it is not unusual for the doors not to have glass. On each shelf of the canastillero are several porcelain or china plates as well as at least one covered tureen called a sopera. The shelves may also contain a variety of dinnerware pieces, creamers, glasses, saucers, etc., but the central item is the covered sopera in which are the fundamentos of an Oricha. We have also seen Oriente canastilleros that contained chromolithographs and ceramic statues of the saint representations of the Oricha. china and/or porcelain Within these

contain an abundance of stones, food, flowers, and other sacred material objects, each designated to the particular Oricha of the space.[153] These
Batá drums are fundamental for Ocha rituals although they are not a permanent component of all Orient sacred spaces. The Batá are a paired set of three doubled-headed, hour-glass shaped drums, one large, the next smaller, and a third the smallest. They are a necessary requirement. They may not necessarily be seen on any particular visit.
.[154]
PICTURE#59

We are in a space consecrated to the warrior spirits of Elegguá, Ogún, and Ochosi. At the same time, it is possible to note the cabinet or “little house” where their attributes are placed when necessary or desired. Two of Elegguá’s signifying garabatos –long hook-like sticks— rest on the door of the cabinet. On top is a pumpkin that signifies Ochún, the youthful and sensual Orisha whose spiritual powers are with streams and fresh water rivers. To the left, among several other objects, is an human-like doll with a cigar. This is a representation of Elegguá, guardian of crossroads and doorways. Elegguá is the only Orisha to whom human characteristic are given.

All of these signifying elements of Regla de Ocha are compromised by the fact that the space is lodged on the floor, a characteristic placement of Regla Conga/Palo. The leader of this temple house serves both religious traditions.











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[1] Ruth Hamilton lecture presentation, African American and African Studies. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State Univeristy, November 4, 2003. Dodson, 2002, Palmie, 200 .
[2] Casa de las Americas is the internationally known literature and cultural research center for Cuba.

[3] There are many countries in the Americas with citizens of African descent and they all are “African Americans.” Therefore, I choose to modify the descriptor with their national location in the Americas e.g. U.S. African Americans, Brazilian African Americans, etc.

[4] Damian J. Fernandez, 1992, 51–71.

[5] This spelling reflects how the tradition is referred to in Cuba, while our use of the Haitian Creole spelling Vodou/Vaudou is used to distinguish the tradition of that island.

[6] Personal conversations with Casa staff during organizational meetings, Santiago de Cuba, 2000, 2002.

[7] Conversations with Joel James and staff of Casa del Caribe, July 2000.

[8] For a discussion of this see Palmie, 2002.

[9] Use of this idea is linked to the conceptual use of legitimation presented in the treatise on the social construction of reality. See Berger and Luckman, 197 .
[10] Hamilton, 19 :
[11] See Greene, 2002; Chidester, 1995; Carmichael et al., 1994.
[12] 1908: 333.
[13] 1908: 335.
[14] 1908: 335 (our emphases).
[15] 1989: 13.
[16] Blalock, 1968.
[17] Yi–Fu Tuan, 1977: 162 (18).
[18] Smith, 1987.
[19] Unabridged dictionaryN.ote
[20] Kedar, 1998: 12.
[21] We will expand on the conceptual use of this term shortly.
[22] Morgan, 2001: 2–3.
[23] Castillo Bueno, 2000.
[24] Millet, 1997.
[25] Personal conversations with Vicente Portuondo Martin, resident of Los Hoyos in Santiago de Cuba, August 2002.
[26] Bethlehem, 1993.
[27] Dodson, 2001.
[28] Weber, 1947: 341-363.
[29] Dodson, 1991.
[30] On an occasion when a group of us was participating in a Bembé, a public party celebrating a practitioner’s spiritual birthday, escorts to the Bembé gave instructions on the proper way to cross the threshold to the house and how to enter. These two persons are not practitioners but were familiar with the boundaries to the space and the appropriate behaviors for entering. Dodson, 1993.
[31] We use this term in its non–Christian sense of “public prayer and worship.,” Dorset & Barber, 1983: 1058.
[32] Interview conversation with Andriol Portuondo, July 2002,. Santiago de Cuba. Lecture of Abelardo Larduet Luaces, Religion Workshop of Festival del Caribe, July 2003.
[33] Dodson, 2002.
[34] Dodson, 2002.
[35] Long, 1995:166.
[36] Bastide, 1978:197 .
[37] Howard, 1998:113.
[38] Dodson, 197 .
[39] Neither Thompson, 1993, Lindsay, Flores Peña, 1998, 1996, nor Brown, 2000 give much attention to the artistic character of sacred spaces in Cuba or to those of Oriente Cuba.
[40] Mosquera, 1996:228-9.
[41] Dodson, 1989.
[42] See the discussion of Stephen Monejo, a runaway slave concerning these communities; Barnet, 1968.
[43] Hu Dehart.
[44] Thomas, 1968:162, 429.
[45] Barnet, 1968:21-25.
[46] Jualynne visited an historically preserved barracón in 1992.
[47] Barnet, 33-36
[48] Howard, 1999; Matibag, 1996; and Brandon, 1993.
[49] Thompson, 1983.
[50] Dodson, 2002.
[51] Personal conversations with Bernardo Garcia and other members and associates of Casa del Caribe, Santiago de Cuba,1999–2000.
[52] Howard, 1999:25-27.
[53] Dodson, 199 .
[54] Try Franklin and .
[55] See La Rosa Corzo, 2003.
[56] Long, 19 ; Ortiz, 19 .
[57] Thompson, 1983: 164–169; Thornton, 1992:79-82.
[58] Palmié, 1995 has a strong discussion on initiation and spiritual genealogy in Cuba.
[59] Howard, 1999: 21–27.
[60] Yai, (1995; Matory, 199 ).
[61] Barnet, 1968: .
[62] Matibag, 1996: 23.
[63] Brandon, 1993: 46.
[64] Brandon, 1993.
[65] Perhaps there is research that identifies aspects of Catholicism that were changed because of contact with Africa–-based spirituality.
[66] Barnet, 1968:73.
[67] Barnet, 1968, 36.
[68] Howard, 2000; Barnet, 1968.
[69] Performances of compasa via cabildo during carnival in Santiago de Cuba are internationally known. Ortiz, 1992; Bethlehem, 19 .
[70] We have used several reference sources for this section and have cited those most appropriate for various discussions. However, we recommend a thorough reading of the following references that enhanced our comprehensions: Mbiti, 1970; Ray, 1976; Thompson, 1983; MacGaffey, 1991Bockie, 1993; Hord & Lee, 1995; Coetzee & Roux, 1998; and MacGaffey, 2000;.
[71] Mintz and Price, 1976.
[72] See Palmié, 19 ; Mintz and Price, 1972.
[73] For fuller clarification of the shared African spiritual orientation see Mbiti, 1970.
[74] Brandon, 1998.
[75] cite source with Yoruba numbers.
[76] Barnet, 1997; Matory, 20
[77] Mintz and Price, 1976.
[78] 1968
[79] See Hord & Lee, 1995.
[80] McKenzie, 1973.
[81] Ray, 1976;. Mbiti, 1969.
[82] Ray, 1976Ibid: 40–42.
[83] Dodson, 2002 and Jose Millet,
[84] Thompson, 1984; Abimbola,19
[85] Thornton, 1992.
[86] Daniel, 199 .
[87] Increasingly we are ofhave been persuaded by the position that Santeriía as a signifier of AfroCuban religious traditions is reified terminology that did not evolve from the epistemological integrity of Cuban practitioners language for their practices. We strongly feel the reified term should be eliminated in favor of the intimate language used by practitioners. Dodson, 2002a.
[88] Palmié,
[89] These self–identified Abakuá members were from Ciego de Avila, Guantánamo, Santiago de Cuba, Las Palmas, and Matanzas but were encountered before research of this book began. Dodson, 1996, 97, 98, 99.
[90] See Palmié 2003 and Miller, for Abakuá development in western Cuba.
[91] Thompson, 1986: .
[92] López Valdes, 1985.
[93] James, C.L.R., 1963
[94] See Ortiz 19 or Bolivar 19 for discussion of earlier practitioners’ characteristics. See Dodson, 2002 for journal notations about black practitioners of Palo.
[95] Vega Suñol, 1991.
[96] This is part of a socialization experience recounted to us by persons raised in Holguín. Dodson, 2001:July.
[97] We are acquainted with several persons from the United States as well as persons from Spain who all practice Regla Conga/Palo. See Dodson, 2004.
[98] Martinez-Alier, 1974:80.
[99] Johnson, 2002.
[100] Ferrer, 19 ; Helg, 2000.
[101] Millet, 2000:115; and Brown, 2003: chapter .
[102] Thompson, 1983.
[103] 1983:101-112; Bolivar Aróstegui, 1998.
[104] Schwegler, 1998.
[105] James, 2001: 22–31.
[106] See Abimbola, 1997.
[107] Personal conversations with Tata Vicente Portunodo and Andriol Portunodo, 2001, 2003.
[108] Ortiz, 19 .
[109] We recommend a re-reading of William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” for seeing how embedded the attitudes are. Also see abclocal.go.com/wpvi/news/41504-stealingbodies.html, April 15, 2004.
[110] Personal conversations with Vicente Portunodo, Santiago de Cuba, July 2001.
[111] Personal interview with , Holguín, July 2002b.
[112] James, C.L.R., 1963:394.
[113] See James, C.L.R. 19 for a solid discussion of how the various racial groups functioned during the Haitian Revolution.
[114] Howard, 1998.
[115] Howard, 1998; O’Kelly, 1968.
[116] Howard, 1998; Matibag, 199 : 188.
[117] Carpentier, 19 .
[118] Thompson, 1983.
[119] Millet, 1989.
[120] 1983:164.
[121] Thompson, 1983:169.
[122] Dayan, 1995.
[123] Dathorne, 1984: 2–5.
[124] We encountered several spellings of this structure; houmforts (Thompson, 1983:181), oufó (Hurbon, n.d.). We are using the Oriente spelling as put forth by Casa del Caribe.
[125] Matibag, 37.
[126] Whereas many Oriente practitioners initially use the language of “saints” to describe entities who were in the universe prior to a material reality, close conversation reveals that they are referring to otherworldly entities who did not possess material substance. This clarification sets the early entities as different from the revered and beatified beings colloquially associated with the word “saints.” Dodson, 2002.
[127] Mbiti, 1969; Ray, 1976; McKenzie, 1973 for discussion of time and clarification of spirits in historical time.
[128] Martinez-Alier, 1974.
[129] Need footnote on Cuban slavery and the church.
[130] It should be remembered that in Catholic iconography the Baby Jesus of Prague, Czechoslovakia is in the arms of a black Virgin Mary.
[131] Dodson, 1995.
[132] This idea is supported by Brandon, 1993 as well as Mintz and Price, 1979.
[133] Thompson, 1984.
[134] James is not the only scholar who understands these relationships, see Brandon, 1993.
[135] In the Cuban context, “criollo” refers to anyone born on the island with European ancestry, MacGaffey, 1962:29.
[136] O’Kelly, 1968.
[137] James, 1989.
[138] Personal conversation, September 25, 2002.
[139] Dodson, 2002a.
[140] Atanda, 1980.
[141] La Rosa Corzo, 2003:70 where he uses J. Pérez de la Riva’s El monto de la inmigración forzada en el siglo XIX. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales as a source. See also Scarano, 1989 and López Valdés, 1985:36.
[142] Scarano, 1988:75.
[143] Drewal, 1989:13; Matory, 2000 and 2001: .
[144] Brown, 2003:140.
[145] Brown, 2003.
[146] Interview conversations with Ocha leaders of Oriente, 2001.
[147] Diaz Fabelo, 1960:27-37; Brown, 2003:124.
[148] Personal interview with Babalawo , Ann Arbor, March 2004.
[149] See Flores Peña, 1998 and Brown, 2003:148-150 for fuller clarifications.
[150] Brown, 2003:20-21, 369.
[151] Abimbola, 1998.
[152] Thompson, 19 .
[153] See Brown, 2003 and Flores Peña, 1994.
[154] Abimbola, 1989. We are not sure if the 200 Yoruba ajogun malevolent forces to humans were also transformed in Cuba.


[*1]Highlighted to remind us to check to see that this is done (or the text is revised accordingly).

[*2]A brief paragraph introducing this list of commonalities would help ease readers into the section and establish the parameters of the content.

[*3]Add description of Regla Arará and chapter summary.


[*4]You appear to have intended to revise this section.

[*5]Is this apostrophe (error) in the original text?