Fidel Castro’s death in November sparked questions about the relationship between religiosity and the state. The Cuban Revolution unleashed at least two decades of repression and condescension aimed at religious communities generally, and the Afro-Cuban religions in particular. Yet, many in the Afro-Cuban religious population understood the Revolutionary leaders to be drawing their power from occult, magical sources, and thus understood them to be religious.
Fidel Castro, in particular, was subject to persistent speculation throughout his leadership, which at times portrayed him as sanctioned by the Cuban-Yoruba deities, and at other times understood him, more ominously, to be an accomplice to grotesque sorcery and sacrifice that kept him in power. For many, Fidel’s once disdainful attitude towards the “black” religions was merely a clever cover designed to obscure his real, mystical source of sustenance.
But if the often disturbing images of Fidel’s hidden sorcery machinations conjure up a vision of the ordinary person’s impotence vis-à-vis the sly workings of an all-powerful brujo (witch) state, practitioners and Cubans more generally have often had admiration and respect for the hidden dimensions of political and social control. As Orozco and Bolívar wrote, “the peasants see him as God. The santeros believe he is the son of Obbatalá. His opponents see him as the devil. He claims to be a Marxist. But he admires Jesus Christ the defender of the poor. Only God and the oricha saints know who Fidel is.”
The fact that many revolutionaries initially hid their religious beliefs and affiliations, only to later “come out” following the Party’s decision in the early 1990s allowing religiosos to join the political process, adds to the pervasive perception that religion and politics are related in some way. This is so, even if this relation is obfuscated by the powers that be. Indeed, as Kenneth Routon says, mystical agents and spiritual protections of all kinds are often conjured up to protect against the all-seeing magical eye of the state and its occult neighbourhood-level bureaucrats.
Afro-Cuban religious practitioners resist their subordinate place in society by harnessing the power of spirits, gods, or indeed, leaders. So who will harness the power of Fidel? Will Fidel-el-muerto, just like the spirits of other Revolutionary heroes such as Antonio Maceo, José Martí, and el Che, appear at someone’s spiritual altar or inside their nganga in the near future?
But in this short piece, we wish to offer a counterpoint to the paradigm above. Afro-Cuban religion does not just symbolically resist or appropriate the power of the state. Instead, we suggest that Afro-Cuban religion proposes a new version of the individual altogether, which may or may not compete with the state’s understanding of the “new man.”
The existing literature on Afro-Cuban religiosity focuses on the politics of marginalization and resistance. In this sense, Afro-Cuban religiosity, through its various strands of tradition (such as Ocha/Ifá or Santería, Palo Monte, or Espiritismo, to mention only three), acquires an almost archetypal status, standing in for the Afro-Cuban experience in general. First, it indirectly expresses the historically marginal position of the Afro-Cuban population. Secondly, it appears to offer a means of resisting such marginality. But within a Marxist framework, this symbolic means of expression actually implies a failure to properly resist—that is, a failure to acquire a solid social consciousness that would accompany the material transformations of the oppressing conditions. However, what we want to argue here is that Afro-Cuban religiosity is, in fact, a thoroughly actual instantiation of resistance. The only caveat is that it might not be resistance as we expect it.
In our ethnographic explorations, we met people who were once active members of the Revolution, yet who now show a relatively open identification with Afro-Cuban religiosity. For instance, Julia, an Afro-Cuban woman born to a Revolutionary father and a santera mother, explained that in her youth she was an atheist and anti-religious. Julia aspired to participate in the construction of her new and promising regime. However, when she began to feel her first spirit possession episodes at boarding school, she began to retract from her political commitments, for fear that she would be ridiculed or reprimanded. For Julia, like for many other religiosos, her diminishing enthusiasm for the ideals of the Revolution ran parallel to her increasing embrace of her religion, at least until the 1990s, when the government reversed its repressive stance.
Yet Afro-Cuban religiosity has not fomented conventional forms of resistance. Instead, it yields a complex kind of individuality, and a private life of the ritual family, born from personal paths (caminos) that are often determined by oracles. This notion of personal destiny or path becomes a very real form of resistance, in the sense that it refuses to be encompassed by organized institutionalization, as well as resisting the centralization of its spiritual and cultural power.
In addition, Afro-Cuban religiosity was traditionally retracted from the public sphere (with a few notable exceptions, such as the letra del año, announced by the youngest priest of Ifá at the beginning of every year). Afro-Cuban religious organization instead made the home its basic architectonic-spiritual edifice and center. But there are signs of this private religious life moving into the Cuban public sphere, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the corresponding religious boom.
The first decades of the Revolution, which effervescently pushed for the mobilization and participation of Cuban citizenry, viewed Afro-Cuban religiosity with suspicion precisely because of its individualism and its focus on private life. It has sought to encompass the individual through all kinds of institutionalization, and only recently has this tendency subsided. The Revolutionary state now tolerates individuality, private initiatives, and religious, aesthetic and cultural choices to a far greater extent, and therefore Afro-Cuban religion has resurfaced.
On a concluding and perhaps ethnographically provocative note, we propose that it is precisely within Afro-Cuban religiosity that Cuban individuality has been traditionally developed. Whether or not Fidel becomes another spirit in the roster of muertos, his death places Afro-Cuban religiosity at the vanguard of the nascent paths Cuban individuality may follow.
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