Guanabacoa

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From the ramparts of Havana’s harbor forts the far shore reads as a low green rise, a town of tiled roofs and bell towers set back from the water. That is Guanabacoa — east across the bay, on higher ground, close enough to the capital to share its trade and far enough to keep its own weather. The name is older than the Spanish who wrote it down. It is Taíno, and the Cuban sources gloss it two ways that come to the same water: sitio de las aguas, the site of the waters, and tierra de ríos y lomas, land of rivers and hills. On that land, in a single colonial town, three separate African liturgical worlds put down roots — the orishas of the Lucumí, the prendas of the Kongo, the leopard-society of the Carabalí — and none of the three has ever left. Guanabacoa is where they are served.

The town across the bay

The record begins with a resettlement. In the middle of the sixteenth century the western third of Cuba was being emptied of its indigenous people — worked to death in the encomiendas, thinned by disease, scattered — and the Cabildo of San Cristóbal de La Habana gathered the survivors onto the hills east of the bay. The Cuban histories date the founding of Guanabacoa as a pueblo de indios, a town of Indians, to 12 June 1554, when the Havana council set the reconcentration in motion; a Franciscan was sent in 1578 to instruct the survivors and raise a church to María Santísima de la Asunción. (The English-language reference works carry a later date, 1581, and the town itself is sometimes said to keep two birthdays; the earlier civic act of 1554 is the one the Cuban record anchors to, and the divergence is worth marking rather than smoothing.) It was, from the first, a place made to hold people who had been moved.

Almost at once it served that purpose for the colony itself. In 1555 the French corsair Jacques de Sores fell on Havana, sacked it, and burned it, and for a short while the singed and homeless capital took refuge on the far shore — the germ, the local memory holds, of a saying that outlived the emergency: como meter La Habana en Guanabacoa, like fitting Havana into Guanabacoa, said of any attempt to cram something large into a space too small. The town was the overflow of the bay, the second ground, the place where whatever Havana could not hold went across the water and stayed.

Stone followed. A chapel to Nuestra Señora de la Asunción stood by the late sixteenth century; the parish rose in standing over the seventeenth; and the church that anchors the town today — the Parroquial Mayor on the central square, with its Moorish-influenced alfarje, its wooden ceiling worked in the mudéjar manner — was built in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, approved in 1714 and finished, in the usual reckoning, by 1721. In 1743, by royal decree of Felipe V, Guanabacoa received the title it still carries in full: Villa de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Guanabacoa, with a coat of arms to match. Its patroness is the Virgin of the Assumption, kept in August; the town wears her name.

The parish church of the Assumption in the heart of Guanabacoa, the villa’s Catholic center, built in the eighteenth century and restored in 2010. Photograph by Ivan2010, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

But the church on the square is the surface of the town, not its depth. The depth was carried in by a different people, under a different compulsion, and kept in a form the parish never fully saw. As the ports and warehouses of Havana bay drew enslaved Africans in their thousands, the town on the eastern shore became one of the seats of the cabildos de nación — the crown-tolerated brotherhoods organized by African “nation,” each a mutual-aid society, a burial fund, a festival club, and, under a Catholic patron saint, a house where a liturgy the colony had not authorized could be kept alive. Guanabacoa is remembered in the tradition and in the scholarship — from Fernando Ortiz and Lydia Cabrera onward — as home to among the first African cabildos in the Havana area. The reconcentration town of the sixteenth century became, in the seventeenth and eighteenth, a mother-ground of the African religions of Cuba. What the full arc of that trade and those brotherhoods was, over the whole island, belongs to the story of the Afro-Cubans; what concerns Guanabacoa is that so much of it began here, and stayed.

The mother-ground of three reglas

Within the living tradition Guanabacoa is not a town so much as a matriz, a womb-ground, and what it bore is not one religion but three, distinct in origin, distinct in what they do, kept side by side across the same streets. They did not merge. A Havana practitioner may be initiated in one and respected in another; the three are neighbors, not a single church, and Guanabacoa is one of the few places where all three sit thick on the ground together.

The first is Regla de Ocha, also called la Regla Lucumí — the tradition that outsiders labeled “Santería.” The name is worth stopping on. It was an outsider’s word, and at first a belittling one: santería, the excessive fuss over saints, said of Black Cubans by those who found their devotion suspect. The priests’ own names for the religion are Regla de Ocha, la Regla Lucumí, or simply la religión, the religion, and those are the names it answers to from inside. What it carries is the pantheon of the orishas, the great powers the Yoruba nation brought across the Middle Passage and rebuilt in the cabildos and the ilé, the house-temples, of the island. Elegguá opens the way and is fed first, at the door, before any other power is greeted — the owner of the crossroads, the trickster who is never the devil the friars took him for. Changó is the thunder-king who owns the double axe and the batá drums. Yemayá is the mother of the sea. Ochún is the river of sweet water and gold. Babalú-Ayé is the lord who sends sickness and lifts it. They are served with their ashé, their sacred force, and — in the layer that reads here as living faith and not mere disguise — alongside the Catholic saints their images have long been paired with: Changó with Santa Bárbara, Yemayá with the black Virgin of Regla honored just across the bay, Ochún with the Caridad del Cobre, Babalú-Ayé with San Lázaro. Whether that pairing began as protective cover under the priest’s eye, or as genuine dual devotion, or as both at once in different hearts, is the question the scholarship has debated longest; the tradition itself, and El Cobre’s own history, carry that argument more fully than a town can. Here it is enough to say that in Guanabacoa the saints and the orishas keep the same feasts, and the people who keep them are not confused about who they greet.

The details are not fixed, and honesty keeps them loose. Regla de Ocha is decentralized and orally transmitted, with no central altar that speaks for all; an orisha’s caminos or roads, particular colors and numbers, the offerings a given house sets, the feast-saint a given lineage prefers — these vary from ilé to ilé, from rama to rama, and the tradition says so itself. What Guanabacoa holds is not a single canonical form but a density of houses, each with its own transmission, worked out over generations in the same town.

The second regla is Palo Monte, also called Regla de Congo or Regla Conga — and it is a different world entirely, not a variant of the first. It descends from the Kongo, the Bakongo cosmology of Central Africa, and it works not with the orishas but with the nganga or prenda, the consecrated vessel in which the powers of the dead and of the forest are gathered and set to work. Its idiom is the monte itself, the wild bush from which it takes its name — the sticks, the earth, the bones, the iron. Where the orisha religion is bright with color and drum, Palo is nearer the ground and the graveyard, and its practitioners hold it the older and the harder of the two. In Guanabacoa the two are worked by many of the same families, kept separate and kept both.

The third is the Abakuá — the all-male fraternal society, closed and initiatory, descended from the Cross River Ékpè, the leopard society of the Efik and Efut peoples of what the Cubans called the Carabalí, on the border of present-day Nigeria and Cameroon. Its first Cuban lodge — a potencia or juego, the society’s name for a chapter — was founded not in Guanabacoa but in neighboring Regla, across a narrow arm of the same bay, in 1836, and the Abakuá spread from there. By the 1880s the society counted dozens of juegos across Havana’s districts and its lodges in Regla and Guanabacoa; the town is reckoned, with Regla and with Matanzas, one of its principal seats. Its public face is the íreme, the masked and checker-cloaked dancer — once called ñáñigo — who moves through the ceremony as a spirit made visible; its sacred marks are the anaforuana, the traced signs that consecrate ground and station. Beyond that public face the society is closed, and it is described here only at the ethnographer’s and the public record’s distance, as it asks to be: the name-guard of the tradition itself is that friendship is one thing and the Abakuá another.

The African originals of all three — the Yoruba orisha religion and the Yoruba people, the Kongo cosmology and its cross of the four moments, the Cross River Ékpè — are named here in plain prose, for they are the roots and not the branch. What grew in Guanabacoa is the Cuban, creolized, saint-shadowed form of each: the orishas served with their saints, the prenda fed in the monte, the potencia keeping its rite. They are taught house to house, from padrino to godchild, and much of what they hold remains, by the tradition’s own account, lineage-variable and closed. The town is where the three of them are practiced at once, on the same hills, within sound of the same parish bell.

The afterlife of the cabildos

The documented history under all of this is sober and heavy, and it should be named without ornament. Guanabacoa’s depth in the African religions is the afterlife of the Atlantic slave trade to Cuba — the last and among the cruelest of the New World slaveries, feeding the sugar boom into the second half of the nineteenth century — and of the cabildos de nación the colonial establishment tolerated in part as an instrument of surveillance, a way to keep the Africans sorted, watched, and led by known figures, even as those same brotherhoods preserved the liturgy, the language, the drumming, and the festival the colony would otherwise have crushed. Abolition came in 1886. The cabildos were pressured and reorganized, refashioned as Catholic-fronted sociedades, and the traditions they had carried went on in the ilé and out of the state’s eye. The fuller weight of that history — the trade, the nations, the emancipation — is carried in the account of the Afro-Cubans; Guanabacoa’s part in it is that the town became one of the places where the memory did not break.

It has since institutionalized that memory. On 26 July 1964 the Museo Municipal de Guanabacoa opened its ethnographic work, and it is remembered, by its own account and by the partner institutions that describe it, as the first Cuban museum of its kind — a museum of religious ethnology whose central collection is given to the three Afro-Cuban religions, holding the objects of the orishas, the prendas of Palo, and the regalia of the Abakuá, much of it tied directly to slavery and to the African contribution to Cuban culture. It is a strange and telling thing, that the same town whose religions were long slandered from outside should be the one to build the first museum that took them seriously. That slander has to be named and refused: for two centuries the Cuban orisha religion was called brujería and “voodoo,” and Guanabacoa, as the ñáñigos’ town, drew a special share of the tabloid caricature of the “brujo” and the ñáñigo — a weapon against the faith, not a description of it. The fuller reckoning with that slander, and with the founding ethnography that was not clean of it, belongs to the account of the Afro-Cubans. The museum on the square answers the caricature with the objects themselves, set out to be understood.

Guanabacoa at the close of the nineteenth century, the old villa on its hills east of Havana bay. From “Our Islands and Their People,” Jose de Olivares, 1899; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The town has another fame that runs alongside the religious one and is not separable from it. Guanabacoa is a cradle of Cuban music. The pianist and composer Ernesto Lecuona was born here; so was the singer Rita Montaner; so was the pianist and singer known to the whole island as Bola de Nieve — Ignacio Villa — whose voice carried the sound of the barrio into the concert hall. The drumming and the song of the cabildos and the ilé are not a separate stream from the music the town is proud of; they are one of its headwaters. The batá that speak to Changó, the toques that call each orisha, the chorus and clave of the rumba that grew up in the same yards — the sacred and the secular music of Guanabacoa were made by the same hands.

After 1959 the Revolution’s early decades of official atheism pressed on all the island’s faiths, and the santeros served their orishas out of the eye of the state; the guarded reopening of the 1990s — the lean years the government named the Special Period — and the further openings of the following decades brought tolerance, and with it religious and cultural tourism, a market in the sacred that is its own kind of pressure on a living town. Through the suppression and the reopening alike the reglas of Guanabacoa were kept, as the pilgrim roads to San Lázaro at El Rincón and to the Caridad at El Cobre were kept, as the crossing to the black Virgin of Regla over the bay is kept. The town on the eastern shore is not a museum-piece of a vanished thing, whatever the museum on its square preserves. Elegguá is still fed at the door, the drum still calls the orishas down, the nganga is still worked in the monte, and the potencia still keeps its rite. Across the water from Havana’s stone forts, on the higher ground where three African worlds came in on the same ships and never left, the religions of Guanabacoa are spoken of in the present tense — because that is the tense in which they are practiced.

→ Related: The Lucumi · The Afro Cubans · The Carabali · Regla Havana · Chango · Yemaya · Ochun · Elegua · Babalu Aye · El Cobre · El Rincon