El Rincón

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The road runs south out of Havana into the flat country past Santiago de las Vegas, and on the night of the sixteenth of December it fills in the dark. There is a man on it moving very slowly, a cannonball chained to one ankle, dragging the iron weight of it kilometer by kilometer toward a small white church he cannot yet see. A woman goes ahead of him on her knees, a child asleep across her back, wearing over her clothes a shift cut from a burlap sack. Others come barefoot, or flat on their backs pushing with their heels, or bent under a slab of concrete roped to the shoulders. They are not doing penance for a sin. They are keeping a promise — paying, in the currency the place accepts, a debt owed to the old man of the sores. And the old man they are coming to has two names at once. He is San Lázaro, the ulcered beggar the dogs came to lick; and he is Babalú-Ayé, the lord of the earth who sends the plague and, being thanked, lifts it away.

The hospital that walked out of the city

The sanctuary began as a place to put the sick where the healthy would not have to see them, and the whole of its meaning grew backward out of that. The institution’s root is a hospital. By a royal decree dated the nineteenth of June 1714, Felipe V ordered the foundation of the Royal Hospital of San Lázaro at Havana, and by 1781 a walled masonry lazaretto bearing the saint’s name stood at the Caleta de Juan Guillén, on the shore just beyond the city walls — a leper colony, kept deliberately outside the gates. For more than a century it held there. But a capital does not stay still, and Havana grew out toward its own leprosarium until the colony of the sick sat inside the living city, which no one wanted.

So the lepers were moved to the countryside. The site chosen was the Dos Hermanos estate, in the hamlet of El Rincón, in the town of Santiago de las Vegas, some twenty-five kilometers south of the center of Havana, in what is today the municipality of Boyeros on the city’s southern edge. The documented chronology of the old hospital sets down the transfer in exact stages: the patients were taken first, on the twenty-sixth of December 1916, to a temporary lazaretto at Mariel, and then, on the twenty-sixth of February 1917, brought from Mariel to the unfinished new complex at El Rincón. What they arrived to was hardly habitable — pavilions still going up, ground turned to mud, no running water and no electric light. The priest Apolinar López, who had come out with the patients, and Sister Ramona Idoate, the superior of the Daughters of Charity, are the two remembered for making the raw site livable: forty-two buildings in all, thirteen of them for the sick, the rest for administration, for the sisters, for services, and for a church. That church held its first San Lázaro feast on the seventeenth of December 1917, and that first festival on the saint’s own day drew the first pilgrims to the isolated site. The date was not incidental. A hospital of the incurable, dedicated to the saint of sores, opened its chapel on the saint’s own day, and from that coincidence of function and feast the pilgrimage would grow.

Leprosy is what set the whole apparatus in motion, and it is worth remembering how the disease was regarded. For most of the history of the colony it was incurable, disfiguring, and dreaded, and its sufferers were shut away from the healthy by law and by fear alike — the lazaretto beyond the walls was as much a quarantine as a refuge. The old Havana hospital of San Lázaro was in time demolished, its function carried out to the country; the name and the saint went with the patients to El Rincón. What did not change was the essential fact that this was, first and last, a settlement of the sick, built to keep them apart. The chapel raised among them was a chapel for the incurable.

The thread is sickness. It is what ties the hamlet to its saint, the leprosarium to its chapel, and both to the power the santeros serve there. A hospital for the diseased became, without anyone planning it, the national seat of the deity of disease — and that is the genealogy of El Rincón in a single line.

The high altar of the sanctuary at El Rincón. The Church honors San Lázaro Obispo, the mitered bishop shown without wounds; the pilgrims come for the other Lázaro, the sore-covered beggar on his crutches. Vanelyazul, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The debt paid in the body

What El Rincón teaches, it teaches through the promesa — the vow paid in the flesh. The logic is plain and severe. A favor is begged of San Lázaro, or received from him: a fever broken, a wound closed, a diagnosis survived, a son brought home. And a favor incurs a debt, which is discharged not in money, or not only in money, but in suffering freely taken on. So the pilgrim who was granted his health, or who is asking for it, keeps the promise with his body. He comes the last kilometers on his knees. He crawls the road on his back. He wears the yute, the jute sacking, that is the saint’s own cloth of poverty and the orisha’s own color of penury. He drags behind him a stone, a cinder block, a lead ingot, a length of railroad iron, or a cannonball, chained to the ankle so that every meter of the road is felt — for endurance is the coin, and the harder the promise the truer its payment. Cuban and international accounts of the pilgrimage record the whole repertoire of self-mortification, and it is not theater. It is theology done with the knees and the shoulders.

The saint who receives it is doubled, and the doubling is the heart of the place. To the many Cubans who would call themselves Catholic, and who kneel at the altar and light a candle, the figure is San Lázaro — read popularly not as the mitered bishop the Church actually canonized but as the beggar Lazarus of the Gospel parable, el Viejo Lázaro, old and lame on his crutches with the two dogs at his open sores. To the santero and the santera he is at the same time Babalú-Ayé, the orisha who owns smallpox, leprosy, and pestilence, and who lifts them as readily as he lays them on — the power whose full lore, whose crutches and sackcloth and dogs and cowries, belongs to his own account and is only gestured at here. This is the religion the outside world learned to call Santería, a name coined by outsiders and long meant as a slur; its own people call it the Regla de Ocha, la Regla Lucumí, or simply la religión, and it is served today across the island and its diaspora as a coherent, living faith. At El Rincón the two devotions do not compete for the same ground. They occupy it together.

The beggar is the point. The Church’s own San Lázaro is the bishop of Marseille, Lazarus of Bethany raised from four days’ death and shown in the sanctuary’s altar-image robed and mitered and whole. But the Lázaro the pilgrims kneel to is the other one — the leper of the parable in Luke, who lay at the rich man’s gate desiring the crumbs, whose sores the dogs licked, and whom the clergy never canonized in that guise at all. The people chose the wounded beggar over the whole bishop, and they chose him because he is like them: poor, sick, at the door, in need. That is the figure the orisha of the sores could be laid upon without strain, for the two are the same kind of holy — a majesty that limps, a power close to the wounded because it was wounded. To el Viejo the faithful bring what suits a beggar-king: candles by the hundred, purple and burlap, coppers and small coins, cigars, and flowers, set before his image along the road and heaped at the church.

That is the doctrine the place quietly insists on: not confusion but convergence. On the night of the feast a Catholic Mass is said inside the sanctuary while, outside and along the road, the smoke of cigars rises, coins and flowers and small coppers are pressed against images of el Viejo, and the whispered Lucumí salutes of the santeros go up — and all of it addresses one merciful and terrible healer, a Cuban form of a Yoruba and Fon power carried across the Atlantic in the slave ships and reassembled, as the Cuban Studies account of the pilgrimage and its parable traces, in the cabildos de nación of the colony. Whether the saint’s image began as protective camouflage for a forbidden orisha, or as a genuine dual devotion held sincerely in one heart, is a question scholars still weigh and do not close; most likely it was both at once, in different hearts and different generations. What is not in doubt is that the santero at El Rincón is not confused about who waits at the altar. The particular roads and colors and offerings a given house keeps for the orisha vary from lineage to lineage — the religion is decentralized and orally transmitted, with no single altar that speaks for all — and those inner matters are named here only at the ethnographer’s distance, described and never prescribed. What is common to every pilgrim, Catholic and Lucumí alike, is the road, and the price of it.

El Rincón is, in this, the great public school of Cuban popular religiosity. The holy does not meet the pilgrim at his strength. It meets him at the point of his illness and his poverty — the two afflictions San Lázaro carries in his own body — and the measure of devotion is not what a person believes but what he is willing to haul the length of a dark road to prove it.

The shrine the people kept

Everything about the origin of El Rincón was an instrument of control: a decree of the Spanish crown, a hospital of the church, a colony built to segregate the diseased out of sight. What the site became was the opposite of all that. The chapel meant to contain the lepers was claimed by the people who came for their saint, and it grew, over the twentieth century, into the second most important pilgrimage sanctuary in Cuba — surpassed only, in the reckoning of the Cuban and Catholic sources, by the Basilica of Our Lady of Charity at El Cobre, the island’s Marian shrine and the seat, for the santeros, of the river-orisha Ochún. On an ordinary day the little church at El Rincón receives on the order of a thousand or fifteen hundred faithful. Across the night and day of the feast the count runs to something like ninety thousand.

That the pilgrimage survived at all is the substance of its modern history. After 1959 the Revolution declared itself officially atheist, and for three decades religious practice was pressed hard — public devotion could stall a career, close a door, mark a family — yet the December walk to El Rincón was made anyway, at real cost to those who made it in the open. The guarded thaw of the 1990s, the lean years the state called the Special Period, brought toleration; the constitution was amended to define the state as secular rather than atheist, the crowds swelled, and the small church was raised to the rank of National Sanctuary. Religious tourism followed, with its own pressures on a holy place. Pope John Paul II came in January 1998, on the first papal visit the island had ever seen, and is remembered to have prayed at the sanctuary as he did before the Virgin at El Cobre — the fine detail of the itinerary reading, in places, more as sanctuary tradition than as fine record. Cardinal Jaime Ortega, the archbishop of Havana, customarily presided over a feast-day Mass there in the years of his tenure. The devotion had not waited for permission, and when permission came it only widened the road.

Devotees converging on the sanctuary of El Rincón for the feast of San Lázaro on the seventeenth of December, when tens of thousands come to keep their vows. Vanelyazul, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The devotion crossed the water with the exile. In Hialeah, Florida, a Rincón de San Lázaro keeps the same night, its doors open through the sixteenth into the seventeenth as the faithful of the Cuban diaspora arrive with their promises, some walking the last stretch barefoot or on their knees just as on the island — the shrine transplanted, the debt still paid in the body, San Lázaro venerated by some as the Catholic saint and by others as Babalú-Ayé, and by many as both.

One distortion has to be named here in order to be refused. For two centuries the Afro-Cuban side of shrines like this one has been caricatured from outside as brujería, as “voodoo,” as “black magic” — a lurid framing that tells the reader nothing true about El Rincón and much about the contempt of those who coined it. That the founding ethnography — Fernando Ortiz’s above all — was itself not clean of the brujería frame is weighed in the account of the Afro-Cubans. The recovery of the shrine as it actually lives owes more to those who listened longer: Lydia Cabrera, whose El Monte of 1954 set down the religion as the priests told it, and Natalia Bolívar Aróstegui after her. Their record, and the record of the pilgrims themselves, describes not witchcraft but a dignified faith of the sick and the poor, whose fuller history — the Atlantic trade, the cabildos, the long making of a Cuban people out of many African nations — belongs to the account of the Afro-Cubans and is only touched here.

Beside the sanctuary, the reason for all of it endures. The leprosarium is still there, and it still works — a specialist center where those cured of Hansen’s disease may remain, cared for by the Daughters of Charity, because the hospital has become their home, and where the lesions and disabilities the disease leaves behind are still treated. The lord of the sores is served, exactly as he was meant to be, next door to a house of the sick. Each seventeenth of December the man who has dragged his cannonball the length of the road reaches the white church at last and is helped to stand, his ankle raw, his promise kept — and the old man he has come to thank answers, as he always has here, to two names at once.

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