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
Friday, July 22, 2005
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
Thursday, July 21, 2005
"Diplo Santería"
Diplo Santería and Pseudo-Orishas (taken from Eleda.org)
©Miguel W. Ramos, Ilarí Obá, Obá Oriaté
In the past ten to fifteen years, there has been an incredible upsurge in the number of unknown orishas turning up in Cuba whose origins are extremely suspicious. These pseudo-orishas that I have chosen to call diplo-orishas were produced for the diplo-santería market. This is a market under the auspices of a particular group of unscrupulous and deceitful diplo-santeros that caters to the extranjeros-foreigners- who visit the island seeking an alleged and idealized religious Mecca. Any extranjero carrying dollars or any other form of hard currency qualifies to enter the market. They then end up exploited and victimized by a corrupt and devious group of religious prostitutes that prey on other people’s sincere faith and unfortunate naiveté.
I will only address the issue of the diplo-orishas, though this is by no means the only religious monstruosity committed by the diplo-santeros. There is now an entire sector of the market dedicated to rituals, the creation of hand-written manuscripts made to look old and thereby authentic, ordination into Yoruba societies that never survived the Middle Passage, plagiarism of books. The list could go on indefinitely. It is my sincere hope that this exposé will inspire others to speak out against this abominable heresy, Olorishas and Babalawós too, as there are as many attrocities being committed by the diplo-babalawós as well. It is really sad that these scoundrels are abusing the legacy that our ancestors left us and tarnishing the name of our religion and its adopted home, all in the name of profit! As an and a Cuban I feel doubly offended. A vast majority of the serious and respectful Olorishas on the island are just as incensed as I.
The list not follows is by no means complete as I am sure that at present, there are many new pseudo-orishas in the process of canonization! With all the orishas that are now appearing in Cuba, is it possible that a new Ilé Ifé is sprouting up in Havana?
read the list and extensive commentary here: http://ilarioba.tripod.com/articlesmine/diplorishas.htm
©Miguel W. Ramos, Ilarí Obá, Obá Oriaté
In the past ten to fifteen years, there has been an incredible upsurge in the number of unknown orishas turning up in Cuba whose origins are extremely suspicious. These pseudo-orishas that I have chosen to call diplo-orishas were produced for the diplo-santería market. This is a market under the auspices of a particular group of unscrupulous and deceitful diplo-santeros that caters to the extranjeros-foreigners- who visit the island seeking an alleged and idealized religious Mecca. Any extranjero carrying dollars or any other form of hard currency qualifies to enter the market. They then end up exploited and victimized by a corrupt and devious group of religious prostitutes that prey on other people’s sincere faith and unfortunate naiveté.
I will only address the issue of the diplo-orishas, though this is by no means the only religious monstruosity committed by the diplo-santeros. There is now an entire sector of the market dedicated to rituals, the creation of hand-written manuscripts made to look old and thereby authentic, ordination into Yoruba societies that never survived the Middle Passage, plagiarism of books. The list could go on indefinitely. It is my sincere hope that this exposé will inspire others to speak out against this abominable heresy, Olorishas and Babalawós too, as there are as many attrocities being committed by the diplo-babalawós as well. It is really sad that these scoundrels are abusing the legacy that our ancestors left us and tarnishing the name of our religion and its adopted home, all in the name of profit! As an and a Cuban I feel doubly offended. A vast majority of the serious and respectful Olorishas on the island are just as incensed as I.
The list not follows is by no means complete as I am sure that at present, there are many new pseudo-orishas in the process of canonization! With all the orishas that are now appearing in Cuba, is it possible that a new Ilé Ifé is sprouting up in Havana?
read the list and extensive commentary here: http://ilarioba.tripod.com/articlesmine/diplorishas.htm
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Women and batá drums
This is the only article I know of dedicated to this issue. Link: http://www.cbmr.org/pubs/131/kalinda131.htm
CBMR Digest Spring 2000, 13 (1)
Cuban Batá Drumming and Women Musicians: An Open Question
Elizabeth Sayre
This article is a follow-up to Andrea Pryor's interview with Nagybe Madariaga Pouymiró, which appeared in the last issue of CBMR Digest (Fall 1999) and continues to explore the role of women in batá drumming.
Cuban batá drumming, with its attendant song and dance styles, is the best known among several African-derived sacred performance traditions reconstructed and reinvented in nineteenth-century Havana and Matanzas—and perhaps also outside these urban centers (see Vélez 1996, parallel text, 1–12). The batá ensemble of three hourglass-shaped, double-headed drums-the iyá, or mother drum, flanked by the small okónkolo and the medium-sized itótele—plays a large repertoire of tightly interlocked melody-rhythms derived from praise poetry for the orishas, Cuban-Yoruba deified forces of nature. Many of the literal meanings of the Cuban toques (batá pieces) have been lost, yet contemporary bataleros can translate the meanings of some drum phrases, which include insults to provoke and praise names to soothe the orishas when they possess devotees. The batá generally are learned through apprenticeship with a master drummer, and the music is maintained relatively strictly, although some improvisation—based on musical rather than verbal ideas—does occur, increasingly so in more modern styles of playing. Still passed down within religious lineages in Cuba and elsewhere, batá drumming is also taught in Cuban music schools to both natives and foreigners, men and women, while would-be batá drummers in the United States and Europe learn from increasingly available transcriptions and recordings, as well as from immigrant master drummers. Now more than ever, the batá are becoming widely known outside the religious context.
Some of the most compelling and beautiful percussion music in the Americas, batá drumming has been the subject of a number of ethnomusicological studies in the past twenty years (see References); however, many musical, liturgical, and historical questions remain to be investigated. These include the question of the prohibition against women and gay men playing consecrated drums in the religious context. This prohibition extends to ceremonies that are played on aberikula (unconsecrated) drums—a type of ceremony that is more common in the United States than in Cuba because of the relative scarcity of consecrated drums here—as well as to many informal, secular settings such as drum and dance classes where unconsecrated drums are used (see Cornelius 1991 for changing dynamics in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s). This exclusion by gender or sexuality immediately affects women and gay men who wish to play or research the batá, precluding certain types of participation or participant-observation. As a woman percussionist and scholar (I play batá and other drums) and as a relative outsider to Lucumí communities, I am obviously far from unbiased, and I am personally implicated in these issues. Even so, the question of women and batá drumming goes beyond mere sexist exclusion, as seen from one perspective, or aggressive intrusion of Western feminism into Afro-Caribbean belief systems, as seen from another.
Explanations about the gender prohibition typically are given as follows.
· Women cleanse themselves through menstruation and therefore do not need to play batá, because playing is itself a cleansing.
· Añá (the orisha of the drums) is a feminine force, therefore a woman playing the drum creates an improper imbalance of gendered energies.
· The batá drums belong to the orisha Changó, the epitome of virility, and a woman player cannot enact the masculinity appropriate to this situation.
· Women are too susceptible to spirit possession to be given the responsibility of playing (men who possess easily are also forbidden to play).
· Feminine energy is of the earth, while masculine energy is of the heavens. Since the drums are used to call heavenly energy (orisha) to earth, men are the appropriate ones to do the calling.
· Because women menstruate, it is dangerous for them to approach the consecrated drums, because their menstrual blood may be mistaken as an offering to Añá.
· Because the menstrual cycle is associated with the Aje, or “witches”—antisocial, feminine spiritual forces—female contact with Añá will void the consecration of the drums (Marcuzzi 1995).
Religious practitioners readily admit that some of the explanations are inconsistent, even within Lucumí (Cuban-Yoruba) theological terms. For example, the batá are sometimes said to be owned by one of the aspects of the orisha Ochún, who represents the river and feminine beauty and sensuality. Also, in ceremony, women practitioners are permitted to touch their foreheads to the drums (foribale) as a sign of respect, just as men do. There is evidence that the tradition is not entirely closed to women players: batá drummers in Nigeria and Matanzas, Cuba, have been known to teach their daughters how to play in the interest of passing on knowledge to subsequent generations (Amira and Cornelius 1992; Fiol 1999; Drysdale 1999). It has been suggested to me that the rigid prohibition against women and gay men playing batá is a result of the influence of Spanish Catholicism on Yoruba beliefs. Whatever the religious or historical reasons for the practice, it continues today in all known contexts; however, the particular dynamics of the gender prohibition differ from place to place and from community to community.
The practice of Yoruba religion, like its music, is becoming more widespread and varied. Several excellent ethnographies document different regional developments in the United States (for example, Brown 1989; Daniels 1998; Hucks 1998). Many contemporary scholars of Yoruba religion, like earlier scholars such as William Bascom and Pierre Verger, have become religious practitioners. Conversely, practitioners are coming into the academy in ever greater numbers. As a result of these cultural developments, the distinguishing of “insiders” from “outsiders” is increasingly complicated, particularly as Yoruba religion now more than ever is a territory from which different, and often conflicting, cultural and political banners are flown (Matory 1998).
As a result, the question of women musicians and batá drumming cannot be reduced to the question of “outsiders” imposing their gender or sexual values on “insiders” or straight men discriminating against women and gay men. Wherever religious communities are active, it is still unusual and often controversial for women—whether insiders or outsiders—to play batá, even in nonreligious contexts.(1) Nonetheless, today there are at least four folkloric women's batá groups active in Cuba: Obini Batá and Ibbu Okun in Havana, Obini Aberíkula in Matanzas, and Obini Irawo in Santiago (Boggs 1992, 306–307; Strubbe 1999; Perkins 1995; Porter 1999; Drake 1999). There also are many women players in Europe, Japan, and Canada, as well as in the United States, where a few women's percussion groups are actively playing batá in traditional styles.
Given the increasing proliferation and differentiation of Yoruba religion and the widely varying dynamics of gender, religious and cultural affiliation, race, and class in the different cities and countries where it flourishes, the question of women and gay men playing batá drums deserves some ethnographic and scholarly attention. The following highly condensed history of batá drumming provides a context for contemporary debates on cultural and gender ownership of the drums.
During the Cuban sugar boom of the 1830s, enslaved and freed Africans from different ethnic groups pieced together, readapted, and added to local traditions from home to fit a brutal new context. For example, the drums in the Oyo (Nigeria) area that had saluted only ancestor spirits and Changó, the tutelary deity of music and dance, were redirected in Cuba to speak praises to an entire pantheon of forces, as people from different regions pooled their resources and memories to create a partly old, partly new spirituality that could address everyday problems in a familiar manner. Until they were banned by the government in 1884, the cabildos de nación, urban mutual aid societies organized by ethnic groups under the auspices of the Catholic church, were probably the most important sites for the maintenance of the Cuban-Yoruba and other African-based traditions (Brandon 1993). Drums and drumming were part of public and private celebrations centered around the cabildos (Brown 1989). At the turn of the century in Cuba, the Lucumí religion was forced to retreat from more public expressions and became centered in private homes, which still are the most important places of worship in Cuba and elsewhere (Brown 1989).
In the early twentieth century, Cubans began to claim their African heritage as part of their national identity, albeit with ambivalence (Moore 1997). Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz was a major intellectual player in the early valorization of Afro-Cuban expressions. In 1936, he commissioned the first set of aberikula drums ever made and presented master drummer Pablo Roche (also known as Okilakpá or “Strong Arm”) and his drummers in public performance on the batá. Since then, the batá tradition has had a secular as well as a sacred existence—in the streets, on the stage, and in the global marketplace (2)—although batá music remains more obscure than other famous African and Afro-Caribbean percussion such as the jembe and the steel pan (Charry 1996). Musical experiments blending batá with other genres began quite early. Ortiz (1952, 324–325), for example, reports his colleague Gilberto Valdes' attempts at composing for batá and symphony orchestra in the 1930s. Many jazz fans are familiar with Mongo Santamaria, Francisco Aguabella (selected as an NEA National Heritage Fellow in 1992), Julito Collazo, and other Cuban sacred drummers who contributed to Latin jazz in the 1950s and later. In the past fifty years, batá drumming has achieved a significant presence in the United States, where knowledgeable bataleros, whether Cubans or their first, second, or third generation students, are now found in all large metropolitan areas.
The Cuban Revolutionary promotion of Afro-Cuban traditions since the early 1960s, including the formation of professional folkloric ballets at the regional and national levels, has affected the batá drumming tradition profoundly. For certain highly skilled musicians in Cuba, batá performance and teaching have been professionalized (see Hagedorn 1995; Vélez 1996). Meanwhile, Cuban folkloric performance has become a model for drummers outside Cuba (Vélez 1994), especially since the early 1990s, when Cuban folkloric groups began to appear in the United States, and organized music and dance study trips to Cuba have become popular among many North American and European enthusiasts. Although frequently raised as a question or problem that requires more research (see Cornelius 1991; Amira and Cornelius 1992; Hagedorn 1995; Vélez 1996; Delgado 1997), the prohibition against women and gay men playing consecrated batá drums, and its relationship to religious, social, and political systems inside and outside Cuba, has never been directly explored in either academic or popular literatures. Andrea Pryor's (1999) all-too-brief interview with Nagybe Madariaga Pouymiró is therefore an important contribution. First, it is the only instance in any of the literature on Afro-Cuban sacred music where a Cuban woman musician's voice is heard. That she is from Santiago, and not Havana or Matanzas, also is unusual and valuable. There are some fine ethnographies and musical biographies on Afro-Cuban sacred drummers, but no one has written about any of the outstanding Cuban women musicians, such as Merceditas Valdes (who died in June 1996) or Amelia Pedroso, who have contributed much to Cuban orisha music.
Second, Pouymiró's theologically based arguments for women playing batá in ceremony are worth noting since women players in Cuba and abroad typically have justified their activities by carefully delineating them as secular or folkloric. Examining issues of gender and sexuality in relation to the batá tradition very well may shed new light on the “folklorization” of Afro-Cuban ritual music.
Third, the interview highlights the dual, and sometimes conflicted, position of batá drumming as both a profession and religious vocation in Cuba.
Fourth, Pryor's introduction reminds us that women's struggles for recognition and success play out differently in different contexts.
Socialist egalitarian feminism in Cuba and liberal democratic feminism in North America and Europe have met Lucumí values (which are far from uniform themselves) on different grounds and have produced very different situations for women musicians. One hopes that Pryor and other musicians and scholars will be inspired to do more work that explores these issues and adds to knowledge and debates about Afro-Cuban traditions.
Discography
Aguabella, Francisco. Francisco Aguabella y sus tambores batá: Oriki ara oko. Olm Records 10038 (1994).
Barreto, Emilio. Emilio Barreto presents Santísimo. Luz Productions CD001 (1996).
Cardona, Milton. Bembe. American Clave 1004 (1986).
Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba. Música Yoruba. Bembé Records 2010 (reissued 1995).
Grupo Afrocuba de Matanzas. Rituales Afrocubanos. EGREM 58 (1993).
———. Raíces Africanas/African roots. Shanachie 66009 (1998).
Grupo Ilu Aña. Sacred rhythms. Fundamento Productions 6120 (1995).
Iluyenkori. Percussions cubaines. Playasound 65084 (1992).
———. CubaTambours Batá: Hommage à Yemaya et Ochún. Playasound 65138 (1995).
Iroko (Bill Summers, Lázaro Galarraga). Iroko. VTL 010 (1992).
———. Ilu orisha. Interworld 924 (1996).
Los Muñequitos de Matanzas. Ito iban echu: Sacred Yoruba music of Cuba. Qbadisc 9022 (1996).
Quinto, Pancho. En el solar, la cueva del humo. RW/Tonga 9704 (1997).
Ros, Lázaro. Olorun I. Xenophile/Green Linnet 4022 (1994).
Ros, Lázaro, and Olorun. Songs for Eleguá. Ashé Records 2001 (1996).
Sacred Rhythms of Cuban Santería. Smithsonian Folkways 40419 (1995).
Santos, John, and the Coro Folklórico Kindembo. Hacie el amor. Xenophile/Green Linnet 4034 (1996).
Spiro, Michael, and Mark Lamson. Bata ketu: A musical interplay of Cuba and Brazil. Bembé Records 2011 (1996).
Filmography
Blank, Les. 1995. Sworn to the drum: A tribute to Francisco Aguabella. El Cerrito, Calif.: Flower Films.
Santana, Alfred. 1986. Voices of the gods. New York: Third World Newsreel.
References
Amira, John, and Steven Cornelius. 1992. The music of Santería: Traditional rhythms of the batá drums. Crown Point, Ind.: White Cliffs.
Boggs, Vernon. 1992. Salsiology: Afro-Cuban music and the evolution of salsa in New York City. New York: Greenwood Press.
Brandon, George. 1993. Santería from Africa to the New World: The dead sell memories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Brown, David. 1989. Garden in the machine: Afro-Cuban sacred art and performance in urban New Jersey and New York. Ph.D. diss., Yale University.
Charry, Eric. 1996. A guide to the jembe. Percussive Notes 34, no. 2:66.
Cornelius, Steven. 1991. Drumming for the orishas: Reconstruction of tradition in New York City. In Essays on Cuban music: North American and Cuban perspectives, edited by Peter Manuel, 137156. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America.
Daniels, Donna. 1998. When the living is the prayer: African-based religious reverence in everyday life among women of color devotees in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ph.D. diss., Stanford University.
Delgado, Kevin. 1997. Negotiating the demands of culture: Batá drumming in San Diego. Master's thesis, University of California, Los Angeles.
Drake, Dawn. 1999. Personal communication with the author, February 5.
Drysdale, Michele. 1999. Personal communication with the author, March 21.
Fiol, Orlando. 1999. Personal communication with the author, March 26.
Hagedorn, Katherine. 1995. Anatomía del proceso folklórico: The “folkloricization” of Afro-Cuban religious performance in Cuba. Ph.D. diss., Brown University.
Hucks, Tracey. 1998. Approaching the god: An historical narrative of African Americans and Yoruba religion in the United States, 1959 to the present. Ph.D. diss., Harvard University.
Matory, J. Lorand. 1998. Yoruba imperialism and the Americanization of Africa: On the rhizomatic roots of the contemporary “Yoruba Revival” in the United States. Paper presented at Symposium: Religion outside the Institution, Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University, June 5–7, Princeton, New Jersey.
Moore, Robin. 1997. Nationalizing blackness: Afrocubanismo and artistic revolution in Havana, 19201940. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Marcuzzi, Michael. 1995. Personal communication with the author, October.
Ortiz, Fernando. 1952. Los tambores bimembrafonos-los batá. In Los instrumentos de la música Afrocubana 4: 205342. Havana: Ministerio de Educación.
Perkins, William Eric. 1995. The women of Ibbu Okun. CUBA Update April/June.
Porter, Don. 1999. Personal communication with the author, April 24.
Pryor, Andrea. 1999. The House of Añá: Women and Batá. CBMR Digest 12, no. 2.: 6–8.
Strubbe, Bill. 1999. Calling down the gods: Spiritual drums in the hands of women. Blue: The New Adventure Lifestyle 2, no. 1:47–48.
Vélez, Maria Teresa. 1994. Eya aranla: Overlapping perspectives on a Santería group. Diaspora 3, no. 3:289304.
———. 1996. The trade of an Afro-Cuban religious drummer: Felipe Garcia Villamil. Ph.D. diss., Wesleyan University.
CBMR Digest Spring 2000, 13 (1)
Cuban Batá Drumming and Women Musicians: An Open Question
Elizabeth Sayre
This article is a follow-up to Andrea Pryor's interview with Nagybe Madariaga Pouymiró, which appeared in the last issue of CBMR Digest (Fall 1999) and continues to explore the role of women in batá drumming.
Cuban batá drumming, with its attendant song and dance styles, is the best known among several African-derived sacred performance traditions reconstructed and reinvented in nineteenth-century Havana and Matanzas—and perhaps also outside these urban centers (see Vélez 1996, parallel text, 1–12). The batá ensemble of three hourglass-shaped, double-headed drums-the iyá, or mother drum, flanked by the small okónkolo and the medium-sized itótele—plays a large repertoire of tightly interlocked melody-rhythms derived from praise poetry for the orishas, Cuban-Yoruba deified forces of nature. Many of the literal meanings of the Cuban toques (batá pieces) have been lost, yet contemporary bataleros can translate the meanings of some drum phrases, which include insults to provoke and praise names to soothe the orishas when they possess devotees. The batá generally are learned through apprenticeship with a master drummer, and the music is maintained relatively strictly, although some improvisation—based on musical rather than verbal ideas—does occur, increasingly so in more modern styles of playing. Still passed down within religious lineages in Cuba and elsewhere, batá drumming is also taught in Cuban music schools to both natives and foreigners, men and women, while would-be batá drummers in the United States and Europe learn from increasingly available transcriptions and recordings, as well as from immigrant master drummers. Now more than ever, the batá are becoming widely known outside the religious context.
Some of the most compelling and beautiful percussion music in the Americas, batá drumming has been the subject of a number of ethnomusicological studies in the past twenty years (see References); however, many musical, liturgical, and historical questions remain to be investigated. These include the question of the prohibition against women and gay men playing consecrated drums in the religious context. This prohibition extends to ceremonies that are played on aberikula (unconsecrated) drums—a type of ceremony that is more common in the United States than in Cuba because of the relative scarcity of consecrated drums here—as well as to many informal, secular settings such as drum and dance classes where unconsecrated drums are used (see Cornelius 1991 for changing dynamics in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s). This exclusion by gender or sexuality immediately affects women and gay men who wish to play or research the batá, precluding certain types of participation or participant-observation. As a woman percussionist and scholar (I play batá and other drums) and as a relative outsider to Lucumí communities, I am obviously far from unbiased, and I am personally implicated in these issues. Even so, the question of women and batá drumming goes beyond mere sexist exclusion, as seen from one perspective, or aggressive intrusion of Western feminism into Afro-Caribbean belief systems, as seen from another.
Explanations about the gender prohibition typically are given as follows.
· Women cleanse themselves through menstruation and therefore do not need to play batá, because playing is itself a cleansing.
· Añá (the orisha of the drums) is a feminine force, therefore a woman playing the drum creates an improper imbalance of gendered energies.
· The batá drums belong to the orisha Changó, the epitome of virility, and a woman player cannot enact the masculinity appropriate to this situation.
· Women are too susceptible to spirit possession to be given the responsibility of playing (men who possess easily are also forbidden to play).
· Feminine energy is of the earth, while masculine energy is of the heavens. Since the drums are used to call heavenly energy (orisha) to earth, men are the appropriate ones to do the calling.
· Because women menstruate, it is dangerous for them to approach the consecrated drums, because their menstrual blood may be mistaken as an offering to Añá.
· Because the menstrual cycle is associated with the Aje, or “witches”—antisocial, feminine spiritual forces—female contact with Añá will void the consecration of the drums (Marcuzzi 1995).
Religious practitioners readily admit that some of the explanations are inconsistent, even within Lucumí (Cuban-Yoruba) theological terms. For example, the batá are sometimes said to be owned by one of the aspects of the orisha Ochún, who represents the river and feminine beauty and sensuality. Also, in ceremony, women practitioners are permitted to touch their foreheads to the drums (foribale) as a sign of respect, just as men do. There is evidence that the tradition is not entirely closed to women players: batá drummers in Nigeria and Matanzas, Cuba, have been known to teach their daughters how to play in the interest of passing on knowledge to subsequent generations (Amira and Cornelius 1992; Fiol 1999; Drysdale 1999). It has been suggested to me that the rigid prohibition against women and gay men playing batá is a result of the influence of Spanish Catholicism on Yoruba beliefs. Whatever the religious or historical reasons for the practice, it continues today in all known contexts; however, the particular dynamics of the gender prohibition differ from place to place and from community to community.
The practice of Yoruba religion, like its music, is becoming more widespread and varied. Several excellent ethnographies document different regional developments in the United States (for example, Brown 1989; Daniels 1998; Hucks 1998). Many contemporary scholars of Yoruba religion, like earlier scholars such as William Bascom and Pierre Verger, have become religious practitioners. Conversely, practitioners are coming into the academy in ever greater numbers. As a result of these cultural developments, the distinguishing of “insiders” from “outsiders” is increasingly complicated, particularly as Yoruba religion now more than ever is a territory from which different, and often conflicting, cultural and political banners are flown (Matory 1998).
As a result, the question of women musicians and batá drumming cannot be reduced to the question of “outsiders” imposing their gender or sexual values on “insiders” or straight men discriminating against women and gay men. Wherever religious communities are active, it is still unusual and often controversial for women—whether insiders or outsiders—to play batá, even in nonreligious contexts.(1) Nonetheless, today there are at least four folkloric women's batá groups active in Cuba: Obini Batá and Ibbu Okun in Havana, Obini Aberíkula in Matanzas, and Obini Irawo in Santiago (Boggs 1992, 306–307; Strubbe 1999; Perkins 1995; Porter 1999; Drake 1999). There also are many women players in Europe, Japan, and Canada, as well as in the United States, where a few women's percussion groups are actively playing batá in traditional styles.
Given the increasing proliferation and differentiation of Yoruba religion and the widely varying dynamics of gender, religious and cultural affiliation, race, and class in the different cities and countries where it flourishes, the question of women and gay men playing batá drums deserves some ethnographic and scholarly attention. The following highly condensed history of batá drumming provides a context for contemporary debates on cultural and gender ownership of the drums.
During the Cuban sugar boom of the 1830s, enslaved and freed Africans from different ethnic groups pieced together, readapted, and added to local traditions from home to fit a brutal new context. For example, the drums in the Oyo (Nigeria) area that had saluted only ancestor spirits and Changó, the tutelary deity of music and dance, were redirected in Cuba to speak praises to an entire pantheon of forces, as people from different regions pooled their resources and memories to create a partly old, partly new spirituality that could address everyday problems in a familiar manner. Until they were banned by the government in 1884, the cabildos de nación, urban mutual aid societies organized by ethnic groups under the auspices of the Catholic church, were probably the most important sites for the maintenance of the Cuban-Yoruba and other African-based traditions (Brandon 1993). Drums and drumming were part of public and private celebrations centered around the cabildos (Brown 1989). At the turn of the century in Cuba, the Lucumí religion was forced to retreat from more public expressions and became centered in private homes, which still are the most important places of worship in Cuba and elsewhere (Brown 1989).
In the early twentieth century, Cubans began to claim their African heritage as part of their national identity, albeit with ambivalence (Moore 1997). Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz was a major intellectual player in the early valorization of Afro-Cuban expressions. In 1936, he commissioned the first set of aberikula drums ever made and presented master drummer Pablo Roche (also known as Okilakpá or “Strong Arm”) and his drummers in public performance on the batá. Since then, the batá tradition has had a secular as well as a sacred existence—in the streets, on the stage, and in the global marketplace (2)—although batá music remains more obscure than other famous African and Afro-Caribbean percussion such as the jembe and the steel pan (Charry 1996). Musical experiments blending batá with other genres began quite early. Ortiz (1952, 324–325), for example, reports his colleague Gilberto Valdes' attempts at composing for batá and symphony orchestra in the 1930s. Many jazz fans are familiar with Mongo Santamaria, Francisco Aguabella (selected as an NEA National Heritage Fellow in 1992), Julito Collazo, and other Cuban sacred drummers who contributed to Latin jazz in the 1950s and later. In the past fifty years, batá drumming has achieved a significant presence in the United States, where knowledgeable bataleros, whether Cubans or their first, second, or third generation students, are now found in all large metropolitan areas.
The Cuban Revolutionary promotion of Afro-Cuban traditions since the early 1960s, including the formation of professional folkloric ballets at the regional and national levels, has affected the batá drumming tradition profoundly. For certain highly skilled musicians in Cuba, batá performance and teaching have been professionalized (see Hagedorn 1995; Vélez 1996). Meanwhile, Cuban folkloric performance has become a model for drummers outside Cuba (Vélez 1994), especially since the early 1990s, when Cuban folkloric groups began to appear in the United States, and organized music and dance study trips to Cuba have become popular among many North American and European enthusiasts. Although frequently raised as a question or problem that requires more research (see Cornelius 1991; Amira and Cornelius 1992; Hagedorn 1995; Vélez 1996; Delgado 1997), the prohibition against women and gay men playing consecrated batá drums, and its relationship to religious, social, and political systems inside and outside Cuba, has never been directly explored in either academic or popular literatures. Andrea Pryor's (1999) all-too-brief interview with Nagybe Madariaga Pouymiró is therefore an important contribution. First, it is the only instance in any of the literature on Afro-Cuban sacred music where a Cuban woman musician's voice is heard. That she is from Santiago, and not Havana or Matanzas, also is unusual and valuable. There are some fine ethnographies and musical biographies on Afro-Cuban sacred drummers, but no one has written about any of the outstanding Cuban women musicians, such as Merceditas Valdes (who died in June 1996) or Amelia Pedroso, who have contributed much to Cuban orisha music.
Second, Pouymiró's theologically based arguments for women playing batá in ceremony are worth noting since women players in Cuba and abroad typically have justified their activities by carefully delineating them as secular or folkloric. Examining issues of gender and sexuality in relation to the batá tradition very well may shed new light on the “folklorization” of Afro-Cuban ritual music.
Third, the interview highlights the dual, and sometimes conflicted, position of batá drumming as both a profession and religious vocation in Cuba.
Fourth, Pryor's introduction reminds us that women's struggles for recognition and success play out differently in different contexts.
Socialist egalitarian feminism in Cuba and liberal democratic feminism in North America and Europe have met Lucumí values (which are far from uniform themselves) on different grounds and have produced very different situations for women musicians. One hopes that Pryor and other musicians and scholars will be inspired to do more work that explores these issues and adds to knowledge and debates about Afro-Cuban traditions.
Discography
Aguabella, Francisco. Francisco Aguabella y sus tambores batá: Oriki ara oko. Olm Records 10038 (1994).
Barreto, Emilio. Emilio Barreto presents Santísimo. Luz Productions CD001 (1996).
Cardona, Milton. Bembe. American Clave 1004 (1986).
Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba. Música Yoruba. Bembé Records 2010 (reissued 1995).
Grupo Afrocuba de Matanzas. Rituales Afrocubanos. EGREM 58 (1993).
———. Raíces Africanas/African roots. Shanachie 66009 (1998).
Grupo Ilu Aña. Sacred rhythms. Fundamento Productions 6120 (1995).
Iluyenkori. Percussions cubaines. Playasound 65084 (1992).
———. CubaTambours Batá: Hommage à Yemaya et Ochún. Playasound 65138 (1995).
Iroko (Bill Summers, Lázaro Galarraga). Iroko. VTL 010 (1992).
———. Ilu orisha. Interworld 924 (1996).
Los Muñequitos de Matanzas. Ito iban echu: Sacred Yoruba music of Cuba. Qbadisc 9022 (1996).
Quinto, Pancho. En el solar, la cueva del humo. RW/Tonga 9704 (1997).
Ros, Lázaro. Olorun I. Xenophile/Green Linnet 4022 (1994).
Ros, Lázaro, and Olorun. Songs for Eleguá. Ashé Records 2001 (1996).
Sacred Rhythms of Cuban Santería. Smithsonian Folkways 40419 (1995).
Santos, John, and the Coro Folklórico Kindembo. Hacie el amor. Xenophile/Green Linnet 4034 (1996).
Spiro, Michael, and Mark Lamson. Bata ketu: A musical interplay of Cuba and Brazil. Bembé Records 2011 (1996).
Filmography
Blank, Les. 1995. Sworn to the drum: A tribute to Francisco Aguabella. El Cerrito, Calif.: Flower Films.
Santana, Alfred. 1986. Voices of the gods. New York: Third World Newsreel.
References
Amira, John, and Steven Cornelius. 1992. The music of Santería: Traditional rhythms of the batá drums. Crown Point, Ind.: White Cliffs.
Boggs, Vernon. 1992. Salsiology: Afro-Cuban music and the evolution of salsa in New York City. New York: Greenwood Press.
Brandon, George. 1993. Santería from Africa to the New World: The dead sell memories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Brown, David. 1989. Garden in the machine: Afro-Cuban sacred art and performance in urban New Jersey and New York. Ph.D. diss., Yale University.
Charry, Eric. 1996. A guide to the jembe. Percussive Notes 34, no. 2:66.
Cornelius, Steven. 1991. Drumming for the orishas: Reconstruction of tradition in New York City. In Essays on Cuban music: North American and Cuban perspectives, edited by Peter Manuel, 137156. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America.
Daniels, Donna. 1998. When the living is the prayer: African-based religious reverence in everyday life among women of color devotees in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ph.D. diss., Stanford University.
Delgado, Kevin. 1997. Negotiating the demands of culture: Batá drumming in San Diego. Master's thesis, University of California, Los Angeles.
Drake, Dawn. 1999. Personal communication with the author, February 5.
Drysdale, Michele. 1999. Personal communication with the author, March 21.
Fiol, Orlando. 1999. Personal communication with the author, March 26.
Hagedorn, Katherine. 1995. Anatomía del proceso folklórico: The “folkloricization” of Afro-Cuban religious performance in Cuba. Ph.D. diss., Brown University.
Hucks, Tracey. 1998. Approaching the god: An historical narrative of African Americans and Yoruba religion in the United States, 1959 to the present. Ph.D. diss., Harvard University.
Matory, J. Lorand. 1998. Yoruba imperialism and the Americanization of Africa: On the rhizomatic roots of the contemporary “Yoruba Revival” in the United States. Paper presented at Symposium: Religion outside the Institution, Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University, June 5–7, Princeton, New Jersey.
Moore, Robin. 1997. Nationalizing blackness: Afrocubanismo and artistic revolution in Havana, 19201940. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Marcuzzi, Michael. 1995. Personal communication with the author, October.
Ortiz, Fernando. 1952. Los tambores bimembrafonos-los batá. In Los instrumentos de la música Afrocubana 4: 205342. Havana: Ministerio de Educación.
Perkins, William Eric. 1995. The women of Ibbu Okun. CUBA Update April/June.
Porter, Don. 1999. Personal communication with the author, April 24.
Pryor, Andrea. 1999. The House of Añá: Women and Batá. CBMR Digest 12, no. 2.: 6–8.
Strubbe, Bill. 1999. Calling down the gods: Spiritual drums in the hands of women. Blue: The New Adventure Lifestyle 2, no. 1:47–48.
Vélez, Maria Teresa. 1994. Eya aranla: Overlapping perspectives on a Santería group. Diaspora 3, no. 3:289304.
———. 1996. The trade of an Afro-Cuban religious drummer: Felipe Garcia Villamil. Ph.D. diss., Wesleyan University.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Little Shop of Santeria
LA Times
COLUMN ONE
Little Shop of Santeria
At his botanica in Hollywood, priest Charles Guelperin welcomes customers who want to contact the supernatural world.
By Daniel Hernandez
Times Staff Writer
July 7, 2005
On a hot and yellow Saturday afternoon in Hollywood, a dozen people gathered at a seance for Olga, a young Russian Jew seeking help from Manuel.
They sat in the cramped rear room of a botanica shop on Santa Monica Boulevard, before an altar topped with a portrait of Jesus Christ. Charles Guelperin, the Santeria priest, explained the day's aim:
"We're doing an investigation of the spirits that work with her, or for her," Guelperin said, his English inflected with his Argentine roots. "It's nothing scary. Every person has a spirit that come in their life as helpers."
For Guelperin, that spirit is Manuel, known among Santeria circles and African folklore students as a 500-year-old warrior-king from the Congo brought on a slave ship to Cuba as a young man.
Guelperin "channels" Manuel for customers at his shop, El Congo Manuel.
"I was his son in a previous life and that's how the relationship came to me," Guelperin, 59, explained. "He was my father. He was also a santero [a practitioner of Santeria] and a son of Ogun."
In the Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria, Ogun is one of 401 orishas, or spirits, who operate as agents for a supreme being. Believers also worship Roman Catholic saints and spiritual ancestors. Hence, Guelperin's supernatural connection to Manuel.
For Guelperin and the people who frequent his shop, spirits are as alive as the living. If everything is done right, they say, a spirit can be coaxed to "mount" a body. Then it is ready to impart proverbs, offer advice, give divinations.
Or drink rum and smoke cigars. Manuel is fond of both.
"He will have the feelings of the flesh," Guelperin cautioned. "Now he has a body. Why not enjoy it?"
The people in the room fired up cigarettes in anticipation, dumping ashes in coconut shells strewn about the floor. A yellowing sign in a nearby corner warned in Spanish: "The management is not responsible for accidents occurred in this establishment."
A Growing Religion
Guelperin refers to himself as a warlock, a medium in touch with the "cosmic world," a lover of all religions and traditions. But he mostly identifies with Santeria, which has grown in the United States in recent decades. The estimates of Santeria adherents in the United States range from 1 million to 5 million, most of them concentrated in heavily Latino cities such as Miami, New York and Los Angeles.
The religion is edging closer to the mainstream, showing up on college syllabi, in museums and in popular songs and music videos. Some aspects are beginning to appeal to non-Latinos, such as Olga the Russian immigrant.
Santeria is practiced in homes and in an increasing number of botanicas, such as El Congo Manuel, sandwiched between Pizza Loca and Pupuseria Loca in a Hollywood strip mall. The shops are one-stop spiritual markets that sell statuettes, oils, candles, herbs and other objects.
A botanica often feels like a cross between a cramped Catholic rectory in rural Latin America, a kitschy Halloween store and maybe a well-worn private TV den in Maywood. Botanicas almost always smell of fresh incense and dead wood.
At El Congo Manuel, the price for small items, such as figurines or special crystals, start at a few dollars. Services such as seances at which Manuel appears or limpias (spiritual cleansings), can cost several hundred dollars.
Guelperin charges far more, although he won't say exactly how much, to initiate someone into Santeria.
The rituals, which can involve the sacrifice of animals, sometimes take place in canyons, forests and near sources of natural water. For years, law enforcement officials wondered if they might be seeing evidence of foul play when they came across the remains of Santeria rituals.
Things took a turn in 1993, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, a Santeria congregation in Hialeah, Fla., was within its rights under the 1st Amendment in sacrificing animals.
In his own work in Los Angeles and in Cuba, where he travels often for Santeria initiations, Guelperin said he has sacrificed "chickens, roosters, pigeons, quails, goats, she-goats, rams and guinea hens."
He is aware that such practices pose a public relations problem for Santeria.
"There is a difference between a killing, a destruction of life with no purpose, and a ritualistic sacrifice," he said. "A killing is a destruction of life with no purpose. A sacrifice is an offering to God, to a higher being, and it's written in the Bible, in the Koran, Abraham was ready to sacrifice his own child."
Fraudulent mediums and botanica owners have been known to cheat or abuse gullible customers.
In cases in Los Angeles and Chicago, "faith healers" sexually abused young women in exchange for treating ill relatives. In 1994, the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services issued a warning against "rattlesnake capsules" which were being sold in botanicas as treatments for acne, cancer and blood disorders. The capsules also apparently carried a strain of salmonella and were blamed for three deaths.
Donald Cosentino, a UCLA folklore professor recently awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to write a book about Guelperin and Manuel, says he has never felt the priest to be a trickster.
Guelperin routinely channels Manuel at Cosentino's lectures at UCLA, the professor said. "Obviously, [the African traditions] work," Cosentino said. "How they work, that's for other people to worry about."
Guelperin acknowledges the existence of unscrupulous santeros. "We're human, like everyone else."
Learning the Craft
Tall and physically imposing, Guelperin guides customers to his office, where he sits behind a narrow desk, lights a Cuban cigar and gives advice via allegory and idiom.
He says he was born with spiritual powers, but didn't realize it until he was 7 years old and a dead aunt appeared before him in his bedroom in Buenos Aires.
Guelperin was able to describe to his mother the dress his aunt wore when she was buried — 10 years before Guelperin's birth.
His father took him to psychiatrists. His mother dragged him to the Escuela Cientifíca Basilio, a spiritualist school in the Argentine capital. He went seven days a week, after regular school, for about eight years.
Before long, neighbors and then strangers began calling at the Guelperins' door, requesting an audience with the young boy who they had heard could connect with the spirit world.
As a teenager, Guelperin grew restless. He said he worked, traveled the world and partied, all the while keeping his spiritual powers in practice and developing clients.
By the 1980s, he was a club promoter living well in Sherman Oaks. Then, Guelperin said, an orisha named Obatala reached him and signaled that his wild nightlife was over.
"I'm fighting with the spirit," Guelperin recalled. "I'm making $10,000 a month, I'm enjoying myself tremendously in the nightclub business. Do you think I want to leave all of this to sit in my house to see who wants to have a reading?"
But the calling was too strong, he said.
He sold his house, went to Cuba to be initiated as a Santeria priest and returned to open El Congo Manuel on Santa Monica Boulevard, where he's done business since 1990.
Today Guelperin lives modestly — except for his 2005 Chevrolet SSR, so bright and yellow that it routinely attracts bees.
Prostitutes, transvestites, day laborers, AIDS patients, studio executives, B-list actors, some elected officials — Guelperin says they all come to him when traditional religions and houses of worship don't seem to deliver on matters of health, the heart and the competitive game of modern life.
Some of his elaborate prescriptions involve dead animals, obscure roots and the mystical weight of digits, weather, daylight and earth.
The other day while Guelperin did an interview and took a telephone call, a client waited for word on what to do with the vegetables used in an earlier ritual.
"Get the eggplants," Guelperin said to his assistant. "Take the flags out, and give [them] to her and she has to take [them] to a forest."
That seemed to make sense to the client.
Seance
As the seance for Olga got underway at El Congo Manuel, the participants were instructed to dip their fingers in a heavy bowl filled with a thin, bluish liquid and white flower petals. By sprinkling the liquid over their faces, necks and arms, the participants clear away "radiation from the streets," Guelperin explained.
He sat in a high wooden chair with a purple cushion, "Manuel's chair," and in a flat monotone began reading prayers in Spanish from a tattered book. Intermittently, he spat rum on the floor on all four sides of him. He pounded his cane nine times against the linoleum.
Then suddenly, a grunt. Guelperin's eyes narrowed and his pupils rolled back. A deep, low cackle rose from his throat. His right foot arched and twisted about.
Manuel had "arrived."
Assistants moved chairs and clutter out of his way. Guelperin removed his right shoe and sock — the spirit, he explains, still fights discomfort from the time a slave master in Cuba cut his foot to prevent his repeated escapes. He leaned against the cane. He sipped rum. He spoke through the right side of his mouth in a mix of Spanish and Lukumi, a dialect closely tied to Santeria, which assistants helped translate.
Then Manuel got down to business. To people he had seen before, the spirit offered terse prescriptions for their recurring dilemmas. One woman was instructed to make a small hole in the skin of a watermelon, burn a candle in it and take the fruit, once it had dried, to a hill. The woman took notes.
Among the newcomers was a young college student named Alicia.
After crudely commenting on her physical appearance, the spirit asked Alicia: Why do you cry on the inside but not on the outside?
"Because I want to be tough," Alicia said after a measured silence.
If you want to cry, cry, Manuel told her through his interpreters. If you want to scream, scream. If you want to say no, say no.
"Sometimes you're like a cigar burning on both ends," he told her, reaching out to her. Spirit and college student shook hands.
Throughout the seance, Manuel gave out more spiritual prescriptions, flirted with the women and put out a cigar on his tongue. To make a point, he sliced through the air a machete that was brought, at his request, from the store's front room.
Manuel asked if anyone else had any other questions before dismounting Guelperin.
He was asked what he missed about being physically alive.
Sex, the spirit answered, though in far more colorful terms.
"What I miss is [sex], because I liked it a lot," said Manuel, who claims to have fathered more than 100 children. "But other than that, I don't miss anything else on the earth."
Soon, Manuel was ready to go back to the spiritual plane. But apparently letting a spirit in is far easier than letting him out. Guelperin's body contorted violently. He screamed and shot up from Manuel's chair, his face red and sweating. Assistants held him in place.
And after a few moments, Guelperin was sitting again, breathing heavily, looking slightly dazed.
"If there isn't something real in all this … then I'm a real nut job," he said with a chuckle.
Olga, the young woman seeking Manuel's help, did not get the answers she had sought. Manuel told her that only her spirits could reveal themselves to her. She would have other opportunities, he assured her. Manuel is always available.
Before closing his botanica on a recent night, after another long day of selling spiritual objects and taking calls from clients, Guelperin seemed aware that some reflection — and self-explanation — was in order.
A sage-looking mannequin of Manuel sits in the storefront window. Certificates noting Guelperin's membership in several local business groups collect dust on the walls. Traffic blurred past on Santa Monica Boulevard.
"I am who I am," Guelperin said, reflecting on topics such as the death of Pope John Paul II and the rise of evangelical Christianity.
"I'm not looking for followers. I don't want to build a huge church, I'm not a messenger," Guelperin said. "I'm just a poor schnook in the middle of Hollywood in a funky store who [tries] to talk to people."
And what of those who might call his work a sham, or worse?
"To each his own."
Monday, July 18, 2005
Santeria in Cuba: Orula, Babalao, YCA
washingtonpost.com
Letter From Cuba
Island Of Faith; As Havana's Fortunes Fall, Yoruba's Prayers Are Rising Up
By Eugene Robinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 20, 2000; C01
GUANABACOA, Cuba –– The babalawo is in. Step this way; he will see you now.
Seventy-five years old, but with a teenager's bright and darting eyes, Jose Lino has been a babalawo--a priest in the Afro-Cuban religion--for three decades. He certainly looks the part as he sits there in his easy chair, carefully sizing you up. He is shirtless and barefoot, his skin a walnut brown, his hair nearly white, his face deeply lined. You'd expect a prophet who wandered in the desert for 40 years to come out looking exactly like Jose Lino. Except for those lively eyes: This is not a prophet who condemns the world, but one who celebrates it.
Across the tiny living room is a framed picture of a Caucasian, airbrushed Jesus with flowing hair and a copiously bleeding heart. In the middle of the floor, like an altar, sits a round table with a child's black baby doll positioned in the center.
But this room is just for sitting and talking, for greeting the many supplicants who drop by. When it is time for the actual reading--the session when he tells you who you are and what will be--Jose Lino takes you into a back room that seems more workshop than sanctuary, unadorned and filled with so much random clutter that you hardly notice the modest little shrine assembled in one corner. He is efficient and practical as he consults the oracle Orula, methodically going about his business while an assistant, one of his sons, takes careful notes.
"Pray to Chango. Ask Chango to take care of your needs," he finally says. "But please, don't be a fanatic about it. Don't be one of those people who stand on the corner and say, 'Chango, help me cross the street.' No, this is for big things. Ask him for things that matter, like health. After all, if you have money but you do not have health, then you're still poor."
When he is done, the babalawo offers you a bit of rum. Then he tells you to wait a second while he walks down the street to a weed-choked hillside, where he uses a long blade to lop off a few branches of an herb called "paradise." It looks like a close cousin to poison ivy. "This would be good to bathe with," he says. "It might help. It couldn't hurt."
The Afro-Cuban religion that most Americans know as Santeria is an everyday fact of life in Cuba, a constant presence as commonplace as potholed streets, afternoon thunderstorms or the laughter of children heading home from school.
First let's deal with the exotica: Yes, the occasional animal sacrifice is involved. But doing horrible things to a chicken or a goat (no worse, believers argue, than the horrors that meat-eaters vicariously inflict on the animal kingdom every day) is required only for certain ceremonies. The day-in, day-out practice of the religion is much more prosaic, taking place inside one's own home, quietly and reverentially, in the form of a conversation with the orishas, or guardians.
The religion, which comes from the Yoruba culture in what is now Nigeria, is as old as the hills. What's new is that here in Cuba the religion is striving to become more African, to connect more firmly with its ancient roots--and that more and more Cubans, in a time of economic crisis and wrenching change, have become believers.
The collapse of the Cuban economy in the early 1990s, after the disintegration of the country's Eastern Bloc sponsors, meant more than just a drastic fall in virtually every Cuban's standard of living. It was also a profound psychological shock. People needed to be comforted, needed to find answers.
"Are there more believers in this period of crisis? I think obviously yes," says Rafael Robaina, a researcher at the Center of Anthropology in Havana who specializes in the faith that most people here call "Regla de Ocha" ("Rule of the Guardians") or simply "the Yoruba religion."
"Man tends to want to believe when he sees his life falling apart," Robaina says. "He tends to want superhuman intervention."
Though not usually thought of in these terms, the religion of the orishas is one of the significant faiths of the New World. It is practiced not only by many Cubans and some other Caribbean islanders, but also by tens of millions of Brazilians. (In Brazil it is called Candomble or macumba,, and the rites and liturgy are somewhat different.)
Experts on the faith say it is on the rise in the United States, especially in cities with large Caribbean immigrant communities such as Miami and New York. Like every religion with such widespread appeal and staying power, it has a well-elaborated theology, a powerful mythology and a set of workable prescriptions for how to integrate spirituality with daily life.
The faith is a syncretism of beliefs held by West African slaves and the Roman Catholicism of the slave masters who brought them here. As it is practiced in Cuba, each of the many orishas--who are lesser deities, depicted in human form--is associated with a specific Catholic saint. For example, the warrior Chango, who rules lightning and thunder and virility, is equated with Saint Barbara; Eleggua, a messenger with dominion over roads and doors, is linked to Saint Anthony. The most devout believers undergo a three-month initiation--dressing all in white and observing certain proscriptions--to dedicate themselves to a particular orisha, who then enters the person's life and becomes a constant presence, almost an alter ego.
While the orishas are revered, there is but one supreme being--Olodumare, creator of the universe. Olodumare is always depicted in the abstract, a recognition that the infinite is by definition indescribable.
To believers, the orishas offer self-knowledge, guidance and support. The orishas are represented by statues; believers offer them prayers, much as Roman Catholics pray to the saints, but also place before them gifts of food and, during certain ceremonies, make animal sacrifice. The orisha acts as a protector, helping the believer make his way past the dangers and uncertainties of life. Through the babalawo, the believer can have his questions answered--from the specific ("Should I marry my girlfriend?") to the cosmic ("What is the purpose of my life?").
There was a time when, at least in Cuba, the religion was practiced mostly behind closed doors. Before the Cuban revolution, the authorities and the Catholic Church discouraged the faith as a pagan cult. After Fidel Castro took over in 1959, things loosened up, but only to a degree. Religion was not in accord with the Communist ideology of the Soviet era, and anyone who displayed open signs of belief in Regla de Ocha was limiting his career prospects--as well as perhaps inviting unwelcome government scrutiny.
Nowadays, though, everywhere you turn in Havana you see someone wearing a beaded bracelet or necklace or some other sign of the Yoruba faith--not only in places like Guanabacoa, where the babalawo Jose Lino lives, a gritty suburb long known as a center of the faith, but also on university campuses and in office buildings. Many Cuban homes announce the householder's adherence with a little shrine to an orisha just inside the front door, on the right. The lyrics of Cuban popular songs are rife with references and appeals to the orishas--and indeed, many of the musicians are believers.
The change is partly due to the fact that the Cuban government is now more tolerant of religion in general--there is no stigma attached to spiritual belief, although government officials do not go around wearing beaded bracelets. Another factor, clearly, is the economic situation.
A third factor, much more difficult to quantify, has to do with the Yoruba faith's significance as an expression of blackness--not as something that belongs exclusively to black Cubans, since many whites also believe and practice, but as an expression of Cuba's African heritage. Evidence of this shift lies in the fact that despite leaving the old continent centuries ago, the faith is now trying to return to its deepest roots, trying to become explicitly more African.
There is, in the religion of the orishas, a traditional New Year's ceremony. It was always performed in Cuba at the end of December, but these days more and more Cubans are staging the ceremony midyear, on June 30. The summer observance has become fashionable because that's the way they do it in Nigeria.
That kind of overtly African influence has been streaming into the faith in recent years. In 1991, after nearly 15 years of stony silence in the face of many petitions, the government granted permission for formation of the Yoruba Cultural Association of Cuba. Early this year, the group renovated and moved into a building in downtown Havana, where it has opened a museum and shrine of the faith.
"This is one of the oldest religions in the world," says Antonio Castaneda, president of the association. "I thought we would never get to this point. You find believers now who are doctors, lawyers, professionals. . . . The president of Nigeria has visited and he was impressed with what we're doing."
Castaneda says he "had the luck to speak with Fidel" and asked him for help in putting the center together. Castro replied that he couldn't donate government funds, but "he said he would make sure the banks lent us the money." The Cuban president kept his promise, and the banks obliged. There was still a bit of government ambivalence, however--the center had been open for six months, but the state-run news media had yet to announce its existence.
The center's main attraction is a museum of the orishas, a grand, light-filled space lined with heroic statues of about 30 of the deities in settings that reflect their mythological life stories. The statue of Yemanya, the goddess of the sea, for example, is posed in front of a painted seascape.
Olodumare is represented by a spill of glittering white fabric. The other orishas are shown as human, specifically African--they have African hair and features and wear African clothing. "This is a defense of negritude," Castaneda says. "The orishas are not just gods, they are black gods. We feel that nobody who truly is ready to accept black gods can be racist."
Rafael Robaina, the anthropologist who studies Regla de Ocha, is tall, thin, brown-skinned, intense, outgoing, generous and brilliant. He is 31 years old and can quote Claude Levi-Strauss and the crudest Cuban popular slang in the same sentence, can make the most obscure and unruly statistics dance obediently in support of an argument, can talk with erudition and insight about almost anything. He also has an orange-and-green beaded bracelet on his wrist.
"That signifies Mano de Orula," he says. "Yes, I am religious. I am a believer."
Tell us about that.
"When I was very young, I was ill. Very ill. I became interested in the religion then, much more than my parents were. It was hard at times, being religious. That wasn't expected of someone who was serious about academics. It was even discouraged. But my interest in the religion just deepened. . . .
"It is an anthropocentric religion, meaning it puts man at the center of the universe. Man lives and dies, and all existence is within that space. There is no before and no after. It is about living, and about living according to your individual way of life.
"It isn't a church. It doesn't have canonical clarity, it doesn't have organization. There is no church at the center of the religion. It puts man and his way of life at the center. It puts great importance on the need for everyone to express individuality and respect individuality. . . . And it's not only a matter of just believing. Music, chants and ceremonies that must be performed are also important. It isn't exclusive. Anyone is welcome. . . .
"The truth is that we [in my religious community] are a bit upset these days, a bit in a state of turmoil. Our babalawo recently died. He was a great man, the man who initiated me and took me through every stage. Now our community is a bit at sea. It is so difficult to find someone who truly has the gift. What do we do?
"Mano de Orula is a three-day ceremony that I went through. That is what the bracelet means. It is a process in which you find out your own individual destiny. You find out what your individual life is about, what it means, and then how you should live to fulfill that specific destiny. The answers are different for every person.
"It gives me great confidence and well-being to know how my life should be and how I should live it.
"In this religion, the real god is man."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Letter From Cuba
Island Of Faith; As Havana's Fortunes Fall, Yoruba's Prayers Are Rising Up
By Eugene Robinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 20, 2000; C01
GUANABACOA, Cuba –– The babalawo is in. Step this way; he will see you now.
Seventy-five years old, but with a teenager's bright and darting eyes, Jose Lino has been a babalawo--a priest in the Afro-Cuban religion--for three decades. He certainly looks the part as he sits there in his easy chair, carefully sizing you up. He is shirtless and barefoot, his skin a walnut brown, his hair nearly white, his face deeply lined. You'd expect a prophet who wandered in the desert for 40 years to come out looking exactly like Jose Lino. Except for those lively eyes: This is not a prophet who condemns the world, but one who celebrates it.
Across the tiny living room is a framed picture of a Caucasian, airbrushed Jesus with flowing hair and a copiously bleeding heart. In the middle of the floor, like an altar, sits a round table with a child's black baby doll positioned in the center.
But this room is just for sitting and talking, for greeting the many supplicants who drop by. When it is time for the actual reading--the session when he tells you who you are and what will be--Jose Lino takes you into a back room that seems more workshop than sanctuary, unadorned and filled with so much random clutter that you hardly notice the modest little shrine assembled in one corner. He is efficient and practical as he consults the oracle Orula, methodically going about his business while an assistant, one of his sons, takes careful notes.
"Pray to Chango. Ask Chango to take care of your needs," he finally says. "But please, don't be a fanatic about it. Don't be one of those people who stand on the corner and say, 'Chango, help me cross the street.' No, this is for big things. Ask him for things that matter, like health. After all, if you have money but you do not have health, then you're still poor."
When he is done, the babalawo offers you a bit of rum. Then he tells you to wait a second while he walks down the street to a weed-choked hillside, where he uses a long blade to lop off a few branches of an herb called "paradise." It looks like a close cousin to poison ivy. "This would be good to bathe with," he says. "It might help. It couldn't hurt."
The Afro-Cuban religion that most Americans know as Santeria is an everyday fact of life in Cuba, a constant presence as commonplace as potholed streets, afternoon thunderstorms or the laughter of children heading home from school.
First let's deal with the exotica: Yes, the occasional animal sacrifice is involved. But doing horrible things to a chicken or a goat (no worse, believers argue, than the horrors that meat-eaters vicariously inflict on the animal kingdom every day) is required only for certain ceremonies. The day-in, day-out practice of the religion is much more prosaic, taking place inside one's own home, quietly and reverentially, in the form of a conversation with the orishas, or guardians.
The religion, which comes from the Yoruba culture in what is now Nigeria, is as old as the hills. What's new is that here in Cuba the religion is striving to become more African, to connect more firmly with its ancient roots--and that more and more Cubans, in a time of economic crisis and wrenching change, have become believers.
The collapse of the Cuban economy in the early 1990s, after the disintegration of the country's Eastern Bloc sponsors, meant more than just a drastic fall in virtually every Cuban's standard of living. It was also a profound psychological shock. People needed to be comforted, needed to find answers.
"Are there more believers in this period of crisis? I think obviously yes," says Rafael Robaina, a researcher at the Center of Anthropology in Havana who specializes in the faith that most people here call "Regla de Ocha" ("Rule of the Guardians") or simply "the Yoruba religion."
"Man tends to want to believe when he sees his life falling apart," Robaina says. "He tends to want superhuman intervention."
Though not usually thought of in these terms, the religion of the orishas is one of the significant faiths of the New World. It is practiced not only by many Cubans and some other Caribbean islanders, but also by tens of millions of Brazilians. (In Brazil it is called Candomble or macumba,, and the rites and liturgy are somewhat different.)
Experts on the faith say it is on the rise in the United States, especially in cities with large Caribbean immigrant communities such as Miami and New York. Like every religion with such widespread appeal and staying power, it has a well-elaborated theology, a powerful mythology and a set of workable prescriptions for how to integrate spirituality with daily life.
The faith is a syncretism of beliefs held by West African slaves and the Roman Catholicism of the slave masters who brought them here. As it is practiced in Cuba, each of the many orishas--who are lesser deities, depicted in human form--is associated with a specific Catholic saint. For example, the warrior Chango, who rules lightning and thunder and virility, is equated with Saint Barbara; Eleggua, a messenger with dominion over roads and doors, is linked to Saint Anthony. The most devout believers undergo a three-month initiation--dressing all in white and observing certain proscriptions--to dedicate themselves to a particular orisha, who then enters the person's life and becomes a constant presence, almost an alter ego.
While the orishas are revered, there is but one supreme being--Olodumare, creator of the universe. Olodumare is always depicted in the abstract, a recognition that the infinite is by definition indescribable.
To believers, the orishas offer self-knowledge, guidance and support. The orishas are represented by statues; believers offer them prayers, much as Roman Catholics pray to the saints, but also place before them gifts of food and, during certain ceremonies, make animal sacrifice. The orisha acts as a protector, helping the believer make his way past the dangers and uncertainties of life. Through the babalawo, the believer can have his questions answered--from the specific ("Should I marry my girlfriend?") to the cosmic ("What is the purpose of my life?").
There was a time when, at least in Cuba, the religion was practiced mostly behind closed doors. Before the Cuban revolution, the authorities and the Catholic Church discouraged the faith as a pagan cult. After Fidel Castro took over in 1959, things loosened up, but only to a degree. Religion was not in accord with the Communist ideology of the Soviet era, and anyone who displayed open signs of belief in Regla de Ocha was limiting his career prospects--as well as perhaps inviting unwelcome government scrutiny.
Nowadays, though, everywhere you turn in Havana you see someone wearing a beaded bracelet or necklace or some other sign of the Yoruba faith--not only in places like Guanabacoa, where the babalawo Jose Lino lives, a gritty suburb long known as a center of the faith, but also on university campuses and in office buildings. Many Cuban homes announce the householder's adherence with a little shrine to an orisha just inside the front door, on the right. The lyrics of Cuban popular songs are rife with references and appeals to the orishas--and indeed, many of the musicians are believers.
The change is partly due to the fact that the Cuban government is now more tolerant of religion in general--there is no stigma attached to spiritual belief, although government officials do not go around wearing beaded bracelets. Another factor, clearly, is the economic situation.
A third factor, much more difficult to quantify, has to do with the Yoruba faith's significance as an expression of blackness--not as something that belongs exclusively to black Cubans, since many whites also believe and practice, but as an expression of Cuba's African heritage. Evidence of this shift lies in the fact that despite leaving the old continent centuries ago, the faith is now trying to return to its deepest roots, trying to become explicitly more African.
There is, in the religion of the orishas, a traditional New Year's ceremony. It was always performed in Cuba at the end of December, but these days more and more Cubans are staging the ceremony midyear, on June 30. The summer observance has become fashionable because that's the way they do it in Nigeria.
That kind of overtly African influence has been streaming into the faith in recent years. In 1991, after nearly 15 years of stony silence in the face of many petitions, the government granted permission for formation of the Yoruba Cultural Association of Cuba. Early this year, the group renovated and moved into a building in downtown Havana, where it has opened a museum and shrine of the faith.
"This is one of the oldest religions in the world," says Antonio Castaneda, president of the association. "I thought we would never get to this point. You find believers now who are doctors, lawyers, professionals. . . . The president of Nigeria has visited and he was impressed with what we're doing."
Castaneda says he "had the luck to speak with Fidel" and asked him for help in putting the center together. Castro replied that he couldn't donate government funds, but "he said he would make sure the banks lent us the money." The Cuban president kept his promise, and the banks obliged. There was still a bit of government ambivalence, however--the center had been open for six months, but the state-run news media had yet to announce its existence.
The center's main attraction is a museum of the orishas, a grand, light-filled space lined with heroic statues of about 30 of the deities in settings that reflect their mythological life stories. The statue of Yemanya, the goddess of the sea, for example, is posed in front of a painted seascape.
Olodumare is represented by a spill of glittering white fabric. The other orishas are shown as human, specifically African--they have African hair and features and wear African clothing. "This is a defense of negritude," Castaneda says. "The orishas are not just gods, they are black gods. We feel that nobody who truly is ready to accept black gods can be racist."
Rafael Robaina, the anthropologist who studies Regla de Ocha, is tall, thin, brown-skinned, intense, outgoing, generous and brilliant. He is 31 years old and can quote Claude Levi-Strauss and the crudest Cuban popular slang in the same sentence, can make the most obscure and unruly statistics dance obediently in support of an argument, can talk with erudition and insight about almost anything. He also has an orange-and-green beaded bracelet on his wrist.
"That signifies Mano de Orula," he says. "Yes, I am religious. I am a believer."
Tell us about that.
"When I was very young, I was ill. Very ill. I became interested in the religion then, much more than my parents were. It was hard at times, being religious. That wasn't expected of someone who was serious about academics. It was even discouraged. But my interest in the religion just deepened. . . .
"It is an anthropocentric religion, meaning it puts man at the center of the universe. Man lives and dies, and all existence is within that space. There is no before and no after. It is about living, and about living according to your individual way of life.
"It isn't a church. It doesn't have canonical clarity, it doesn't have organization. There is no church at the center of the religion. It puts man and his way of life at the center. It puts great importance on the need for everyone to express individuality and respect individuality. . . . And it's not only a matter of just believing. Music, chants and ceremonies that must be performed are also important. It isn't exclusive. Anyone is welcome. . . .
"The truth is that we [in my religious community] are a bit upset these days, a bit in a state of turmoil. Our babalawo recently died. He was a great man, the man who initiated me and took me through every stage. Now our community is a bit at sea. It is so difficult to find someone who truly has the gift. What do we do?
"Mano de Orula is a three-day ceremony that I went through. That is what the bracelet means. It is a process in which you find out your own individual destiny. You find out what your individual life is about, what it means, and then how you should live to fulfill that specific destiny. The answers are different for every person.
"It gives me great confidence and well-being to know how my life should be and how I should live it.
"In this religion, the real god is man."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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