Governing Spirits: Religion, Miracles, and Spectacles in Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1898–1956 (review)

Reinaldo Román’s Governing Spirits explores a tense dialogue between those who intended to intervene in the control of practices not inscribed in an identifiable theology, by manipulating the legal apparatus and other specialized and modern knowledges of “fanatism,” “millenarism” and popular beliefs, and a myriad of other interpretations of the links between occult and visible powers, human and non-human forces, and known and unknown spirits. Román’s insightful narrative on men-gods and brujos in Cuba and woman-virgins, healers, preachers, and chupacabras in Puerto Rico invites us to rethink the influence that an entire sociological tradition had in the characterization of what has been called popular religiosity and hybrid religious practices. However, more than a study of the sociology of religion in two Caribbean countries at the end of 19th and the first decades of the 20th century, the historical analysis of the practices of control of these supposedly superstitious practices in Puerto Rico and Cuba, reveals the complex links between diverse invisible powers and ontologies acting upon the sensible territories of the State and the Nation. “Witchcraft,” healing, fantasy, social insubordination, and religious heterodoxy were produced by men and women in contexts of intense social transformation. These practices were not only repressed but also denounced because of their supposed disruptive powers. As Román argues, “critics presented wizards, healers, visionaries, and saints as obstacles to regeneration and potential threats to public order. Suspicion that superstitious men and women could embrace misguided agendas gave rise to anxieties about the governments’ capacity to keep moral and political order” (p. 5).

Román examines a series of rather similar cases: men-gods roaming small cities and state prisons; the young virgin Elenita and her misioneros preaching catholic sacraments; the Afro-Cubans known as brujos and accused of witchcraft, healing, rape and cannibalism; the suffering woman operating miracles under Fulgencio Batista’s Cuba; and finally the 1990’s return of the ‘goatsucker’ in Puerto Rico. In reading these cases, he transforms what sounds like religious ambiguity into fertile soil for the reflection on the moral dimensions of certain social practices and the dialogue between different ways of interpreting them. In order to explore some of the book’s achievements in this regard, let us focus on the case of men-gods and their relationship with Spiritist groups and modern knowledge in Cuba.

In the first chapter, Román shows how interpretations loaned to the practices of curing, magic and brujería attributed to two of the most famous “men-gods” that populated the pages of the newspapers of Santiago de Cuba at the beginning of the 20th century were associated with debates on modernity, order, and civilization as well as attempts to normatize practices used for healing and religious purposes. Nevertheless, the destinies of the two “men-gods” —Juan Manso and Hilario Mustelier—cannot be reduced to the production of a discursive and epistemological context marked by an elegy to the wondrous solutions of modernity. Anti-fetichist (Latour 1996) narratives and practices regarding what was denominated witchcraft reveal mere fragments of the actions and relations established among men-gods, objects, spirits, and their believers. In addressing this evidence with sociological readings concerned with defining the logic and the designs of so-called primitive forms of religiosity, Román at times diverts the attention of his readers to a fascinating interpretative dialogue: that which contrasts the “man-gods” and their followers with the discursive codes used by the State and its mediators for their interpretation. From this perspective, we could ask: is it possible for us to understand the nature of these practices absent their codes of (re)cognition? Even while it faces, through a Foucauldian reading, the “regimes of knowledge” in which the voices of Mustelier and Manso made themselves “heard,” it is not clear how various...