Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba

4: Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe

81 Spirits that come in dreams With no words to walk on. —African proverb More than any other landscape in Cuba, Oriente is known as “land of the dead.” This is largely due to the historical presence of enslaved descendants from Africa’s west central region of Kongo Kingdom ethnic groups. Spiritual life among this group of peoples is personally interconnected with the dead and with spirits of the dead.1 Captives from the kingdom arrived in Oriente (see map 2) as early as the sixteenth century and established the African presence as an intimate and ongoing factor in social structures that would become Cuban: people, nation, culture , and religion. Oriente was the first island location of contact between Africans, the autochthonous population, and europeans, as well as the site of the first european settlements and importation of enslaved Africans in the sixteenth century.2 The region has recorded regular earthquakes since 1551 and is home to very active seaports near two of its larger cities, Santiago de Cuba and guantánamo (see map 2). A considerable share of Cuba’s more than two hundred other harbors, bays, and inlets are also in Oriente.3 The coastal 4 Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe  82 Chapter 4 sites of guantánamo, Santiago, and Manzanillo, as well as other smaller harbors (see map 2), allowed the region to become the site of a flourishing contraband economy during the four colonial centuries. Clandestine trade and smuggling with foreign and Spanish ships was a normal pattern and fashioned Oriente into a separate economic arena from the island’s official commercial and trading center in western Cuba. The illicit enterprises also helped maintain the region as an internally well-organized and integrated economy, based on the underground exchanges.4 The absence of transportation across the Sierra Maestra mountains, as well as wind and ocean currents that were more convenient to trans-Atlantic trade in western harbors to serve Spanish colonies of Mexico and Latin America, operated to reinforce Oriente as an isolated and insulated backwater of the island colony. The region has continued to have a rather diverse, though now legal, economic base, including cattle ranching that came with Spanish settlers, centuries of mining, full-scale coffee cultivation arriving from Haiti, and other tropical agricultural crops such as bananas, citrus, and cacao, as well as sugar production.5 even though most of the original inhabitants and their descendants would not survive as a distinguishable group, spiritual behaviors developed from contact between autochthonous inhabitants and Africans would become indigenous. The behaviors are indigenous because they evolved from remembered practices of West Central Africans who shared and merged their spiritual approaches with similar ones of the remaining Amerindians. The transculturated ritual behaviors expressed mutual spiritual identity and were used to bury each group’s dead with common cosmic comprehensions. early emphasis on rituals and activities related to the dead has been passed on to later generations of Oriente practitioners as well as to other inhabitants . Remnants of these earliest behaviors appear to be part of coherent practices of the reglas congo.6 The reglas consist of a variety of established ritual lineages, particularly Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, balongo, Kimbisa, and briyumba, and are known to be derived from different regions in West Central Africa associated with Kongo Kingdom ethnic groups. The differing names for the reglas seem to correspond with various regions of ethnic groups in that area. Several Oriente practitioners shared their assertion that the names are associated with Kongo ethnic groups and maps of the region (see map 3); the work of William Macgaffety and that of John Thornton would support the idea.7 83 palo monte/palo mayombe We found practices of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe in Oriente to be the most prevalent given that we encountered no devotees of other reglas congo. We first thought this tradition represented two distinct sets of ritual customs, Palo Monte and Palo Mayombe. However, when we interviewed practitioners about differences, they comprehended only one set of practices with two names. This contrasts with some Spanish language literature that discusses two separate sets of traditions,8 but we acknowledge respondents’ understandings as these guide their lives and published literature has rarely if ever included insights from Oriente. Although most historical research indicates that a variety of ethnically Kongo Africans were captured and transported to locations in Cuba, Arwin Schwegler and other linguists have found that much of...