Miami Herald
Posted on Fri, Jul. 22, 2005
IMMIGRATION
Cuban Vegas troupe granted asylum
Members of the Havana Night Club show defected to Las Vegas from Cuba in November. Now, the U.S. government has granted them asylum.
BY DAVID OVALLE
dovalle@herald.com
Members of Havana Night Club, the show that drew headlines when its members defected en masse last year from Cuba and settled in Las Vegas, will walk into a government office today to apply for something many Americans take for granted:
Social Security cards.
''Then, a new life starts,'' said Nicole Durr, the show's director.
The 49 dancers, singers and musicians this week received letters in the mail at their Las Vegas apartments with the word: They had finally been granted U.S. asylum.
Said Puro Hernández, the show's musical director: ``Now comes the responsibility that comes with credit cards and bills. You have it all -- now you have to know how to manage it.''
The troupe defected in November and began an extended run at the Wayne Newton Theater at the Stardust Resort & Casino.
The show spans the history of Cuban music, starting from deep drums entrenched in the island's African roots, to the Spanish colonial era, the Tropicana cha-cha-cha pre-Castro days and the infectious reggaeton of today.
''This is great news and I'm glad they've been received as openly and generously as they have,'' said Joe Garcia, the former executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation, who lobbied for their visas.
Havana Night Club had performed across Europe and Asia and was invited to play in Las Vegas by entertainers Siegfried & Roy.
But troupe members couldn't obtain visas because of the chill in relations between Cuba and the United States.
After Durr proved to the U.S. State Department that the troupe operated independently of the Cuban government, visas were granted.
Cuba balked at letting them come, but amid international pressure -- from exile groups and even protests by cast members -- the Castro government relented.
Saying they would never be able to return to Cuba and perform, 51 of 53 members defected. Two of the defectors eventually went back to the island.
Gloria Estefan performed with the troupe in Las Vegas in December.
Later, professional baseball pitcher Orlando ''El Duque'' Hernandez, who had defected with the help of the same immigration attorney as theirs, also visited the show. He teared up after seeing the performance.
The troupe has since done two stints at the University of Miami's Convocation Center.
The group also made headlines in June when producers pulled from the market a CD that featured a music video that critics said promoted travel to Cuba. The show said the CD was produced well before the defections.
Havana Night Club's run has been extended at the Stardust until Sept. 4.
Big plans are in the works, said show director Durr, who promised the performance is being made even grander.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Monday, July 25, 2005
Ocha history in NYC
The Yoruba Orisha tradition comes to New York City
African American Review, Summer, 1995 by Marta Moreno Vega
The work of Katherine Dunham, Zora Neale Hurston, and Pearl Primus - building on the research of Melville Herskovits and W. E. B. Du Bois - introduced an intellectual perspective of the African Diaspora into the arts. These artists worked studiously to incorporate an international racial and cultural legacy into an African-based aesthetic which could serve as a unifying link for Africans in the Diaspora. Dunham, for example, insisted that the members of her dance company understand the cultural traditions of creative expression in their respective countries, and her school at 43rd and Broadway nurtured developing and accomplished artists who embraced the African Diaspora in their creative expression. "Our school," writes Dunham in an unpublished autobiography,
became the popular meeting place of Caribbean, Central and South American diplomats, painters, musicians, poets and the like. At our monthly "Boule Blanches" we usually presented new and untried Cuban orchestras such as Perez Prado, Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaria and Bobby Capo. Cuban Julio Iglesias toured with us for a couple of seasons. Celia Cruz came to these affairs both as a guest and entertainer. Among our regular participants and followers were Helen Hayes and her daughter, Lena Home, Xavier Cougat and many others. (2)
Dunham's work with the Maroons of Jamaica and with traditional African communities in Haiti, along with research in Cuba, Martinique, and Senegal - among other locations - filled the productions she staged for international audiences with images, symbols, music, dance, instruments, and ritual practice of the African Diaspora. But Cuba held a special attraction for her.
On Dunham's first trip there, in 1938, she met the families of the drummers Julio and LaRosa, and performed rituals that they had been unable to accomplish in New York City. And to maintain an African Diaspora focus in her dance company, she incorporated the expertise of researchers like Fernando Ortiz and Lydia Cabrera; the writing of Afro-Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen; and the music of the composer Lecona in her productions. "Cuban music and ritual," she writes, "were inextricably interwoven into my life - both personal and professional."(1)
When Dunham could not find drummers for her company in 1952, she returned to Cuba and recruited Julito Collazo and Francisco Aguabella, renowned percussionists in the Latino, jazz, and popular music communities who had been trained in the Orisha tradition.(2) Julito Collazo would become one of the pioneer members of a small group of Yoruba traditional practitioners who were instrumental in establishing Orisha worship in New York City. He settled in New York in 1955 when Dunham's touring company ran out of engagements,(3) and along with Francisco Aguabella, he performed the songs, dances, and music of Afro-Cuban traditions and spread these traditions to international audiences.
In 1955, there were approximately twenty-five people in New York City who were believers in the Orisha tradition (Collazo interview). The founding member of the Orisha tradition in New York City was Babalawo Pancho Mora (Yoruba name, Ifa Morote), who arrived in New York in 1946 and, soon after, established the "first ile, or house of the orishas" there (Murphy 50). Mora had been initiated as a high priest of Ifa in Cuba on January 27, 1944, by Babalawo Quintin Lecon, a renowned Cuban Ifa priest, and was the first babalawo in New York to practice Ifa divination (Murphy 49-50).
Mora's belief in this ancient tradition and his desire to maintain his belief system motivated him to found the first Orisha community in the city. From his pioneering work, the tradition has grown to include thousands of initiates from all walks of life and ethnic groups. He has initiated several thousand godchildren from varied professions and international backgrounds, and has traveled extensively to Latin America and nationally to perform rituals and spread the practice of Santeria (Mora interview).
On December 4, 1955, Francisco Aguabella and Julito Collazo attended their first Santeria ritual in New York, a celebration to Chango (Santa Barbara) by santero Willie, also known as "El Bolitero" ('the numbers runner'), an Afro-Puerto Rican initiated in Cuba by Pancho Mora's sister. Aguabella and Collazo found out about the ceremony, which took place at 111th Street and St. Nicolas Avenue in Harlem, at the world-famous Palladium night club, where many Latin musicians gathered and played.(4)
After observing for a time the ceremony at the home of Willie "El Bolitero," Collazo and Aguabella joined in the singing. They attracted much attention, since few people at the time knew the Yoruba chants to the orishas. As the son of the renowned santera Ebelia Collazo del barrio San Miguel in Cuba, Julito Collazo had grown up in the Orisha religion and learned the intricacies of this African-based tradition (Collazo interview).(5) At the age of fifteen, he was accepted into a neighborhood bata drum group and began his professional career. Simultaneously, Julito became more involved with other Afro-Cuban religions and increased his knowledge of the philosophies and rituals of each sect. Under the guidance of the renowned traditional bata drummer Pablo Roche of Cuba(6) and of master traditional drummers Raul Diaz, Trinidad Torregrosa, Nicholas Angarica, and Miguel Somodeville, Julito Collazo became omo Anya, initiated in the secret knowledge of the Orisha Anya, owner of the drum.
The Yoruba community between 1955 and 1959 included important figures in the entertainment field who helped promote the songs and music of the Santeria tradition. The presence of Cuban musicians like Frank "Machito" Grillo and Mario Bauza, founder of the Afro-Cubans Orchestra, influenced Afro-American jazz as well as Latin music. Bauza's introduction of master Afro-Cuban drummer Chano Pozo to Dizzy Gillespie, and the incorporation of Chano Pozo - an initiate of Afro-Cuban religions - into Dizzy's orchestra, opened new musical horizons in African American jazz.
The continued collaboration among Chano Pozo, Mario Bauza, and Dizzy Gillespie further served to popularize traditional Afro-Cuban music. Gillespie continued throughout his career to incorporate the music of Santeria, the rhythms of Abakua rituals (nanigos), Kongo music, and others, because of his close association with these Cuban musicians. Together, they developed "Cubop," the integration of two African-based musical styles:
Chano taught us all multirhythm; we learned from the master . . . . He'd teach us some of those Cuban chants and things like that . . . . You have different ones, the Nanigo, the Arrara, the Santo (music to the Yoruba Orisha) and several others, and they each have their own rhythm . . . . They're all of African derivation. (Gillespie 319)
The percussionists Patato Valdez, Candido, and Mongo Santamaria were also very influential, and the affinity of the Puerto Rican musicians culturally and musically with Afro-Cuban music and musicians established a strong bridge of exchange. Tito Puente, the internationally known Puerto Rican musician, left the Afro-Cubans Orchestra during this period to establish the Tito Puente Orchestra. The circle of musicians that were part of his group included Puerto Ricans Willie Bobo and Ray Barretto, and Cuban Vincentico Valdez. Although few of the Cuban musicians were initiated (Collazo interview), they were surrounded by Santeria practice in Cuba, and so they brought the philosophy, belief system, and rituals with them to New York City. The passing on of these traditions to Puerto Ricans during the early days of Santeria practice in New York City was critical to its growth. In fact, the first initiates in New York City were Puerto Ricans. The similarity of languages, histories, geographic location in the Caribbean, and racial and cultural expressions provided the basis for easy communication and exchange.
The center of Orisha activity was located on the Upper West Side, where most of the Afro-Cuban and Afro-Puerto Rican community resided. The Rendezvous Bar at Lenox Avenue between 113th and 114th Street, where stowaways from Cuba "hung out," and the beauty parlor of Illuminada at 110th Street and Madison were popular meeting places among Orisha believers. The concentration of Latinos in these areas enhanced the familiarity between the two cultural groups and nurtured the growth of the Orisha belief system.(7)
In 1956, the Afro-Cuban percussionist Mongo Santamaria organized the first public performance of Orisha music and dance at the Palladium night club, in tribute to the Yoruba Orisha Chango. Julito Collazo performed songs and dances for the Orisha Chango and made a broad audience aware of this ancient African belief system.(8)
The music of Santeria continued to receive popular exposure when Tito Puente asked Julito Collazo to participate in recordings of his orchestra. These recordings introduced Yoruba chants for the first time in contemporary commercial recordings in New York City. Latin Percussions, one of Tito Puente's classic albums is considered the first commercial recording of Santeria music (Collazo interview).
Another traditional leader who advanced Yoruba tradition in New York City was Cuban-born Mercedes Nobles (Yoruba name, Oban Yoko), who traveled to New York in 1952. Yoko's mother was eight years old when her Afro-American grandparents moved to Cuba during World War I. In 1958, Yoko returned to Cuba and was initiated into the Yoruba tradition on March 9 as a priestess of Chango. Julito Collazo played for her first cumpleano de Santo, her Orisha birthday celebration, on March 9, 1959 (Collazo interview).
During the late '50s, as the Orisha community expanded in New York City, believers would return to Cuba to perform initiations. In 1961, Oban Yoko, with the consent of her Orisha, performed the first initiation of Orisha ('mounting of the Orisha,' or hacer Santo) on the head of Julia Franco, at 610 W. 136th Street in Manhattan. Yoko went on to establish a casa de Santo ('House of Orisha') in New York City. When I interviewed her in 1981, she had initiated thirty-two people into the Orisha tradition, and as the first santera to initiate a recognized Orisha godchild in New York City, she established precedents for performing initiation ceremonies there. The reaction to this pioneering move was much criticized (Collazo, Scull). However, Oban Yoko's pioneering spirit gave Orisha a permanent home in New York, and the presence of Babalowos Pancho Mora and Bebo sanctioned this first step in initiating devotees in New York City. Not only did Yoko's courageous and pioneering action validate New York City initiations, but local initiation allowed people who could not afford to travel to Cuba to become recognized members of the Orisha community.
The influx of Cubans escaping the Cuban Revolution of 1959 further accelerated the belief in the Orisha tradition in New York City, as Joseph Murphy points out:
Since the Cuban revolution of their 1959, the United States has seen a reinfusion of Africanity into its melting pot. Thousands of santeros have come as exiles, bringing the orishas to America again. This has meant a second, if less brutal, transplantation and a second acculturation of Yoruba religion. This time an entirely new set of ethnohistorical factors has come into play as santeros acquire North American culture and Americans feel the impact of santeria. (115)
The growing community of Latinos, the establishment of botanicas, where ritual products could be sold, and the creation of Latino neighborhoods served to facilitate the practice of the religion, and as a consequence the presence of Orisha became increasingly public in the Latino community. The handful of practitioners in New York City in the early 1950s were joined by several thousand others by 1964, the year Pancho Mora held a public drum ceremony that attracted three thousand people, including Latin music stars Julio Collazo and Machito (Murphy 50). During the 1960s, Mongo Santamaria also held public celebrations to the Orisha Chango in Latino teatros.
During this period, re-creations of Cuban bata and conga drums were used. The first bata de fundamento was brought to New York City from Cuba in 1979.(10) These drums were ritually prepared, given voice (dar le voz al tambor) by Papo Angarica in Cuba, a babalawo, omo Anya, musician, son of a famous santero, oriyate, and historian. Sacred drums receive the same ritual birth as people: Just as initiates are born from believers - thus maintaining and extending ritual family ties through the community - the drum is born from another sacred drum, thus establishing historical and traditional linkages.
Since there were no sacred drums in the U.S. before Ornelio Scull acquired his, it was not possible to "give birth" to sacred drums developed in New York City. Now various sets of sacred bata drums exist outside Cuba. One set belongs to Orlando "Puntilla Rios," omo Chango, omo Anya, who came to the United States during the Mariel Boatlift in 1981. He is one of the most influential ritual drummers and performers of the Afro-Cuban Yoruba tradition in New York City. Once he established himself in the Orisha community, he had a set of sacred bata drums consecrated. Another set belongs to Puerto Rican percussionist and omo Anya, Louis Bauzo, who, as a traditional musician and leader of a traditional dance company, has helped promulgate the Orisha tradition.
The first African Americans to initiate into the Yoruba belief system were Oba Sergiman and Christopher Oliana in 1959. Already versed and initiated into the Haitian system of Vodun, they sought to expand their spiritual knowledge and cultural centeredness. Pursuing Black Power strategies to empower the African American community, Oba Sergiman opened the first African American temple in West Harlem devoted to the loas (divinities of Dahomey) of West Africa and Haiti and the orishas of Cuba (originally of Yorubaland West Africa).(11) He notes that his pride in the reclamation of Africa as part of the African American experience came with much struggle.
African Americans and Cuban Americans had to confront cultural barriers and racist attitudes before the orishas could encompass both communities. The participation of the African American community in Yoruba traditions increased Orisha exposure, but publicity made the Cuban traditional community uneasy, since many of its members were illegal aliens trying to maintain a low profile. The images of Catholic saints in Cuban/Puerto Rican Yoruba practice created another point of conflict between Latinos and African Americans, who wished to remove all images of Western European oppression from the tradition. These issues motivated African Americans to look increasingly towards Nigeria for their development in the Orisha traditional belief system.
African Americans actively sought to incorporate the orishas of Cuba and 1oas of Haiti into the Black Power Revolution as a means of confronting the division between the African American and Latino communities. The inclusive vision of santeras Asunta Serrano, Mercedes Nobels, Juana Manrique, along with Babalawo Pancho Mora, helped embrace African American initiates. In the Harlem community, African Americans discovered the gods of Africa at their back doors. The Cuban and Puerto Rican communities had brought and preserved the orishas and made them available to the African American community. The work of anthropologists and artists like Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Percival Borde, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others had provided culturally grounded principles which guided the thinking, work, and practice of cultural activities of the late sixties and seventies. And Black Arts activists, in turn, incorporated the symbols, languages, images, rhythms, songs, and dress that connected our Diaspora experiences to our root cultures. The work of Puerto Rican visual artist Jorge Soto incorporated the symbols of Orisha Chango, the thunder-god. The work of African American artists Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, and Barbara Ann Teer reflected the understanding of Yoruba philosophy and practice. The works of cultural nationalists connected political struggle to cultural expansion, providing creative expressions directly connected to our historical legacies and continuity.
Notes
1. Dunham adds, "I am definitely Yemanja. She is my guide and my mother, unless I happen to be involved in Buddhist research. Fortunately, there is not conflict between Yemanja sent out to sea in her gift-laden barque on the shores of Corcavado in Brazil, or a river whose name I do not know in Ibadan, Nigeria, or a leaky, Haitian boat sent out to sea, hardly seaworthy, with a time-worn Yemanja lying on the prow on her sequine-covered bedspread, or on my balcony at Leclerc in Haiti, or right here on my small altar in East St. Louis, Illinois. Frankly, I feel as much Cuban as anything else" (Durham 3).
2. All of the leading performers who have been instrumental in the promulgation of Orisha tradition were part of the cultural aesthetic movement nurtured by Katherine Dunham. Before they became major performing artists in the Latino community, Mongo Santamaria, Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Perez Prado, Julito Collazo, and Francisco Aguabella all exchanged information and ideas in the nurturing environment Dunham established. The interrelationship of the cultural experiences of the African American and African Latino communities dates to the mid-thirties, and the music of Tito Puente, Celia Cruz with La Sonora Matancera, and Celina would educate New York audiences in the songs and celebratory messages and practices of the Orisha tradition of Cuba.
3. In Cuba, December 4 is the feast date of Chano, and of Santa Barbara, the catholic saint, who is used as a camouflage for the African Orisha Shango.
4. Conga drums were played at the ceremony in 1955 by the Afro-Cuban musician Arsenio Rodriquez, who came to New York City around 1949, and his brother Kiki, who was initiated with the Orisha Ogun in Cuba, before coming to New York City (Collazo interview). During this period, the sacred bata drums used in Yoruba ceremonies had not been introduced to New York City. The toques (drum ceremonies) were played with conga drums solely. Collazo's account differs from Robert Farris Thompson's statement: "Julito Collazo and Francisco Aguabella brought bata to the United States in 1955" (170). Actually they brought their skill in playing the bata drums and their knowledge of toques. Omelio Scull introduced the first set of Cuban fundamento drums to New York City. The first set of sacred bata drums arrived in New York City in 1979 (Scull interview). When Collazo first started playing toques, he played solo with conga drums and sang simple Yoruba chants, so that people could follow the call and response necessary in ceremonies that provide the energy to call the orishas to earth to manifest themselves.
5. Collazo's mother had been initiated in Cuba by an African named Dominga Latuan.
6. Pablo Roche was a major informant for anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in his research documenting African traditions in Cuba.
7. In the early sixties, the courts became aware of the practice of Orisha: A santero accused of manslaughter killed a chicken in court before the judge who was to decide his sentence, and the judge became so irate that he had the santero deported to Cuba. In Cuba, the santero was freed, since the laws of the United States did not apply to Cuba. The man is still living there (Collazo interview).
8. Robert Farris Thompson says that the first time he saw Julito Collazo perform for the orishas was at the Palladium night club during the Chango presentation. They were formally introduced by the orchestra leader of the Afro-Cubans, Frank "Machito" Grillo, child of the Orisha Chango.
9. Ornelio Scull also participated in this first initiation lavando Elegua and Obatala ('washing the Orishas Elogua and Obatala'). This is part of the Orisha ritual of initiation and rebirth into the Yoruba belief system.
10. According to Ornelia Scull, Olu Anya de Oba De'e (a Yoruba name indicating ownership and name of the sacred bata drum set), a master traditional drummer, bought the drum to New York City.
11. In a presentation to the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York City, Oba Sergiman recognized the need to connect the Black activist movement to a culturally grounded philosophy and lifestyle. He identified a division within the Black Power Movement between political activists and cultural activists. Sergiman's cultural activism led him to develop the first temple in West Harlem and later to establish Oyotungi Village, a Yoruba community in South Carolina.
Works Cited
Gillespie, Dizzy, with Al Fraser. To Be, or Not . . . to Bop. Garden City: Doubleday, 1979.
Dunham, Katherine. Autobiography-in-progress.
Murphy, Joseph M. Santeria: An African Religion in America. Boston: Beacon, 1988.
Thompson, Robert Farris. Faces of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas. New York: Museum for American Art, 1993.
Collazo, Julito. Telephone interview. Feb. 1995.
Mora, Pancho. Personal interview. New York, May 1981.
Scull, Ornelio. Personal interview. Puerto Rico, Mar. 1994.
Sergiman, Oba. "History of the Orisha Tradition in New York City." Caribbean Cultural Center, New York, Feb. 1994.
Yoko, Oban. Personal interview. New York, May 1981.
Marta Moreno Vega directs the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York City. She recently received her Ph.D. from Temple University in Philadelphia and developed this article from her dissertation on Yoruba philosophy.
COPYRIGHT 1995 African American Review
African American Review, Summer, 1995 by Marta Moreno Vega
The work of Katherine Dunham, Zora Neale Hurston, and Pearl Primus - building on the research of Melville Herskovits and W. E. B. Du Bois - introduced an intellectual perspective of the African Diaspora into the arts. These artists worked studiously to incorporate an international racial and cultural legacy into an African-based aesthetic which could serve as a unifying link for Africans in the Diaspora. Dunham, for example, insisted that the members of her dance company understand the cultural traditions of creative expression in their respective countries, and her school at 43rd and Broadway nurtured developing and accomplished artists who embraced the African Diaspora in their creative expression. "Our school," writes Dunham in an unpublished autobiography,
became the popular meeting place of Caribbean, Central and South American diplomats, painters, musicians, poets and the like. At our monthly "Boule Blanches" we usually presented new and untried Cuban orchestras such as Perez Prado, Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaria and Bobby Capo. Cuban Julio Iglesias toured with us for a couple of seasons. Celia Cruz came to these affairs both as a guest and entertainer. Among our regular participants and followers were Helen Hayes and her daughter, Lena Home, Xavier Cougat and many others. (2)
Dunham's work with the Maroons of Jamaica and with traditional African communities in Haiti, along with research in Cuba, Martinique, and Senegal - among other locations - filled the productions she staged for international audiences with images, symbols, music, dance, instruments, and ritual practice of the African Diaspora. But Cuba held a special attraction for her.
On Dunham's first trip there, in 1938, she met the families of the drummers Julio and LaRosa, and performed rituals that they had been unable to accomplish in New York City. And to maintain an African Diaspora focus in her dance company, she incorporated the expertise of researchers like Fernando Ortiz and Lydia Cabrera; the writing of Afro-Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen; and the music of the composer Lecona in her productions. "Cuban music and ritual," she writes, "were inextricably interwoven into my life - both personal and professional."(1)
When Dunham could not find drummers for her company in 1952, she returned to Cuba and recruited Julito Collazo and Francisco Aguabella, renowned percussionists in the Latino, jazz, and popular music communities who had been trained in the Orisha tradition.(2) Julito Collazo would become one of the pioneer members of a small group of Yoruba traditional practitioners who were instrumental in establishing Orisha worship in New York City. He settled in New York in 1955 when Dunham's touring company ran out of engagements,(3) and along with Francisco Aguabella, he performed the songs, dances, and music of Afro-Cuban traditions and spread these traditions to international audiences.
In 1955, there were approximately twenty-five people in New York City who were believers in the Orisha tradition (Collazo interview). The founding member of the Orisha tradition in New York City was Babalawo Pancho Mora (Yoruba name, Ifa Morote), who arrived in New York in 1946 and, soon after, established the "first ile, or house of the orishas" there (Murphy 50). Mora had been initiated as a high priest of Ifa in Cuba on January 27, 1944, by Babalawo Quintin Lecon, a renowned Cuban Ifa priest, and was the first babalawo in New York to practice Ifa divination (Murphy 49-50).
Mora's belief in this ancient tradition and his desire to maintain his belief system motivated him to found the first Orisha community in the city. From his pioneering work, the tradition has grown to include thousands of initiates from all walks of life and ethnic groups. He has initiated several thousand godchildren from varied professions and international backgrounds, and has traveled extensively to Latin America and nationally to perform rituals and spread the practice of Santeria (Mora interview).
On December 4, 1955, Francisco Aguabella and Julito Collazo attended their first Santeria ritual in New York, a celebration to Chango (Santa Barbara) by santero Willie, also known as "El Bolitero" ('the numbers runner'), an Afro-Puerto Rican initiated in Cuba by Pancho Mora's sister. Aguabella and Collazo found out about the ceremony, which took place at 111th Street and St. Nicolas Avenue in Harlem, at the world-famous Palladium night club, where many Latin musicians gathered and played.(4)
After observing for a time the ceremony at the home of Willie "El Bolitero," Collazo and Aguabella joined in the singing. They attracted much attention, since few people at the time knew the Yoruba chants to the orishas. As the son of the renowned santera Ebelia Collazo del barrio San Miguel in Cuba, Julito Collazo had grown up in the Orisha religion and learned the intricacies of this African-based tradition (Collazo interview).(5) At the age of fifteen, he was accepted into a neighborhood bata drum group and began his professional career. Simultaneously, Julito became more involved with other Afro-Cuban religions and increased his knowledge of the philosophies and rituals of each sect. Under the guidance of the renowned traditional bata drummer Pablo Roche of Cuba(6) and of master traditional drummers Raul Diaz, Trinidad Torregrosa, Nicholas Angarica, and Miguel Somodeville, Julito Collazo became omo Anya, initiated in the secret knowledge of the Orisha Anya, owner of the drum.
The Yoruba community between 1955 and 1959 included important figures in the entertainment field who helped promote the songs and music of the Santeria tradition. The presence of Cuban musicians like Frank "Machito" Grillo and Mario Bauza, founder of the Afro-Cubans Orchestra, influenced Afro-American jazz as well as Latin music. Bauza's introduction of master Afro-Cuban drummer Chano Pozo to Dizzy Gillespie, and the incorporation of Chano Pozo - an initiate of Afro-Cuban religions - into Dizzy's orchestra, opened new musical horizons in African American jazz.
The continued collaboration among Chano Pozo, Mario Bauza, and Dizzy Gillespie further served to popularize traditional Afro-Cuban music. Gillespie continued throughout his career to incorporate the music of Santeria, the rhythms of Abakua rituals (nanigos), Kongo music, and others, because of his close association with these Cuban musicians. Together, they developed "Cubop," the integration of two African-based musical styles:
Chano taught us all multirhythm; we learned from the master . . . . He'd teach us some of those Cuban chants and things like that . . . . You have different ones, the Nanigo, the Arrara, the Santo (music to the Yoruba Orisha) and several others, and they each have their own rhythm . . . . They're all of African derivation. (Gillespie 319)
The percussionists Patato Valdez, Candido, and Mongo Santamaria were also very influential, and the affinity of the Puerto Rican musicians culturally and musically with Afro-Cuban music and musicians established a strong bridge of exchange. Tito Puente, the internationally known Puerto Rican musician, left the Afro-Cubans Orchestra during this period to establish the Tito Puente Orchestra. The circle of musicians that were part of his group included Puerto Ricans Willie Bobo and Ray Barretto, and Cuban Vincentico Valdez. Although few of the Cuban musicians were initiated (Collazo interview), they were surrounded by Santeria practice in Cuba, and so they brought the philosophy, belief system, and rituals with them to New York City. The passing on of these traditions to Puerto Ricans during the early days of Santeria practice in New York City was critical to its growth. In fact, the first initiates in New York City were Puerto Ricans. The similarity of languages, histories, geographic location in the Caribbean, and racial and cultural expressions provided the basis for easy communication and exchange.
The center of Orisha activity was located on the Upper West Side, where most of the Afro-Cuban and Afro-Puerto Rican community resided. The Rendezvous Bar at Lenox Avenue between 113th and 114th Street, where stowaways from Cuba "hung out," and the beauty parlor of Illuminada at 110th Street and Madison were popular meeting places among Orisha believers. The concentration of Latinos in these areas enhanced the familiarity between the two cultural groups and nurtured the growth of the Orisha belief system.(7)
In 1956, the Afro-Cuban percussionist Mongo Santamaria organized the first public performance of Orisha music and dance at the Palladium night club, in tribute to the Yoruba Orisha Chango. Julito Collazo performed songs and dances for the Orisha Chango and made a broad audience aware of this ancient African belief system.(8)
The music of Santeria continued to receive popular exposure when Tito Puente asked Julito Collazo to participate in recordings of his orchestra. These recordings introduced Yoruba chants for the first time in contemporary commercial recordings in New York City. Latin Percussions, one of Tito Puente's classic albums is considered the first commercial recording of Santeria music (Collazo interview).
Another traditional leader who advanced Yoruba tradition in New York City was Cuban-born Mercedes Nobles (Yoruba name, Oban Yoko), who traveled to New York in 1952. Yoko's mother was eight years old when her Afro-American grandparents moved to Cuba during World War I. In 1958, Yoko returned to Cuba and was initiated into the Yoruba tradition on March 9 as a priestess of Chango. Julito Collazo played for her first cumpleano de Santo, her Orisha birthday celebration, on March 9, 1959 (Collazo interview).
During the late '50s, as the Orisha community expanded in New York City, believers would return to Cuba to perform initiations. In 1961, Oban Yoko, with the consent of her Orisha, performed the first initiation of Orisha ('mounting of the Orisha,' or hacer Santo) on the head of Julia Franco, at 610 W. 136th Street in Manhattan. Yoko went on to establish a casa de Santo ('House of Orisha') in New York City. When I interviewed her in 1981, she had initiated thirty-two people into the Orisha tradition, and as the first santera to initiate a recognized Orisha godchild in New York City, she established precedents for performing initiation ceremonies there. The reaction to this pioneering move was much criticized (Collazo, Scull). However, Oban Yoko's pioneering spirit gave Orisha a permanent home in New York, and the presence of Babalowos Pancho Mora and Bebo sanctioned this first step in initiating devotees in New York City. Not only did Yoko's courageous and pioneering action validate New York City initiations, but local initiation allowed people who could not afford to travel to Cuba to become recognized members of the Orisha community.
The influx of Cubans escaping the Cuban Revolution of 1959 further accelerated the belief in the Orisha tradition in New York City, as Joseph Murphy points out:
Since the Cuban revolution of their 1959, the United States has seen a reinfusion of Africanity into its melting pot. Thousands of santeros have come as exiles, bringing the orishas to America again. This has meant a second, if less brutal, transplantation and a second acculturation of Yoruba religion. This time an entirely new set of ethnohistorical factors has come into play as santeros acquire North American culture and Americans feel the impact of santeria. (115)
The growing community of Latinos, the establishment of botanicas, where ritual products could be sold, and the creation of Latino neighborhoods served to facilitate the practice of the religion, and as a consequence the presence of Orisha became increasingly public in the Latino community. The handful of practitioners in New York City in the early 1950s were joined by several thousand others by 1964, the year Pancho Mora held a public drum ceremony that attracted three thousand people, including Latin music stars Julio Collazo and Machito (Murphy 50). During the 1960s, Mongo Santamaria also held public celebrations to the Orisha Chango in Latino teatros.
During this period, re-creations of Cuban bata and conga drums were used. The first bata de fundamento was brought to New York City from Cuba in 1979.(10) These drums were ritually prepared, given voice (dar le voz al tambor) by Papo Angarica in Cuba, a babalawo, omo Anya, musician, son of a famous santero, oriyate, and historian. Sacred drums receive the same ritual birth as people: Just as initiates are born from believers - thus maintaining and extending ritual family ties through the community - the drum is born from another sacred drum, thus establishing historical and traditional linkages.
Since there were no sacred drums in the U.S. before Ornelio Scull acquired his, it was not possible to "give birth" to sacred drums developed in New York City. Now various sets of sacred bata drums exist outside Cuba. One set belongs to Orlando "Puntilla Rios," omo Chango, omo Anya, who came to the United States during the Mariel Boatlift in 1981. He is one of the most influential ritual drummers and performers of the Afro-Cuban Yoruba tradition in New York City. Once he established himself in the Orisha community, he had a set of sacred bata drums consecrated. Another set belongs to Puerto Rican percussionist and omo Anya, Louis Bauzo, who, as a traditional musician and leader of a traditional dance company, has helped promulgate the Orisha tradition.
The first African Americans to initiate into the Yoruba belief system were Oba Sergiman and Christopher Oliana in 1959. Already versed and initiated into the Haitian system of Vodun, they sought to expand their spiritual knowledge and cultural centeredness. Pursuing Black Power strategies to empower the African American community, Oba Sergiman opened the first African American temple in West Harlem devoted to the loas (divinities of Dahomey) of West Africa and Haiti and the orishas of Cuba (originally of Yorubaland West Africa).(11) He notes that his pride in the reclamation of Africa as part of the African American experience came with much struggle.
African Americans and Cuban Americans had to confront cultural barriers and racist attitudes before the orishas could encompass both communities. The participation of the African American community in Yoruba traditions increased Orisha exposure, but publicity made the Cuban traditional community uneasy, since many of its members were illegal aliens trying to maintain a low profile. The images of Catholic saints in Cuban/Puerto Rican Yoruba practice created another point of conflict between Latinos and African Americans, who wished to remove all images of Western European oppression from the tradition. These issues motivated African Americans to look increasingly towards Nigeria for their development in the Orisha traditional belief system.
African Americans actively sought to incorporate the orishas of Cuba and 1oas of Haiti into the Black Power Revolution as a means of confronting the division between the African American and Latino communities. The inclusive vision of santeras Asunta Serrano, Mercedes Nobels, Juana Manrique, along with Babalawo Pancho Mora, helped embrace African American initiates. In the Harlem community, African Americans discovered the gods of Africa at their back doors. The Cuban and Puerto Rican communities had brought and preserved the orishas and made them available to the African American community. The work of anthropologists and artists like Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Percival Borde, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others had provided culturally grounded principles which guided the thinking, work, and practice of cultural activities of the late sixties and seventies. And Black Arts activists, in turn, incorporated the symbols, languages, images, rhythms, songs, and dress that connected our Diaspora experiences to our root cultures. The work of Puerto Rican visual artist Jorge Soto incorporated the symbols of Orisha Chango, the thunder-god. The work of African American artists Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, and Barbara Ann Teer reflected the understanding of Yoruba philosophy and practice. The works of cultural nationalists connected political struggle to cultural expansion, providing creative expressions directly connected to our historical legacies and continuity.
Notes
1. Dunham adds, "I am definitely Yemanja. She is my guide and my mother, unless I happen to be involved in Buddhist research. Fortunately, there is not conflict between Yemanja sent out to sea in her gift-laden barque on the shores of Corcavado in Brazil, or a river whose name I do not know in Ibadan, Nigeria, or a leaky, Haitian boat sent out to sea, hardly seaworthy, with a time-worn Yemanja lying on the prow on her sequine-covered bedspread, or on my balcony at Leclerc in Haiti, or right here on my small altar in East St. Louis, Illinois. Frankly, I feel as much Cuban as anything else" (Durham 3).
2. All of the leading performers who have been instrumental in the promulgation of Orisha tradition were part of the cultural aesthetic movement nurtured by Katherine Dunham. Before they became major performing artists in the Latino community, Mongo Santamaria, Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Perez Prado, Julito Collazo, and Francisco Aguabella all exchanged information and ideas in the nurturing environment Dunham established. The interrelationship of the cultural experiences of the African American and African Latino communities dates to the mid-thirties, and the music of Tito Puente, Celia Cruz with La Sonora Matancera, and Celina would educate New York audiences in the songs and celebratory messages and practices of the Orisha tradition of Cuba.
3. In Cuba, December 4 is the feast date of Chano, and of Santa Barbara, the catholic saint, who is used as a camouflage for the African Orisha Shango.
4. Conga drums were played at the ceremony in 1955 by the Afro-Cuban musician Arsenio Rodriquez, who came to New York City around 1949, and his brother Kiki, who was initiated with the Orisha Ogun in Cuba, before coming to New York City (Collazo interview). During this period, the sacred bata drums used in Yoruba ceremonies had not been introduced to New York City. The toques (drum ceremonies) were played with conga drums solely. Collazo's account differs from Robert Farris Thompson's statement: "Julito Collazo and Francisco Aguabella brought bata to the United States in 1955" (170). Actually they brought their skill in playing the bata drums and their knowledge of toques. Omelio Scull introduced the first set of Cuban fundamento drums to New York City. The first set of sacred bata drums arrived in New York City in 1979 (Scull interview). When Collazo first started playing toques, he played solo with conga drums and sang simple Yoruba chants, so that people could follow the call and response necessary in ceremonies that provide the energy to call the orishas to earth to manifest themselves.
5. Collazo's mother had been initiated in Cuba by an African named Dominga Latuan.
6. Pablo Roche was a major informant for anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in his research documenting African traditions in Cuba.
7. In the early sixties, the courts became aware of the practice of Orisha: A santero accused of manslaughter killed a chicken in court before the judge who was to decide his sentence, and the judge became so irate that he had the santero deported to Cuba. In Cuba, the santero was freed, since the laws of the United States did not apply to Cuba. The man is still living there (Collazo interview).
8. Robert Farris Thompson says that the first time he saw Julito Collazo perform for the orishas was at the Palladium night club during the Chango presentation. They were formally introduced by the orchestra leader of the Afro-Cubans, Frank "Machito" Grillo, child of the Orisha Chango.
9. Ornelio Scull also participated in this first initiation lavando Elegua and Obatala ('washing the Orishas Elogua and Obatala'). This is part of the Orisha ritual of initiation and rebirth into the Yoruba belief system.
10. According to Ornelia Scull, Olu Anya de Oba De'e (a Yoruba name indicating ownership and name of the sacred bata drum set), a master traditional drummer, bought the drum to New York City.
11. In a presentation to the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York City, Oba Sergiman recognized the need to connect the Black activist movement to a culturally grounded philosophy and lifestyle. He identified a division within the Black Power Movement between political activists and cultural activists. Sergiman's cultural activism led him to develop the first temple in West Harlem and later to establish Oyotungi Village, a Yoruba community in South Carolina.
Works Cited
Gillespie, Dizzy, with Al Fraser. To Be, or Not . . . to Bop. Garden City: Doubleday, 1979.
Dunham, Katherine. Autobiography-in-progress.
Murphy, Joseph M. Santeria: An African Religion in America. Boston: Beacon, 1988.
Thompson, Robert Farris. Faces of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas. New York: Museum for American Art, 1993.
Collazo, Julito. Telephone interview. Feb. 1995.
Mora, Pancho. Personal interview. New York, May 1981.
Scull, Ornelio. Personal interview. Puerto Rico, Mar. 1994.
Sergiman, Oba. "History of the Orisha Tradition in New York City." Caribbean Cultural Center, New York, Feb. 1994.
Yoko, Oban. Personal interview. New York, May 1981.
Marta Moreno Vega directs the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York City. She recently received her Ph.D. from Temple University in Philadelphia and developed this article from her dissertation on Yoruba philosophy.
COPYRIGHT 1995 African American Review
Sunday, July 24, 2005
Santeria vs. Catholicism in Cuba (1998)
Afro-Cubans say Catholics have slighted their religions
In Cuba, a clash between religions Afro-Cuban creeds, Catholics at odds
January 12, 1998, in the Miami Herald
By JUAN O. TAMAYO
Herald Staff Writer
In a clash over Cuba's religious image, leaders of Afro-Cuban creeds are complaining the Roman Catholic Church has launched an offensive against them on the eve of Pope John Paul II's visit.
Catholics have branded them "pseudo religions,'' the Afro-Cuban leaders say, excluded them from meetings with the pope and rejected their offer of a drumming rite of welcome for the pontiff in Havana's cathedral.
Cardinal Jaime Ortega has denied attacking the religions and said he's only criticizing efforts, by the communist government, to promote Afro-Cuban rites as an alternative to Catholicism and a tourism draw.
"It gives me great pain that for propaganda and business reasons . . . there are attempts to split'' Afro-Cuban believers away from Catholicism, Ortega told the church magazine Truth and Hope in a recent interview.
"These brothers know . . . the church has always welcomed them with Christian Love,'' he added. "The offensive, if there is one, is not against those brothers but against those who aim to split them away.''
Such words have not soothed leaders of the religions brought to Cuba by African slaves—Santeria, Palo Monte and Abakua—who complain that Cuba's Catholic hierarchy is out to attack and marginalize them.
"As far back as October, the church has been more publicly verbal in its anti-Santeria positions,'' said Ricardo Guerra, a Havana Santeria babalawo, or priest, who talked to Ortega after a Mass last Tuesday.
Catholics claim to be the largest religion in Cuba, with 4.2 million baptized members. Afro-Cuban rites have a strong following, but one harder to quantify because they lack institutional organization.
"I told Ortega we simply wanted to know why they excluded us'' from the pontiff's Jan. 25 meeting with leaders of Cuba's Protestant, Jewish and Catholic faiths, Guerra said in a phone conversation.
"The cardinal said the meeting is for Christians only, but that he would try to meet us after the pope's trip,'' Guerra said. Told that Jews are not Christians, he seemed surprised. "You see? It's just us.''
Not taken seriously
Afro-Cuban religious leaders also pointed to past comments by Ortega, who has referred to the faiths as "pseudo religions,'' and Havana Msgr. Jaime Gaitan, who has said that Santeria "lowers man to mediocrity.''
"There are academics who believe Santeria is an official religion. It would seem that our culture was African . . . and that this would be the only way to express religiosity,'' Gaitan said in a homily in September.
Behind such comments is the belief by Cuban Catholics that the communist government has long favored Afro-Cuban religions as a political counterweight to Catholicism and a lucrative tourist attraction.
Although President Fidel Castro favored Santeria in his first years in power as the religion of Cuba's black and poor, his government began stifling all religions when it declared itself communist and atheist in 1962.
But in 1978, the government began promoting several Afro-Cuban babalawos, friendly to the regime, as folkloric attractions for foreigners who paid in hard currency, said Havana Santeria expert Natalia Bolivar.
They were the so-called "diplo-babalawos,'' who charged for their services in U.S. dollars, just like the government "diplo-stores'' that sell imported goods to foreign diplomats in dollars.
The government kept most of the dollars, Bolivar said, from the $15,000 that a Spanish TV station once paid to film a half-hour ceremony to the $1,000 that babalawos charged to initiate visiting foreigners into the secrets of their religions.
Those babalawos also put on special "ceremonies'' for foreigners, including some with bare-breasted women dancers who went into "trances,'' and eventually drew strong protests from serious believers.
Government tourism offices, meanwhile, promoted the Afro-Cuban religions in their advertising abroad, giving the impression that Santeria and not Catholicism was the island's dominant religion,
"For years this government has promoted Santeria as a virtual official religion, giving oxygen to friendly babalawos to earn tourist dollars while trying to asphyxiate the church,'' said one Havana priest.
A more defined faith
But with Catholics growing in strength as Castro eased restrictions in advance of the pope's visit, the priest added, church leaders decided it was time to push their own dogma, embracing all Afro-Cuban believers who accept Catholic leadership while distancing the rest.
"It seems to me the church has decided that it wants people to be more defined in their faith, less willing to mix their Catholicism with Santeria,'' said Ernesto Pichardo, president of Hialeah's Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye.
"They are pushing for the people to be fully converted to Catholicism, and not be mixing religions,'' added Natalia Bolivar, both an academic expert and believer in Afro-Cuban religions.
Catholic relations with the Afro-Cuban religions have always been uneasy because of their tenuous common ground—Catholic practices adopted by the Afro-Cubans long ago to hide their African roots from slave masters.
Ortega has recently sidelined the Rev. Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, a former Havana vicar and liberal who long advocated Catholic tolerance of Afro-Cuban religions and followers.
But even the leaders of Afro-Cuban religions themselves do not agree on their relationship with Catholicism.
Many babalawos insist that theirs is a "syncretic'' religion, a mixture of African and Catholic beliefs. That is why some of the Afro-Cuban gods known as Orishas also have Catholic equivalents such as the Virgin Mary.
"I have been Catholic since birth, and I demand that all my followers are baptized in the church before I initiate them,'' said Miguel Angel Plasencia, a 47-year-old Santeria priest in Havana.
But some purists argue that Afro-Cuban rites should be considered independent, fully formed religions that only took on some of the trappings of Catholicism to protect themselves.
"These are not syncretic religions,'' said Bolivar. "They are separate religions, but they make use of Catholicism and send their people to fill Catholic churches.''
Copyright © 1998 The Miami Herald
accessed from: http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y98/jan98/12ex1.htm
In Cuba, a clash between religions Afro-Cuban creeds, Catholics at odds
January 12, 1998, in the Miami Herald
By JUAN O. TAMAYO
Herald Staff Writer
In a clash over Cuba's religious image, leaders of Afro-Cuban creeds are complaining the Roman Catholic Church has launched an offensive against them on the eve of Pope John Paul II's visit.
Catholics have branded them "pseudo religions,'' the Afro-Cuban leaders say, excluded them from meetings with the pope and rejected their offer of a drumming rite of welcome for the pontiff in Havana's cathedral.
Cardinal Jaime Ortega has denied attacking the religions and said he's only criticizing efforts, by the communist government, to promote Afro-Cuban rites as an alternative to Catholicism and a tourism draw.
"It gives me great pain that for propaganda and business reasons . . . there are attempts to split'' Afro-Cuban believers away from Catholicism, Ortega told the church magazine Truth and Hope in a recent interview.
"These brothers know . . . the church has always welcomed them with Christian Love,'' he added. "The offensive, if there is one, is not against those brothers but against those who aim to split them away.''
Such words have not soothed leaders of the religions brought to Cuba by African slaves—Santeria, Palo Monte and Abakua—who complain that Cuba's Catholic hierarchy is out to attack and marginalize them.
"As far back as October, the church has been more publicly verbal in its anti-Santeria positions,'' said Ricardo Guerra, a Havana Santeria babalawo, or priest, who talked to Ortega after a Mass last Tuesday.
Catholics claim to be the largest religion in Cuba, with 4.2 million baptized members. Afro-Cuban rites have a strong following, but one harder to quantify because they lack institutional organization.
"I told Ortega we simply wanted to know why they excluded us'' from the pontiff's Jan. 25 meeting with leaders of Cuba's Protestant, Jewish and Catholic faiths, Guerra said in a phone conversation.
"The cardinal said the meeting is for Christians only, but that he would try to meet us after the pope's trip,'' Guerra said. Told that Jews are not Christians, he seemed surprised. "You see? It's just us.''
Not taken seriously
Afro-Cuban religious leaders also pointed to past comments by Ortega, who has referred to the faiths as "pseudo religions,'' and Havana Msgr. Jaime Gaitan, who has said that Santeria "lowers man to mediocrity.''
"There are academics who believe Santeria is an official religion. It would seem that our culture was African . . . and that this would be the only way to express religiosity,'' Gaitan said in a homily in September.
Behind such comments is the belief by Cuban Catholics that the communist government has long favored Afro-Cuban religions as a political counterweight to Catholicism and a lucrative tourist attraction.
Although President Fidel Castro favored Santeria in his first years in power as the religion of Cuba's black and poor, his government began stifling all religions when it declared itself communist and atheist in 1962.
But in 1978, the government began promoting several Afro-Cuban babalawos, friendly to the regime, as folkloric attractions for foreigners who paid in hard currency, said Havana Santeria expert Natalia Bolivar.
They were the so-called "diplo-babalawos,'' who charged for their services in U.S. dollars, just like the government "diplo-stores'' that sell imported goods to foreign diplomats in dollars.
The government kept most of the dollars, Bolivar said, from the $15,000 that a Spanish TV station once paid to film a half-hour ceremony to the $1,000 that babalawos charged to initiate visiting foreigners into the secrets of their religions.
Those babalawos also put on special "ceremonies'' for foreigners, including some with bare-breasted women dancers who went into "trances,'' and eventually drew strong protests from serious believers.
Government tourism offices, meanwhile, promoted the Afro-Cuban religions in their advertising abroad, giving the impression that Santeria and not Catholicism was the island's dominant religion,
"For years this government has promoted Santeria as a virtual official religion, giving oxygen to friendly babalawos to earn tourist dollars while trying to asphyxiate the church,'' said one Havana priest.
A more defined faith
But with Catholics growing in strength as Castro eased restrictions in advance of the pope's visit, the priest added, church leaders decided it was time to push their own dogma, embracing all Afro-Cuban believers who accept Catholic leadership while distancing the rest.
"It seems to me the church has decided that it wants people to be more defined in their faith, less willing to mix their Catholicism with Santeria,'' said Ernesto Pichardo, president of Hialeah's Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye.
"They are pushing for the people to be fully converted to Catholicism, and not be mixing religions,'' added Natalia Bolivar, both an academic expert and believer in Afro-Cuban religions.
Catholic relations with the Afro-Cuban religions have always been uneasy because of their tenuous common ground—Catholic practices adopted by the Afro-Cubans long ago to hide their African roots from slave masters.
Ortega has recently sidelined the Rev. Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, a former Havana vicar and liberal who long advocated Catholic tolerance of Afro-Cuban religions and followers.
But even the leaders of Afro-Cuban religions themselves do not agree on their relationship with Catholicism.
Many babalawos insist that theirs is a "syncretic'' religion, a mixture of African and Catholic beliefs. That is why some of the Afro-Cuban gods known as Orishas also have Catholic equivalents such as the Virgin Mary.
"I have been Catholic since birth, and I demand that all my followers are baptized in the church before I initiate them,'' said Miguel Angel Plasencia, a 47-year-old Santeria priest in Havana.
But some purists argue that Afro-Cuban rites should be considered independent, fully formed religions that only took on some of the trappings of Catholicism to protect themselves.
"These are not syncretic religions,'' said Bolivar. "They are separate religions, but they make use of Catholicism and send their people to fill Catholic churches.''
Copyright © 1998 The Miami Herald
accessed from: http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y98/jan98/12ex1.htm
Saturday, July 23, 2005
Holy Wars, Inc. (1998 article on Santeria in Miami)
From miaminewtimes.com
Originally published by Miami New Times 1998-04-09
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
Holy Wars, Inc.
A vicious fight is raging among the high priests of newly fashionable Santeria, where Websites beckon and the gods are far from crazy
By John Lantigua
White-haired Gerardo Lastra is behind the counter at his business, the raucous Riviera Botanica in the Allapattah section of Miami, when an unusual pair of customers cruises in. One is a portly Santeria priest in a flowered shirt, an elderly man Lastra knows as Vicente. The client with the santero, however, is a stranger: middle-aged, dressed in a beautifully tailored suit, designer tie, and what appear to be Gucci pumps. He is impeccably groomed, the picture of modern success as he stands next to a life-size statue that represents the ancient African deity Chango, god of thunder, lightning, royalty, and virility.
Vicente places their order: a rooster, two hens, a peahen, seven plants that have special powers, and two different kinds of flowers. While the order is being filled, the second man's cell phone sounds. He steps outside to escape the cacophony of the disconsolate sacrificial fowl caged at the rear of the store.
Lastra asks Vicente who the new customer is. "Oh, he's a politician, a Republican," the santero replies. "We're going to ask Eleggua to open the way for him and his candidates." Eleggua is an oricha, a Santeria deity.
Lastra smiles. "Well, that's good. I'm a Republican too." The younger man returns and pays the bill of $62.74 after complaining about the rise in prices. He and Vicente walk out, their birds inside brown paper bags punched with air holes, to face the 1998 elections.
This year marks the fifth anniversary of a unanimous Supreme Court decision that, in effect, legalized Santeria. The ruling struck down laws on the books in the City of Hialeah that prohibited animal sacrifice and that had been used to curtail the free practice of the religion. Since that ruling, Santeria, though still misunderstood and maligned, has grown in numbers of followers and in the diversity of people who practice it, says Lastra.
"We get everybody in here -- doctors, lawyers, prosecutors, you name it," he explains. It amuses him that while prosecutors once visited wanting to close him down, he has since had them in his shop as customers. Visits to local santeros reveal the pace at which Santeria, essentially nature worship, is adapting to the modern world. But those contacts also expose bitter and vituperative divisions among some high-profile practitioners, rifts that have emerged since they all celebrated the Supreme Court decision. It is a power struggle that appears to be tied to the process of modernization and institutionalization of a religion said to be 5000 years old. But there are also accusations that behind the bad blood is competition for the money spent on rituals -- millions of dollars each year in Dade County.
On Palm Avenue in Hialeah, in the midst of a major commercial strip, Fernando Pichardo, age 48, sits in the office of his storefront temple, the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye. Fernando is a santero but performs no religious rites. Instead, he handles the business and legal issues for the church. At the moment, he is expanding his Website (home.earthlink.net/~clba/). Nearby hang the church's framed papers of incorporation in the State of Florida. It was Pichardo's 43-year-old brother Ernesto -- the oba, or master of rites, of their church -- who took the groundbreaking case to the Supreme Court and won. At the moment, Ernesto is performing private consultations in an adjoining office. The throwing of sacred cowrie prophecy shells, sixteen miniature conches, can be heard through the closed door.
The homepage of the Website carries this slogan: "Progress is our religious mission." Traditional Santeria drumming and lyrics, sung in the Yoruba language of Nigeria, accompany the text, which explains that Babalu Aye was the first Santeria temple in the nation to certify clergy, 80 of whom have been issued documents of authenticity since 1995.
The site also lists courses, Ernesto Pichardo's clerical and academic history, and the names of the temple's board of directors. "We believe that maintaining a professional organization and good character can sustain our religious and cultural prestige. Prestige in the long run will provide a longstanding, powerful institutional foundation." One of the church's goals: "To establish affiliations and support with other corporations and legal entitiy [sic]."
For a religion identified in many people's minds with the sacrifice of goats and chickens, this is surprisingly legalistic language. But Santeria is much more than bloodletting, the Pichardos insist, and since their court victory, modernization and expansion of their religion have been their principal goals.
Today Lukumi Babalu Aye lists people of seventeen nationalities in its congregation, which is mostly Latin but includes Italian, British, and Russian immigrants as well. It offers for the first time ever in the United States Santeria baptism, marriage ceremonies, and funerals in an institutional setting; burial plots were recently contracted for at Woodlawn West Cemetery in West Dade. The Pichardos also visit inmates in local prisons for religious ceremonies and counseling.
But the degree to which the brothers are trying to institutionalize Santeria may best be illustrated by the latest addition to their Website. It is a feature that will allow priests and priestesses to buy at wholesale prices many items used in rituals for the deities. The name of the service is Orisha Depot. Among those items are sacred oils, cowrie shells, necklaces made of coconut shells and other natural fibers, and clothing (almost always white, the color favored by practitioners). Orisha Depot also offers items used in rituals for specific orichas, such as beaded axes, and the occasional animal -- bats, for example. Finally, the list includes "user-friendly, preformatted consultation forms for ifa and merindilogun," the records that must be completed after a divination session when the shells are thrown.
There are different fees established for "sponsors" of the church, who pay twenty-dollar monthly dues, and for "associates," for whom contributions are voluntary; there is also a column marked "clearance sale."
Fernando Pichardo compares the service to that available to the Catholic Church, which buys candles and wine wholesale. It's all part of the modernization, he says. "It makes good common sense."
Miles away in the middle-class Miami neighborhood of Belle Meade, a phone rings. The occupant of this comfortable house, a large, middle-aged black man in a shirt of African design, answers. "ASi?"
He listens a moment. "Yes, this is the santero Rigoberto Zamora," he answers in Spanish.
As he listens, his eyes travel around his consulting room, which is crowded with statues -- an Egyptian priestess, an American Indian chief, the Virgin Mary, African figurines representing spirits. Other decorations include peacock feathers, a real lion's head, a grass skirt, and an Encyclopedia Americana, although Zamora reads little English.
"Where are you calling from long-distance? Ah, Santo Domingo, very good."
He plays with the buckle on the black leather briefcase next to his cell phone. "No, I can't do that kind of consultation just like that over the phone. Yes, we can do the consultation by fax." The fax machine sits in view, just beyond a bowl filled with bones.
"No, the fax number isn't in the ad in your newspaper." (Newspapers from the Dominican Republic and Miami lie on the desk, all containing his ad: "Consultations Babalawo [high priest], Rigoberto Zamora.") "But first you have to send me a money order for $25. That's right. Of course, if you need a treatment, that will cost more. Yes, okay, I will wait to hear from you." He hangs up.
Like the Pichardo brothers, Zamora is moving into the modern age. In the next room is a computer on which he says are the names of his many clients and the histories of his consultations with them. Santeria clergy have always kept such records; each one is called a libreta de ita -- the "book of life," the adherent's life.
But despite the fact that they are both using technology in the service of their ancient religion, Ernesto Pichardo and Rigoberto Zamora are sworn enemies. Zamora, age 59, is best known in South Florida for his arrest for sacrificing goats and fowl in front of television cameras on June 27, 1993, days after Pichardo's Supreme Court victory.
The cameras recorded what Zamora said was a Santeria ritual. They showed Zamora and a helper, Pedro Flores, in white caps, sacrificing goats and a lamb by sawing across the animals' necks with knives. They killed chickens in a similar fashion, though they ripped the heads off some of the birds and dashed others against the ground. Altogether about twenty animals were killed in an apartment on Miami Beach. The cameras caught blood gushing into buckets on the floor and piles of carcasses. Zamora claimed to be exercising his newly validated rights, but neighbors were outraged. The police claimed his knives were dull enough to have caused unnecessary suffering. They eventually charged him with cruelty to animals.
For Ernesto Pichardo, who for years had fought to have his religion recognized and legalized, exorcised of its negative connotations and embraced by more believers in the United States, Zamora's videotaped carnage was a disaster. Within weeks a group of more than 350 babalawos from the United States and the Caribbean Basin, with Ernesto Pichardo as their spokesman, went public with a petition condemning Zamora. Such sacrifices were not to be performed for television cameras, the clergy said, but only in limited religious situations. They labeled Zamora a charlatan and a notoriety-seeker.
His knifework that day made him famous outside the Santeria community. "I am extremely well-known," Zamora says. "People stop me at gas stations and stores. I have been on all the big local shows -- Ocurrio Asi, Pedro Sevsec, Cristina -- and I've been interviewed by journalists from all over the world."
But as his notoriety has grown, so has the feud with the Pichardo brothers and their allies, who claim Zamora is not a babalawo at all and that his claims to the title of santero are fabricated.
"Babalawos who have spoken with him, questioned him, say he is a complete impostor," says Ernesto Pichardo. "People get off the plane from Cuba, set up in an apartment somewhere, and claim they are babalawos. They cheat people. This is why we need certification, why we need an institution -- to weed these people out."
Zamora spits back: "Pichardo, he wants to monopolize this religion. He wants to be the Pope, and in Santeria, there is no Pope. All santeros are independent. Anyway, the only people who really understand this religion are black people like me. It comes from Africa. It is in my blood. Pichardo is white. It isn't in his blood. The whites are trying to steal our religion because of the money in it."
Santeria is said to have tens of thousands of followers and hundreds of clergy in South Florida, with some 50 botanicas in Dade County alone to supply its believers. Initiation as a santero, involving a multifaceted series of ceremonies that takes weeks or months, costs from $7000 to $8000 at the low end and up to $15,000 or more, Ernesto Pichardo explains, depending on which oricha sect the person is joining (The oricha will serve as a believer's guardian and be accorded special homage. Which oricha protects a believer is determined by the throwing of cowrie shells). Just how many people are being initiated is not clear, but everyone agrees the religion is growing.
As the church's two best-known figures in South Florida, Ernesto Pichardo and Rigoberto Zamora represent starkly different images of Santeria and visions for its future. Pichardo, a former freelance advertising and marketing consultant, has designed and taught courses on Afro-Cuban religions at Miami-Dade Community College and instructed law-enforcement, hospital, and mental-health personnel in the same subject. He wears suits and ties on occasion, speaks and writes English, and discusses his beliefs in academic tones. Like many well-to-do white Cubans, Pichardo came to the United States early in the Cuban exile, in 1961.
Zamora, by contrast, was a foot soldier in the Cuban army that fought against Fidel Castro and is descended from slaves who worked on the sugar-cane plantations of Havana province. He speaks almost no English, wears dashikis, and expresses himself in bursts, his arms slashing through the air like machetes. He didn't leave the island until the Mariel boatlift of 1980, when many less affluent Cubans arrived in Florida. "You have to understand that many people who came during the Eighties spent their whole lives until then in neighborhoods where our religion was practiced in Cuba," cautions Picardo. "They know enough to put on very interesting facades. They can fake it."
The Eighties also brought serious image problems for Santeria. It was embraced publicly by certain gaudy cocaine dealers who asked the deities to protect them from police and rival dealers. Some santeros embraced the drug traffickers, taking hefty fees from them, says Pichardo. "Our religion was almost bankrupted by that kind of person," he adds. "The problem we had in the Eighties was, we weren't institutionalized. We couldn't police ourselves."
Pichardo says today there is a great deal of fraud being perpetrated on believers by santeros with no training or verifiable "godparents" in the religion. Entrance into the clergy is a matter of apprenticeship and of participating in certain rituals. Since many practicing santeros emigrated from Cuba, checking on "lineage" is complicated. There is no licensing except through Pichardo's church, so anyone, he says, can set up as a santero and begin taking believers. Besides the regular fee for shell readings, the clergy charges for "treatments," which run from cleansings with branches and herbal drinks and baths to performing prescribed good deeds or collecting natural objects, like sticks or feathers, for offerings to the gods. Such treatments can cost hundreds of dollars.
Pichardo accuses Zamora of being one of those impostors. "We have been told by representatives of the religion in Cuba that Zamora was never initiated. Even his family says it isn't so."
Zamora is incensed at the charges. "I was initiated," he insists. "I was dipped in the river. My head was painted. They put saints on my head. I slept on the floor for seven days. I went to drummings. I can tell you my godmother and godfather and the witnesses.
"But more than that," he continues, growing irate. "I was persecuted in this country for practicing my religion. I had to move six or seven times over the years. One time the police came to my apartment in Little Havana. I had blood all over me. I had to hide the carcasses of the animals under a bed. The police told me to open up. I said, 'Only if you have a warrant.' They went away, and the people in the ceremony finally left.
"Pichardo didn't suffer that, because this society is racist," says Zamora. "I have suffered for my religion. And in that religion, power does not come from any institution. It comes from my own power of prophecy, like santeros all through the ages."
Many people wrongly believe Santeria is some kind of devil worship fueled by animal sacrifice. Why would anyone believe in it? Why would it be growing, and why would anyone argue over its future? The answer lies largely in hundreds of Santeria consultation parlors spread all over South Florida.
In a consulting room in the neighborhood of Allapattah, a santero is peering into the future. The room around him is decorated with unsettling figurines, including the Grim Reaper. He pours his cowrie shells into his hands and shakes them with a clicking sound that is millennia old. He mumbles an incantation in Yoruba mixed with Spanish, draws a cross pattern with the shells, then lets them fall into a wicker tray.
The santero is Rene Martinez, a 39-year-old goateed man with a ready smile and a gentle manner that belies his background, which he says includes stints as a Navy SEAL and undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration. Over his short-cropped black hair, he wears a purple silk cap with gold trim, donned especially for the reading.
Several days before, Martinez celebrated the seventh anniversary of his initiation as a santero. Under a tent in his back yard, surrounded by believers and accompanied by drummers, he fell into a trance, "possessed" by the deity who is his guardian. He kissed the ground, then rose and began to twirl madly. His gaze became wild, and he broke out in a sweat. Finally, using only hand signals because he could not speak, he chose individuals from the crowd and conveyed messages of counsel to them from the oricha. About a half-hour later, exhausted, he emerged from his trance, once again calm and soft-spoken.
He stares now at the small shells. There are sixteen of them, as always, each with a puckered opening on one side that looks like a mouth -- an old mouth, hopefully, a wise mouth. He counts how many of the shells land mouth up, notes the number in the "book of life," and throws twice more. The two numbers that emerge are nine and five.
"Osa-oche," he says, using the Yoruba words for this combination of numbers. "That means wind and blood." He is doing the reading in English, a language that gives him a professional advantage, since many santeros speak only Spanish. He has given his client a ball of crumpled white eggshells to hold in one hand, symbolizing good. A small conch shell is held in the other; it bodes trouble, he explains. He taps one fist, takes the fetishes back, and starts again. He will throw the cowrie shells a total of twenty times, sometimes combining numbers, sometimes not. He provides a running commentary on the cyphers and their general connotations, finding some positive, others not so propitious.
In the middle of the reading, the santero's beeper goes off. He checks, but it's not an emergency. He finally embarks on his interpretation of the shells, guided by the numbers but applying his own powers of prophecy. If there is a pressing issue, he will deal with that; if not, the reading takes a look at the near future. There are changes coming, he tells his client, "money sitting outside your door," if the client will only stick to his projects. A relative is sapping strength. Make that person be more independent. Be circumspect with ideas; someone close may stab you in the back. You are divorced, aren't you? Sexually active, so watch for sexually transmitted diseases. He frowns at one particular set of numbers and taps them with a wary finger. "And definitely watch your prostate."
"My prostate?" the client asks.
"Yes. Your kidneys, too. But definitely your prostate. I'm not saying there's anything wrong or anything will happen, but go to your checkups regularly."
"I'll do that," the client promises.
Instructions follow, which Martinez says will drive off negative forces: Go to the botanica and buy special beans called miniestra. Put them in a plastic bag and wipe them over the body three times. He also wants a small amount of smoked fish, some corn, and several pennies placed in a gourd and left in some bushes. The client puts $21 in the wicker tray, 21 being a significant number in Santeria and the traditional payment for the basic service. The reading is over. Martinez smiles warmly and says goodbye. He has a perfect bedside manner.
According to Santeria practitioners, the growing numbers of people who consult them don't do so simply to have their futures deciphered, but rather to confront specific crises in their lives. "Lots of people with stress, ya know?" says Martinez. "Lots of stomach problems, lots of nerves, and lots of depression." Clients arrive with all the dilemmas of modern life: pressures pertaining to money and love, to workplace and legal issues and illness. Those conditions are often exacerbated by the complex emotional history of exile and forced migration shared by many South Floridians. And $21 is nothing compared to the $150 or more psychiatrists charge per hour.
A woman and her sixteen-year-old son arrive together for a consultation in a sparkling new four-wheel-drive vehicle. "They're from Nicaragua," Martinez explains. "The boy has big problems. At one point he came up behind his mother with a knife as if he was going to stab her. She had to have him put away. The mother is bringing him to me now. I try to calm him down."
In visiting the waiting rooms of santeros, one gets the impression that the majority of the clients are women, middle class, and under various degrees of duress. Santero Jose Montoya works out of his large new home in Country Walk in Kendall. An ally of Zamora in the conflict with the Pichardos, Montoya has been supporting himself as a santero in Dade County since 1984, a few years after he arrived from Cuba. He says that more than 90 percent of his clients are women. "Most of them want help with affairs of the heart -- infidelity, loneliness, separation, divorce, broken families."
Ernesto Pichardo also says that women tend to seek his help more than men, though the gender gap at his church is not so wide and his adherents' issues are more varied. "Women always seem to be more concerned with the sanity of their families," says Pichardo. "And they have more spiritual concerns."
He thinks Santeria is embraced by Hispanics, in particular, not just as a way to confront common ills, but also as an antidote to Catholicism. "Catholicism's bottom line and emphasis is the afterlife, and it causes a lot of alienation in this life," he says. "Catholics don't know their here-and-now. How can anyone keep those Ten Commandments all through life? How can you not fail? There are future lives in our religion, but it focuses primarily on this life. It is concerned with good health, tranquillity, and prosperity in this life right now. There are no evil forces in it, only positive. We try to keep people balanced."
Besides individual readings, the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye offers ceremonies called "spiritual masses" conducted by the Pichardos' mother, Carmen Pla Rodriguez, who is recognized by her followers as a medium. Ostensibly a ritual to make contact with the dead, one recent spiritual mass attended by twelve people turned into something more like a group therapy session. The group focused on a man in his twenties who said he worked for a car dealership; he was having problems with his nerves. The participants -- who included an airplane mechanic, a factory manager, and two hospital workers -- all wore the traditional white. They sat in a circle in the main room of the church, which was filled with incense, glasses of water, burning candles, and a shrine to the dead. With Rodriguez leading them in communion with the dead, they said they were being contacted by spirits giving them information about the young man. Based on those contacts, they had recommendations to help him alleviate his tensions.
"That is how our religion is," says the 68-year-old Pla Rodriguez. "We turn to the human being next to us and try and see how we can help him."
Still, her son Ernesto rejects the depiction of santeros and santeras as inexpensive psychiatrists. "What distinguishes us from psychiatrists -- and from Catholic priests, who also counsel people -- is our power of divination."
For a moment, Pichardo sounds like his enemy Zamora, who opposes centralization of the religion and says each practitioner's power is based on an innate ability to see the future. But Pichardo hastens to explain: "That power [of divination] must be developed through training and study. Certification of priests will assure that. We need to return the religion finally to the institution it was and is in Africa."
The history and nature of that institution, the model Pichardo wants to invoke, is debated not just by Zamora, but by others, as well. Santeria was born in what is now Nigeria as early as 3000 years before Christianity, scholars say. Its true name is ayoba -- Santeria, or "the way of the saints," being a derogatory term originated by the Catholic Church in Cuba, according to Pichardo. Ayoba, which is essentially a form of animism, recognizes the life force in all of nature. It identifies deities who personify those forces, according to Pichardo: Chango for thunder, lightning, and virility; Yemaya for the sea; Olokun for the dark and secret bottom of the sea; Ochon for love; Obatala for creativity; Osain for healing. Through a holy person and rituals of divination, contact is made with those gods, and their forces are tapped.
"In Nigeria each deity in a community has a temple," says Pichardo. "Apart from home worship, you have these centers. Ordination to the priesthood there is a community event. When slaves were brought to Cuba, their religion was outlawed by the Catholic Church. It had to be practiced clandestinely, and, yes, it became a way to deal with crisis." Not only for the Afro-Cubans but, beginning in the Spanish colonial era, for the white Cubans who turned to the gods of their slaves when they despaired of getting help from their own Catholic saints.
"With Catholicism you are told to pray and then wait. We, on the other hand, confront the crisis," says Pichardo. "We give people tools to fight these negative events in their lives." Those tools are the rituals and other acts designed to bring back a stray spouse, for example, or save a dying relative. "What we do is demonstrable," he continues. "It is not based on faith."
Constitutional changes in Cuba in the Forties assured freedom of religion, but ayoba was not recognized as a religion and still had to be practiced in the shadows. Castro's government, in contrast, has nurtured it, though the reasons for that are perhaps Machiavellian. Some say government support is a way of undercutting the influence of Catholicism. Others claim Castro has used the religion as a tourist attraction. (Some practitioners in Cuba charge tourists in dollars and are called diplobabalawos, as in diplotiendas, the stores that accept only U.S. currency.) Still others note that a religion employing herbal remedies helps alleviate the drastic scarcity of Western medicine on the economically ravaged island. The Cuban government has formed an association of Santeria practitioners, but there are no temples in Cuba.
What Pichardo envisions is radically different. "After failed attempts in Cuba," he says, "what we are trying to do here is bring back that sense of community that existed and exists in Africa, and not depend on the individual so much. This society demands it."
But Miami-Dade Community College anthropologist Mercedes Sandoval sees the heritage of Santeria differently. She has been a student of the religion in South Florida for years and understands its attractions in the modern world, especially for women. Women can reach positions of influence as santeras through its apprenticeship system and without long, formal study. They cannot be babalawos, but their prospects are better in Santeria than in Catholicism, says Sandoval. "It serves as a family support system for many people," she says. "It gives people a way to deal with matters they can't control in their lives. And it gives them direct contact with the supernatural."
She has also been studying the ongoing struggle for influence among the locals. "Ernesto Pichardo is a precocious individual. He is man who knows a lot about this country, a lot about public relations, how to beat the system. That is to his credit." But she believes his attempt to institutionalize Santeria and certify santeros is ill-founded and ill-fated. "Santeros have always been independent," she says. "The allegiance of the santero or santera is to his or her own lineage, his own teachers. That is the way it works."
Sandoval believes there are other reasons Santeria has not been centralized. "In Nigeria the names of deities, and sometimes the beliefs, change from one area to another. In Cuba it's the same. There were no missionaries who came to convert them. The priests were slaves. There is no bible. They don't have one leader. In Havana some babalawos used to come together, but many others were very isolated.... Just look at the Christians in the beginning. It took a long time to establish what we know as the Catholic Church. They borrowed the structure of the Roman empire, the Pope as emperor. We come from that experience of centralization. In Nigeria they came from separate kingdoms. What he's talking about will be very different and difficult."
And then there are the differences in personalities involved. Zamora ally Jose Montoya, who organized a conference in 1996 to try to establish ethical controls on the church, says he has since given up any attempt to bring Santeria clergy together -- and he doesn't want to be organized by anyone either. "Babalawos are very egocentric people," says Montoya. "I'm tired of trying to organize them. I won't do it again."
Sandoval uses a different word to describe them: "Santeras and santeros are the most jealous people in the world. My God, how they go at each other."
In Miami backbiting has become vicious. After Pichardo's outspoken attack on Zamora after the Miami Beach slaughter, the venom escalated. "Pichardo is an enemy of the religion," Zamora fumes. "He joined the police in attacking me." Zamora is standing on the patio at his house. On the ground around him are chicken feathers; next to them is a blue plastic bucket with water bloody from the latest sacrifice. "These are people who have no authority. Neither of the Pichardo brothers can be head of ayoba. They can't even be babalawos because they are both gay."
Pichardo confirms that in Africa homosexuals cannot become babalawos, but he points to his two children and two marriages. "I don't think Zamora knows much about my relations with women," he says. "But I also think that kind of attack on anyone is not very priestly."
At the moment Pichardo may have the upper hand. Over the past two years, his enemies have closed Santeria operations they tried to run outside their homes. Zamora shuttered a storefront consulting room on SW Eighth Street in Little Havana, and his ally Montoya folded his Church of Chango Eyife down the street from the Pichardos' church. They both say the locations were bad, and each says he does very good business in private practice at home.
Montoya has retired from the public spotlight in the past year, but he remains angry at the Pichardos. He calls them "my enemies, 100 percent" and says he isn't finished with them. "I haven't said much lately. But I'm biding my time," Montoya warns. "I'm like the cabaria, a bird that waits and then strikes the fatal blow in the chest with its beak."
Back at the Riviera Botanica, Gerardo Lastra is still doing dynamite business. Behind the counter are signs announcing that he accepts MasterCard and Visa. You can put your goats on American Express. He owns a house in Miami Lakes, as well as the large jungle-lush lot across the street from his store on Seventeenth Avenue in the middle of the city. There he grows medicinal plants of all kinds. People troop in with crumpled pieces of paper bearing instructions from their priests.
A Venezuelan santera arrives, accompanied by a very beautiful young woman of Greek descent who speaks only English. Her boyfriend is apparently straying. The piece of paper the santera holds says, "When the Flame of Love Has Gone Out." It contains a recipe for baths and teas and offerings to the gods. Lastra, the Republican, is not worried about the ecumenical struggle going on around him. "All I know is that this is growing. The orichas are here to stay.
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/Issues/1998-04-09/news/feature.html
Originally published by Miami New Times 1998-04-09
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
Holy Wars, Inc.
A vicious fight is raging among the high priests of newly fashionable Santeria, where Websites beckon and the gods are far from crazy
By John Lantigua
White-haired Gerardo Lastra is behind the counter at his business, the raucous Riviera Botanica in the Allapattah section of Miami, when an unusual pair of customers cruises in. One is a portly Santeria priest in a flowered shirt, an elderly man Lastra knows as Vicente. The client with the santero, however, is a stranger: middle-aged, dressed in a beautifully tailored suit, designer tie, and what appear to be Gucci pumps. He is impeccably groomed, the picture of modern success as he stands next to a life-size statue that represents the ancient African deity Chango, god of thunder, lightning, royalty, and virility.
Vicente places their order: a rooster, two hens, a peahen, seven plants that have special powers, and two different kinds of flowers. While the order is being filled, the second man's cell phone sounds. He steps outside to escape the cacophony of the disconsolate sacrificial fowl caged at the rear of the store.
Lastra asks Vicente who the new customer is. "Oh, he's a politician, a Republican," the santero replies. "We're going to ask Eleggua to open the way for him and his candidates." Eleggua is an oricha, a Santeria deity.
Lastra smiles. "Well, that's good. I'm a Republican too." The younger man returns and pays the bill of $62.74 after complaining about the rise in prices. He and Vicente walk out, their birds inside brown paper bags punched with air holes, to face the 1998 elections.
This year marks the fifth anniversary of a unanimous Supreme Court decision that, in effect, legalized Santeria. The ruling struck down laws on the books in the City of Hialeah that prohibited animal sacrifice and that had been used to curtail the free practice of the religion. Since that ruling, Santeria, though still misunderstood and maligned, has grown in numbers of followers and in the diversity of people who practice it, says Lastra.
"We get everybody in here -- doctors, lawyers, prosecutors, you name it," he explains. It amuses him that while prosecutors once visited wanting to close him down, he has since had them in his shop as customers. Visits to local santeros reveal the pace at which Santeria, essentially nature worship, is adapting to the modern world. But those contacts also expose bitter and vituperative divisions among some high-profile practitioners, rifts that have emerged since they all celebrated the Supreme Court decision. It is a power struggle that appears to be tied to the process of modernization and institutionalization of a religion said to be 5000 years old. But there are also accusations that behind the bad blood is competition for the money spent on rituals -- millions of dollars each year in Dade County.
On Palm Avenue in Hialeah, in the midst of a major commercial strip, Fernando Pichardo, age 48, sits in the office of his storefront temple, the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye. Fernando is a santero but performs no religious rites. Instead, he handles the business and legal issues for the church. At the moment, he is expanding his Website (home.earthlink.net/~clba/). Nearby hang the church's framed papers of incorporation in the State of Florida. It was Pichardo's 43-year-old brother Ernesto -- the oba, or master of rites, of their church -- who took the groundbreaking case to the Supreme Court and won. At the moment, Ernesto is performing private consultations in an adjoining office. The throwing of sacred cowrie prophecy shells, sixteen miniature conches, can be heard through the closed door.
The homepage of the Website carries this slogan: "Progress is our religious mission." Traditional Santeria drumming and lyrics, sung in the Yoruba language of Nigeria, accompany the text, which explains that Babalu Aye was the first Santeria temple in the nation to certify clergy, 80 of whom have been issued documents of authenticity since 1995.
The site also lists courses, Ernesto Pichardo's clerical and academic history, and the names of the temple's board of directors. "We believe that maintaining a professional organization and good character can sustain our religious and cultural prestige. Prestige in the long run will provide a longstanding, powerful institutional foundation." One of the church's goals: "To establish affiliations and support with other corporations and legal entitiy [sic]."
For a religion identified in many people's minds with the sacrifice of goats and chickens, this is surprisingly legalistic language. But Santeria is much more than bloodletting, the Pichardos insist, and since their court victory, modernization and expansion of their religion have been their principal goals.
Today Lukumi Babalu Aye lists people of seventeen nationalities in its congregation, which is mostly Latin but includes Italian, British, and Russian immigrants as well. It offers for the first time ever in the United States Santeria baptism, marriage ceremonies, and funerals in an institutional setting; burial plots were recently contracted for at Woodlawn West Cemetery in West Dade. The Pichardos also visit inmates in local prisons for religious ceremonies and counseling.
But the degree to which the brothers are trying to institutionalize Santeria may best be illustrated by the latest addition to their Website. It is a feature that will allow priests and priestesses to buy at wholesale prices many items used in rituals for the deities. The name of the service is Orisha Depot. Among those items are sacred oils, cowrie shells, necklaces made of coconut shells and other natural fibers, and clothing (almost always white, the color favored by practitioners). Orisha Depot also offers items used in rituals for specific orichas, such as beaded axes, and the occasional animal -- bats, for example. Finally, the list includes "user-friendly, preformatted consultation forms for ifa and merindilogun," the records that must be completed after a divination session when the shells are thrown.
There are different fees established for "sponsors" of the church, who pay twenty-dollar monthly dues, and for "associates," for whom contributions are voluntary; there is also a column marked "clearance sale."
Fernando Pichardo compares the service to that available to the Catholic Church, which buys candles and wine wholesale. It's all part of the modernization, he says. "It makes good common sense."
Miles away in the middle-class Miami neighborhood of Belle Meade, a phone rings. The occupant of this comfortable house, a large, middle-aged black man in a shirt of African design, answers. "ASi?"
He listens a moment. "Yes, this is the santero Rigoberto Zamora," he answers in Spanish.
As he listens, his eyes travel around his consulting room, which is crowded with statues -- an Egyptian priestess, an American Indian chief, the Virgin Mary, African figurines representing spirits. Other decorations include peacock feathers, a real lion's head, a grass skirt, and an Encyclopedia Americana, although Zamora reads little English.
"Where are you calling from long-distance? Ah, Santo Domingo, very good."
He plays with the buckle on the black leather briefcase next to his cell phone. "No, I can't do that kind of consultation just like that over the phone. Yes, we can do the consultation by fax." The fax machine sits in view, just beyond a bowl filled with bones.
"No, the fax number isn't in the ad in your newspaper." (Newspapers from the Dominican Republic and Miami lie on the desk, all containing his ad: "Consultations Babalawo [high priest], Rigoberto Zamora.") "But first you have to send me a money order for $25. That's right. Of course, if you need a treatment, that will cost more. Yes, okay, I will wait to hear from you." He hangs up.
Like the Pichardo brothers, Zamora is moving into the modern age. In the next room is a computer on which he says are the names of his many clients and the histories of his consultations with them. Santeria clergy have always kept such records; each one is called a libreta de ita -- the "book of life," the adherent's life.
But despite the fact that they are both using technology in the service of their ancient religion, Ernesto Pichardo and Rigoberto Zamora are sworn enemies. Zamora, age 59, is best known in South Florida for his arrest for sacrificing goats and fowl in front of television cameras on June 27, 1993, days after Pichardo's Supreme Court victory.
The cameras recorded what Zamora said was a Santeria ritual. They showed Zamora and a helper, Pedro Flores, in white caps, sacrificing goats and a lamb by sawing across the animals' necks with knives. They killed chickens in a similar fashion, though they ripped the heads off some of the birds and dashed others against the ground. Altogether about twenty animals were killed in an apartment on Miami Beach. The cameras caught blood gushing into buckets on the floor and piles of carcasses. Zamora claimed to be exercising his newly validated rights, but neighbors were outraged. The police claimed his knives were dull enough to have caused unnecessary suffering. They eventually charged him with cruelty to animals.
For Ernesto Pichardo, who for years had fought to have his religion recognized and legalized, exorcised of its negative connotations and embraced by more believers in the United States, Zamora's videotaped carnage was a disaster. Within weeks a group of more than 350 babalawos from the United States and the Caribbean Basin, with Ernesto Pichardo as their spokesman, went public with a petition condemning Zamora. Such sacrifices were not to be performed for television cameras, the clergy said, but only in limited religious situations. They labeled Zamora a charlatan and a notoriety-seeker.
His knifework that day made him famous outside the Santeria community. "I am extremely well-known," Zamora says. "People stop me at gas stations and stores. I have been on all the big local shows -- Ocurrio Asi, Pedro Sevsec, Cristina -- and I've been interviewed by journalists from all over the world."
But as his notoriety has grown, so has the feud with the Pichardo brothers and their allies, who claim Zamora is not a babalawo at all and that his claims to the title of santero are fabricated.
"Babalawos who have spoken with him, questioned him, say he is a complete impostor," says Ernesto Pichardo. "People get off the plane from Cuba, set up in an apartment somewhere, and claim they are babalawos. They cheat people. This is why we need certification, why we need an institution -- to weed these people out."
Zamora spits back: "Pichardo, he wants to monopolize this religion. He wants to be the Pope, and in Santeria, there is no Pope. All santeros are independent. Anyway, the only people who really understand this religion are black people like me. It comes from Africa. It is in my blood. Pichardo is white. It isn't in his blood. The whites are trying to steal our religion because of the money in it."
Santeria is said to have tens of thousands of followers and hundreds of clergy in South Florida, with some 50 botanicas in Dade County alone to supply its believers. Initiation as a santero, involving a multifaceted series of ceremonies that takes weeks or months, costs from $7000 to $8000 at the low end and up to $15,000 or more, Ernesto Pichardo explains, depending on which oricha sect the person is joining (The oricha will serve as a believer's guardian and be accorded special homage. Which oricha protects a believer is determined by the throwing of cowrie shells). Just how many people are being initiated is not clear, but everyone agrees the religion is growing.
As the church's two best-known figures in South Florida, Ernesto Pichardo and Rigoberto Zamora represent starkly different images of Santeria and visions for its future. Pichardo, a former freelance advertising and marketing consultant, has designed and taught courses on Afro-Cuban religions at Miami-Dade Community College and instructed law-enforcement, hospital, and mental-health personnel in the same subject. He wears suits and ties on occasion, speaks and writes English, and discusses his beliefs in academic tones. Like many well-to-do white Cubans, Pichardo came to the United States early in the Cuban exile, in 1961.
Zamora, by contrast, was a foot soldier in the Cuban army that fought against Fidel Castro and is descended from slaves who worked on the sugar-cane plantations of Havana province. He speaks almost no English, wears dashikis, and expresses himself in bursts, his arms slashing through the air like machetes. He didn't leave the island until the Mariel boatlift of 1980, when many less affluent Cubans arrived in Florida. "You have to understand that many people who came during the Eighties spent their whole lives until then in neighborhoods where our religion was practiced in Cuba," cautions Picardo. "They know enough to put on very interesting facades. They can fake it."
The Eighties also brought serious image problems for Santeria. It was embraced publicly by certain gaudy cocaine dealers who asked the deities to protect them from police and rival dealers. Some santeros embraced the drug traffickers, taking hefty fees from them, says Pichardo. "Our religion was almost bankrupted by that kind of person," he adds. "The problem we had in the Eighties was, we weren't institutionalized. We couldn't police ourselves."
Pichardo says today there is a great deal of fraud being perpetrated on believers by santeros with no training or verifiable "godparents" in the religion. Entrance into the clergy is a matter of apprenticeship and of participating in certain rituals. Since many practicing santeros emigrated from Cuba, checking on "lineage" is complicated. There is no licensing except through Pichardo's church, so anyone, he says, can set up as a santero and begin taking believers. Besides the regular fee for shell readings, the clergy charges for "treatments," which run from cleansings with branches and herbal drinks and baths to performing prescribed good deeds or collecting natural objects, like sticks or feathers, for offerings to the gods. Such treatments can cost hundreds of dollars.
Pichardo accuses Zamora of being one of those impostors. "We have been told by representatives of the religion in Cuba that Zamora was never initiated. Even his family says it isn't so."
Zamora is incensed at the charges. "I was initiated," he insists. "I was dipped in the river. My head was painted. They put saints on my head. I slept on the floor for seven days. I went to drummings. I can tell you my godmother and godfather and the witnesses.
"But more than that," he continues, growing irate. "I was persecuted in this country for practicing my religion. I had to move six or seven times over the years. One time the police came to my apartment in Little Havana. I had blood all over me. I had to hide the carcasses of the animals under a bed. The police told me to open up. I said, 'Only if you have a warrant.' They went away, and the people in the ceremony finally left.
"Pichardo didn't suffer that, because this society is racist," says Zamora. "I have suffered for my religion. And in that religion, power does not come from any institution. It comes from my own power of prophecy, like santeros all through the ages."
Many people wrongly believe Santeria is some kind of devil worship fueled by animal sacrifice. Why would anyone believe in it? Why would it be growing, and why would anyone argue over its future? The answer lies largely in hundreds of Santeria consultation parlors spread all over South Florida.
In a consulting room in the neighborhood of Allapattah, a santero is peering into the future. The room around him is decorated with unsettling figurines, including the Grim Reaper. He pours his cowrie shells into his hands and shakes them with a clicking sound that is millennia old. He mumbles an incantation in Yoruba mixed with Spanish, draws a cross pattern with the shells, then lets them fall into a wicker tray.
The santero is Rene Martinez, a 39-year-old goateed man with a ready smile and a gentle manner that belies his background, which he says includes stints as a Navy SEAL and undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration. Over his short-cropped black hair, he wears a purple silk cap with gold trim, donned especially for the reading.
Several days before, Martinez celebrated the seventh anniversary of his initiation as a santero. Under a tent in his back yard, surrounded by believers and accompanied by drummers, he fell into a trance, "possessed" by the deity who is his guardian. He kissed the ground, then rose and began to twirl madly. His gaze became wild, and he broke out in a sweat. Finally, using only hand signals because he could not speak, he chose individuals from the crowd and conveyed messages of counsel to them from the oricha. About a half-hour later, exhausted, he emerged from his trance, once again calm and soft-spoken.
He stares now at the small shells. There are sixteen of them, as always, each with a puckered opening on one side that looks like a mouth -- an old mouth, hopefully, a wise mouth. He counts how many of the shells land mouth up, notes the number in the "book of life," and throws twice more. The two numbers that emerge are nine and five.
"Osa-oche," he says, using the Yoruba words for this combination of numbers. "That means wind and blood." He is doing the reading in English, a language that gives him a professional advantage, since many santeros speak only Spanish. He has given his client a ball of crumpled white eggshells to hold in one hand, symbolizing good. A small conch shell is held in the other; it bodes trouble, he explains. He taps one fist, takes the fetishes back, and starts again. He will throw the cowrie shells a total of twenty times, sometimes combining numbers, sometimes not. He provides a running commentary on the cyphers and their general connotations, finding some positive, others not so propitious.
In the middle of the reading, the santero's beeper goes off. He checks, but it's not an emergency. He finally embarks on his interpretation of the shells, guided by the numbers but applying his own powers of prophecy. If there is a pressing issue, he will deal with that; if not, the reading takes a look at the near future. There are changes coming, he tells his client, "money sitting outside your door," if the client will only stick to his projects. A relative is sapping strength. Make that person be more independent. Be circumspect with ideas; someone close may stab you in the back. You are divorced, aren't you? Sexually active, so watch for sexually transmitted diseases. He frowns at one particular set of numbers and taps them with a wary finger. "And definitely watch your prostate."
"My prostate?" the client asks.
"Yes. Your kidneys, too. But definitely your prostate. I'm not saying there's anything wrong or anything will happen, but go to your checkups regularly."
"I'll do that," the client promises.
Instructions follow, which Martinez says will drive off negative forces: Go to the botanica and buy special beans called miniestra. Put them in a plastic bag and wipe them over the body three times. He also wants a small amount of smoked fish, some corn, and several pennies placed in a gourd and left in some bushes. The client puts $21 in the wicker tray, 21 being a significant number in Santeria and the traditional payment for the basic service. The reading is over. Martinez smiles warmly and says goodbye. He has a perfect bedside manner.
According to Santeria practitioners, the growing numbers of people who consult them don't do so simply to have their futures deciphered, but rather to confront specific crises in their lives. "Lots of people with stress, ya know?" says Martinez. "Lots of stomach problems, lots of nerves, and lots of depression." Clients arrive with all the dilemmas of modern life: pressures pertaining to money and love, to workplace and legal issues and illness. Those conditions are often exacerbated by the complex emotional history of exile and forced migration shared by many South Floridians. And $21 is nothing compared to the $150 or more psychiatrists charge per hour.
A woman and her sixteen-year-old son arrive together for a consultation in a sparkling new four-wheel-drive vehicle. "They're from Nicaragua," Martinez explains. "The boy has big problems. At one point he came up behind his mother with a knife as if he was going to stab her. She had to have him put away. The mother is bringing him to me now. I try to calm him down."
In visiting the waiting rooms of santeros, one gets the impression that the majority of the clients are women, middle class, and under various degrees of duress. Santero Jose Montoya works out of his large new home in Country Walk in Kendall. An ally of Zamora in the conflict with the Pichardos, Montoya has been supporting himself as a santero in Dade County since 1984, a few years after he arrived from Cuba. He says that more than 90 percent of his clients are women. "Most of them want help with affairs of the heart -- infidelity, loneliness, separation, divorce, broken families."
Ernesto Pichardo also says that women tend to seek his help more than men, though the gender gap at his church is not so wide and his adherents' issues are more varied. "Women always seem to be more concerned with the sanity of their families," says Pichardo. "And they have more spiritual concerns."
He thinks Santeria is embraced by Hispanics, in particular, not just as a way to confront common ills, but also as an antidote to Catholicism. "Catholicism's bottom line and emphasis is the afterlife, and it causes a lot of alienation in this life," he says. "Catholics don't know their here-and-now. How can anyone keep those Ten Commandments all through life? How can you not fail? There are future lives in our religion, but it focuses primarily on this life. It is concerned with good health, tranquillity, and prosperity in this life right now. There are no evil forces in it, only positive. We try to keep people balanced."
Besides individual readings, the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye offers ceremonies called "spiritual masses" conducted by the Pichardos' mother, Carmen Pla Rodriguez, who is recognized by her followers as a medium. Ostensibly a ritual to make contact with the dead, one recent spiritual mass attended by twelve people turned into something more like a group therapy session. The group focused on a man in his twenties who said he worked for a car dealership; he was having problems with his nerves. The participants -- who included an airplane mechanic, a factory manager, and two hospital workers -- all wore the traditional white. They sat in a circle in the main room of the church, which was filled with incense, glasses of water, burning candles, and a shrine to the dead. With Rodriguez leading them in communion with the dead, they said they were being contacted by spirits giving them information about the young man. Based on those contacts, they had recommendations to help him alleviate his tensions.
"That is how our religion is," says the 68-year-old Pla Rodriguez. "We turn to the human being next to us and try and see how we can help him."
Still, her son Ernesto rejects the depiction of santeros and santeras as inexpensive psychiatrists. "What distinguishes us from psychiatrists -- and from Catholic priests, who also counsel people -- is our power of divination."
For a moment, Pichardo sounds like his enemy Zamora, who opposes centralization of the religion and says each practitioner's power is based on an innate ability to see the future. But Pichardo hastens to explain: "That power [of divination] must be developed through training and study. Certification of priests will assure that. We need to return the religion finally to the institution it was and is in Africa."
The history and nature of that institution, the model Pichardo wants to invoke, is debated not just by Zamora, but by others, as well. Santeria was born in what is now Nigeria as early as 3000 years before Christianity, scholars say. Its true name is ayoba -- Santeria, or "the way of the saints," being a derogatory term originated by the Catholic Church in Cuba, according to Pichardo. Ayoba, which is essentially a form of animism, recognizes the life force in all of nature. It identifies deities who personify those forces, according to Pichardo: Chango for thunder, lightning, and virility; Yemaya for the sea; Olokun for the dark and secret bottom of the sea; Ochon for love; Obatala for creativity; Osain for healing. Through a holy person and rituals of divination, contact is made with those gods, and their forces are tapped.
"In Nigeria each deity in a community has a temple," says Pichardo. "Apart from home worship, you have these centers. Ordination to the priesthood there is a community event. When slaves were brought to Cuba, their religion was outlawed by the Catholic Church. It had to be practiced clandestinely, and, yes, it became a way to deal with crisis." Not only for the Afro-Cubans but, beginning in the Spanish colonial era, for the white Cubans who turned to the gods of their slaves when they despaired of getting help from their own Catholic saints.
"With Catholicism you are told to pray and then wait. We, on the other hand, confront the crisis," says Pichardo. "We give people tools to fight these negative events in their lives." Those tools are the rituals and other acts designed to bring back a stray spouse, for example, or save a dying relative. "What we do is demonstrable," he continues. "It is not based on faith."
Constitutional changes in Cuba in the Forties assured freedom of religion, but ayoba was not recognized as a religion and still had to be practiced in the shadows. Castro's government, in contrast, has nurtured it, though the reasons for that are perhaps Machiavellian. Some say government support is a way of undercutting the influence of Catholicism. Others claim Castro has used the religion as a tourist attraction. (Some practitioners in Cuba charge tourists in dollars and are called diplobabalawos, as in diplotiendas, the stores that accept only U.S. currency.) Still others note that a religion employing herbal remedies helps alleviate the drastic scarcity of Western medicine on the economically ravaged island. The Cuban government has formed an association of Santeria practitioners, but there are no temples in Cuba.
What Pichardo envisions is radically different. "After failed attempts in Cuba," he says, "what we are trying to do here is bring back that sense of community that existed and exists in Africa, and not depend on the individual so much. This society demands it."
But Miami-Dade Community College anthropologist Mercedes Sandoval sees the heritage of Santeria differently. She has been a student of the religion in South Florida for years and understands its attractions in the modern world, especially for women. Women can reach positions of influence as santeras through its apprenticeship system and without long, formal study. They cannot be babalawos, but their prospects are better in Santeria than in Catholicism, says Sandoval. "It serves as a family support system for many people," she says. "It gives people a way to deal with matters they can't control in their lives. And it gives them direct contact with the supernatural."
She has also been studying the ongoing struggle for influence among the locals. "Ernesto Pichardo is a precocious individual. He is man who knows a lot about this country, a lot about public relations, how to beat the system. That is to his credit." But she believes his attempt to institutionalize Santeria and certify santeros is ill-founded and ill-fated. "Santeros have always been independent," she says. "The allegiance of the santero or santera is to his or her own lineage, his own teachers. That is the way it works."
Sandoval believes there are other reasons Santeria has not been centralized. "In Nigeria the names of deities, and sometimes the beliefs, change from one area to another. In Cuba it's the same. There were no missionaries who came to convert them. The priests were slaves. There is no bible. They don't have one leader. In Havana some babalawos used to come together, but many others were very isolated.... Just look at the Christians in the beginning. It took a long time to establish what we know as the Catholic Church. They borrowed the structure of the Roman empire, the Pope as emperor. We come from that experience of centralization. In Nigeria they came from separate kingdoms. What he's talking about will be very different and difficult."
And then there are the differences in personalities involved. Zamora ally Jose Montoya, who organized a conference in 1996 to try to establish ethical controls on the church, says he has since given up any attempt to bring Santeria clergy together -- and he doesn't want to be organized by anyone either. "Babalawos are very egocentric people," says Montoya. "I'm tired of trying to organize them. I won't do it again."
Sandoval uses a different word to describe them: "Santeras and santeros are the most jealous people in the world. My God, how they go at each other."
In Miami backbiting has become vicious. After Pichardo's outspoken attack on Zamora after the Miami Beach slaughter, the venom escalated. "Pichardo is an enemy of the religion," Zamora fumes. "He joined the police in attacking me." Zamora is standing on the patio at his house. On the ground around him are chicken feathers; next to them is a blue plastic bucket with water bloody from the latest sacrifice. "These are people who have no authority. Neither of the Pichardo brothers can be head of ayoba. They can't even be babalawos because they are both gay."
Pichardo confirms that in Africa homosexuals cannot become babalawos, but he points to his two children and two marriages. "I don't think Zamora knows much about my relations with women," he says. "But I also think that kind of attack on anyone is not very priestly."
At the moment Pichardo may have the upper hand. Over the past two years, his enemies have closed Santeria operations they tried to run outside their homes. Zamora shuttered a storefront consulting room on SW Eighth Street in Little Havana, and his ally Montoya folded his Church of Chango Eyife down the street from the Pichardos' church. They both say the locations were bad, and each says he does very good business in private practice at home.
Montoya has retired from the public spotlight in the past year, but he remains angry at the Pichardos. He calls them "my enemies, 100 percent" and says he isn't finished with them. "I haven't said much lately. But I'm biding my time," Montoya warns. "I'm like the cabaria, a bird that waits and then strikes the fatal blow in the chest with its beak."
Back at the Riviera Botanica, Gerardo Lastra is still doing dynamite business. Behind the counter are signs announcing that he accepts MasterCard and Visa. You can put your goats on American Express. He owns a house in Miami Lakes, as well as the large jungle-lush lot across the street from his store on Seventeenth Avenue in the middle of the city. There he grows medicinal plants of all kinds. People troop in with crumpled pieces of paper bearing instructions from their priests.
A Venezuelan santera arrives, accompanied by a very beautiful young woman of Greek descent who speaks only English. Her boyfriend is apparently straying. The piece of paper the santera holds says, "When the Flame of Love Has Gone Out." It contains a recipe for baths and teas and offerings to the gods. Lastra, the Republican, is not worried about the ecumenical struggle going on around him. "All I know is that this is growing. The orichas are here to stay.
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/Issues/1998-04-09/news/feature.html
Friday, July 22, 2005
Presentation of a iyawó on video
This is a video I found online at a site for Centro de estudios Cultura . This is a Santeria/Regla de Ocha initiate (a iyawó) being presented to Aña drums. Traditionally, this is never to be filmed.
http://www.cecta.net/presentacionaltambor.htm
http://www.cecta.net/presentacionaltambor.htm
Santeria article in New Catholic Times (2-13-05)
Cuba: Santeria, scarcity and survival
Catholic New Times, Feb 13, 2005 by Mario Degiglio-Bellemare
The rural solidarity program was over. All participants except for myself had gone back home. I had planned to stay on a little longer in order to visit a few important popular religious devotional sites.
Here I was in Cuba, going in the direction of Santiago de Las Vegas, about 30 minutes south of Havana.
I had come to Cuba as part of a diverse U.S.-based delegation of church folk, activists and small farmers attempting to forge links with Cuban agricultural cooperatives, small farms, and small organic growers. In my work as vice-chair of the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) from 1999 to 2004, I came into contact with "Agricultural Missions" and was invited to participate in the Cuba rural justice tour.
For me, being in Cuba was a journey in bringing my knowledge of geo-politics, my interest in liberation theologies and my personal memories of nonno's garden into a comprehensible road map. As I walked through the finely crafted organic farms of Cuba, these seemingly distinct pieces began to fit together like a puzzle.
In isolation, and made vulnerable by Cold War U.S. foreign policies, Cuba has had a hard time sustaining socialist principles while trying to develop alternate economic models. Cubans had to diversify and return to organic farming in order to maintain basic food supplies. But like the slew of vintage cars on the streets of Havana testify, Cuba is a land of recycling.
We travelled to El Ricon, to the sanctuary of the famous San Lazaro shrine, one of the most important popular religious sites in Cuba. I was with my South African companero, Moa. The previous day, I took him to a divination session with a Santeria babalawo (priest), and a famous black virgin, Nuestra Senora de Regla (who mixes with the Santeria orisha, Yemaya--the patroness of the waters).
San Lazaro
The Catholic devotion to San Lazaro has been associated with many healing miracles. Devotees come from across Cuba seeking his soothing comfort and assistance. Our translator in the solidarity program told us that when he had suffered depression, he found himself before San Lazaro one day seeking the saint's blessed support. He told us how that day his life was changed forever and his faith strengthened. He is now active member of the Baptist church and a progressive Christian working for justice in Cuba.
In the rich and complex imagination of Cuban popular religion, San Lazaro mixes with the Santeria orisha Babalu Oye, whose name means, "Father of the World." Although disfigured by disease, Babalu Oye is associated with a healing power that preferentially opts for the excluded of society, especially the sick. He is an important orisha in Cuba and his devotees can be seen sporting his trademark blue and black colored plastic beads around their necks or wrists. An orisha is basically a divine being, who like the Catholic saint, petitions on behalf of humanity, and whose origins stem from the cosmic religious worldview of the Yoruba peoples from present-day Nigeria and Benin.
Santeria is to Cuba what Voodoo is to Haiti: a hybrid religion cobbled together on slave ships and plantations, in-between the African, indigenous, and pre-Tridentine Catholic traditions of the Americas. And like Voodoo, Santeria has been an important system of identity formation, cultural survival, and anti-colonial resistance for slaves and their descendants in Cuba. Ask how widespread Santeria is on the island, and (as with Voodoo) many will tell you 90 to 99 per cent! A domestically-based religious system, Santeria is understood to permeate all aspects of Cuban society (not only the 'Afro-Cuban' reality), including popular Catholicism.
When Fidel Castro met Brazilian priest and liberation theologian, Frei Betto, in 1985, his eyes were opened to a revolutionary way of being Christian--and especially of being Catholic--in Latin America. Castro knew only the Catholic church of pre-revolution Cuba, a church that supported elite interests. Inspired by the early writings of liberation theologians, the bishops at the Medellin (Colombia) Conference in 1968 devised a radical re-thinking of Latin American Catholicism. Inspired in part by the success of the Cuban revolution, the Latin American Catholic bishops basically switched sides to be in solidarity with the landless poor instead of the elite landlords. But in Cuba, the Catholic hierarchy felt betrayed by the revolution and distrustful of its atheist Marxist ideology.
However, the leadership of some Protestant churches in Cuba attempted to foster a theology that was in critical support of the basic goals of the revolution. After his encounter with Betto, Castro met with religious leaders and opened Cuba to religious tolerance, hence an amendment to the constitution, which removed the word "atheist" from the definition of the post-revolutionary Cuban state and replaced it with the word "secular."
As I read through the Castro/Betto conversations, I am struck by the presence of the WSCF at these meetings. A group of Christian students open a session between Castro and Betto with a Bible study on Luke 4: 16-19, where they describe Jesus as a liberator who identified his ministry with the Jubilee tradition of the Hebrew Bible--15 years before the debt cancellation Jubilee campaign.
These WSCF students, mostly Protestants, were participating in the re-making of Cuba by re-engaging with the prophetic traditions of the Bible. This, I thought, has always been the strength of the WSCF, from its critique of fascism in Europe during WWII, to the anti-colonial struggles in the 'South' throughout the 1960s, to its contemporary focus on feminist theologies and religious pluralism. Prophetic Bible study programs have been the heart and soul of the WSCF and they continue to be.
Absence of prophetic Catholicism
Where was the prophetic Catholicism we have come to know from Latin American liberation theologies? Certainly not at the level of the so-called 'official' Catholicism of the clerics. When asked by a young woman named Regla (who professed Santeria) what faith I adhered to, I told her I was Catholic. Regla told me that the height and base of Catholicism in Cuba tend to exist semi-autonomously. In my academic work I tend to avoid easy dichotomies, but here in Cuba, this split is very strong.
The ways in which Catholicism and Santeria have been brought together is one example of the way in which popular religion is in itself a distinct wisdom of the people. It is what Chilean Catholic sociologist of religion, Christian Parker, calls Latin America's otra logica. Parker means that the religious wisdom of the people, especially its hybrid character, is 'an/ other' kind of rationality, a different way of understanding the divine and the world.
The 'official' theologies of Catholicism are much too invested in the framework of Western modernity to understand popular religion on its own terms. This is not only true in Cuba, but everywhere in Latin American, where in the expression "I'm Catholic," writes theologian Diego Irarrazaval, "for many Latin American people implicitly mean that they take part in the feast days of the people."
The healing miracles of San Lazaro/Babalu Oye are not simply the folk stories of old. Devotion is still alive and well. On San Lazaro's feast day (Dec. 17), some devotees travel great distances to fulfill contractual obligations with their transcendent ally. In the popular religious imagination of Latin America, milagros or miracles, are everyday occurrences to be expected. Studies on popular religion in Cuba have shown a long history of curanderismo, the practice of healing, which finds its roots as a survival strategy to the shock and trauma of conquest and slavery.
The U.S. blockade has crushed the hopes of many Cubans seeking a transformed future. What kind of future do Cubans want? I venture to say a future that engages the basic goals of the revolution, but differently; a future that can heal and reconcile the deep divisions that have plagued families and communities.
San Lazaro and Babalu Oye will surely be part of this different future somehow.
Mario Degiglio-Bellemare is a theology doctoral student at the University of Toronto.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Catholic New Times, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group
Catholic New Times, Feb 13, 2005 by Mario Degiglio-Bellemare
The rural solidarity program was over. All participants except for myself had gone back home. I had planned to stay on a little longer in order to visit a few important popular religious devotional sites.
Here I was in Cuba, going in the direction of Santiago de Las Vegas, about 30 minutes south of Havana.
I had come to Cuba as part of a diverse U.S.-based delegation of church folk, activists and small farmers attempting to forge links with Cuban agricultural cooperatives, small farms, and small organic growers. In my work as vice-chair of the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) from 1999 to 2004, I came into contact with "Agricultural Missions" and was invited to participate in the Cuba rural justice tour.
For me, being in Cuba was a journey in bringing my knowledge of geo-politics, my interest in liberation theologies and my personal memories of nonno's garden into a comprehensible road map. As I walked through the finely crafted organic farms of Cuba, these seemingly distinct pieces began to fit together like a puzzle.
In isolation, and made vulnerable by Cold War U.S. foreign policies, Cuba has had a hard time sustaining socialist principles while trying to develop alternate economic models. Cubans had to diversify and return to organic farming in order to maintain basic food supplies. But like the slew of vintage cars on the streets of Havana testify, Cuba is a land of recycling.
We travelled to El Ricon, to the sanctuary of the famous San Lazaro shrine, one of the most important popular religious sites in Cuba. I was with my South African companero, Moa. The previous day, I took him to a divination session with a Santeria babalawo (priest), and a famous black virgin, Nuestra Senora de Regla (who mixes with the Santeria orisha, Yemaya--the patroness of the waters).
San Lazaro
The Catholic devotion to San Lazaro has been associated with many healing miracles. Devotees come from across Cuba seeking his soothing comfort and assistance. Our translator in the solidarity program told us that when he had suffered depression, he found himself before San Lazaro one day seeking the saint's blessed support. He told us how that day his life was changed forever and his faith strengthened. He is now active member of the Baptist church and a progressive Christian working for justice in Cuba.
In the rich and complex imagination of Cuban popular religion, San Lazaro mixes with the Santeria orisha Babalu Oye, whose name means, "Father of the World." Although disfigured by disease, Babalu Oye is associated with a healing power that preferentially opts for the excluded of society, especially the sick. He is an important orisha in Cuba and his devotees can be seen sporting his trademark blue and black colored plastic beads around their necks or wrists. An orisha is basically a divine being, who like the Catholic saint, petitions on behalf of humanity, and whose origins stem from the cosmic religious worldview of the Yoruba peoples from present-day Nigeria and Benin.
Santeria is to Cuba what Voodoo is to Haiti: a hybrid religion cobbled together on slave ships and plantations, in-between the African, indigenous, and pre-Tridentine Catholic traditions of the Americas. And like Voodoo, Santeria has been an important system of identity formation, cultural survival, and anti-colonial resistance for slaves and their descendants in Cuba. Ask how widespread Santeria is on the island, and (as with Voodoo) many will tell you 90 to 99 per cent! A domestically-based religious system, Santeria is understood to permeate all aspects of Cuban society (not only the 'Afro-Cuban' reality), including popular Catholicism.
When Fidel Castro met Brazilian priest and liberation theologian, Frei Betto, in 1985, his eyes were opened to a revolutionary way of being Christian--and especially of being Catholic--in Latin America. Castro knew only the Catholic church of pre-revolution Cuba, a church that supported elite interests. Inspired by the early writings of liberation theologians, the bishops at the Medellin (Colombia) Conference in 1968 devised a radical re-thinking of Latin American Catholicism. Inspired in part by the success of the Cuban revolution, the Latin American Catholic bishops basically switched sides to be in solidarity with the landless poor instead of the elite landlords. But in Cuba, the Catholic hierarchy felt betrayed by the revolution and distrustful of its atheist Marxist ideology.
However, the leadership of some Protestant churches in Cuba attempted to foster a theology that was in critical support of the basic goals of the revolution. After his encounter with Betto, Castro met with religious leaders and opened Cuba to religious tolerance, hence an amendment to the constitution, which removed the word "atheist" from the definition of the post-revolutionary Cuban state and replaced it with the word "secular."
As I read through the Castro/Betto conversations, I am struck by the presence of the WSCF at these meetings. A group of Christian students open a session between Castro and Betto with a Bible study on Luke 4: 16-19, where they describe Jesus as a liberator who identified his ministry with the Jubilee tradition of the Hebrew Bible--15 years before the debt cancellation Jubilee campaign.
These WSCF students, mostly Protestants, were participating in the re-making of Cuba by re-engaging with the prophetic traditions of the Bible. This, I thought, has always been the strength of the WSCF, from its critique of fascism in Europe during WWII, to the anti-colonial struggles in the 'South' throughout the 1960s, to its contemporary focus on feminist theologies and religious pluralism. Prophetic Bible study programs have been the heart and soul of the WSCF and they continue to be.
Absence of prophetic Catholicism
Where was the prophetic Catholicism we have come to know from Latin American liberation theologies? Certainly not at the level of the so-called 'official' Catholicism of the clerics. When asked by a young woman named Regla (who professed Santeria) what faith I adhered to, I told her I was Catholic. Regla told me that the height and base of Catholicism in Cuba tend to exist semi-autonomously. In my academic work I tend to avoid easy dichotomies, but here in Cuba, this split is very strong.
The ways in which Catholicism and Santeria have been brought together is one example of the way in which popular religion is in itself a distinct wisdom of the people. It is what Chilean Catholic sociologist of religion, Christian Parker, calls Latin America's otra logica. Parker means that the religious wisdom of the people, especially its hybrid character, is 'an/ other' kind of rationality, a different way of understanding the divine and the world.
The 'official' theologies of Catholicism are much too invested in the framework of Western modernity to understand popular religion on its own terms. This is not only true in Cuba, but everywhere in Latin American, where in the expression "I'm Catholic," writes theologian Diego Irarrazaval, "for many Latin American people implicitly mean that they take part in the feast days of the people."
The healing miracles of San Lazaro/Babalu Oye are not simply the folk stories of old. Devotion is still alive and well. On San Lazaro's feast day (Dec. 17), some devotees travel great distances to fulfill contractual obligations with their transcendent ally. In the popular religious imagination of Latin America, milagros or miracles, are everyday occurrences to be expected. Studies on popular religion in Cuba have shown a long history of curanderismo, the practice of healing, which finds its roots as a survival strategy to the shock and trauma of conquest and slavery.
The U.S. blockade has crushed the hopes of many Cubans seeking a transformed future. What kind of future do Cubans want? I venture to say a future that engages the basic goals of the revolution, but differently; a future that can heal and reconcile the deep divisions that have plagued families and communities.
San Lazaro and Babalu Oye will surely be part of this different future somehow.
Mario Degiglio-Bellemare is a theology doctoral student at the University of Toronto.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Catholic New Times, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)