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chapter eleven Santería in Cuba: Tradition and Transformation Christine Ayorinde Cuban Santería, also known as the “Regla de Ocha” (the rule or law of the orisha), is an example of how cultural and religious forms that are identifiably Yoruba have not only survived but have flourished in a new environment. Anthropologist William Bascom’s research in Nigeria and Cuba in the 1930s and 1940s prompted him to suggest that Yorubas could go to the New World to learn about their religion.1 This chapter describes some of the features of Santer ía that illustrate continuity but also the changes that make it a distinctively Cuban form. These changes reflect the challenges of transmission over space and time, societal constraints on practice, and the encounter with other cultures . It is important to note, however, that it is not only elements of ritual, language, and material culture that can be identified as Yoruba but also the processes by which the Regla de Ocha was able to successfully incorporate new cultural elements and capture new audiences. Although Christianity and Islam appear to have displaced the orishas in West Africa, it would be a mistake to attribute their expansion in the Americas solely to the effects of the middle passage. Recent studies of the orisha cults demonstrate how their incorporative , decentralized, and flexible nature made them eminently suitable for transmission and growth.2 The Regla de Ocha was originally the religion of the people who became known as Lucumí in the Spanish American colonies.3 They carried with them their deities, called orishas or, in Cuba, orichas. Although Africans grouped under the Lucumí ethnonym are recorded from the first half of the seventeenth century, the majority arrived in the nineteenth century at the height of the sugar boom. Mortality rates were extremely high, and it was cheaper to replace slaves than to breed them.4 The Lucumí were sent mainly to plantations in 209 Falola_Childs,Yoruba Diaspo 2/2/05 1:34 PM Page 209 the Havana-Matanzas region on the western side of the island. Their arrival late in the trade explains the overwhelming Yoruba influence on Cuban cultural and religious forms, though it is often also attributed to their presumed cultural superiority.5 The processes that shaped the Regla de Ocha and other Afro-Cuban religious practices began on the plantations and in the cabildos de nación, also called cabildos de africanos. These were civil institutions that helped Africans to adapt to their new environment by providing practical assistance, a decent burial for the dead, and the gathering of funds to buy freedom for slaves.6 During the colonial period Africans were encouraged to congregate in cabildos divided along ethnic lines in order to prevent their uniting against the regime. This division facilitated the preservation and reconstitution of their cultural and religious practices. At times the persistence of these perturbed both religious and secular authorities. Public parades were prohibited, and the more overtly African dances and dirges were no longer allowed at funerals. The apparent religious syncretism was also an area of concern. One disposition stated that blacks would not be allowed to raise altars to the Catholic saints “for the dances in keeping with the customs of their country.”7 By the late nineteenth century, during the period of the abolition of slavery and the wars of independence against Spain, the policy changed from one of maintaining cultural divisions to facilitating the assimilation of the former slave population. The cabildos were seen as anachronistic. The dances, masquerades, and other customs were regarded as vestiges of slavery, inappropriate and undesirable in a modernizing nation. Yet despite efforts to eradicate cultural (and sometimes also biological) Africanity, instead of fading away it spread among all sectors of the population. The religious traditions forged in the cabildos were carried on in the ilé ocha (house[s] of the oricha), ethnically heterogeneous cult groups where blacks, mulattoes, and whites could assume a Lucumí identity through initiation. In addition to historical data about the Lucumí communities in Cuba, the information we have about the process of reconstitution of the orisha cults is found largely, but not exclusively, in oral accounts transmitted from generation to generation of practitioners. These tell of renowned “iyalochas” (cult priestesses) and “babalochas” (cult priests) who established ritual lineages or “ramas” that continue to the present day.8 At some point there was an exchange of ritual knowledge between the priests and priestesses of orisha cults that...

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