Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba

8: Findings and Conclusions

160 To be indifferent to the past is breaking faith with the people who had to tolerate oppression, indignity, and much unhappiness. —Remarks during “Living Room Conversations” of the African Atlantic Research Team Much before the opening of the twenty-first century, the historian of religions, Charles H. Long was writing and speaking about human orientation, knowledge, religion, time, space, and related phenomena.1 One essential proposition of his work is that “it is the misinterpretations ” of the promise of wealth and riches from the Americas that “constitute the problem of interpretation” regarding those who were exploited by that promise. “It is by going through the misinterpretations that a new awareness of the problem will take shape.”2 This proposition proved pertinent to our research of sacred spaces in Oriente because we took the charge seriously and attempted to construct and reconstruct an interpretation of socioreligious historical events relative to the creation of indigenous religions in the region. Significantly, we tried to do this from the perspective of those colonial enslaved persons who first joined in ritual behaviors not grounded in the Spanish Christian model. Long was likewise interested in how, as part of the “promise” of cross8 Findings and Conclusions  161 findings and conclusions Atlantic european expansion and colonization, individuals from enslaved and oppressed groups survived their exploitive ordeals as they related to the european promise. His emphasis is on the interpretive, but the interpretive of those not included in the promise. He entreats scholars and researchers to report on oppressed communities as active and creative participants that built societies in the Americas while simultaneously creating a symbolic reality of their own vision, a symbolic reality that was also embedded within the material and political world of their oppressors. We found Long’s propositions particularly appropriate as guides for our task of understanding Oriente indigenous practices. This concluding discussion is designed to reveal some of the salient conceptual findings from the research, and we begin by discussing how our working definitions for key concepts were expanded through the field investigation. In chapter 1 we put forth basic working parameters for these definitions, but now we turn to fuller exploration of the key concepts as the research refined their applicability. At the same time, this chapter will engage findings about some important meanings inherent in religious lifestyles and sacred space realities we encountered in Oriente. The naturalistic field research in which our team engaged is well suited to reveal meanings and motivations within and behind human behavior and that is engrained within the sociological enterprise. field research and its methodological techniques are indispensable to an interpretive endeavor, for helping to explain the how’s and why’s of human activity. Our work on Oriente’s sacred spaces fits well into this perspective and may make a few significant contributions to academic and general understandings about African descendants in Cuba, indigenous traditions of the island, the use and significance of sacred spaces, and several other arenas of knowledge about human religious life. Knowledge contributions of this nature are even more noteworthy when surrounded by historical and social conditions that affected the descendants. We believe that the preceding chapters represent the necessary sociohistorical background and so now turn to clarifying conceptual issues as these were revealed to our team as we proceeded through the Oriente investigation. What We Learned Conceptually Defining Indigenous Our working definition of “indigenous” deepened after several years of living with and observing African-descendant devotees using ritual activities 162 Chapter 8 that contained behaviors influenced by their continental ancestry as well as influences from early autochthonous Cuban inhabitants. We observed that merged, habitualized sacred behaviors had materialized within the region as part of colonial Cuba as a “contact zone.” The island and its regions were a colonial location where multiple cultural communities contacted and engaged each other within a social environment of dramatic power inequities , where they struggled and grappled for social space within those power arrangements, where neither group could leave with ease, and where new behavioral forms particular to the situation were created.3 In the shared physical reality of Oriente, the earliest colonial Indians and Africans created combined ritual customs that included but were not limited to using tobacco, importing material objects into sacred notations of spiritual work, and incorporating Africa-based drum rhythms into the work, as well as the presence and visitation of spirits in the historical world of humans. New...