The Afro-Cubans

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On the sixth of January the drums came down out of the barrios and into the center of Havana. It was the Día de Reyes, the Feast of the Three Kings, and for one day the colonial city surrendered its streets to its enslaved and free black inhabitants. The cabildos marched, each nación in its own dress and behind its own drums, under a king and a queen elected for the day. The Lucumí danced one way and the Congo another; the Arará carried the rhythms of Dahomey, and the Carabalí brought out the horned, masked figure of the Cross-River societies. The procession wound toward the residence of the Captain-General, where each group knelt for a coin, an aguinaldo, and asked to be seen. To a Spanish official it was a licensed carnival, a safety valve, a picturesque disorder tolerated once a year. To the people in the street it was the single day on which the many Africas of Cuba could stand in the open in their own colors and answer to their own gods. In 1884 the colonial government put a stop to it. The parade was outlawed and the drums pushed back behind walls. But the thing the parade had gathered — a people assembled out of more than twenty nations — did not disband with the holiday.

Día de Reyes en La Habana, the Epiphany procession of the Afro-Cuban cabildos, painted by the Basque-Cuban costumbrista Víctor Patricio de Landaluze (1830–1889). Via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The nations behind one name

The Afro-Cubans reach the documentary record first as cargo and only afterward as community. The scholarly consensus holds that more than one million enslaved Africans were carried to the island across the whole span of the Atlantic trade — estimates run from roughly 700,000 to well over a million — and the traffic surged at the very end of the eighteenth century. When the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804 destroyed Saint-Domingue’s plantation economy, Cuba rushed into the gap and became one of the world’s leading producers of sugar; in the years between 1791 and 1805 more than ninety thousand enslaved people passed through Havana alone. Sugar made the trade, and the trade made a black majority in the sugar districts. By the census of 1841, near the demographic peak, the enslaved numbered something on the order of 436,000 — close to half the island’s people — and the free people of color, generally of mixed descent, formed a further large share; together, Cubans of African descent were a near-half, and in the plantation west often an outright majority, of the colony’s population.

They did not arrive as one people. They came as many “nations,” naciones, and the colonial and ethnographic record fixes six principal groupings among more than twenty distinct African origins. The Lucumí were the Yoruba, whose homeland service of the orishas is the African root of what became Regla de Ocha in Cuba. The Congo, or Bakongo, were Bantu peoples of the Kongo kingdom and Angola. The Carabalí were the Cross-River peoples of the Calabar coast — Efik and Ejagham — from whom the Abakuá society descends. The Arará were the Gbe-speaking Ewe and Fon of Dahomey and Allada. Alongside them the record names the Mandinga of the western Sudan and the Ganga of the Sierra Leone hinterland. These labels were often crude, a slaver’s shorthand pinned to a port rather than a people, and they scrambled real ethnic distinctions; but in Cuba the captives took the categories up and made them their own, so that a “nation” became less a memory of Africa than a thing built on the island.

The institution in which they built it, and the institution through which they enter the archive, is the cabildo de nación. These were mutual-aid brotherhoods, modeled on the Spanish cofradías — the lay confraternities first organized in Seville in the later Middle Ages — and adapted in Cuba to gather free and enslaved people of the same nation. They are attested from the late sixteenth century: a Mandinga Zape cabildo is recorded in 1568, and an Arará house held a lot in Havana by 1691. A cabildo pooled funds, cared for the sick, and buried its dead with the proper rites; it elected officers, kept a house, and paraded on feast days. And under cover of all this ordinary business it did the thing that mattered most. As the study of the cabildos makes plain, these houses kept the drums, the songs, the dances, and the gods — reassembling, out of the wreckage of the Middle Passage, a liturgical life that the plantation had every reason to erase. It is no accident that the same colonial authorities who tolerated the cabildos as instruments of control spent three centuries trying to regulate them.

The very word for these people is itself a scholar’s coinage of the twentieth century. “Afro-Cuban” — afrocubano — was given its currency by the ethnographer Fernando Ortiz, and the population it names is, in the present, a contested figure. The 2012 census recorded 1,034,044 Cubans, or 9.26 percent, who identified themselves as black; add those who called themselves mulatto or mestizo and the share of self-declared African descent climbs steeply, while a University of Miami genetic study estimated that roughly 62 percent of Cubans carry some African ancestry. The gap between the counted and the inherited is not a paradox but a history — of a racial arithmetic in which lightness was long an asset, and self-description learned to hedge. The Afro-Cubans, on any of these measures, are not a remnant. They are a living people, and much of Cuba besides.

What the cabildos kept

Within this world the cabildos were the cradle in which the scattered Lucumí rebuilt, out of memory and improvisation, the service of the orishas. What crossed the ocean was not a book or a temple but a people, and it was in the people that the orishas were reborn. The tradition that emerged is La Regla de Ocha-Ifá, which outsiders came to call “Santería” — a name that began in the mouths of others, sometimes with a sneer at black Catholicism, and that many of its own people set aside in favor of Regla de Ocha, La Regla Lucumí, or simply “la religión.” Its priests are the santeros and santeras, crowned with an orisha, and above them the babalawos, the priests of the Ifá oracle. Its knowledge is house-bound: an ilé, a religious household descended from a founding elder, keeps its own lineage of caminos, colors, numbers, and feast days, so that what is fixed in one house may differ in the next. There is no central church and no single canon. There are lineages, and there is ashe — the sacred force that a rite carries forward.

The great interpretive key the Afro-Cubans give the record is a single word, and it too is Fernando Ortiz’s: transculturación, transculturation. He coined it in his Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar — Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, published in 1940 with a preface by the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski — to name what he thought “acculturation” had missed. When cultures meet in the crucible of conquest and slavery, Ortiz argued, the weaker does not simply dissolve into the stronger. Something new is forged, carrying original elements forward even as it becomes its own thing; the process is a loss, an uprooting, and a birth at once. He drew the figure from Cuba’s own two crops, the native tobacco and the imported cane, but its truest field of demonstration was the religion of the people he had spent his life studying.

For transculturation is exactly the grammar of the orisha-and-saint correspondences that give Cuban devotion its doubled face. Changó, the thunder-king who owns the double axe and the batá drums, is served behind the image of Santa Bárbara. Yemayá, the mother of the sea, stands behind the black Virgin of Regla whose town looks across the bay at Havana — the very Regla whose September procession carries her image down to the water. Ochún, the river of sweetness and gold, is the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, the patroness of all Cuba, in her yellow shrine at El Cobre. Elegguá, the opener of the crossroads who is fed first at the door, wears the face of the Niño de Atocha or of San Antonio. And Babalú-Ayé, the lord who sends and lifts disease, is San Lázaro, the sore-covered beggar to whose sanctuary at El Rincón the promised crawl each December. How to read these pairings is one of the genuinely open questions of the field. Were the saints a mask — protective camouflage that let a forbidden worship hide behind the church’s own images — or a real second devotion, a faith with two faces held in one heart? Scholars divide, and the tradition itself does not speak with one voice; what it does not do is confuse the two powers, or mistake the plaster saint for the orisha behind it. Read from within, the doubling is neither disguise nor muddle but a way the ashe of the African powers found new masks and endured.

The Afro-Cubans carry, in fact, not one tradition but a braided sacred world, and it is a mistake to collapse the strands. The Yoruba-descended Regla de Ocha is only one rama. The Kongo nation gave Cuba Palo, the Regla de Congo, whose power is gathered in the consecrated vessel and whose cosmology reaches back to the Bakongo world of the crossroads-sign and the ancestral dead. The Carabalí gave the all-male initiatory society called Abakuá, with its masked ireme dancers and its secret sign-writing, the only African-derived closed fraternity of its kind in the Americas. And over and through all of them runs Espiritismo, the spiritism of Allan Kardec’s books absorbed and Africanized into a commerce with the dead. Each has its own gods or forces, its own drums, its own rites; a single person may be initiated in more than one. The African roots — the Yoruba religion of the orishas, the Fon and Ewe worship of the vodun, the Bakongo cosmology of the living and the dead — are named honestly in this world as what came before. What Cuba made of them was new.

From brujería to recognition

The afterlife of the Afro-Cubans is a long oscillation between suppression and recognition, and it begins with the cabildos being slowly strangled even as they were tolerated. A Bando de Buen Gobierno of 1792 already set out to control them. Through the nineteenth century their feast-day processions were pushed outside the city walls, and in 1884 the government outlawed the Día de Reyes parade altogether. In 1887 new laws forced the cabildos to seek official licenses, and in 1888 they were made to reorganize as ordinary mutual-aid societies under the rules written for white Cuban clubs — a bureaucratic dissolution of their national character. Emancipation, when it came, came late and grudgingly. The Moret Law of 1870 freed only children born to enslaved mothers and the very old; the patronato of 1880 renamed the remaining slaves “apprentices” and bound them for a further eight years; and full abolition arrived only by Spanish royal decree on the seventh of October, 1886, making Cuba, after Brazil, the last country in the hemisphere to end the ownership of human beings. The illegal trade had by then already died out, around 1867, decades after the Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1817 had promised to end it.

The scholarly reception of the Afro-Cubans cannot be separated from Fernando Ortiz, and Ortiz must be read critically. The same man who gave the world transculturation began his career as a criminologist of race. His 1906 Los negros brujos — The Black Sorcerers — was the first installment of a projected study of what he called the “hampa afrocubana,” the Afro-Cuban underworld; it framed the religion as brujería, witchcraft, a criminal atavism, and a barrier to be cleared away for the sake of national progress. That book helped fix the very caricature — the “witchcraft,” the “voodoo,” the sensational animal sacrifice — that later scholarship, and the practitioners’ own voice, have had to name and reject. It is a caricature and not a description, and it belongs to the history of the slander, not to the history of the religion. The remarkable thing is that Ortiz himself moved. In Los cabildos afrocubanos of 1921, in his monumental studies of Afro-Cuban music culminating in La africanía de la música folklórica de Cuba (1950), and above all in the concept of transculturation, the prosecutor became the tradition’s most influential documentarian, and in his last decades he denounced racism outright. After him the recovery passed to more sympathetic hands: Lydia Cabrera, whose El Monte of 1954 remains the great compendium of the living lore, gathered largely from the mouths of practitioners themselves; Miguel Barnet, who set down the testimony of the runaway slave Esteban Montejo; and Natalia Bolívar Aróstegui, whose surveys of the orishas carried the knowledge to a wide readership. The founding ethnography is indispensable and compromised at once, and it is read best with both facts held together.

The Revolution of 1959 opened a new chapter of hostility. The Marxist-Leninist state took a dim view of all religion, and the 1976 constitution codified official atheism. Santeros and babalawos found themselves harassed by the police, denied membership in the Communist Party, and required to seek permits for their rites; a santero could be at once a folkloric treasure, paraded for tourists as national culture, and a suspect citizen barred from the Party for the same beliefs. The turn came with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the desperate hardship of the Special Period. In November 1991 the Party opened its ranks to believers, and in July 1992 the constitution was amended to redescribe the state not as atheist but as secular, adding an article that forbade discrimination on the basis of religious belief. Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1998, followed by Benedict XVI in 2012 and Francis in 2015, sealed the reopening of public religious life, and the Afro-Cuban traditions emerged into the open along with the churches.

They emerged into a market. The same openness that let the orishas be served without fear also drew them into the tourist economy: initiations sold to foreigners on a schedule, botánicas stocked for visitors, folkloric performance blurring into rite. Practitioners argue among themselves over what is devotion and what is show, over how much of a closed knowledge can be carried into the daylight without ceasing to be itself. The debate is a sign of vitality, not decay. Each year the roads still fill: the promised drag themselves the last stretch to San Lázaro at El Rincón on the seventeenth of December, and the pilgrims climb to the yellow Virgin of the Caridad at El Cobre, and in the old cabildo-town of Guanabacoa across the bay the three reglas are kept side by side as they have been for two centuries. The parade of 1884 was outlawed; the people it had gathered were not. They are still assembled, still many nations and one, and they still keep their gods.

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