Sacred Spaces and

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

a volume in the religions of the americas series

Series Editors: davd carrasco and charles h. long

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

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

university of new mexico press

albuquerque

 2008 by the University of New Mexico Press

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

Library of C ong ress Catalo g ing -in-Pu blication Data

Dodson, Jualynne E.
Sacred spaces and religious traditions in Oriente Cuba /
Jualynne E. Dodson in collaboration with Jos Millet Batista.
p. cm. (Religions of the Americas)
Includes bibliographical references (p.

) and index.

isbn 978-0-8263-4353-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Holgun (Cuba : Province)Religious life and customs.
2. Sacred spaceCubaHolgun (Province)
3. Afro-Caribbean cultsCubaHolgun (Province)
I. Millet Batista, Jos. II. Title.
bl2566.c9d63 2008
299.609729162dc22
2008024176
Book design and type composition by Melissa Tandysh
Composed in 10.5/14 Minion Pro
Display type is Incognito

Dedicated to the Spiritual and Historical Lives of

Vicente Portuondo Martin of Santiago de Cuba and
Olga Batista of Holgun.

Vicente Home Going!

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

Jualynne E. Dodson, 2002

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

List of Illustrations and Maps

viii

Editors Foreword

ix

Preface by the African Atlantic Research Team

xi

Acknowledgments
Introduction

xiii
1

Part I
chapter 1. Contours and Concepts

21

chapter 2. African Cosmic Orientation:

Core Commonalities

39

chapter 3. What Sacred Spaces Do

61

Part II
chapter 4. Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe

81

chapter 5. Vod

104

chapter 6. Espiritismo

124

Part III
chapter 7. Land of the Dead Beginnings:
Muertra Bemb de Sao

147

chapter 8. Findings and Conclusions

160

Notes

177

Glossary of Select Terms

189

Bibliography

192

Index

205

Color plates follow page 18

vii

Illustrations

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

Plates

26
30
31
65

follow page 18

Figure 1. Drummers in Santiago de Cuba

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

45
23

Editors Foreword

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

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

editors foreword

Preface

The African Atlantic Research Team (AART) is a mentoring collective that

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

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

xii

preface

Acknowledgments

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

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

xiii

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

Space s c onst ru ct ed b y religiou s pr ac tition e r s of

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

epistemology or knowledge system about what it means to be human. Within

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

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

introduction

Definitive research into Cuban religions was made popular in the first
half of the twentieth century by the internationally renowned scholar Don
Fernando Ortiz (18811969). Ortiz was impressed with the black Cuban
populations continued use of Africa-based spiritual customs, ritual dances,
musical instruments, song traditions, linguistic variations, plus other ac
companying cultural expressions and material objects.3 He was interested in
how such a continuation of cultural manifestations affected race relations in
his country. Ortiz conducted some of the earliest anthropological research
and writing on the topic, in Spanish and English,4 but he barely mentioned
Oriente and there is no evidence that he collected data or wrote about the
eastern region.
Rmulo Lachataer, another Cuban writer and one who worked with
Ortiz, corresponded with the elder scholar and suggested the need for investigating religious practices in Oriente. Lachataer contended that procedures
in the east could be different because of different historical and cultural factors that influenced and distinguished the region from Cubas western areas.5
There are no indications that Ortiz engaged the contention but, despite this
methodological omission, Ortiz is primarily responsible for introducing
international academic and general reading audiences to the documented
presence and continuation of Africa-based practices in Cuba.
Ortizs ongoing groundbreaking investigations also established a conceptual canon about Cuban cultural customs. He proposed that these were
not practices assimilated into existing European definitions of cultural behavior or religious activities but were created from African descendants basic
understandings about life as they contacted and exchanged with different
ethnic groups and with members of other cultural groups on the island. Later,
Charles H. Long and Mary Louise Pratt would explore such colonial spaces of
inequitable power distribution where this cultural mixing, exchanging, and
grappling for social presentation were distinct phenomena, contact zones.6
But Ortiz saw that Cubas processes of cultural creation were not merely
representations of prevailing academic ideas about assimilation and acculturation. He suggested that essential details of the islands racial composition
and historical development were not unilateral processes of cultural acquisitionAfricans behaving like Europeans. Rather, Ortiz argued that, to be fully
understood, sociocultural changes that took place in Cuba required a more
interactive conceptualization. He proposed transculturation as the pivotal
concept to describe Cubas colonial cultural mixing wherein groups grappled,
fought, and dynamically combined their ideas of appropriate behaviors for
introduction

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

introduction

introduction

the new society and came to form entirely new ideas, new behaviors, and a
new people.7
For the first three decades of the twentieth century, Ortizs work was
integral to the ongoing debates of E. Franklin Frazier (18941962), Melville
Herskovits (18951963), and their followers. These US researchers held opposing views, to Ortiz and to each other. Frazier hypothesized that Africa-based
practices had been lost or assimilated in the Americas, while Herskovits
argued that many West African behaviors still existed across the Atlantic
among descendants who were born in the Americas.8 Ortizs third option
was that Africa and the Americas were each present in New World cultural
expressions but these were new formations, born from contact and exchange
among the multiplicity of cultural inhabitants living under colonial conditions in lands across the Atlantic.
At the same time, Ortizs research and writing was embedded in the
social Darwinism of his education and historical era, and it erroneously
encased further study of Cuban religions within the colloquial rubric of
folk practices. We concur with Christine Ayorinde in her overall assessment that Ortiz viewed the exceptional religious behaviors as primitive,
though exotic, expressive holdovers of a backward, uneducated black people who were peripherally related to the progress of Eurocentric modern
understandings about human life.9 Others who followed in Ortizs footsteps must be positioned as important researchers of Africa-based Cuban
customs, but positioned also as researchers who conceptualized them as
folk behaviors, not belonging to perceived ideas about regular or serious
culture and religion.
Rogelio Fur, Lydia Cabrera, Jorge Castellanos and Isabel Castellanos,
Miguel Barnet, and others are part of this school of normative, though falsely
dichotomizing thought.10 This perspective employs Eurocentric standards
and vocabulary that devalue folk traditions as outside a universal, normative
model of organized and civilized social structure. Religious traditions that
continue to exist outside the model (particularly the Christian model) are
then understood and reified as less than, even paganistic if not demonic.
The dichotomy goes forward to position behaviors of blacks, mulattos, and
campesinospeasant farmers, poor and mostly uneducated Cubansas a
confusing mess, syncretism, animalistic, or the result of fanatical practitioners.11 Too much of this paradigm persists even as there are newer
research findings about the integrity of Africa-based sacred practices in Cuba,
Brazil, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and other parts of the Americas.12
6

introduction

Late in the 1970s, an abundance of English language material began to be

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

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

introduction

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

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

No less than four research team members consistently lived within

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

10

introduction

The socioeconomic class status of our research group requires more

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

introduction

11

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

12

introduction

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

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

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

introduction

13

Particularities of a religions history and geography;

Distinctiveness of a shared relationship to the common Africa-based
cosmic orientation;
Any alignment of the spaces with religious tenets of practitioners
who assembled the spaces as well as alignments with other religions
practices.

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

introduction

the phenomenological principles of life, and the behavioral approaches to

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

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

15

migrated as organized ritual practices to, or evolved in, Oriente; thus we

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

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

16

introduction

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

introduction

17

myriad issues and complexities of Oriente sacred spaces and indigenous

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

18

introduction

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

Figure 2 (Above): The one sacred space of an indigenous religion that we

observed with a visible, outdoor sign. Photo by Sonya Maria Johnson, African
Atlantic Research Team.
Figure 3 (Opposite top): Local legend says this is a nineteenth-century nganga
used by Guillermn Moncada, an Oriente native and hero of Cubas first and
second wars for independence. Photo by Shanti Ali Zaid, African Atlantic
Research Team.

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

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

Figure 6: A replication of a cosmogram scripted in a Palo Monte/Palo

Mayombe casa de religion of Oriente (although this appears as black writing
on white, original scripting is in white chalk on a cement background).
Replication drawing by Shanti Ali Zaid and Jualynne E. Dodson, African
Atlantic Research Team.

Figure 7: A palero, practitioner of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, in a typical

salute to his nganga. Photo by Ricardo Merlin, Casa del Caribe.

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

Figure 9: It is normal for there to be an image of a Native American

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

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

Figure 11 (Above): Four ritual drums of the Dahomeian Vod style in a

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

Figure 14: Part of Rafael Melendezs sacred space. He is wearing collares

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

Figure 15: The Africa-derived divine spirit of Babal Ay is linked with

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

Figure 16: An Espiritismo Cordon ritual. Practitioners raise hands, move

in a circle, and chant as part of their work. The leader of this worship house
claims there are no Africa-based or Christian elements, but representations
on the wall suggest otherwise. Photo by Jualynne E. Dodson, African Atlantic
Research Team.

Figure 17: A cazuela of a Muertra Bemb de Sao community in Santiago de

Cuba. It is the very large center object that sits in front of the person in blue.
The cazuela is filled with a variety of powerful sacred objects. Photo by Shanti
Ali Zaid, African Atlantic Research Team.

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

Part I

This page intentionally left blank

Contours and Concepts

To be gi n to c om preh end and ana ly z e s ac re d spac e s

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

21

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

Geographic and Historic Contours

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

Chapter 1

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

Dominican Republic. When he returned in 1493 and 1494, he explored

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

23

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

Chapter 1

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

25

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

26

Chapter 1

The Bakongo

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

27

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

Chapter 1

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

29

Map 4: Nineteenth-century map of palenque sites in Oriente. The map shows

documented paths of escaped African descendants and their migratory
directions in the year 1841. We have inserted some known palenque and
rancheadores (hired slave catchers) sites. Map adapted by Shanti Ali Zaid,
African Atlantic Research Team.

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

Chapter 1

compound and captured eleven people. Records of the captives inquisition

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

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

contours and concepts

31

Santiago de Cuba continued to serve as an important focal city of trade and

cultural exchange for Haiti, Jamaica, and other Caribbean settlements (see
map 5), but major decisions about Cuba rarely considered the needs of the
islands eastern residents beyond general discussion and debate. Orientes
remote location resulted in inhabitants increasingly turning inward, strengthening their self-reliance and self-referencing, and taking pride in their independent behaviors, including those of their religious activities.36 Practices of
the Bakongo were the strongest of these.

Ew Fon/Adja Haitians

Challenges to the numerical and cultural primacy of Kongo Kingdom,

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

Africans of Yoruba ethnicity imported to the island during the nineteenth
century. The numbers are startling: the number of Lucum/Yoruba rose
from 8.22 percent (n=354) . . . between 1760 and 1769 to 8.38 percent (n= 453)
between 1800 and 1820 and then to 34.52 percent (n=3,161) between 1850 and
1870.38 Despite their numbers and subsequent cultural influence on Cuban
religious life, particularly in the west, these individuals did not arrive in large
numbers in Oriente and thus their presence there was not a dominant factor.
This does not preclude some Yoruba-based ritual activities in Oriente, or the
adherence to spiritual understandings associated with their Africa-derived
lifestyle. However, it does reinforce that the first, strongest, and longest lasting reference for Orientes spiritual approaches was established by ethnic
groups from Africas west central Kongo regionthose who were in eastern
Cuba from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward.39 The regions
geographic circumstances and sociopolitical separation provided conditions
that allowed the initial Kongo-based spiritual core to be handed down to
subsequent generations. When the Ew Fon/Adja of Haiti arrived, their practices were well aligned with these Kongolese-derived foundations.
There is no doubt that during the four-hundred-plus years of Spanish
colonial domination over Cubas plantation economy, the system of African
enslavement was the larger societal mechanism that influenced how and
what these descendants produced, for their masters and for themselves. At
the same time, governing social structures did not prevent early practitioners from demonstratively articulating their cosmic orientation through
sacred lifestyles and spaces, even if those articulations were not overtly
visible to the public eye. Ironically, much content of the ritual practices,
and those adjusted from early colonial activities, remained vigorous despite
continuous efforts to deny, persecute, and/or impugn ideas related to an
African identity.
For the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Oriente inhabitants have continued to live out indigenous religions that contain a copious number of behavioral remnants from colonial-era rituals. For the first
fifty-nine years of the twentieth century as well, the entire island was a neocolonial but constitutional republic under the direction of United States
business investments, religious infiltration, and general influences.40 The
absence of bona fide colonialism did not change the legal and extralegal
restrictions imposed against African descendant practitioners and their
indigenous religious rituals. Sacred work remained mostly clandestine. For
contours and concepts

33

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

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

35

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

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

As social scientists committed to interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary

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

Prior to encountering the origins and practices of Cuban religions in Ori

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

Chapter 1

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

In discussing the lives and history of oppressed people, and particularly

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

37

Transculturation

The concept of transculturation came into academic usage through the

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

38

Chapter 1

African Cosmic Orientation

Core Commonalties

You Africans dont know time

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

39

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

Human Interaction and Knowledge

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

Chapter 2

where they produce patterns of habitualized activities: particular greetings

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

41

cultural communities, individuals and collectives, was central to their creation of such customs.
Understandings about cosmic orientation are contained within symbolic representations produced by human communities in their dance, art,
music, languages, and vocabularies. Language and vocabulary may be oral,
written, gestural, characters (e.g., Chinese symbols), and so on. These symbolic representations contain appreciations about reality, and the cosmic orientation is rooted deep within the shared linguistic system. When expressed,
the orientation is an appreciation of what it means to exist or to be, just as
it indicates basic rules about behavior with natural phenomena. These are
critical understandings for all humans and foretell their existence in Oriente
practices of indigenous religions.
Eventually, our field observations and understanding of the core components of cosmic orientation and principles or rules of natural phenomena
led us to propose that Africa-based knowledge remains a part of the cosmic
core that practitioners continue to use to adapt and create their symbolic
world. At the same time, cosmic orientation is pivotal to the complete body
of knowledge shared by human cultural communities and it is used interactively in members daily living experiences with time and space.3 Their
orientation is also used to construct fundamental social relations, like family, religious affiliates, educational relations, and so on. Over mutual time
and experiences, the collective knowledge defines the group members
world and becomes a significant part of their reality. For enslaved Africans
in Oriente, cross-cultural contact and exchange had been a reality for most
of their ethnic groups even before their trans-Atlantic passages and these
were an important beginning for the body of knowledge shared, created,
and transmitted to African descendants in the new world.
The Ew Fon/Adja people of contemporary Benin, the peoples of
Yorubaland (now known as Nigeria), the Bantu-speaking peoples of the
Kongo Kingdom of modern Angola and Gabon, and peoples of other areas
in western and southwest central Africa had had mutual, interactive migration and trade long before trans-Atlantic crossings as captives.4 These contacts and exchanges were partially facilitated by reciprocal relationships and/
or warfare, but the ease of African cross-ethnic cultural exchange was also
due to the common cosmic orientation of the ethnic groups. Each African
societal cluster, with a variety of ethnic and subcultural groupings, comprehended their world as part of a divinely created, universal order, and they
understood human beings as part of that order but not the most important
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Chapter 2

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

Religion permeates all departments of life so fully that it is not always

easy or possible to isolate.
There is no formal distinction between the sacred and the secular,
between the religious and non-religious, between the spiritual and
the material arenas of life.
There are no creeds to be recited; instead, any equivalent of creeds are
written in the heart . . . and each one [person] is . . . a living creed.
Where the individual is, [so] is his religion because he is a religious
being.7

From the basics of their mutual cosmic understanding, various African

ethnic and societal groups developed interactive patterns and typifications
for ritual practice, what we would call religious activity. Enslaved persons
transported to Oriente carried their homeland ideas to the Americas and
we contend that such conceptions remained active in the regional environment throughout the colonial eras and beyond. A contributing factor to the
continuation was that Oriente received legal and clandestine shiploads of
Africa-born captives throughout all of the colonial centuries.8 We observed
contemporary material and nonmaterial objects within regional sacred
spaces that practitioners reported were part of what had been handed down
to them through history and adapted to contemporary circumstances.
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The understanding of reality articulated by contemporary practitioners confirms Mbitis findings on Africa-based ideas about religion. For
example, when our research team first asked what religion an individual
practiced, many responded that they lived an African life or an African
way rather than speak about religion. Their statements and body language conveyed a dislike for the use of religious language and a preference for the Africa-related descriptors. Initially we also tried to delineate
between sacred or religious activities and those we presumed to be secular,
to distinguish between spiritual and material arenas of life. Again, practitioners consistently converted our language of separate categories into words
that blurred linguistic difference. This is consistent with Mbitis discussions
about African conceptualizations of religion.
An example of the interconnection between cosmic orientation and
language can be seen in how practitioners spoke of the president of Cuba.
Fidel Ruiz Castro was regularly referred to as president of their country,
but respondents also spoke of him as a participant in indigenous religious
realityactual, envisioned, or symbolic. In this fashion, they used words
that coincided with spiritual understandings of the man and his actions
even as he is the political leader of the island. They were so persistent in
linguistically connecting what we separated into two categories of lifethe
sacred and the secularthat we became convinced we could not faithfully
portray their symbolic world if we maintained our categorized perspective.
Therefore, we began to analyze information from their viewpoint of an
integrated, African way of life. This is yet another way in which indigenous
religions impact life in Oriente.
Changes or adaptations to twentieth- and twenty-first-century life do
seem to be occurring in Oriente, at least in one area of Africa-based religious practice. This concerns the existence of a creed or regularly articulated
statement of beliefs. We observed that, during some rituals, communities of
practitioners recited the same sets of statements to express religious beliefs or
basic understandings about the cosmos. The creed-like litanies were recited
during ceremonies of Orientes Regla de Ocha/Lucum and Espiritismo traditions, but we also heard such a litany in one community of Palo Monte/Palo
Mayombe adherents. This was a surprise because up to that point we had
known the Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe spiritual practice to be particularly
without a creed. When coding individual and focus-group interviews, we
could not clarify if practitioners felt the content of the recitation was integral
to sacred comprehensions, or if the creed was merely rote, a valued exercise
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learned from ancestors, not necessarily reflective of ideas incorporated into

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

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

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

An ultimate supernatural entity or Creator is ultimately responsible

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

Such an orientation clearly generates essential knowledge about the world

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

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

The nature of being in the universe;

The concept of time;
The nature of space and the spirit world;
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Understandings about the nature of power in the universe;

Acceptance of spiritual revelation and possession as events that are
normal occurrences in the material world.

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

The idea of being is a complex understanding about what it means for

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

The Africa-based idea of time is distinct, minimally as related to Western

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

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

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

Each indigenous tradition possesses creation stories that include an ultimate supernatural entity or Creator, as well as other divine beings and
spirits. The stories describe how the forces of these ethereal entities function, both before and after creation, and each tradition gives differentiated
emphases to the Creator and divine spirits, including their responsibilities
in the cosmic universal order. In our study, the religions common Africabased orientation informs the understanding that creation included bringing the universe into existence, but it also posits that supernatural forces
influence some human-made things and their relationships.
Oriente practitioners appreciate that the human world of historical and
material thingsincluding galaxies and other known and unknown parts
of the totality of the universeis not the only world. This comprehension
acknowledges a world of benevolent and malevolent spirit forces that participate in the historical world of humans and in the otherworld of spirits.
However, the perception should not be equated with Western civilizations
ideas about heaven and hell.
On the other hand, the indigenous religions have dissimilar customs re
garding how humans interact with, respond, and react to divine spirits. The
variations are a result of beliefs rooted in the African-ethnic backgrounds
of the different religions and in their differential evolution within circumstances of Orientes historical development. The shared understanding that
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traverses each tradition is that divine spirits occupied or filled space long
before a material, cosmic world appeared and they remained present and
active even as the world known by humans was created. Divine spirits are
intimately related to the ultimate supernatural entity (the Supreme Creator),
to creation, to other supernatural forces of the cosmic world, and to humans
and other spirits. Divine spirits possess an astonishing amount of supernatural essence that is the power of creation. The integrated relationships of these
spirits to nature and to the process of creation exemplify the monotheistic
and polytheistic linkage of Africa-based cosmic orientation. Said another
way, the cosmic perspective of Africa-based religions integrates belief in a
singular entity of ultimate supernatural nature with an appreciation of multiple, supernatural spirit forces.16
Such a comprehension overlaps with the cosmic appreciation about
time and coincides with the nature of spirits of the dead. The latter category
is a separate but related group of spirits whose differences are demarcated
by the time phenomenon. The first group of spirits of the dead is composed
of those whose bodies have recently died and who occupy present time in
a category known as the living dead. The second category comprises the
spirits of human ancestors, those who died a long time ago. Members of
each category can have distinct characteristics just as humans can be differentiated by gender, hair color, eyes, height, weight, food preferences, and so
on. Ancestors and the living dead spirits continue to interact with the material world as long as living family members, friends, and others remember
the spirits and call upon them. Family members, friends, acquaintances,
and others who remember and call upon ancestors and the living dead may
never actually have known the individuals in life.
Remembered ancestor spirits, known and unknown, are another category of the dead. They occupy a more distant past time from the living dead
and from those in the generalized category of recent or unremembered
ancestors. This group of spirits inhabits the spirit world of a far distant past.
However, all groups of spirits can temporarily visit and participate in the
material world of humans. Spirits, usually those of either ancestor category,
can be part of future time and space. Their participation in future time is
through the yet-to-be-born, babies who will come into human form soon
and/or are still in the womb or conception process. Oriente practitioners
place enhanced value on visitations by spirits, as they know spirits who
visit can share with humans the wisdom gained from participating in past
time and in present time, as well as have access to the near future.
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Oriente practitioners further propose that some humans are allowed or

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

In concert with their African heritage, practitioners in Oriente view the

ultimate supernatural entitythe Supreme Creatoras the actualization of
total power, as the force of creation and more. This power transcends forces
of nature to produce all that is natural, part of the cosmic world humans
know, and beyond. Generalized power is the ability to make things happen
within the creative rhythm of the universe but beyond patterns understood
by most humans. That is to say, general power is the ability to make things
happen even when there is total opposition. This idea resonates with sociologist Max Webers basic definition of the power phenomenon but goes
beyond it to include an ability that transcends natural relationships, more
in line with what Weber considered charismatic power.18
A fraction of the universe-derived power, or an ability to make things
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happen, was distributed to everything at the time of creation but not in equal
portions. In order to participate in the extraordinarily efficacious power that
transcends patterns of humans and other beings, an individuals partial power
must combine with the partial power of other created things. That is to say,
to make things happen, one must collaborate with the power of other natural and supernatural entities to access powers that transcend opposition.19
Collaboration can be with the power of particular spirits of either category
of the dead, with the power of divine spirits, or with the power of the natural
forces of the worldincluding thunder, rain, lightning, water, fire, and so on.
Oriente practitioners agree that to approach comprehension of the creative
power in the natural rhythm of the cosmic world, humans can monitor such
forces as thunder, the ocean, stars, fire, wind, earth, and love, as well as the
cycles of life, death, and life again.
Practitioners of all indigenous religions revere and respect universal
order, although each tradition approaches powers of the universe and powers of creation in different ways. Likewise, each tradition uses the power
phenomenon differently. Some emphasize its use for revealing spiritual
messages for the living, while others employ power to make things happen
based on adherents requests.
Revelation and Possession

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

develop abilities to respond creatively to revealed inspiration. We call this
improvisation and the definitive role of syncopated rhythms in Cuban music
might well be a creative musical consequence of the culturally expressed
phenomenological idea of revelation. The musical forms and people who
have mastered them are anticipating disclosures from the spiritual world
and they allow space inside the timing of their compositions for such an
event.21 Likewise, the expectation of revelation is recognized and expressed
by Oriente religious practitioners who assemble sacred spaces. They make
room in ritual time and their spaces for spirits, and they socialize new members to expect spirit contact.
An event that demonstrates how revelation of ritual time and space
changed plans for scheduled activities occurred with our research team at
the worship house of a religious community. We were sitting with a family
when the tata (leader of a Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe community) entered
the room and announced, Vicente just came to me while I was washin. He
wants us to be ready to receive him at the next work. You all gotta be sure to
be here when he comes. However, as community members gathered later
that day for a sacred event designed for purposes not related to the visit
from Vicente, several worshipers who had not heard the tatas earlier statement revealed that the spirit of the previous leader, Vicente, had been in
the room. Neither of the practitioners were expecting the visit at this event
because it was not designed to (and had not) summoned spirits. The occurrence demonstrates that those with consciousness about spirits are regularly open for contact and revelation.
Indigenous traditions practiced in Oriente hold that revelation happens through contact with or by spirits. Devotees told us that rather than a
sighting or embodied event, they also experienced such inspirational contact through dreams. The provocative quotation that opens the next part
encapsulates spirit inspiration rather than embodiment. Spirits that come
in dreams, with no words to walk on refers to the idea that spirits need
human receptacles who hear and can speak messages from the otherworld.
At the same time, humans must have knowledge and ability to recognize the
symbols when and however they happen, just as they must remain open to
receive the revelations.
Spirit possession is intimately linked with revelation and represents the
process of entering a condition of amazing perceptive consciousness: a state
of altered awareness caused by the presence of an ethereal being, a spirit
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temporarily occupying a humans body. We feel that Rachel Hardings findings about this phenomenon, which she encountered in Brazil, accurately
represent the significance of spirit possession as understood by practitioners in Oriente. Harding proposes that spirit possession is a relationship
of exchange, of mutuality, of shared responsibility, and above all of accompaniment. The possessing spiritual entity can be a divine spirit, an ancient
ancestor spirit, a recent ancestor spirit, or a spirit of the living dead. While
sharing the body of a human, each type of spirit can impart knowledge and
images from the historical world as well as from the otherworld of supernatural beings. In this way, the person(s) possessed, and those who witness
the event, are reminded that the material, historical conditions of their present world are not the ultimate statement of existence. This knowledge can
be empowering for individuals and collectives whose lives and beings have
been signified as powerless. Harding affirms this when she says that possession is particularly significant because the occupation of black bodies
by divine beings is a stunning contestation by the oppressed of inhumane
positions imposed on colonial and contemporary African descendants.22
Possession by a spirit of any category happens most regularly when
some portion of space in the human material world has been temporarily
reordered to permit these forces to enter present time. This spatial and temporal rearranging is usually achieved through appropriate rituals and other
sacred procedures. The rearrangement uses liturgical and venerational
devices, such as spatial adornment, prayers, chants, songs, drumming, and
dance, as well as food, drink, and other offerings known to please and facilitate contact with spirits of the otherworld. Although efforts at atmospheric
alterations can and often do lead to spirit visits, there is no guarantee that
the beings will possess humans or that the contacted spirits will be the ones
to visit. Nevertheless, all of our respondents expressed the understanding
that spirits are available to help humans lead better lives, lives that are more
in balance with the created universal order.
Ritual

Rituals, by definition, repeat, reiterate, and reinforce shared knowledge

just as they reinforce sacred and creative acts from past and recent present time.23 Rituals are prescribed activities through which humans can
unite with the historical and thereby generate special time flexibility within
the present. The time flexibility allows practitioners to transcend present
time. This is the episodic discontinuity of the Africa-based concept of the
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time phenomenon. During ritual time, humans reestablish contact with

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

There are other forms of reverence derived from Africa-based cosmic orientation and phenomenological principles, but we have identified a select
few as significant and wish to explore them as additions to the above major
categories. Such activities as chanting, singing, drumbeats, and dancing are
intimate and integral parts of Oriente reverent behaviors and they characterize religious traditions as practiced in the region. Some of these forms of
reverence are more prominent, energetic, and visible in one or more traditions, but, at some time or another, one or more appeared in ritual work
done in sacred spaces we researched. The activities were never observed as
mere ambiance or supplements to sacred work but were perceptibly essential components of the totality of symbolic language contained in ceremonial behaviors of a religious practice. Activities of reverence are a form of
prayer as well as a means of preparing for entrance into the perceptive consciousness of spirit possession.
Drum rhythms, dance gestures, formulaic chants, some songs, and even
spatial adornmentas well as interactions among and between theseare
coded to identities of divine spirits, ancestral spirits, and spirits of the living dead. The coded presentations help to change the material worlds atmospheric space of sacred work in order to create a charged ambiance that
encourages visitation from the supernatural world. The goal of the changes
is to invite spirits to present time so that practitioners might receive an
embodied experience, a possession, or an altered consciousness. These allow
humans to be included more deeply in the insightful knowledge and rhythms
of creative power, if only temporarily.
Rhythms, chants, drumbeats, songs, and dance also function as mechanisms that transmit historical information. These linguistic religious and
ritual utterances incorporate descriptive messages of events that mark a
communitys connection to ancestral history and more recent past events.
The articulations also can include events about other practitioner groups and
worshipers who share the same sacred tradition but within a different community. For example, chants and some drum rhythms contain stories and
proverbs about continental beginnings, while many invocational songs and
chants that begin ceremonies are regularly played, sung, or spoken in languages of a religions African origins or transculturated linguistic creation.24
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Orientes Cuban Spanish may be used for the names of significant personalities, activities, and places, but other aspects of the sung and performed
prayers may also be in the language of a traditions African origins.
A ritual event of the Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe tradition will be useful
to demonstrate some of these points. In Oriente, Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe
is noted to convene special chanting or singing battles. The battles are
planned ritual occasions as well as spontaneous gatherings in which designated reputed singers from different worship communities come together
competitively to learn and demonstrate detailed knowledge of significant
ancestral episodes of their religion and respective practicing communities.
If there are resources, the battles include drumming and rhythmic chants.
The songs of storytelling that accompany the rhythmic drums and chants
are coded expressions traceable to streams of knowledge about African origins and ancestry of the religion and/or a specific community.
There can be dancing at the battles but whatever the components, there
are precise rules for how the events are to proceed. There are rules for interrupting a battlers verbal performance in order to respond or change the
direction of the storytelling; rules for how to exclude battlers who are telling a story incorrectly and/or are exceptionally weak; and there are rules for
who is eligible to compete or be a battler. Furthermore, there are specifications to determine when the social event has ended and who was the most
successful. Successful competitors are collectively determined and individual as well as community reputations are vested in the competitions. Battlers
are trained within their worshiping groups and require years of preparation
as well as an appropriate voice and spiritual designation.
However, the most important aspect of battle occasions is not the competition but the fact that the ritual introduces, corrects, and/or affirms at
tendees in their knowledge of historical personalities and occurrences of
their tradition. The gatherings also confirm the valued aesthetic of song,
drumming, chants, rhythms, and collective participation as important forms
of sacred behavior. These and other ritualized occasions are activities of reverence even as they are oral records of events and revitalize a traditions historical chronologies, including genealogies.25
When all components of some rituals are appropriately performed,
including the coded forms of reverence in drums, chants, songs, and
dance, the atmosphere surrounding the activities is reordered. A spiritual current can be established and under these rearranged conditions,
revelation, possession, or another embodied experience is more likely to
african cosmic orientation

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occur. Each religion acknowledges that rhythms, chants, drumbeats, and/

or dance are normal parts of sacred reality and are central to invoking a
personified spiritual occurrence.

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

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What Sacred Spaces Do

Academic fields of religious studies, anthropology,

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

61

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

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

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

help set boundaries to demarcate the social context of a community;

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

Context and Boundary Setting

A first responsibility of sacred spaces is that of setting boundaries within

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

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for having a high percentage of African-descendant citizens. We had even

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

several significant street names, as well as the location of family homes of
military heroes, Oriente natives, and African descendants General Guillermn
Moncada and General Antonio Maceo Grajales. Map enhanced by Shanti Ali
Zaid, African Atlantic Research Team.

his temple house and sacred spaces were situated. We were told that this
was an historical city site of Cuban religious rituals because the neighborhood had been the home of the leader credited with introducing Oriente
to coherent practices of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe and of Regla de Ocha.8
One block beyond the tatas house, we encountered a small unobtrusive
building, well painted, with large pink and black letters that read Templo
San Benito de Palermo (see figure 2).
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We had seen the building before but never perceived it as a site containing indigenous religious sacred spaces and activities. We had understood that buildings that served as centers for such religious practices or
that contain sacred spaces of these traditions did not have outdoor signs.
The absence of outside notifications is connected to the fact that colonial
and twentieth-century authorities vigorously persecuted practitioners of
the traditions. This forced many, if not most, practices to be conducted
clandestinely.9 We knew this and initially perceived Templo San Benito de
Palermo to be part of Cuban Catholic reality; a religious tradition sanctioned for centuries by island authorities.10
For those whose cultural knowledge was greater, the building was a
focal point of religious life and customs that evolved from particular historical experiences of Los Hoyos and Oriente. The tata explained this to
us and we finally understood that the building stood as monument to
our cultural misunderstandings about the anonymity of worship centers
of these traditions. The entire escorted exploration helped to expand our
cultural perceptions as there are general, abstract, or academic rules about
human phenomena, and there is the actual lived experience within these
generalities. We were beginning to know Los Hoyos as a specialized place,
a place with content of indigenous religion, and a place bound externally
and internally with worship locations of the practices. We continued to
have experiences that enhanced our cultural perceptions, but these examples demonstrate that spaces can and do set boundaries and context, even
within city neighborhoods.
At the same time, many Oriente geographies of sacrality are bounded
within domestic residences or other family buildings. No matter how
tiny the familys living arrangement, most practitioners will have at least
one or more sacred spaces in their homes, and boundaries of the different assemblages demarcate what does or does not belong. In some
homes, a sacred site is larger and better appointed than the area where
the family lives. However, when leaders are responsible for building and
maintaining the sites, they become specialized gathering locations for
practitioners to collectively contact spirits of the otherworld. Leaders
sites are then often referred to as Casas de Templo (temple houses)
and though they are rarely bounded with outward signs or notations
as the San Benito de Palermo location was, spaces of religious leaders
are exceptional.

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Communication and Communion

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

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

communication with the spirit world can occur. Objects are symbolic representations of the Africa-based alternative time model, the alternative
temporal modality contained within the cosmic orientation. For Oriente
practitioners, these objects in their spaces contain and are manifestations
of the divine power of creation. Their incorporation in the spaces exemplifies practitioners intentional continuation of their inherited customs and
cultural identity. The objects say all things of creation have inherent value.
While material objects in spaces continue to evoke this characteristic, they also are grounded in the world of humans. Many can be considered as spiritual capital, an expansion of Pierre Bourdieus exploration
of theoretical ideas about capital. He proposed that while the concept is
normally associated with economics, it could also be understood as various species of symbolic capital.13 This opened an analytical avenue in the
study of religion wherein Bradford Verter expanded upon Bourdieu for
applicability in the field and proposed a notion of spiritual capital we feel
is useful for understanding material objects employed in Oriente religious
practice.14 Verter contends, and we agree, that some spiritual themes,
ideas, and/or objects can be understood to acquire a materiality and value
that transcends their inherent composition or religious function. This
extended understanding objectifies spiritual items, and their objectified
appreciation, while still connected to religious participation, has additional value: they are spiritual capital. This is precisely the nature of several
categories of material objects within spaces of Oriente; some objects are
transformed into form[s] of material and symbolic commodities of spiritual significance.
The material transformation is in addition to the sacrality of objects and
their function as participants in communication with spirits. Sometimes the
pieces are also appropriated and made available for distribution and consumption, as some select, small, portable objects become spiritual capital
that is sold to international tourists willing to pay to own materials associated with indigenous religious practices.15 Such visitors seem to be attracted
to necklaces, bracelets, stones, seeds, and other small objects they presume
hold spiritual power and are part of Oriente religiosity. In addition to the
spiritual power they may possess, objects are valued as capital because of
their ability to garner financial return in the countrys strained economy.
Later in our discussion, we will return to the concept of spiritual capital
in Oriente.
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Within the sacred nature of their function, material objects are necessary participants in processes of atmospheric change that allow the entry of
spirits into sacred spaces. The materials are the special rocks, feathers, tree
branches, cloths, and so on, that must accompany drum rhythms, chants,
special decor, dance, and other forms of reverence needed to change the
atmosphere so that spirits might visit with practitioners. Objects assistance
in spiritual communication is almost always invisible to uninformed observers or those who do not share an understanding of practitioners symbolic
universe. To the informed, however, observing an objects position in a space
activates a body of shared knowledge and can elicit a cultural and/or religious
perception about communication between humans and spirits in that space.
The objects are internal boundary markers of symbolic sacredness and, as
such, must be acted upon and interacted with.
Just as sacred sites function in a variety of ways to communicate with
spirits, they also are locations of generalized, varied, and frequent communing between and among humans. Practitioners contend that the locations are family meeting places, settings where adherents can rely upon
seeing and talking with people who share their cosmic orientation, if not
their actual religious lifestyle. To test this proposition, we carefully began
each data-gathering encounter by spending time in the family house and/
or neighborhood of a sacred space. We first entered the house, went to the
location of sacrality, made appropriate gestures to acknowledge the sites
spiritual essence, and then sat wherever other visitors or family members
were seatedinside or outside the house, often facing the street. Sometimes
we sat for hours, talking with neighbors and family members, helping
comb hair (male and female), playing with children, joking with teenagers,
or generally visiting with passersby. This was not a formal interview time,
but a time when we were conducting prescribed observations to determine
if the spaces were truly settings of human communing. We also were reintegrating ourselves into the rhythm of the particular house, neighborhood,
and the religious community, even as our presence was proactive participation in reciprocal interactions of everyday life and conversations. We, too,
were communing with practitioners, with the sacred geographies, and with
all those familiar with one, the other, or both.
We found that although tourists did visit some sacred spaces, they rarely
involved themselves in the communing. This was unlike visits by worshipcommunity members, or visitors who were initiates of a different religious
tradition, and/or members of a different worship community. No one was
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obligated to be at the spaces during nonceremonial times, and tourists were

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

Another important role of sacred spaces is to provide practitioners with

locations that guarantee they will remember those of the spiritworld. To
remember spirits is an important and required phenomenological principle derived from Africa-based orientation. However, re-member-ing is
not merely the mental recall of people or events but includes the cognitive
returning of an absent community member to the consciousness of those
present in ritual space, as well as the returning of the absent members, if
only by visual memory. Each time a member practitioner actually or figuratively returns to locations of sacrality, they are integrated and reintegrated
into the body of religious knowledge that bonds the practicing collective;
they are re-member-ed.
When members have long periods of absence, because of geography,
life circumstances, or physical death, sacred spaces themselves become the
locational ritual instrument for recalling and re-member-ing those not present. This is achieved during ceremonial gatherings and through verbal or
symbolic articulations that intone names of the absent. Also intoned are
the names of special spirits of the living dead, as well as titles of significant
events of ancestors and divine spirits. A litany of names of absent members
and spirits of all categories can be recited during the allocated invocational
time. The intoning and recalling is putting the entire religious collective
back together for the ritual work to be done. The complete body of believers is thereby symbolically re-member-ed, returned together into present
time of the human community and communion ritual. The re-membering accentuates practitioners physical participation in ritual activities and
sacred spaces are the context. The result is a concrete and symbolic reestablishment of human, spiritual, and religious linkagesthe putting of actual
and spiritual bodies back into the ritual time of the communitys cosmic
orientation.17 In Oriente, this is an important role of sacred spaces.
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The shared Africa-based cosmic orientation necessitates re-membering because, at a minimum, spirits of the living dead are understood to
exist within current human life reality and thereby are available to assist
in difficulties of living family members, if living persons remember them.
Ritual remember-ing helps accomplish this obligation but there are other
ordinary, taken-for-granted, everyday life behaviors of Oriente practitioners that demonstrate the importance of keeping the memory of those
who have died. For example, inhabitants habitually pour a small amount
of a newly opened bottle of beverage, particularly rum, on the ground as a
spiritual libation. When we asked about this behavior, we were consistently
told, Its for those whove gone before, for the departed, for the ancestors.
We pour libations for the ancestors. The action occurred in sacred as well
as in everyday places, that is, street corners, parks, parties, front doorsteps,
and so on. The pouring of libations to the earth is understood as a gesture
of reverence to all foreparents and ancestors because all are interred in the
earth as a universal place, no matter where they were buried. Respondents
insisted that the earth is one, all of it is sacred because it was divinely
created and holds the bodies of those who have died. Therefore, before
drinking from a new bottle of liquidwhether in sacred spaces or otherwisehumans should pour libations as reverence to the creative relationship of the earth and to those whose bodies have gone before.
The repertoire of religious knowledge that undergirds libation behavior is derived from the same cosmic orientation that informs ceremonial
re-member-ing. That knowledge and those actions help to reinforce the orientation as well as to maintain the union of sacred and secular that Oriente
practitioners operationalize in their Africa-based lifestyle. The coming
together of sacred and secular within life is but one representation of an
alternative model of timean alternative temporal modality contained
within the orientation. Rituals performed in sacred spaces enhance the significance of religious reality as part of this alternative concept of time.
Locations of sacrality also serve to stimulate collective memory of the
general Cuban population since the vast majority has working familiarity with practices associated with the nations African heritage and with its
indigenous religions. Cubans know that thousands of sacred spaces are constructed by way of religious knowledge transmitted through the history of
their country. Minimally this consciousness is created through basic information imparted in the nations educational curriculum, and the government maintains Casas de Cultura (cultural houses) in every municipality,
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city, and most towns, where an abundance of extracurricular activities

designed to familiarize citizens with this national heritage are performed.18
Neighborhood performance events convened by Santiagos Festival del
Caribe introduced us to an example of how the religiosity of Cubas African
heritage is disseminated to become generalized national awareness. Our
team accompanied an annual neighborhood celebration for young children, a street festival. Three blocks of the street had been blocked off and
children comprised the majority of performers and audience. There was
the expected high energy, loud talking, and laughter of childrens normal
play, but there also was structured dancing, drumming, and singing choreographed from rituals of indigenous religions. When the young audience
was asked to identify the spirits represented in a particular performance,
or to sing a chant associated with ritual coding, the school-aged children
simultaneously and enthusiastically recited the correct names and sang out
appropriate coded chants.19
Throughout the larger, citywide festival activities, we also heard a multitude of stories, myths, songs, poems, dances, proverbs, and other content
from the reservoir of Cuban cultural knowledge. Within these were details
about and from indigenous religions of the nations heritage. Therefore,
whether or not they are practitioners, Cubans are informed about the countrys religious inheritance and familiar with stories and myths associated
with many such traditions. Citizens also know that the traditions have sacred
spaces and the spaces, as well as knowledge of them, are memory markers
for nonpractitioners shared historical and active contemporary relationship
with their African heritage.20
In addition, sacred spaces serve as memory devices to hearken practitioners imagination back to collective ritual experiences that occurred at the
sites. Experiences that included supernatural participation are especially significant and memories associated with them are activated by sacred spaces.
Ritual processes of initiation are outstanding in this regard and include
socialization instructions to adherents about their duty to remember the
experiences. The rites are collective activities in sacred spaces that incorporate new members into a community. Practitioners reported vivid memories associated with sacred spaces and their initiation experiences. They
recounted in great detail the ritual bath that everyone must take for initiation
and acknowledged recalling such details when encountering a sacred space.
An initiation usually occurs in a worship community leaders geography of spirit engagement. The impressionable rituals that occur in the
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site usually establish initiates awareness of their linkage to dynamic, spiritrelated customs and authority of the tradition. It is therefore not surprising
that respondents reported memories of their initiation process are evoked
when they actually or figuratively revisit that site of sacrality or even visit
other sacred spaces. My head is just filled with pictures and images of that
time when I was scratched (initiated). As such, a role of sacred spaces is
to reestablish the special meanings of individuals shared experiences and
reaffirm their belonging to a ritual family. Individuals also can momentarily reflect on completed or incomplete religious responsibilities when
they encounter sacred spaces. Thus, the sites are locations of communication and communing, places where whole communities are re-member-ed
literally and figuratively. Sacred spaces serve to create strong memories of
significant ritual events, to stimulate the evocation of such powerful recollections, and they are reminders of individual and collective relationship to
a religious tradition.
Meaning

Another sure role of sacred spaces is their influence in establishing meaning for a religious community/family. These are the places where members
regularly and predictably acquire knowledge of their shared cosmic understanding and learn their traditions interpretations of life and the universe.
Members teach and share common meanings about the world as understood through their practice, and most of these customs are taught in sacred
spaces, not in schools; there are no private schools in Cuba. Practitioners
collective meanings about reality are created through shared interactive
historical experiences as well as through linkages to those experiences in
which they did not participate. Language is indispensable in the development of this interpretative commonality. It is important to remember that
ritual language of some indigenous religions in Oriente is directly linked
to the African and Cuban historical heritage of the traditions. These languages serve to assist in creating and sustaining historically forged identity
and interpretative commonality among practitioners.
As well, Oriente spaces draw meaning from devotees shared experiences in the social and political realities of their eastern environment.
This is especially true because generations of regional practitioners were
active in colonial Africans palenques, the liberated zones of neo-African
social reality. More recent generations fought in Cubas three nineteenthcentury wars of national identity, independence, and sovereignty. Regional
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participants helped create memories, reputations, and historical authority that carry contemporary significance for Oriente ritual customs. Many
women and men who supported the liberation efforts were religious devotees who gathered for sacred activities before, during, and after going into
combat.21 Veterans returning from these fields narrated their account of
the events and thereby handed down stories of activities, heroic people,
and pivotal deeds of their military experiences. Particularly important were
events where supernatural intervention occurred.
Combatant practitioners inevitably wove into their war stories supernatural beings battle participation where that was the case; their interpretive reporting was fraught with nationalistic as well as spiritual meanings.
The stories were passed on to new generationspractitioners, neighbors,
and family members alike. Some accurate historical accounts were made
into popular poems and songs about the cosmic nature of military occurrences but many reports became legends and myths that took their place
in the Oriente expressive repertoire. In this way, historical details that
contained a spiritual emphasis were made accessible to the larger public. Throughout Oriente, ritual songs, chants, invocations, sacred drum
rhythms, re-member-ing litanies, and general conversations continue to re
peat many of these stories.22
Sacred spaces can encapsulate these historically significant meanings
linked to spiritual, national, and regional identity. The pilon and nganga of
the national hero Guillermn Moncada are exemplary. The pilon is a large
wooden, cylinder-shaped, bowl-like vessel used in earlier generations with
an equally large mortar-like grinding stick. The nganga is the cast-iron kettle
used to hold the sacred elements for the religious tradition of Palo Monte/
Palo Mayombe (see figure 8). We were able to conduct interviews with
descendants of Moncada, a military general of African descent. Guillermn,
as our practitioner colleagues affectionately called him, fought fearlessly in
the Ten Years War of 1868 but received a disabling wound and could only
fight briefly in the 1895 War of Independence.23 The home of one Moncada
descendant, an Espiritismo practitioner, contains a pilon and nganga as
inherited family artifacts (see figure 3). As is the custom in families who
practice indigenous religions, Moncadas descendant inherited these artifacts
from ancestors and elders. Local legend contends that General Moncada
used this nganga in his work as a leading member of his practitioner community. We verified this story through interviews with several nonfamily
elders of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe and see it as part of Oriente reality.
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Cuban school curricula include General Moncada as an important

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

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

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tradition. The spirits are reported to frequently participate in contemporary

rituals.25 In figure 14, the number of objects probably cannot be accurately
counted even as the assemblage is profoundly colorful. This space contains
such a wide variety of objects as to suggest contradiction. However, both
spaces are actively used in Oriente for ritual activities, both are within the
same family of religious tradition, both are eye-catching artistic arrangements, and they are also different, one from the other.
Another example of sacred spaces inspiring artistic expression is the
work of the internationally known artist Wilfredo Lam (19021982). Lam
was the son of a Cantonese immigrant and a Cuban mulatto woman. His
godmother was a well-known leader of a religious community in the
islands Sagua la Grande area. Although we cannot verify that he was initiated into any tradition, we do know that he grew up and was socialized
with an intimate relationship to the countrys indigenous religious environment and his artistic creations were inspired by exposure to and experiences with that atmosphere. His creations contain representations from
identifiable religious practice, and he is said to be the first plastic artist in
all the history of western art to present a vision from the African presence
in America.26
Sidewalk tiles of the La Rampa neighborhood in Havanas Vedado district are showcases of Lams images and provide an example of spiritual
inclusions in the contemporary, ordinary life of urban Cuba (see figure 5).27
The ceramic tiles are derived from cosmograms or sacred scripting of the
reglas congo, as well as from practices of other indigenous religions. The
tiles publicly display the inclusive nature of religious ideas through art in
the nations cultural customs.

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

set context and boundaries,

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

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We integrated the discussion with particulars of Oriente practitioners ex

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

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Part II

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Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe

Spirits that come in dreams

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

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sites of Guantnamo, Santiago, and Manzanillo, as well as other smaller

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

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

gional rituals and then proceed to engage foundational knowledge of the
tradition, continuing on to consider sacred spaces created by Palo Monte/
Palo Mayombe Oriente practitioners.

Arrival and Formation

As an organized and coherent set of ritual behaviors, Palo Monte/Palo
Mayombe arrived in Oriente at the turn of the twentieth century with
migrants from western Cubas Matanzas area.10 However, this is only true
for the organized, coherent set of ritual practices. We contend that knowledge and ideas from Kongo Kingdom ethnic groups arrived in the region
much soonerin the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of Spanish colonial occupation. It was in 1522 that the Spanish colonial empire began to
exchange autochthonous labor in Cuba for that of enslaved Africans. The
Kongo Kingdom families of Bantu people were the largest number of persons of a single ethnic group imported between that time and the end of
the seventeenth century.11 The relationship was not coincidental as the
Spanish purchased Africans from the Portuguese whose trade had been
established with Africas Kongo peoples since the mid-fifteenth century.
The Portuguese human cargo was imported to Cuba as cheap, reliable
labor for copper and other ore mining and for the development of small
agricultural enterprises.12 The city of Santiago de Cuba, organized in 1515,
was the colonys capital until 1607 and was the main port of entry for the
first generations of African descendants.13
Those Africans who survived Atlantic Ocean crossings experienced
inordinate pain and suffering but nevertheless brought with them their cosmic orientation as an important body of knowledge about what it means
to be human. Their understandings about the cosmos and the principles
or rules of nature were enculturated comprehensions learned from birth
and childhood in African time, space, and social orders. The earliest and
initial entrance into Oriente of the Africa-based cosmic orientation and
phenomenological knowledge provided an alternative to that of colonial
Europeans. It was not a dominant alternative, nor was there social or political equity between the alternatives. However, it was an additional model
for understanding what it means to exist and, given the nature of human
interaction, the population of Africans shared their perspective.
There were at least two oppressed cultural groups in colonial Cuba,
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Africans and the Native Indians. Europeans enslaved both and, despite differences in customs and language, the two suppressed groups engaged in
reciprocal, interactive relationships. Enslaved Africans found that many
of their comprehensions about being human and how to effectively operationalize that humanity was shared with their new relations. For example,
Amerindians and Kongo descendants each understood the significance of
ancestors, the interconnection of ancestors and the land, and the necessity
to revere ancestors and communicate with spirits, and they each understood that spirits could and did inhabit the world of humans. These conceptual commonalities became part of Orientes spiritual foundation as the
two groups continued to interact and conduct new combined ritual activities. Local legends contend that the Indians shared the ritual use of tobacco
with the early Africans and Kongo Kingdom descendants introduced
Indians to the use of drum rhythms to invoke a spiritual atmosphere.14
Hence, the use of tobacco15 and Africa-derived drum rhythms, as well as
the common cosmic orientation and shared phenomenological principles
took root in Oriente.
The two groups of enslaved people were linked by spiritual affinity, by
sociopolitical status, and by mutually constructed rituals. In 1533, the linkage expanded as together Africans and Indians attacked the colonial town
of Baracoa. The purpose of the raid was to capture food and other consumer
resources.16 Significantly, European settlement in the region had only begun
in 1514 and enslaved Africans began arriving in notable numbers in 1522. In
less than twenty years the two bonded groups had connected sufficiently to
implement an attack. This suggests that the creation of new behavioral forms,
the transculturation process, began immediately and did not require generations to be productive. Spiritual focus was not omitted from the process.
What has become Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe ritual practices would
have been part of the transculturated emphasis on communication with
spirits and specifically working with spirits of the living dead. Contempo
rary practitioners refer to these spirits as muertos (the dead) and understand that they are active in the material world of humans present time.
Muertos can be invoked to help humans accomplish goals when adherents
maintain spiritual contact, but humans are obligated to maintain a relationship, particularly with ancestral spirits who when called upon can be
active in the present. Practitioners also are to remain in communication
with divine spirits. In return, invoked spirits will contact, if not embody,
devotees in order to transmit knowledge, wisdom, and power that can help
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guide life in the present, historical space. Neither spirits nor receivers of
communications from these are given categorical gender-specific designations. Women are eligible to receive spirit wisdom just as the female aspect
of spirits can be invoked.17
Orientes early ritual activities were passed on to new generations to
some extent by way of life in palenques de cimarronessettlement communities of Africans and Indians who escaped enslavement. Within palenques
and other rebel locations, the role of muertos remained of primary ritual
importance because these spirits were available to help.

Palenques
It is impossible to envision the development and continuation of Palo
Monte/Palo Mayombe or any Africa-based practices without discussing palenques. As early as the second half of the sixteenth century, if not
before, enslaved Africans and those remaining Indians began running
away from bondage and forming settlements in the mountains of Oriente.
These palenques operated from the mid-1500s through approximately 1886
when slavery in Cuba was outlawed.18 Some mountainous towns of the
region are the result of or built around old settlement sites.19 Palenques
were neo-African zones of liberation and epitomized resistance to the system of colonial slavery, but they were also domestic, economic, military,
and spiritual survival centers for the oppressed. Such locations existed in
various parts of the island, from western Pinar del Rio to eastern areas of
Guantnamo.20 However, palenques of the east were distinct in their size,
longevity, and social functioning.
The Sierra Maestra mountains provided isolated forested spaces for
hiding after runaways escaped from a plantation or other work center. The
mountains also helped separate Oriente from official colonial control based
in western Cuba. The separation included palenques. When in 1607 the
island capital was moved to Havana, the mountainous geography exacerbated the separation and produced Orientes isolation. There was increased
difficulty (if not reluctance) in providing the east with military and other
authorized protections, as well as economic support. At best, coastal cities such as Baracoa, Guantnamo, Santiago, and Manzanillo might have
contact with the west, but even these relations were not dependable.
Consequently, Oriente was politically, militarily, and socially isolated in its
geographic separation from western centers of colonial activity.21
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The absence of support from colonial authorities made eastern inhabitants more vulnerable to increasing attacks from foreign pirates and
privateers, especially the English. Oriente residents, including palenque in
habitants, became self-reliant for material survival and self-referencing in
social behaviors. Palenque members fought, worked, procreated, and died
in their well-organized, neo-African communities, and records show that
the communities participated in the clandestine trade relations that helped
characterize the regions colonial economy.22 Within the settlements, crossethnic African group interactions brought forth new, transculturated ritual
behaviors that referenced inhabitants African background. This aided the
continued use of Kongolese Africa-based ritual knowledge, as these ethnic
members were the strongest residential participants.
Even as Kongo groups were culturally dominant, Mandingo, Carabal, and
members of other African ethnic communities also found Orientes mountainous geography ideal for participating in liberated communities. When
nineteenth-century Chinese were brought to Cuba, some of them also joined
palenques.23 Members cultivated food products, hunted small animals, and
conducted raids on nearby plantations, villages, and towns, as well as traded
with clandestine supply ships for needed provisions. The mountains and foothills facilitated thicket and forest retreats and, over time, palenques took on
complex social organizations. The liberated zones perpetuated themselves and
were known by colonial authorities to exist through generations, despite military attacks to close them down.24 There were famous or infamous palenque
captains in charge of strategic planning for the collectives and whose reputations were well known by Oriente establishments. There were separate settlements designated for women and children, such as Maluala, and members
from different palenques coordinated regular and successful raids on nearby
plantations in a fashion resembling military operations of local authorities.25
The social order of palenques was aligned with Africa-based structural arrangements if by no other evidence than the existence of a chief or
captain and the inclusion of gender-separated arenas.26 As palenque residents retreated into forested areas to perform sacred customs, their Africabased cosmic orientation and principles about phenomena of the universe
informed ritual behaviors that addressed spiritual needs of members. The
early patterns were the foundations upon which indigenous religions would
evolve through centuries of such Africa-based activities. The bemb (drum
party), for example, is one such ritual attributable to the forested circumstances of palenque life.27
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Responses from contemporary practitioners and current research findings of Casa del Caribe investigators describe colonial bemb as a grand
celebration event that invoked ancestral and other spirits to visit the world
of gathered descendants.28 Along with the voice, drums were the definitive
instrument of the events and the character of bemb drums was based on
Kongolese construction, Kongolese rhythms, and other heritages of these
African people. The large, cylinder-shaped, wooden constructions with animal skin stretched across the top or head, played a central role in the colonial gatherings. The top of the drum is larger in circumference than the
bottom, with the whole instrument standing about two and a half to three
and a half feet tall. Sounds that come from Kongo-type drums are deep in
tone though there is a tonal range. Indications are that early colonial activities continued late into nights of dancing, drumming, and chanting/singing
under the trees and stars.29
Drums in many contemporary Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe celebrations are similar in shape and function to their colonial predecessors. They
are usually played in groups of three, although we participated in events
where only one or two were used and, on at least one occasion, we observed
more than three drums participating in a celebration. Figure 1 shows these
Kongo-type instruments after the middle drummer emphatically took his
position to demonstrate to the others. The middle drummer is an elder
practitioner whose drumming and ritual knowledge is well known in the
region. On two successive occasions during the activities, he had chastised
the three younger drummers to stop playing those bat rhythms. After the
second call for corrections, the elder signaled for the middle drummer to
move and replaced him. As the elder took-up the middle drum he insisted
that the drummers go back to playin rhythms of our Congo ancestors.
In addition to Kongo-type drums, dancing, and singing, the cazuela
was a transculturated ritual object that appears to have been incorporated
into early ritual behaviors of colonial Oriente and transmitted to new generations. The cazuela, a large, shallow pan or bowl-like container, was used for
such domestic tasks as food preparation, cooking, washing, and so on. At the
same time, a specially designated cazuela was set aside for exclusive use in
Orientes Africa-based ritual life, to hold important sacred objects. Cazuelas
were material objects whose symbolic representation often violated colonial
authorities definitions of religious normality (see figure 17). The containers held rocks, dirt, twigs, chains, nails, pieces of animal and human bones,
hair, skin, and other items that religious historian Charles Long identifies
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as associated with intimacy and obligation, actualities and potentials, and

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

descendants born in Cuba, and even foreigners. In attempting to understand this cross-ethnic membership, Palmi contends that the cross-ethnic
practices are not based on sanguine genealogy of practitioners but on their
ritual initiation into a group. Orientes social, political, and geographic landscape facilitated this symbolic, if not real, blurring of ethnic identities and
the merging of ethnic practices within groups bound by ritual initiation.34
In other words, the transculturation process took place and we would further say that the shared cosmic orientation facilitated this.
Not withstanding the stronger Kongolese influence, Orientes early
palenques were populated with smaller subgroup admixtures of informal
ritual clusters of practitioners. The ritual subgroups provided African ethnic descendant members with familiar emotional, psychological, and spiritual comfort that was related, but not exclusive to, specifics of their ethnic
backgrounds. At the same time, the evolving ethnogenic, affinity ritual
groups were not exclusive or exhaustive in the east but appeared elsewhere.
They and their activities served as a type of moral and social organizer for
members and existed inside and outside of neo-African social formations
like palenques. Europeans controlled which ethnic groups would arrive in
any given location but within the liberated formations, members controlled
behaviors as they had social and spiritual commonality. Multi- and crossethnic membership in ritual affinity groups as well as in palenques became
the pattern.
By the close of the seventeenth century colonial officials were so well
acquainted with the informal, ritual affinity relationships, and they were
so well organized in their activities, that authorities felt compelled to align
them within existing social arrangements of colonial Spanish authority. The
colonial government authorized the existence of the neo-African groupings
and labeled them as cofradias. Authorities envisioned that cofradias would
function as separate African civil organizations and thereby increase contentment with the existing social and political colonial order. The assumption was that cofradias would function much as such European groups had
in Spain.35 However, benevolence was not the motivation for the colonial
shift. The enslaved population had engaged in resistance activities since the
beginning of the trans-Atlantic trade and, in so doing, constantly caused
large and small economic disruptions. As rebellions continued throughout colonies of the Americas, and grew larger in sites in Brazil and Haiti,
Cuban colonists feared further uprisings and full-fledged revolution on
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their island. They searched for ways to thwart such developments.36 To hold
back Africans rebellious ideas and behaviors, officials sanctioned social
space for the informal neo-African arrangements to participate in colonial
social order; cofradias became marginally part of the social structure.
The approved cofradias were modeled after European civil groups that
emphasized spiritual content, but among Oriente neo-African cofradias,
there was little if any obligation to replicate the European model. Rebellious
activities of all types continued in the region throughout the eighteenth
century and cofradias employed official sanction as social space for further
implementation of members preferred transculturated customs, including
ritual practices. In form, function, and now with colonial approval, the ritual affinity groups were neo-African cofrada societies.
In the latter parts of the eighteenth century, there was a shift in African
ethnic membership in Orientes palenque liberated zones, as well as in the
ethnic affinity cofrada groups. The successful Haitian Revolution of 1791
produced the worlds first independent nation of African descendants
and caused a major exodus of French colonial planters, many of whom
brought their enslaved laborers with them to Oriente. The migration from
the French colony had begun earlier in the century as small farmers were
pushed from their lands by competition from large successful sugar plantations. The movement of farmers and their laborers was exacerbated as
rebellion and the Haitian Revolution unfolded. By the close of the historical revolutionary event and the establishment of the Haitian Republic, the
international sugar capital shifted from Haiti to Cuba and gave the Spanish
island a tremendous need for large numbers of enslaved Africans.
The mid-eighteenth-century presence of increased numbers of Haitian
Africans in Oriente provided an additional African cultural influence to
that of descendants from the Kongo Kingdom, though it did not displace
the earlier effect. The cosmic orientation of Haitian Africans was aligned
with that of Orientes existing Kongolese foundations. The newest arrivals
understood Africa-based time, space, and power. They knew that spirits
were present in the material world, they worked with the dead, they used
drums and drum rhythms in their spiritual work, and for them, too, animal
sacrifice was an important ritual activity. Africa-based sacred practices had
already been transculturated in the French colony and Haitian Africans
brought these and other customs to Oriente. This meant that although
Haitians settled and established their own religious tradition and communities in the region, they did so upon Kongolese foundations and shared
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perspectives. In palenques and cofradias, on sugar and coffee plantations,

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

Foundational Knowledge
Central to the Oriente practice of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe is the knowledge that the world of humans contains at least four elemental categories:
(1) divine spirits; (2) spirits of the dead (ancestors and more); (3) animate
things; and (4) inanimate material. The supernatural Supreme Creator of
all is known as Nsambe and comprehensions about the four categories
include knowledge that entities in each possess some of the cosmic energy
dispensed at the time the universe was brought into existence. This does
not mean that there are equal amounts of energy in each of the four categories or in each entity within a category. Rather, as it was brought into
existence through the essential creative essence of Nsambe, each entity in a
category was given some portion.
Although practitioners do not normally envision the following in
this way, Nsambe, or Sambia-Mpungo, can be recognized as the singular, omnipresent, ultimate supernatural Supreme Being and Creator of all
existence. Everyone is grateful to Nsambe because humans and everything
else were brought into the world, as humans know it, through the power of
this supernatural force or being. At the same time, humans were created
with sufficient capacity to attend to their own subsistence in a rational life
cycle and have no need for further contact with the ultimate supernatural.
Individually, devotees of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe do not even call the
name of Nsambe, although the power force is conceived in all things that
humans need. The leader of a practicing community and possessor of the
powerful nganga spirit of the community, the tata, may utter a brief invocation with Nsambes name at the beginning of a special ritual, but this is
as often as the name is uttered; and one must have a well-developed ear to
hear and recognize the calling.
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Another comprehension of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe is its naturalistic and scripting focus as reflected in its sacred spaces. The naturalistic
emphasis understands that the convergence of supernatural creative energies is best found in uncultivated settings in forested areas. To affirm the
significance of the forest, practitioners often build sacred spaces that replicate those areas; they bring the forest into domesticated places such as
homes, gardens, patios, auditorium, and so on. Outdoor greenery is placed
near other sacred objects in the spaces and the outdoor materials are especially added for major ceremonies, such as the animal sacrifice that is part
of feeding the nganga. Greenery is also part of an embel (initiation) of a
new practitioner.
Sacred spaces of the tradition can include other components of forested areas as well. We observed a dried taxidermic snake wrapped around
a stick, placed near the nganga. We saw similarly preserved forest animals,
including an iguana, the head of a lion, the stuffed head of a monkey, a dried
muskrat, and a turtle, some or all of which were ordinary inclusions in Palo
Monte/Palo Mayombe spaces. These are natural, uncultivated materials of a
forested environment brought into sacred spaces to represent the concentration of the creative life force that the religion holds in sacred esteem.
The presence of consecrated scripting is also found in locations of sacrality and is an important component of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe knowledge and practice. These are Africa-based cosmograms that are scripted
sign complexes, written as symbols and pictures that communicate meaning. They are a language of their own. This is consistent with Palo Monte/
Palo Mayombe as one of the islands reglas congo cultural family of religions.
Oriente scripts are part of the sacred and cultural vocabulary that exemplifies shared knowledge and can inform practitioners on both sides of the
Atlantic about the religious identity of the signature. Those who know the
symbol system can read Orientes cosmograms.
Communities of this tradition that were part of our research always
began certain rituals by writing a cosmogram on the floor of the sacred
space where activities were to occur. Physically the symbols mark the ritual
beginning as they communicate to those present that, We understand our
relationship to the earth, the sky, and all that is in creation. The symbols
and scripting are a flash of the spirit, visibly notating practitioners orientation about their world and affirming their cosmic perspective at the start
of circumscribed activities. For example, as part of the initiation ritual, a
straw mat, large green leaves, or another natural fiber completely covers
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the cosmogram and uninitiated participants never see the written symbols. Figure 6 is a simulated representation of an Oriente cosmogram. We
say representation because practitioners are exceptionally protective about
publicizing their sacred and symbolic work.
The symbolic writings contain the spiritual signature of a communitys tata who will orchestrate a particular activity, just as the scripts carry
information about the spiritual initiation and genealogy of specific community groups.37 For example, the hereditary spirit of a practicing Palo
Monte/Palo Mayombe community, called the prenda, is in each nganga
and is known to be exceptionally powerful. The name of a communitys
nganga is also the name of the prenda. When identifying themselves via
their religious affiliation, practitioners (called paleros) recite a genealogical litany of their nganga community that includes this hereditary name.
The genealogical identity is exceptionally important for it establishes and
maintains the active reputation of a practicing group. Scripting that contains the communitys name, identity, and history, if widely known, can be
negatively used by others.
Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe requires work or engagement with spirits
and material matter from the deceased. Practitioners understand that this
ritual prerequisite is the core of efficacious power in the religion even as
there is a large repertoire of objects that contain some of the power of creation. The objects and their power are brought into geographies of sacrality
and the objects must be from each of the religions four essential categories. The three-legged, cast-iron cauldron or pot, the nganga, is the heart
of ritual life for the tradition and is a prerequisite instrument that sits in
the center of sacred spaces. The nganga, like spaces themselves, contains
objects from the four elemental categories.
The word nganga and other language used in Oriente Palo Monte/Palo
Mayombe rituals are consistent with language of ethnic groups of Kongo
Kingdom people.38 The linguistic and continental connection clarifies the
nomination of nganga, but practitioners understand that etymologically the
term refers to continental usage as the wise man who is material and knowledge.39 The prefix nga connotes the title of a leader and emphasizes nobility
and dignity. As antecedent, nga adds a superlative character to the meaning of any word; therefore, nganga refers to an extraordinary leader whose
knowledge, nobility, dignity, and wisdom are superlative in their nature.40
Although nganga may be embodied in a human, in Oriente it is dually
understood to be the power concentrated within the iron caldron. The
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container does not merely hold the powerful objects but the nganga is
the power; nganga is being. The instrument symbolically represents and
is knowledge, nobility, dignity, wisdom, and the superior power of Palo
Monte/Palo Mayombe. The nganga is the universal world, it is all life, and
it is an indispensable cosmic element of the traditions practice in Oriente.
Initiated individuals who own and/or work with the nganga conduct spiritual work through it. These practitioners are known as paleros and/or
ngangaleros, while the leader of a community of paleros is a tata.
Nganga work is a vigorous, interactive, energetic exchange between
spirits of the caldron, forces and spirits of initiated practitioners, between
any generalized spirits of the living dead, and between the extraordinary
spiritual powers of the tata. The collaboration usually includes ngangaleros
who, by definition, possess the ability for a spirit to come to their bodies,
possess the strength for spirit embodiment, and may achieve the extraordinary state of consciousness or trance. It is the tata, along with knowledgeable and well-experienced paleros/ngangaleros who identify individuals
with this potential spiritual strength. However, spirits must confirm the
human identification; a spirit must actually come to the body of a person
before that person is confirmed as possessing the strength of spirit.
The coming of a Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe spirit, or a humans crossing the threshold to extraordinary consciousness, is not often accomplished
even as adherents call on the nganga daily with questions and petitions.
Neither responses of the nganga to human petitions nor the coming of
a spirit to a palero are predictable phenomena but practitioners know it
always happens. The most ordinary location for the coming of a spirit is
in a sacred space and during ritual activities. However, spirits are known
to come to the tata or a palero in a sacred space whether or not a ritual is
in progress.
Human communication with Nsambe, the ultimate supernatural spirit,
is through work with the nganga and work with the dead of all categories.
As one tata nganga reported, The dead lived together with us in flesh, and
now theyre with the otherworld of spirits. They can show us how to live
better and join them in that world. The dead are usually called upon to help
humans solve problems and receive understandings about a doubtful future
because they are powerful actors in the universal order. A tata consults spirits
of the dead who, in turn, give symbolic clarifications through mythological
messages related to the historic past. The tata is responsible for translating and interpreting these messages as devotees rely on the interpretations
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as wise messages from the dead who, in this manner, help resolve issues
of the present.41 While power of the dead can be called upon to do good,
that power also can be activated to do negative things in humans historical
world. In either case, humans must live with consequences of their requests
and the resulting actions. This is an important, foundational comprehension
of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, coupled with a reputation for exceptionally
efficacious spiritual work.
Africa-based understandings of time and space are another Palo Monte/
Palo Mayombe foundational appreciation that intersects with ritual work
with spirits. Energies from elements in human time and space must interact
with those from supernatural space and time if a given issue is to be resolved
with spirit assistance. Ordinarily this occurs during the sacrality of ritual
activity when humans can more easily facilitate spirits crossing into the historical realm. It is in the intensive actions and interactions of ritual time
that humans may also have limited and temporary access to the supernatural realm. Knowledge of how to participate in rituals of cross-realm experiences represents practitioners comprehension of an alternative model of
time; an alternative temporal modality that is beyond the linear historical
understanding of Western religions.
Animal sacrifice is yet another foundational understanding of this religious tradition and it, too, is directly linked to the nganga and work with
that sacred instrument. In Oriente, ritualized sacrifice of animals is normal
community work. These sacred activities are understood within the cosmic
context of humans responsibility to seek right relations in and with everything that Nsambe brought into existence.42 Imbalance is common, normal,
and predictable among the interwoven and complex varieties of universal
components. When these relationships become particularly skewed, a ritual
sacrifice may be needed to return to a more balanced state of affairs. The
sacrifice is an offering to the nganga, a feeding of essential energy essence,
the blood of an animal or fowl.
The concept of family is an important foundational aspect of Palo
Monte/Palo Mayombe lifestyle as practiced in Oriente. It extends beyond
blood relations to include the totality of initiated members of a religious
community as well as to encompass all spiritual beings of that group. Socio
logically, Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe provides an organizational model of
family based on the traditions understandings about the ordered nature of
the spirit world. Humans implement the model with the tata nganga as head
of the structure. He is assisted by the female Yayi and both are guided by the
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powerful spirit instrument, the nganga. This leads to additional structural

components that are equally hierarchal in the historical world. However,
the tradition does not separate social organization of humans from that of
the spiritual world. The whole is a symbolic universe.
Nsambe is at the apex of all that is in the universal world and is the
head of the human family. The father of a given worshiping community is
the tata nganga, but spirits of the sacred cauldron share responsibilities as
leader of the human family. Usually, the tata has, by spiritual genealogy and
social relations, inherited the communitys nganga cauldron and its powers
have been passed to him by the previous tata nganga. The transfer occurs at
a ritually designated time after the death of the original leader and requires
that ritualistically all decision-making members of the community come
to consensus as to who will actually assume leadership work. This role is
expected to be transferred to a genealogical family member of the dead tata
who was identified early in life, if not at birth, and who has been trained
throughout adulthood to assume the position if he has been designated
and there is ritual consensus.
Designation of the potential new leader is expected to be made just
before the previous tata dies, as it is assumed that a tata will know when
he is going to die and will name his successor close to that date. After the
death, if the decision-making community members ritually agree to accept
the designated person, a new leader becomes tata, father of the entire
extended religious family. One respondent reported that at the death of a
tata nganga, spiritual elders of a community, who themselves may possess
a nganga, have the option to form their own community and/or to connect
with another worshiping family, whether or not they remain with the original group. In other words, Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe practitioners may
have memberships in more than one worship family.
All persons initiated into the religion by a communitys successive tata
ngangas are included as members of the extended family. This indicates
that a community will include more than one tata nganga and more than
one set of initiates. Noninitiated but consanguine family members are also
considered part of the family and the number of members in a single religious community/family can be in the hundreds, if not thousands. I guess
I have about four thousand godchildren is what one tata told us. Initiated
members can reside oceans away from the sacred space and leader who initiated them. We know of an Oriente family/community that includes members who live in Spain, the Netherlands, Venezuela, and the United States.
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To achieve the level of tata nganga, a man must have been identified as
strong enough to receive spirits, must have acquired a requisite secret body
of ritual and religious knowledge, and must have inherited a nganga that he
directs and is reciprocally directed by. The nganga resides in the tatas sacred
space and, between the leader and the nganga, they coordinate affairs of
the extended religious family. The muerto is a most critical component of
the nganga as it is the spirit of a specific dead person known to visit the
historical world, particularly through the nganga and the tata. Each sacred
caldron possesses such a designated muerto, but when we asked practitioners about the definition, meaning, and characteristics of the muerto of an
nganga, there was no general consistency in their responses.
However, the one characteristic about which respondents did agree was
that the nganga is and does contain the prenda. The prenda is an extraordinarily powerful, divine spirit designated to communicate with humans
with specific messages from the spirit world. We could not determine how
paleros in Oriente understand the relationship or difference between the
prenda and the muerto, but in some locations we were told that they are
equal, while in other places it was said that a muerto is too young to be a
prenda. Our posture is that, until there is further research, we accept that
Oriente devotees of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe engage their nganga as the
holder and personification of el muerto and prenda as extraordinarily
powerful spirits available to assist humans.
The Yayi, mother of the practicing community, accompanies the tata
in managing spiritual affairs of the family through the nganga. All initiated
members experience symbolic, spiritual birth through the nganga by way
of the embel/initiation, and this is usually conducted by the Yayi and tata.
In Oriente, the tata and Yayi are godparents to all members of a given community of practitioners and they are in charge of helping to resolve members spiritual problems and difficulties. And despite the fact that humans
exist in a material world, the Africa-based orientation of the religions sees
most all problems and difficulties as spiritual.
Initiated women may also hold positions, though there is disagreement
and inordinate hesitancy to discuss what these are. Respondents reported
that Madre de Agua (mother of water), Madre Nkisi (mother with power
that makes things happen), and Madre nganga are titles of such positions.
When we presented our discussion of these as positions, none of the practitioners attending the annual meeting on religions disputed, questioned,
or corrected our report from the field, although they had done so on other
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of our databased reports about Oriente religions.43 Women who hold these
positions may possess a nganga, but this fact is rarely discussed and only
shared with a few people for public consideration.44
Some of womens ritual responsibilities in Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe
include dressing ceremonial animals after a sacrifice and preparing foodstuffs during and after rites, rituals, and celebrations. At the same time,
these responsibilities are not gender specific. We observed men and women
preparing ritual foodstuffs just as we observed men who prepared animals
after sacrifice. We also found men and women cleaning the floor of sacred
spaces after specific ceremonial sacrifices, even as men more normally
maintained the regular cleanliness of sacred sites. We also observed that
the gender fluidity noted in Palo communities extended to women participating, but not competing, in chanting and battle events.
Although these are important elements of the foundational knowledge
from which Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe practitioners live out their Africabased lifestyle in Oriente, this is not a complete discussion. We have chosen
to present the more salient comprehensions that are rarely omitted when
practitioners speak of their tradition.

Sacred Spaces
Constructed spaces of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe are designed to replicate outdoor forest areas. In forests, a sacred center is a location wherein
descending cosmic power is known to have previously intersected with
other energies from elements in the four essential categories of the human
realm. The outdoor sacred geographies are sites where it is known that
energy from each of the four essential categories has focused power and
where power of the otherworld of spirits has united with the four to equal
an authoritative juncture. This combination is acknowledged as existing in
an alternative modality of time and space. Palo practitioners understand
that the conversion creates an arena of cosmic energy, a dynamic flowing
of highly articulated reciprocal spiritual communication that is spectacular,
but not a spectacle.
The cosmic arena also characterizes sacred spaces built by devotees
and, when special ritual work is done appropriately, the sensually explosive
potential of convergence can be felt if not observed. Rituals of initiation,
rituals to eliminate negative situations, memorial rituals for the dead, rituals to return balance to earthly matters, or rituals to celebrate the day of a
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divine spirit are exemplary occasions when cosmic energy convergence can
occur. Conceptually, it is this characteristic of reciprocal cosmic communication and dynamic energy transmission that positions Palo Monte/Palo
Mayombe spaces as charismatic centers. The spaces make things happen
even against opposition.
As a mandatory religious instrument, the nganga sits in sacred spaces
and contributes to their charisma. Palo practitioners understand that cosmic forces are more likely to visit and consult with elemental energies of
an assembled space when it and the nganga are prepared in a ritualistically appropriate manner. It takes well-developed religious knowledge to
assemble a nganga within a sacred location. There can be dirt from farreaching corners of the earth; sticks from an assortment of specialty trees
and bushes; and expressly empowered rocks from oceans, rivers, mountains, and valleys, as well as skeletal fragments from a wide selection of
dead sacred humans and animals. To know where to find and how to select
any and all of these requires decades of training and experience.
Some material objects of a nganga can be seen in figure 7, and the
image includes the ngangalero/palero saluting the sacred cauldron of his
space. According to the tradition, the green tree leaves and branches are
inserted natural elements that help transpose the small room into a location of sacrality and a space for strong effective ritual activity. The lighted
candle designates the space as one where practitioners know who they are
spiritually and that they belong to a cosmic order. Respondents also report
that The candle lights the way for visiting spirits. A glass of clear water
helps spirits cross from the otherworld and arrive in the human realm. The
nganga, with all of its characteristic elements, each with its own cosmic
energy, sits in the center of the space to receive offerings and to actively
participate in all Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe work. On the left in figure 7,
just behind or above the green, red, and white can, is a cazuela, a characteristic marker of Oriente sacred spaces.
Initiated practitioners are required to salute the nganga whenever they
enter its presence and before sacrificial rituals. The salute has several forms
but usually begins with the ngangalero/palero kneeling before the nganga
and sacred objects centered in the space. Crossed fists touch the floor, first
one over the other and then the reverse. While knocking three times, the
practitioner says, Salaam alaakem, malkem salaam. The forehead gently
touches the floor and the practitioner, still bending, lifts the upper body to
offer personal words of thanks and petition. Often the practitioner takes a
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mouthful of malafa (clear rum) and, while crossing one hand to the opposite shoulder, sprays the liquid across all items in the space. Then, with the
same gesture of the opposite hand and shoulder, sprays another mouthful of the liquid in the same manner. Before turning his or her back to the
space, the practitioners hands usually touch the nganga and then his or her
own forehead or lips.
A similar or variation of this type of salute is required of everyone
before the beginning of feeding of the nganga or a ritual with blood sacrifice. Sacrifice is one of the more important rituals to occur in sacred spaces
of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, and the tata nganga is the person with sufficient religious knowledge and spiritual authority to determine what type
of sacrifice must be donea change in human behavior and/or animal
blood offerings, for example. Before a sacrificial ceremony, a cosmogram
is scripted on the floor (see figure 6). This is accompanied by singing or
chanting, and drumming if resources permit. The scripting signifies that
only initiated practitioners should be inside the sacred space.
When proper congo-style drums are not available for the ceremony, some
community member will beat the appropriate rhythms on some other surface or on their bodies. Doors to the sacred space are opened when the specialized activities are over and just before it is time for the sacrificial animal
to be brought inside. All practitioners and any visitors begin singing, chanting, and drumming again, as the animal enters. A designated and trained
religious authority, another tata, holds the animal during the presentation.
Individually everyone bows and presents their body to the held animal. After
all have bid farewell, the tata nganga or a designated tata places a special knife
to the animals throat and everyone present pinches their throats, vibrating
the pinched skin, and says ceremonial words that ask for a smooth and quick
cut. Participants are also asking that the sacrifice be acceptable. The animals
blood flows in a straight line, down the knife blade that points to the nganga
below (the assembled group is feeding the nganga). The knife and blood
are then directed toward covering other sacred objects of the ceremony that
were designated to be fed, such as a cazuela.
When all required animals have been sacrificed, the fed nganga and
other objects are ritualistically returned to their regular places in the sacred
space and the floor is cleaned and sanitized. There is a sequential and procedural pause before generalized celebration resumes with singing, chanting,
and dancing. Drums and drummers can be an integral part of this festive
phase and, based on the nature of the ritual, a collective meal is shared by
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individuals for whom the sacrifice was performed. Every effort is made for
everyone in attendance to receive some of the sacrificial food. Practitioners
understand that eating cooked flesh of appropriately designated and sacrificed animals gives strength to all who consume it.
When one enters a Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe sacred space, the most
visible and striking aspects are the sensuality of material objects. The dried
blood of sacrificed animals, the skeletal head of a lion or other being, the
femur or other bone of a human, the taxidermic character of a large turtle, a dried snake skin, links of a large chain, spikes from railroads, large
axes, and more are all dramatically and unavoidably attractive to human
senses. Figure 8 is a close-up of a Palo sacred space including the variety of
material objects associated with ritual work of the tradition. Among these
is a ceramic representation of an Indian and a red headband with feathers
(see figure 9). These are symbolic inclusions from the cultural traditions of
Cuban Indians. The ceramic image is not what we believe Cuban Indians
looked like but practitioners focus on the category of Indians, not authentic characteristic replicas. During certain rituals, the tata nganga and/or
other paleros/ngangaleros can receive a special Indian spirit and respondents reported that this is a particularly special and powerful spirit. When
the Indian spirit crosses over and comes to a tata or a palero, the red headband is ritualistically placed on the person and the spirit imparts knowledge to practicing members who are present.

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

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

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Vod

Approximately thirty-five miles of sea separate eastern

Cuba from the nation of Haiti. On a clear evening, from shores of the
former French colony, one can see the lights of Santiago de Cuba, the second largest city in Cuba (see map 5). It is no wonder, therefore, that Haiti,
where at least 66 percent of the contemporary population is of African
descent, has influenced religious traditions in Oriente.1 Haiti is internationally known as the seat of Vodou religious practice in the Americas; ritual
behaviors were adapted from their African origins and transculturated
within colonial activities of cultural populations that inhabited the French
colony then known as St. Domingue.2 The Ew Fon/Adja ethnic group of
West Africa was the most dominant continental population in the colony
as they had been captured and brought to the Caribbean from areas now
known as the Peoples Republic of Benin.
Although religious traditions from the Ew Fon/Adja arrived directly
from Africa in colonial Cuba before the close of the eighteenth century,
these early Fon practices were not as widespread as in St. Domingue. Africabased practices from the tradition, known as Arar, have been mostly confined to western and central parts of Cuba. Some small numbers of Arar
groups continue, but based on our literature and field research, Oriente
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communities.3 The Cuban tradition of Vod permeates Oriente but it was

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

Coming to Cuba
The African starting point of Haitian Vodou is the Ew Fon/Adja ethnic
communities of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century areas we know as Dahomey
or Benin. Religious practices of these continental groups provided foundational orientation and phenomenological principles, but, like others
from Africa imported to the Caribbean, the Fon had already incorporated
ideas and customs developed through contact and exchange with other
African cultural groups. The contact had occurred long before Europeans
arrived. Groups from the Ew Fon/Adja, the Fulani, the Kongolese, those
of Yorubaland, and other neighboring kingdoms and empires participated
in cultural exchanges that accompanied trade, war, political alliances, and
other such contacts. When Europeans began transporting Africans across
the Atlantic Ocean, captured members of the intersecting communities had
already incorporated, adapted, substituted, and/or woven compatible features into new spiritual practices. These merged behaviors were part of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ew Fon/Adja knowledge as these captives
first arrived in the Caribbean. As they made the involuntary voyages, persons introduced into the French colonial system of enslavement brought
the reformulated sacred knowledge in their minds and hearts, and scripted
in their bodies. The enslaved reformulated, yet again, the new religious
practices from their remembrances of the African traditions. In this regard,
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Robert Farris Thompson has the following to say about the multiethnic
African inclusion of content in the African and New World process:
The cultures of the conqueredMahi to the north, Kewtu and
Anago Yoruba to the eastwere fairly close to the Dahomean way
of life. . . . Fusion and refusion of Yoruba spirits, first in Dahomey
and then all over again in Haiti, go a long way toward explaining the phenomenon of multiple avatars of the same DahomeanYoruba god.6
Sacred customs of Dahomeys Ew Fon/Adja people were dominant among
early practices in St. Domingue, and through fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
encounters the religious tradition of Haitian Vodou was produced. Everyone
on the French colonial island developed new behaviors appropriate for the
Caribbean environment, whether they chose to or not. The multicultural
nature of populations and exchanges in the Americas, coupled with the
inequitable distribution of power in the sociopolitical colonial structures,
ensured that new behaviors would evolve. Africans Haitian religion was one
of a multitude of such new creations that included language, food, clothing, political structures, and so on. And it was the transculturated Haitian
Vodou that Haitian Africans brought to Oriente when French planters
moved themselves and their bonded persons to Oriente. The large number
of enslaved workers they brought to the east diversified the regions existing
African-descendant population and its religious practices.
However, migration to Oriente from Haiti had begun before this late
eighteenth-century movement. Gold, sugar, and other profitable enterprises
initially brought French settlers to the Americas just as such economic opportunity had lured other Europeans, including Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch.
By the mid-1600s, indigo, coffee, and tobacco farmers of St. Domingue began
to reduce the production of these crops for that of sugar. Profitable sugar cultivation demanded larger and larger land spaces and infinitely more human
labor. The crop conversion and the demand for the cheap labor of enslaved
African workers pushed small farmers out of the French colony. As the eighteenth century moved into its second decade, French farmers could not compete with the large agribusiness of sugar cultivation, resulting in a first French
migration to Oriente, bringing their slave labor with them.7
Similarly, during this period and before, some African descendants who
ran away to escape the horrific conditions of St. Domingues enslavement
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fled to Oriente where the Sierra Maestra and its palenques offered them
liberated zones.8 These migrations, prior to the Haitian Revolution, were
small compared to the large numbers of Haitian Africans who arrived in
the region as a result of turmoil surrounding that revolution.9 The social
and political changes brought about economic upheavals that forever interrupted the islands sugar production. French planters fled the disorder by
the thousands and again migrated to Oriente, a region that proved ideal
for their agricultural projects. French Haitian farmers and slave masters
viewed the eastern region as an opportunity to capitalize on the international sugar trade now that Haitis production was in disarray. Planters
brought enslaved laborers of Ew Fon/Adja background and these became
the second definitive African ethnic group in Oriente.
Mountains and foothills of the Sierra Maestra were also conducive
to the successful production of coffee and tropical fruits, such as mangos, bananas, and pineapples. The cool, sun-soaked growing environment
allowed migrants to quickly adapt their agricultural skills as well as technological and administrative expertise to the eastern region. They were particularly helpful in mechanizing Cubas coffee and sugar production and
transforming those enterprises into internationally profitable commodities.
However, for enslaved Haitian Africans now relocated in Oriente, there was
special familiarity, familiarity related to our interest in sacred spaces.
The name of Orientes largest city, Santiago de Cuba, is also the name
of the Catholic counterpart of Haitians transculturated religious warrior
spirit, Oggn Fai. Africans from the French colony, renamed Haiti after
the success of the 1804 revolution, were intimately familiar with Oggn
and knew of his similarities to the Catholic warring saint of Santiago de
Compostella. Ew Fon/Adja descendants had transculturated Oggn and
Santiago through contact and exchanges with Europeans in St. Domingue, if
not before. Robert Farris Thompson says the following about this process:
In the course of supposed Westernization, Haitians actually transformed the meaning of the Catholic icons by observing their similarities to African spirits. Haitians restructured the identity of
the saints to the Catholic Church in terms of their own religious
language.10
Oggn Fai/Santiago was one such divine spirit who was restructured
through European contact and was the force invoked by Boukmans
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soldiers of the Haitian Revolution. An old song about another Haitian rebel
leader, Mackandal, had been handed down from earlier freedom fights
and helped strengthen the comparative understandings between French
and Spanish island realities. The song said, Santiago, Im the wars son,
Santiago. Cant you see that Im the wars son? According to legend,
Mackandal was a fugitive slave who escaped burning at the stake after poisoning several French as well as Haitian colonists. He reportedly proclaimed
that he would change his form before his execution. He was burned at the
stake, but as no one saw the punishment or Mackandals body thereafter,
he became part of legend about supernatural forces; remember, he dared
poison whites. Similarly, the connection between revolutionary warriors of
Mackandal, Boukman, and Oggn Fai/Santiago became interconnected for
most Haitian Africans. Those arriving in Oriente were surely familiar with
the association.11
Shared cultural and spiritual familiarity did not alter conditions of
enslavement, but common sights in the capital city of Santiago can not be
ignored. Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier evoked the familiarity Haitian
Africans would have felt in Orientes sights and situations as he speculated on their religious comprehensions when first encountering churches.
Carpentier describes what the Haitians would have seen:
Baroque gold, human hair on the Christ, the confessional . . . overloaded with mysterious moldings, . . . dragons being smashed by
Holy feet, Saint Antons pig, black Virgins, Saint Jorge with buckskin and doublet. They all had an enveloping force, a seductive
power, by presence, symbolism, attributes and signs. All similar
to those that emanated from altars consecrated to Damballa, the
serpent god in Haitian hunfos [temples].12
Such eighteenth-century images and realities in the Oriente environment
contained cosmic truths already known by Haitian Africans. They were in
new geographic territory but the visual aesthetic was well understood.
Haitian religious practitioners, called serviteurs, also recognized several patterns of their spiritual customs in the already-established Kongobased practices of Oriente sacred lifestyles. The recognition went beyond,
but included, shared orientation about the supernatural world, practices
of ritual initiation, animal sacrifice, and iconic parallels in sacred spaces
and each group of African descendants understood the coming of spirits to
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human bodies. Kongo-based traditions emphasis on spiritual work with

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

Becoming Cuban
Societal similarities between the French and Spanish plantation economies
were a factor in facilitating eighteenth-century Haitian Africans adjustments in Oriente. Central to the arena of religion and religious organization were similarities of civil society groups in the two locationsFrench
Haitian societ and Cuban cabildo.13 The colony of St. Domingue was noted
for its variety of cultural and ethnic inhabitants as well as for its racially
separated social groupings. Independent voluntary associations of the public sector were mechanisms used by free persons of color, free blacks, and
even some enslaved blacks to participate in the colonys civil order. There
were several militias and police units of African descendants early in the
French colonys history,14 and rituals derived from Ew Fon/Adja heritage
gave spiritual foundation and cohesion to many of the black groups. Vodou,
the religious tradition constructed by African descendants in the colony,
was instrumental in inspiring activities that led to the Haitian Revolution.
One such ritual event is repeatedly cited as an important catalyst.15
It was from their history and/or experience as part of such social ar
rangements that Haitian Africans in Oriente found familiarity in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cabildo arrangements. Cuban authorities
initially had sanctioned as cofrada associations Africans informal affinity
groups, but by the close of the eighteenth and opening of the nineteenth
century, these had been restructured into more formal cabildos. The intent
of cabildos for sanctioning authorities was to integrate independent affinity groups, from palenques and elsewhere, into a more functional relationship with colonial social structures. Such integration, it was thought, would
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prevent rebellious activities in Cuba.16 Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century

Haitian Africans arrived at this point of conversion and found that cabildos functioned much like similar organizations in their island homeland.
Unlike in the French colony, however, entire cabildos did not serve as military units, not even during Cubas 18681878 Ten Years War when large
numbers of African descendants voluntarily fought with insurgent criollo
Cubans.17 Still, despite differences in purpose and some functions, the fact
of sanctioned cabildos in Oriente permitted Haitian Africans to adapt to
social organizing in their new homeland.
African Haitian organizations included members from other ethnic
families, but the cultural definition was clearly Haitian and the groups
named themselves Tumba Francesas or Tajones.18 The groups developed
as permeable but relatively closed communities for no other reason than
that Haitians arrived in Oriente as a group during roughly the same time
period. They worked on geographically self-contained coffee and other
farms, called cafateles or fincas, which were surrounded by mountainous areas with extremely limited transportation. These factors helped to
strengthen tumbas and tajones in their Ew Fon/Adja Haitian identity and
were reinforced by the numbers of descendants who continued to arrive
from Haiti. At the same time, the groups were religious associations and
mutual-aid organizations, and many were performing collectives for civic
and religious holiday activities.
One archeologically restored finca or cafetale, the Isabelica Plantation,
lies deep within the Sierra Maestra and is a strong example of earlier areas
where enslaved Haitian Africans lived and worked. Isabelica was saved
from fires set by insurgents during the 1895 War of Independence and now
serves as a visible reference for the contained nature of Africans who cultivated coffee and other products in the mountain region. The cafetales and
fincas of Oriente were successful production centers, and Judith Bettelheim
proposes that the Afro-Haitian population was infinitely significant. She
says, When considering that 32 percent of the total immigrant French
population were slaves, one can realize that the Afro-Haitian culture has
grown in eastern Cuba.19
In remote areas of the mountains, enslaved Haitian Africans maintained their traditional ritual songs, dances, and drumming practices
within their Tajona/Tumba Francesa associations. Research of Casa del
Caribe field investigators found that Haitians rehearsed their routines on
flat-stoned terraces used to dry coffee beans.20 These musical preparations
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were in advance of carnival or other festive occasions and included versions

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

of the Santiago conga group Foco Cultura Congo de Los Hoyos directly
informed us that they use the chant and claim to have organizational origins
in the Tumba Francesa organized by Moncada.23
Before a carnival or festival event in cities and towns below the Sierra
Maestra, Tajona/Tumba Francesa members marched with their drums,
costumes, and sticks down the roads from their fincas and cafetales to the
celebrations, singing and chanting rhythms from Haitian Africannow
Cubantraditions. The groups used special Haitian-style drums (see figure
11), danced in distinctive manners, and sang in Haitian French patois.24 The
ethnic-based groups had created social space for themselves in Oriente life
and were contributing to transculturated expressions that signaled being
Cuban. Results of their contributions can still be seen in the disproportionate number of Oriente apellidos (surnames) of Haitian French origin.
Names like Valiente, Lescay, Martn, Crombet, and Millet are reminders
of this special involvement and are an equally strong remnant of Haitian
influence in the region.
Haitian Vodou was also recomposed in Oriente where eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century religious practices of other African descendants were
already participating in the Cuban transculturation process. However,
unlike most other African ethnic groups, elements of Haitian regional customs were renewed and reaffirmed by an uninterrupted inflow of additional Haitian migrants that persisted even after legalized slavery ended in
Cuba in 1886. This continuous in-migration was precipitated by the need
for cheap labor, which Haitians provided far into the twentieth century.
This and other continuous movements of large numbers of African
descendants, over more than four hundred years, is what sociologist Ruth
Simms Hamilton called the geo-circularity of African descendantsfrom
their continental homelands to the Americas, from homes in the western
hemisphere to other locations in the Americas, as well as similar patterns
of movement in Europe.25 It was/is a migration pattern generated by capitalist needs for cheap labor or other cost reductions. Between 1912 and
1916, for example, Haitian immigration to Cuba grew from 8,784 people
to 79,274, and most went to areas in Oriente. Like their ancestors of earlier
years, Haitians brought ideas and familiarity, if not active experiences, with
Haitian Vodou.26 Over centuries, successive Oriente relocation of Haitians
as a specific ethnic group has reinforced ritual customs and strengthened
the regions Haitian-African character.
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Belief Foundations
The Vod tradition of Oriente contains the characteristic Dahomean-type
pantheonic lineages of Loa, or divine spirit forces. These are the primary
spirits venerated by traditions in Haiti as well as in Oriente. Cuban Haitian
Loa are a reblending of African Ew Fon/Adja continental knowledge with
cultural contacts, in St. Domingue where they became Haitian, and yet
another articulation of the tradition in Oriente. In Haiti and in Oriente, Loa
lineages are Rada and Petro. Robert Farris Thompson describes their presence in the Americas:
Rada, after the slaving designation for persons abducted from
Arada, on the coast of Dahomey, itself derived from the name of
the holy city of the Dahomeans, Allada; and the other called PetroLemba, or simply Petro, after a messianic figure, Don Pedro, from
the south peninsula of what is now Haiti and the northern Kongo
trading and healing society, Lemba.27
Beyond and above each of the Rada and Petro divine spirit lines is the Bon
Dieu or Grand Met, the Supreme Creator power.
Absolutely fundamental to practice of Vod in Oriente is the reverence of Damballa. Damballa is the lead spirit within the Rada class of Loa
and is represented as a serpent. Rada Loa are exceptionally powerful. They
are responsible for and have dominion over the soul, the sky, the earth, the
seas, and the universe. These Loa only perform good works and, as strong
as they are, their power is limited. The triumvirate of Baron Samedi, Baron
Cimetiere, and Baron Crois lead the Petro class of spirits, and they are even
stronger. Petro Loa are ancestors whose bodies have departed the human
historical world beyond the living dead; they are spirits of the dead who
have moved beyond phenomena of humans material time, beyond the time
of the living dead, and into macrotime of the long past as discussed in chapter 2. Petro spirits are even able to intervene in Rada activities on behalf of
human beings who serve the Petro Loa through Vod ritual practices.
Another important foundation to this religious tradition in the east
is the linkage of ritual and sanguine family relations. For the most part,
Orientes early Vod groups and their ritual activities were closely aligned
with consanguine family relations and included any additional kin related
to the female and male leaders, called mambo and hungn respectively. The
genealogical family of the mambo or hungn provides the closest internal
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linkage of a ritualistically bonded Vod family. That is to say, blood family

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

Tajona/Tumba Francesa, just as they are centers of Haitian ritual practices.
Ritual practice of possession and revelation is another important foundational understanding in the region. Serviteurs understand that the most
basic access to the supernatural otherworld occurs through the act of spirit
mounting or possession. This coincides with cosmic ideas held by members of other indigenous religions and most regularly occurs during Vod
rituals in sacred spaces as Loa borrow a practitioners body. However, the
term possession is not conceptually positioned in Africa-based cosmic orientation, nor derived from knowledge foundations of the continent. We
prefer the more accurate descriptor suggested by Rachel Harding from her
research in Brazil. Harding contends that the phenomenon of a spirit coming and mounting a human body
is a relationship of exchange, of mutuality, of shared responsibility,
and above all of accompaniment . . . Possession is particularly significant because the occupation of black bodies by a divine being
is a stunning contestation of subalternity.31
This more accurately reflects how Oriente respondents communicated
their experiences with the phenomenon.
An older representation of experiences expressed by our respondents was
presented by Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, the seventeenth-century Kongolese
revolutionary leader. She reported on experience with the spirit and body
phenomenon that was based on encounters with a visiting spirit significant
in Kongo history. Beatrizs account represents yet another manner in which
spirits speak, visit, and inform humans through embodied communication
as we observed with our research groups:
A clear vision appeared. It was a man dressed in the simple blue
hooded habit of a Capuchin monk, so real that he seemed to be
standing in the room. I am Saint Anthony, firstborn son of the
Faith and of Saint Francis. I have been sent from God to your head
. . . First I had gone into the head of a woman who was in Nseto,
but I had to leave as the people there did not revere me well. Then
I left Nseto and went to Soyo where I entered the head of an old
man. But there was a Reverend Father stationed there, and the
people wanted to beat me, so again I fled. Then I went to Bula, and
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the same thing happened again. I am trying once more this time
in Kibangu, and I have chosen you.32
Dona Beatrizs report is pointedly significant because she was a member of the
Kongo ethnic family of Africans who were ancestors to the enslaved Bakongo
captives imported to Oriente. Beatriz and her people were also ancestors to
Kongo groups that exchanged religious knowledge with Dahomey ethnic
groups on the continent and in Oriente. The overlapping but distinct African
ethnic communities had knowledge and experiential familiarity with spirit
mounting and revelation. Both Dona Beatriz and Hardings descriptions of
the phenomena are conceptually closer to statements of Oriente practitioners regarding spirits who revealed knowledge to them about how, where,
and with what to build sacred spaces.
Oriente Vod serviteurs understand that as a spirit accompanies the
human body, the human person is able to enter a temporary state of exaltation and move into the time and space of the spiritual otherworld. This
profound and honored process is made possible through ritual activities
performed in assembled geographies of sacrality, sacred spaces of the tradition. That most serviteurs hope to experience this spirit embodiment is
because the Africa-based cosmic orientation of their religious tradition
informs them about the priority of the phenomenon, as well as about other
aspects of the world in which they live. The orientation identifies humans
historical material world as one that includes spirits and is a world that is
periodically visited by spirits, particularly divine spirits who can appear at
ritual times.33 This is an especially important foundational aspect of Vod
comprehensions that also expresses an alternative model of time.
Vod serviteurs reported that as a spirit enters their bodies, they experience an extraordinary force moving into/onto their being. From the
perspective of our observations, being mounted by the spirit evokes a
trance-like state of awareness. Practitioners understand that divine spirits
of the supernatural world must own the body if serviteurs are to participate in the phenomenon of macro, cosmic time and acquire knowledge
that can aide in human life. Serviteurs surrender their bodies in service
to divine spirits. Joan Dayan, author of Haiti, History, and the Gods, contends that for those who serve the Loa, to surrender individual will, body,
and become a vessel for use by the Loa is the best, if not the highest, type
of spiritual submission.34 Faithful submission to divine will, and being
entered or mounted, is the aspiration of most Vod serviteurs.
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At the same time, Vod in Oriente is much more than an organizational structure or an exchange relationship with spirits who accompany the
human body. It is a lifestyle that encompasses everything that might concern
practitioners; Vod is part of all aspects of their existence. This, too, is a fundamental aspect of the tradition. O. R. Dathorne described how intimate and
all encompassing the religious practice is. Of serviteurs he said,
They turn to it to consult the most adequate alternatives they must
pursue in life related to crop and harvest, birth, marriage, death,
and everything else connected to the whole existence structure.
Vod is nation, music, and death; knowledge of gods; the right type
of sacrifice; and the observance of the proper behavioral course. It
is also an instance laced with Bon Dieu [Good God]; as this lace
occurs during the possession, the venerator is able to obtain the
knowledge of the sense and significance of life itself.35
Another foundational understanding of Vod in Oriente is the ritual sacrifice of animals. Practitioners reported that animal sacrifice is intimately
linked to their Africa-based understanding of the cycle of life. The shared
cosmic orientation informs them that all things created have the essence or
power of Bon Dieu/Grand Met, the Supreme Creator. Blood is the material manifestation of this essential power because with it there is life and
without it there is no life. During designated ritual events, animal blood
must be offered as an indicator to the Loa that humans are living within
the cosmic rhythm of creation. We have never seen a house pet sacrificed,
but chickens, birds, goats, and pigschiefly pigsare a normal sacrificial
offering in Oriente Vod rituals.

Spaces
Oriente colonial Vod sacred spaces usually were in wooded areas of the
Sierra Maestra mountains, flatland communities of llano canero (areas
of sugarcane production) that were sprinkled throughout the mountain
range. Today, ideal spaces of sacrality are still in forested areas where the
sky, mountains, rivers, trees, and animals are natural parts of the Vod traditions sacred scenery. Many Oriente worshiping communities continue to
live, work, and carry out their ritual practices in such areas. At the same
time, historic as well as contemporary spaces can be found in more visible
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vicinities of cities like Santiago, Guantnamo, and Las Tunas. We were told
of communities in every localein the hills, suburbs, and citiesbut our
most active contact was with sacred spaces and serviteurs from areas of Las
Tunas, Santiago, Guantnamo, and Palma Soriano.
Some spaces are built within domestic settings: the interior of a bedroom or a specified room of the principal officials residence might be dedicated to ritual activities. Other spaces were completely separated from the
leaders domestic household. From one community to the next, sacred
sites do not appear to be built according to dogma or exact standard. Their
size, shape, materials, and contents vary depending on spirit communication received. Rituals that incorporate a large number of practitioners will
require more space than the inside of a typically small room of an Oriente
house. This variety based on spirit communication is consistent with the
foundational understanding that rituals are more often than not organized
by leaders and are based on a leaders ability to receive and interpret messages from Loa. Yet and still, the most valued of all sacred geographies are
in forested areas of Orientes mountains and an extraordinary number are
known to be there.
When not outdoors in forested places, and sometimes when in these
locations, the hunfo is the site of a common Vod geography of sacrality.36
These are assembled edifices but not the finished or refined structures we
associate with most constructed buildings. Hunfos are erected specifically
for particular Vod occasions and can remain or be disassembled after the
events. The semipermanent buildings are situated in patio-like areas where
members of a community gather, individually and collectively, to engage in
time-honored activities. Hunfos usually have four poles that circumscribe
a buildings perimeters, and a thatch roof is preferable. Some may remain
upright and not be dismantled, but they are usually secured to prevent outsiders from entering.
One Vod community in our research regularly erects a hunfo at the
beginning of the annual Festival del Caribe, a weeklong event (see figure 12).
To uninformed visitors, the configuration is an artistic inclusion of activities
that celebrate popular Caribbean religious cultures. The structure is made
of animal skin, processed and stretched around poles to resemble an octagon shape. There is one entrance where two pieces of skin come together.
We were informed that as a functioning part of the religious community
that builds this structure, it serves to define and construct as sacred the
space that members will use throughout the myriad of activities associated
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with the festival. The hunfo becomes the center around and in which ritual
Vod customs are enacted during the international events. Members of the
worship group can reconnect with their tradition, even as they participate
in larger more general events. After seven days of Festival del Caribe, this
hunfo is dismantled.
However, whether in a temporary or permanent location, or even when
the sacred sites are in domestic places, the floor of a Vod space is an ex
ceptionally important focal point of spiritual activities. Before most ceremonial events, a Vod vev is drawn on the floor. The vev is an intricately
shaped symbolic representation that is scripted by drizzling flour, meal,
colored dust, chalk, ground eggshells, or other designated materials on the
ground or floor surface. The precise configuration of a vev is based on serviteurs knowledge about Loa and Vod cosmic matters. An authoritative
leader for the activity for which the community gathers usually constructs
and/or instructs the drawing before ritual events. Additional ritual acts are
then performed on and around the vev.
Oriente practitioners and artists have created beautiful and expansive
aesthetic art works based on the concept and process of the vev. During
one Festival del Caribe, the creation in figure 13 was assembled at the
entrance of Santiago de Cubas main conference center, Teatro Heredia.
This specific vev was scripted in front of the constructed hunfo and contained the Haitian national emblem at the upper center and the flag of
Cuba at the bottom. Sand for the scripting was made from grinding colored rocks that are a natural formation in eastern Cuba. The vev itself was
built to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Haitian Revolution
and Haitian contributions to the people, culture, and religious landscape of
Oriente. This vev also demonstrates our contention about the inclusion of
nationalistic ideas in ritual work as well as the integrated nature of sacred
and secular activities.
Like the vev, a place for fire is significant in Vod consciousness and
sacred spaces. Most rituals take place in front of a fire, usually a very large fire
that has been built in front of the space. However, the poteau-mitan (wooden
pole that sets a midpoint of an entire geography of sacrality) is an indispensable component for rituals and spaces of the tradition. This pole is anchored
in the earth of the peristyle dance area that is the hunfo. The poteau-mitan,
which reaches from the ground toward the sky, or through a hole in the roof
if the site is indoors, functions as a symbolic centering device that connects
the earthly world with the realm of the supernatural. The pole is the site of
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Loa entry into ritual arenas and into human historical time.37 The poteaumitan often includes a carved representation of Damballa the serpent, or
an actual reptile is wrapped around the pole with its head facing upward.
A Vod ceremony cannot begin without four critical components: a leader
(mambo or hungn), a fire, a poteau-mitan centering pole, and a vev. The
actual location of the sacred space is less significant, though most practitioners reported that designated, constructed hunfos in outdoor forested areas
are the most spiritually powerful.
The color red dominates Oriente Vod sacred sites, but these special
locations also contain a variety of material objects in other colors. On a low
shelf, or on the floor near the poteau-mitan pole, is a large, darkened bottle
or jug containing aguardiente (unrefined clear rum) or another strong clear
alcoholic liquid. Included within the liquid can be distinguishable amounts
of vinegar, small sticks or twigs, rocks, fermented herbs, an abundance of
hot peppers, leaves, a gun bullet or two, small pieces of metal, and other
materials. The jug immediately catches the eye of a person entering an
Oriente Vod space because this bottle is ritualistically passed to every person who crosses the threshold. Each person is expected to take at least one
mouthful of the liquid. The first mouthful, by those who are knowledgeable,
is to be sprayed at the table or other location of the room where there are
sacred objects. After that, when the jug is passed, one is expected to swallow
some of the peppery mixture.
Sacred spaces of Vod rituals also contain broken tree branches hung
on a wall or placed on the floor, as well as noticeable other material objects
that include seashells, large seeds, sticks, animal skins, bones, rocks, animal tusks or horns, and small animals themselves. A variety of photographs
and other iconic images of humans and Catholic saints are on the floor and
walls of a hunfo. The variety of rocks, stones, and other objects represent
and embody the spiritual presence of Loa and are numerous, noticeable,
and symbolically significant in all Oriente Vod spaces. These objects help
serviteurs transcend historical boundaries associated with contemporary
human time and space to that of ritual spirit time and space. The colorful
hand-sewn banners that regularly appear in Haitian Vod sites are much
less common in Oriente sacred spaces of Vod.38
Objects in these spaces are known to be part of divine creation and to
interact with bodies of humans as they both participate in time and space
of otherworld knowledge. This comprehension infuses sacredness into all
life by not separating conceptions of subject and object. Material things of
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Vod and other indigenous religions are regularly understood to be sacred

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

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

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

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

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Espiritismo

Cuban Espiritismo is a varied set of religious practices

that are exceptionally popular in Oriente. Although it is not an
Africa-based tradition, it does include marker characteristics from the
nations African heritage. Espiritismo originates from practices in the
United States and from the spiritual work of the Frenchman Hippolyte
Lon Denizard Rivail (18041869), better known as Allan Kardec. Kardec
focused his work on cosmic ideas about spirits and their ability to visit the
historical world of humans. He was concerned with demonstrating the scientific veracity of spirits and their capacity to communicate. Kardec held
gatherings, called sances, to demonstrate that spirits of the dead did visit
the living world, and in 1857 he published Spiritualist Philosophy:The Spirits
Book.1 The practice he developed was known as Kardecian Spiritism, and
its fundamental beliefs centered on such understandings about spirits.
Kardecian doctrine drew from Christianity, including an articulated
interpretation of the Ten Commandments, but his main idea was that spirits of the dead could be put into different groups or categories and that
they communicate and visit the living. His sances were designed to converse with select spirits in particular categories, and principles of the tradition also contended that spirits reincarnate in another human body. The

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doctrine became an international phenomenon, but it was more akin to

philosophy than a religion with systematic ritual practices.2
Kardecian ideas and sance customs traveled to the Americas sometime in the decades before the 1860s, following the development of spiritualism in the United States. The North American movement materialized
earlier in the nineteenth century and enjoyed popularity as the United
States underwent geographic shifts in its expanding population, as well as
significant social and cultural changes. Scientific and technological transformations also affected US family and work life and all of these factors
joined forces with those of the hundreds of thousands of European immigrants arriving in never-ending waves at the nations ports. The mounting
sense of social change and instability was equally affected by the increasing
probability of civil war. The potential of wars dire consequences served to
heighten a focus on death and life thereafter; creating a ripe environment
for Kardecian ideas.
Residents of colonial Cuba were familiar with events within their
northern neighbors borders. The two countries were more than geographic
neighbors because of close relations between many of their leaders and
intellectuals. Several Protestant principals from the island had studied in
nineteenth-century US seminaries3 and the confluence of social relations
brought US Spiritualism, influenced by Kardecian Spiritism, to Cuba sometime in the 1860s. As island insurgents of the Spanish colony prepared to
enter their Ten Years War of 18681878, Spiritualism/Spiritism as well as
US-style Protestantism entered once Catholic-dominated Cuba.4
Cubas eastern region was particularly receptive to ideas of Kardecian
Spiritism as influenced by US Spiritualism. Religious practices based on
cosmic ideas about working with spirits of the dead were already deeply
embedded in Oriente ritual life, and ideas about spirits resonated with
inhabitants there. Many had working knowledge and behavioral familiarity with the Africa-based orientation that had arrived some three to four
hundred years earlier with Africans from the Kongo Kingdom. Thus, ideas
about and the practice of working with spirits was normal in Oriente, but
with the arrival of Spiritualism/Spiritism, Oriente Cuban ideas could be
aligned with a certain scientific and modern legitimacy.
The search for legitimacy was important to populations of European
descendants on the island. Many who had been born in Cuba but without
distinguishable connection to European status and privilege were intent
upon demonstrating their allegiance to their island and their opposition to
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the colonial monarchy. This could be done partially by aligning themselves

with the new scientifically legitimate Spiritualism/Spiritism and distancing
themselves from Africa-based traditions or descendants. Things African
were negatively associated with slavery, ignorance, and primitive underdevelopment. The goal of many light-brown to white-skinned Cubans, and
some African descendants as well, was to have an independently recognized
and respected Cuban identity whose cultural foundations were endorsed
by or resembled customs of Europe and North America.5 Religious legitimacy was noteworthy as part of this vision. It was a quest that intersected
with growing nineteenth-century sentiment toward scientific development
and nationalistic support for an independent Cuba, free from Spanish colonial rule.6 Spiritualism/Spiritism presented an alternative set of ritual practices because it allowed Oriente progeny of campesinos (peasants) and other
island-born descendants to continue their eastern perspective regarding spirits and everyday life without directly linking them to an African heritage.
Many intellectuals, landowners, and shop owners, as well as campesinos
and others of the period, were poised to break away from Spanish control
of the colonys social structure. Only a few island-born Cubans held deep
loyalty to Spanish colonialism, to the Catholic Church, or to its equally elitist colonial clergy. But neither were many white-skinned European descendants enamored with Africa-based ritual practices. A spiritual and religious
alternative to well-established Africa-based customs, and an alternative not
aligned with Spanish colonialism, was an acceptable religious and political
choice. Therefore, Oriente was amenable when Kardecian-influenced spiritualism arrived. Adherence to the new religiosity became an important signifier of patriotism; to be a Spiritualist identified one as a Cuban patriot.
This convergence of religion and politics further characterized Oriente as
an independently strong and nationalistically Cuban region with distinctive spiritual patriotism.
Today, several varieties or families of Espiritismo can be found in western areas of the island, but the widest variety and the largest number of
practicing communities is in the east, in the contemporary provinces of
Guantnamo, Santiago, Holgun, Las Tunas, and Gramma. The tradition
has at lease four distinct families or pathways that reflect contact, exchange,
and transculturation between ideas of Kardecian-influenced spiritualism in
Orientes multicultural and multireligious population and their established
orientation. The interactive contact brought forth new behaviors in most
all ritual practices and gave birth to Espiritismo. Each of the four families
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contains a rich, dynamic, and coherent set of particularized, yet linked and
sometimes overlapping, customary practices. The popular denominationlike varieties can be summarized as follows:
Espiritismo Cruzado
Practices of this family of Espiritismo are characteristically filled with
transculturated and reconstructed components of the islands Africabased religions, Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, Vod, Regla de Ocha/
Lucum, as well as with practices from Cuban folk Catholicism. Cruzado
appears in many forms because it was born in the islands multicultural and multireligious environment. Of this tendency to multifaceted expression, Don Fernando Ortiz once wrote, When the Cuban
African men practice a religion, whichever this may be, they tend to
add: according to my way.7 He was acknowledging the reality that
practitioners adapted religious traditions to the particularities of their
Cuban-African lifestyles and cosmic orientation. Cruzado is just such a
constructed sacred tradition that represents the Cuban way.
Espiritismo de Cordon
This variety of Espiritismo is set apart by the richness of dance and
songs that accompany its rituals. With the leadership of spiritual
mediums, practitioners carry out spiritual work by forming a cordon
(human chain or cord). This ritual practice is particularly prevalent in
Oriente but rarely found in Cubas western or middle regions.
Espiritismo de Mesa o Cientfico
Followers of this family of Espiritismo self-identify their practice as
science, not religion. Fundamentally, their central ritual consists of
believers sitting around a mesa (table) and entering a state of trance
after making invocations that establish communication with cosmic
spiritual forces. Despite this activity, followers do not consider themselves ritualistic.
Espiritismo de Caridad
Similar in beliefs to those of Mesa, Espiritismo de Caridad gives more
emphasis to the practice of despojo8 (charitable gifts) and santiguacin
(sacred pilgrimages). Practitioners strongly contend that by so doing
they garner benefits to themselves and/or to others in need.
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Several of our Espiritismo-practicing respondents contended that there is a

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

Espiritismo Cruzado
Specifically speaking, Espiritismo Cruzado crosses Kardecian Spiritism with
ideas and customs of several other religious practices found in Oriente when
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the nineteenth-century EuroNorth Americanbased tradition arrived. The

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

A first foundation of Espiritismo Cruzado is that work of the tradition is

divided into two major categories of practitioners: celebrants and believers.
Celebrants are persons who work directly with spiritual currents, those collective energy transmissions that flow from otherworld spirits who are in
communication with humans. Believers are persons who are faithful devotees
of Cruzado but who do not personally work with such spiritual currents or
the spirits themselves. Each type of practitioner may construct sacred spaces
but believers have little understanding about what should be assembled or
why, except as positive mimicry or beauty. Celebrants, on the other hand,
are fully knowledgeable about the tradition and purposefully place objects in
assembled spaces based on their awareness of how to work with the power of
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the spiritual currents and commissions, that is, specific groupings of spirits
whose combined power manifests itself to Cruzado celebrants.
In each of the six Cruzado houses, called temples, that we investigated,
celebrants worked with three fundamental spirit currents:

One properly understood as spiritual;

One that notices the presence of Regla de Ocha/Lucum;
One that is the spiritual current of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe.

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

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

Based on resources available to celebrants, a sacred space of Espiritismo

Cruzado is built by assembling material objects associated with supernatural
powers as informed by the religion. The geographies of sacrality are embedded with markers that indicate spiritual crossings and signify the practices
and the tradition as indigenous to Cuba. For example, a representation of
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Eleggu is placed in a corner or behind the main access door of assembled

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

image of a spirit that has demonstrated itself to be particularly important
within a community of celebrants. This spirit is referred to as owner of the
space and practitioners see themselves as the genealogical offspring of the
entity. Generally, the most popular spirits/saints among Oriente followers of Cruzado are Shango/Santa Brbara, Ochn/La Caridad, Obatala/La
Mercedes, Babal Ay/San Lzaro, Yemaya/Virgin de Regla, Oggn/Santiago
de Apostle, and Eleggu/Baby Jesus. Although those in this listing of spirits
transculturated with Catholic representations are known to be exceptionally
popular, celebrants reported that all spirits are important in our religion
and all of them have their miracle in the work. Similarly, the iconic Catholic
understandings and names associated with transculturated spirits are most
prominently derived from the Yoruba-based Regla de Ocha.
All of the Cruzado sacred spaces we observed had a great number of
glasses and cups filled with water. These containers are a generalized signature or marker characteristic of the tradition and are usually made of
crystal or of a material as close to crystal as practitioners can afford. We
were told that the glasses of water function to assist spirits in their search
for clarity when working with celebrants. During a ritual of individualized
consultation, for example, a glass of water is understood to be the element
of transmission or communication. Practitioners reported that the water
will reflect what spirits wish to transmit.
Like most sacred geographies of all varieties of indigenous religions in
Oriente, spaces of Espiritismo Cruzado also contain the symbolic representation of an Amerindian. Spaces without an actual Amerindian image
possessed such allegorical objects as arrows, bows, feathered headbands,
and beads. Cruzado practitioners reported that the presence of representations of Amerindian spirits, and the spiritual work with them, reflects participation of the original owners of the Cuba landscape. This sustained one
of our indicators of Cuban religions as indigenous; the new rituals accepted
and were accepted into the interred ancestral land space and spiritual orientation of the islands autochthonous population. Cruzado celebrants
pointed out that the appearance of Amerindian spirits during their rituals
is an indication of particularly laborious and powerful spiritual work.11
Another image that appears in Cruzado sacred assemblages is that of
Africana or the African Queen. The depiction is a doll and is not crossed
with spirits of any other religious tradition, Christian or otherwise. She
does not carry a spirit/saint name and Cruzado adherents know her as an
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exceptionally powerful spirit force. Africana functions to keep bad influences from penetrating the entire arena and to protect the domestic house
from intrusive dangers. She is usually represented as a black-skinned doll
dressed in white, blue, red, or other colors, depending on religious particulars of the celebrants constructed site. The doll and her name indicate
that she and the spirit she represents are of African descent. We noted the
African and other non-European phenotypical characteristics of objects
and references in Cruzado and other indigenous religions, but we tried
to accept the veracity and integrity of respondents clarification of their
meaning without overly imposing a racialized judgment based on outward appearances.12
Some celebrants claimed that they could do spiritual work without
constructing a sacred space and that they could work with a desired spirit
even if its image were not present in a space. Some practitioners even contended that they could invoke, speak with, and work with spirits without
the mediation of a celebrant. Yet others proposed that the sacred geography
is an actual representation of the tradition and is in homage to spirits they
revere. Despite these variations, all agreed that the creation of sacred spaces
is influenced and inspired by spirits and that spirits actually indicate how a
site should be constructed and what is to be included. Therefore, Cruzado
spaces have common characteristics but also carry a certain individuality.
When a celebrant dies, his or her space must be transferred by indication of the spirits to an adherent who, preferably, is biologically related
to the deceased. This person should be someone with comparable spiritual
abilities or un hermano de obra (a brother of the work). Images from the
space are conferred to this person who is supposed to know how to attend
to them according to dictates of religious custom. We found that this transfer occurred when a celebrant, foreseeing death, prepared the designated
person with the particulars about caring for the specialized contents. On
some occasions, spirits have indicated that all contents of a sacred assemblage should be collected and thrown into the sea.
Although these discussions about basic and fundamental understandings, and about sacred spaces of Espiritismo Cruzado, represent clarifications about the tradition that have not been readily available to readers of
English, they are not an exhaustive set of clarifications of what practitioners of the tradition believe or how they build sacred spaces. At the same

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

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

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When Spiritism and Spiritualism arrived in Oriente during the

nineteenth century, inhabitants were the initiating participants in the
islands first independence struggles against Spain and the Catholic clergy.
Many of these insurgents gravitated toward the new religious practices as
deemed compatible with their existing cosmic orientation and expressive of
their anticolonial postures; the practices were not Spanish or Catholic and
they were not linked to colonialism. As ritual behaviors for the new tradition evolved, many became expressly anticolonial, oriented toward gaining independence, and important elements within a matrix of a developing
distinct Cuban identity. The new shapes of active sacrality were clearly
indigenous to the island.
Spirit communications and other ritual practices that became Espiritismo
de Cordon were an active, anticolonialist, indigenous religious mode of selfassertion that became the preference for many nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Oriente patriots of all social classes. Those with European ancestry
who rejected the Catholic clergys interventions into their spiritual lives
were particularly attracted to Espiritismo. These insurgent patriots preferred
behaviors more reflective of their regional homeland experiences. The Cuban
historian Joel James reviewed events related to the 1895 War of Independence
and identified the incorporation of such ritual behaviors that became significant to Cordon rituals. James uncovered reports of soldiers from various social classes who fought for the common goal of independence, and he
located events within those struggles that reflected the cohesive role played
by an emerging Espiritismo de Cordon. We will summarize some of Jamess
historical breakthroughs because Cordon mirrors political, as well as spiritual, nationalism in Oriente.16
Civil populations of Oriente were the first to rise in insurrection for a
second time at the close of the nineteenth century. Inhabitants had fought
unsuccessfully in the 18681878 Ten Years War, but they had not lost their
zeal for an independent, anticolonial Cuba, where there would be neither legal enslavement nor de facto bondage. This was above all true in
Oriente and many were displeased with the closure of the Ten Years War
because these aspirations were not met in a treaty with Spain. Some forms
of enslavement were outlawed at that time, but the plantation economic
system remained, as did the de facto enslavement of African descendants.
Oriente inhabitants were again first to be involved in insurrection against
Spain and participated enthusiastically in the 1895 movement.

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As those before them had done in 1868, great numbers of African

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

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

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

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

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

Most temples of Espiritismo de Cordon have a dedicated entrance that

opens to a larger space devoted to a focal table where rites and ceremonies
unfold. The entrance has a basin filled with water resting on a chair at its
right side. This represents the specialized protected entrance of Cordon
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sacred spaces and each person entering is required to wash her or his hands
before coming into the temple. In interviews, practitioners reported that
washing hands prohibits harmful and evil elements or substances from
crossing the threshold. A Cordon leader also reported that members must
be cautious about the harm other traditions can cause.
The focal table of Espiritismo de Cordon is obviously an important part
of an assembled geography as it is where Cordoneros invoke spirits to participate with them in rituals of the earthly plane. The table has shelves above
and at least one shelf below its main level, and this combination is normally
the principal axis of a sacred space. A white tablecloth covers the tabletop and a large goblet devoted to all spiritual guides is placed in the center. Two glasses filled with water are placed on each side of the goblet and
the Kardecian prayers that begin each session are read at the focal table. In
one space we observed that this type of table occupied all of the living and
dining room areas of the owners house, as the entire space was dedicated
exclusively to the Cordon ritual.
Also on the main platform of the focal table are symbolic representations
of spirits and spiritual currents, as well as a plaster image of an Amerindian
accompanied by a sunflower. This was true for each Cordon community,
and we were told that the plaster Amerindian recalls/re-members spirits
of the Amerindian commission that works with the particular community.
The sunflower symbolizes the commission itself. In the middle of the shelf
above the table is an electric light bulb that is perpetually on. A portrait
of San Hilarin is underneath the bulb, and a medium reported that the
light bulb is the light of San Hilarin. Respondents reported that the table
represents El Santisimo, the holy sacrament of Christianity. A metal cross
may also be on the wall or sit above all the shelves.
Other shelves of the Cordon focal table contain a variety of objects and
images: bottles, pictures of deceased family members or friends, photos of
Catholic virgins and other saints, chromolithographs, and glasses with clear
water, as well as offerings of flowers that are associated with specific spirits. Cordoneros told us that the flowers provide strength, while the water
gives clarity, and that the espritus (spirits of deceased persons depicted in
pictures and other objects) unite in working with Cordon mediums in the
religions characteristic ritual.
The cordon ritual is conducted in the sacred space and starts with a
preparatory or invocational phase of reading from the book Chosen Prayers
by Allan Kardec, and consisting of prayers of love to the Celestial Father.22
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After prayers, the book is ritualistically closed with solemn and slow reverence. Cordoneros now understand that spiritual communication has
been established and the Celestial Father has granted consent to form the
Cordon, or cord. As the central work of this Espiritismo, the cordon ritual
actually begins when mediums, in communication with the spirits, stand
and hold hands with each other and all others in the temple do likewise.
This forms a horseshoe configuration that is opened at the site of the focal
table. The principal medium and guide begins to chant, to call forth spirits to join the membership in the work. Members respond to the chant
with a rhythmic chorus repeated over and over. At the end of each refrain,
and before repeating it, members make guttural sounds that punctuate the
chanting rhythm. While continuing to hold hands, they move their arms
first up into the air then down toward the floor (see figure 16). Their feet
slide in unison in a counterclockwise direction, first one foot then the next.
A vigorous foot stomp completes each sideways slide.
Often the guiding medium will interrupt the Cordon obreros on the
downward movement and instruct members to slightly touch the floor
with their joined hands. On their upward motion, they are instructed to
separate their hands and elevate them to heaven in a self-blessing gesture.
Occasionally the principal medium will ask all mediums to concentrate
their thoughts in God. This usually indicates that work of the Cordon is
not going well or not strong enough and the concentration must precede
additional rounds of sliding and chanting.
At least one person comes to a Cordon charity work session seeking
healing or spiritual charity from the group. At a designated time in the
ritual, such persons are led to face the centralized focal table. The membership concentrates its work on eliciting an anointing of spiritual wellbeing for all persons present but particularly for the seekers. During the
process, some mediums and members enter a trance, will have spirits come
to them, or will be possessed. In their altered state of consciousness, these
persons receive knowledge from the otherworld that is interpreted and
shared with everyone present, including those seeking charity.
Conclusion of the entire Cordon service is the deliverance. Mediums
proceed around the inside of the cord configuration and separate practitioners joined hands. With hands separated, each person leans forward and
slightly touches the floor with the tips of their fingers and turns in personal
circles. Participants then raise their hands above their heads and shake
them upward. This last act is executed as the deliverance, and mediums
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instruct all participants to unfold in the same fashion to deliver themselves. There are then closing chants and a special song, giving thanks to
God and the spirits who have allowed the session to be successful. The
Cordon is now finished.

Summary Thoughts
Espiritismo Cruzado and Espiritismo de Cordon are each a set of coherent
practices that are part of one lineage within a single indigenous religious
tradition. Espiritismo de Cordon is intimately linked to nineteenth-century
Cuban nationalism and many behaviors of Espiritismo Cruzado are similarly embedded within the nations cultural consciousness. Oftentimes the
two religious varieties share attitudes about non-Espiritismo practices and
they have differing ritual activities.
Sacred spaces of the two sets of customs highlight the internal dissimilarities that can and do exist among Espiritismo practices just as the two
traditions share arenas of contestation about other religions. Internal distinctions between the two begin with basic understandings about divine
spirits. Cruzado spirits are presented as transculturated entities, united
through images and representations by way of Christian and Africa-based
understandings. Espiritismo de Cordon spaces, on the other hand, present
spirits images as associated with Catholic Christianity, not as transculturated sprits.
At the same time, the two sets of sacred practices disagree about the
nature and naming of images in sacred spaces. Cordoneros contend that
practitioners of cross-Spiritism, that is, Cruzado, perform dirty works to
do evil. These attitudes appear to indicate a struggle for moral superiority of one set of religious practices over another. However, we propose that
Cordoneros adamant objection to and dismissal of Cruzados Africa-based
practices, and their apparent subconscious desire to show spiritual superiority, affirm a perceived awareness of power, strength, and efficaciousness
of the Africa-based customs. We propose this to be true as well of Cruzado
practitioners who show similar disdain for Africa-based religions while
including many of those practices in their spiritual work.
The geographies of sacrality constructed by practitioners of the two
lineages also contain internal differences. Espiritismo Cruzado spaces are
indoor, elaborate, colorful, mosaic-like assemblages of multiple objects:
images, flowers, and other items. Figure 14 shows the compacted fullness
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of an exemplary Cruzado space. By comparison, objects and visual representations in the sacred site of Espiritismo de Cordon (figure 16) may seem
less adorned. We offer the comparisons with care, however, as we believe
definitions of the sacred belong to aesthetics of practitioners. Too often,
comparisons across cultures and traditions lead to ethnocentric mendacity
rather than human understanding.

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Land of the Dead Beginnings

Muertra Bemb de Sao

Thus far we have outlined historical parameters of

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

147

presence in Oriente. That is to say, our best research knowledge tells us that
ritual behaviors that evolved into habitual patterns to become Muertra
Bemb de Sao originated among the earliest enslaved colonial Africans,
more specifically those from Kongo ethnic groups.
Rituals distinct to Muertra are extremely widespread in Cubas eastern
region, if for no other reason than that many of its behaviors have been incorporated into other religious practices. Therefore, if our summations about
origins are correct, this sacred tradition contains some of the islands oldest
customs and this chapter connects those prenineteenth-century social and
sacred patterns even as it is a field report that needs further exploration. Our
late encounter with Muertra, while not a coincidence, was a surprise.
Over the years, the research team had lived in local neighborhoods of
the region and garnered a strong reputation for the authentic and meticulous way we conducted our work, but no one had directed us to practitioner communities of Muertra Bemb de Sao until one of our last visits. The
timing did not amaze us, but it was disconcerting that we had failed to recognize and connect earlier observations. We should have known, or at least
raised questions earlier, because respondents had consistently described the
spiritual character of Oriente as the land of the dead and when they did,
they used such wording as Tierra de Muertras or Tierra de Muertos.
But neither descriptor jarred our thinking. We interpreted the words muertos or muertra as types of creolized Cuban idiomatic Spanish terms that
referred to individuals who had died or to spirits of those who had died
in the Oriente landscape. We knew the region was a first landing site for
enslaved Africans and that the land held physical remains of hundred of
thousands of Amerindian and African ancestors who have been respectfully interred and revered for some five centuries. We therefore found it
logical that there would be a colloquial understanding about such Oriente
history. It was equally logical to assume that the region would be referred
to in a transculturated linguistic idiom such as Tierra de Muertras and
that the taken-for-granted public language for regional spirits would be
muertos. Practitioners often linked some of these phrases, that is, Tierra
de Muertra or Bemb de Muertos, and this further confused our ability
to depend on language to clarify cultural realities.
Again, that did not attract our attention, though it should have. In addition, we experientially understood the Cuban translation for bemb to be
a drumming party for spirit(s), which it is. So we assumed that Muertra
Bemb de Sao referred to a drumming party either for spirits of the living
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dead or for specific divine spirits. We even asked island social scientists
about the possibility that Bemb de Sao might be a Portuguese derivative.
They were not sure about the Portuguese but proposed the words were
Cuban, though not of Spanish origins. We never considered that Muertra
Bemb de Sao might be a religious tradition to be included in our investigation. We made an error. Even now, as we describe understandings assembled from practitioners of Muertra, we are prepared for future research to
clarify our mistakes.
We surmise that Muertra Bemb de Sao originated among colonial
enslaved Africans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and we turn
now to the briefest review of how these ancestors arrived in Oriente. We
remind readers that some of the details will sound familiar because the historical foundations and some of the behavioral practices overlap with the
tradition of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe discussed in chapter 4. We proceed
to examine the case study data of Muertra Bemb de Sao, the research
anomaly or anecdotal ritual practices of our investigative project.

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

From 1501, Spanish colonials in Cuba received royal authorization to substitute captive Africans for the islands exhausted Amerindian labor force.5
These earliest historical realities circumscribed the context for Bantuspeakers of West Central Africa earliest arrival and presence in Oriente, a
presence that stamped Kongo cultural markings on regional behavior. This
is not to suggest that the cultural markings were definitive for all Oriente
life, including all sacred lifestyles. Rather, as with linguistic influences,
we propose that the regions Kongo influence was marked and remains to
such an extent that it characterizes the core of Oriente religious practices.
Linguistic research suggests that essential elements of languages were
defined by the first generation of slave workers who [socialized] subsequent newcomers to the . . . way of life. Similarly, we contend that fundamentals of religious ritual practices were set forth with equal rapidity
at the same time by the first generations of enslaved workers in Oriente.6
Our proposition is built upon the fact that Oriente was the initial landing
location for the earliest Africans of the the Spanish colony, the majority
of those Africans were from Kongo ethnic groups, and that Kongo presence continued in the region.7 Kongo-based rituals were at the core of
customs that gave birth to behavioral patterns associated with several contemporary traditions, including Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe and Muertra
Bemb de Sao.
By the middle of the sixteenth century, persons from ethnic groups of
the Kongo were the majority of those entering Oriente and best represented
an ethnic collectivity during the first years and century. These Africans
shared a generalized Kongo culture and language system, common cosmic
orientations, and phenomenological principles about life in the universe,
and, as all humans do, they used these as guides to establish their spiritual foundation in eastern Cuba. They understood that the individual and
the community are dependent upon powers of being outside the human
arena.8 Even when words or postures cant express it, there is an attitude,
an orientation, the initial deciphering of a way to be in the world.9 These
Africans shared and exchanged their remembered homeland ideas and rituals with one another, and with those remaining Amerindians. Encounters
with colonial Indians were some of the first opportunities for Africa-based
behaviors and ideas to be combined and become part of Cubas processes
of transculturation. The contacts were not as random as might be expected
as Amerindians and Africans collaborated in joint campaigns to attack
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Spanish settlements as early as 1530, and relationships between descendants

of the two struggling groups shared time and space within palenques, a
trademark social pattern of Oriente.10
Oriente palenques were an alternative social living arrangement to colonial enslaved life. They were vibrant, though poor and rough, settlements
of collective housing and living for African and remaining Amerindian
descendants who escaped enslavement. Within the communities, inhabitants cared for each other through the life cycle; engaged in economic trade
with local, national, and international contacts; and conducted defensive
and offensive campaigns against colonial authorities. Before their numbers were radically reduced, Amerindians were particularly known to form
mountain settlements near the northeastern town of Baracoa, but they,
too, were part of the neo-African palenques that existed throughout the
region.11 Collaborative relations in the settlements and in rebellious attacks
against Spanish colonialists provided the foundation for what Vincent
Harding called outlier communities.12
Outliers are created when individuals and collectives of individuals
take actions outside boundaries of existent structures of exploitation. They
challenge the model(s) of normality but, more importantly, the actions are
radical enough to expand the vision of possibilities for freedom for others
living under similar conditions.13 Oriente palenques were just such outliers
for enslaved colonial Africans and their descendants. Specific for our focus
on Kongo foundations of contemporary sacred behaviors, palenques were
an important arena for the development of customs that became marker
characteristics of their African heritage and of the region. For those who
fled enslavement, the settlements were liberated zones of alternative social
arrangements and a model of freedoms possibilitya model even for those
who remained within the bondage system.
From within the neo-African settlements, palenque members retreated
into forested areas to articulate remembered fragments of sacred behaviors
that expressed their humanity. In those separate arenas, members activities
were beyond the overt constraints of colonial control. They engaged in ritual
behaviors recalled from African homelands and called upon known spirits
from those realities. The results became a body of regularized actions that
embraced elements from several different ethnic groups but that retained the
character of the larger group of Kongolese Africans. Understandings from
these Oriente-constructed ritual practices were transmitted to new generations of regional residents not only in palenques, but also to those African
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descendants not living in the liberated arrangements.14 Respondents in

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

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

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

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

Understand the nature of general and ritual time as multidimensional,

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

This cosmic orientation gave rise to behavioral practices and customs that
have been known since the islands colonial periods and both have been
transmitted to contemporary generations to form characteristic behaviors
that minimally are part of Muertra Bemb de Sao.
When we talked and interviewed Muertra practitioners, not to mention adherents of other indigenous traditions, they spoke repeatedly within
the orientation. They said, Our ancestor spirits must be consulted so that
we know how to live our lives, and If the spirits dont agree with the
things we want to do, then we must avoid that pathway. In discussing the
need to respond to drums, we were regularly told, You must listen to what
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the drums say and respond. The drums talk for the spirits and the songs
remind of us of how our ancestors lived. These articulations, coupled with
observations of the content of sacred spaces kept us aware of the Africabased orientation that undergirds Muertra Bemb de Sao and other indigenous religious of the region.
Palenques of Orientes Sierra Maestra mountains were havens for
Kongolese and others of their continent to transmit this orientation and
construct their transculturated, neo-African behaviors. Such exemplary
behaviors happened in bembdrum parties convened by palenque
members in the small savannahs with some thickets of insulating groups
of trees,17 in the sao where they could actively revere divine and other
spirits. This was collective action that was part of the cultural imperative
of Kongolese tradition. It was aligned with their cosmic orientation and
was an aspect of the phenomenological principles of the West Central
African people. Minimally, Kongo ethnic groups are known to have
required such a collective response for victory in battles, days of remembrance for deeds of special spirits (muertos), actual or religious birth of
new community members, and for the transition of the spirit of a physical
body to the otherworld.18 Whenever such situations occurred in colonial
Oriente and called for communal observance, the bemb drum party was
a predictable result.19
Despite the predominance of Kongo influences, a palenques bemb was
a collective social arena wherein members from differing ethnic backgrounds
gathered and combined particulars of their remembered behaviors with
other articulations of cultural lexicons. Drumming, singing, dancing, chanting, and other exchanges among participants of the collective event evolved
into a sacred and secular, cultural manifestation of bemb.20 The happenings
became regularized for African descendants in and out of palenque settlements, and the regularized, transculturated activity was transmitted to other
generations and/or to new inhabitants. The neoAfrican Cuban music,
song, dance, and bemb itself became well known in Oriente and continues into the present day. However, while several indigenous religions employ
such components of Kongolese marker characteristics from the colonialera bemb, a fuller array of such signature features became centralized into
the Muertra Bemb de Sao sacred lifestyle and was transmitted to contemporary practitioners. As one respondent told us, My grandmother was
enslaved and taught my family how to sing and dance at bemb.
Research findings of investigators of Santiagos Casa del Caribe and
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other elder interview respondents reported that the older, collective bemb
was usually held under a large tree in a cleared forest areathe Sao. A
large tree is phenomenologically important because an Africa-based orientation understands that this universal entity has a life span that is longer
than most humans; it lives in past and present time and therefore carries
much wisdom. Rituals conducted under such a tree contain enhanced
sacrality and are felt to have special efficacious potential. In addition to
receiving increased sacrality from the location, colonial bemb held under
a large tree or trees in a cleared forest area also possessed the marker characteristics of Kongolese drums and rhythms (see figure 1), chants, singing,
and dancing. The presence of these attributes heightened the Kongolese
nature and consecrated disposition of the events.
As with the contemporary Muertra Bemb de Sao rituals we ob
served, colonial bemb altered the regular atmosphere of everyday life to
such an extent that visitations and possessions from muertosspecific
spiritsbecame a customary part of the sacred activity. Bemb was then
understood, as it is understood today, to be an activity that was part of
humans responsibilities in the reciprocal revered relationship with the
world of spirits. It was an activity that altered the atmosphere and called
upon spirits of the otherworld to visit with humans. Successful visits and
possession by spirits was an astonishing manifestation that divine forces
were and continued to be with African descendants, a supernatural companionship infinitely more powerful than colonial or present-day sociohistorical circumstances. The ritual and celebratory events were repeated
and recounted with such satisfaction and accuracy that contemporary
elder respondents reported that older bemb was more real and like its
supposed to be.
At the same time, we do not see early bemb activities as a coherent
set of religious practices, although they were habitualized into interactive
patterns of sacred behavior. We do however, contend that Muertra Bemb
de Sao became a coherent set of sacred customs because sufficient numbers of African descendants continued to engage in and extend colonial
practices and to socialize others to ritualized particulars of the celebratory
forest events. Insurgents of the 1895 Independence War who encountered
African descendants coming from the mountains to join the war observed
the ritualized customs that stemmed from bemb. Reports state that these
black rebels sang, chanted, drummed, and danced while moving counterclockwise: marker attributes of sacrality within Kongo tradition and a
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combination of activities aligned with ritual life of colonial forest bemb

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

The use of Kongo-type drum rhythms (figure 1);

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

We observed that one or more of these characteristics were part of several

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

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

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Generalized, nonspecific spirits of all those who have died;

Designated spirits of the ancient dead who work with specific living
individuals;
Divine spirits of ancient, supernatural beings.

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

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

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Findings and Conclusions

To be indifferent to the past is breaking faith with the people who

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

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Atlantic European expansion and colonization, individuals from enslaved

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

What We Learned Conceptually

Defining Indigenous

Our working definition of indigenous deepened after several years of living with and observing African-descendant devotees using ritual activities
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that contained behaviors influenced by their continental ancestry as well as

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

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

of beauty, models of time, and celebration exemplify their Africa-based
orientation as well as the historical, regional self-referencing sacred life.
Contemporary devotees maintain daily lives within two time realities but
prioritize the reality of their religious practices. On the one hand, they
exist in a Cuban society guided by Eurocentric ideas and a linear approach
to time. While on the other hand, they actualize a significant portion of
their lives within the event-based time of ritual practices and cosmic perspective that has been tested and handed down through generations. The
latter time concept has informed them about principles of natural phenomena and guided them on how and with what to celebrate sacred occasions. For example, colonial Europeans held the majority of political and
social resources and wielded most power derived from those. They reconstructed organizations and institutional relations to support their idea/
ideal religious holidays as dictated by understandings of Christian and
Cuban Catholic liturgical practices.6 These settlers and their progeny created public holidays and organized celebratory activities with little consideration or respect for Cuban Indian or African descendants ideas about
sacred celebration. Secular, nonsacred behaviors were ordered to cease on
such holy days, as all colonial inhabitants were expected to take part in
designated activities.
For those excluded from decision-making power, the mainstream holiday meant social space away from the laborious drudgery of their work
and an opportunity to release some of their overwhelming frustrations.
It was a temporary public celebration opportunity for the bonded and
oppressed people of the island.7 The European elite and upper classes considered African involvement in social celebrations as exotic entertainment,
but the descendants of darker hue soon appropriated the allocated times,
reinterpreted and restructured them yet again into Africa-based occasions.
They publicly dressed, sang, drummed, danced, and paraded in African
ways and inserted their meanings of the celebrations into the Europeanstructured holiday events.8 Nineteenth-century literary persons of African
descent are even reported to have employed and inserted expressions from
their sacred heritage into what appeared to be purely Hispanic written
forms of artistic cultural representation.9
Although they held alternative conceptualizations about being human,
African descendants lived within and acknowledged Spanish Catholic
ideas in Cuba; some of the latter overlapped or paralleled Africa-based
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notions. For example, ideas about the veneration of sacred entities and
the shared understanding that spiritual forces/saints could be called upon
for assistance were particularly compatible with Africa-based comprehensions about the universe. However, the recognized compatibility of cosmic
ideas and some ritual practices did not erase or replace the Africa-based
cosmic core. Rather, the new thoughts served as labels within a Catholic
veneer that gave the appearance of compliance with colonial and postcolonial power structures, while holding Africa-based ideas central. As well,
the appearance of the Eurocentric veneer curtailed some social repudiation
and persecution of the Africa-based center and thereby brought a modicum of social space to these oppressed people.
The result was that African descendants participation in celebratory
activities was within their own ideas about time as these supposedly powerless people changed the nature and character of Cuban holidays. In Oriente,
many such occasions became associated with and named for Africa-based
commemorations. Shango and Babal Ay are strong examples.10 Over
centuries, even as celebrations for Santa Brbara and San Lazaro were official Catholic holidays, activities associated with the festivities were stylistically altered and not wholly associated with European or African cultural
ideas. Figure 15 is a papier-mch representation of the transculturated
image of Babal Ay that symbolizes the spirit/saint in the religio-cultural
commemoration. The image demonstrates that elements of the holiday celebrations were changed yet again to the African descendants orientation of
veneration, sacred things, and merriment.
Within indigenous customs of Oriente, our research found that many
such new concepts about holiness and celebration were infused with
Africa-based knowledge. For example, animal sacrifice might be needed.
All night drumming, singing, and dancing also could be required and
such new practices were grounded in an alternative temporal modality.
All became part of island tradition in purpose, focus, and stylistic performance. Contemporary Oriente inhabitants, and those who share their
perspective, express this distinct understanding when they ritualistically
refer to island sites and when they return to the region for Shango and
Babal Ay celebrations, not the Catholic ones.11 The historical processes
of transculturation and the continuation of celebrations that are infused
with cosmic orientation and ritual practice that distinguish Cubas indigenous religions was an impressive finding of our investigation of sacred
spaces in Oriente.
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Temporal Modality
We also found that Oriente practitioners sacred spaces reflect colonialinitiated processes of appropriating material, space, and ideas from an
Africa-based model of time. This occurred within sociohistorical realities
of regional religious practices and is exemplified by scheduling ritual activities according to modern world definitions of societal obligations, but
beginning and ending such rituals within indigenous religions time concepts. We found that devotees communicated time frames of ritual activities as Eurocentric, but made their arrival, participation, and departure
from the work within the time definition parametered by Africa-based
cosmic orientation. This was true even across different religions where customs varied.
From the perspective of practitioners alternative temporal modality,
ritual work is a constant, demonstrated contestation, if not conflict with the
larger societys prevailing time model about being human. Their national
membership compels participation in the sociopolitical reality of Cuba and
Oriente, but as Fredrik Barth would say, like most humans, practitioners
participate in multiple, more or less discrepant, universes of discourse;
they construct different, partial, and simultaneous worlds in which they
move; their cultural construction of reality springs not from one source
and is not of one piece.12 At the same time, we were not convinced that the
contestation and conflict of temporalities is necessarily a negative one that
has potential for social schism. We found that Oriente devotees maintain
their societal responsibilities and functioning but conjointly do not abdicate sacred responsibilities and required activities.
Devotees make daily adjustments to sustain the integrity and priority
of Africa-based sacred lifestyles, lifestyles that for centuries provided their
ancestors and them with a sense of ultimate meaning and purpose as well as
a direct relationship to cosmic creation and power. This power, too, is understood to transcend the human-constructed, sociopolitical world of inequities and oppression. We found that the symbolic universe created by Oriente
devotees across religious traditions was not formed from a single source or
from a solitary wellspring. Rather, the sacred world was practitioners selfpresentation aimed at signifying their place in a socially constructed world
that had left them out. As such, their adherence to the alternative temporal
modality is part of the core Africa-based cosmic orientation. Their devotion
may be as David Brown sees the continuation of alternatives, a consciously
cultivated style of subversion of values; a subversion of values, time, place,
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and performance that is grounded in the spiritual temporality of indigenous

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

Counter/Re-signification in Practice
Like much of cross-cultural research conducted on issues of religion, one
finding of our work was that what you get is not always what you saw, or, you
didnt get what you saw because you only thought you saw it. This reminds
us that, with cross-cultural investigations, too often we bring unnecessary
interpretive baggage for comprehending the investigative sites. In Oriente,
we were reminded that practitioners constantly counter/re-signify meanings
in many of their actions in their world, and too often what we think of as
superstitions are merely behaviors labeled by those who do not understand
and/or share comprehensions about the symbolic universe with those doing
the actions. This was true for sacred spaces built by Oriente practitioners and
it is true for images presented in this book. All incorporate a myriad of material articles that can appear almost anywhere on the globe. However, when
placed in Oriente sacred spaces, they are counter/re-signified from meanings
not associated with the cosmic orientation of Cuban indigenous religions
into sacred objects of ritual work.
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For those who do not share practitioners understanding of the symbolic world, such spaces and activities within them can be misunderstood
and labeled as superstitions. The situation usually arises from a plethora
of negative significations that have been imposed upon religious traditions that differ from Eurocentric civilizations Christian core. Many who
hold such a core automatically and unconsciously assume that most things
African or Africa related, particularly religious ritual workings, are dark,
dirty, demonic, and/or inferior. This signifying of a whole continent and its
people is a product of European expansion and theft in the western hemisphere.15 It involves five centuries of dependency on enslaved and African
labor for development, the consistent creation and imposition of stereotypical rationales to justify the race-based exploitative relationships, and the
implementation of formal and informal social structures that ensured permanence of white supremacy.
At the same time, these impositions have not been unilaterally accepted
and neither have Oriente practitioners yielded to all such significations.
Sacred spaces speak loudly of continued resistance to a world circumscribed
by white hegemonic ideas of humanity, sacrality, and religion. They are active
representations of an alternative understanding, are consciously cultivated
styles of subversion and re-signification, and include objects and activities
that continue to be antithetical to Eurocentric understandings of the sacred.
The spaces contain preserved dead animals; remains of sacred and ritualistic animal sacrifice; water and earth from a variety of global spaces; special
rocks, sticks, and other objects also from diverse settings; experiences with
spirit visitations and comings to human bodies; and much more.
Oriente geographies of sacrality, their contents, and the practitioners
who use them belong to religious realities whose meanings are far from
Eurocentric core designations; they present a visual image that conflates
and confounds, if not confuses, many such designations. Consequently,
many of us who assume Eurocentric approaches regularly dismiss as superstition the content and behaviors that occur in Oriente spaces. In fact, the
spaces, their content, and activities are a consistent counter/re-signification
to hegemonic imposition. They are intimate parts of a lifestyle wherein
participants employ alternative definitions and interactional requirements
for spiritual work even as that work must be performed within mainstream
societal understandings not demarcated by their cosmic orientation; the
spaces and actions are counter/re-significations of what the larger social
reality might dictate.
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These counter/re-signified comprehensions are not individual or temporary but are found in each Oriente sacred space and within each set of
regional practices of a religious tradition. They are historical long-term patterns of generations of practitioners intentional collective behavior. They are
counter/re-significations because the cosmic core from which the understandings and behaviors are derived has been successful in helping new generations adjust and adapt behaviors while not fully yielding to alternative or
imposed orientations. Contemporary ritual work, though not the same as
that conducted by practitioners colonial foreparents, continues with critical
elements that have persisted beyond the lifetime of originators of any singular
ritual arrangement.16 Our research found that this was the case for Oriente
sacred spaces constructed for ritual work, spaces and work that are essential
counter/re-significations of colonial, postcolonial, modern, and postmodern
realities even as they were constructed and propagated as normative within
the symbolic world of devotees.
Equally, the traditions, their customs, and spaces are counter/re-significations because they continue to be the lived reality for a significant number of nonpractitioners in that some 80 percent of all island inhabitants
practice one or more of the religious lines.17 These alternative sets of customs are full lifestyles, not mere temporary representations of individual
idiosyncrasies. They are patterns of beliefs and behaviors that are daily and
weekly put into practice by collectivities of members. Our research found
that these observable patterns of counter/re-signification are intimately
woven into lives of adherents. In addition, the sacred customs are not
exclusive to a particular Oriente town or city, and many have been shared
beyond regional and national borders.18

Integrated Religious Plurality

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

169

results from specific and different religious traditions. This intentional in

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

Chapter 8

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

171

of the regions colonial periods. This seems to suggest that, like Catholicism
in earlier periods, Regla de Ocha enjoys more visibility throughout Cuba
and the world than do more popular traditions practiced in Oriente. The
name recognition of Yoruba-based spirits, when employed for comparable spirits of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, Vod, Espiritismo, and Muertra
Bemb de Sao provides an ease of translation for regional customs that are
already integrated pluralities.
The use of familiar nomenclature and less well-known practices also
helps Oriente devotees participate in the Cuban tourist economy where
certain religious practices have developed valuable spiritual capital. Practi
tioners can encourage tourists to visit their sacred sites and/or take part in
public ceremonies by using names familiar to foreign travelers, names like a
bemb for Shango or Ochn. Though tourists may not know what the event
is or its religious significance, they have heard the words as associated with
Cubas indigenous religions and are interested in seeing them. This provides
Oriente inhabitants with opportunities to garner dollars, which are more
valued than the peso currency of their country. The economic supplement
enhances the survival of participating religious adherents.
An example of material that functions as spiritual capital within the
integrated religious plurality is a figurine regularly purchased by tourists
that of Eleggu, the spirit force responsible for all crossroads and named
within the lexicon of Regla de Ocha/Lucum. Tourists purchase replicas of the
figurines used by practitioners or those produced by government-operated
factories. At the same time, such figurines are found behind doorways in
homes of nearly all practitioners of our research, no matter the religious tradition they followed.
Our finding on Oriente religious practice as integrated pluralities follows a trajectory set by David Brown in his book Santera Enthroned: Art,
Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion and by Stephen Palmi in
his volume Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity
and Tradition. Each author is concerned with interpreting the spiritembodying and spirit-directing materials of Cuban-derived religious
expressions, respectively the ritual content of Regla de Ocha and the heterogeneous objects, bilongo of reglas congo.21 Each shares a focus on how
products of the indigenous customs are distinct expressions that incorporate but do not singularly represent either of the base cultures from which
they were historically formed. The intersection with our idea about Orientes
integrated religious plurality occurs because the various Cuban indigenous
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Chapter 8

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

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

173

period of development. Surez also acknowledged that only Africa-based

religions of his country responded to citizens needs in their changing
circumstances before and after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. The indigenous religions, he said, have permeated the entire country. Our research
findings confirm Reverend Surezs contentions to be particularly true
in Oriente.24
At the same time, we found residuals of Catholicism to be a continuing element of life in Oriente, but only in so far as it has been cojoined
with indigenous ritual practices. There are Catholic churches in most all
regional cities, towns, villages, and some smaller settlements, but the number of Catholic practitioners seen in any of these is small given the size of
the structures. The exception is among those churches where the patron
saint corresponds with a spirit force of an indigenous tradition. Interview
respondents informed us of the Christian nature of these Oriente structures and simultaneously instructed us about the fixtures participation in
their indigenous religious lifestyles. For example, the Cathedral at Cobre in
Oriente that is dedicated to the Catholic Virgin of Charity is known by most
as an iconic sacred space of the Africa-based divine spirit of Ochn. This
cathedral is well populated with devotees and receives hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. This also is the Oriente space that the pope of
the Roman Catholic Church visited, likely preferring to understand it only
as representing the Christian tradition. We found that in Oriente religious
life, at any given moment in history, an entity or activity rarely belongs to a
single representation.
Local neighborhood communities maintain Catholic physical structures to the best of their ability and available resources, and practitioners
of indigenous religions use the buildings within certain rituals and rites
of their tradition. Material residue from cleansing rituals of several indigenous sacred procedures, for example, is regularly deposited just outside
of select churches. Individuals are instructed to place the accumulated
remains from their ritual acts in front or just to the side, in the shade of
a nearby Catholic church. As with Reverend Surezs proposition, our
research found Catholic churches to be peripheral to indigenous traditions, their sacred spaces, and their spiritual activities. But we do not view
Orientes integrated relationships as associated with conventional notions
of syncretism or as a colloquially understood hybrid of originally separate
elements.25 As Fernando Ortiz advised, we found that Oriente inhabitants
make and do things in their Cuban way.26
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Summation
All religions are dynamic; they constantly change. Indigenous religious practices of Oriente are no different, and over the five hundred years of their
presence in the region, they have adjusted to particularities of their sociopolitical and historical circumstances. No matter how much information
we uncover about beliefs, rituals, ceremonies, rites, boundaries, parameters,
rules, objects, spirits, and other specifics of religiosity in Oriente, the practice of traditions that equal a phenomenon live because of and within movements and changes of humans social, political, economic, and historical
lives. Those, too, are not static, they change.
Our exploration of the sacred spaces of Cubas indigenous religious
practices in the eastern region of Oriente was meant to open this area and its
activities for inclusion into the larger academic arena of systematic research.
For the most part, academic knowledge has been accumulated almost exclusively from data and information gathered from practitioners of the western
regions of Havana, Matanzas, Trinidad, Cienfuegos, and others.
By choosing to focus on Oriente locations of sacrality, rather than on
those of the west, we were able to identify four sets of religious practices
that have previously been underinvestigated yet are actively performed in
the region and within which sacred spaces are constructed. We have photographed these spaces as they appeared at the time of our visits. However,
because we know that humans, religions, and sacred spaces are always
changing, those who follow us to investigate Oriente will most likely find
that sacred spaces and those who construct them will only include remnants of what we found. Future researchers will need to adjust their tools,
their concepts, and their analysis when compared to the work weve completed. This is the inherent nature of the study of human phenomena, religion, and sacred spaces.
This endeavor was not meant to be all encompassing but does put forth
a plausible historical narrative for which there is clear circumstantial evidence that can provide a starting point for future investigations. Additional
interrogation of colonial Oriente places, material culture, and historical
documents is necessary. We plea for additional archaeological, anthropological, sociological, ethnographic, field, and quantitative survey research,
as well as other types of investigations. No matter the type of work that follows ours, or the realities of human religious change, we feel confident that,
with adjustments and corrections, the core of our explorations and findings will be substantiated.27 We await!
findings and conclusions

175

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Notes

introduction

1. See, for example, Ortiz, 1965; Simpson, 1978; Castellanos, 1988; Bolvar, 1998,
1996; and Brown 2003.
2. Ferrer, 1999, and Scott, 1985, are examples of full English volumes.
3. In Havana, there is an entire museum of Ortizs collections of artifacts.
4. Ortiz, 1947:97103.
5. Lachataer, 2001.
6. Long, 2005; Pratt, 2000.
7. Ortiz, 1947.
8. Frazier, 1957 [1949]:79; Herskovits, 1941.
9. Ayorinde, 2004.
10. Fur, 1979; Cabrera, 1983, 1986; Castellanos and Castellanos, 1988; Barnet,
1997.
11. Barnet, 2001:8897.
12. See Schwegler, 1998a; Palmi, 2002; Brown, 2003; Ayorinde, 2004.
13. Thompson, 1983; Brandon, 1993; Matibag, 1996.
14. Brown, 2003: Preface.
15. Works by Bolvar Arostegui and Gonzalez Daz, 1998, and Cabrera, 1983, on
the subject may have reached broader visibility, but all of their materials have
not yet been translated into English.
16. Bettelheim, 2001, does begin considerations of Palo Mayombe but by way of
its contributions to art.
17. Barnet, 1997:131.
177

 18. Our spelling of the religion will be as it is spelled in OrienteVodexcept

when we refer to the Haitian practices, which we will spell Vodou.
19. Millet and Alarcn, 1998.
20. Millet, 1993, 1996a, 1996b.
21. It is exceptionally difficult to get a long-term visa to work in Cuba and the US
governments continuing blockade of the island prohibits freedom to travel.
I often resided in Oriente for two to three months and returned as many as
three times a year during the nine consecutive years.
22. Timing and political issues interfered with us conducting interviews with the
entire sample group.
23. Mintz and Price, 1976.
24. Long, 1995, but specifically 17198; Hamilton, 1990: 1526.
25. Palmi, 1995.
26. Palmi, 2002.
27. Brown, 2003:140, 291; Zaid, 2007.

chapter 1
1. Turner, 1997:288; Hall, 2005:5765 also develops this line of reasoning.
2. Weve seen this spelling in academic and professional writings but have
observed the Siboney spelling in Oriente.
3. Prez, 1995:1418; Sued-Badillo, 1999:25991.
4. Andrews, 2004:17; Thomas, 1971:2122, 1511.
5. Prez, 1995:2527; Duharte, 2001:15.
6. Spain became a single nation only after it was agreed that Isabella would be
co-king with Ferdinand. Colloquial gender usage has lost that fact.
7. Palmer, 1997:13.
8. Ibid.
9. Thomas, 1971:1511; Turner, 1997:28990; Duharte Jimnez, 2001:15; Hall, 2005:
4245 and chapter 3 wherein she fully discusses the Clustering of African
Ethnicities in the Americas.
10. Price, 1996; Palmer, 1997:36.
11. Palmer, 1997:36.
12. Daz, 2000:9.
13. Aimes, 1967:58.
14. Duharte Jimnez, 2001:1516.
15. Bosch Ferrer, 2003; Duharte Jimnez, 2001; Crem Ramos and Duharte
Jimnez, 1994; and Franco, 1973.
16. Prez, 1995:3841.
17. Duharte Jimnez, 2001:1518.
18. Thomas, 1971:19.
19. Turner, 1997:288, 29091, 300301.
20. Thornton, 1992:9697.
21. Lopz Valdes, 1985; Hall, 2005; Heywood and Thornton, 2007:9.
22. Daz, 2000:4243.
178

notes to pages 827

23. Duharte Jimnez, 1986:3.

24. Price, 1996; Daz, 2000; Andrews, 2004:14; Hall, 2005:6768.
25. Palmi, 1993:34647; Hall, 2005:3437.
26. Schwegler, 1998; 2002. Also see Fick, 1990:5657 for a discussion of Africans
use of homeland languages in Haiti.
27. Prez, 1995.
28. Prez, 1995:3942.
29. Respondents told us that even the western city of Matanza has the reputation
of being the Athens of Cuba.
30. Our calculations are based on figures provided by Franco, 1973; Duharte
Jimnez, 1986:5; Ferrer, 1999:96; Andrews, 2004:1719, 41; La Rosa Corzo,
2003; Bosch Ferrer, 2003. Also see Thomas, 1971:69.
31. Several contemporary Oriente villages and towns were palenque sites. Our
research team visited the town of Palenque as just such a contemporary
continuation.
32. See Franco (1973) for one of the first discussions of palenques after OKelly
(1874) mentions them.
33. La Rosa Corzo, 2003:60.
34. Mara Elena Dazs report on descendants in El Cobre and Gwendolyn Midlo
Halls discussions of African ethnic clusters.
35. Thomas, 1971:18.
36. Prez, 1995:9, 2930.
37. Aimes, 1967:5660.
38. Hall, 2005:163. Her statistics are drawn from Manuel Moreno Fraginals, 1977.
39. Turner, 1997:288. Hall (2005:5765) also develops this line of reasoning.
40. See Ayala, 1999: chapter 6.
41. de la Fuente, 2001:2046.
42. Respondents tell the story of the Cuban band leader, Desi Arnaz, whose
father was mayor of Santiago de Cuba in early decades of the twentieth century. Arnazs father forbade him to visit bemb activities of the city, but the
boy found a way to participate and later became well known for incorporating many rhythms from his clandestine activities into his US music career.
43. This action was an effort to consolidate state power and began when Cuban
authorities observed the participation of liberation theology and its subscribers in struggles of Nicaragua. The more earnest efforts in this direction,
however, occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the removal of
economic subsidies to the island. Ayorinde, 2004.
44. Wirth, 2003; Martnez Fur, 1979.
45. The fight at Playa Gron was the battle against US supported invaders of the
island that was won by the Cubans. The United States refers to the event as
the battle at the Bay of Pigs.
46. Dodson, 1999. The pastor was Rev. Raul Suarez.
47. For the most part, these are activities and events we observed or in which we
participated.
48. Ortiz, 1947.
notes to pages 2738

179

chapter 2

1. Walvin, 2000. We know that human beings begin the process of enculturating knowledge from birth forward but most of the information, behaviors,
and values of that process are foundations for consciousness and cognitive
understanding that usually begin to form after ten years of age.
2. Equino, 1996.
3. It could be argued that cosmic orientation of a cultural community circumscribes rather than gives direction to interactive patterns that become part of
daily living and the taken-for-granted, typified categories.
4. Peel, 2003; Thornton, 1992; Parrinder, 1961.
5. See Thompson, 1983 and 1993; MacGaffey and Barnett, 1970.
6. Mbiti, 1969.
7. Mbiti, 1969:13.
8. Several interview sources report the late nineteenth-century arrival to Cuba of
new Africans born on the continent. See Hall, 2005:3436, 16164. However,
we only have local legends and oral traditions that there were such twentiethcentury debarkations.
9. Mintz and Price, 1976:3841.
10. Mintz and Price, 1976, 1996; Hall, 2005:85; Franco, 1973:49; Thomas, 1971:
Appendix iii.
11. Hall (2005:42, 52) discusses the multilingual nature of captive Africans as well
as European and other efforts to sever the internal ethnic ties among the various peoples.
12. Matibag, 1996; Matory, 1999; Peel, 2003.
13. See Hord and Lee, 1995.
14. McKenzie, 1973.
15. Ray, 1976; Mbiti, 1969 and 1991.
16. Matibag, 1996:11.
17. Dodson, 2002b.
18. As discussed in Gerth and Mills, 1946.
19. Thompson, 1983; Abimbola, 1989; Bockie, 1993; Palmi, 2002.
20. Thornton, 1992:23840, Thompson, 1983, and Brown, 1991 also make these
contentions.
21. Dodson, 1988.
22. Harding, 2000:156.
23. See Cheal (1992) and Smith (1987) for examples on ritual.
24. Schwegler, 1998a, 2006.
25. See Wirtz, 2003; Johnson, 2002: chapter 2; and Matibag, 1996:15.

chapter 3
1. Tuan, 1977:18, 162.
2. It must be remembered that legal enslavement in Cuba ended in 1886 and,
as late as the 1960s, there were Cubans who had lived through that era. See
Barnet, 1968.
3. See Gerth and Mills (1946) for Max Webers classic exploration of charisma.
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notes to pages 3962

 4. Morgan and Promey, 2001:23.

5. Price, 1996: chapters 23.
6. This was said to us specifically at the Annual Conference of North American
and Cuban Philosophers and Social Scientists, Havana, Cuba, July 1329,
2002.
7. Tuan, 1977.
8. Brown, 2003:140. Also see Zaid (2007) for an honors thesis that used extensive oral history field methods to gather data on this topic.
9. Ayorinde, 2004.
10. Thomas, 1971: chapter VIII; Prez, 1991.
11. Mbiti, 1969, 1991; pBitek 1970; Opoku, 1978.
12. Interview conversation with Andriol Portuondo, July 2002, Santiago de Cuba.
Lecture of Abelardo Larduet Luaces, Religion Workshop, Festival del Caribe,
Santiago de Cuba, July 2003.
13. Bourdieu, 1993.
14. Verter, 2003:15159.
15. Prez, 1991.
16. Dodson, 2002b.
17. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes and I discussed this idea in a 1995 article. See Dodson
and Gilkes, 1995.
18. Our research team visited hundreds of Casas in large, small, and middlesized cities. We also participated in activities that were part of Cubas African
heritage.
19. Activities of the childrens street festival are an annual part of Festival del
Caribe. We participated in no fewer than five of them. See Dodson, 2002b;
2003; or 2004, for example.
20. During each phase of the research, members of our team conducted spontaneous informal interviews with random citizens of Oriente and asked what
they knew about religious traditions practiced in their area. Although we
spoke with young and old, students, hospital workers, military personnel,
taxi drivers, hotel workers, cooks, teachers, housewives, and other categories
of citizenry, our interviews cannot be categorized as survey or questionnaire
data as the Cuban government does not permit foreigners to do those types of
investigations. Nevertheless, each person with whom we spoke told us what
they knew about the traditions, including some details.
21. James, 1974.
22. The song Choncholi is a good example of this. It is still part of annual
Carnival parades of Oriente and says, Choncholi se va pal monte, cojelo con
quien te va (Choncholi [the name of a Cimarron, no one in particular] will
go to the mountains; he will take with him, whomever will go).
23. Howard, 1998:113.
24. We observed children as young as two years patiently integrated into ritual
activities of more than one Cuban religious tradition.
25. Millet, 1996a.
26. Mosquera, 1996:22829.
notes to pages 6377

181

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

chapter 4

1. MacGaffey, 2000.
2. Sued-Badillo, 2003:28386.
3. Prez, 1995:314.
4. Prez, 1995:4041.
5. Prez, 1995:9.
6. The spelling of Kongo with a K is used when referring to the African land
spaces from which are derived a series of indigenous religions. Otherwise the
spelling is as our research practitioners informed.
7. See Heywood and Thornton, 2007; MacGaffey, 2000; Thornton, 1998.
8. See for example Bolvar Arostegui and Gonzalez Diaz de Villegas, 1998.
9. Schwegler, 1998.
10. Brown, 2003; Zaid, 2007.
11. Duharte, 1988; Walvin, 2000.
12. Prez, 1995:1012.
13. Aimes, 1967; Thomas, 1971.
14. Dodson, 1999. Casa Cultura in Baracoa presents a historical pageant that reenacts the earliest encounter between autochthonous inhabitants and African
descendants. The pageant includes indigenous inhabitants sharing the smoking of tobacco (cigars) to ensure messages are received in the spirit world. It
also includes African descendants sharing their coded drum rhythms.
15. In the Cuban ritual context, tobacco refers to cigars, not to cigarettes or
other forms we associate it with in the United States.
16. Bosch Ferrer, 2003. Also see Price, 1996: chapters 2 and 3.
17. Ferrer, 1999:35.
18. See Franco, 1973; 1996; and Prez, 1996. There is some debate as to whether
palenque members vacated their settlements in the 1870s or 1880s. See Barnet,
1968.
19. In 2005 our research team visited the Oriente palenque region and the small
town also named Palenque.
20. La Rosa Corzo, 2003; Bosch Ferrer, 2003. Our research team also visited
palenque areas of western Cuba and found that they were structurally and
functionally established for transitory inhabitants. The historical guide
reported that western palenque members used the sites as a stopover in their
journey to eastern settlements.
21. Prez, 1995:3948.
22. See Price, 1996.
23. HuDehart, 2007.
24. Philalethes, 1996.

182

notes to pages 7787

 25. Bosch Ferrer, 2003; La Rosa Corzo, 2003. Oriente practitioners reported that
events of one successful raid on a plantation, Lmon, were passed to contemporary generations and are re-membered through rituals and Carnival celebrations. Also see Bettleheim, 2001:147.
26. See Yai, 1996. Asafo social structures of Ghana are in keeping with this idea
also.
27. Here we note that bemb is contemporarily associated with bat drumming
of Yoruba ritual traditions. However, this is not the exclusive relationship of
the drumming parties and our investigation suggests that bembs were part
of Oriente traditions before the large numbers of Yoruba arrived in western
Cuba in the nineteenth century.
28. This finding was reported at the Workshop on Religion of Casa del Caribe,
1999, Santiago de Cuba. The panel was composed of Jos Millet, Abelardo
Larduet Luaces, and Vicente Portoundo Martin.
29. Interviews with Juan Batista, supervising coordinator for music and dance
performance of Kokoy, the premier folk performing troupe of Santiago de
Cuba, July 2006. Batista is a senior research associate for Casa del Caribe of
the same city. See Dodson, 2006.
30. Long, 1995:37.
31. For a fuller clarification of this concept, see Thompson, 1983; MacGaffey,
1991.
32. Thornton, 1998.
33. Interviews with Vicente Portoundo Martin, Andriol Martin, and Juan Martin,
July 2002, August 2004, and August 2005 respectively.
34. Palmi, 1995.
35. Howard, 1998.
36. Genovese, 1979.
37. So far, we have found Robert Farris Thompsons English volume (1983), and
Natalia Bolvar Arostegui and Gonzalez Diaz de Villegass Spanish one (1998)
to contain the best clarifications of the complexities of cosmograms in the
reglas congo traditions.
38. Schwegler, 2002.
39. James, 2001:2231.
40. Thornton, 1998.
41. Personal conversation with Abelardo Larduet Luaces and Andriol Martin
in Santiago de Cuba, July 2003 and July 2004 respectively. See also Larduet
Luaces, 2002.
42. See Larduet Luaces, 2002; Abimbola, 1997.
43. Dodson, 2006.
44. Personal interview with Louis Fran Figueredo, July 2004, Santiago de Cuba.

chapter 5
1. Koslow, 1999:108, 116.
2. See Ferm, 1945.
notes to pages 87104

183

 3. Again remember that our spelling of the Oriente religion will be as it is spelled
in Oriente, that is, Vod. When we refer to Haitian practices of the tradition,
we will spell it Vodou.
4. On more than one occasion, professors of the University of Havana reported
this to us. Personal conversations with faculty members during the Annual
Meeting of Cuban and North American Philosophers, June 2002 and 2003,
Havana, Cuba.
5. Personal interview with Vod practitioner and dancer of Ciego de Avila
(Dodson, 1989).
6. Thompson, 1993:166.
7. Knight, 1970:19.
8. Korngold, 1944; Franco, 1996:39, 43; Duharte Jimnez, 2001.
9. Thomas, 1971; Knight, 1997.
10. Thompson, 1993:169, 172.
11. Dubois, 2004:5152.
12. Carpentier, 1974, translated by Jos Millet.
13. A cabildo was the local Spanish governing unit by way of which community
members through group participation were consulted and contributed to the
civil make-up of a city/town. Initially in the colonial periods, when African
descendants of Cuba could not have cabildos, they organized their social
arrangements outside Spanish authority. Early in the eighteenth century, Cuban
authorities began to recognize the informal groupings as cofradias, and as the
century closed, after the revolution in St. Domingue, cofrada activities were
acknowledged as cabildos. Among African descendants, these organizations
were named after continental ethnicities and became formal arrangements of
neo-African life and activity. See Howard, 1998.
14. Dubois, 2004:6568.
15. See Korngold (1944) and James (1963) for a solid discussion of how the various
racial groups functioned during the Haitian Revolution.
16. Howard, 1998.
17. OKelly, 1874.
18. See Philip Howard (1998) for a full discussion of cabildos; Millet and Brea
(1989) for a similar discussion, including Tumbas Francesas; and see Bettelheim,
2001a.
19. Bettelheim, 2001a:144.
20. See Bettelheim, 2001a. Our team also had personal conversations with Jos
Millet, Casa del Caribes leader of the research group on popular religions.
21. Millet and Alarcon, 1998.
22. See Bettelheim, 2001a:14647; and also Bosch Ferrer, 2003; Duharte Jimnez,
1986; Franco, 1973.
23. See Bettelheim, 2001a:147; Ferrer, 1999:84. The director of Foco Cultura Congo de
Los Hoyos also reported details of the legend. Foco claims descendance from one
of Santiagos original cabildos de nacin and maintains that Moncada organized
their original comparsa as a Tumba Francesa and that it was later converted into
the Conga de Los Hoyos. Annual conversations with Antono Bandera, director
of Foco Cultura Congo de Los Hoyos, July 2003, 2004, and 2005.
184

notes to pages 10512

24. Millet, Brea, and Vila, 1997.

25. Hamilton, 1990.
26. Ayala, 1999:16674; Howard, 1998:7; Andrews, 2004.
27. Thompson, 1993:164.
28. Dodson, 2004. We conducted no fewer than four interviews with different family members, of two older generations. They each confirmed that there were
religious practitioners in their family history, specifically the grandmother of
the military brothers, and that the practices were definitely of Haitian origins.
These family members also said that there were practitioners of Palo Monte/
Palo Mayombe within their family. We continue to probe this issue.
29. Thompson, 1983:169.
30. Dodson, 1999.
31. Harding, 2000:15456.
32. Thornton, 1998:10.
33. This is not to deny or replace the fact, as respondents told us, that spirits can
and do appear at nonritual times and in nonsacred spaces.
34. Dayan, 1995.
35. Dathorne, 1994:25.
36. We encountered several spellings for the structure, for example, houmforts
(Thompson, 1983:181) and ouf (Hurbon, n.d.). We are using the Oriente spelling as put forth by Casa del Caribe.
37. Matibag, 1996:37.
38. A collection of these Haitian banners have traveled the United States on exhibition at various museums; for example, the American Museum of Natural
Historys exhibition Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, Washington, DC, October
1998January 1999.

chapter 6

1. The bibliographic citation lists 1875 as its publication date, though the original
volume was first released in 1857 and translated in 1875.
2. Glazier, 2001.
3. Ramos, 1989:2223.
4. Prez, 1995:2426; Ramos, 1989:22.
5. See Thomas 1971:51518. For an ability to assume this position, see Ayorinde,
2004; de la Fuente, 2001; Ramos, 1989.
6. See Thomas, 1971.
7. See Ayorinde (2004:5660) for a fuller discussion of Ortizs position.
8. We are familiar with the use of this term to describe ritual cleansing or purification. Such usage is not incompatible with the Espiritismo understanding of
doing charitable acts.
9. It should be remembered that in Catholic iconography the Baby Jesus of
Prague, Czechoslovakia, is in the arms of a Virgin Mary whose skin color
is black.
10. Espiritismo can be found in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, see, for
example, Romn, 2007.
notes to pages 11232

185

 11. Dodson, 1995.

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

chapter 7

1. See Thomas, 1971; Prez, 1988.

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

186

notes to pages 13354

 20. This was not an exclusive development of Oriente or of palenques. Throughout

Cuba, where African descendants and members from other cultural groups
gathered to celebrate and/or recreate, various behavioral expressions were
combined that became normal new island expressions in the islands transculturation process.
21. James, 1989, 1999; Ferrer, 1999:3435.
22. Interviews with historical guides at Isabelica coffee plantation, an archeological restoration guided by UNESCO. Dodson, 2004, 2005, and 2006.
23. See Thornton, 1998.

chapter 8

1. Long, 1995, 1999.

2. Long, 1995:154.
3. Pratt, 2004:46.
4. Vansina, 1985:126.
5. Prez, 1995:45.
6. See Brandon (1993) to understand that Cuban Catholicism was not a replication of religious practices in Europe.
7. Prez, 1995; Barnet, 1993. Also see the film The Last Supper for an excellent
visual example of how this worked for enslaved Africans.
8. See image of Africans participating in holiday parades in Ortiz, 1986, and
Nunley and Bettelheim, 1988.
9. See discussion and propositions about two well-known nineteenth-century
Cuban poets, Placido and Mansano, in Pettway, 2009.
10. See Bettelheim, 2001a.
11. We have an academic colleague who consistently contacts our team to determine if we are traveling to Santiago de Cuba for Shango or San Lazaro
because he will be doing so.
12. Barth, 1989:130.
13. Brown, 1989:3439.
14. We draw a parallel between this time perspective and well-known academic
knowledge that US African-American Protestant congregations worship
can and does extend far beyond worship times of their European-American
brethren. This resonates with Charles Long, 1999.
15. We are not oblivious to the signification of Africa and its descendants that
was carried out by Islamic contact, but our focus is the Atlantic world. See
Lewis (1999) for a treatment of the Islamic issue.
16. We are indebted to Charles Long for our ability to articulate ideas based on
his original conceptual thinking. See Long, 1995.
17. Ramos, 1989:16.
18. We are familiar with communities in Venezuela, Spain, the United States,
Argentina, and France who carry out activities based on Oriente practices of
indigenous religious alternatives about being human, the counter/re-signified
alternatives. Our team shared Oriente ritual experiences with representatives
from practice communities in these locations who had returned in 2005 to
renew, re-member their religious affiliation and commitment.
notes to pages 15469

187

 19. See Zaid (2007) for an interesting presentation of one Oriente spiritual leader
whose practice incorporated knowledge and customs from two, if not three,
coherent sets of indigenous religious traditions. Mr. Zaid is a member of our
research team.
20. Brown, 2003:140; Zaid, 2007.
21. Brown (1989) is concerned with art and ritual content; Palmi (2002:168)
considers the objects in the bilongo category of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe
and other reglas congo; and Thompson (1983:117) also speaks of the materials
in this manner.
22. Palmi, 2002:143.
23. Ibid.:155.
24. Dodson, 1998b, 1999. Reverend Suarez was the first religious believer elected
to the National Assembly after the 1994 change in the Cuban constitution.
25. Palmi, 2002:163.
26. Ortiz, 1947:99100.
27. We have been preliminarily affirmed by an interview with Jorge Ulloa Hung,
licensed archaeologist of Casa del Caribe.

188

notes to pages 16975

Glossary of Select Terms

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

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

glossary of select terms

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

glossary of select terms

191

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Index

The letter f followed by a number

refers to a figure in the Plates section.
The letter m following a page number
refers to a map. The letter n following
a page number refers to a note. The
number following the n indicates the
number of the note on that page.
Abaku, 1516
Africa, 25, 26; epistemology and, 12.
See also Africans; Kongo Kingdom
African Atlantic Research Team, xi, 9
African Religions and Philosophy
(Mbiti), 4344
Africans, 3; Amerindians and, 37,
8485;concept of power and, 5354;
concept of time and, 4951; cosmic
orientation and, 4547; cosmic orientations and, 3940; Cuban public
holidays and, 16465; Cuban social
order and, 2425; cultural interactions and, 4243; geo-circularity
and, 112; migrations to Oriente
from Haiti and, 1067; natural
phenomena and, 4648; nature of
being and, 4849; Oriente and, 25;
religion and, 4344; revelation and

possession and, 5456; ritual and,

5658; shared foundational knowledge and, 43; Spanish Catholicism
and, 16465
Afro-Cuban Religious Experience
(Matibag), 7
Aimes, Hubert H. S., 24
Alarcn, Alexis, 8
Amerindians, Africans and, 37, 8485
Angola, 27
animal sacrifice: Espiritismo Cruzado
and, 130; Palo Monte/Palo
Mayombe tradition and, 96; Vod
and, 117, 121
Arar, 104
Arawak, 22
Arnaz, Desi, 179n42
Ayorinde, Christine, 6
Babal Ay, f15, 165
Bakongo, 2732; culture of, 28, 183n26;
in Oriente, 29
Baracoa, attack on, 85
Barnet, Miguel, 6, 8
Barth, Fredrik, 166
being, nature of, 4849
205

bemb drum parties, 14849, 152, 154,

179n42; Muertra Bemb de Sao
and, 15455; palenques and, 8788
Bettelheim, Judith, 110
Birth of African American Culture
(Mintz, Price), 14
Bourdieu, Pierre, 69
Brandon, George: Santeria from Africa
to the New World, 7
Brown, David H., 16667; Santera
Enthroned, 7, 17273
Brujos de Limn, 11112
cabildo, 109, 122, 184n13
Cabrera, Lydia, 6
Canizares, Raul: Walking with the
Night, 7
Carabal, 27, 29, 87
Carpentier, Alejo, 108
Casa del Caribe, 88
Casas de Cultura, 7273, 182n14; in
Baracoa, 85, 182n14
Casas de Templo, 66
Castellanos, Isabel, 6
Castellanos, Jorge, 6
Castro, Fidel Ruiz, 44
Cathedral at Cobre, 174
Catholicism, 174; Africans and, 16465
cazuela, f17, 8889; Espiritismo
Cruzado and, 130, 158; Muertra
Bemb de Sao and, f17, 15658; Palo
Monte/Palo Mayombe tradition
and, f7, 100, 103, 158
Chosen Prayers (Kardec), 14142
Ciboney, 22
Ciego de Avila, 105
cofradias, palenques and, 9091, 102,
10910
Columbus, Christopher, 2223
concepts: indigenous religion, 3637;
intentionality, 37; religion, 36; transculturation, 38
contact zones, 3, 38, 162
cosmic orientation, 1415, 4547,
16365; Africans and, 43, 4547;
language and, 44; symbolic representations and, 4142
Council of Baptist Workers and
Students, 3435
206

index

counter/re-signification in practice,
16769, 187n18
Creciente de Valmaseda, 137
creeds, 4445. See also specific
traditions
Cuba: 1959 Revolution and, 34, 179n43;
economy of, 24; geographic and
historic contours of, 2236; geography of, 22, 23; Haitian immigrants
and, 112; indigenous religions in,
1516; slavery and, 33; social order
of, 2425; Spanish immigration
and, 2223; Special Period and,
3335; Ten Years War and, 125, 136;
United States and, 3334; western
and eastern regions of, 2829. See
also Oriente
Dathorne, O. R., 117
Dayan, Joan: Haiti, History, and the
Gods, 116
Daz, Mara Elena, 27, 31
Duharte Jimnez, Rafael, 2425
Eleggu, 130, 132, 172
Espiritismo, 12, 89, 4445; Africa
and, 12425; African customs and,
126; families of, 12628; Muertra
Bemb de Sao tradition and, 128;
race and, 13; religious legitimacy
and, 12526; women in, 12
Espiritismo Cruzado, f14, 127, 12835,
14344; Africana and, 13334;
animal sacrifice and, 130; belief
foundations of, 12931; cazuela
and, 158; celebrants and believers and, 12930; doctrine and, 131;
Eleggu and, 130, 132; Espiritismo
de Cordon and, 14344; Indian
images and, 133; name derivation
of, 130; Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe
and, 130; plurality and, 170; Regla
de Ocha/Lucum and, 130, 133;
sacred spaces and, 13135; spirit
images and, 13233; uniqueness of,
131; water and, 133
Espiritismo de Caridad, 127
Espiritismo de Cordon, 127, 13543;
belief foundations of, 13840;
charity work and, 140; doctrine

and, 139; Espiritismo Cruzado

and, 14344; focal table and, 141;
healing and, 139; Kardec and,
13839; mediums and, 140; national
identity and, 13538; otherworld
importance and, 138; protected
entrance and, 14041; rituals of,
f16, 14143; sacred spaces, ritual
and, 14043; sacred spaces and, f16;
symbolic representations and, 141;
as uniquely Cuban, 13738; water
and, 141
Espiritismo de Mesa o Cientfico, 127
Espiritismo (Millet), 89
ethnogensis, 8990
Ew Fon/Adja people: African interactions and, 4243; Haiti and, 3236,
104; Vodou and, 1056
Festival del Caribe, f12, 73, 11819; vev
and, f13
festivals, 7273
Flash of the Spirit (Thompson), 7
Foco Cultura Congo de Los Hoyos, 112
Folklrico Nacional, 34
Four Yorb Rituals (Mason), 7
Frazier, E. Franklin, 6
Fur, Rogelio, 6
gender, religious practice and, 12. See
also women
Gonzlez-Whippler, Migene: Santera,
7
Greene, Sandra: Sacred Sites and the
Colonial Encounter, 61
Haiti (St. Domingue), 31; Cuban social
order and, 109; immigration to
Cuba and, 112; Oriente and, 31, 32;
Revolution of 1791 and, 91; sugar
and, 91
Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo, 31
Hamilton, Ruth Simms, 112; Toward
a Paradigm for African Diaspora
Studies, 14
Harding, Rachel, 56, 11516
Harding, Vincent, 151
Havana, 28, 86
Herskovits, Melville, 6
Hispaniola, 2223

fa traditions, 7
indigenous religions, 15; concept of
time and, 4951; definition of,
16162; nature of being and, 4849;
nature of power and, 5354; nature
of space and the spirit world and,
5153; possession and, 5556; revelation and possession and, 5456;
ritual and, 5658
initiation, 7374
integrated religious plurality, 16973
Isabelica Plantation, 110
Islam, 187n15
James, Joel, 136
Kardec, Allan, 124; Chosen Prayers,
14142; Kardecian Spiritism,
12425, 128, 13839; Spiritualist
Philosophy, 124
Kimpa Vita, Beatriz, 11516
knowledge, human interaction and,
4045; habitualized activities and,
4041; typifications and, 41
Kongo Kingdom, 25, 26m, 27; Cuba
and, 8; Ew Fon/Adja Haitians and,
3233; Haitian Africans and, 1089;
Muertra Bemb de Sao and, 149
50, 152, 15556; Muertra practices
and, 15253, 15455; Oriente and,
29; palenques and, 2930; reglas
congo and, 82
Lachataer, Rmulo, 3, 8
Lam, Wilfredo, f5, 70
Long, Charles H., 3, 8889, 139, 160
61; Significations, 14
Los Hoyos, 6466, B
Los Olmos, 64
Lucum/Yoruba, 33
Maceo Grajales, Antonio, 7677, 114
Maceo Grajales, Jos, 114
MacGaffety, William, 82
Mackandal, 108
Mandingo, 2728, 29, 87, 156
Mart, Jos, 7677
Mason, John: Four Yorb Rituals, 7
Matibag, Eugenio: Afro-Cuban
Religious Experience, 7
index

207

Mbiti, John: African Religions and

Philosophy, 4344
Millet, Jos: El vod en Cuba, 8;
Espiritismo, 89
Mintz, Sidney, 45; Birth of African
American Culture, 14
Moncada, Guillermn, 7677, 11112
Morgan, David: Visual Culture of
American Religions, 61, 63
Morgan, Henry, 29
Muertra Bemb de Sao, 9, 16, f18,
15253; cazuela and, f17, 15658;
characteristics of, 15358; coherence of, 15556; cosmic orientation, 15354; Espiritismo and, 128;
foundational knowledge of, 15253;
Kongo Kingdom and, 14950, 152,
15455, 15556; Oriente relationship
and, 14952; plurality and, 17071;
Portuguese traders and, 152; race
and, 1213; report from the field
and, 14749; spirits and, 155, 15758;
trees and, 155
Murphy, Joseph: Santera, 7; Working
the Spirit, 7
Navidad, La, 2223
neighborhoods, sacred spaces and,
6466
Neimark, Philip John: Way of the
Orisa, 7
nganga, 8, 75, 89; Palo Monte/Palo
Mayombe tradition and, 9495
nkisi, 89
Nsambe (Sambia-Mpungo), 92; communication with, 9596; human
family and, 97
Oggn Fai/Santiago, 1078, 11415
Oriente, 23m; Africans in, 25, 2728,
4142, 81; Bakongo in, 29; Carabal
in, 27; economy of, 27, 82; Haiti
and, 31, 32; Haitian migrations and,
1067; Haitians and, 9192; Haitian
Vodou and, 106; illicit trade and,
29, 82; indigenous religions and,
3334, 82; integrated religious plurality and, 12; as isolated backwater,
2829, 3132, 8687, 163; as land of
the dead, 81; Mandingo in, 2728;
208

index

map of, 45; modern adaptations

in, 4445; slave economy and, 41,
136; Spiritism and Spiritualism in,
136
Ortiz, Fernando, 3, 38, 127, 152, 174; on
Cuban cultural customs, 3; on folk
practices, 6; on transculturation,
3, 6
outlier communities, 15152
palenques (de cimarrones), 2931,
8692, 15152; bemb and, 8788,
15354; colonial forces and, 3031;
El Portillo, 3031; Haitian immigrants and, 11112; Kongo Kingdom
and, 2930; population of, 90;
social organization and, 87; Spanish
authorities and, 9091
Palmi, Stephan, 15, 8990; Wizards
and Scientists, 17273
Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, 8, 9,
4445, 65; animal sacrifice and,
96; cazuela and, 158; chanting or
singing battles and, 59; cosmograms and, f6, 9394, 101; drums/
drumming, f1, 88, 101; Espiritismo
Cruzado and, 130; family and,
9697, 103; foundational knowledge
of, 9299; Kikongo language and,
83; naturalistic and scripting focus
of, 9394; nganga and, f7, 9495,
100101; Oriente origins of, 8486,
102; palenques and, 8692; pilon
and nganga and, 7576; prenda
and, 98; prevalence of, 83; race and,
1213; sacred spaces and, f8, f9,
99102, 103; spirits and, 83, 8586,
98; tata and, 92; tata nganga and,
94, 9798; time and space understandings and, 96; women and, 12,
86, 9899; Yayi and, 98
phenomenological principles, 4760
pilon, 75
Playa Gron, 34, 179n45
poteau-mitan, 11920, 122
Pratt, Mary Louise, 3
Price, Richard, 14, 45
Promey, Sally H., 61, 63

race, 1213
reality, social construction of, 4045
Recio, Antn, 27
Regla Arar, 1516
Regla de Ocha/Lucum, 1, 7, 4445, 65;
costs and, 171; Espiritismo Cruzado
and, 130, 133; spirit names and,
17172
Regla If, 7, 16
reglas congo, 82
re-member-ing, memory and, 7174
research methods, 181n20
revelation, 5455; art and, 5455; openness to, 55
reverence, forms of, 5860, 70
ritual practices, 5658; everyday life
and, 57; healing and, 57; suppression of, 3335; time flexibility and,
5657; tourism and, 35, 69, 7071
Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter
(Greene), 61
sacred spaces, 1; aesthetic and creative
acts and, f4, f14, 7677; charisma and, 6768; communication and communion and, 6771;
context and boundary setting
and, 6366; Cuban collective
memory and, 7273; definition
of, 62; Espiritismo Cruzado and,
13134; Espiritismo de Cordon and,
14043; Eurocentricity and, 16869;
as family meeting places, 70; identity and, 7476; material objects
and, 6870; meaning and, 7476;
neighborhoods and, 6466; Palo
Monte/Palo Mayombe tradition
and, 99102; past-time values and,
f4, 51; re-member-ing and, 7174; as
ritual memory devices, 73; roles of,
6263, 7778; Vod and, 11722
Sanchez de Moya, Francisco, 25
San Hilarin, 141
Santera. See Regla de Ocha/Lucum
Santera Enthroned (Brown), 7, 17273
Santeria from Africa to the New World
(Brandon), 7
Santera (Gonzlez), 7
Santera (Murphy), 7

Santiago de Cuba, 3132, 84, 183n26;

Carnival parades in, 111
Schwegler, Arwin, 83
Significations (Long), 14
slavery, 2324; Cuba and, 33;
Ferdinand and Isabella and, 23,
178n6; Oriente and, 27; Portuguese
traders and, 25, 84; runaways
and, 25; sugar and, 2425, 27, 91.
See also Africans; palenques (de
cimarrones)
space and the spirit world, nature of,
5153
spirits, 4647; communication
and communion with, 6771;
Espiritismo Cruzado and, 13031;
Espiritismo de Cordon and,
13840; Muertra Bemb de Sao
and, 155, 15758; Palo Monte/Palo
Mayombe and, 9495; possession
by, 56; Regla If and, 16; Vod and,
11517. See also specific traditions
spirits, ancestral, 53, 58, 67, 71
spirits, divine, 16, 4647, 5154, 58, 67;
re-member-ing and, 71
spirits, living dead, 49, 52, 53, 56, 58,
67; Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe
tradition and, 83; re-member-ing
and, 7172
spirits, nonmaterial, Africans and,
4647
spirits, warrior: Vod and, f11, 11415
spiritual capital, 69
study methods, 914; boundary categories and, 1314; procedures, 89,
178n21; research questions and, 9;
socioeconomic class status and,
1112; sources and, 13
Surez, Ral, 17374
sugar: Haiti and, 91; Oriente and, 32,
82, 106; slavery and, 2425, 27, 91
superstition, 16768
Supreme Creator, 48, 49, 53; Nsambe
as, 92
Tajona/Tumba Francesa, 112; drums
and, f11
Templo San Benito de Palermo, 6566
temporal modality, 16667
terminology, spellings of, 18
index

209

Thomas, Hugh, 25, 3132

Thompson, Robert Farris, 106, 107, 113;
Flash of the Spirit, 7
Thornton, John, 54, 82
time, 2; concept of, 4951; sacred work
and, 167, 187n14
tobacco, 85
tourism, ritual practices and, 35, 69,
172
Toward a Paradigm for African
Diaspora Studies (Hamilton), 14
transculturation, f15, 15051, 165; Ortiz
on, 3, 6
Tuan, Yi-Fu, 61
Tumba Francesas (Tajones), 11011
Turner, Mary, 2122
typifications: organizations and, 41;
ritual practice and, 4344
Vansina, Jan, 163
Verter, Bradford, 69
Visual Culture of American Religions
(Morgan, Promey), 61, 63
Vodou: African origins of, 1059;
Oriente and, 106
Vod, 8, 9, 178n18; animal sacrifice
and, 117, 121; belief foundations
of, 11317; Bon Dieu/Grand Met

210

index

and, 113, 117; Damballa and, 113;

domestic settings and, 118; fire and,
11920; forests and, 11718; Haitian
cultural identity and, 12122; Haiti
and, 1045; hunfo and, 118; Leggba
and, 11415; as lifestyle, 117; Loa
and, 113, 122; material objects and,
12021, 12223; plurality and, 171;
possession and revelation and, 115
17; race and, 13; ritual and sanguine
families and, f10, 11314; sacred
spaces and, 11723; spirits, Petro
class of, 113; vev and, 119; warrior
spirits and, 11415; women in, 12
vod en Cuba, El (Alarcn, Millet), 8
Walking with the Night (Canizares), 7
Way of the Orisa (Neimark), 7
Weber, Max, 53
Wizards and Scientists (Palmi),
17273
women: in Espiritismo, 12; in Palo
Monte/Palo Mayombe, 12, 86,
9899; in Vod, 12
Working the Spirit (Murphy), 7
Yoruba. See Lucum/Yoruba