Regla

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On the seventh of September the strip of water between Old Havana and the far shore is busy before the light comes up. The lanchita — the low passenger ferry that has crossed the bay for longer than anyone bothers to reckon — runs full, and the people crowded aboard it are dressed in blue: deep azure, turquoise, the pale blue of a calm sea, and white. Many carry white flowers. Some carry candles, and here and there a woman holds a doll in the same colors, cradled like a child. On the far bank, a few steps up from the dock, a church has opened its doors, and out of it, on the shoulders of her bearers, comes a small Black Madonna in a blue mantle with a white infant in her arms. She is the Virgin of Regla, patroness of the bay and of everyone whose living is on the water. Half the crowd that brings her flowers is greeting her by a second name.

The town that took its name from an image

Regla lies on the low south shore of the Bay of Havana, directly across the harbor water from the old city, near the bottom of the bay where the ships turn to their berths. It is one of the municipalities of Havana, a working district of some 44,185 people at the 2022 count, and its coordinate — a little above 23 degrees north and a little west of 82 degrees, the harbor spread out before it — puts it face to face with the more famous shore it has always served. The name is older than the town. It belongs first to the image, and only afterward to the place that grew up around her.

The settlement began as a shrine. The tradition, followed by the church itself, holds that a pilgrim — remembered as Manuel Antonio — raised a small hermitage to Our Lady of Regla on this bank in 1687, on the third of March by the fullest telling. A hurricane threw the first building down within a few years, and the shrine was rebuilt; an image of the Virgin was enthroned in the rebuilt hermitage in 1694. The image at its heart, the devotion holds, was brought across the ocean from Spain, a little Black Madonna of the same lineage venerated at Chipiona, in the province of Cadiz. On the twenty-third of December 1714 she was declared patron saint of the town of Regla, and she was honored, in the same early-eighteenth-century decades, as patroness and protector of the Bay of Havana — the guardian of the harbor mouth and of the sailors and fishermen who passed it; the city’s own account dates that bay-patronage to 1708. The church one sees today is the third or fourth on the ground. A second great hurricane, in October 1810, ruined the intermediate building, and the present sanctuary rose in the years just after — begun in 1811 and finished around 1818, to plans by the engineer Pedro Abad Villarreal — the plain, thick-walled, single-towered church that is now the Santuario Nacional de Nuestra Señora de Regla, a national sanctuary and a protected monument.

Around that shrine a town accumulated, and its growth can be read almost as a tide table. The recorded population stood at 164 souls in 1755; it reached 789 by 1778, and 2,218 by 1810 — a hermitage-village swelling into a port. What made it swell was the harbor. Regla became a place of shipyards and careening-docks, of warehouses and, in time, of oil refineries and the great container terminal that still work the bay; a place where cargo was landed and stored and repaired, and where the men who did that labor lived close to the water because their work was on it. Its Afro-Cuban depth is inseparable from that maritime economy. Enslaved Africans, and after the abolition of Cuban slavery in 1886 the freed men and women who came looking for wage work on the docks, settled the dockside barrios — people of the Yoruba nation the island called Lucumí, of Kongo descent, of the Cross-River Carabalí — and their religions came ashore and stayed. Regla became, in the ordinary speech of the island, a byword for two of them: for La Regla de Ocha, the Cuban orisha religion, and for Palo Monte, the Kongo-descended practice also called la Regla de Palo. The coincidence in the word is worth pausing on. The Spanish regla means rule, or order, or observance; it names the town’s saint, and it names, quite independently, the ordered systems of the orishas and the nganga — the same plain word doing three kinds of work on the same shore.

The national sanctuary of Our Lady of Regla, on the Regla waterfront across the bay from Old Havana. Photograph by Aniol, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The rule, and the sea

The Virgin of Regla is a Black Madonna, and her blackness is not incidental to how Cubans have loved her. The Cuban image descends from the Virgen de Regla of Chipiona, on the Atlantic coast of Andalusia, a dark-faced Marian devotion whose surname carries the regla — the Rule — of Saint Augustine, for the legend attached to the Spanish original makes her image a thing Augustine himself was moved to carve, later hidden underground beside a fig tree through the centuries of the Moorish conquest and recovered by a medieval apparition. What crossed to Cuba was already, then, a traveling Virgin: an import twice over, Andalusian by way of a still older story, set down on a Caribbean dockside where the sea is the whole economy of the place. Dressed in blue, patroness of sailors and fishermen and of mothers, she took to the harbor as if she had been made for it.

And on that harbor she was met by another power who owns the same water. In La Regla de Ocha — the orisha religion the Yoruba captives and their descendants rebuilt in the cabildos, the mutual-aid brotherhoods the colony permitted its African “nations” — the black Virgin of the bay is served as one being with Yemayá, the great mother of the sea. This is the matter the town holds most firmly, and it deserves to be stated without the softening word. For her devotees the Virgin of Regla is not merely like Yemayá, and not a mask worn over her; she is Yemayá, encountered at the exact place where the orisha is nearest — the salt water at the foot of the streets. The reading is exact, feature answering feature. Yemayá owns the ocean and all its life; the Virgin is patroness of the sea and its sailors. Yemayá’s colors are blue and white; the Virgin wears blue, and blue and white are what the devotees put on to come to her. Yemayá is the mother, cool and deep and fierce in defense of her children; the Virgin is a mother with a child in her arms. The African root is named here in plain prose and not disguised: Yemayá is the Cuban Lucumí form of the Yoruba orisha Yemoja, honored on her river in the Yoruba country of what is now southwestern Nigeria and carried into the Atlantic in the last, cruelest decades of the slave trade, reborn on the Cuban shore as the salt sea itself. What crossed the ocean changed and endured at once.

The town’s whole geography teaches the doubling. Regla is a threshold — the near shore reached only by crossing water, the church set down a few steps from the dock, the bay lapping at the ends of the streets. To come to the Virgin at all, one crosses the sea that is Yemayá; the pilgrimage and the orisha’s own element are the same stretch of water. Here the aché of the mother — her coolness, her depth, the mercy people ask of the sea — meets the Catholic mercy of Our Lady, and a devotee may light a candle to the Virgin of the Rule and salute Yemayá of the harbor in one unbroken motion, without any sense of choosing. Alongside Ocha, in the same barrios, the other great current runs: Palo Monte, la Regla de Palo, of Kongo descent, working its own order with the prenda and the powers of the dead. The particular way any of this is kept is not fixed from above. Regla de Ocha is a decentralized faith, carried by word of mouth from godparent to godchild, and the roads of Yemayá — her caminos, the aspects under which she is served, along with their colors and numbers and the offerings set for them — differ from house to house and lineage to lineage; one ilé will know a Yemayá of the deep and another a Yemayá of the harbor mud, and no single altar speaks for all. What is described here is watched from the ethnographer’s distance and from the public street, not instructed.

Yemayá at the water’s edge

The seventh and eighth of September is when the doubling becomes visible to the whole city. The eighth is the feast of the Nativity of Mary, the Virgin of Regla’s day in the Catholic calendar; the celebration gathers on the seventh and crests on the eighth with a solemn Mass and, at its heart, the procession. The image is lifted from the sanctuary and carried out through the crowded streets of the town and down toward the water — the same water that brought her and that is Yemayá’s own. The scholar Lisa Maya Knauer titled her study of the event, for the Hemispheric Institute, All Roads Lead to Yemayá, and the phrase catches what a visitor sees. Thousands come. They come dressed in the sea’s colors, blue upon blue and white, many of them having crossed on the lanchita that morning with flowers and candles in hand. Some cross themselves at the small windows of the church with a coin and then throw the coin into the bay, a shining thing dropped to the mother of the water with a whispered word. The blend the day makes — of Catholic piety, popular devotion, and Regla de Ocha, held together without strain — is now recognized by the Cuban state as cultural heritage of the nation, a public acknowledgment of what the shore has always done.

It is a day that refuses the easy account of syncretism as mere confusion or mere disguise. Nobody in that procession is confused. The crowd knows precisely who is being carried and precisely who waits in the bay, and for very many of them the two are one, greeted in a single act of devotion. Scholars have long debated how the joining first came about — how much of the early identification of orisha with saint was protective camouflage, in a colony where drumming to the powers could be punished, and how much was genuine dual devotion from the start. Some of it, surely, was cover. But the living faith of Regla is not a hidden thing behind a screen; it is one presence with two names, and the devotion to the Virgin is as sincere as the salute to Yemayá. That, and not the old talk of masks, is what the seventh of September looks like from the dock.

The image of Our Lady of Regla within the sanctuary — the little Black Madonna in blue who is, for many of the same worshipers, Yemayá of the bay. Photograph by Christian Pirkl, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Three registers, kept apart

Regla’s story asks to be told in three keys that must not be run together, and the record itself insists on the distinction. The first is sober municipal history. Regla is a real district of Havana with a real economy — a dockworkers’ and industrial suburb whose Afro-Cuban density is the direct sediment of the Atlantic slave trade, of the cabildos de nación that let the colony’s African peoples keep their own brotherhoods, and of the freedmen and freedwomen who settled the waterfront after 1886 to work the ships. None of that is legend. It is demography and labor, and it is documented as such.

The second key is church tradition, and it is more contested than the confident dates suggest. The 1687 hermitage, the pilgrim Manuel Antonio, the image enthroned in 1694, the arrival of a Spanish Black Madonna, the patronage of 1708 and 1714 — these come down through devotional accounts that vary in their details and their dating from one telling to the next, and they are held here as tradition, marked as tradition, not fused with the census. The third key is tradition-internal devotion: the identification of the Virgin with Yemayá, which is the faith of the santeros and santeras and of a great many ordinary Cubans, described at the believer’s own valuation and at the ethnographer’s distance, never reduced to a curiosity.

The distinction matters most where the record has been most abused. For two centuries the Cuban orisha religion, in Regla as everywhere on the island, was libeled from outside as brujería — witchcraft — and later as “voodoo,” “black magic,” and worse, its animal sacrifice worked up into lurid copy. The tabloid brujería frame that shadowed the harbor town’s cabildos was a weapon against the faith, not an account of it. The founding ethnography’s brujería frame — Fernando Ortiz’s above all — is weighed in the account of the Afro-Cubans; the later and more careful listeners set the religion down as its priests told it: Lydia Cabrera, whose El Monte of 1954 did so first, and after her Natalia Bolívar Aróstegui and Miguel Barnet, who recovered these traditions as the coherent, dignified systems they are. The tabloid Regla of witch-doctors and black magic is a distortion of the historiography, to be rejected and not repeated. The Regla of the seventh of September is the true one.

The crossing kept

The pilgrimage has outlasted more than one attempt to quiet it. After 1959 the Revolution’s decades of official atheism pressed on all the island’s faiths; public devotion thinned, and the practice of Ocha and Palo drew back into the yards and front rooms, served out of the eye of the state. The guarded opening of the 1990s changed the weather. The lean years the government called the Special Period, and the constitutional turn of 1992 that redefined the state as secular rather than atheist, together with a rising tide of religious tourism, brought the great days back into open and crowded view — and brought with them, too, the pressures of a market in the sacred, which are their own kind of strain on a holy place. Through the suppression and the reopening alike, the crossing has been kept.

Regla is not the only shore on the island where a Catholic saint and an orisha keep the same feast. The road up to the yellow Virgin of El Cobre, who is Ochún, and the December pilgrimage to San Lázaro at El Rincón, and the cabildo-town of Guanabacoa over the next rise, each hold the same double devotion in their own way, and the arc of that whole world — the many African nations, the cabildos, the abolition of 1886, the long reconstruction of a faith — belongs to the story of the Afro-Cubans as much as to any single shrine. But Regla holds its version at the edge of the water, where the doubling is most literally at home. To reach the black Virgin one must cross the sea that is the mother of the sea; the church stands where the streets run out and the bay begins.

So the seventh of September comes around, and the lanchita fills again, and the little Black Madonna in blue is carried down toward the harbor she has guarded for three centuries. The flowers go on the water. The coins go after them, spinning down into the green bay with their whispered requests. And the crowd on the dock, dressed in the colors of the sea, calls out to the mother of the sea by both her names at once, and finds no difficulty in it at all.

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