The open-air bookstands in Habana Vieja’s Plaza de Armas are a beacon for tourists and visiting scholars alike, each hoping to find a souvenir or unearth a rare volume or two. These independent sellers that line the perimeter of the square offer a civilized counterpoint to the frenetic energy of hard currency commerce buzzing around them.
On any given day, a variety of bibliophiles set out their thigh-high display cases, that show a dozen titles to be propped up like menus on slanted shelves roped off with string. Each seller has a few extra boxes of books tucked out of sight, in case someone asks for a specific title not on show and if they don’t have what you’re looking for, they will work with the other sellers to locate it. On these shelves, nestled between the Spanish language editions of general Cubanía, you will see ubiquitous copies of El principito as well as the heftier works of Marx and Lenin. Usually on the lower shelves and in the boxes are a few titles concerning Cuba’s Afro-Atlantic religions and the island’s African presences. In Cuba, la religion is understood to signify the conglomeration of collaborative and entwined practices of Lukumi/Santería, Palo Mayombe, espiritismo as well as the Calabar Abakuá presence and the works on offer pretty much tell a story of the golden age of Cuban ethnographic enterprise in Afro-Atlantic religion. Fernando Ortiz, Miguel Barnet, and Romulo Lachatañere’s works are in abundance here, as well as a few more cryptic photocopied and stapled treaties on Ifá divination which only practitioners would really be able to identify. In contrast to Miami, the works of Lydia Cabrera, the doyenne of Afro-Atlantic religion in Cuba are conspicuous by their absence, her erasure tied no doubt to her permanent departure to the US in 1960.
In Havana, some more recent works by Natalia Bolivar are available in the peso nacional stores, as well as newer works by the Fundación Fernando Ortiz, yet there really isn’t a huge output of serious works being produced, startling really, considering the fascination both citizens and foreigners have for la religion. This is especially puzzling considering the very conspicuous consumption and public display of Afro-Cuban religions on the island in terms of music, performance and the people dressed head to toe in imported white clothes and wearing beaded necklaces and bracelets that denote their costly initiation in Lukumi.
Why aren’t these same passions for the religion reflected in the ways people learn about it through texts? Part of the answer can be gleaned in the actual shortage of paper for printing. Banks in Cuba print their ledgers and statements on dot-matrix printers, using that paper with perforated edges with little holes in them that you remember from the 1980s. I have seen some documents on the orishas passed between priests that have been printed on such paper, hinting at the resourcefulness of those thirsty for religious knowledge. During my fieldwork, I learned the surprising way of how religious knowledge is being rapidly shared in Cuba that subverts the need for paper and overturns what we might think about technical capability – information is being briskly shared electronically.
My post here is to describe the curious, unlikely, and unexpected use of digital media in Cuba for the dissemination of Afro-Cuban religious materials between and for practitioners. And while everybody is familiar with the works of Ortiz et al, there are new, seminal works being authored by Afro-Cuban practitioners on computers and circulate in Cuba despite the scarcity of computer equipment and the prohibitive costs and carefully limited use of Internet connectivity. Afro-Cuban religious practitioners are making learning possible in a sophisticated and cutting edge method that belies both the capabilities and existing ideas of practitioners in Cuba.
During my fieldwork investigating Chinese influence in Afro-Cuban religions in Cuba, I was left awestruck by the pervasive nature of electronic religious texts that are traveling within the island at an incredible velocity. According to a report by Freedom House, only 5% of Cubans have regular access to the Internet, mainly by government officials and enterprises. Officially, the Internet cannot be installed for use in the home, and most workers have access to emails through their workplace, and even then emails do not support attachments. Through these few networks and through the growth of home computers, which are not connected to the Internet, files on divination, ceremonies and other aspects of religious practice are passing from one initiate to another, and being added to as more and more authors add their knowledge to these files. While most of these files appear to be authored on the island, there are related snippets of website archives, on the religion and related practices. I was given a zipped folder of esoterica that ran the full gamut from Freemasonry, to chakras, to astrology. The bundle of files make for very interesting reading and are being used to guide various practices on obscure and lesser-known religious practices. The trajectory and growth on popularity of these files is something I am keen on studying further.
It appears that the need for the Internet is not as important as one may think, as connectivity for Cubans is cost prohibitive, especially for those without outside support or extra income to afford the hotel prices for Internet that even leave many tourists wincing at the escalated price. Instead, the data are passed through portable devices. During my interviews with religious practitioners, I was asked repeatedly, “¿tienes memoria?” meaning did I have a USB flash drive? Santeros, Babalawos, Paleros, Abakuá, as well as associated musicians, and singers – young and old – asked me the same question, and when I confirmed I did, it would invariably lead to an important type of data field collecting that I had not anticipated. I was to receive the multimedia electronic files created and consumed by practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions passed directly to my flash drive. I accumulated a number of important documents that illustrated a different veneer of religious practice on the island.
I am currently working on a paper that explores this in more depth and by openly discussing this here; it helps to overturn the static and perhaps outdated idea of religious transformations on the island. The growth in electronic media sharing for news and entertainment has been the subject of recent headlines in America and Europe, with reports of el paquete semanal being a popular method for Cubans keeping up to date with news, novelas, television series and foreign box-office hits. With access to a USB-ready DVD player, neighbors can easily get together to keep up with their shows and the rapidity by which new releases are shared is astounding. It’s no wonder that USBs make a very thoughtful gift when travelling to the island.
The paquete is perhaps as ubiquitous or even more so than illegal hook ups to cable, at least with the USBs residents do not run the risk of being fined or having their cables being summarily severed. In any given week, I could count on finishing my fieldwork days decompressing by watching the current season of La flecha [Arrow] and the Big Bang Theory with my interlocutors. Pedro, a Babalawo and musician who lives in el Vedado also introduced me to a phone application shared via Bluetooth that allow Babalawo to hear the entire corpus of 256 divination chapters recited in great depth. The paquete is therefore has a dual meaning in Cuba, one that delivers news and entertainment, but is also appropriated for other areas of knowledge sharing. Another well-respected and renowned practitioner gave me his accumulated works on the initiation ceremonies for the orisha, Babalu-Aye, something he had been carefully curating for a few years. His motive was to be able to pass on his knowledge to his ahijados, his initiated Lukumi godchildren and to prevent them fighting over his handwritten libretas after his passing.
The paquete is also used for distributing data in the arts, including poetry, independent films and images. The Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami recently acquired their first paquete from Cuba for their permanent collection and this speaks volumes (no pun intended) about the future of collection and media curation initiatives. Practitioners of Afro-Cuban religion on the island are as resourceful as ever, and highly sophisticated in their co-operative use of available technologies, one that is set to expand in ever surprising and path-making ways in the near future. Perhaps the booksellers mirror Habana Vieja perfectly, and virtual memory, physically symbolized by flash drives, are a truer reflection of Cuba’s channels for contemporary popular and religious communications.
Image: Cuban postal stamp celebrating advances in portable digital data devices.