“Where do you start the movements that reach your fingertips?” asked Atanasio Mederos, in Spanish. I was one of seven dance students standing in front of him on the stage at Little Havana’s Koubek Center, a historic building and arts and culture center located on SW 27th Avenue, not far from Calle Ocho. This was the first class of the day: Afro-Cuban modern dance.
“En los hombros?” responded one of the students, tentatively. She was one of several students who had flown from Los Angeles to participate in this weekend’s Ife Ile Afro Cuban Dance Festival. Other students hailed from New York City and Boston.
I’d driven here from East Little Havana, a gringa ambassador of the neighborhood.
“No,” replied the lanky and tall Mederos, swiveling his body to face the empty seats of the theater, so we could examine his exposed back. Reaching behind him, he pointed to the base of his spine. “It starts here. Everything starts here. Let the energy start here and then let it rise up to eventually move your head or your fingers.”
As I stood there trying to focus on the routine he was demonstrating, envisioning my undulating spine as a snake, I did not realize that the aging mulatto man standing in front of me had performed years earlier in one of my favorite Cuban modern dance choreographies, Sulkari, performed in 1971 by the Danza Contemporanea De Cuba (formerly Danza Moderna De Cuba) and choreographed by the legendary Eduardo Rivero-Walker. Mederos, a former dancer with Compañía de Danza Moderna de Cuba, arrived in Miami in 2015 and is now a consultant to Ife Ile Afro Cuban Dance Company, founded and directed by Neri Torres. In Sulkari, male dancers held a staff and pounded it on the ground, like paleros summoning the dead. They held it like a phallus. They readied it in the air, like a weapon.
Drummers were now settled on one side of the stage, ready to accompany the next classes of the day: Afro-Cuban folkloric dance classes teaching the movements and rhythms associated with various Orishas of Santería/Lukumí, followed by classes in Palo, rumba, salsa suelta, Cubatón. The lead drummer this morning was Buda (Damián Díaz Leal), who defected to Miami several years ago as a performer with one of Cuba’s most famous rumba groups, Yoruba Andabo.
The “Orishas” class began with Elegguá (he who “opens the roads”), then Ochosi. I know the drummers; they were regulars at the Afro-Cuban drummings that used to take place at Top Cigars on Calle Ocho every last Friday of the month during the Viernes Culturales (Cultural Fridays) festival – until one Viernes Cultural several months ago, that is. While the group was singing and drumming to Elegguá, a SWAT team of code enforcement officials and police in bulletproof vests swarmed in, calling it a “routine inspection,” their squad cars double-parked on Little Havana’s most famous street. For the time being, Elegguá had closed this road; he’d closed this door, for rumba, at least. Local drummers had begged me to help them find a new place in Little Havana for the monthly rumba.
Regardless of our varied ancestry and skin color, in this moment we embodied and commemorated the memory of Cuba’s enslaved Africans in rebellion against a plantation owner . . .”
More students had arrived and now the stage was full. After the Ochosi class, Juinier Quintero, formerly of the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba, taught us how to improve our technique in dances of the “Congo cycle.” As the pace of the drumming (on congas, not batá) accelerated, punctuated by the clang clang ka-clang, clang clang of the guataca (the metal blade of a hoe, struck with a metal bar), we grabbed invisible staffs and practically leapt into the air, our faces fierce. Regardless of our varied ancestry and skin color, in this moment we embodied and commemorated the memory of Cuba’s enslaved Africans in rebellion against a plantation owner, while moving to the high-energy music of the Cuban religion/ spiritual-healing practice Palo Monte.
The next day, I headed over to the 2nd annual AfroCubaMiami conference. Like last year, it was held at CubaOcho Museum & Performing Arts Center in Little Havana.
In February, the Afro Cuban Forum had taken place here, bringing together leaders and advocates from and for Miami’s Afro-Cuban community. CubaOcho, which is owned by Roberto and Yeney Fariñas Ramos, sits across from Domino Park: the park originally named for Antonio Maceo, revered Afro-Cuban general in Cuba’s wars of independence. In Havana, according to scholar Ivor L. Miller, black generals Maceo and Quintín Bandera are commemorated as devotees of Palo Monte. Alongside Domino Park is Domino Plaza, where performances take place during Viernes Culturales, the legendary Tower Theater, built in 1928, and El Exquisito, the longtime restaurant where a large white banner now hangs across its entrance, blue letters announcing: “We Support Law Enforcement.”
The AfroCubaMiami conference, which took place on August 13th and 14th, brought together priests and practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions from Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia and across the U.S., including Jose Manuel Pérez Andino, president of the Asociación Cultural Yoruba de Cuba, and Mercedes Agustina Armenteros, director of the Museo de los Orichas in Havana. This Miami conference is organized by the Asociación Cultural Yoruba U.S.A. Miami, founded and directed by Babalawo (Ifa priest) Luis E. Laza, a great-great grandson of Addechina Obara Meyi (named Remigio Herrera on a plantation), Cuba’s first babalao.
The conference began with the U.S. national anthem, followed by Cuba’s. Surrounding us on walls and ceilings in CubaOcho, colonial-era paintings from the Ramos Collection included depictions of Cuba’s sugar plantations and laboring black bodies, but also the 78 by 113-inch “La Rumba,” by mulatto painter Antonio Sánchez Araujo, which Roberto calls “The Cuban Mona Lisa.” Next to the podium, a vase overflowed with blue and white flowers and shells, indicating that it honored Yemayá, the Lukumí Orisha of the ocean syncretized with La Virgen de Regla. Just inside the entrance to CubaOcho, shimmery blue satin clothes framed an altar also to Yemayá,. I wondered how many present at the conference had visited Little Havana’s Ermita de Regla, where plaques in English and Spanish announce that La Virgen de Regla, the “black Madonna,” is the “Patroness of Little Havana.”
Presenters at AfroCubaMiami emphasized the need for unity between Ifa and Lukumí priests (both of them part of what is known as “Santeria” but with different realms of ritual authority, forms of divination and restrictions on inclusion in the priesthood) and consistently mentioned the need to connect practitioners of the various Afro-Cuban religions on a global scale. They shared histories; one speaker reminded attendees that Addechina had used his fortune to purchase freedom for slaves; he was emblematic of the need to support one another.
After the lecture presentations, Marisol Blanco—who lives in Little Havana and teaches Orishas and rumba dances across from CubaOcho at DAF Studio, entered the center of the room along with the members of her dance troupe Sikan, moving to the rhythm of drums. Again the clang of the guataca. Again the long staffs—los palos, but not imagined: real enough to hear them crack as two dancers—one of them white Cuban, the other black Haitian, struck them together during a choreographed battle.
That same evening, I returned to the theater at the Koubek Center, this time to see the Ife Ile Afro Cuban Dance Company perform Neri Torres’s “City of Orichas.” Torres, the founder and executive director of Ife Ile, defected to the U.S. from Cuba in 1991 and has since won the 2013 Florida Folk Heritage Award; she also served as the former principal dancer and choreographer for Gloria Estefan. An Afro-Cuban woman, she grew up with Lukumi music and dance traditions. Her choreography began with a video projected on the stage, showing scenes of downtown Miami and dancers representing particular Orishas performing at types of places associated with each Orisha. The video was accompanied by live drumming below the stage.
In the video, the dress of the Orishas transforms into the everyday outfits of Miamians: Oggún is dressed like a construction worker, dancing by the under-construction Brickell City Centre; Ochún is dressed in a flirtatious yellow skirt and top with high heels. The same dancers from the video then appeared on the stage, in these same clothes, enacting a contemporary interpretation of a pataki (spiritual story) about Ochún giving money to the poor. Scenes transitioned between traditional sacred music and club-loud Afro-House conjured by Oba Frank Lords with his top hat and long staff in his hand, and Kataihashe. In one scene, the clang of the guataca returned! Dancers clashed to the aggressive music of Palo, representing hungry and impoverished citizens fighting each other, a consequence of the greed of the few. Those sticks. Those lines. Those markers. In the end, Ochún—and Yemayá—feed the people.
Back at AfroCubaMiami for the last day of the conference, unity was again a dominant theme. When Laza gave an award of appreciation to Roberto and Yeney Fariñas Ramos, Yeney stood in front of the mic and said (in Spanish), “This is your house. It’s an honor for us to host this conference again. Freedom of expression, freedom of religion is important to us. Every year, on the 7th of September, here, we have a celebration, for La Caridad de Cobre, Ochún, our patron saint. You are all invited.”
It occurred to me that all of the speakers at the conference were beginning their presentations by honoring their spiritual lineages, Orishas, spiritual elders and fellow practitioners, verbally pounding a staff to the ground. Then I remembered Mederos’ advice: don’t go back to the shoulders. Go back further. Start at the root, and let it move your head.
Cover Image and photos of Neri Torres dance performance by Rafael Rincón (c) 2016 (RS Shoot Photography).
Cuba Ocho photos by Corina Moebius (upper) and Juan Caballero (right).