Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture

7. Religious Syncretism

7 Religious Syncretism Cultivated people harmonize without imitating. Immature people imitate without harmonizing. Confucius It would be a mistake to assume that there was only one religion in China. Along with Buddhism, a major world religion, Taoism (both a philosophy and a system of religion) and Confucianism (which has never been an established religion with a church and priesthood) complete what is known as the “Three Ways.” Of the three, Confucianism has been the most influential movement in Chinese thought, followed by Taoism and then Buddhism. Despite decades of antagonism from the Chinese government, Chinese traditional religion (a syncretic expression of all three religious systems together), with more than 400 million followers, is the fourth largest in the world, after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. Most works dealing with Chinese religiosity in Cuba reflect the new developments that took place as a result of the contacts among Chinese, Creole , and black African creeds. The West African Yorubas who were transported as slaves began to practice a blend of Yoruba and Catholic beliefs that was called, initially as a derogatory term, Santería.1 In order to have their religious practices accepted by their Catholic Creole masters, the Lucumí disguised the orishas (spirits that reflect God’s various manifestations) as Catholic saints and worshipped them on saint’s days (hence the name “Santería”).2 Because of this identification of orishas with saints, today the terms are often interchangeable. A similar analysis may be applied to Chinese religion in Cuba. Referring to its syncretism with Catholic beliefs, Frank F. Scherer claims that, while none of the main religions in China were monotheistic, the invention of Sanfancón was used at the time and is still being used today by the Sino-Cuban community as a strategic alternative: “the making of a syncretic Chinese-Cuban ‘saint,’ Sanfancón, remains inextricably linked to bringing ‘Chinese religion’ into an orderly Hispanic pantheon, or at least into a mentality , occupied by ‘Christian’ gods so as to become intelligible even to the non-Chinese mind” (“Sanfancón” 164). In this sense, the recent Sino-Cuban 94 Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture reinvention of “Chinese religion” and of Sanfancón, a “saint” that is not recognized in China, is, according to Scherer, an illustration of the strategic self-Orientalization carried out by this community: “‘Chinese religion’ in Cuba today has less to do with long-standing ‘Chinese’ traditions, or even a return to ‘religion’ per se, but everything to do with the subaltern employment of strategies that allow for the opening of alternative spaces in which the construction of identities other than those prescribed by the State takes place” (“Sanfancón” 166). During the interviews I conducted in Havana’s Chinatown in the summer of 2006, however, several Chinese and Chinese Cubans pointed out that, although they do refer to Sanfancón as a saint, the syllable “San” at the beginning of the name has nothing to do with the notion of sainthood; rather, it is a phonetic adaptation of the Chinese word for “alive,” which explains the fact that the “saint” is based on a real-life person. Another of these strategies, Scherer adds, is the adoption of monotheistic values to represent supposedly Confucian precepts. In contrast, following the tradition from Southern China, the Chinese in California have always built altars to honor Kwang Kung (or Kuan Kong)— the same god of literature and war from which the name Sanfancón derives —but they have never called him a saint. If we consider that Kwang Kung was also worshipped in China, the Chinese Cuban innovation resides mainly in considering him a saint. On the other hand, in her essay “The Great Bonanza of the Antilles” Mayra Montero seems to interpret the figure of Sanfancón as a Chinese version of the orishas of African origin, rather than as an example of syncretism with Catholic religion or an attempt to comply with Christian monotheism: “I was exposed to phenomena of syncretism as singular as that of Chinese Santería, and I visited, in the legendary Calle de Zanja, crucial heart of the Chinese barrio of Havana, altars in which the African Orishas blended with the improvised Orishas of Asian origin, such as the very miraculous San Fan Con” (199; qtd. Alejandro Lee Chan). In either case, the existence of the Chinese “saint” Sanfancón is a clear example of religious syncretism with other ethnic groups in Cuba.3 Another example of religious syncretism in Cuba...