Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
By
A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
2012
ABSTRACT
By
being African includes an understanding that they are the ritual descendants and
show how practitioners’ use of natural elements from forested spaces of Oriente, along
with artifacts from Cuba’s colonial history, allows them to create and maintain a religious
genealogy that positions spirits, particularly colonial Africans, as significant others. Such
activities assist Palo practitioners’ creation of their “African” identity that is born out of
also give credibility to the local idiom “Oriente is the land of the dead” because this
particular location contains skeletal remains of the colonial dead as well as the site of
(confidanza) set the parameters of how Palo supplicants lived an “African” life style.
Secondly, Palo worshipers’ engagement of African spirits was central to their
religious family genealogy inclusive of spirits presented alternative achieves from which
Departed members of the Roberts, Johnson, Douglas, Malone, and Kirkpatrick families
James Isabella
Levi Isaac
Zoya Vivian
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would not have been able to complete this work without the sustained faith,
Dodson and Mindy Morgan. Similarly, I thank committee members James Pritchett and
Heather Howard for lending their expertise to the project and for bringing me through
she identified my ability to think critically many years ago, and encouraged me to find
I am grateful to the late Harriette Pipes McAdoo and Susan Applegate Krouse,
committee members who have passed on since guiding me through the earlier portions
of my degree programs, but whose spiritual presence and legacies remain part of me as
a scholar. To Professor Emeritus Charles H. Long, thank you for sustaining my ideas
and excitement about “worrying questions,” and for helping me identify “that I liked
This work and the ideas developed within it would not have been possible without
the steadfast care and steadfast commitment of the faculty and staff of Casa del Caribe.
Their sharing of expertise and encouragement for my scholarly development over the
years has made the difference in how I move forward in the struggle of ideas.
To the extended households and families of Señora Suri, Señor Juancho, and
Señora Norma, my appreciation for how you continually opened your hearts and homes
to me goes beyond expression and I gratefully remain in your debt. My friends Miguielito
and Adria made me a home away from home and provided specialized living support
v
and loyal collegiality to ensure that I could carry out my studies in a focused manner
“without pain” or worry. The family of Señora Rosira, and Roxanna also made me
welcome in their home and provided insightful conversation while I collected the data.
Anthropology and African American & African Studies. Your words of encouragement,
gifts of food, and constant companionship have seen me through. Without my stalwart
companions as well as mentors on the African Atlantic Research Team, particularly Mrs.
Flora Gilford, Sheryll White, Diana Lachatanere, Alyce Emory, and Dr. Montgomery,
who saw me through the thick, thin and everything in between, my moving through the
and their life partners, DJ and Laura, Lori and Douglas, Natasha, Frank, Micah and Joel,
and to my nephew and niece, James and Isabella Burrell, thank you for always
gatherings. I thank you most of all for always believing that I could do this. This work is
for you. To Karla Johnson, words are insufficient to capture your dedication and care,
and the encouraging vigil you held from beginning to end. You have always been
present, and I thank you. Finally, to my editor Lorelei Laird, I owe you a debt of gratitude
for your painstaking labor of bringing out the nuances of my work through your diligent
several generous fellowships from Michigan State University, including the Summer
Retention Fellowship, Grants from the Graduate School, an NSF- Culture, Resources
vi
and Power Fellowship through the Department of Anthropology, and Tinker Field
Research Grants. The dissertation research was made possible through funding from
the TIAA-CREF Ruth Simms Hamilton Research Fellowship, The Martin Luther King-
Cesar Chavéz-Rosa Parks Future Faculty Fellowship, and the NSF-Alliances for
Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) Research Fellowship, MSU chapter.
While there are many who influenced and assisted me in the writing process, any
vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF TABLES………………………………………………………………………………ix
LIST OF FIGURES………………………………..……………………………………………x
GLOSSARY OF TERMS………………………………...…………………………………….xi
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………..1
CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSIONS…………………….……………………………………….154
APPENDIX….…...…………………………..……………………………………………….160
BIBLIOGRAPHY…..……………………..……………………………………………….…163
viii
LIST OF TABLES
ix
LIST OF FIGURES
x
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
Auxiliary: Spirit entity responsible for ushering in other spirits into a supplicant’s body.
Baety: Large public square within a Taíno village located in front of a cacica or
cacique’s domicile used for public religious and political activities.
Cazuela: terracotta bowls or small iron cauldrons containing many of the same
elements as an nganga, serving as “houses” for African spirits.
Congo: Spirit of an African individual imported to Cuba from the regions now known as
Angola, Gabon, Congo, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
De Sao: Forested spaces that contain the plants, animals, and soil practitioners’ harvest
to use to construct sacred spaces and use in ritual activities. Location of the Other
World.
Guide: A spirit responsible for assisting supplicants with daily as well as long-term life
decisions and behaviors affecting their overall spiritual well-being.
Hijado/a: A male or female initiate of a Cuban religious tradition under the spiritual
protection of a senior female or male member or spiritual eader in the community.
xi
Ifá: The fraternity of male priests consecrated to communicate and translate the “total
knowledge” contained within the Odú sacred text.
Ignecios: Sugar plantations, which increased presence and production within Cuba
after the Haitian Revolution in the early 1800s. French creole planters fled to Cuba
before and during the uprising, bringing with them technology to bolster Cuba’s sugar
production for North America and Europe.
Madre Nganga/Madre Nkisi: A female who has mastered the ritual knowledge and
protocols to engage spirits through the use on an nganga.
Muerto: The spirit of an individual who once lived and died within Cuba. Has its own
social biography, which it communicates to living individuals.
Ndokis: Ancestral spirits of those who once lived in the material world of humans but
are not individually known or remembered by living individuals. This category of spirits is
made up of entities that have transitioned to the divine Other World.
Nfumbi: Spirits of individuals who have died but have biographies known by living
persons.
Nganga: The consecrated central ritual element within Regla Palo Monte, contained
within a cast-iron cauldron holding mkisi brought together to respond to a supernatural
spirit force affiliated with a naturally occurring phenomenon.
Nkisi: Material objects and substances that contain concentrated power from a
Supreme Creative Force, drawn from nature or manufactured objects associated with
the social history of Cuba.
xii
Prenda: The primary assistant and messenger spirit of an nganga’s central spirit. The
prenda is responsible to carrying out tasks that the nganga spirit may assign to aid the
worship community.
Protector: Spirit responsible for offering physical and spiritual protection for a
practitioner.
TaTa Nganga: A male individual who has mastered special designated abilities to
initiate, facilitate, and interpret communication with and from spirits through the use of
an nganga.
xiii
INTRODUCTION
1
Beginnings
It was hot and the air thick as the interview got under way. We were in Santiago
1
de Cuba, right before the annual Carnaval season would take hold of the city for two
weeks of celebration. Five student members of the African Atlantic Research Team
(AART) of Michigan State University had come to observe an interview between the
2
Team’s director and Felipe , a practitioner of one of Cuba’s distinct religious traditions,
Palo Monte/Mayombe. Felipe was a soft-spoken man in his early thirties, who had been
practicing Palo for some 25 years, and had been apprenticing with one of the leading
Palo households in the eastern/Oriente region. Everyone sat attentive in a large living
room; window slats were turned down in vain to keep out the noonday heat while a
freestanding fan pushed that same hot air around the room.
The second hour into the interview, AART students were able to ask questions of
Felipe related to our particular research interests. At the time, I was focused on Palo
influences in Carnaval. I had heard about the contemporary and historic aspects of
Carnaval within Cuba, with an emphasis on Santiago de Cuba. I had also become
familiar with pieces that engaged Carnaval celebrations as opportunities for social
inversion, which allowed the underclasses and disenfranchised to have periods of time
when normative social hierarchies were blurred. I combined these understandings with
season and surmised that aspects of Cuba’s African inspired religious traditions
1
This is the Spanish spelling of carnival.
2
All names of interviewees have been changed to ensure confidentiality. Felipe was
involved in pre-dissertation research activities, however unavailable to continue
throughout the study.
2
influenced dance movements, adornment practices, and musical presentations that
From what I had read and observed I assumed that connections between
Carnaval in Santiago and the religious practice of Palo Monte could provide me with an
interesting research question. I nervously asked Felipe what influences Palo had on
Carnaval. He quickly responded that each person brought his or her own
and there was no overarching influence from that one religious practice alone shaped
the centuries-old celebrations. I was shocked and rather crestfallen to hear that what I
had thought would be a researchable question made no sense to participants in the site.
People did not live the way I had come to think. As Felipe’s answer begun to settle in I
was certain I heard my question shatter like glass against the linoleum tile. Almost
devastated and rather despondent, I sulked as I followed Felipe and the other AART
students through the streets of Santiago seeing how Carnaval preparations were
developing. We were treated to small cones of ice cream as we meandered through city
streets, watching the transformations for the festivities. Kiosks were erected from fresh
cut wood and palm leaves, parade review stands were methodically constructed for
evening parade activities, and vendors lined the streets selling brightly colored toys and
gazed out over the crowded streets. He said, “Oriente is the land of the dead.” The
remark reverberated in my ears, especially because several days earlier a male elder of
the practitioner’s Palo community had said the same thing: “Oriente is the land of the
3
dead,” he said after he had prostrated himself before the ritual elements of the Palo
Felipe why that particular phrase he shrugged his shoulders saying, “it has to do with
the Vodú coming into the east [Oriente].” He said no more and we walked on. I was
intrigued, why would a location be known for its relationship with the dead? Six years
3
later, Eva , one of the senior female leaders and member of the worship community,
explained that when people joined the religious community, they become family
members to the dead of the Palo worship community because, “without the dead, we
are nothing” (Johnson 2009). The following study seeks to unpack the dead as
3
All Palo worshipers of the case study are identified by pseudonyms. See the spirit
genealogy in Chapter 5, Figure 7, and Appendix for details.
4
Introduction
demonstrate how Palo supplicants’ identity is based upon the comprehension that they
are the inheritors of sacred ritual knowledge from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
sustain their “African way of life” through ongoing engagement of spirit beings,
particularly, “African” spirits, to negotiate positions of social marginality within the island
nation.
As the above field account suggests, the dissertation research question evolved
from experiences within the site where individuals consistently spoke of the deceased
and spirits in ways that suggested that these entities were more than a passive
presence in humans’ daily reality; these non-human entities were active members of
interview that “[spirits] walk with you everywhere,” while interviewee Sophia, the
matriarch of the community and mother of Antonio, one of the community’s male
leaders affirmed that “everyone has their guide, protector, and Africans” (Johnson 2009;
Johnson 2010). Such provocative statements suggested to me that there were deeper
associations and meanings that Palo practitioners associated with spirit beings, and I
In the summer months of June and July of 2003, 2004 and 2006, I conducted
pre-dissertation field site visits to Santiago de Cuba in Oriente, Cuba. Oriente’s Palo
5
devotees consistently referred to a multiplicity of spirit beings in their sacred and daily
activities, and were explicit to include spirit actors as critical members of this type of
religious work, using familial roles to describe spirits, “my brother Pa Fransisco, my
sister Ma Rufina.” Members of the worship community also foregrounded the active
involvement with spirits-- the dead—in their daily lives, which differed considerably from
The majority of the literature I had engaged on Palo Monte was based on
accounts and understandings of how the religion was practiced in the western regions
of the country, with a particular emphasis on Havana. Those authors who have
considered the ritual complex of Palo Monte have meticulously discussed the particular
elements and processes that go into constructing the consecrated ritual element of Palo
Monte, an nganga. The ritual language of the tradition has also garnered much attention,
as has the distinctiveness of the religious activities of Palo devotees (Cabrera 1986;
Bolívar Arostegui and Villegas 1998). Works that are more recent have sought to
engage Palo within the context of the nation’s social history, and these studies have
concentrated on western portions of Cuba (Palmié 2002; Ochoa 2007; Routon 2008).
western urban locales can be extrapolated to include circumstances of the island’s other
(Lachatañeré and Ayorinde 2006). Not until recently has there is emerging literature
6
traditions outside of western locales and urban centers (Bettelheim 2001; Bettelheim
2005; Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler 2005; Mikelsons 2005; James Figarola 2006b;
James Figarola 2006a; Dodson 2008). One significant factor contributing to Oriente
Concentrated reading on Oriente revealed how this geographic location was the
original site of encounter and contact between the autochthonous Taíno AmerIndians
and Europeans in the late fifteenth century. Oriente also was the first site to receive
captive Africans early in the sixteenth century and it was the first administrative seat of
power for the island. In the third decade of the seventeenth century, the colonial
sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth. The eastern region of Cuba was also the point
abundance of historical details suggests that Oriente is especially significant for Cuba’s
project of sovereignty and national identity. This holds true for African-descended
Cubans and their continuous activities of self-definition in the island nation. Oriente
offers compelling and appropriate sites for investigating religion, spirits, and self-defined
identity.
7
contemporary Cuba. Additionally, Palo is well represented in Oriente and even non-
among all of Cuba’s religious traditions. Additionally, there was prima facie pre-research
evidence that devotees of Palo appear to have sustained intricate relationships with
spirits, and undertake extensive actions to engage these entities in daily activities, and
consult spirits in ceremonial settings, and involve them as intricate members of their
religious family genealogy. My question was: How was the worship family’s genealogy
was constructed and what roles did non-human entities play in practitioners’ sense of
self-identity?
Anthropology has long been concerned with cultural creations by human beings
and the meanings they associate with such social formations. The field of anthropology
comprehensions about and practices of engaging the sacred; that which is beyond
religion.
context of the academic field of African American & African Studies (AAAS), with a sub-
field interest in studies of the African Diaspora. Cuba has been a pivotal center of
colonial trade and exchange and was a definitive geographic location for the distribution
of enslaved Africans that created the Atlantic African Diaspora. My research about
religion on the Caribbean island falls within the contours of studies treating cultural
8
practitioners’ understanding of spirits, the purposeful creation of religious family
genealogies that incorporate spirits, and the construction of self-defined identity as part
of African Diaspora phenomena. Such considerations emerging from AAAS partner well
communities.
Organization
The dissertation is organized into six chapters and the introduction. Chapter 1,
Conceptual Roots: The Literature, reviews published literature that engages topics and
issues central to the dissertation in the arenas of African Diaspora, religious activity by
history of Cuba, with a focus on the AmerIndians who inhabited the island before the
particularly in the geographic zone of Oriente. This chapter also traces how African
descendants fit into the larger social dynamic of the island nation through its
of Palo Monte/Mayombe, provides information about the spiritual and ritual foundations
of contemporary practices of Palo Monte/Mayombe that are central to the creation of the
spirit genealogy on the study community. It also covers the creation of sacred locations
where spirit interactions are negotiated and the bonds of the Palo religious family
enacted. Chapter 5, Palo Worship Community, presents the data of the case study, and
a portion of the community’s spirit genealogy based on interviews. The chapter also
9
presents the detailed meaning Palo supplicants assign to their relationships with spirit
investigating spirit beings inside religious practices within the African Diaspora.
10
CHAPTER 1:
CONCEPTUAL ROOTS: THE LITERATURE
11
[T]he story of death and slavery illustrates a premise common to many
religious worldviews, that the dead are active participants in the living
world…However, few have seriously examined the way that death shaped
daily life [in the Atlantic], or how, in the terms proposed by the psychiatrist
Robert Jay Lifton, people symbolized “continuity in the face of death” in
struggles over property, authority, morality, territory, and belonging. In
other words, we know little about how the meaning of mortality motivated
people to act or, as many would have understood then, how the dead
affected the history of the living?...In what ways (or by what means) did
people formulate their relations with the dead? How did mortuary belief
and practice respond to demographic, socioeconomic, political, and
religious changes? How were ways of relating to the dead embedded in
political conflict? (Brown 2008: 5-7).
Introduction
Vincent Brown’s emphasis on the concept and state of death in the history of the
Atlantic world identifies a pivotal element that has affected sociocultural, political, and
economic formation processes and social conditions within the Atlantic African Diaspora.
By foregrounding death and the dead, Brown draws attention to the living, their creative
actions, and responses in the face of a state of being beyond living human
comprehension. Brown’s statement provides a context for Eva’s statement, noted in the
opening ethnographic account, about how the living cannot exist disassociated from the
dead of their religious community. By emphasizing how death framed the lives of the
living within the Atlantic, Brown reveals what anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot
differential exercise of power makes some narratives possible” (Trouillot 1995: 25).
Trouillot goes on to discuss four critical stages to the production of history that
writes:
12
Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial
moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the
moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact
retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective
significance (the making of history in the final instance) (italicized in the
original, Trouillot 1995: 26).
When positioned together, Brown and Trouillot offer a way to comprehend the
African descendants as enslaved labors within the Atlantic. When practitioners engage
the dead of the Atlantic world, particularly the dead of subaltern communities, different
case in point. By reengaging the dead affiliated with the eastern landscape of Cuba
through physical products of the natural and social landscape, the levels of silencing
can be undone to reveal alternative archives that inform identity within contemporary
Cuba. The framing of Palo supplicants’ religious life in relationship to the spirits of the
dead, specifically the African dead of the east, provides the point of departure for the
review of the salient literature that informed the work of this study.
attention to the definitional components of the concept that engage the myth and/or
vision about an original homeland, and the return to that land of origin. I will relate these
two aspects to the African Diaspora, with a focus on how the original exile of Africans
shaped religious manifestations in the Caribbean, and Cuba as a site that received
thousands of Africans from multiple ethnic groupings. This discussion leads to the
literature that treats spirit engagement as part of religious practice, particularly within
13
literature review is dedicated to the making of relationships that create genealogies.’ It
will treat how understandings about genealogy inform the creation of religious family,
which relies on the dynamic interplay between humans and spirits within Palo
Diaspora
produced a group’s expulsion from their home of known origin to locations not chosen
by the exiled community, as well as the type of limitations they encountered in their new
locations. The Jewish expulsion from Babylon in the sixth century B.C.E. provides
framing of the forced movement of Africans from the continental space of Africa as a
type of diaspora first occurred during the 1965 International Congress of African
momentum in the academic discourse with African state independence movements, and
further established ways the concept of diaspora could be related to historical and
1993: 41-49).
14
particularly with the founding of the journal Diaspora in 1991 (Hu-Dehart 2005; Hua
2005; Sahoo and Maharaj 2007). In his 1991 article in the inaugural issue of Diaspora,
from other types of migratory flows. Safran’s six criteria have established standard
parameters for how academics have come to evaluate forms of coerced migration and
Safran’s baseline model proposes that a diaspora refers to when communities and/or
entire populations are forced from their land of origin, and their ties to their homeland
conversations about the intentionality behind human relocation projects. Robin Cohen
refined Safran’s parameters for defining diaspora by proposing that diasporas should be
divided into “ideal type” categories, which are “formed and mobilized in certain
circumstances” (Patterson and Kelley 2000: 11-19; Sokefeld 2004: 133-155; Cohen
2008: 16-19). In Cohen’s schema, the suggestion is that the African Diaspora can be
displacement over prolonged periods of time and within circumstances not of their
15
choosing (Cohen 2008: 40-48). The exiled communities maintain distinctive identities
that are bound to a homeland space and make them resist assimilation into normative
social patterns and roles of the host nation. Such ties to a real or imagined natal land
The concern over external alliances also can intensify host nation members’ resistance
anthropological discourse with his 1994 article, “Diasporas.” Clifford proposed that
diasporal movements are longstanding and cover a wide geographic scope. Clifford
emphasizes how diasporas ultimately reveal politicized struggles within the local or
“host” nation and the historical process of expulsion that inserted dislocated
communities into newer social spaces (Clifford 1994: 308). A significant component of
itself against the norms of the host nation-state, and the tensions that can arise between
However, what the Palo worshipers suggest is that their religious practice
an alternative understanding for how communities forced to relocate interact with native
contained within Palo drawn from the knowledge base of the Taíno and resistant
migrants from Africa, does what André Levy suggests: that in diasporic spaces,
“concepts such as ‘center’ and ‘periphery’ lose their fixed and essentialist character, for
16
they turn out to be relative, historically situated, defined, and constituted” (Levy 2000:
152). Palo practitioners blur the social boundaries of “center” and “periphery” by
understandings can be adapted and incorporated into social agents’ realities, like in the
case of the Palo worship community of this study, we must turn to history, because, “in
1992: 29). The history that shaped the religious creation of Palo Monte/Mayombe and
its impact on its observers in Oriente begins with the forced relocation of African people
to the Atlantic world. The following section focuses on the sociocultural contours of the
African Diaspora and Creative Action The African Diaspora refers to the idea
and reality of worldwide displacement of African people and their descendants. The
language also refers to a way to conceptualize and study the social processes that
created generational flows of African ethnics across multiple geographies, including the
continental space of Africa and throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Europe (Lewis
1990: 3-27; Inikori 2001: 49-75; Hamilton 2007; Zeleza 2010). However, Joseph Harris’s
1993 volume on the topic proved pivotal to reaffirming the appropriate usefulness of
African Diaspora for adequate accounting of cultural linkages between Africans within
continental spaces and for descendants throughout the globe. Harris’s work may have
been the first to propose conceptual parameters that emerged organically from the
global social and historical experiences of African descendants over time. In this fashion,
he suggested that as a theoretical tool, African Diaspora includes the voluntary and
17
involuntary dispersion of Africans throughout the globe and presents a “dynamic,
continuous, and complex phenomenon stretching across time, geography, class, and
gender” (Harris 1993: 4). This study is focused on the coerced distribution of African
people across the Atlantic Ocean to primarily serve as the enslaved labor force for
Ruth Simms Hamilton went further in visioning the global phenomenon of African
descendants disbursed over time and space. She proposed a four-part paradigmatic
model for systematically studying this diasporal group of humans. Hamilton accepted
the general assertions of Robin Cohen and William Safran, and expanded the writings
of Joseph Harris, George Shepperson, and St. Clair Drake about the depth and
expanse of the African Diaspora (Drake 1993; Harris 1993). She propositioned that the
African Diaspora is
need to go beyond the “fact-finding phase” when studying African descendants and
move beyond descriptive accounts to the difficult task of theory construction. Hamilton’s
model includes four distinct yet intersecting criteria for studying and evaluating the
variable differences among people of African descendants over time and space. Her
intent is to stimulate the creation of theory that can project and predict patterns of
behaviors in various parts of the African Diaspora. Ruth Hamilton’s African Diaspora
18
paradigm includes four fields of interconnected social relations that form core
components of analysis. The areas are: geosocial mobility and displacement; African
Hamilton’s model is particularly useful in that she employs the conceptual frame of the
Africans and their descendants were imported. Hamilton’s model provides for the
intersection of all of the “four fields of social relations,” suggesting that factors that
inform each component of the model also affect and/or overlap with the other three
fields. The two fields most useful for comprehending Palo practitioners’ creation of a
spirit genealogy and how such engagement of spirit others affects their identity within
contemporary Cuba are the second and fourth fields of relations: African Diaspora
suggesting that
For Palo practitioner of the study, Africa has symbolically been relocated to the Cuban
landscape and fused with the ancestral wisdom inherited from the autochthonous
community. The ritual knowledge current-day practitioners use to engage spirits is part
of the religious inheritance transmitted by the spirits of deceased Africans who were
19
present at the formation of alliances in Oriente between the Taíno and the imported
who struggled for self-definition and maintained their familial connection to spirits of the
the spirits of the African ancestral dead of Oriente, and the ritual wisdom of the
autochthonous stewards of the land, Palo practitioners have reimagined Africa and used
Palo to “[re]constitu[te] the religious revalorization of the land, a place where the natural
and ordinary gestures of the black man [sic] were and could be authenticated” (Long
2000: 12).
The emphasis on the social resistance for self-affirmed concepts of self and
recount its ritualistic origin stories of the coming together of Taíno and Africans in
eastern Cuba, and, significantly, discuss themselves as “Africans” within Cuba. This
their past contribut[ing] to the formation of communities of consciousness that arise out
of very particular experiences based on structural inequalities” (Hamilton 2007: 3). Palo
practitioners remember and access their narratives through spirit family creation and
engagement, even as the official records remain reluctant to engage and/or silent on the
20
historical realities that created Palo Monte/Mayombe in Oriente. While employing the
concept of the African Diaspora uncovers processes of historical fact creation, the
arenas of fact assembly and the construction of narratives within the Atlantic diaspora in
Cuba’s eastern theater can be accessed by way of engaging the literature that treats
Based on the work of Melville Herskovits that examined how African derived
cultural behaviors were “retained” among African descendants in the Americas, Sidney
Mintz and Richard Price’s 1976 treatise proposed that the “cultural transfers” of Africans
to social spaces of the New World created new ways of living. Mintz and Price
were based on “grammatical” principles, rather than the static transfer of “traits” or
“complexes” based on the assumed “cultural unity of West Africa” as Herskovits had
postulated (Yelvington 2006b: 48-50; Mintz and Price [1976] 1992: 9). In the subfield of
details about African-inspired religions, especially within the Caribbean and Brazil.
These works have made effective use of expanded understandings about the
extraction patterns of the Atlantic Slave Trade in African people, and how the
importation flows affected the constructed New World social realities (for example, see
Hall 2005; Heywood and Thornton 2007; Eltis and Richardson 2010). The dialectic
between sites of embarkation and the manifestation of certain religious practices in the
Americas has yielded significant information about religion and identity creation in the
Americas.
21
Exemplary works include the writings of J. Lorand Matory, who discussed how
Brazilian Candomblé was constantly infused with ritual information from practitioners’
ongoing transit between the Portuguese colony and Yoruba land in the mid-nineteenth
century (Matory 2005: 73-114). Stephen Palmíe offers a dense discussion about how
two of Cuba’s religious creations, Regla de Palo and Regla de Ocha/Santería, present
an interlocking moral terrain that creates new responses to the practitioner's social
national identity (Palmié 2002). The work of Ramon Ochoa continues to provide
ritual work in their lived reality, which alters their comprehension of their historical
material world (Ochoa 2007: 473-500). David Brown has produced a meticulous volume
in Cuba, with its ceremonial centers concentrated within the western region of the island
Neo-African Religions in a New World presents a collection of essays that speak to the
component within African-inspired religious practices in the Atlantic. In fact, each author
provides rich and thick descriptions of the sacred spaces of the religions they engage,
details related to supernatural spirit beings and their avatar, as well as the type of
accouterments supplicants associate with such entities. Each author also presents a
discussion about the rituals used to engage spirit beings. However, while we know how
22
spirit entities figure into these religious narratives, we do not have a firm understanding
about why other worldly entities figure so prominently within the practices of African-
inspired religions of this portion of the African Diaspora. The religious lives of Palo
practitioners offer expanded understandings about why spirit others are so significant to
their social identity; the spirits are part of a spiritual family lineage that bind practitioners
to the location. In his formative volume, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar,
Cuban scholar Don Fernando Ortiz inserts how natural elements of the land inform
Cuban social relations and cultural creations. Moreover, Ortiz captures the
African and European traditions. Ortiz termed the blending of these social actors’
lifeways as transculturation,
the highly varied phenomena that have come about in Cuba as a result of
the extremely complex transmutations of culture that have taken place [in
Cuba], and without a knowledge of which it is impossible to understand
the evolution of the Cuban folk, either in the economic or in the
institutional, legal, ethical, religious, artistic, linguistic, psychological,
sexual, or other aspects of its life. The real history of Cuba is the history of
its intermeshed transculturations (Ortiz [1947] 1995: 98).
The practice of Palo Monte/Mayombe in Oriente presents such a type of “real history” of
Cuba: however, in Palo, the archives assembled are the sacred ceremonial locations,
and the narratives revealed are the informed consultations from ancestral communities
of subalterns. Such a shifting to “revalorize” the dead and their contributions to the
religious lives of Palo practitioner gives voice to alternative ways of being Cuban that
are framed by the collaborative wisdom of the Taíno and African ethnics.
Within texts that have become foundational within African American & African
Studies, authors have placed emphasis on how principles have informed the structuring
23
of religion among African descendants, particularly in the Atlantic. Such writings lend
credence to Mintz and Price’s thesis about the “grammatical” structures that inform
sacred life among members of the Atlantic African Diaspora. Robert Farris Thompson’s
book Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy gives insightful
inspired religious practices. His detailing of the Other World of the dead in BaKongo-
inspired sacred action provides a case in point for how the principle of spirit
engagement informs the lives of the living through the employment of “spirit-embodying
materials” (Thompson [1983] 1984: 117). Drawing on the work of John Mbiti, Peter Paris
argues:
The traditions of African people both on the continent and in the diaspora
are diverse in cultural form yet united by their underlying spirituality. The
former is evidenced mainly by the differences of language and other
cultural mores. The latter is seen in the broad consensus among African
peoples that the three forms of life, namely, nature, history, and spirit are
ontologically united and hence interdependent (Paris 1995: 22).
Paris’s assessment is useful for understanding what type of principles have been
significant for the shaping of Atlantic religions among African descendants. The issues
of unity between physical and social realms of existence are useful for investigating how
the interactive accounts between Palo practitioners and their spirit familiars present
alternative archives and points of reference for their sense of identity in eastern Cuba.
spirits and with other worship community members, we can comprehend the effect on
their social identity. Family structures that include spirits, particularly ancestral Africans
24
The majority of the literature treating religion within African American & African
However, what these sources contribute to the larger discussion of religious creation
among African descendants in the Atlantic is how these social actors;’ religious spaces
and activities have served as centers of power and protest to renegotiate social power
for members of this diaspora (for example see Higginbotham 1993; Lincoln and Mamiya
1994; Dodson 2002). While Palo is not a religious tradition that enjoys the benefits and
practitioners social location at the margins of society precisely positions the religion as
offer a strong example of identity construction born out of opposition to oppression. The
making of religious families that include other worldly agents stands as a definitive
the Oriente location. What Palo in the Oriente location also represents is the type of
unsilencing that Trouillot and Long call for, a reorienting to understand alternative
their relationships with spirits, particularly the dead of Oriente, produces a new way to
consider the “making of [historical] sources; the making of archives”; the retrieval of the
facts from those archives in narratives; and the community’s retrospection and the
25
In the building of sacred spaces to engage other worldly agents, Palo worshipers
“ceremonial center” as
the site of the revelation of sacrality; it sets forth the possibility for the
effective use of space...The urban community may occupy the site of the
ceremonial center or be founded at some distance from it; in any case, the
ceremonial center is the power that generates the creation and
sustenance of every other form of the space of the urban environment…A
particular urban form identified with the ceremonial center becomes the
locus of power and thus creates all the areas around it as peripheries,
dependent upon the power of the center. The relationship between the
center and the periphery fluctuates between the centrifugal and the
centripetal dynamics of power. Power moves from the center to the
periphery and then back to the center. Power is authenticated to the
extent that it participates with the center, and all powers and meanings at
the periphery must seek their legitimatization through their participation in
the center (Long 2004: 92).
Here Long gives us a way to frame Palo worshipers use of space in their urban locale of
Los Hoyos. However, what he also brings to the fore is how the “ceremonial center”
serves as the life-force that infuses the city location with sacred power. What Palo
worshipers and others maintain is that the forested spaces of Oriente are the
ceremonial center for Cuba. The environments of Oriente are the nuclei of sacrality
because they served as the sanctuary for colonial Cuba’s subaltern agents of resistance,
who were the ritual and social ancestors of the island nation. The physical mountainous
landscape of Oriente is also the locality where the human world and Other World
converge. Palo worshipers use the flora and fauna of Oriente to construct spaces that
engage members of their spirit genealogy to access as well as replenish their identity
archive. The annals for Palo practitioners’ identity are coalesced and contained within
26
of their spirit network, Palo practitioners retrieved the narratives of their ritual ancestors
simultaneously reposition the historical narratives of the island as well as re-form the
contemporary reality of practitioners; their history, their lives are voiced and unsilenced.
In this way, “Oriente as the land of the dead” refers to how Cuba’s ancestral subaltern
are remembered; their bones, their spirits cry out and Palo worshipers receive, respond,
and create their “African” identity from these “transmissions” (Johnson 2009).
succinctly addresses how spaces, particularly urban spaces, are recruited in the service
Cities of the dead are primarily for the living. They exist not only as
artifacts, such as cemeteries and commemorative landmarks, but also as
behaviors. They endure, in other words, as occasions for memory and
invention…the memories of some particular times and places have
become embodied in and through performances (Roach 1996: xi).
Palo worshipers use their created locations of sacrality within Los Hoyos to transform
the location to enact considerations of what it means to be “African.” For Palo adherents
Genealogy
In his concluding chapter to the edited volume The Cultural Analysis of Kinship:
genealogy, stating;
27
recognized as such by members of a society under study in accordance
with their cultural criteria for doing so. Biological pedigrees may be needed
for the genetic study of inherited diseases, but they are not the
genealogies used in ethnographic practice by cultural anthropologists for
getting at principles of family and kinship organization…Indeed, one can
construct a genealogy out of any relationship that is recursively
reproduced through time (Goodenough 2001: 207).
to the ties that bind them together. While the writing of David Schneider disrupted long
held understandings and approaches to studying human connections in the 1970s, his
dismantling of kinship did underscore the need to make studies about the connections
precisely what Goodenough’s assertion guides us to: that understanding the principles
that inform relatedness frames the ways “group” and “other” are constructed.
Within the early waves of the Atlantic crossing of Africans, and up until
emancipation was complete throughout the western hemisphere at the close of the
nineteenth century, family among Africans and their descendants was not institutionally
recognized throughout slave-holding societies (Berlin 1998: 3-14; Berlin 2003: 9). Given
this historical reality, authors have reflected on ways to understand social units early
members within this diaspora employed to sustain themselves. Stephen Palmié has
proposed that within the Americas, the creation of affinity groups based on the
ethnogenesis, is one way to understand how groups within the African Diaspora
organize kinship when ties to blood kin and ancestral lands have been irrevocably
initiation into an African inspired religion. The work of Niara Sudarkasa treats how
28
African descendants reassembled themselves into new collectives, not necessarily
related by blood ties but the use of principles such as “respect for elders and reciprocity”
to define and implement social roles that nurtured individuals and groups (Sudarkasa
2007: 40).
Oriente and the spirit entities whose remains are part of the landscape. In this way, the
establishing of kinship with the dead establishes kinship relationships among the living
of the Palo worship community. The recovery of family connections occurs not merely
by initiation into the worship community, but through the supplicants’ blood pact
established with the dead (James Figarola 2006b: 239-232; Johnson 2009). C. Nadia
Seremetakis’s work on death within Inner Mani, like the questions asserted by Vincent
Brown about the power of death in how cultural groups imagine themselves and others,
writes;
Palo worshipers of this study employ their spirit genealogy to substantiate “generations
relationships with spirits of the land reclaim the content of their ritual ancestors, and in
so doing deconstruct the silencing of fact creation, the making of archives, and the
making of narratives through fact retrieval, all in sustained attempts to reclaim history
29
and self-define in their contemporary social circumstances. Palo worshipers’ creation of
family as mediated through relationships with spirits binds them to not only to the land,
to be kept alive. In this way, practitioners of Palo in Los Hoyos continue to perform in
contemporary Cuba what Ira Berlin summarizes as a similar experience for generations
Whether they pressed for civil rights or mechanic lien laws, access to land
or to public accommodations, their actions reflected the generations of
captivity as well as the revolutionary changes that accompanied
emancipation. The freedom generation could no more escape its past than
previous generations of black men and women. Like those who came
before them, they too had no desire to deny their history, only to transform
it in the spirit of the revolutionary possibilities presented by emancipation.
Their successes––and failures––would resonate into the twenty-first
century (Berlin 2003: 270).
Through the life of their religious practice, Palo worshipers demonstrate how
30
CHAPTER 2:
METHODS
31
Introduction
This chapter is a discussion of research methods used to collect data for the
of the Cuban religious tradition of Palo Monte/Mayombe in the eastern city of Santiago
de Cuba. In this chapter, I discuss my research affiliations that enabled me to study the
religious practices of observers of Palo Monte/Mayombe, clarify how and why I chose
the site and the community, discuss selected data gathering techniques and types of
data they elicited, and present how I recorded information gathered. I conclude with a
academic arena of African American & African Studies (AAAS). The four-field approach
products they create (see Haviser 1999; Blakey 2001; Borofsky 2002; Goodenough
2002; Baba and Hill 2006; Fennell 2007a; Fennell 2007b). These multidimensional yet
documentary and archeological sources that provided data for understanding and
contextualizing the earliest people in Cuba, the Taíno AmerIndians, who laid the
were equally helpful in providing understandings about for the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries for different African ethnic populations, particularly the Kongolese,
32
that also inhabited locations within the island’s eastern/Oriente region at the earliest
in the annals of human history (Drake 1987: 1-42; Hamilton 2007: ix-41; DuBois [1903]
the U.S. at the turn of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century (for example see
DuBois 1903; DuBois [1899] 2007; DuBois [1903] 1994: 53-67). DuBois was a
pathbreaker, and proposed a foundational vision for the field of AAAS when he
excluded of from the human record, and inventive ways were needed to recaputre and
give voice to their experiences (DuBois 1903; Drescher 1994: 361-367; DuBois [1903]
1994). Ensuing AAAS researchers and scholars have agreed with DuBois’s proposition,
particularly as they considered training students (Kilson 1973; Anderson 2001; Gordon
2001; Woodson [1933]1998). While this academic arena has yet to standardize a
specific set of research methods for investigating the lives of African-descended people,
the interdisciplinary approach remains a hallmark and mandate for those serious about
studying the lives of these populations. Implicit within works of earlier writers addressing
details of their creation (Whitten and Torres 1998; Yelvington 2006a). As part of this
33
continuing legacy, I too have made prioritizing African descendants’ intentional cultural
creations, over time and geographic space, foundational to the theoretical orientation of
the dissertation.
process of my investigation before actually visiting the research site. I found that the
Research Affiliations
the African Diaspora, proposed that conducting field research as a member of a team,
strategy. She suggested that such teamwork “makes possible a many-sided approach
to complex problems and offers the stimulation of ideas exchanged while in the field”
(Powdermaker 1966: 114). This perspective is one shared and used by members of the
African Atlantic Research Team (AART), housed at Michigan State University and
have collaborated with them as lead research assistant for both domestic and
34
international investigative projects, particularly in the Team’s primary research site of
Oriente.
descendants and communities with whom those descendants share social space and
anthropology, African American & African Studies, history, and plant biology. It was my
alignment with the Team, and its long-term Cuba research presence and experience
that allowed me entrée and flexibility in negotiating the dissertation’s field research site
as Team members had been cultivating the location for some fifteen years before I
investigative approaches and benefit from the Team’s in-country reputation and
professional networks. This was especially true regarding AART’s collaborations with
and Casa has continued for some twenty years and demonstrates the effectiveness of
my entrée and rapport with in-country researchers, leaders and members of Oriente’s
In 2003, I began collaborating with both AART and Casa researchers on a long-
4
I will not use specific names of research collaborators in order to maintain
confidentiality as well as out of respect for the delicate and nuanced political relations
between Cuba and the U.S. Instead, I will identify Casa researchers numerically.
35
research process, and before formally initiating the dissertation research, I conducted
interviews and engaged in participations and observations during the 2003, 2004 and
2006 field sessions carried out during the months of June and July. These experiences
Oriente’s local language, social customs, and distinctive ritual protocols for six of Cuba’s
seven Africa-inspired religions practiced in the region. Further, the on-site pre-
investigative methods, pre-test my interview style, refine the research focus, and create
One cultural practice that I learned during the pre-research activities and that
was particularly central to the dissertation research was making time to regularly visit
respondents and their neighbors. The African Atlantic Research Team terms this
practice “hospitality visits,” the extended time we made to sit with individual neighbors
and families in the research site, sharing food and drink, and engaging in light
conversation about health and the life happenings of community members. Often such
entrée and rapport for discussing intimacies of religious life and practices was
established in these early exposures and familiarities with people within the various
36
everyday with community members did much to enhance my rapport and their
confidanza, the respectful trust people entrust to another who they believe will
safeguard and represent their integrity and wellbeing (Johnson 2010). Hospitality visits
also allowed Casa personnel, research respondents, and general community members
student several years before I began the dissertation investigation. The openness and
For the formal portion of the dissertation research, I was in the field June to
August in 2008 and 2009, and during a final field session, from December 2009 to
February 2010, for a total of nine months. This type of division of field research into
several seasons proved more advantageous for me due to increased travel restrictions
from both the U.S and Cuban governments. Time in between field sessions also
allowed me time to reflect upon the data in order to enhance my understandings about
Palo observers’ spirit encounters, and religious family making and how such
colonial circumstances continually provided data on how the eastern/Oriente region was
a distinctive cultural site within the island. This was where original contact and
exchange between indigenous AmerIndians and Europeans and later multiple ethnic
African populations occurred (Sued-Badillo 2003b: 259-265; Pérez 2011: 10-14). The
documentary review also revealed that in 1522, enslaved AmerIndians and Africans in
37
Oriente combined their efforts in organizing and successfully raided the Spanish
settlement of Bayamo (Dodson 2008). Such joint activities were not uncommon, and
these self-liberation activities were critical to the dissertation’s proposition that the Taíno
and early imported Africans had reciprocal exchanges and collaborative relations that
led to the construction of new religious ritual behaviors. The documentary information
perform and claim are part of the inherited religious legacy from contact between the
Taíno and Africans, specifically Kongolese individuals. The literature also revealed that
Until the latter part of the twentieth century, practitioners of Cuba’s distinct, Africa
administrations and state authorities (Helg 1995: 108-116; Ayorinde 2004: 15-18).
membership and religious activities. Such reservations if not suspicions stem from
Cuban, and U.S. occupying authorities (Helg 1995; Sawyer 2006; Hearn 2008). Under
such social conditions, Palo practitioners learned and are ritualistically instructed to
conceal their religion in order to protect their belief system and affiliated members. The
result has been a meager if not absent amount of quantifiable data on the number and
38
location of Palo practitioners. At the time I conducted the research, Cuban researchers
had no way to identify the total number of practitioners of Cuba’s distinctive religious
traditions; they have yet to produce a systematic census of religious believers in general
and have yet to produce data on the number of practitioners of Palo Monte/Mayombe
scale numerical information on island inhabitants, which means that I was not able to
Despite such difficulties, yet because of the rich potential to gain insights into
largest city in the eastern region, Santiago de Cuba. Seven of the 18-some members of
Casa del Caribe’s investigative team responsible for studying African-inspired religions
also reported that the city is known for having a large concentration of Palo devotees
and my work led them to know that I would respect their sacred lifestyle and maintain
their confianza. Consequently, I will not reveal specific ritual details within this
participant, and interviewer, and data collected during those encounters with those
techniques.
39
Data Collecting Methods
colleagues at Casa del Caribe. Casa has had designated researchers of “popular
religions” since its beginning in 1984 (Dodson and Johnson 2009). The professional and
student staff has produced a focused body of literature on Cuba’s distinct religions as
discern that Palo is clearly well known among religious practitioners in Santiago de
Cuba (Johnson 2008; Johnson 2009; Johnson 2010). I then began to look for a sample
The sample population, from which I would select a case study, was based upon
the snowball sampling technique (Berg 1995: 36; Bernard 2002: 185). I asked
individuals who participated in festival activities of Casa del Caribe if they knew of Palo
practitioners and/or a Palo worship house. I spoke with more than 250 Santiago citizens,
construction workers, lawyers, nurses, engineers, street cleaners, public health workers,
and others. There were several referrals––some successful, some not so successful––
but eventually I identified a pool of 25 potential respondents for interviews and small
focus groups. More important, there was consensus among this random review that the
most prominent Santiago Palo community was based with a family in the city’s Los
5
Hoyos neighborhood.
5
I am not certain if the success of this process indicates Cubans’ increased comfort
level in talking about Palo or that my credentials and familiarity allowed them to feel
secure in speaking with me.
40
Los Hoyos (the holes) is a neighborhood dating from Santiago’s colonial period
noted for its location down the hill from the city’s colonial governmental and residential
center district. The location is significant because rain and other waters run away from
the city center, down the hill to Los Hoyos. The holes that formed from water settling
were rarely repaired, and the residents have historically been poor and African
descendants. The neighborhood was renamed “Los Olmos” after the success of the
1959 revolution but usage of the older and more affectionate name Los Hoyos persists
exceptionally potent ritual work with at least five of Cuba’s distinct religious practices.
More than half of the individuals with whom I spoke, though forthcoming about Palo,
expressed negative surprise about my interest in the tradition. Their surprised and
somewhat recoiling responses suggested to me that though Casa del Caribe continues
its active educational programs to educate the Cuban population about its distinctive
African heritage and Regla Palo Monte as a part of that religious history, there is a
continuing discomfort about the religious practice held by a general population (Dodson
and Johnson 2009). Nevertheless, I selected the Los Hoyos neighborhood, the referred
Palo religious household, and its network of members as the case study for the
dissertation investigation. I lived, worked, and listened inside of this community of Palo
members in order to gain clarity about the making of a Palo religious genealogy based
on engagement of a variety of spirits and how this shaped devotees self understanding.
41
The Case
The identified Palo worship community of Los Hoyos is well known to Palo
practitioners throughout Cuba and has maintained an esteemed local reputation across
the region for its exceedingly successful ritual work with spirit beings. An estimate of its
initiated members would be over 1,000. While this is a conservative number of the full
worship community of the case study, my dissertation research was with all those who
came to the central worship house in Los Hoyos with regularity and were regular
where their leader usually conducts the majority of most ritual work and most important
ceremonies. The religious community leader, several practitioners, and the leader’s
blood relatives reside within the house while other members live throughout the Los
Hoyos neighborhood, the city of Santiago, other regions of Cuba, and internationally. I
could not include every Palo member of the community in my study so I limited the final
research case to approximately 50 individuals who sustained close ties to the worship
community through their participation in significant ceremonies. This was the sample
group indicative of Santiago Palo practitioners and, according to six senior researchers
The research case study group included leaders, initiated practitioners active in
such events, and individuals related to the Palo leaders by birth or marriage. The blood
and married family members were regularly participants in the majority of the worship
community’s religious activities even though they were not formally initiated into the
Palo tradition. Demographically, the selected research group included 19 women and
42
31 men. The women’s ages ranged from 50 to 70 while the men’s ages were 26 to 78;
all participants could read and write and had completed secondary education, while six
community’s spirits and religious genealogy. For the data collection, I employed
systematic observations and participant observation when attending Palo public and
private activities. I utilized the method of participant observation when it would have
been obtrusive to merely observe, which was usually determined when a Cuban
participant drew me into the action. When not participating, I was systematic about
consisted of watching and mentally making note of what I saw and heard. For example,
I made note of the number of people involved, the physicality of the spaces, and their
involved with activities even as I was the researcher. On these occasions, for example,
it often was not possible to record what I saw and heard at the instant it occurred
43
mental notes served to help improve my observation and participation skills as data
was able to develop categories for collecting and recording the data. This meant that my
data collection through these methods was systematic and thereby enhanced the ability
to collect data that gave perspective to what Palo practitioners actually do in their
religious work and how they went about engaging their spirit members. These two
methods also provided information about the times and locations where ritual
procedures of the Palo worship community would occur, not to mention opportunities to
gather demographics.
over the course of the dissertation research. Public ceremonies were demarcated by
whether people not initiated into Palo, and/or non-members of the worship community,
were allowed to attend along with initiated members and observe ritual proceedings.
Private events were those when only initiates and select invited individuals were able to
attend. An average of 100 to 150 or more individuals could attend a public ceremony,
including individuals with no affiliation but who came to observe “and be refreshed” by
the ceremonial proceedings (Johnson 2008). Private ceremonies, on the other hand,
Palo public and private ceremonies allowed me to learn about the details of the
religion’s ritual protocols and how these fit within the making of the community’s
44
religious genealogy and individual devotees’ understandings about themselves as
The physical space in which Palo ceremonies took place was a pivotal first
category among those used to record information. I made notes on where the activities
occurred and detailed the physical characteristics of the location. For example, I noted
the composition of ceremonial spaces, types of objects present, and how they were
arranged. I looked for prominent colors or materials within a space and whether
spaces most often before rituals began. Colors were a significant component of Palo
sacred space construction and contributed to the symbolic meaning and visual
dynamics, as certain color combinations represent spirit beings (Dubin 1990). The
surroundings and context of ceremonial and ritual spaces, I learned to understand how
Time was another category by which I recorded and organized data. I was
careful to record the time of day each activity began and finished and the type of
behavior(s) that indicated opening and closing of activities. Soon, I could recognize and
note phases of an activity and what type of behavior delineated the phases. These data
would be used to establish any relationship between time, sequencing of activities, and
data collection was attendees at public and private events of the worship community. I
45
observed gender differences of leaders, and participants, their approximate age, and
Similarly important were where event participants were positioned within the
ceremonial space, their gender and their approximate age. I recorded the total number
of attendees, their gender, the roles they performed, their degree of participation, and
their arrival and departure times. These data allowed me to identify patterns to
relationships.
Palo ceremonial events are sensory activities and experiences (Johnson 2010).
Sacred spaces of the tradition are assembled from naturally occurring and human-made
objects that emit smells, have a diversity of texture and colors, and are soft, hard, or
changes I could sense in the atmosphere created in relationship to the space. I detailed
if there was music and/or singing during an event, and if there was food, drink, or
Interviews
I employed individual and group interview methods with informal and formal
Palo consider spirits as participating community members and the religious procedures
46
undertaken to maintain a collaborative network of practitioners and spirit beings.
Individual interviews also provided data that gave insights concerning how practitioners
descended Cubans. At the same time, individual and group interviewing techniques
revealed how community members acquired their individual sense of self and group
identity as related to their Spirit-beings groupings. This was most helpful in providing
clarity and dynamics about spirit engagements as part of Palo devotees’ religious reality,
linked to Oriente’s distinct sociohistorical context. Such insights helped clarify how Palo
supplicants presented and articulated their spirit genealogy through the assembling of
sacred spaces and the verbal invocation and transmission of their religious lineage.
Interview data also brought voice to how these Palo worship community members
persons; four females ages 45 to 70, and 11 males ages between 22 to 78. During the
course of these interviews, I was also able to collect data about members of the male
leadership of the Palo worship community who had died. This gave me data for an
additional three individuals to add to my charting of the worship community’s Palo spirit
genealogy (see spirit genealogy in Chapter 5, Figure 7, p.147). Interestingly, it was the
female members of the sample who were able to provide this data along with
information about who within the research community would be amiable to speaking
with me for what the community came to know as “tu tesis” (your thesis). For these
47
designated but flexible sequence for asking the questions. For informal individual
interviews, I maintained topical areas but allowed respondents to cover these within a
conversational format. I did not rigidly adhere to an interview questionnaire, and found
that informal interviews often provided details about a topic, idea, event, or individual
Interestingly, women were the community members best able to provide the data
on the male leadership, as well as links to other Palo worship community members.
Women with seniority in the worship community were also able to explain the
biographies of spirit members of the community’s genealogy and the human ritual
descendants of the collective, and the interconnections between living and ancestral
members. The power afforded to senior females inherent in safe guarding the details of
the religious family networks history aligns with assertions by Evelyn Higginbotham and
1993; Dodson 2002). These authors assert that within the institution of the “Black
Church” within the United States, the political and even economic power, and decision
making of religious collectivities resides with the women of the group. Further, while the
visible and public power is most often associated with and represented by men, the
invisible power of women is what maintains the groups’ sacred history, along with
descended women within Protestant Christianity, the presence of the political and
spiritual power of women within African-inspired traditions is on the increase, and while I
48
was not solely focused on women and power for this project, my data do support
emerging studies about women, African-inspired religions and power (Brown 2001;
topically focused, and as such, I did not develop a sequential questionnaire. I was able
to conduct a minimum of 15 formal groups among Palo practitioners as well as the un-
initiated blood family members of the Palo leadership during the course of the data-
characteristic e.g., generational peers, gender, age, religious role, etc. Informal groups,
on the other hand, often could not be controlled by me and usually occurred episodically
usually emerged during hospitality visits, visits wherein my intent was to connect with
or “work” with spirits, which would begin an informal group interview. My work with the
informal interview groups led me to the last data-gathering method life histories.
Life Histories
I used the technique of collecting life histories among respondents during formal
and informal interviews, as well as during group sessions. The life histories began with
of birth; mother’s and father’s birthplaces; number of siblings; number of aunts, uncles,
and cousins; family household moves; where blood-related family members lived, as far
back as great-great grandparents; and what religious tradition, if any had been practiced.
49
In addition to blood relatives’ lineages and geographic connections, life history
interviews provided data on how Palo practitioners organized their life narratives in
relationship to when they first began encountering spirit beings, and/or when they were
initiated into Palo. As such, I began to incorporate the date, location and details about
when, how, and why practitioners began to engage with spirit being(s). Another
significant category guiding data-collection was the question: What were the motivating
factors and/or inspirations that caused practitioners’ to begin building ceremonial sites
to facilitate their encounters with spirit being(s)?. As in interview sessions, I took jotted
notes to record details: however, I would stop and lay my notebook aside when
practitioners wanted to speak about some of the more intimate details regarding the con
The methods I selected provided a range of tools by which I could study Palo
family lineages, and how such relationships framed devotees’ identities. In particular, I
experiences practitioners encounter with their spirit familiars. The qualitative methods I
selected allowed me to “listen with my body” in ways that were not only culturally
sensitive, but also provided access to data that would otherwise would not be made
available. Had I used a standardized written questionnaire, people would have been
reticent if not completely closed, about sharing the intimate details of their relationships
with their spirit family members. The selected methods and my implementation of these
50
“make sense of another’s life” in a manner that was respectful of the multiple fields of
seen and unseen action where their reality occurred (Denzin 1994: 512).
gathering and cultivated practitioners’ trust as they taught me how to engage my sense
of smell, taste, touch and vision for a stronger comprehension of their experiences and
understandings with the spirit familiars of their religious practice. In essence, the
organically from the Palo worshipers. I initially adopted the process to help orient my
techniques and adjusted with it overtime for dissertation data collection (Dodson and
Zaid 2012). This approach to data collection aligns with Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s well-
The process and action of “listening with my body” during the research of Palo in Los
Hoyos follows Smith’s critical assessment that researchers need adjust their own
behaviors” that define parameters of respect. In the case of my work, the worship
51
community summarized the interactive and collaborative exchange in the research
process as confianza. In addition to inviting me to share tobacco and rum as part of the
practitioners’ hospitality ritual, they regularly invited me to smell plants, study the
specific shapes and colors of items, such as rocks, sticks, and earth. They explained
how they collected the materials and their significance to the spirit forces, encouraging
me to ask questions, exclaiming “¿viste?” [do you see, do you understand?]. They
Palo and their active engagement of spirits; they valued my “listening with my body,”
and were exceptionally receptive of my work, and routinely spoke of the confianza in me.
Recording
rarely wrote any type of notes during data gathering activities. Rather, I recorded
observational and participation notes in field journals after each event or activity at my
residence and away from respondents. There were occasions when, at respondents’
insistence, I wrote short scratch or jotting notes during an interview session “so that [I]
could remember and learn” (Jackson 1990: 17-31; Emerson, et al. 1995). Otherwise, I
write-ups at the end of each day or as soon as possible after the session (Ottenberg
1990: 144).
When I had prior permission to do so, I took still photos of spaces before
activities but did not employ other mechanical data-collecting devices: for example, tape
practitioners often commented was a better strategy and that “with my body” in order “to
52
know” increased their confianza/trust in me. The issue of confianza was a recurring
theme among the Palo practitioners of Los Hoyos. They often spoke of how confianza is
cultivated and why it is significant to them in the building of a religious family network. I
discuss this idea further in the data chapter because it was important to the Palo
worshipers.
recording data. Debriefing refers to the process Team members use to collectively
information from our preparatory field research work and working concepts. Debriefing
serves as our pre-analysis of the data while in the field. This process allows us to review
the data and revise our research questions, or our field research methods. Debriefing
equally provides a forum for us to discuss any type of tensions that can and do develop
recognize gaps in our data collection and attempt to address those voids before leaving
the site, or perhaps what questions we need to hold over for our next field session. We
attempt to conduct our debriefing meetings with as many of the researchers present as
is possible. This means that we will review our activities during or immediately after
shared meals. Holding our sessions at these specific times trains researchers to begin
Debriefing has at least four features that organically emerge and develop during
our sessions, which I also employed during the dissertation research field sessions:
• Data review
• Concept review
53
• Reflection
• Implications
When I was alone in the site I followed AART’s same debriefing process, reviewing
data, my concepts, and my reflections and implications on my long walks back to my in-
country housing from the field site. These systematic critical reflection periods also
allowed me time to construct and/or refine research categories and questions, and to
identify potential questions for new interviews. The technique of debriefing also allowed
me to think about and come up with creative responses to problems that emerged
cribbing notation system for recording interview data and later transcribed these into
full-length field journal entries when I returned to my residence. The approach enhanced
respondents’ trust and made them more willing to share aspects of sacred practices and
Palo practitioners as well as Casa researchers reacted quite demonstratively when they
would ask if I had an audio recorder for interviews and I would reply in the negative. I
had found when I attempted to use an audio recorder that individuals were quite self-
conscious about the interview and were not forthcoming about their practices. Years of
experience within the site had also alerted me to how community members understood
religions for personal gain. Often I witnessed other foreign academics inappropriately
inserting themselves, and/or audio or video equipment inside the middle of religious
activities, unseeing and perhaps uncaring, of how their actions were being responded to
54
by Cubans. By taking an observational stance in such situations, I could see the
Also, I have experienced how Cuban immigration officials respond when students
are too enthusiastic with their recording devices, which draw a great deal of suspicious
attention to the students’ activities (Johnson 2008). Moreover, in a social context that
does not have the same level of access to material goods and technological devices,
possessing and openly using such items can stimulate if not exaggerate, distrust
towards foreigners. This also carries an additional liability of making oneself a target of
solicitation if not petty theft (Johnson 2004). My exposure along with other members of
AART to the types of behaviors and responses to individuals with technology has made
me choose to limit my own use of and reliance on technology, though I will use make
use of a limited number of life images to “set the scene” of ritual activities. Otherwise, I
place great primacy on interactions unfiltered through technology, and that has in turn
Problems
National Politics: Political tensions between Cuba and the United States are
long-standing and affected all aspects of the dissertation research. The U.S. has
maintained an embargo against Cuba since 1960. In order to travel to my Oriente site, I
always had to secure specific licensing permissions from the U.S. Office of Foreign
Asset Control (OFAC) prior to my travel. The process is arduous, and most often, I did
not know if I had been granted permission until a few days prior to the scheduled
departure from the U.S. With permission from OFAC, entering Cuba, and being allowed
55
to stay in country as a foreign researcher from the U.S. proved increasingly challenging
Continuously, I had to be aware of national and international political tensions and how
that research appointments were best scheduled and confirmed during face-to-face
given day of research activities, much in line with how other field researchers have
During the years of the study, as political tensions increased between the two
negotiating financial penalties levied against converting the U.S. dollar into Cuba’s two
monetary systems. I regularly found it a challenge to secure suitable housing that could
Health issues, too, were a recurring challenge as, in addition to not being
accustomed to the Cuban environment, I have several physical conditions (allergies and
related asthma, dehydration). At times, I physically did not respond well physically to
some of Santiago’s environments, like the prevalence of animals in family homes and
the intense heat. I was ill during several days of a research session.
presents special issues related to political tensions between the two governments. As
just such a researcher, I was regularly under scrutiny by Cubans, officials, and citizens.
56
To contradict these impressions, I employed AART’s approach to “hospitality visits.” I
visited Palo practitioners of the worship group and in the Los Hoyos neighborhood. I
made hospitality visits to Palo members of the Los Hoyos worship house, other
residents of the Los Hoyos neighborhood, and leaders of other Cuban religious
traditions who lived in the area, as well as visits to Casa del Caribe personnel. These
visits occurred during each data gathering session in the field and often included
sharing meals and beverages, and/or sitting casually with family members or close
Occasionally, I brought small items for the household such as tobacco, rum, candles,
matches, cooking oil, flowers or other items that are in short supply in Cuba when I felt
moved to do so. The exchange of small gifts fit into the culturally normative practices of
This approach to developing and enhancing rapport in the research site also
exploitative of religious practitioners and their sacred objects and knowledge. One elder
woman respondent summed the attitude about foreign researchers by saying, “They
come to steal our things and put them in museums in their countries.” A second older
female demonstrated this discomfort by avoiding my request for an interview for several
weeks until she learned that I would not be recording the session with a mechanical
interactions and time spent with women also helped lessen gender tensions with them.
Spending time with the women of the community opened up opportunities to collect data
57
on gender as well as refine my understandings about how community’s spirit genealogy
Cross-Cultural Issues
Language: A major challenge of the research into Palo within Cuba was the
issue of the plural languages that operated in Oriente, in Santiago, and in the site
become familiar with the Oriente variant of the language as well as with what
Spanish communications, and the code switching that occurred between these two
languages. I had to learn Spanish and the various idiomatic expressions of Oriente
Spanish and Congo in order to communicate effectively in general social and religious
Gender: Cuban norms of gender behavior are also filtered through Oriente’s
tradition. This proved challenging for my research and it took a number of years before
researcher, over 23, unmarried, from the U.S., Black, and with no children. The
combination of such social positions in one person did not translate well within the
region’s cultural and gender norms. For example, it is not culturally appropriate for
single women to be out alone after sunset. This would mean that the times I had to
conduct interviews was restricted to daylight hours, however, because people have jobs
58
and family responsibilities that consume the majority of their day, I had to insert my
I continually had to demonstrate, not merely verbally articulate that I was aware
of and respectful of these norms. The visible public power of the community is most
often positioned with men. Therefore, when I had to interview male leaders and spend
time with them I had to ensure that I counter- balanced those sessions with spending
hospitality time with women to behaviorally demonstrate that my intentions were strictly
professional, in spite of ongoing advances from men. Over time I learned how to
effectively stave off unwanted male attention by incorporating the concept of “discipline”
into how I would describe why I limited my time with men, would leave events early, or
not attend at all; it was counter to my discipline to do these things (“no es mi disciplina
para hacer eso”). My consistent behavior, over time and multiple site visits, helped to
curtail male advances and diminish social tensions with female community members.
within the site, as culturally it is expected that each individual learn how to live and
behave in a disciplined way that benefits the collective. The concept of discipline also
had great cache among Palo practitioners in that they believe it takes great personal
discipline to adhere to the type of lifestyle that their spirit familiars dictate. Indeed, they
believe that in order to service their spirits appropriately, it takes great “sacrifice” to
discipline one’s behaviors as well as garner resources enough to care for one’s living
Ritual Protocol: Distinct ritual protocols exist for all Cuban religious traditions
and these had to be learned in order to establish entrée and maintain rapport with all
59
neighborhood members as well as practitioners of Cuba’s distinctive religions. In
addition to greeting individual study participants, I also had to pay respects to their
sacred spaces using the appropriate ritual protocol to begin any conversation within
their home settings. It took years and ongoing exposure within the field site to develop
proficiency with these rituals. However, taking the time and effort to learn these sacred
protocols enhanced my rapport with respondents thereby enhancing the data collection
process and allowing me to clarify the meanings Palo worshipers assigned to their spirit
descended Cubans.
60
CHAPTER 3:
CUBA’S SOCIOHISTORICAL CONTEXT
61
Introduction
Today’s devotees of Palo continue to report that the complex of their religious
tradition descends from combined religious knowledge and activities of Taíno and
Kongo ancestors as handed down to their Cuban progeny across several generations.
Research participant Eva (see Appendix) further suggested that when individuals are
initiated into the Palo worship community, they become “blood” relatives with other
supplicants as well as with the lead spirit entities of the collective, and joined with the
rituals of “ingesting” elements derived from Oriente’s natural landscape. Eva explained
that when Palo devotees come into contact with the products of the earth where the
dead are buried, the “ambiance” of the dead’s wisdom rises and is embodied by Palo
devotees. The “ambiance” Eva refers to suggests that Palo devotees live a sentient
experience in which the entire social sphere is permeated, and at times punctuated, by
identity means that the history informing such understandings is a central component to
considers the historical details of how Cuba’s subaltern communities created spaces
and social practices that provide new insight about cultural formations within the island
nation during its early colonial development. I suggest that ultimately Palo devotees’
inherited understandings about spirits and historical social figures within Oriente reveal
hidden narrations about identity that become more accessible through the study of how
the region’s religious lineages were created and maintained. The fullness of the
62
discussion is warranted in that a fundamental assumption of the dissertation research
was that AmerIndians and Africans, specifically Taíno and Kongolese, encountered
each other in the island’s eastern region and began the embryonic creations that
created the social space for the formation of Palo Monte/Mayombe religious lineages,
There are several factors that have shaped the formation of the spirit genealogy
of the Palo worship community in Oriente, not the least of which is lodged in the
diversity of the island’s natural, bio-diverse geographic zones that helped shape social
development within Cuba from initial European contact and conquest and through the
well as examining salient political contours and social movements that have shaped the
island-nation during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and how this has affected
Geography
Cuba is the largest island nation of the Caribbean’s Greater Antilles, the larger
islands of the area, and it is located between 74° to 85° west longitude and 19º40´ to
23°30´. The island is framed by three bodies of water; the Atlantic Ocean in the east,
the Gulf of Mexico to the northwest, and the Caribbean Sea in the south. The Gulf
Stream is the river-like body of oceanic waters that begins in the Caribbean, ends in the
Northern Atlantic, and was an important natural navigational phenomenon that helped
bring the Spanish to Cuba (Thomas 1997; Eltis and Richardson 2010). The Gulf Stream
also was significant to colonial authorities’ decision to move the island capital from the
63
eastern city of Santiago de Cuba to Havana in the western portion of the island
The island is 750 miles in length, 22 miles wide at its most western tip, and 124
miles wide at its greatest width in the east. The island’s landscape includes a mixture of
grassland savannahs with small, widely spaced trees and mountains. The highest of the
mountain ranges is the Oriente Sierra Maestras in the east. There are some 200 natural
harbors, bays, and inlets throughout the island’s 2,500 miles of seacoast. Mountain
ranges, plains, and rivers provided natural boundaries for the island’s six historic
century, which and continued until after the 1959 success of the Cuban Revolution. The
six provinces were Pinar del Río, Havana, Matanzas, Las Villas, Camagüey, and
Oriente.
64
In 1973, the six traditional provinces were rezoned into fourteen divisions of the
social distinctions and boundaries over the course of the nation’s centuries of existence.
These social peculiarities include cultural and linguistic variations that continue to
and/or modifying hard consonant sounds, along with eliminating the fricative “th,” is also
a common trait among populations throughout the Americas who employ African
Columbus and other conquistadores under Spanish authority. By 1512, Baracoa, the
first European settlement, was organized on the northeastern end of the island. The
Spanish founded other settlements throughout the island, including Bayamo in 1513;
Trinidad, Sancti Spíritus, Havana, and Puerto Príncipe in 1514; and Santiago de Cuba
in 1515. Santiago served as the colonial capital until 1630, when the seat of power was
transplanted to the western province and city of Havana. European nations interested in
creating a colonial empire based on large-scale mono-crops at the turn of the sixteenth
century were desirous of Cuba’s naturally diverse environment. Its human resources
were also coveted by early empire-seeking nations (Thomas 1998: 1-26; Pérez 2011:
38-43). Interest in the island increased when tobacco and sugar cultivation proved
65
profitable in Cuba’s western region; the central provinces’ large soil-rich savannah
successful. The eastern/Oriente region has had the most varied environmental
conditions for supporting extensive fruit, vegetable, coffee, and sugar cultivation as well
as cattle ranching.
Between 1502 and 1630, Oriente served as the geographic context in which the
nation’s first struggles for social power began. In the early years of the colony, battles
occurred between the conquering Spanish and the AmerIndians and imported
individuals extracted from Africa. It was within this cultural mixture of contact, exchange,
and grappling for human dignity that the beginnings of new cultural life, and thereby
religious practices, were constructed. While the Cuban national project begins in
Oriente, the foundations of that project stem from struggles between the Spanish
conquistadors and the AmerIndian population that had long-standing complex societies
concentrated in the eastern area of Cuba before Europeans’ arrival in the fifteenth and
realities in Oriente. In that respect, it is necessary to retrieve what is known about Taíno
66
New Knowledge about Taínos
6
The 1960s academic and political movement to bring Black Studies into U.S.
higher education was a movement to study and represent the cultural integrity and
international contexts. The movement(s) had profound effects and altered historically
white colleges and university campuses as well as most U.S. academic arenas (Kilson
1973; Drake 1980; Drake 1987; Harris, et al. 1990; Anderson 2001; Holloway and
Keppel 2007; Pritchett 2010; Mintz and Price [1976] 1992). Renewed investigations into
what were once considered closed historical research questions have been an indirect
product of Black Studies’ programs and departments in locations of higher learning. For
example, archeologists and historians have returned to texts and data on indigenous
societies of first communities in the Americas (Schmidt and Patterson 1995; Kiddy
1999; Garofalo 2006; O'Toole 2006). This has given us better understandings about
(Sued-Badillo 1995).
The Taíno AmerIndians occupied the eastern region of Cuba and maintained an
intricate religious system as part of their social structure, before Christopher Columbus
and before the importation of Africans beginning in the sixteenth century. The Taíno
cosmic world consisted of humans, spirits associated with natural phenomena, spirits of
6
The nomenclature of Black Studies, African American & African Studies, and Africana
Studies reflects an ever-changing U.S. socio-political atmosphere in which the field is
situated. Black Studies refers to the early years of the field’s formation within historically
white universities and colleges, approximately 1968 until the early to mid-1980s. From
this point forward I will be using African American & African Studies (AAAS) to reflect
current understandings about the academic field.
67
familial dead, and entities existing inside of plants, rocks, and animals. During the
earliest contact between the Taíno and Spanish, Fray Ramón Pané produced the first
known European written description of the Taíno religious system, which appeared in
Fernando Columbus’s biography about the exploits of his father. While limited by
on the cosmic orientation of Indian groups living throughout the Caribbean’s Greater
Antilles (Pané and Arrom 1999; Abulafia 2009: 131-137). Historian David Abulafia
Ramón Pané provided a window into the mental world of the Taíno
Indians. This is a record of a vanished people; it is extremely precious.
That said, it is also a record of European failure to understand what was
being said; part of its interest lies in the bewilderment Pané felt when he
heard old men and women retail Taíno stories of the creation of man and
the sea, or when he witnessed their shamans [sic] having what were
supposed to be two-way conversations with the recently deceased. In
other words, it is a record of both the Taíno and the European mentality.
Pané attempted to describe Taíno myths by fitting them within a structure
that any European would expect to find…[Taíno] conception of the
material world and its relationship to the world of the dead and spirits was
so different from that of medieval Christians, Jews or Muslims that Pané
was well and truly puzzled…[For the Taíno] past and present were
intertwined, just as the living and dead, man (sic) and the animal world
were intertwined (Abulafia 2009: 137-138).
dimensions of the Taíno belief system that are relevant to the dissertation research.
that concern the universe and its organization: the existence of spirits; humans’ ability
to communicate with such entities; the integrative nature of time modalities, specifically
between the past and present; and that human and non-human worlds are interwoven
68
and reciprocally interdependent (Abulafia 2009: 137-139). His discussion is equally
useful for clarifying the cultural curtailing and/or distortions of Taíno belief system as
explained by Euro-centric categories for religious and cultural traditions not like their
own.
intend to understand history from the perspective of those who have been silenced
(Long 1995: 61-69; Trouillot 1995: 1-30). In this instance, by reading through the
qualifiers of the Frey to distance himself from the Taíno’s origin stories, we are able to
piece together the context and content of Taíno comprehensions about the order of the
universe (Long 1995: 31-39). These discussions of silencing partner well with Abulafia’s
reading of Frey Pané’s account of Taíno beliefs in that we can see that the “moment” of
fact creation and “archiving” of non-Christian religious worlds contains distortions that
originate from a recorder of history who did not comprehend nor prioritize how Taíno
The Frey’s record is equally burdened by the ethnocentrism of his own social
Trouillot’s understanding of silencing is where the focus of African American & African
Studies is most potent in helping scholars recover meanings that silenced communities
assign to their social worlds. The process of retrieving and revealing new facts and
reflecting on those materials in new ways that allows previously hidden data
significance. That is the necessary type of “crawling back” mandated to engage the
69
integrity of silenced peoples’ life ways. The following is an example of such “crawling
back” through history to engage the integrity of the life practices of the Taíno cultural
7
populations to occupy Cuba were the Ciboney , who were on the island in
approximately 1000 B.C.E. Ciboney communities are believed to have had two different
Peninsula, Florida and Jamaica (Domínguez Figure 2 Taíno archeology dig with
pottery and conches remains,
1984; Torres-Cuevas 2007; Pérez 2011: 13- Banes Cuba. smj 2006 ©
19).
The first wave of Ciboney migrants, known as the Guaybo Blanco, located their
settlements mainly in the western coastal portions of Cuba in Las Villas, Matanzas,
Havana, Pinar del Río and a small island off the cost of Pinar del Río, Isle of Pines. The
7
The literature discussing Cuban AmerIndians does not clarify if the names scholars
used to categorize them are/were equal to what the groups used to identify themselves.
Additional archival research is needed to clarify how these names came to be a part of
the written record.
70
Guaybo Blanco lived in open-air transitory camps, along ravines and cliffs, and inside
caves. The second wave of Ciboney migration, the Cayo Redondo, arrived about 2000
B.C.E. and was situated in Cuba’s eastern portions. Archeological evidence suggests
that both waves of Ciboney migrants lived in small family clustering clans and
maintained a seminomadic life style, dependent on fishing and collecting plant and
animal food resources, from the surrounding environment (Pérez 2011: 10-14).
displaced from the eastern region by the next family of AmerIndian migrants, the
Arawak. The first groups of Arawak to the island were the Sub-Taíno, beginning in the
ninth century. It is believed that the Sub-Taíno cultural community originated in South
America and settled in Cuba as part of their inter-island transit throughout the
Caribbean, wherein they maintained intricate trade networks (Harrington, et al. 1935;
Keegan 1992; Sued-Badillo 1992b; Sued-Badillo 2003b; Sued-Badillo 2003a). The Sub-
Taíno maintained larger settlements throughout the island, yet preferred to concentrate
their villages along the northeastern coast of Cuba. Their villages consisted of
multifamily houses called bohíos (see Figure 3), arranged around a central rectangle
area, a baety. These villages could contain upwards of 2,000 inhabitants. The Sub-
Taíno subsisted on marine life, wild plants, and hunted animals, and crops cultivated on
small plots. They built intricate, submerged coastline holding pens for fish, turtles, and
conches, keeping upward of several thousand animals enclosed for a community’s use.
Archeological evidence suggests that the Sub-Taíno held property communally and
were well organized under a local leader cacica (female) or cacique (male). They
71
hammocks, fishing line, etc. (Domínguez 1984). Tobacco also was carefully grown for
use in religious ceremonies. Intricate carvings, beadwork, and adornment items have
been found at Cuban sites known to have been used by Sub-Taíno societies (Guarch-
from the island of Hispaniola, current-day Haití and the Dominican Republic. This
migratory wave continued to live inside the established social structures of the first
community’s dead. However, the second wave of Taíno social and cultural expansion in
Cuba was truncated and brought to closure in 1492 with the arrival of Christopher
Taíno settlements on Hispaniola were more extensive than within Cuba, and
provided some of the strongest resistance to Spanish presence in the Caribbean. In fact,
in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries large federations of cacicas and
caciques countered the invasion of the Spanish with intensive and extensive attacks
using forces numbering in the tens of thousands. Some Taíno fled to Cuba to regroup
their forces and continue launching assaults against Spanish encroachment (Sued-
Badillo 2003a; Pérez 2011: 15-25). One cacique by the name of Hatuey continues to be
especially in Oriente, the site of his stronghold. Hatuey and his forces had begun their
war against the Spanish in Haití, yet withdrew to regroup in Cuba. Hatuey was
72
eventually caught and burned at the stake, remaining defiant till the end, refusing
Heaven”(Johnson 2006).
larger islands of the Caribbean, with the densest populations living in what we now
know as Haití, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Though not as densely
populated as its neighboring islands, eastern Cuba was a sizable Taíno stronghold. The
matrilineal kinship system that functioned within and across islands. The most powerful
individuals and the central core of the social system were cacicas and caciques chiefs.
These leaders were thought to be imbued with superhuman qualities and able to
marshal community members and cosmic power to enact and enforce social order. The
political leaders of a cacicazgos could be women or men, though the power of position
was solely transmitted through female lines of a ruling family. There is a recorded
example of a woman who married a cacique of another society but after the death of her
cacique brother, she returned to her home to assume authority as a cacica of the
The cacica or cacique of a Taíno community was the only member who could
was paramount among these groups of AmerIndians, and raids to capture women and
thereby absorb the power and territory of their families was a regular practice that would
initiate intergroup warfare. The raids made ongoing warfare a normative phenomenon
73
throughout the islands. However, warfare could be mitigated by the formation of
guaytiao, pacts of eternal friendship between cacicas and caciques. New consideration
of the written and archeological data suggests that in the early years of contact with
Europeans, the cacicas’ or caciques’ practice of giving wives to the explorers was a
series of attempts to form guaytiaos that would commit the new comers to alliances
A single cacica or cacique could have several thousand if not several hundred
with Europeans there were more than 100 Taíno cacicas and caciques operating in and
among islands of the Greater Antilles (Sued-Badillo 2003b: 287). Cuba specifically was
known to have some 17 cacicas and/or caciques that over saw cacicazgos of up to
2,000 inhabitants (Sued-Badillo 2003b: 259-279). The cacique’s living quarters, which
were round residential buildings made of palm leaves with conical shaped thatched
roofs and called bohíos, were positioned with the baety, the space in front of the cacicas
74
gathering occurred. Villages were loosely organized around this central rectangle space
of the baety.
Archeological evidence suggests that Taíno villages were organized close to the
sea, as its products provided a cornerstone of food resources and village economy.
Conches were of primary importance as this marine shell animal provided food, material
for adornment, the manufacture of tools for daily survival, and implements of war. In
addition to marine life, Taíno communities subsisted on fruit, especially the guayaba,
and cultivated tubers and grains. Their diets were supplemented by wild plants and
engaging spirits, supra-natural ones and spirits of their dead Figure 4 Large
replica of a zemís in
family members. They represented supra-natural spirits in the the courtyard of El
Museo de Banes,
form of carved wooden figurines called zemíses. Banes, Cuba. smj
2006 ©
Archeological evidence suggests that zemíses were
understood to contain the spirit-essence of trees from which they were carved, and as
such, took on an “elite status…in the complex relationship between the physical and
symbolic landscapes of the Taíno” (Saunders 1996: 811). Village members designated
75
spaces in individual living quarters for the zemís(es) to live along side family members
(Bisnauth 1996: 131-144; Sued-Badillo 2003b: 265; Abulafia 2009: 137-138). In addition
to creating space in bohíos for zemíses, interaction with the statues of spirits included
providing them with designated food items for their ethereal consumption.
Several recent authors have reported that the bones of the Taíno dead were kept
in gourds or terra cotta pots in designated spaces inside the households of living family
consistent with newer understandings about the cosmic orientation of Taíno culture as
the remains of their dead were regularly used in ritual practices (Saunders 1996;
evidence to suggest that contact between Taíno and their spirit familiars was facilitated
by the ingestion of cohiba, a white powered substance derived from tobacco. This
recent information about Taíno beliefs and practices regarding categories of spirits
allows insight into what types of beliefs and practices were present in the social
universe of the Taíno, and what would be echoed by the Palo Monte/Mayombe religious
collective: that there is an active spirit universe that intersects with the social world of
humans, and that the products of the land can be recruited to facilitate those
relationships.
Taíno and Religion: Recent academic review and re-assessment of Taíno life
and culture allow me to surmise that the physical representations of zemíses beings, as
well as the remains of the dead within households, were a means of spiritually
populating living spaces with nonseen members of Taíno kinship groups. The powers of
a kinship group extended beyond the living to include categories of other worldly beings
76
as members of the social group, and the social power of a cacicazgos community was
only potent and effective when regularly companioned with Other World power. Such
comprehensions about relatedness set the early cultural parameters for how Palo
members.
Spirits of dead Taíno members, zemíses, and living family and other human
physical and interactive relationship with daily lives of community members. They were
set into place inside of Taíno collectivities, not distanced from the everyday reality of a
living community. This Taíno inclusivity of those who had died and those that were
between all community members. Individuals and categories of all actors in the spirit
social world had responsibilities if not obligations toward the others in the collective
“physical” representations by sharing food, and actively seek communication with the
In any village, the physical boundary between the human world and the world of
spirits was the edge of the cacica or cacique––spiritual and social leader’s––domain.
This was usually at the beginning of the wild-forested areas and signifies how animal
and plant sources could be incorporated into the world of the living. By collecting and
importing flora and fauna into human social spaces, the Taíno infused the power of the
77
spirit world into those spaces. These activities were a cultural priority and a foundation
ethereal others. For those who would come to know Oriente as “home,” the sacred
power known to be in statues, bones, rocks, etc. could be recruited and activated to
reassert and restructure sacred kinship systems. Here the evidence also points to how
individuals could place substances drawn from the land into circulation during
interactions with the various actors of the kinship system to bond and re-bond the living
community to the land. The recruitment of the natural world to mediate relations
between the human and spirit work is also reflected within the interview statements of
Palo worshipers who understand that the wisdom of the land is equally transmitted
through their constructed sacred ceremonial spaces even as their spirit familiars
communicate with them. Antonio, the last male leader of the Palo worship community,
commented on “how rocks contain the ambiance of the earth—that all things of nature
have life,” and when he picks one such natural element up and holds it, he “asks [the
how the social position of cacicas or caciques affected Taíno religious understandings,
though some note that these leaders held religious power. This is puzzling, given that
Taíno religious world. My assessment is that through emphasis on kinship systems and
the centrality of cacicas and caciques to Taíno social order, these leaders represented
the long-term medium through which the Other World guidance could be channeled,
received, and acted upon in a cacicazgos community. This understanding could explain
78
why the systematic violent elimination of the caciques by the Spanish conquistadors
and their agents––priests and settlers––wreaked havoc on Taíno social systems. The
destruction of cacicas or caciques throughout the first half of the sixteenth century, to
make way for Spanish exploitation of the Caribbean region and its people, meant that
Taíno individuals central to kinship networks and alliances were destroyed. It also
meant that power and guidance from the Other World was severed. The imprisonment
dismantled social life as they were forcibly removed from their bohío, the batey, and the
edge of the Other World, all sites of sacrality. The destruction of these key social figures
severed the living connections between the Taíno and their spirit familiars, and in so
doing, decimated the core relationships that maintained Taíno social order. However,
instead of completely silencing Taíno social and religious narratives, the transfer of the
ancestral wisdom of how to maintain the bonds between the human and spirit world
through using multivocal elements of nature was transferred to the newest and reluctant
The composite of these new and recent understandings helps us better set the
social context of early Cuba into which imported sixteenth-century Kongo Africans
arrived. Additional comprehensions about the Taíno socioreligious structure are doubly
informative for this dissertation project as they add veracity to articulations made by
necessity to detail life, beliefs, and practices of the first Kongo Africans who
79
The Kongolese Presence
At the turn of the sixteenth century, the predatory Spanish began using members
AmerIndians were completely dependent on the Spanish for their food and shelter
(Rouse 1992; Keegan 2007). The strange new living arrangements coupled with
exploitative work patterns and exposure to new diseases that caused further destruction
to native communities. However, these new realities faced by Taíno were met with
Spanish forces. Individuals and groups ran away from Spanish enslavement and staged
individual and collective rebellions, such as intentionally killing themselves to join the
Other World rather than live in enslavement (Rivera-Pagán 2003: 329-338; Sued-Badillo
2003a: 274-286; Abulafia 2009: 192-198). Nevertheless, the Spanish decimated the
Taíno and other indigenous populations by the middle of the sixteenth century (Rouse
1992). The Spanish were intent on establishing their European understandings of social
structure, culture, and religious priorities and preferences to the new colony. Even after
the first generation of European contact, Cuban Taíno society had been completely
Since the early fifteenth century, the Portuguese had experimented with enslaved
labor on plantations in the Canary Islands. For the most part, these laborers for the
enterprises on the Canary Islands were from areas drawn from groups within the Kongo
80
Kingdom territory. Individuals from varieties of ethnic groups contained within this
kingdom, including some of their mulatto descendants, were used as enslaved labor on
the Islands and then later exported throughout sectors of Spanish and Portuguese
societies (Sued-Badillo 1992a; Inikori and Engerman 1994: 1-21; Thomas 1997: 114-
149; Pané and Arrom 1999; Mendes 2008: 63-79; Abulafia 2009: 65-114).
At the close of the fifteenth century, the use of people captured from Africa was
seen as an effective way to replace Taíno labor in plantation, mining, domestic, and
skilled labor enterprises. The Spanish priest, Father Bartolomé de las Casas, who
participated in and witnessed the systematic destruction of the Cuban Taíno and their
cultural system, eventually petitioned the Papacy of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth
century to end enslavement and genocide of AmerIndians, and turn to a more reliable
labor pool of people extracted from Africa (Sued-Badillo 1992a; Pané and Arrom 1999).
The burgeoning trade in Africans was seen as a reliable replacement labor pool
and the Church, including Las Casas, supported the exchange (Sued-Badillo 1992a;
Pané and Arrom 1999). By 1502, the dual Spanish Kings, Isabel and Ferdinand
authorized the importation of Africans to the Americas, and African populations quickly
became the replacement labor force for Cuba (Sued-Badillo 1992a: 77; Palmer 1997:
13). Individuals drawn from the regions from and surrounding the Kongo Kingdom were
the numerical majority of captives that the Portuguese transported to the Americas
during these early years. At the time, the Kongo Kingdom covered areas contemporarily
known as Gabon, Angola, the Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
relationships within this African kingdom and held a monopoly on the burgeoning trans-
81
Atlantic importation of Africans from the sixteen through the mid-eighteenth centuries
(Thornton 1998b; Thornton 1998a: 43-71; Hall 2005: 144-164; Eltis and Richardson
2008: 1-22). Warfare and political maneuvering within the Kongo Kingdom continued to
produce streams of captives for the forced relocation sites across the Atlantic.
Individuals known to possess efficacious religious knowledge and spiritual power were
exported to the New World of the Americas (Thornton 1998b: 199-214; Thornton 1998a;
Heywood 2002: 91-105; Thornton 2002: 73-83). While there were many different ethnic
groups within the Kingdom’s boundaries, it was the BaKongo ethnic members of the
Kongo Kingdom who accounted for the majority of Africans imported to Oriente (Valdes
1988; Díaz 2000: 113; Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler 2005: 33-37; Hall 2005: 67-68;
Heywood and Thornton 2007; Dodson 2008: 27-32). The prevalence of BaKongo
ethnics as the predominate number of African people imported to the Oriente region is
significant. Recent linguistic study of the ritual language of Palo Monte in Oriente has
revealed that the prevalence of Palo religious communities in the eastern province can
suggests that the most “orthodox forms of [Palo] rituals are maintained in the eastern
Historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s work provides details about the importation of
African ethnic groups to the Caribbean, revising and expanding earlier speculations
about the social realities of Africans and their descendants during the centuries-long
transatlantic exchanges. Midlo Hall extended the original 1975 propositions of Sidney
Mintz and Richard Price and proposed that instead of completely fragmented crowds of
82
individuals, specific ethnic grouping of Africans made specialized contributions to social
formations in the Americas. She and others began focusing attention on the significance
imprint, and formations across the Atlantic. Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler add
additional refinement and insight to how such cultural creative processes occurred
within Oriente by suggesting that the numeric concentration and dominance of the
BaKongo in the area meant that the cultural content these social actors contributed
John Thornton and Linda Marinda Heywood’s scholarship provides details of the
nature of the type of cultural influence that the BaKongo Kikongo-speaking ethnic
dissertation project. These authors helped clarify the prominence of ancestral insight to
the lives of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Kongolese and the type of rituals used to
access such knowledge (Thornton 1998b; Heywood and Thornton 2007). Thornton’s
1998 volume on the Kongolese Saint Anthony, Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, a fifteenth-
century Kongolese woman of noble birth, provides an even more detailed discussion of
the potency of ancestral revelation in directing political and social action of the living
significant to my work. In the Kongolese social world Dona Beatriz occupied, the
Ngangas, “medium[s] to the Other World,” were responsible for bridging the physical
distance between the Other World of spirits and the material world where the living
Nganga derives from the Kikongo word meaning “knowledge” and/or “skill” but is
83
fabric, the “knowledge” and “skill” to transcend the material world and be in contact and
communion with other worldly beings was the skill of an Nganga. Individuals recognized
and anointed as Ngangas formed kimpasi societies to address the social needs of a
kimpasi society had physical lodging space set apart from the community and
encampment at the edge of the human social realm “in the wild,” Ngangas were
world of the spirits and the material world. As Thornton reported about access to the
Part of individuals’ religious practices within the Kongo Kingdom was the
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negotiate their political and social relationships (Thornton 1998b: 13; Thornton 1998a).
As is normative for human cultural behavior, they organized their social world based on
activity and/or input from other worldly spirits. This was a significant understanding
the Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, Thornton highlights the type of normal behavioral
activities associated with the religious realities of individuals forcibly exported from the
In his work on Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and in subsequent writing, Thornton
draws our attention to the fact that the political maneuvering and upheaval that marked
the Kongo Kingdom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created steady streams
political functioning. They would have been significant participants in the religious
knowledge of warring factions. Winners in such battles would immediately ship Ngangas
out of the area to life-long exile in the Americas (Thornton 1998b; Heywood and
because critical links between the wisdom of the Other World and the human world had
been severed (Thornton 1998b; Thornton 1998a; Thornton 1999; Cavazzi, et al. 2010).
However, documentary evidence suggests that exile to the Americas did not end
Kongolese reliance on religious expertise and abilities nor did it end the role or activities
of Ngangas. In Cuba and particularly in Oriente, it suggests that instead the Nganga’s
85
knowledge was transplanted, transformed, and given new meaning when Kongolese
came in contact with the Taíno in the new social circumstances of enslavement.
into Cuba’s social development during the earliest centuries is that the remaining
enslaved Taíno found that the social norms that guided their behaviors were closely
aligned with Africans practices. Though both cultural groups were enslaved, they
maintained the ability to recompose social order inclusive of ideas and practices about
the integration of living and spirit entities. In some ways, this equaled a new foundation
of independence and self-rule for the two, now-uniting groups. The joint precedent
served as a significant referent for continued action, particularly rebellion and religious
practice. It was also a significant referent for all of Cuba’s social and political identity
development.
Ethnic boundaries were also more flexible because the radically new social
circumstances of Africans and remaining native population were not inclusive of their
social or cultural needs. Ethnic and cultural distinctions known in Africa transformed and
expanded in the Americas, and group affiliation was established by way of ritual
initiation. Stephen Palmíe has discussed this additive approach to community network-
(Palmié 1993). While Midlo Hall and Palmíe provide details from more urban spaces
where Africans and their descendants were active contributors to colonial society, I find
their work equally useful to speculate about the social exchanges between Africans, the
native population, and their descendants that were not part of the visible exchanges in
86
As the Spanish colonial system expanded in the sixteenth century, the numbers
of the enslaved people began to shift, and Africans, specifically those drawn from the
boundaries of the Kongo Kingdom, began to outnumber and then replace Cuba’s native
and animal husbandry. However, the numerically dominant Africans also continued their
resistance efforts, fighting and self-liberating in the same manner as the remaining
Taíno populations. Oriente’s isolation from the power centers of the island also created
an even greater sense of social distance from the Spanish metropole. Self– and group
liberation activities from enslavement became the norm in Oriente from as early as 1535,
when a joint raid by a Taíno and African coalition fighting force attacked the Spanish
settlement of Bayamo and razed it to the ground. Such sustained raids and armed
resistance by the subjugated populations against the Spanish settlers in Oriente was set
Spanish colonials in the east pleaded for reinforcements to combat the banded
AmerIndian and African forces who harassed colonial settlements, the petitions were
Most significantly, some Africans and Taínos escaped to the mountainous terrain
of the Sierra Maestras in Oriente and formed palenque communities; free and self-
defined settlements of people who had escaped bondage (Dodson 2008: 86-87). It is
estimated that a minimum of 300 palenques existed in the eastern mountain ranges,
with an average of 250 members, but often times numbering in the hundreds if not
thousands (Franco 1973: 29-32; Duharte 1986; Dodson 2008: 29-31). Evidence of the
87
records that chart systematic raids and sustained warfare by palenque communities on
Spanish settlements in Oriente from approximately 1533 to 1871 (Franco 1973: 29).
The new information about the numerical make up of the palenques would have been
skewed towards the BaKongo cultural proclivities, suggesting that the practices of these
inhabitants would have been reflective of intensive influence from members of this
ethnic grouping. At the turn of the sixteenth century, the Taíno populations had suffered
significant losses due to maltreatment, disease, and radical assaults on their way of life.
Africans became the numerical majority both in palenques and as the enslaved labor
force throughout Oriente. The numerical majority of the Africans over time suggests that
from the Kongolese. The grappling for social power and presence that occurred in
Oriente in the formation of the Cuban colony had thousands of causalities. Many other
thousands were lost within the continental space of Africa and in the transit to the island
colony. These dead joined the familial categories of others who died after living through
the early centuries of nation building in the island. The interring of the remains of these
individuals and their mixed-race progeny over the course of several generations
that the combined ideas, beliefs and behaviors of these groups set the “baseline” for
and their descendants, which would be incorporated into the sociocultural fabric of
Oriente. Historian Jalil Sued-Badillo best summarizes the interchange between the
88
The principal mixing of races that occurred in the sixteenth century was
between indigenes and blacks [sic]. It is important to recognize this
because it fell to blacks to keep alive for posterity much of the culture of
the indigene peoples. The native order of life—agriculture on small plots,
living in bohíos, the medical secrets of the native flora, fishing and
gathering techniques, something of the old religion and even of ancestral
values—had to be maintained by a line that was in some real sense
foreign to it all. But even more important—love of freedom had to be kept
alive as well. Given the system of exploitation under which both races
worked, colour [sic] had no meaning (Sued-Badillo 2003b: 286).
between the remaining Taíno’s and newly imported Africans in the sixteenth century
that have remained relatively unexplored. First, that the racial and ethnic intermixing
occurred most often between the Taíno and imported Africans in the early colonial years.
The shared social position of enslavement, resistance to labor bondage, and “love of
freedom” would have provided strong incentive for the AmerIndians and Africans to join
about the material world of humans overlapping with the world of spirit beings, and the
need for human attention to ritualistically maintain such relationships could also serve
empowerment, the united efforts of the two groups imprinted Oriente with an ethos that
prioritized the inclusion of spirit beings in the everyday reality of subsequent generations.
This attitudinal position is best encapsulated by a local idiom, “Oriente is the land of the
dead” (Johnson 2004; Johnson 2008; Johnson 2009). Casa researcher # 2 confirmed
the integrative ritual partnering by the early collaborative alliances between the native
89
The philosophy (of Palo) is African; and the rituals and symbols (bones in
a basket, tobacco and powders) of the native populations were adopted.
Fundamentally, African practices are additive and adaptive based on the
effectiveness of the exchange between the spirits and people. The dead
are the essence of religion in Oriente; the intimate connection between life
and death is negotiated by the TaTa’s work with the nganga (Johnson
8
2008).
Cosmic Commonalities:
The once-enslaved Taíno and Africans who fled to the mountains of Oriente
combined their overlapping comprehensions about the dead and natural phenomena.
These shared understandings about the universe’s order provided the basis for the
formation of new ritual practices reflecting the new and shared social reality of each
group. In addition to intersecting appreciations about the dead and supernatural beings,
the two groups also held an understanding that forested areas were sacred reservoirs
containing the creative essence of the universe in the form of plants, rocks, soil, animals,
etc. (Franco 1973; Thompson, et al. 1981; Luaces 2002; Johnson 2004; Torres-Cuevas
Each group believed that a successful and vibrant community consisted of a wide
variety of spirits, including but not limited to supernatural beings associated with natural
phenomena, ancestral spirits, and the recently dead. The Taíno and Kongo African
members of their social world. Spirit members of the community were to be engaged
ritualistically and re-membered into the material world of the living (Dodson 2008: 71-
74). That is to say, that the spirits’ membership in the collective was to be regularly
8
The definition of a “TaTa” will be presented in chapter 4 along with clarification of
nganga spelled with a lowercase “n.”
90
reaffirmed through ritual activities to include these entities into the social lives of the
living. The purpose of such exchanges reflected each group’s understanding that spirits
have experiential wisdom about the nature of human worlds as well as dimensions of
access ancestral wisdom about how to negotiate their social reality as well as their
connections within a universe beyond their human capacities. In this regard, each group
prioritized exchanges with the ancestral dead by utilizing their skeletal remains. Each
group would have had expertise about how to engage ethereal entities and shared
those skills to commune with spirits. For example, the native populations brought
understandings about the flora and fauna of the land and how to use them for rituals to
invoke spirit beings to commune with the living. Tobacco and the hutiya were two such
key biological elements from Taíno religious practices that became part of these ritual
would have been familiar to the newly imported Kongo people. A reverence for the dead
and the continuation of the presence of the dead as part of the social activity of the
living also held a key position in the principels of the early Kongolese imported to Cuba.
What is of critical significance for the focus of this dissertation research is that the
remaining AmerIndian population and the newly imported African populations had
comprehensions about other worldly beings as entities that could and should be brought
into the physical and social reality of humans. Even before they came into forced
contact with each other in Oriente, each community had designated geographic
locations, living space, social role(s), and specialized behavioral practices dedicated to
91
communing with other worldly beings within their societies. The priority of communing
with spirit entities as members of the living community in such particularized ways
became an early and significant social behavior that imprinted itself in the social fabric
The two populations would have melded their rituals into ceremonial complexes
and assembled spaces inclusive of material goods from their natural and social
environment that reflected aspects of the spirit entities they collectively engaged. That is
to suggest that significant spirit others of the two communities would be jointly re-
and Kongolese groups would have facilitated the creation of a religious world that
their social lives and symbolic worlds. More importantly, such companioned interactions
to engage the ancestors via elements of newly created home space would respond to
their innate human need to perform their religious world in their own terms.
I propose that shared perspectives about the sacrality of the natural landscape
space and how to use it to integrate the reality of human being with that of spirit beings
was a key component to how the AmerIndians and Africans combined their religious
worlds. That both the Taíno and the Kongolese understood forested spaces as the
gateway to the Other World was critical for developing rituals that drew upon materials
from the natural world to invite different spirit beings into the reality of these human
groups.
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Within reported activities among sixteenth-century Taíno and Kongo populations,
we can see the emergence of the foundations for a newly constructed religious world
inclusive of shared comprehensions about and ritual activities that engaged the land, its
products, and the remains of the ancestral dead. These composite understandings and
ritual activities provided cornerstones of religious world creation inspired by the land, its
products, and the remains of the ancestral dead. All of these pre-cursor ideas, beliefs
and ritual activities were transmitted to the racially mixed generations of Oriente, Cuba
and in the twentieth century, would be officially organized into the formal practice of
Palo Mayombe (James Figarola, et al. 1999; Luaces 2002; Dodson 2008; Johnson
2008).
AmerIndian and African populations in Oriente during the early years of the Cuban
colony set the precedent of incorporating ideas and religious practices of additional
9
migrating populations. In the late 1700s, French criollos fleeing the Haitian Revolution
migrated to Cuba, bringing their captive African-descended labor force and technical
advances in sugar, coffee and tobacco production with them. Africans and African
descendants brought to Cuba from the newly liberated island of Haití continued
engaging loa, supra-natural spirits and ancestral dead through the ritual practices of
Voodoo/Vodú (Millet and Alarcón 1998: 104-123; Dodson 2008: 104-123). Spiritualism
was another tradition that flourished in eastern Cuba at the turn of the nineteenth
century. Spiritualism, or Espiritísmo and its variants, was imported from the United
9
Criollo refers to those individuals born in the Americas during the colonial era,
regardless of their race or ethnicity.
93
States and based on French Spiritualism practices. Spiritualism centered on
The importation patterns of Africans to Cuba changed over time as intra- and
inter-empire grappling shifted circumstances in Western Africa and among other nations
participating in the larger trans-Atlantic trade in humans (Gemery and Hogendorn 1974;
Drescher 1994; Palmer 1997; Thomas 1997; Eltis and Richardson 2008). Notably, by
the mid-1830s, people drawn from the Yoruba Empire were pressed into the
population (Lovejoy and Trotman 2002: 55-79; Falola and Childs 2004; Hall 2005).
Cuba’s primary ports of importation and exportation had been relocated from Oriente to
the Havana and Matanzas provinces in response to these global economic and political
transformations. These structural changes repositioned colonial interests away from the
Havana and the western provinces would be known as Cuba’s seat of political,
In 1803, the Haitian Revolution came to fruition, which saw the successful
descent (Trouillot 1995; James [1963] 1998). The success of the first Black Republic in
the Americas powerfully affected all colonial systems in the hemisphere. Haití
introduced a counterstatement to racialized rule and enslavement, which had been the
normative social structuring from the early sixteenth century forward. The Haitían
Revolution also induced change in the economic system of the Americas. The fall of
San Domingue’s (now Haití’s) French-run sugar plantation system in 1803 meant that
94
Europe had to find a new supplier for its sugar addition. Cuba served as the colonial
inheritor of sugar production for North America and Europe. Cuba assumed the
responsibilities of sugar production for the Western world, and with it, redoubled the
intensive exploitation of African bodies for labor. Franklin Knight estimated that
The majority of sugar production in Cuba took place on the open plains of the
western and central portion of the island. Some sugar production took place in Oriente,
but not on the same scale. What each region throughout Cuba did share during the
nineteenth century was revolt and rebellion of enslaved Africans and their increasing
descended people during in the Las Escalares period of uprising from the late 1820s to
1844. During the Las Escalares period of rebellion, well-organized units of people of
African lineage launched a series of attacks against their enslavers. A woman, Carlotta,
and co-conspirators, Manuel and Felipe, mounted one well-known campaign in the
providence of Matanzas. The uprising lasted for several days, moving from one
plantation to the next. It was eventually brutally suppressed. As part of their torture and
punishment for collaboration with the rebelling forces, individuals were tied to ladders
and whipped nearly to death, giving the period of rebellion its infamous name, “Las
Escalares” (The Ladders) (Saco and Ortiz 1938; Ortiz 1975; Palmié 2002; Johnson
throughout the nineteenth century, and it was well known that if enslaved individuals in
the west or central sections of the island could get to Oriente, they could join up with the
95
palenque community network and live freely (Montejo and Barnet 1968: 43-47; Johnson
even as these newer episodes of social upheaval were instigated in the west and
In 1868, activities to bring about the end of enslavement intersected with the
aspirations of Cuba’s European criollos for independence movement from Spain. Carlos
Manuel Céspedes, a Spanish criollo plantation owner immediately enlisted the help of
the enslaved African-descended population and raised the first call to rebellion against
the Spanish metropole in the mountains of Oriente by freeing and recruiting the
enslaved workers to fight in the war against Spain. Céspedes declared Cuba was to be
free for all Cubans, and he along with the newly freed African Cubans on his plantation
conducted a ceremony to launch the new alliance and the call to war against Spain
(Ferrer 1999: 15-35). Of significant importance, individuals living in the palenques and
Ferrer 1999). Antonio Maceo and Guermond Moncada were two free Cubans of African
lineage who were key leaders during Cuba’s protracted independence struggle from
96
1868 forward. Each man was born and raised in the historic neighborhood of Los Hoyos.
Moncada was an active practitioner of ritual practices that engaged the dead, and held
an active nganga during the 1868 to 1898 independence movement (Johnson 2008).
One of Moncada’s direct descendants continues to maintain his sacred ritual materials.
Maceo and Moncada along with other free Cubans of African lineage, organized
multiracial fighting forces composed of free and enslaved individuals. In 1878, when
Spanish racialized propaganda was successful in having white creole leadership sign a
treaty to end aggressions to end enslavement and prevent Cuba from becoming
another Black Republic like Haití, General Maceo refused to capitulate. Instead, Maceo
and those loyal to him and the cause for a free Cuba went into exile and marshaled
support to reignite the Cuban independence movement in 1878 (Foner 1977; Ferrer
1999).
Historically and contemporarily, Los Hoyos has been a seedbed for rebellion
against European-dominated power structures within Cuba. The neighborhood was also
ceremonial center of the city (Dodson 2008; Johnson 2009; Johnson 2010). I situated
the dissertation research in the neighborhood of Los Hoyos because of the central role
it and members of its population played in the socio-historical context of Cuban religious
formation and identity formation. Los Hoyos residents continue to celebrate their
Cuba’s self-rule. In telling the family history of the Palo worship community, one
interviewee Sophia, the matriarch of the blood-related family members of the Palo
worship community, recounted how both her maternal and paternal grand fathers fought
97
in the independence wars. This is to suggest that the blood family members of the Palo
worship community were linked to the local and national history of social struggles for
freedom and independence as these took shape in Oriente. That is to say that her
family has a long-standing and intimate involvement with the shaping of politics in the
Oriente region. Contemporarily the impact of the family on social relations has occurred
in the arena of religion, most notably through the family’s effective ritual work with spirits
within Palo.
In 1898, Cuba was formally recognized as a free republic, but the struggle to end
colonial rule had not officially ended within the island nation. Months before
warship was blown up in the harbor of Havana, and the U.S. invaded Santiago de Cuba,
declaring war on Spain. Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders and Black U.S.
regiments organized during the Civil War invaded Santiago de Cuba, attacking
recalcitrant pockets of Spanish soldiers along with battle-worn Cuban units (Brock 1998;
Traxel 1998; de la Fuente 2001; Bronfman 2004). The U.S. intervention in 1898
replaced the Spanish as political, economic, and social overseers, realizing a long-held
aspiration of U.S. President Thomas Jefferson; for the U.S. to own Cuba and its natural
independent political and economic system, as corruption was the norm, and
international businesses and politics continued to hold sway over the internal
organization. One potent example of external demands dictating Cuba’s system was the
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Colored Party) was formed in 1907 by Black veterans from the War of Independence.
government and social benefits of Cuba’s First Republic. The exclusion had occurred
even as Blacks had fought in all wars that led to Cuban independence from colonial rule.
In response to PIC, the Cuban government, at the threat of invasion from the U.S.,
massacred some 3,000 African-descended associates of the PIC in 1912 after they had
gathered in La Maya, a small predominately Black town in Oriente (Montejo and Barnet
1968: 215-218; Helg 1995; Castíllo Bueno 1996: 48-54; Castro Fernández 2008;
After the massacre, political organizations based on race were outlawed, and a
particularized form of “color blindness” became the national rhetoric, even as racialized
discrimination had been the cultural norm for four centuries. Cuba’s race relations were
further strained by the U.S. imposition of its own legalized form of segregation, ushered
into U.S. law in 1896’s Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling. The double layering
new social order nearly nonexistent for Black Cubans. Race-based society-wide
Hemisphere of the Atlantic (Helg 1990: 37-43; de la Fuente 2001: 23-44) made any
99
However, despite the state-sanctioned tyranny, communities that continued to
1920s a young U.S.- and Spanish-trained criminologist, Don Fernando Ortíz, began to
study the social and cultural lives of African descendants. Indeed, Melville Herskovits
had extensive correspondence with Ortíz, which influenced his own scholarship on
African “retentions” within the Atlantic Diaspora of Africans (Yelvington 2006a). While
Ortíz and the majority of his students focused on the western regions of Cuba, R.
Lachatañeré proposed that research conducted in the Oriente region would hold more
1992). The work of this dissertation falls within the scope of a growing English-language
scholarship that focuses on Oriente and its Africa-inspired practices (Zaid 2006; Wirtz
2007; Dodson 2008; Dodson and Johnson 2009; Ashcraft-Eason, et al. 2010).
unchanged from the Republic years up until 1963. While Protestantism and Catholicism
were practiced, and indeed Catholicism was recognized as the “official” national religion,
with more than 75 percent of the population practicing one or more of the traditions
(Ayorinde 2004; Sawyer 2006; Hearn 2008). The Cuban Revolution, initiated in 1953 in
structural adjustments, and health, land, and educational access for all citizens became
a priority. Along with these social reforms, race-based and gender discrimination was
made illegal nationally (Smith and Padula 1996; Thomas 1998; Gleijeses 2002;
Guevara and Deutschmann 2003). During the 1953 struggle, as was the case during
100
the 1868 movement, Black Cubans would account for the majority of the fighting forces.
This strong representation of African descendants in the 1953 movement, as with the
other armed struggles of the nation, had to do with their potential for social freedoms
In the year’s following the 1959 Revolution, Black Cubans enjoyed more access
to the nation’s educational, employment, housing, and medical resources than during
any other time of the nation’s five-hundred-year history. However, the 1991 fall of the
former Soviet Union, Cuba’s key economic supporter, sent the island-nation’s gross
national product plummeting to a $-11.9 million dollars (Johnson 2004; Johnson 2008).
With the loss of the main importer of its sugar, Cuba has had to restructure its economic
system for the second time in the last fifty years to meet its social needs. Even as this
second structural adjustment has had severe implications for Cuba’s national project,
several key items significant to the dissertation research continue to garner attention.
The increase of tourism has brought in much-needed capital: however, with increased
The geographic isolation from the rest of the island by the island’s largest
mountain range meant that that all “orientales” (easterners) were left to struggle to exist
as best they were able in the “backwater” region of Cuba. Oriente’s existence on the
awareness throughout the region that continued to influence the island’s sociopolitical
development throughout the colonial era, throughout the years of the republic, and
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contemporarily. Oriente’s increasing isolation created distinctive cultural expressions,
However, even as Pérez credits the eastern region as “the most Cuban region,” and the
the island’s archetypical province. I would expand Peréz’s observation about Oriente’s
social world that included their spirit familiars that frames the region’s contributions to
Cuba’s nation building project. In this respect, the physical geography of Oriente has
become imbued with alternative chronicles about the generational legacies of freedom
from physical bondage, as represented by the skeletal remains of the first orientales
who sought their own forms of identity, and by the forested spaces of the Sierra
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memory of the nation. In these conversations, Dr. Danzic affirmed that when
practitioners of Cuba’s distinctive religions in the western portions of the island are
asked “where is the most sacred space of Cuba…they will tell you always Oriente—
10
Oriente is the consecrated ground. ” Contemporary Palo practitioners encapsulate
their comprehension of the sacrality of Oriente as “African meets Indian, now the African
I would further assert that Palo sacred spaces serve as alternative archives that
incorporate representations of spirit beings and the natural elements of the Other World.
Palo ritual spaces reflect the inherited wisdom from the Taíno about the sacred
sanctuary of the forest and exist as the social archives that document the struggle of
subaltern communities in eastern Cuba to reconstruct and maintain sacred family units.
Palo worshipers’ maintenance of their ritual spaces and activities to commune with the
practice, Palo devotees incorporate the social history of the location in their everyday
activities of remembrance and consultation. The next chapter will provide an overview of
the spiritual orientation of Palo Monte/Mayombe that informs the religious practice and
sacred genealogy construction of its practitioners, which reveal the hidden histories of
10
The conversation between Drs. Danzic and Hernandez took place on December 12,
2011 in 101 Morrill Hall, then offices of the AART. In attendance were Dr. Gwendolyn
Midlo Hall, AART Director Dr. Jualynne E. Dodson, and Team members Crystal Eddins,
William Escalante, and Alexandra Gelbard.
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CHAPTER 4:
SPIRITUAL FOUNDATIONS
OF
PALO MONTE/MAYOMBE
104
Introduction
Reglas Congo refers to those religious traditions that are based in the ritual and
Monte, one of the Reglas Congo, have consistently experienced virulent forms of
persecution and violence and the practices continue to be among the most
Congo traditions have not gone unnoticed or unaddressed. Emerging archeological and
written archival materials are beginning to provide details on how sixteenth- and
cultural activity in the Americas (García 1995; Fennell 2007b: 199-232; Mendes 2008;
Thompson [1983] 1984: 103-158). The intent of this chapter is to provide a better
emphasis on components central to the dissertation: spirit entities, time, revelation, and
from which I produced the dissertation’s case study of Palo Monte in Santiago de Cuba.
11
Both Spanish and English literature treating cultural features inspired from areas now
known as Gabon, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola use “c” to refer to
things derived from Kongolese influences. I will use “c” when referring to aspects of
Palo Monte religious reality and “k” when referring to sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century Kongolese people.
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Roots of Palo Monte
12
Palo Monte is one subdivided practice line of the larger religious family
complex known as Reglas de Congo (Bolívar Arostegui and Villegas 1998). The family
incorporates several lines of religious practice inspired and/or derived from cultural
traditions of the earliest Africans first imported to Cuba’s eastern regions. The
characteristics. Colloquially, the family group, and the affiliated religious line of practice
that is the focus of this dissertation, are known as Congo and Palo. The name Palo
Kongolese individuals and their biological and ritually affiliated descendants in Cuba. An
effective way to understand Reglas Congo is to use the analogy of a forest. Reglas
Congo is the forest, yet the forest is composed of individual trees. Palo Monte is one of
those trees and Mayombe is but one branch of that tree. The use of the “slash” between
Not all early African importees were Kongolese by birth or by way of cultural
and in colonies of the Americas rapidly created affinity groups (Sudarkasa 2007: 35)
12
The community of the case study use language of Mayombe. However, for clarity I
will use Palo Monte/Mayombe to disrupt the negative connotations colloquially assigned
to the Mayombe line of ritual practice.
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13
based on “Old World” cultural resources . Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, building on
on such a blending of cultural practices and identities, which they term “creolization”
(Mintz and Price [1976] 1992: ix). They affirm that the creolization process was
necessary in order for colonial laborers to survive and prevail in the Americas’ new
geopolitical and cultural worlds. Stephen Palmié discusses this “New World” process of
it reflects collective affiliations that are reconstructed and/or created African groups
whose starting points are a shared social reality (Palmié 1993). His proposition lodges
the collective affiliations or groupings in Cuba’s urban areas, and other writers concur
Palmié established that the ethnogenetic process is most likely found in urban
areas of the African Diaspora, and that Cuba presents a strong exemplary case in point.
However, the numerical dominance of the Kongolese in the earliest centuries of the
eastern regions of the island colony could offer insight into the creation of affinity groups
in other than urban centers. David Eltis and David Richardson’s Atlas of the
Transatlantic Slave Trade estimates that between 1501 and 1700, some 1,251,900
people were imported from regions of the Kongo Kingdom (Eltis and Richardson 2010:
13
Within the continent of Africa, contact between Kongolese, Dahome, Yoruba, and
other distinct African civilizations had already begun the sharing of cultural as well as
spiritual understandings. Experiences of contact, sharing, and adaptation in the
Americas were not original; only the subjugating variety of enslavement was new (Midlo
Hall, 2005; Thornton and Heywood 2007).
107
religocultural mores is a significant insight into rituals, rites, and cosmic understandings
that later shaped the religious complex of Palo Monte (Díaz 2000: 113).
I have already discussed that early alliances between Taíno and Kongo African
captives in eastern Cuba occurred quickly, evidenced by joint raids of such eastern
cities as Baracoa in 1522 and Bayamo in 1537. These self-liberating activities of the
remaining Taíno AmerIndians and captive Kongolese Africans also joined to comprise
Oriente. However, the liberation and “love of freedom” was but one common feature of
each community.
The contact and encounter in Oriente, Cuba of Kongolese Africans and Taíno
AmerIndians allowed the two cultural groups to comprehend their shared, common
awareness about the world, not merely their mutual sociopolitical status as enslaved
under Spanish rule. As the previous chapter introduced, the Taíno AmerIndians and
Africans imported from areas under the cultural influence of the Kongolese Kingdom
locations. The forest was that space that demarcated the world of living beings from the
world of primordial spirits and all ancestral dead. All naturally occurring elements of the
forested space were infused with strong power and potent essence imparted by a
Supreme Creative Force, an essence, and force beyond that given to living humans.
Palo practitioners ground the awareness about the cosmic world with ordered
108
know Nz/(Inz)ambi as the single Creative Force of the entire universe and all in it that
was not created by humans––and even some human creations are at the influence,
direction, and effect of Nz/(Inz)ambi (James Figarola 2006b: 59-68). Every being and
Plants, rocks and other parts of the universe considered “inanimate” also are imbued
with Nz/(Inz)ambi essence of creation. This orientation goes further to maintain that the
universe is not merely populated by living beings that have discernable material
essence. There also are categories of ethereal beings or spirits who occupy spaces
throughout the universe. Just as living beings can, for example, be divided into warm-
Palo are divided into four categories; mpungos, nfumbi, ndoquis and the Yet-To-Be-
Born.
Mpungos are supernatural beings, divine spirits directly responsible for the
environmental phenomena in which the living and humans reside. Ndoquis are the
ancestral spirits of those who have lived in the material world that humans occupy, but
who have died during times that no living humans can remember, times lost to human
memory. Nfumbi are the living-dead spirits, the ethereal beings of those deceased
individuals who have biographies known by living persons. The living-dead beings are
spirits of individuals who have died but whose life experiences have not been forgotten,
and whose spirits have yet to pass into the divine or ancestral Other World. Nfumbi are
the closest to human beings in that they have experiential knowledge of what it means
to exist in the historical material world of humans as well as in the Other World. There
also are other spirits among the world of the living-dead; they are those of the Yet-To-
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Be-Born. These ethereal beings are entities who have not yet occupied the human
The mpungos and nfumbi categories of Palo spirits have the ability and
responsibility to permeate and occupy the human material realm. Their Nz/(Inz)ambi-
appointed responsibilities and power are designed to gain the attention of human beings
in order to advise, correct, and assist them in living a life that is in balance with the order
of the universe: the cosmic order. Inside this orientation that maintains spirits as active
positive relationships with the totality of the universal order, including with animate and
inanimate beings. That is to say, human beings must develop positive relationships with
other humans in addition to with all plants and animals, spirit beings of all varieties, and
the cosmos beyond human control (Mbiti 1990; James Figarola 2006b). Such
relationships can take shape as prayers, sacrificial abstinence, rituals, and/or rites
with objects (Cabrera 1986; Bockie 1993; Bettelheim 2001; Palmié 2002; Ochoa 2007).
Within this perspective, such relationships toward the cosmos can include taking time to
notice and acknowledge the interconnectedness of creation aspects within the individual
self, within the wider practicing community, and ultimately within other human beings.
Although Palo practitioners understand that not all humans practice the same religious
tradition, the commonality of being human is sufficient for them to know and act upon
the fact that there are enduring bonds between all humans.
practitioner maintain the belief that spirit entities, particularly mpungos and nfumbi, have
110
the specific task, as designated by Nz/(Inz)ambi, to guide, assist, and reprimand
and within humanity at large. The category of spirits of the Yet-To-Be Born are charged
with the obligation of ensuring humans are in the appropriate places to receive and
acknowledge their birth when their spirit comes within and takes shape in a physical
Time
Practitioners of Palo understand and organize their lives around the idea that
living things, humans, and spirit beings coexist in a reality of temporal fluidity. In this
reality, time is not linear, with a beginning or end. Time is conceptualized as being
saturated with experiences of the total universe that are unknown to humans, yet
understood by mpungo spirits. John Mbiti’s groundbreaking text discusses the time
continuum within African philosophy and his discussion is quite appropriate for putting
existence. Mbiti suggests that time among African-descended people is most concerned
with what is past and what is available in the current moment. The past is of greatest
importance in that it is the collective stock of knowledge into which all aspects of the
cosmos are absorbed and from which all beings can draw wisdom (Mbiti 1990: 15-28).
For example, the earth has its own inherent wisdom due to the longevity of its existence,
as do creatures that are part of its bionetworks. Humans, as the more recent additions
to the earth, have the most to learn and enact to integrate themselves as active
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actualization. The future is not considered with great concern, in that the nearness of
current activity is prioritized over the abstraction of what is to come in a distant and yet-
some fixed point of preferred existence. Such prioritizing of the current over future
arrangement of time as “a philosophy of life put into practice.” Humans as part of this
practice-of-living are introduced to the world through birth, are responsible to be active
participants in engaging the universe, and discern lessons brought forward from
primordial time in the form of messages from the Other World. Humans can find insights
for how the universe came into existence, human life, life-after-death cycles, and the
Other World. Communication activities are pivotal to the practice of Palo and
practitioners maintain contact with spirit others in order to sustain the communication
paramount part of the intricately interwoven reality that Palo devotees occupy. Mpongo
and nfumbi spirits can and do visit the world of the living when humans create the
appropriate atmospheres for spirit intercessions. Within their everyday reality and during
(Mbiti 1990: 25) where the material world is made receptive for spirits to enter and
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assist in performing ritual activities. The exchanges with mpungos and nfumbi spirits
can take the form of small-and/or large-scale rituals of communication, singing, dancing,
It is through ongoing consultation with the mpungos and nfumbi, and through
careful observation of one’s day-to-day reality, that imbalances between self and
relationships throughout creation can be discerned and acted upon. Imbalances can
originate from any source, as Palo practitioner believe that both positive and negative
energies can influence action throughout the universe. However, negative energies are
creation (Johnson 2008). Sacrifice among Palo practitioners can take the form of giving
order to live in an integrative fashion with the cosmic order. Animal sacrifice is one form
addressed in a fashion that requires only the most sacred of essences to return the
current of energy back to a positive relationship. Through the offering of blood, the most
relationships under their purview. However, it is only through ongoing consultation and
fellowship with spirits that Palo devotees can access the type of wisdom necessary to
know when sacrifice is required and to live in balance with the universe’s rhythms.
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A second arena of human-spirit engagement that is of primary importance is
active communion between members of the material world and those of the nonmaterial
Other World. This form of spirit communication occurs when practitioners’ bodies are
“borrowed” by an mpungo or nfumbi spirit in order that the spirit can fellowship directly
with humans of the religious community. The act of spirits cosharing a human body is
an intimate activity where the practitioner has learned how to suspend her or his
consciousness in order that a spirit can use her or his physical body to have “face-to-
face” interaction with members of the worship community. Samuel recounted how
“spirits come in dreams or during ‘trances’. During ‘trances,’ they do not speak well
because they are dead. The consciousness of the person goes to a little place in the
head (indicated by him pressing his finger tips to his skull) and the spirit is in the body
The spirits are “re-membered,” returned/brought from planes of the Other World
and its knowledge pools into direct contact with the Palo community. Not only does “re-
membering” bring spirits into the human realm, but it helps practitioners to recall the
bond between the past and the present; it recalls and even asserts new knowledge from
the Other World into the lives of the living. When the purposeful actions of Palo
practitioners bring the realms into clearer association with each other, the connection
When mpungo or nfumbi spirits enter the historical material world by way of
wisdom from the spirit realms, realms beyond human activity. This is a revelation that
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humans, in turn, use to interpret and activate influence in the lives of the living. In his
A piece of information about the other world [sic], its nature, or its intention
that is perceptible to people in this world through one or another channel.
Revelations provide this world with its window on the constructing a
general understanding of the nature of the other world and its inhabitants
(a philosophy), a clear perception of its desires and intentions for people
to obey (a religion), and a larger picture of the workings and history of both
worlds (a cosmology). It is thus through revelations that religions are
formed, and it is also through them that they change (Thornton 1998b:
238; Thornton 1998a).
Thornton’s discussion proficiently encapsulates the roles of human and spiritual actors
within the religious tradition of Palo. Revelation enjoys a privileged place within the
practice of Palo, as it is from and within these reciprocal relationships with spirits that
Rituals assist in the production of Palo ceremonial space that induces revelations,
and the revelations bolster the stock of collective memory that supplicants draw upon
and refer back to in times of individual or community need. Thereby, rituals help
preserve group solidarity in the material and spiritual realms. Victor Turner proposes
The multivalent ritual actions are recruited to mobilize the meaning system of Palo
Monte and to act on practitioners’ particular ideas, wishes, responsibilities, and needs.
As Turner discusses, humans access the time of the realm of spirits through rituals
wherein music, ritual language, dance movements, food elements, and animal sacrifices
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that help alter the physical settings of human-dominated spaces in order to invite spirits
into direct communion with humans. Drumming, singing and dance ceremonial settings
serve beyond creating ambiance to be liturgical activities conducted within the ritual
language, and are articulated vocally and through the body to inform and reinforce
ethical orientations of religious supplicants. The liturgical aspects also help to regulate
bodily practices to continue maintaining balance relationships with the Other World.
prevalence of communing with spirit beings through body cohabitation among African
reclaim their bodies, not as sites of generational violence, but as actual sites of
liberation. In the case of Palo practitioners, spirit mountings represent the reconnection
to primordial sources of the universe’s wisdom that allows them to imagine and rescript
their humanity using positive self-referents. By living with spirits, Palo supplicants are
able to reaffirm their spiritual foundations, which serve as their centers of moral
authority not bounded in the limits of their racialized social circumstances. Such
about themselves. Mateo quoted Antonio’s discussion about spirits during his interview,
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stating that, “the mufundi are not a fantasy. Religion is for the poor, not the rich.”
(Johnson 2010).
communication and interaction between spirits, creation, and humans. They are known
as Ngangas. One female respondent of my research project noted that the spiritual
potency of Palo Monte/Mayombe is linked to the fact that a sacred pact is formed
It has long been assumed that part of the long-held aversion of the general
Cuban public to Regla Palo Monte and its practitioners is the involvement of a small
blood sacrifice from the neophyte and the use of the skeletal remains of humans and
other animals (Luaces 2002; Johnson 2004; Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler 2005).
Initiates can advance their training within the tradition and ascend within a carefully
ranked system of responsibilities. Women and men hold positions within Regla Palo
Monte leadership, though men are more visible in public forms. The public positioning of
organizations. However, as noted in the methods chapter, some literature asserts that
the specialized power of women is no less effective and perhaps holds sway over
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Nganga, with a capital “N,” refers to an individual who has mastered the ritual
knowledge of Palo, whereas nganga with a lowercase “n” refers to the physical sacred
spaces of Palo. A male individual who has mastered special designated abilities to
initiate, facilitate, and interpret communication with and from spirits is designated as a
TaTa Nganga. The female leadership in Palo is called Madre Nganga, as well as Madre
Nkisi. There are additional ranked positions within the religious tradition, but specifics of
these distinctions were beyond the scope of the dissertation’s research focus. However,
communicate within and on behalf of the Other World, so these individuals in and of
Sacred Spaces
of spirit others through using nkisi, material objects and substances that contain
concentrated power from Nz/(Inz)ambi. Nkisi can be drawn from the natural created
world, such as rocks, plants, sticks, soil, remains of humans, and animals. Nkisi can
also be manufactured objects associated with the social history of Cuba, such as chains,
iron cauldrons, crosses, etc. Practitioners understand nkisi as items and substances
imbued with small portions of the universe’s creative essence, which is power. When
nkisi are arranged together within Palo ceremonial spaces, they become minkisi,
multiple nkisi functioning in concert to alter the atmosphere of a ceremonial space and
make it receptive to revelatory communications with and from spirits. Individual nkisi
and collective minkisi are employed by Palo practitioners to communicate, receive, and
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commune with different spirit beings, except the Yet-To-Be-Born (Bockie 1993: 10-19;
The central minkisi complex that prevails inside Palo ritual activities is an nganga,
supernatural spirit force affiliated with a naturally occurring phenomenon: thunder, rain,
the forest, animals of the forest, etc. The spirit within an nganga has a primary assistant
spirit. The assistant spirit is called a prenda or the “dog of the” nganga. The role of the
transplanted from Africa, they “vomited them up when they arrived in Cuba,” and now,
“the fundamentals are housed within the nganga” (Johnson 2009). A TaTa Nganga
transmits the exact nature and combination of an nganga’s fundamentals to those who
apprentice him in the religious tradition. Knowledge held by TaTa Nganga can take
decades to learn and master. One semiformal interview respondent likened the ability
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and expertise of effectively working within the religious tradition as fuerza, power that is
Palo sacred spaces are a dynamic and multivocal layering of a large array of
textures, smells, sights, and sounds. All elements contained within a space are
facilitate Palo devotees’ communication between the visible human world and the
invisible spirit worlds . During one ritual feeding of the dead, or feeding of the spirits, the
incantations at the beginning of the ceremony were sung by another TaTa that was part
of the worship community, welcoming spirits and practitioners to the ceremony and
night my Africans, good night paleros].” He continued, singing, “Since I was a pikanini
[sic], I was here with this mpungo.” Those present responded to the call with “Since I
was a chicitico [little child], I was here with this mpungo.” When the welcome had been
sung and the energy of the space sufficiently charged with the singing and drumming,
Antonio stepped in, transiting from the prelude of the ceremony to the formal invocation
of the spirits of the sacred space, by addressing the ngangas, stating that “All are
assembled here, your Africans, this night”(Johnson 2008). This excerpt demonstrates
how the Palo worship community engages the spirits contained within the ngangas to
The most fundamental sacred space for Palo devotees is the forest, the “de sao,”
as it contains the latent universal power that can be activated within constructed Palo
ceremonial spaces. Members of the study community took great pains to recreate “de
sao” spaces inside their homes, alongside their ngangas where they perform ritual work.
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During my interviews with research participants Yvonne and Mateo, Thomas had come
by for different elements to complete spiritual work with his African spirits. Both reached
into different bags and spaces tucked into corners around their spiritual spaces to
produce the little bits of earth, wood, and elements Thomas asked for (Johnson 2010).
During one field session, Antonio took a colleague from the African Atlantic
Research Team and me on a walk throughout the city to assist in gathering items for his
ceremonial work. As we walked throughout the city, the TaTa would pause, pointing out
plants that were part of the cultivated shrubbery that lined the streets. He commented
on healing properties contained in each plant. He would select a few and tell us the
plants name in Spanish, sometimes accompanied with its Congo name in Kikongo;
allow us to smell it; and then picked some to store inside the baskets we carried for him.
Our scouting party of three continued walking throughout city streets, occasionally
stopping at different homes of Antonio’s hijados (godchildren), and have coffee or water
along the way back to his nganga. Occasionally the TaTa Nganga would have us wait
and he would inquire about their prices. At the end of our walk, and upon returning to
the worship house, he went straight to the room with the arrangement of several
ngangas, throwing open the doors and calling into the room “hello people!!” The TaTa
then placed some of the leaves we had gathered in front of the picture of his uncle,
Esteban, the worship community’s first TaTa Nganga who died in 2003, saying “we
always remember you” (Johnson 2008). In addition to fresh plants and animals brought
by this leader into the Palo worship house, a readily available supply of pigeons and
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chickens, sometimes accompanied by a pig or goat, were kept in the back patio area of
Mateo recounted how he and Antonio would also go great distances to forested
areas surrounding the city of Santiago to collect soil, plants, rocks, branches, and
animals. These items are stored in or near areas near several ngangas of the worship
house in the “de sao” area. Other palero/as replicated the process of looking for and/or
gathering objects for their individual ceremonial/sacred spaces. As I conducted the five
politely interrupted the interviews to speak with the interviewee(s). The visitor would
either deliver such objects as soil, holy water, chickens, or figurines for a palero’s
spiritual work, their sacred space, or they would discuss how and where to collect items
for ritual activities. At the conclusion of their interaction, the interviewee palero/a would
explain to me the objects’ purpose and significance (Johnson 2008; Johnson 2009). To
be clear, not all palera/os have ngangas or the knowledge-power to create one. While
their initiation into Palo serves as their beginning introduction to a “Congo way of life”
the practitioner must apprentice with a TaTa Nganga or Madre Nganga to learn about
The extensive time and labor Palo practitioners expend altering their homes to
accommodate their ritual spaces are poignant examples of the creation of “ceremonial
centers.” I suggest that the Palo worship community of the case study prioritizes
forested spaces as its ceremonial centers and brings resources from the forest as well
as from around the city-scape to recreate “de sao” in their home settings. While their
homes are in an urban area, the source of the Palo worship community’s religious
122
power is grounded in the forest as the access point to/for the Other World. The human
Ngangas and ritual ngangas serve as ceremonial communication bridges to the spirit
world. That the primary site of the community’s ritual work is located in Los Hoyos is not
as central to the community’s religious power as its ability to recreate in its ceremonial
spaces access to the sanctuary of the Other World, the “de sao.”
The Palo ceremonial center of this case study in the urban locality of Los Hoyos
takes on enhanced significance in that it recruits the power of the Other World as
contained within natural elements from “de sao” to be combined with creative power of
the Other World that is received during visits from spirits. Instead of the ceremonial
center and human creative energies being prioritized, we see the created world beyond
human manipulation serving as the sanctuary of knowledge and power. That is to say
that “de sao,” as the access point to the Other World, is employed to draw the wisdom
of the created world and universes into the current reality of Palo practitioners. The
intimacy of the relationships Palo practitioners forge and sustain with mpungo and
nfumbi spirits ensures that avenues of access to the stored pools of the knowledge of
the cosmos remain strong. The creation of ceremonial spaces equally keeps the human
world keyed to receive spirit representatives that serve as both the foundation and wise
members of the Palo worship community. The next chapter will discuss practitioners’
construction of a spirit genealogy and the meanings they assign to the interactive
relationships with spirit beings, which assist worship community members with enacting
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CHAPTER 5:
Palo Worship Community
124
Spirits are able to assist people with distinguishing what is bad and what is
good, and they transmit information about actions that are good and bad
because they can see the universe wherever they are in it whenever they
want. Spirits’ ties with the universe are wider and everywhere. They
transmit messages through the bodies of people or through dreams. The
dead, muertos, those who once had bodies, are about to decompose and
rise and associate with the universe and assist God—because God is at
the top. [These entities] are part of the earth, things in nature and you
have to ask permission to take from it—for example, when you cut a tree,
you need to ask permission to take it, and to pay because nothing is for
free…When a body is put into the ground, the ascent of the body through
decomposition allows the spirit to rise and permeate other spaces and
aspects of nature, of the universe. That is why spirits of the departed are
able to reach out in dreams and create connections with the living
because they permeate the world. Sleep is a state where humans are
open to receive during [their] dreams. Eva’s discussion of spirits (Johnson
2010).
Introduction
community maintain about their spirit familiars as privileged participants in the everyday
reality of humans. The data also suggest that Palo practitioners engage their spirit
others in ways that allow these human agents to maintain an alternative historical
record that that affirms their identity as African descendants in Cuba. The lived reality
that Palo worshipers create in concert with their spirit others presents Palo as a tradition
that contains the inherited legacy of the spiritual wisdom of the nations founding
subaltern communities.
ritual activities that were transmitted to new generations in Cuba’s eastern region.
These discussions also clarified the overlap in spiritual and cosmic orientation between
Kongo and Taíno cultural groups. However, those ritual and cosmic, if not
125
epistemological, understandings had yet to be formalized into a cohesive set of
issues pertaining to life and death. As previous authors have demonstrated, religion is
created when a collective demonstrates its beliefs through ritual activities keyed to
engage aspects of ultimate existence. The questions, therefore, are: When, what, and
The formal organization of Palo did not occur in eastern Cuba until early in the
from the western Matanzas region, near Havana, to Oriente. Little is known about
Pérez’s life before he arrived in Oriente but Casa and AART researchers do feel that he
arrived in the area as part of governmental forces assigned to the region to confront
Party (Zaid 2006). The PIC evolved at the turn of the twentieth century into an
organized protest by African-descended Cuban men who served in leadership and other
positions during Cuba’s 1895 War of Independence from Spain. These war veterans
found themselves, and other persons of color structured out of Cuba’s new Republic’s
social order and holding no places in the leadership despite the fact that soldiers of
color were the majority of fighters in number (Montejo and Barnet 1968; Helg 1995;
The racialized segregation, while not new within Cuba’s social system, took on a
more virulent form after the United States’s 1898 intervention in the island nation’s
military actions. The U.S. subverted Cuba’s decades-long military campaigns for
independence from Spain, and ultimately excluded Cubans from signing the treaty. This
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action made Cuba a de facto U.S. colony. The 1898 date holds double significance
because it was only two years after the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme U.S. Court
decision that legalized racial segregation in the United States. This newer form of racial
segregation was exported and implemented in all territories under U.S control, including
Cuba. As the new Cuban Republic began to take shape under the watchful eye of the
U.S., the PIC organized to protest its members’ exclusion from the new government
Oriente, a small town on the outskirts of the city of Santiago de Cuba. The U.S.
instructed the Republic’s President, José Miguel Gómez, under direct control of the U.S.
governor, to eliminate the growing PIC protest or risk another U.S intervention Cuban
forces were sent to La Maya to curtail the PIC’s efforts, and the encounter resulted in
the massacre of more than 3,000 African-descended persons, whether or not they were
members and supporters of PIC (Whitney 2001: 17-21; Guerra 2005: 217-242; Castro
Fernández 2008).
From that point forward, raced based political parties were outlawed in Cuba and
a new era of persecution increased and intensified especially against citizens affiliated
life intersected with the PIC and events surrounding its organization: however, his living
descendants and Cuban scholars affirm that he was from the Matanzas region and that
he migrated to Oriente in the first decades of the twentieth century. It is also affirmed
that Pérez held superior ritual expertise in at least two, if not more, African-inspired
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Soon after his arrival, Pérez settled in the Los Hoyos neighborhood of Santiago
de Cuba. Los Hoyos was already a seedbed of African-inspired religious activity and
Pérez quickly became known and sought after for his powerfully effective work with
receive systematic training about how to engage and work with spirits. While his was
not the only centro in Santiago, it soon became recognized as one of the most powerful,
as Pérez and his students’ demonstrated knowledge of how to create and maintain
guidance. Casa del Caribe researchers have cited Pérez’s centro as the first one to
beings, beginning with the supranatural spirit-force that resided in his nganga. The
reported that Pérez’s nganga served as the parent nganga for Santiago de Cuba, and
some felt this was true for all of Oriente (Johnson 2010). Data from the dissertation
research was gathered from practitioners of one of the Palo Monte/Mayombe spiritual
lineages in the city of Santiago de Cuba. It was a branch of practicing spiritual family
members from one line belonging to Reynerio Pérez’s initiated hijado and protégé,
Esteban, uncle to Antonio and previous TaTa Nganga of the community until his death
in 2003. Casa researcher #4 commented that Esteban had developed one of the
strongest “branches” of Palo in Oriente (Johnson 2010). Esteban had a national and
international reputation for being quite knowledgeable and effective in his work with
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spirits. Esteban had an equally strong reputation for advocacy dedicated to
strengthening and improving the historically Black neighborhood of Los Hoyos. He also
was known for championing the religious practices of its inhabitants and expanded his
work to national and international practicing arenas as well as to academic forums. One
that this could be done through educating a wider audience about these distinctive
Research participants Eva, Yvonne, Mateo, Fernando, and Daniel helped explain
the spirits who were incorporated into Esteban’s religious genealogy, portions of which
are presented in Figure 7 in this chapter. They reported that Esteban had an intimate
ritual protocols associated with several other distinctly Cuban religions, even before he
began his studies with Reynerio Pérez. Significantly, as Sophia, his older sister and
family matriarch recounted, Esteban was born and raised in the city of Santiago de
Cuba. His extended birth family had a long-term residency in Oriente, particularly in the
area surrounding the eastern town of El Cobre, a town known both for its religious
potency for several of Cuba’s religious traditions and as a site of African resistance
during the early colonial era (Díaz 2000; Johnson 2009). Sophia, though not initiated
into Palo, preserves the details of the family’s blood ancestry as well as an overview of
the spiritual work conducted within the family. She discussed how members of
Esteban’s biological family members resided in or near Santiago de Cuba and/or in the
mountainous region just beyond the city, and “[their] uncles were ‘espiritistas,’ and
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practiced a type of spiritualism of “familiar” spirits, of their ancestors, “not Palo.” Sophia
recounted, “Everyone has their guide, protector and Africans,” and more uncles on her
mother’s side were espiritistas as were her parents. “Familiar spirits are of blood, of the
person. However, the songs that are the strongest are the Africans, like Ma Rufina,
Pase Rio, Pa Folco” (Johnson 2009). As a child, Esteban began interacting with spirits
and grew to be well known for his organic understanding of how to engage spirits of the
dead whose material remains were once interred within the Oriente landscape (Zaid
Monte/Mayombe case study because within the city of Santiago de Cuba, this Palo
Monte/Mayombe religious network is well known for its effective work with spirits.
Esteban’s effective and serious work with spirits, coupled with his approach to
Oriente, attracted many individuals to him for consultation and spiritual guidance, even
as a young teenager. In 2009, Esteban’s nephew and protégé Antonio estimated that
Esteban had some 2,000 individual godchildren located throughout Cuba, the
As Esteban sought to enhance his work with spirits he was soon referred to
Reynerio Pérez, who quickly discerned that the young man possessed a distinct gift and
awareness about spirit engagement, and began to train the young man in the formal
ritual protocols of Palo and Regla de Lucumí/Ocha (Zaid 2006). Long before his death
in 2002, Esteban was able to create a far-reaching spiritual family network, and a
cornerstone of his religious family was Palo Monte/Mayombe. Palo worship community
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members also confirmed the normative practice of how older community residents
helped them recognize their own spiritual inclinations, and taught these practitioners
how to effectively communicate and/or “work” with spirits long before Pérez arrived in
Oriente. Yvonne recounted how an older woman, after observing her behavior, said that
she needed to get someone to help her work with her spirits to maintain her health.
Mateo detailed how when he was younger, he “felt a calling in my heart to begin my
spiritual work,” and as a child he would help maintain the “altar” spaces of his
grandmother, “putting up fruit and candles,” and credits his grandmother with beginning
his spiritual training. Fernando reminisced about how his grandfather was “a palero, but
he died before he was about to teach me. I have been able to develop my capacities
when I came to the Palo worship house and began working with Antonio.” Samuel noted
that the centros, the specialized spiritual schools, were established and continue to be
held by someone versed in the ritual protocol of specific religious traditions to “help
people understand how to live with their spirits and how to control their trances [when
spirits mount an individual’s body and take over the body’s thoughts and actions] when
they are in the street, in the house. One of the most powerful centros is in Guantanamo,
Esteban was one such individual who had the ability to be in trance as part of his
communication processes with spirits. With instructions from Reynerio Pérez, Esteban
combined his organic comprehensions about Oriente spirits with the formal ritual
behaviors and knowledge of Palo (Johnson 2009; Johnson 2010). Under Pérez’s
tutorage, Esteban became one of the most prominent TaTa Ngangas throughout
Oriente and in Cuba, and was sought out nationally and internationally for his
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exceptionally effective work with spirits associated with Palo Monte/Mayombe, in
addition to his knowledge about local spirits (Johnson 2009). Esteban had found ways
spirit communications, which resonated with people throughout the city of Santiago de
Cuba and Oriente. Observers of Palo reported that “religious” people always had their
own personal spirits and communicated with them (Johnson 2009). Fernando explained
14
that each group of spirits work as a “cielo —a group of confidants that support and
care for one another. For example, [the mpungo of the nganga] and Pa Abran are family,
they work together, but they form a part of a cielo, compatriots that have amicable
Yvonne, an older woman within the Palo worship community related the history
of how “Reynerio brought the knowledge of the prendas [spirit assisting the primary
spirit-force residing in an nganga] from Matanzas and gave that knowledge to Esteban.
Esteban developed Palo in this area—his was the first prenda born here, in this earth
[indicating Oriente].” Another worshiper affiliated with the collective, Ivor, stated that
of Palo in the area. Reynerio brought [the knowledge of Palo] to the area and he saw
the potential in Esteban; however, he said what you have now is not doing anything for
you, so he made Esteban a prenda for his nganga” (Johnson 2010). Yvonne’s and
Ivor’s statements also confirmed what Casa researchers and other neighborhood
community members had asserted: Esteban was responsible for the “branch” of Palo
14
Palo observers had several different names to indicate particular collectives of spirits,
including cielo, commission, and team. I use the particular language practitioners used
with an appreciation that they were referring to groups of spirits associated with the
worship community.
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“planted” by Peréz in Oriente. Even as the formal practice of the Palo Monte/Mayombe
line was ritualistically “planted” in Santiago by Peréz and entrusted to Esteban, Esteban
continued to partner the formal work of Palo spirits with the spirit work with local spirits
that many of the respondents kept specialized ritual elements specifically designated for
their African spirits, that they associated with the Oriente location. These sacred
containing many of the same elements as an nganga, serving as “houses” for African
spirits. Respondents called these assemblages cazuelas, and Antonio discussed these
Thomas recounted how “everyone has an African, it is born with you,” and when
Yvonne has an event at her house, she brings her African down so he can watch over
the house, because “the Africans always walk with you” (Johnson 2009). The intimate
Africans suggested to me that this particular category of spirit had significant, if not
forested spaces along with material remains of the dead that reflected aspects drawn
presence of the community dead among living family members. Cazuelas were placed
alongside ngangas and actively incorporated into Palo ritual processes. Twelve
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respondents from the interview sample maintained relationships with African spirits, and
kept their cazuelas alongside of their ngangas as key members of their spirit genealogy
(Johnson 2009; Johnson 2010). Practitioners also kept other African spirits inside of or
close to their Palo ritual spaces, represented by dolls, which, similarly to cazuelas and
ngangas, also contained minkisi. Respondents commented that each African had
formed con permisos, sacred covenants between the worshiper and their spirits, with
each entity possessing its own identity and biography, known only to the individual Palo
practitioner.
One male, the TaTa Nganga, and one female, the Yayi, typically guide the Palo
speculations about the identity of the Yayi, I was not able to confirm it during the
research. Both female and male worship community members served in long-standing
and ranked positions in relationship to the primary TaTa. The length of time members’
had been initiated within the collective, their individual amount of ritual knowledge, and
their ability to effectively work with spirit familiars on their own established their ranking
within the collective. People could only advance in position once they had developed
proficiency in the ritual language and ritual protocol, and demonstrated mastery enough
to effectively assist with ceremonies during formal public and private ceremonies.
Equally, an individual had to acquire specific elements to accompany and support their
advancing religious responsibilities and social role. For example, before an individual
could acquire an nganga, she or he had to learn about each element, natural or
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otherwise, that belonged within the nganga; its significance; its physical and
metaphysical properties; and how it related to the work with spirits (Johnson 2009).
At the time of the dissertation research, one of Esteban’s nephews, Antonio, lead
the Palo Monte/Mayombe religious work of the community until his sudden death in
September 2009. Antonio was identified as having the ability to work with spirits when
he was five years old. His mother, Sophia, relayed how one day in preschool he called
for his spirits to come save him. At that point, Antonio had educational and spiritual
teachers come to the house to tutor him as he was easily mounted with spirits. Esteban
received permission from Sophia to continue Antonio’s tutelage in spirit work (Johnson
2009).
Antonio’s passing was a monumental loss for the Palo community of the case
study as well as for the larger network of Palo worship houses throughout Oriente. His
knowledge base and wisdom about Palo, as well as several other Cuban religions, were
well beyond his 36 years of life, and as such, he was regularly brought in to consult with
other leaders throughout Oriente because of his expertise and position. Antonio had
also inherited all of Esteban’s godchildren, in addition to his own, as well as Esteban’s
political leadership position within the Los Hoyos neighborhood and among Palo houses
throughout the city. Equally significant, Antonio had inherited all of his uncle’s spirits. It
was this connection with the inheritance of spirit relationships that alerted me to the
need to further probe the issue of relationships between practitioners of Palo and their
spirits. I then set about creating a genealogy of relationships between Palo practitioners
and the spirits they considered significant others. Over the course of the research, I was
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able to construct a sample of the interrelationships between the Palo leadership,
Oriente’s distinguishing social ethos is the prevalence of spirit beings. The Palo
Monte/Mayombe case study community provided one example of the prevalence of this
understanding about multiple spirit-actors as part of the human social world. Devotees
of Palo in this worship community proposed that different categories of spirits occupy
the physical and metaphysical dimensions of the universe, yet they “reside” in el mundo
espiritual, the spiritual world. Samuel, who had inherited spiritual responsibilities within
the religious family for another religious tradition, carefully delineated the different types
of ethereal beings members of the collective engaged and the nature of the social
The first thing to understand is that they [spirits] are all dead, and the
language[s] of spirit and muertos refer to the same thing. [There are]
protectors, guides, Africans, and general muertos. Protectors and guides
can be blood related or related to someone through marriage. These types
of spirits were once living humans. They are like Superman, rushing into a
situation to resolve it for the living family members. A person’s relationship
with spirits will always exist (Johnson 2010).
them: as trusted and loving others who can and will intercede on the practitioner’s
behalf, like “Superman.” Even as each practitioner had a unique array of spirit familiars
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guide, a protector, an African, a supernatural spirit force, and sometimes an auxiliary
spirit, an entity that served as an “usher” to organize what spirits could “mount” a
practitioner’s body and when an individual is between trances. Guiding spirits were
usually blood-related familial dead who served as confidants and trusted life advisors.
Most often, a guide was a grandmother, great aunt, uncle, grandfather, mother, father,
deceased blood relative or other significant individual spirit charged with keeping the
Palo practtioner safe from any type of harm (physical, mental, spiritual) or any type of
misfortune. Palo adherents kept the deceased individual’s personal artifacts such as a
book, statue, clothes, or picture alongside a glass of water within some portion of their
[Spirits] lead people through the good and bad of life. They help their
children, to protect them. There are also some very bad spirits, like in life.
You have to feed your spirits, a little rum a little tobacco, or coffee, just like
what you have [to eat]. You think of them too, and give them some. They
have the energy to work with you—they are nourished. They can also heal.
They can see things/conditions that need healing—you have a problem
here, have that checked, do this with this plant (Johnson 2009).
It became clear that Palo observers took great care to include space and make
time to cultivate their relationships with all of their spirits, interacting with these ethereal
confidants as they would an individual person with whom they had a cherished
relationship. Mateo best summarized such intimate associations with spirit others as
this; “The spirits are to maintain the light of a person, and when you love something, you
Practitioners’ continual attendance to the needs and desires of the dead also
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messages and/or advice from their guides and protector spirits. A practitioner’s
supernatural spirit force also offered protection and guidance, and could operate as the
intercessory caregiver between the individual and the rest of the cosmos. Each person,
and thereby practitioner, is also known to be born under the protection and tutelage of
one specific supernatural being, shares personality characteristics with that particular
spirit, and has an affinity for the types of material attributes associated with the spirit-
force. For example, Juan was affiliated with the spirit-force Sarabanda, the entity
responsible for community protection, iron, and the forest. The practitioner was well
known within the community for his attentive care of neighbors and children, serving as
a protective presence during large-scale ceremonial events, sitting quietly to the side,
ensuring everyone and everything remained safe. The practitioner’s serving in this
capacity was seen as quite normal and natural, given that he was the son of Sarabanda.
present small gifts to the spirit space first, leaving a candle or cigar for the familial dead.
This type of action seemed to put people at ease before we began the interview. On
more than one occasion, when I had brought Yvonne, Eva, or Sophia flowers, they
would place them in front of pictures of departed loved ones, or within the sacred space.
In a similar fashion, when I brought small sweets for the children, the gifts were first
offered to or set aside for the spirits of the family. Family members also took some type
of action to mark the days of a departed loved one’s birth and death. Eva discussed
how she would not go to the cemetery to visit the graveside, but instead take a little bit
of beer, rum, and tobacco and set them to the side for the loved one. These encounters
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continually occupy and perform significant roles within their life, and therefore were
obligation, but rather from a deep sense of affection and mutually sustained support.
familiars, respondents also used their spirit genealogy and their personal roles within
these networks to create bonds with other Palo practitioners. It was quite common for
members of the Palo worship community to call on one another throughout the week, if
not daily to share the recent news in their lives as well as to consult with one another to
accomplish their work with spirits. Members would come by and take the noontime meal
with other members, share other food and drink, or alternatively request or offer
substances or objects each other could use in their religious work; I observed different
types of water, small chickens, types of earth or sticks being exchanged. When such
transactions would occur, the receiving respondent would politely interrupt the interview
and offer the visitor some rum to suplar, to spray rum over the nganga and cazuela
Often, the conversation between the Palo worship community members would
include in-depth discussions about the needs of their spirits, and how the practitioner
was seeking out resources to meet those needs (Johnson 2008; Johnson 2009;
Johnson 2010). After observing such exchanges, I began to incorporate small gifts for
would bring cigars, matches, candles, or flowers, and place them next to the
was common for the practitioner to use one of these gifts immediately to initiate
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conversation, such as lighting the cigar to smoke between us or lighting a candle in front
of her or his ritual space. Later Yvonne and Juan told me that such actions allowed the
During the course of four individual interviews, other members of the Palo
develop, centered on the topic of Palo and spirit affiliations within the religious tradition.
One topic that emerged during these encounters was distinctions between Oriente and
the western areas of the island. In the process of discussing how the individual adherent
had become affiliated with Esteban’s spiritual network. I learned that Thomas had
that: “Over there [in the western portion of the island] they only have one spirit, an Indio,
and the Indio does not speak to them. No, no, no, no!! I need all my spirits, the spirits of
Oriente, I cannot function without them!” Yvonne looked on approvingly, repeating “only
one?!,” and chuckling in agreement with Juan. Their shared perspective about the
The responsibility for reciprocity and care for other members needs increased
be present and attend to the needs of visitors to the Palo worship community’s primary
house whenever there were large-scale ceremonial events. Female and male members
were responsible for dressing and cooking sacrificial animals after Palo ceremonies,
and then serving each person present, regardless of their membership status, so that
the fuerza or power, of the sacrifice could be ingested. Before palera/os who assisted
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left the ceremony house, the TaTa Nganga distributed additional meat to them. If a
neighborhood family or one in the Palo worship needed supplemental food rations, the
TaTa was responsible to meet the survival needs of others. What became clear was
that the religious network did more than provide for its members’ spiritual welfare; it also
provided social avenues of support to meet their material needs. However, the mutual
aid that Palo members received was not exclusive to only the worship community’s
membership. The resources that members brought into the network, and/or received
from it also went to support others in the wider community, both extending and
come to their houses asking for food or another type of material help during an interview
session. I rarely saw an incident when some type of assistance was not given. Antonio
provided a case in point when he and I were scheduled to have an interview at 11:00
a.m. Instead, he was called away by someone needing food in another neighborhood.
He had taken the time to take food to them and settle the family. Our interview did not
get underway until 9:00 p.m that same day. These sharing activities that originate inside
that when the needs of the spiritual family and wider community are not met by the
social order, they are able to supplement those needs through the established avenues
Such support was particularly important because many associated with the Palo
worship community did not have access to the same type of hard currency resources
that are available to individuals working within the tourism sector. As I discuss in the
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conclusion, racial discrimination based on African phenotype is on the increase, as
North American and Western European tourists import their own racial standards to be
catered to and serviced within Cuba. This means that the social marginalization of
household goods, some types of clothing, and other such imported necessities that
must be purchased in the hard currency of the tourist market are becoming harder to
obtain. The mutual aid that the Palo worship community provides for its members and
Each interviewee shared the story of how he or she became part of the Palo
collective. In each case, there was some type of stimulation in their daily life that
compelled them to begin relationships with spirits. As they were each brought into
contact with Esteban’s religious family, they began and/or furthered their spirit education
by being introduced into Palo Monte/Mayombe. Yvonne recounted how she had seen
an image in a dream and went to a Palo ceremony at Esteban’s house. When she
heard the drum rhythms, her right leg began to tremble in time with the drums. She
attempted to stop the movement, but it continued. Before long, she was mounted with a
spirit and her body was prostrate before the nganga. Esteban called for Antonio to bring
him some specialized chalk to pass over her body to bring her back to herself.
Afterward, Esteban told Yvonne that he wanted to speak with her about this thing. She
asked Esteban, “Did I do something wrong?” “Quite the opposite!” She was then
initiated into Palo. Mateo also stated that he received a “good transmission” (dream)
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about being initiated so he agreed to go through the ceremony. However, when the time
came, he did not go because he got scared. He went to the Palo worship house three
hours late intentionally. Antonio embraced him, comforting Mateo as he cried, saying,
“When the time is right, you will come, and we will do it.” Then one day Mateo felt
something calling him to the Palo house. The ceremonial space was all prepared for
him to be initiated. Antonio told him, “Pa Falco told me you were coming.” After his
initiation, Mateo said he could “feel more, I hear songs in my dreams…an African spirit
came to him and said, bring these things with you. As my spiritual work advanced in
As Eva’s quote at the beginning of the chapter says, these individuals offer
additional examples of how states of dreaming and the types of messages that occur
during dream sequences are thought to be spirit transmissions that provide Palo
worshipers with ways to align their waking activities with the wisdom of the spirit world.
came in their dreams, that the directives received were to be acted upon because they
trusted the advice that was received. Practitioners ascribed the aspects of confianza to
their spirit beings; however, Palo worshipers also talked about how their confianza in
spirits is enhanced because of the nature of the con permiso/covenants that the
Eva credited the depth of the con permisos with spirits in Palo to the fact that
“Palo is the one tradition that you bleed for, sacrifice for [during initiation]; it is a pact
with God.” She went on to explain that the family that is made through Palo, with the
spirits and with other practitioners, who becomes “blood” relatives (Dodson 2008: 98).
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Worshipers understood that the community bonds between worshipers and with the
community’s spirits are associations that require personal sacrifice physically, but also
behaviorally. Practitioners understood that through their initiation, they are physically
committed to relationships that obligate them to care for “family members” materially as
well as spiritually. Ivor gave this explanation and example; “Spirits are the ultimate
authorities on who you can and cannot have faith in. For example, if someone stole
something and wouldn’t confess, you can put them before the prenda and the prenda
will tell you. Then you can reject this person from the community because they have
broken the confianza of the collective” (Johnson 2010). An additional dimension to the
creating of the Palo worship network of humans and spirits was the cultivation of
relationships with elements drawn from nature, from the physical landscape of Oriente,
which in turn establishes lines of interconnectedness between the practitioners and their
In one of the last interviews I had with Antonio, he described the exchanges
between the spiritual world and the world of humans as one wherein there are different
human being has several different spirits that watch over him or her and accompany the
individual through life. The spirits are responsible for sending out vibrations to the
human world, and it is the vocational call, or “commission” of the spiritual leader, to read,
understand, translate, and act upon the spirit’s transmissions until the leader’s call to
serve the living and spirit members of the community ends on earth upon death.
religious role upon their death became apparent when the names of the recently dead
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Palo leadership were included in prayers of invocation before private and public
positing members of the collective whom I was able to interview as well as those
members who participated in spontaneous focus groups. Note where Reynerio Peréz
sits at the top left with a directional arrow connecting to Esteban. The directional red
arrows depict who initiated whom into the Palo collective, and are therefore known as
the “godfathers” of the individual of the collective. Each individual would have one
primary and one secondary “godfather” responsible to communicate with the spirits on
behalf of that individual to ensure their emotional wellbeing, but also to apprentice
inviduals to assist them with understanding and cultivating their own relationships. The
directional green arrows indicate which ngangas “birthed” another nganga, as each of
these sacred spaces maintain an identity independent from the human being who
attends to it, with its own central spirit force and attendant spirit, the prenda.
While all members of the collective are related to the spirits of the leadership––in
this case, the male leader who initiated them––individual practitioners also maintain
their own individual sets of spirits. That is to say that everyone is related to Esteban’s
nganga and his African, Pa Abran, as well as being related to each other through these
same entities, so that Pa Abran is their spirit father while Esteban is their godfather, and
they are “sisters and brothers” in religion, taking on responsibilities of care for newer
Palo members, regardless of the chronology of the Palo observers. What is prioritized
among adherents is the level of experience and wisdom garnered from their
relationships with the spirits of the collective, and the extent to which an individual
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carries out her or his religious duties in tending to her or his individual spirits. Not all
members have a full array of spirit others; some have certain spirit relationships and not
others, and the presence or absence of such bonds is highly individualized and
personal. The independent spirit familars of each member attend to the practitioner, his
or her’s blood family members, and his or her intimate associates upon the request of
the practitioner, so that the particular spirits of one person are thought to not necessarily
intervene in the activities of another practitioner, but instead have “casual” aquaintances
with individuals. Eva explained that, “What is mine is mine, and what is theirs is theirs,”
as she explained the relationships between spirits and individuals. However, if the
leadership spirits of the community communicated with the particular spirit comission of
an individual, “that was another thing” because, as Samuel clarifiied, spirits have a
“vista that is larger and can see the ways things are and want to share that with their
children, care for them. Spirits have the vista of truth” (Johnson 2010).
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Figure 7 Spirit genealogy of Interviewees
147
Spirits in Motion: Activating the Genealogy:
Each research participant had their own individual stories about how their spirits,
particularly their African spirits sought them out to develop a con permiso between
themselves and the spirit. Some practitioners reported that their “Africans” came to
press the practitioner to seek advice about how to respond to the spirit’s overt
assertions. Respondents commented on how once they had decided to respond to the
spirits, they began to learn more about who the “African” was when he or she was living,
and his or her personal preferences. In turn, the, the practitioners stated how they kept
the secrets of the spirits, never revealing the spirits’ formal names because such
violation would disrupt the con permiso of the spirit, and the confidanza of the
community (Johnson 2009; Johnson 2010). Jorge discussed how “[spirits] help save
someone, they help with spirituality, materially, with the peace of life, harmony,
happiness, tranquility, unification, and [the] power of life. The different ways [to
accomplish] these things is by asking the prenda and it will direct the person as to which
African spirits. The data that emerged suggested that Africans, specifically Congo
Africans, were ethereal others that “anchored” an individual’s spirit commission. In the
case study community, Esteban’s African served as the anchoring community member
for the living practitioners as well as all of the individual spirits of each practitioner.
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Samuel, explained the significance of the African spirit who over saw the entire worship
community, both living and dead, as this; “Every family needs a boss” (Johnson 2009).
Palo practitioner as individual Africans who were either dislocated from their homelands
in Africa during the time of enslavement, or alternatively those of African lineage who
were born into enslavement in Cuba. Continental-born Africans who were brought to
Cuba were called bozales, Spanish for arms, to signify the type of labor they would
perform in the colony. Bozal was the pidgin these individuals would have spoken, a
linguistic fusion between Kikongo and Spanish (Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler 2005),
and is the type of language these types of African spirits speak in when they mount a
Palo practitioner’s body. Those of African lineage born within Cuba were called criollos;
signifying individuals who were born within the New World (Knight 1970; Palmer 1997).
Criollo spirits use more Spanish when embodied by a practitioner, yet the spirit’s
The key “boss” African spirit of the Palo worship community was known by
15
practitioners to be Pa Abran a male Kongolese man who was born in African and
brought to Cuba in the earliest years of the colony’s formation. Practitioners understood
the Congo spirit to be brave and have affinity to a certain plant, as the plant came to
represent the spirit’s strength. When Pa Abran came down and mounted an individual,
most usually the male leader of the case study Palo worship community, the embodied
15
I use a pseudonym for this spirit, as using its distinctive names could be used to
identify practitioners who maintain ritual relationships with this entity.
149
spirit would dispense advice, lecture, joke, and commune with practitioners, while
Antonio and began to hug people present, speaking to them in bozal. A member fluent
in bozal translated the spirit’s words into Spanish so that other people present could
understand. Suddenly, an older woman stepped in front of the spirit, hands on hips,
then raised a finger that she used to stab the air, emphatically telling the spirit that he
must do something with his child, her grandson, because the grandson was
Pa Abran tilted his head to the side, quietly taking in the grandmother’s words.
The spirit called for the child to be brought to him, and sat down, gently taking the child
into his lap. The spirit asked the child if this account of his behavior was true, and the
child, wide-eyed nodded. Pa Abran spoke gently, telling him that his behavior was not
acceptable, that he must not worry his grandmother. The spirit then dictated to those
members attending him a list of the type of elements that were needed to conduct a
small ceremony with the grandmother and grandchild to correct the situation. The
grandmother thanked the spirit; the boy kissed the spirit on the cheek at the spirit’s
urging and slid down from his lap. The spirit carried on joking and advising those who
sought his input and direction (Johnson 2006). This encounter provides an example of
the type of consultation work spirits could and would conduct with members of the Palo
worship community.
placed on the head of the individual who had come to embody the spirit. The headdress
150
was fashioned from feathers and band in the style of Plains U.S. Native Americans.
Casa researcher #2 suggested that the use of symbols signifying U.S. Native
Americans in religious activity in Cuba could be attributed to the fact that by the mid-
positions as wise spirits as they were the first humans on the island and carry the
wisdom of the land and its memories. Whenever a member of the Palo worship
placed around the shoulders of the embodied spirit (Johnson 2008). In his
red handkerchiefs were to the enslaved because the cloths could be used as protection
from the sun as well as for adornment (Montejo and Barnet 1968: 30-32). Practitioners’
use of the headdress to represent the wisdom of the AmerIndians and the red
handkerchief for the enslaved Africans reflects their understanding that it is from these
ancestral beings that their religious and identity narratives are contained. By
ritualistically accessing and communing with their spirit familiars, Palo worshipers re-
member themselves to the to the sanctified spaces of Oriente which has been marked
as their homeland through the ritual engagement of the space and its spirits. Antonio
along with four other members of the sample interview pool, emphatically insisted that
“everyone has an African” in spite of any ancestral racial difference that could be
physically observed (Johnson 2006; Johnson 2009; Johnson 2010). Palo practitioner in
151
racial/ethnic background, because they understand that “it is the African ancestors that
During Palo ceremonies, if a spirit descended to commune with the living in the
form of a spirit mounting, practitioners would provide objects and/or food goods the
nfumbi enjoyed during life, usually tobacco and rum. On one such occasion, the spirit of
Pa Abran mounted a female member of the Palo network. The spirit, now re-membered
back to the Palo collective and embodied by the woman, took up a handful of leafy
branches, sprinkled perfumed water on them and stalked through the house, waiving
the branches over the group of assembled members and AART researchers. The spirit
of Pa Abran then called “his” children to him—those who had been initiated into his
religious genealogy of Palo, and told them to place their hands upon him to be blessed.
I found three key features of Palo practitioners’ spirit genealogy. The first feature
spirits; maintaining the community’s principles of con permiso and confidanza; principles
which also set the parameters of how to live an “African” life style. Members of the
worship community were accountable based on their religious affinity with Palo
archival ritual knowledge these entities held about how to live self-defined ways of
where shifts of race-based preferencing are looming, Palo worshipers commune and
consult with the spirit members of their genealogy as a way to keep present sites and
152
collective narratives coupled with the maintenance of family networks composed of
humans and spirit entities, along with the construction of sacred centers from the bones
of their ancestral dead and products of the de sao in Los Hoyos assisted Palo
adherents with making Oriente their “homeland.” Oriente as the “land of the dead” in
153
CHAPTER 6:
CONCLUSIONS
154
Concluding Thoughts:
Palo practitioners of the worship community suggested that the native wisdom of
the Taíno AmerIndian population provided the genealogical as well as ritual knowledge
foundations to their practice of Palo Monte/Mayombe. Palo members credited the Taíno
populations as their ritual ancestors, suggesting that the “Indians” were the first to live in
the land of Cuba; therefore, they were the ancestral spirits who contained the
foundational knowledge of how to engage the natural resources of the land of Oriente.
Practitioners understood that the Taíno passed along invaluable sacred knowledge
about how to live within the geography of Oriente to the imported Africans, who also ran
away and shared free spaces of living with the native population in Oriente during the
“the ways of our ancestors.” When I inquired further, as to which ancestors they were
referring to, individuals would continually state the Africans. However, they were also
quick to say that it was the indios (Indians) [sic], who taught the Africans how to use the
land. For practitioners, the type of relationship between these sets of ancestors
understand that the AmerIndians imparted the knowledge to the Africans, and it was
these social actors who maintained the traditions related to plant use to invoke
The encapsulation of ritual knowledge inside of practices that utilize the natural
land elements is in agreement with Jalil Sued-Badillo’s assertion that it was the “most
foreign” of individuals who were able to sustain and transmit the ritual knowledge
155
archives of the Taínos. In essence, the Palo members’ chant that states, “African meets
Indian and now the African is Indian” demonstrates Sued-Badillo’s assertion that it was
the imported Africans and their progeny that sustained aspects derived from Taíno
cultural traditions.
constructing sacred sites inside of their homes or, alternatively, rely on the ceremonial
center of the Palo leadership to facilitate communications with the spirit-guides of the
TaTa Nganga through his nganga. Palo practitioners of this collective will use products
from nature as well as crafted artifacts from Cuba’s social history to both construct their
sacred spaces and conduct ritual activities directed at the constructed sacred spaces. A
recurring goal of such activities is to communicate with spirit others to garner insight,
protection, and guidance in the supplicants’ social surroundings. The advice garnered
from the spirit beings is used to negotiate the practitioners’ current social world
experiences as well as shape and/or integrate them within the universe’s order, which is
practitioners believe that only key spirit others can successfully translate the world of
the living into effective ways of knowing because of such entities’ experience within the
human historical material world and their experiences within el mundo espiritual the
Knowledge about the land and how to use its elements becomes pivotal for Palo
successfully manipulate nature’s elements that devotees can activate and maintain their
relationships with spirits. Moreover, knowledge about the plants and animals of the
156
space allows practitioners to use natural products to treat everyday physical and
spiritual health aliments of each individual. Palo worshipers would also use
they understood as negatively affecting social relations in the material reality as well as
between Pa Abran and the grandmother who consulted the spirit about her grandson’s
behavior. Ivor suggested that it was also possible for Palo worshipers to engage the
prenda to establish who in the community had violated the confidanza of an individual
member. The use of the spirits of the genealogy in mundane and everyday matters
speaks to the importance practitioners place on the roles spirits perform as social and
moral authorities for the community. Indeed, the social relationships practitioners
maintain with each other are negotiated through the principles that are channeled
The inherited intimate relationship Palo practitioners maintain with the Oriente
location as part of their religious work is significant because they recognize this specific
propose that the spirits of the Africans who were enslaved, lived, and died in Oriente are
the key figures within the community’s religious family. The privileged position
worshipers assign to African spirits like Pa Abran is lodged in the historical time such
entities occupied, the time of collaborative resistance by the remaining AmerIndians and
the newly imported Africans. Palo supplicants’ emphasis on the African spirits suggests
that the legacy of living inside the forested spaces of Oriente in self-defined
157
supplicants’ “African” identity. The attention they give to maintaining this distinct identity
that minority members hold a degree of doubt of their acceptance in their current social
reality.
evidence of this marginality. Even with the inroads the Cuban state has made in making
eradicated with legislation. Moreover, the increase of tourism to bolster the Cuban
economy, in attempts to minimize the effects of the U.S. embargo, reinfuses hegemonic
race-based preferencing back into Cuba’s social contexts to cater to North American
and Western European conceptions of race. As such, there has been a resurgence in
negative depictions of African descendants in the popular art of the nation, where
distorted images of Black Cubans are sold throughout the island, even in its finer hotels
(Dodson and Johnson 2009; Johnson 2010). While Cubans struggle to reclaim and
reconcile the racialized social violence of their past, like the events of the 1912
worship community is accessing its own reservoirs of positive identity assertion and
the ancestral spirits of Oriente is that they have inscribed their comprehensions of a
“homeland” onto the geographic landscape of the eastern region. That is to suggest that
for these Palo adherents, their homeland is where their ritually inherited and biological
158
earlier ideas about the mythic return to a home of origin outside of the geographic
boundaries of Africa. The return for Palo worshipers is continual, if not daily, as their
comprehensions about Africa are informed by their ritual annals as contained in the
sacred spaces of the ngangas. Palo worshipers’ “African” identity is lodged in the
sociohistorical experiences of and their religious creations inside of, Cuba. Palo
skeletal remains are interred within Oriente inscribes the location as their sacred
ceremonial center, which in turn allows them to employ alternative archives to assert
their own narratives of identity and community into Cuba’s contemporary social reality.
claiming of association and kinship with ethereal others whose struggle for self-
definition has marked the eastern region, “the land of the dead” as the “most Cuban” of
all of the nation’s provinces. The annals of that are maintained inside of Palo ritual
spaces and inside of the knowledge-based of the worship community’s spirit genealogy
present active and current testament to the type of unsilencing that can occur when
159
APPENDIX
160
Table 1: Palo Worship Community Interviewees, 1 of 2
161
Table 2: Palo Worship Community Interviewees, 2 of 2
162
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