Cubans seek solutions and solace in Santería amid crises

Associated Press
April 9, 2023

HAVANA (AP) — From a two-room concrete home on the fringes of Cuba’s capital, the rumble of wooden drums spills out onto the streets.

Neighbors gather at the door and kids climb a fence to peer inside. They watch as dozens of Cubans wearing white and African beads make offerings at a bright blue altar consuming half a room, asking for luck, protection and good health.

While nearly 70% of Latin America’s 670 million people consider themselves Catholic, in Cuba, Santería is the name of the game.

A fusion of African religions and Catholicism, Santería was one of the few religious practices to quietly endure through decades of prohibitions and stigma by the communist government.

Now, as that stigma gradually fades and the country enters a moment of compounding economic, political and migratory crises, the religion is growing in popularity and expanding to new demographics.

“Every day the religion grows a little more,” Mandy Arrazcaeta, 30, said among the throngs of people in his home dancing and making offerings at the altar to a plastic doll depicting the Yoruba deity Yemayá. “Right now, Santería in the country is a sort of bastion.”

Santería was born as a form of quiet resistance among the island’s black communities. The religion dates back centuries to when Spanish colonists brought in hundreds of thousands of African slaves.

While the Spanish tried to force Catholicism on the slaves, the Africans brought their own religions, mostly from West Africa, which they would camouflage by attaching their deities — orishas — to Catholic saints.

Cuba’s patron saint, Our Lady of Charity, for example, blended with the golden deity, Oshun.

“It would mix and mix ... through this Catholic virgin, they would speak to their African saints,” explained Roberto Zurbano, a Cuban cultural critic. “That’s how the religion was able to survive.”

While there are hundreds of orishas in Santería, practitioners known as santeros usually worship only a handful, connecting with them through rituals and offerings.

On one Friday night, Arrazcaeta, family and friends splay out offerings of coconut and red Cuban pesos emblazoned with the face of Che Guevara, sacrificing two chickens over bowls filled with rocks and seashells. In exchange, they ask for good health, strength during hardship, and even luck in love.

“It’s something that’s very Cuban, something spontaneous that we do. Because we know the struggles we face in this country,” Arrazcaeta said.

Millions worldwide are estimated to practice Santería, though definitive numbers – especially in Cuba – are hard to pin down due to the religion’s informal nature. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom estimates 70% in Cuba practice some version of Santeria or similar African-based religions.

What is clear in the altars dotting homes across the island and the many Cubans in Havana cloaked in white – worn by santeros their first year after converting to represent rebirth – is that Santería has captured the Cuban consciousness.

Following the Cuban revolution in the 1950’s, Fidel Castro dismantled religious structures and expelled the priests who criticized his government. Religion, famously described by communist philosopher Karl Marx as “the opium of the people,” was strictly prohibited.

Catholicism, highly dependent on meeting in churches and on hierarchy, withered.

Meanwhile, Santería practitioners pulled from the same tools they used to survive in earlier centuries.

“People did believe, but you couldn’t say anything because it was politically prohibited by Marxism. All that did was strengthen Afro-religious faiths in very closed circles,” Zurbano said. “They would keep it a secret, keep their religiosity to themselves.”

Zurbano’s family would quietly perform rituals inside their home and divide ceremonies that once would last a week into smaller two-day chunks to avoid alerting authorities. Some adherents secretly wore religious garb under street clothes.

Katrin Hansing, an anthropologist in Cuba for City University New York, said Santería endured because of its flexibility, and because of its perceived utility in assuring good health in exchange for offerings.

In the 1990s when Cuba’s main ally, the Soviet Union, collapsed and the island spiraled into economic crisis, many Cubans found solace in Santería.

The Cuban government has accepted it, but the officially authorized ceremonies remain practically deserted, as islanders prefer celebrations in more informal settings such as Arrazcaeta’s home.

“It’s incredibly resilient as a religious system,” Hansing said. “It’s so decentralized and it allows the individual believer or practitioner to make it what they need it to be.”

Santería is once again seeing a surge, and expanding past historically impoverished black communities.

Arrazcaeta, a white Cuban and member of the LGBTQ+ community, found refuge in the religion when he was 12. Once an Evangelical Christian, he said he felt rejected by members of that religion for being gay.

“I never fit in that religion,” Arrazcaeta said. “I liked that Santeria doesn’t obligate anyone to fit into a model.”

As a teenager, he began putting glasses of water around the house, as offerings to orishas. His mother, Maritza de la Rosa Perdomo, would throw the water out, saying there was no place for religion in her home.

That changed three years ago, when Arrazcaeta joined a wave of Cubans in embarking on a journey to the U.S., traversing the perilous jungles of the Darien Gap.

When Arrazcaeta went missing for seven days in the jungle, the first thing Perdomo did was put out an offering.

“I began to beg for my son, I said I needed to hear from him, to know that he was alive. I was begging with my whole heart,” Perdomo said.

When she received a call from him shortly after, she decided to join the religion alongside her children.

“A religion that used to be, you know, dominantly practiced by descendants of Africans or people of African descent has now become a multiracial religion in Cuba,” Hansing said. “Santería has grown enormously.”

But for each practitioner, Santería means something different.

For Arrazcaeta, who nowadays travels between Cuba and work in Florida as an Uber driver, Santería is a spiritual experience. For Perdomo, it’s a way of seeking good health. For both, it’s a way to stay connected with the other an ocean away.

“Today, the entire country is dressed in white,” Perdomo said.

https://apnews.com/article/cuba-santeria-religion-e7bf183a2c2bdbe2e3ed4ff85a142b31

Cuba's Santeria priests forecast prosperity in New Year's prophesy

REUTERS

Sarah Marsh
January 4, 2017 

Priests from Cuba's Afro-Cuban religion forecast a prosperous 2017 in their New Year's prophecy and told Cubans to be hopeful despite the economic and diplomatic headwinds the Caribbean island-nation faces.

The ritual-filled Santeria religion, which fuses ancient African beliefs brought to Cuba by slaves with Catholicism, is practiced by millions of Cubans, many of whom eagerly await for guidance from its annual forecast.

"This (reading) forecasts a favorable development from the point of view of economic management," priest Lazaro Cuesta, clad in white as a symbol of purity, told a news conference in Havana on Tuesday.

That forecast contrasted with President Raul Castro's gloomy depiction of the economy last week. He told the National Assembly that Cuba entered a recession last year in tandem with the crisis in Venezuela, a key ally, although the economy might eke out growth in 2017. [nL1N1EM0NE]

It also flew in the face of darker prophecies in recent years. The Santeria priests, known as babalawos, had predicted an explosion in migration and social unrest in 2015 and 2016.

Asked about the future of U.S.-Cuban relations given U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's threat to end the fledgling detente, Cuesta used an image to suggest both sides would continue to negotiate. [nL1N1DT0IP]

Cuesta said the reigning Yoruba deity Oggun, god of iron, tools and weapons, would use his machetes to cut down the plants preventing communication.

"Independently of the instability anyone might feel, of the political happenings in the world, the letter of the year gives the Cuban people, and the world, hope," he said.

"If we are capable of hearing, expressing, understanding, contributing, the results without doubt will arrive."

The babalawos recommended santeria devotees wear white, avoid the excessive consumption of alcohol, and pay attention to possible acts of corruption.

They advised followers to protect coastal areas from waste and to encourage economic and sociocultural exchanges between countries.

Senior babalawo Bebo Padron said this year's prophecy called for Cubans to unite, possibly a reference to opposition to the country's government and those who have emigrated.

Two of the six slogans for 2017 chosen by the faith were "Only one king governs a people" and "no hat can be more famous than a crown".

Santeria followers have believed their gods were on the side of the Cuban revolution ever since a white dove landed on the shoulder of late revolutionary leader Fidel Castro during a victory speech in Havana.

(Reporting by Sarah Marsh; Editing by Paul Simao)

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-new-year-cuba-predictions-idUSKBN14O152

One of Cuba's fastest growing economies is inspired by the life of saints

Fusion
Walter Thompson-Hernández
September 29, 2016

HAVANA—Cuba’s most widely practiced religion is experiencing a popularity boom that it hasn’t seen in decades.

Santeria, a syncretic religion that blends West African Yoruba beliefs and traditions with Roman Catholicism, has existed in Cuba since the days of the West African slave trade, but proliferated during the economic crisis of the 1990s and is now practiced by nearly 80% of the population.

The religion is currently experiencing another popularity boom, but one that seems to be tied to the country’s opening to the U.S. and the gradual expansion of capitalism.

Santeria could be considered one of Cuba’s fastest-growing informal economies, luring tourists who are willing to pay thousands of dollars to become Santeria priests.

Religious experts I spoke to on the island say the average price to become initiated in the religion ranges from $1,000 to $3,000, which includes a ceremony to sacrifice a live animals including and other rituals including dance and the mixing of an assortment of holy plants for seven days.

In the U.S. and Europe, a similar Santeria ceremony might cost anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000. So more foreigners are traveling to Cuba to becomesanteros. And as the internet grows across the island, so, too, is Cuba’s Santeria economy.

“Santeria is going virtual; there are more online stores,” says Adrian Lopez-Denis, a Latin American Studies professor at Princeton. He says the internet is making it easier for Cubans to study Santeria online, and market it to foreigners. “Today, most santeros have a laptop because they study the e-books and software to become santeros. It’s through educational software that people are learning now: Santeria 2.0. And, of course, they are commodifying it.”

But the Santeria boom has some of its faithful concerned that the newfound popularity will lead to exploitation and appropriation of a religion that is deeply connected to Cuba’s Afro-descendant legacy.

Juan Alvarez, a middle aged Afro-Cuban man who lives with his his family in Havana, is a long-time Santeria follower who worries that the religion is evolving from an organic spiritual practice to a lucrative business that leaves Afro-Cubans in a precarious condition.

“Santeria has become really trendy,” he told me in his living room, as his son’s stereo thumped U.S. rap songs in the next room. “Whites have been coming to Cuba and practicing this black religion and stealing our secrets. They began to realize that there was money to be made and they started taking advantage.”

Alvarez says the exploitation and hypocrisy is as old as Cuba itself.

“Since the beginning, whites have always been interested in black religions. Now they are saying that our religion is good, but we as black people are bad,” he says. “They want to criticize black people but also be like black people; it’s a form of racism and envy.”

Lucas Napoles-Cárdenas, a celebrated Santeria storyteller and Afro-Cuban activist from Havana believes that the rise of Santeria’s popularity has created a form of racial exploitation that’s “similar to what happened with rock and roll in the U.S., when whites took over black music in the 1950s and claimed it as their own.”

A similar appropriation is happening in Cuba with Santeria, he says. “They [foreigners] have now tried to take the religion over here. They study the religion and are taking ownership of it.”

Still for others who practice Santeria, like Christian Betancourt, a 36-year-old European descendent who lives in Santo Domingo, a small rural town located in the Villa Clara province, Santeria is not entirely defined by its racial dynamics.

Betancourt became a Santero in 2001, and has become a babalao, the religion’s highest rank. He thinks the growth of the religion is about people from all walks of life looking for spirituality.

“The religion is growing and can be practiced by whomever believes in a supreme higher being,” he explained as he prepared an assortment of ceremonial herbs for a practitioners upcoming ceremony. “It doesn’t matter what color you are. There are a lot of people today who have fallen in bad situations and all of those things are missing from their lives. People are coming from all over the world to practice Santeria because we have the purest form here.”

Some Santeria practitioners don’t see any problem with making money from the religion. After all, Santeria certainly wouldn’t be the first religion to profit from faith.

“We are living in a place where there is a lot of struggle and necessity,” says Neviz Ayón Samé, a woman who claims she was cured of disease by a Santeria priest when she was young. “People who become santeros are often waiting for a foreigner to come from the outside so that they can make money. You can’t survive with what the government pays you, so Santeros do whatever it takes to survive like charge tourists a lot of money for their services and, in a way, are obligated to do these illegal things.”

“It’s all about survival,” she said.

http://fusion.net/story/350296/one-of-cubas-fastest-growing-economies-is-inspired-by-the-life-of-saints/