BONES CRY OUT: PALO MONTE/MAYOMBE IN SANTIAGO DE CUBA

By

Sonya Maria Johnson

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ANTHROPOLOGY AND AFRICAN AMERICAN & AFRICAN STUDIES

2012
 ABSTRACT

BONES CRY OUT: PALO MONTE/MAYOMBE IN SANTIAGO DE CUBA

By

Sonya Maria Johnson

I argue that practitioners of Palo Monte/Mayombe in the city of Santiago de Cuba

construct a religious genealogy inclusive of spirits to affirm their sense of an “African”

identity in contemporary Cuba. I will demonstrate that these practitioners’ sense of

being African includes an understanding that they are the ritual descendants and

stewards of the blended spiritual knowledge created by sixteenth and seventeenth

century AmerIndian Taíno and Kongolese inhabitants of eastern/Oriente, Cuba. I will

show how practitioners’ use of natural elements from forested spaces of Oriente, along

with artifacts from Cuba’s colonial history, allows them to create and maintain a religious

genealogy that positions spirits, particularly colonial Africans, as significant others. Such

activities assist Palo practitioners’ creation of their “African” identity that is born out of

the island’s Oriente sociohistorical circumstances. I assert that such understandings

also give credibility to the local idiom “Oriente is the land of the dead” because this

particular location contains skeletal remains of the colonial dead as well as the site of

natural/sacred elements Palo supplicants use to engage their spirits.

I found three key features/functions of Palo practitioners’ spirit genealogy. First,

the principles of reciprocity, covenants of confidentiality (con permiso), and trust

(confidanza) set the parameters of how Palo supplicants lived an “African” life style.
Secondly, Palo worshipers’ engagement of African spirits was central to their

understanding of their identity as “Africans.” Finally, Palo worshipers’ construction of a

religious family genealogy inclusive of spirits presented alternative achieves from which

supplicants created their self-defined “African” homeland in Oriente.

 DEDICATION

In loving memory of the strongest leaves of my trees:

Vicente Portundo Martín

Andriol Stevenson Portundo

Departed members of the Roberts, Johnson, Douglas, Malone, and Kirkpatrick families

Harriette McAdoo, Professor Emeritus, Michigan State University

Susan Applegate Krouse, Associate Professor, Michigan State University
Ruth Simms Hamilton, Professor, Michigan State University

And to the children…this labor is for your future

James Isabella
Levi Isaac
Zoya Vivian

  iv
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would not have been able to complete this work without the sustained faith,

resilient commitment, and intellectual insight of my committee co-chairs Jualynne E.

Dodson and Mindy Morgan. Similarly, I thank committee members James Pritchett and

Heather Howard for lending their expertise to the project and for bringing me through

the finals stages of my degree programs. I am particularly indebted to “Dr. J” because

she identified my ability to think critically many years ago, and encouraged me to find

my vocation, and stood by me unwavering as I struggled to do just that; somos y somos.

I am grateful to the late Harriette Pipes McAdoo and Susan Applegate Krouse,

committee members who have passed on since guiding me through the earlier portions

of my degree programs, but whose spiritual presence and legacies remain part of me as

a scholar. To Professor Emeritus Charles H. Long, thank you for sustaining my ideas

and excitement about “worrying questions,” and for helping me identify “that I liked

those dead people” in the first place.

This work and the ideas developed within it would not have been possible without

the steadfast care and steadfast commitment of the faculty and staff of Casa del Caribe.

Their sharing of expertise and encouragement for my scholarly development over the

years has made the difference in how I move forward in the struggle of ideas.

To the extended households and families of Señora Suri, Señor Juancho, and

Señora Norma, my appreciation for how you continually opened your hearts and homes

to me goes beyond expression and I gratefully remain in your debt. My friends Miguielito

and Adria made me a home away from home and provided specialized living support

  v
and loyal collegiality to ensure that I could carry out my studies in a focused manner

“without pain” or worry. The family of Señora Rosira, and Roxanna also made me

welcome in their home and provided insightful conversation while I collected the data.

My heartfelt appreciation goes to my supportive friends and colleagues in

Anthropology and African American & African Studies. Your words of encouragement,

gifts of food, and constant companionship have seen me through. Without my stalwart

companions as well as mentors on the African Atlantic Research Team, particularly Mrs.

Flora Gilford, Sheryll White, Diana Lachatanere, Alyce Emory, and Dr. Montgomery,

who saw me through the thick, thin and everything in between, my moving through the

doctoral process would not have been possible.

To my parents, Harold D. Johnson and Brenda N. Johnson, and to my siblings

and their life partners, DJ and Laura, Lori and Douglas, Natasha, Frank, Micah and Joel,

and to my nephew and niece, James and Isabella Burrell, thank you for always

understanding why I had to be elsewhere during holidays, birthdays and family

gatherings. I thank you most of all for always believing that I could do this. This work is

for you. To Karla Johnson, words are insufficient to capture your dedication and care,

and the encouraging vigil you held from beginning to end. You have always been

present, and I thank you. Finally, to my editor Lorelei Laird, I owe you a debt of gratitude

for your painstaking labor of bringing out the nuances of my work through your diligent

and masterful attention to the text.

The pre-dissertation research portions of my study were made possible by

several generous fellowships from Michigan State University, including the Summer

Retention Fellowship, Grants from the Graduate School, an NSF- Culture, Resources

  vi
and Power Fellowship through the Department of Anthropology, and Tinker Field

Research Grants. The dissertation research was made possible through funding from

the TIAA-CREF Ruth Simms Hamilton Research Fellowship, The Martin Luther King-

Cesar Chavéz-Rosa Parks Future Faculty Fellowship, and the NSF-Alliances for

Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) Research Fellowship, MSU chapter.

While there are many who influenced and assisted me in the writing process, any

mistakes within the document are my own.

  vii
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES………………………………………………………………………………ix

LIST OF FIGURES………………………………..……………………………………………x

GLOSSARY OF TERMS………………………………...…………………………………….xi

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………..1

CHAPTER 1: CONCEPTUAL ROOTS: THE LITERATURE ………………...……….…11

CHAPTER 2: METHODS ………………………… ………………..…………….……...….31

CHAPTER 3: CUBA’S SOCIOHISTORICAL CONTEXT………………...……………....61

CHAPTER 4: SPIRITUAL FOUNDATIONS OF PALO MONTE/MAYOMBE…………104

CHAPTER 5: PALO WORSHIP COMMUNITY………………...……….………………..124

CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSIONS…………………….……………………………………….154

APPENDIX….…...…………………………..……………………………………………….160

BIBLIOGRAPHY…..……………………..……………………………………………….…163

  viii
 LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Palo Worship Community Interviewees, 1of 2….……….…………........page 161

Table 2: Palo Worship Community Interviewees, 2 of 2……………….…………page 162

  ix
 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 Contemporary map of Cuba……………………………………………......page 64

Figure 2 Taíno Archeological dig with pottery and conches remains…………..…page 70

Figure 3 Replica of Taíno Bohío houses……………………………………...……..page 74

Figure 4 Large replica of zemís in the courtyard of El Museo de Banes…...…….page 75

Figure 5 Guermand Moncada’s ritual elements……………………………………..page 96

Figure 6 Primary ngangas of the Palo worship community………………………page 119

Figure 7 Spirit genealogy of Interviewees…………..………..……………………page 147

  x
 GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Abakuá: An all-male Africa-inspired secret religious society originating in Cuba in the

early 1830’s.

Auxiliary: Spirit entity responsible for ushering in other spirits into a supplicant’s body.

Baety: Large public square within a Taíno village located in front of a cacica or
cacique’s domicile used for public religious and political activities.

Bohío: Conical shaped housing structures among the Taíno.

Cacica: Female leader of a cacicazgos.

Cacicazgos: Taíno chiefdoms located throughout the Caribbean and concentrated

within the islands now known as Haiti and Puerto Rico.

Cacique: Male leader of a cacicazgos.

Cazuela: terracotta bowls or small iron cauldrons containing many of the same
elements as an nganga, serving as “houses” for African spirits.

Cojobas: Taíno religious ceremonies.

Congo: Spirit of an African individual imported to Cuba from the regions now known as
Angola, Gabon, Congo, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

De Sao: Forested spaces that contain the plants, animals, and soil practitioners’ harvest
to use to construct sacred spaces and use in ritual activities. Location of the Other
World.

Encomienda: Proto-plantation physical and social arrangements by the Spanish to

keep Taíno populations enslaved.

Espiritísmo: A religious tradition based on nineteenth-century Kadeckian Spiritualism.

Guaytaios: A covenant of eternal friendship used by the Taíno to form expanded

networks and social and political alliances.

Guide: A spirit responsible for assisting supplicants with daily as well as long-term life
decisions and behaviors affecting their overall spiritual well-being.

Hijado/a: A male or female initiate of a Cuban religious tradition under the spiritual
protection of a senior female or male member or spiritual eader in the community.

  xi
Ifá: The fraternity of male priests consecrated to communicate and translate the “total
knowledge” contained within the Odú sacred text.

Ignecios: Sugar plantations, which increased presence and production within Cuba
after the Haitian Revolution in the early 1800s. French creole planters fled to Cuba
before and during the uprising, bringing with them technology to bolster Cuba’s sugar
production for North America and Europe.

Kimpasi: A location and social groupings of individuals specially trained to

communicate with spirits and translate those communications to the larger community in
the fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century Kongo Kingdom.

Kongo: An individual originating from areas held by fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and

seventeenth-century Kongo Kingdom and grouped into an ethnic distinction created in
the New World.

Madre Nganga/Madre Nkisi: A female who has mastered the ritual knowledge and
protocols to engage spirits through the use on an nganga.

Mpungo: Devine supernatural spirits directly responsible for environmental

phenomena; intercessors between humans and the Supreme Creator.

Minkisi: A composite of specially designated nkisi objects containing exceptional

sacred significance.

Muerto: The spirit of an individual who once lived and died within Cuba. Has its own
social biography, which it communicates to living individuals.

Ndokis: Ancestral spirits of those who once lived in the material world of humans but
are not individually known or remembered by living individuals. This category of spirits is
made up of entities that have transitioned to the divine Other World.

Nfumbi: Spirits of individuals who have died but have biographies known by living
persons.

Nganga: The consecrated central ritual element within Regla Palo Monte, contained
within a cast-iron cauldron holding mkisi brought together to respond to a supernatural
spirit force affiliated with a naturally occurring phenomenon.

Nkisi: Material objects and substances that contain concentrated power from a
Supreme Creative Force, drawn from nature or manufactured objects associated with
the social history of Cuba.

Nz(Inz)ambi: Supreme Creative Force within the religious tradition of Palo

Monte/Mayombe.

  xii
Prenda: The primary assistant and messenger spirit of an nganga’s central spirit. The
prenda is responsible to carrying out tasks that the nganga spirit may assign to aid the
worship community.

Protector: Spirit responsible for offering physical and spiritual protection for a
practitioner.

Regla de Ocha/Lucumí: Yoruba-inspired religious tradition based on engaging

supernatural spirits collectively known as the Orisha, who possess anthropomorphic
qualities and act as intercessors between humans and the totality of creation, and also
have responsibility for naturally occurring phenomena. Ocha/Lucumí practices gained
momentum in Cuba in the mid-nineteenth-century.

TaTa Nganga: A male individual who has mastered special designated abilities to
initiate, facilitate, and interpret communication with and from spirits through the use of
an nganga.

Vodú: Religious tradition influenced by practices in what is now known as Benin.

Observers rely on the Loa, supernatural entities, to act as mediators between humans
and other entities and substances throughout the universe. Vodú was introduced to
Cuba from the neighboring island of what is now known as Haiti in the late-eighteenth
century and early nineteenth century, with the inception of the Haitian Revolution.

  xiii
 INTRODUCTION

  1
Beginnings

It was hot and the air thick as the interview got under way. We were in Santiago

1
de Cuba, right before the annual Carnaval season would take hold of the city for two

weeks of celebration. Five student members of the African Atlantic Research Team

(AART) of Michigan State University had come to observe an interview between the

2
Team’s director and Felipe , a practitioner of one of Cuba’s distinct religious traditions,

Palo Monte/Mayombe. Felipe was a soft-spoken man in his early thirties, who had been

practicing Palo for some 25 years, and had been apprenticing with one of the leading

Palo households in the eastern/Oriente region. Everyone sat attentive in a large living

room; window slats were turned down in vain to keep out the noonday heat while a

freestanding fan pushed that same hot air around the room.

The second hour into the interview, AART students were able to ask questions of

Felipe related to our particular research interests. At the time, I was focused on Palo

influences in Carnaval. I had heard about the contemporary and historic aspects of

Carnaval within Cuba, with an emphasis on Santiago de Cuba. I had also become

familiar with pieces that engaged Carnaval celebrations as opportunities for social

inversion, which allowed the underclasses and disenfranchised to have periods of time

when normative social hierarchies were blurred. I combined these understandings with

pre-dissertation observational and participant observation data from the Carnaval

season and surmised that aspects of Cuba’s African inspired religious traditions

                                                                                                               
1
This is the Spanish spelling of carnival.
2
All names of interviewees have been changed to ensure confidentiality. Felipe was
involved in pre-dissertation research activities, however unavailable to continue
throughout the study.

  2
influenced dance movements, adornment practices, and musical presentations that

were part of these large-scale performances.

From what I had read and observed I assumed that connections between

Carnaval in Santiago and the religious practice of Palo Monte could provide me with an

interesting research question. I nervously asked Felipe what influences Palo had on

Carnaval. He quickly responded that each person brought his or her own

understandings, religious and otherwise, to the public celebrations and performances,

and there was no overarching influence from that one religious practice alone shaped

the centuries-old celebrations. I was shocked and rather crestfallen to hear that what I

had thought would be a researchable question made no sense to participants in the site.

People did not live the way I had come to think. As Felipe’s answer begun to settle in I

was certain I heard my question shatter like glass against the linoleum tile. Almost

devastated and rather despondent, I sulked as I followed Felipe and the other AART

students through the streets of Santiago seeing how Carnaval preparations were

developing. We were treated to small cones of ice cream as we meandered through city

streets, watching the transformations for the festivities. Kiosks were erected from fresh

cut wood and palm leaves, parade review stands were methodically constructed for

evening parade activities, and vendors lined the streets selling brightly colored toys and

other odds and ends.

Nonchalantly, Felipe commented on the distinctive nature of the east as he

gazed out over the crowded streets. He said, “Oriente is the land of the dead.” The

remark reverberated in my ears, especially because several days earlier a male elder of

the practitioner’s Palo community had said the same thing: “Oriente is the land of the

  3
dead,” he said after he had prostrated himself before the ritual elements of the Palo

worship community as a greeting to the community’s spirit members. When I asked

Felipe why that particular phrase he shrugged his shoulders saying, “it has to do with

the Vodú coming into the east [Oriente].” He said no more and we walked on. I was

intrigued, why would a location be known for its relationship with the dead? Six years

3
later, Eva , one of the senior female leaders and member of the worship community,

explained that when people joined the religious community, they become family

members to the dead of the Palo worship community because, “without the dead, we

are nothing” (Johnson 2009). The following study seeks to unpack the dead as

interlocutors of the living within one community of Palo practitioners.

                                                                                                               
3
All Palo worshipers of the case study are identified by pseudonyms. See the spirit
genealogy in Chapter 5, Figure 7, and Appendix for details.

  4
Introduction

Through this research, I argue that Palo Monte/Mayombe worshipers in Los

Hoyos create a religious genealogy inclusive of spirit beings to enact an alternative

narrative of personhood in contemporary Cuba, which they understand as “African.” I

demonstrate how Palo supplicants’ identity is based upon the comprehension that they

are the inheritors of sacred ritual knowledge from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

Taíno and Kongolese ethnics in eastern/Oriente, Cuba. I content that practitioners

sustain their “African way of life” through ongoing engagement of spirit beings,

particularly, “African” spirits, to negotiate positions of social marginality within the island

nation.

As the above field account suggests, the dissertation research question evolved

from experiences within the site where individuals consistently spoke of the deceased

and spirits in ways that suggested that these entities were more than a passive

presence in humans’ daily reality; these non-human entities were active members of

their worship community. Yvonne, an elder female practitioner stated during an

interview that “[spirits] walk with you everywhere,” while interviewee Sophia, the

matriarch of the community and mother of Antonio, one of the community’s male

leaders affirmed that “everyone has their guide, protector, and Africans” (Johnson 2009;

Johnson 2010). Such provocative statements suggested to me that there were deeper

associations and meanings that Palo practitioners associated with spirit beings, and I

sought to comprehend why this seemed to be a recurring perspective among adherents.

In the summer months of June and July of 2003, 2004 and 2006, I conducted

pre-dissertation field site visits to Santiago de Cuba in Oriente, Cuba. Oriente’s Palo

  5
devotees consistently referred to a multiplicity of spirit beings in their sacred and daily

activities, and were explicit to include spirit actors as critical members of this type of

religious work, using familial roles to describe spirits, “my brother Pa Fransisco, my

sister Ma Rufina.” Members of the worship community also foregrounded the active

involvement with spirits-- the dead—in their daily lives, which differed considerably from

the literature that I engaged.

The majority of the literature I had engaged on Palo Monte was based on

accounts and understandings of how the religion was practiced in the western regions

of the country, with a particular emphasis on Havana. Those authors who have

considered the ritual complex of Palo Monte have meticulously discussed the particular

elements and processes that go into constructing the consecrated ritual element of Palo

Monte, an nganga. The ritual language of the tradition has also garnered much attention,

as has the distinctiveness of the religious activities of Palo devotees (Cabrera 1986;

Bolívar Arostegui and Villegas 1998). Works that are more recent have sought to

engage Palo within the context of the nation’s social history, and these studies have

concentrated on western portions of Cuba (Palmié 2002; Ochoa 2007; Routon 2008).

The writers’ underlying assumptions suggest that experiences of African descendants in

western urban locales can be extrapolated to include circumstances of the island’s other

sociocultural regions. However, R. Lachatañeré proposed in the mid-twentieth century

that Oriente’s manifestations of Cuba’s religious traditions were distinctively different

than as practiced in the western/Occidente region, which warranted further studies

(Lachatañeré and Ayorinde 2006). Not until recently has there is emerging literature

seeking to engage Lachateñeré’s proposition, and have authors begun to examine

  6
traditions outside of western locales and urban centers (Bettelheim 2001; Bettelheim

2005; Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler 2005; Mikelsons 2005; James Figarola 2006b;

James Figarola 2006a; Dodson 2008). One significant factor contributing to Oriente

distinctions of Cuba’s religions, particularly within Palo Monte/Mayombe, was a stronger

emphasis on a range of spirits as part of ritual work.

Concentrated reading on Oriente revealed how this geographic location was the

original site of encounter and contact between the autochthonous Taíno AmerIndians

and Europeans in the late fifteenth century. Oriente also was the first site to receive

captive Africans early in the sixteenth century and it was the first administrative seat of

power for the island. In the third decade of the seventeenth century, the colonial

administration moved to the western city of Havana; however, Oriente continued to

serve as epicenter for captive laborers’ movements of self-liberation throughout the

sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth. The eastern region of Cuba was also the point

of origin for sociopolitical liberation movements throughout the twentieth century,

culminating in the realization of Cuba’s revolutionary activities in 1959. Such an

abundance of historical details suggests that Oriente is especially significant for Cuba’s

project of sovereignty and national identity. This holds true for African-descended

Cubans and their continuous activities of self-definition in the island nation. Oriente

offers compelling and appropriate sites for investigating religion, spirits, and self-defined

identity.

My choice to focus on a Palo religious collectivity in Santiago de Cuba was

based on these distinguishing characteristics of Oriente, seeking to comprehend how

the focus on spirit beings influenced group members’ self-identifying as “African” in

  7
contemporary Cuba. Additionally, Palo is well represented in Oriente and even non-

practitioners acknowledge that it is the most powerful in terms of engaging spirits

among all of Cuba’s religious traditions. Additionally, there was prima facie pre-research

evidence that devotees of Palo appear to have sustained intricate relationships with

spirits, and undertake extensive actions to engage these entities in daily activities, and

consult spirits in ceremonial settings, and involve them as intricate members of their

religious family genealogy. My question was: How was the worship family’s genealogy

was constructed and what roles did non-human entities play in practitioners’ sense of

self-identity?

Anthropology has long been concerned with cultural creations by human beings

and the meanings they associate with such social formations. The field of anthropology

of religion specifically investigates and reports on aspects of human groups’

comprehensions about and practices of engaging the sacred; that which is beyond

human creation and manipulation. Thus, my interest in Cuba’s Africa-inspired religious

tradition of Palo as practiced in Oriente is centered squarely within anthropology of

religion.

In addition to my anthropological interest, I approached the questions within the

context of the academic field of African American & African Studies (AAAS), with a sub-

field interest in studies of the African Diaspora. Cuba has been a pivotal center of

colonial trade and exchange and was a definitive geographic location for the distribution

of enslaved Africans that created the Atlantic African Diaspora. My research about

religion on the Caribbean island falls within the contours of studies treating cultural

creations of African descendant communities. AAAS allows me to frame Oriente Palo

  8
practitioners’ understanding of spirits, the purposeful creation of religious family

genealogies that incorporate spirits, and the construction of self-defined identity as part

of African Diaspora phenomena. Such considerations emerging from AAAS partner well

with my anthropological perspective for examining spirit entities within religious

communities.

Organization

The dissertation is organized into six chapters and the introduction. Chapter 1,

Conceptual Roots: The Literature, reviews published literature that engages topics and

issues central to the dissertation in the arenas of African Diaspora, religious activity by

way of spirit engagement, and genealogy creation and maintenance. Chapter 2

Methods, reviews methodological techniques employed to collect data. Chapter 3,

Cuba’s Sociohistorical Context, presents the geographical as well as sociopolitical

history of Cuba, with a focus on the AmerIndians who inhabited the island before the

Spanish invasion and discusses the forced introduction of Africans as laborers,

particularly in the geographic zone of Oriente. This chapter also traces how African

descendants fit into the larger social dynamic of the island nation through its

development as a colony, republic, and socialist state. Chapter 4, Spiritual Foundations

of Palo Monte/Mayombe, provides information about the spiritual and ritual foundations

of contemporary practices of Palo Monte/Mayombe that are central to the creation of the

spirit genealogy on the study community. It also covers the creation of sacred locations

where spirit interactions are negotiated and the bonds of the Palo religious family

enacted. Chapter 5, Palo Worship Community, presents the data of the case study, and

a portion of the community’s spirit genealogy based on interviews. The chapter also

  9
presents the detailed meaning Palo supplicants assign to their relationships with spirit

familiars. Chapter 6 Conclusions, presents conclusions and their significance to

investigating spirit beings inside religious practices within the African Diaspora.

  10
 CHAPTER 1:
CONCEPTUAL ROOTS: THE LITERATURE

  11
 [T]he story of death and slavery illustrates a premise common to many
religious worldviews, that the dead are active participants in the living
world…However, few have seriously examined the way that death shaped
daily life [in the Atlantic], or how, in the terms proposed by the psychiatrist
Robert Jay Lifton, people symbolized “continuity in the face of death” in
struggles over property, authority, morality, territory, and belonging. In
other words, we know little about how the meaning of mortality motivated
people to act or, as many would have understood then, how the dead
affected the history of the living?...In what ways (or by what means) did
people formulate their relations with the dead? How did mortuary belief
and practice respond to demographic, socioeconomic, political, and
religious changes? How were ways of relating to the dead embedded in
political conflict? (Brown 2008: 5-7).

Introduction

Vincent Brown’s emphasis on the concept and state of death in the history of the

Atlantic world identifies a pivotal element that has affected sociocultural, political, and

economic formation processes and social conditions within the Atlantic African Diaspora.

By foregrounding death and the dead, Brown draws attention to the living, their creative

actions, and responses in the face of a state of being beyond living human

comprehension. Brown’s statement provides a context for Eva’s statement, noted in the

opening ethnographic account, about how the living cannot exist disassociated from the

dead of their religious community. By emphasizing how death framed the lives of the

living within the Atlantic, Brown reveals what anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot

discusses as silences; the intentional privileging of historical accounts where “the

differential exercise of power makes some narratives possible” (Trouillot 1995: 25).

Trouillot goes on to discuss four critical stages to the production of history that

contribute to the suppression of subaltern communities’ social narratives. Trouillot

writes:

  12
 Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial
moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the
moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact
retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective
significance (the making of history in the final instance) (italicized in the
original, Trouillot 1995: 26).

When positioned together, Brown and Trouillot offer a way to comprehend the

silences created within societies radically altered by four centuries of dispersion of

African descendants as enslaved labors within the Atlantic. When practitioners engage

the dead of the Atlantic world, particularly the dead of subaltern communities, different

narratives begin to emerge. Practitioners of Palo Monte/Mayombe in Oriente offer a

case in point. By reengaging the dead affiliated with the eastern landscape of Cuba

through physical products of the natural and social landscape, the levels of silencing

can be undone to reveal alternative archives that inform identity within contemporary

Cuba. The framing of Palo supplicants’ religious life in relationship to the spirits of the

dead, specifically the African dead of the east, provides the point of departure for the

review of the salient literature that informed the work of this study.

The discussion begins by considering the literature of diaspora, with particular

attention to the definitional components of the concept that engage the myth and/or

vision about an original homeland, and the return to that land of origin. I will relate these

two aspects to the African Diaspora, with a focus on how the original exile of Africans

shaped religious manifestations in the Caribbean, and Cuba as a site that received

thousands of Africans from multiple ethnic groupings. This discussion leads to the

literature that treats spirit engagement as part of religious practice, particularly within

African-inspired religious creations of the Caribbean. The concluding section of the

  13
literature review is dedicated to the making of relationships that create genealogies.’ It

will treat how understandings about genealogy inform the creation of religious family,

which relies on the dynamic interplay between humans and spirits within Palo

Monte/Mayombe as definitional sources of an identity that practitioners describe as

“African” in Cuba’s contemporary social reality.

Diaspora

The concept of diaspora has become an effective analytical tool to comprehend

involuntary movements of human populations in that it emphasizes the conditions that

produced a group’s expulsion from their home of known origin to locations not chosen

by the exiled community, as well as the type of limitations they encountered in their new

locations. The Jewish expulsion from Babylon in the sixth century B.C.E. provides

experiential boundaries of an archetypal diaspora: expulsion from a homeland. The

framing of the forced movement of Africans from the continental space of Africa as a

type of diaspora first occurred during the 1965 International Congress of African

Historians in Tanzania. Increased attention to understanding the scope of global

relocations of African descendants as a cohesive process of displacement gained

momentum in the academic discourse with African state independence movements, and

the multivolume, multilingual UNESCO publication, The General History of Africa,

further established ways the concept of diaspora could be related to historical and

contemporary realities of African descendants worldwide (Harris 1993: 3-8; Shepperson

1993: 41-49).

Since the Congress, attention to defining the conceptual contours of diaspora as

it applies to human communities’ forced or semi-forced migration has increased,

  14
particularly with the founding of the journal Diaspora in 1991 (Hu-Dehart 2005; Hua

2005; Sahoo and Maharaj 2007). In his 1991 article in the inaugural issue of Diaspora,

William Safran provided six criteria to distinguish a diaspora of “minority communities”

from other types of migratory flows. Safran’s six criteria have established standard

parameters for how academics have come to evaluate forms of coerced migration and

resettlement Safran writes:

1) They or their ancestors, have been dispersed from a specific original

“center” to two or more “peripheral,” or foreign, regions; 2) they retain a
collective memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland—its
physical location, history, and achievements; 3) they believe that they are
not––and perhaps cannot be—fully accepted by their host society and
therefore feel partly alienated and insulated from it; 4) they regard their
ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and as the place to which
they or their descendants would (or should) eventually return—when
conditions are appropriate; 5) they believe that they should, collectively,
be committee to the maintenance or restoration of their original homeland
and to its safety and prosperity; and 6) they continue to relate, personally
or vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another (Safran 1991: 83-
84).

Safran’s baseline model proposes that a diaspora refers to when communities and/or

entire populations are forced from their land of origin, and their ties to their homeland

spaces are disrupted if not completely ruptured. This stimulated additional

conversations about the intentionality behind human relocation projects. Robin Cohen

refined Safran’s parameters for defining diaspora by proposing that diasporas should be

divided into “ideal type” categories, which are “formed and mobilized in certain

circumstances” (Patterson and Kelley 2000: 11-19; Sokefeld 2004: 133-155; Cohen

2008: 16-19). In Cohen’s schema, the suggestion is that the African Diaspora can be

classified as a “victim” type of displacement because its members were subject to

displacement over prolonged periods of time and within circumstances not of their

  15
choosing (Cohen 2008: 40-48). The exiled communities maintain distinctive identities

that are bound to a homeland space and make them resist assimilation into normative

social patterns and roles of the host nation. Such ties to a real or imagined natal land

can supersede diasporal communities’ commitment to the nation-state of residence.

The concern over external alliances also can intensify host nation members’ resistance

to/rejection of dispersed populations (Cohen 2008: 57-58).

James Clifford inserted the concept of diaspora within mainstream

anthropological discourse with his 1994 article, “Diasporas.” Clifford proposed that

diasporal movements are longstanding and cover a wide geographic scope. Clifford

emphasizes how diasporas ultimately reveal politicized struggles within the local or

“host” nation and the historical process of expulsion that inserted dislocated

communities into newer social spaces (Clifford 1994: 308). A significant component of

James Clifford’s treatment of diaspora engages how a diasporal community defines

itself against the norms of the host nation-state, and the tensions that can arise between

diasporal communities and local autochthonous communities, due to the unanticipated

and imposed presence of the relocated others.

However, what the Palo worshipers suggest is that their religious practice

contains the inherited wisdom of Cuba’s autochthonous population, which demonstrates

an alternative understanding for how communities forced to relocate interact with native

populations in diasporal circumstances. The inherited blended ritual knowledge

contained within Palo drawn from the knowledge base of the Taíno and resistant

migrants from Africa, does what André Levy suggests: that in diasporic spaces,

“concepts such as ‘center’ and ‘periphery’ lose their fixed and essentialist character, for

  16
they turn out to be relative, historically situated, defined, and constituted” (Levy 2000:

152). Palo practitioners blur the social boundaries of “center” and “periphery” by

positioning the colonial subaltern dead of Oriente as originators of social narratives of

struggle. Trouillot reminds us that in order to comprehend how such multivocal

understandings can be adapted and incorporated into social agents’ realities, like in the

case of the Palo worship community of this study, we must turn to history, because, “in

short, heterogeneity cannot be grasped without serious reference to history” (Trouillot

1992: 29). The history that shaped the religious creation of Palo Monte/Mayombe and

its impact on its observers in Oriente begins with the forced relocation of African people

to the Atlantic world. The following section focuses on the sociocultural contours of the

diaspora that refashioned the Atlantic; the African Diaspora.

African Diaspora and Creative Action The African Diaspora refers to the idea

and reality of worldwide displacement of African people and their descendants. The

language also refers to a way to conceptualize and study the social processes that

created generational flows of African ethnics across multiple geographies, including the

continental space of Africa and throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Europe (Lewis

1990: 3-27; Inikori 2001: 49-75; Hamilton 2007; Zeleza 2010). However, Joseph Harris’s

1993 volume on the topic proved pivotal to reaffirming the appropriate usefulness of

African Diaspora for adequate accounting of cultural linkages between Africans within

continental spaces and for descendants throughout the globe. Harris’s work may have

been the first to propose conceptual parameters that emerged organically from the

global social and historical experiences of African descendants over time. In this fashion,

he suggested that as a theoretical tool, African Diaspora includes the voluntary and

  17
involuntary dispersion of Africans throughout the globe and presents a “dynamic,

continuous, and complex phenomenon stretching across time, geography, class, and

gender” (Harris 1993: 4). This study is focused on the coerced distribution of African

people across the Atlantic Ocean to primarily serve as the enslaved labor force for

“new” social worlds.

Ruth Simms Hamilton went further in visioning the global phenomenon of African

descendants disbursed over time and space. She proposed a four-part paradigmatic

model for systematically studying this diasporal group of humans. Hamilton accepted

the general assertions of Robin Cohen and William Safran, and expanded the writings

of Joseph Harris, George Shepperson, and St. Clair Drake about the depth and

expanse of the African Diaspora (Drake 1993; Harris 1993). She propositioned that the

African Diaspora is

an approach to history, a method of inquiry—rooted in the historical

experiences of a socially identifiable global aggregate of dispersed and
interconnected people…whose social relationships have been largely
inscribed by their geographical displacement at historically significant
moments…These defining moments are the major turning points in history
that establish the scope, extensiveness, and severity of the displacement,
as well as its future significance (Hamilton 2007: 4).

Hamilton’s construct of an interdisciplinary paradigm emerged from an academic

need to go beyond the “fact-finding phase” when studying African descendants and

move beyond descriptive accounts to the difficult task of theory construction. Hamilton’s

model includes four distinct yet intersecting criteria for studying and evaluating the

variable differences among people of African descendants over time and space. Her

intent is to stimulate the creation of theory that can project and predict patterns of

behaviors in various parts of the African Diaspora. Ruth Hamilton’s African Diaspora

  18
paradigm includes four fields of interconnected social relations that form core

components of analysis. The areas are: geosocial mobility and displacement; African

Diaspora connections; power, domination, and inequality; and agents of resistance.

Hamilton’s model is particularly useful in that she employs the conceptual frame of the

African Diaspora to undergird the processes of social formation in locations where

Africans and their descendants were imported. Hamilton’s model provides for the

intersection of all of the “four fields of social relations,” suggesting that factors that

inform each component of the model also affect and/or overlap with the other three

fields. The two fields most useful for comprehending Palo practitioners’ creation of a

spirit genealogy and how such engagement of spirit others affects their identity within

contemporary Cuba are the second and fourth fields of relations: African Diaspora

connections and agents of resistance. By African Diaspora connections, Hamilton was

suggesting that

as a place, Africa in the diaspora is part of a collective memory, a

reference for tradition and heritage. Its symbolic and material significance
lies within changing relations and ideas of homeland and diaspora…ways
of thinking about the homeland are mitigated by time and conditions of
departures over long and short spans of time…As St. Claire Drake points
out, the “myth of the return” has always been an important aspect of the
African-diaspora connection in both symbolic and concrete terms. The
“myth of the return” suggests that for its diaspora, Africa is a concept, an
aspect of the symbolic and meaning construction process germane to the
black [sic]cultural experience. The degree and extent of its significance
varies over time and space among different actors and subpopulations of
the diaspora (Hamilton 2007: 19-21).

For Palo practitioner of the study, Africa has symbolically been relocated to the Cuban

landscape and fused with the ancestral wisdom inherited from the autochthonous

community. The ritual knowledge current-day practitioners use to engage spirits is part

of the religious inheritance transmitted by the spirits of deceased Africans who were

  19
present at the formation of alliances in Oriente between the Taíno and the imported

Africans, particularly members of the BaKongo ethnic group. In essence, Palo

worshipers understand that to be “African” is to be descended from those individuals

who struggled for self-definition and maintained their familial connection to spirits of the

Oriente location in the extreme social circumstances of enslavement. By connecting to

the spirits of the African ancestral dead of Oriente, and the ritual wisdom of the

autochthonous stewards of the land, Palo practitioners have reimagined Africa and used

Palo to “[re]constitu[te] the religious revalorization of the land, a place where the natural

and ordinary gestures of the black man [sic] were and could be authenticated” (Long

2000: 12).

The emphasis on the social resistance for self-affirmed concepts of self and

community by Palo practitioner can also be comprehended through Hamilton’s fourth

field of action, the conceptualizing of African descendants as agents of resistance. As

agents of resistance, Palo worshipers continue to employ their religious practice,

recount its ritualistic origin stories of the coming together of Taíno and Africans in

eastern Cuba, and, significantly, discuss themselves as “Africans” within Cuba. This

self-definition of “African” in contemporary Cuba is based out of “how they remember

their past contribut[ing] to the formation of communities of consciousness that arise out

of very particular experiences based on structural inequalities” (Hamilton 2007: 3). Palo

practitioners have sought a sense of empowerment by maintaining their distinct identity

by aligning themselves with the historical circumstances of their community’s creation;

practitioners remember and access their narratives through spirit family creation and

engagement, even as the official records remain reluctant to engage and/or silent on the

  20
historical realities that created Palo Monte/Mayombe in Oriente. While employing the

concept of the African Diaspora uncovers processes of historical fact creation, the

arenas of fact assembly and the construction of narratives within the Atlantic diaspora in

Cuba’s eastern theater can be accessed by way of engaging the literature that treats

African-inspired religions in the Americas, with a focus on spirit engagement.

Religion in the African Atlantic

Based on the work of Melville Herskovits that examined how African derived

cultural behaviors were “retained” among African descendants in the Americas, Sidney

Mintz and Richard Price’s 1976 treatise proposed that the “cultural transfers” of Africans

to social spaces of the New World created new ways of living. Mintz and Price

presented a model that suggested African-inspired cultural practices in the Americas

were based on “grammatical” principles, rather than the static transfer of “traits” or

“complexes” based on the assumed “cultural unity of West Africa” as Herskovits had

postulated (Yelvington 2006b: 48-50; Mintz and Price [1976] 1992: 9). In the subfield of

anthropology of religion, the English literature has provided expanded ethnographic

details about African-inspired religions, especially within the Caribbean and Brazil.

These works have made effective use of expanded understandings about the

extraction patterns of the Atlantic Slave Trade in African people, and how the

importation flows affected the constructed New World social realities (for example, see

Hall 2005; Heywood and Thornton 2007; Eltis and Richardson 2010). The dialectic

between sites of embarkation and the manifestation of certain religious practices in the

Americas has yielded significant information about religion and identity creation in the

Americas.

  21
 Exemplary works include the writings of J. Lorand Matory, who discussed how

Brazilian Candomblé was constantly infused with ritual information from practitioners’

ongoing transit between the Portuguese colony and Yoruba land in the mid-nineteenth

century (Matory 2005: 73-114). Stephen Palmíe offers a dense discussion about how

two of Cuba’s religious creations, Regla de Palo and Regla de Ocha/Santería, present

an interlocking moral terrain that creates new responses to the practitioner's social

reality as it has been informed by historical moments significant to the creation of a

national identity (Palmié 2002). The work of Ramon Ochoa continues to provide

ethnographic clarity about how individuals incorporate their African-inspired religious

ritual work in their lived reality, which alters their comprehension of their historical

material world (Ochoa 2007: 473-500). David Brown has produced a meticulous volume

about the history of the creation of Yoruba-inspired tradition of Santería/Regla de Ocha

in Cuba, with its ceremonial centers concentrated within the western region of the island

nation (Brown 2003). Patrick Bellegarde-Smith’s edited volume Fragments of Bone:

Neo-African Religions in a New World presents a collection of essays that speak to the

transgenerational “fragmented,” “reconstituted,” and “remythologized” histories

contained within African-inspired religions within the Americas (Bellegarde-Smith 2005) .

A common feature of each text is the presentation of spirit beings as a significant

component within African-inspired religious practices in the Atlantic. In fact, each author

provides rich and thick descriptions of the sacred spaces of the religions they engage,

details related to supernatural spirit beings and their avatar, as well as the type of

accouterments supplicants associate with such entities. Each author also presents a

discussion about the rituals used to engage spirit beings. However, while we know how

  22
spirit entities figure into these religious narratives, we do not have a firm understanding

about why other worldly entities figure so prominently within the practices of African-

inspired religions of this portion of the African Diaspora. The religious lives of Palo

practitioners offer expanded understandings about why spirit others are so significant to

their social identity; the spirits are part of a spiritual family lineage that bind practitioners

to the location. In his formative volume, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar,

Cuban scholar Don Fernando Ortiz inserts how natural elements of the land inform

Cuban social relations and cultural creations. Moreover, Ortiz captures the

heterogeneity of Cuba’s cultural heritage and identity, from a blending of Indigenous,

African and European traditions. Ortiz termed the blending of these social actors’

lifeways as transculturation,

the highly varied phenomena that have come about in Cuba as a result of
the extremely complex transmutations of culture that have taken place [in
Cuba], and without a knowledge of which it is impossible to understand
the evolution of the Cuban folk, either in the economic or in the
institutional, legal, ethical, religious, artistic, linguistic, psychological,
sexual, or other aspects of its life. The real history of Cuba is the history of
its intermeshed transculturations (Ortiz [1947] 1995: 98).

The practice of Palo Monte/Mayombe in Oriente presents such a type of “real history” of

Cuba: however, in Palo, the archives assembled are the sacred ceremonial locations,

and the narratives revealed are the informed consultations from ancestral communities

of subalterns. Such a shifting to “revalorize” the dead and their contributions to the

religious lives of Palo practitioner gives voice to alternative ways of being Cuban that

are framed by the collaborative wisdom of the Taíno and African ethnics.

Within texts that have become foundational within African American & African

Studies, authors have placed emphasis on how principles have informed the structuring

  23
of religion among African descendants, particularly in the Atlantic. Such writings lend

credence to Mintz and Price’s thesis about the “grammatical” structures that inform

sacred life among members of the Atlantic African Diaspora. Robert Farris Thompson’s

book Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy gives insightful

discussions on the philosophical underpinnings to “New World” expressions of African-

inspired religious practices. His detailing of the Other World of the dead in BaKongo-

inspired sacred action provides a case in point for how the principle of spirit

engagement informs the lives of the living through the employment of “spirit-embodying

materials” (Thompson [1983] 1984: 117). Drawing on the work of John Mbiti, Peter Paris

argues:

The traditions of African people both on the continent and in the diaspora
are diverse in cultural form yet united by their underlying spirituality. The
former is evidenced mainly by the differences of language and other
cultural mores. The latter is seen in the broad consensus among African
peoples that the three forms of life, namely, nature, history, and spirit are
ontologically united and hence interdependent (Paris 1995: 22).

Paris’s assessment is useful for understanding what type of principles have been

significant for the shaping of Atlantic religions among African descendants. The issues

of unity between physical and social realms of existence are useful for investigating how

the interactive accounts between Palo practitioners and their spirit familiars present

alternative archives and points of reference for their sense of identity in eastern Cuba.

By assessing the principles that Palo practitioners emphasize in their engagement of

spirits and with other worship community members, we can comprehend the effect on

their social identity. Family structures that include spirits, particularly ancestral Africans

in Oriente, are a significant feature of Palo religious practice.

  24
 The majority of the literature treating religion within African American & African

Studies concentrates on variations of Christian practices within the U.S. context.

However, what these sources contribute to the larger discussion of religious creation

among African descendants in the Atlantic is how these social actors;’ religious spaces

and activities have served as centers of power and protest to renegotiate social power

for members of this diaspora (for example see Higginbotham 1993; Lincoln and Mamiya

1994; Dodson 2002). While Palo is not a religious tradition that enjoys the benefits and

recognition of inclusion in Cuba’s institutionalized religions (Hearn 2008), its

practitioners social location at the margins of society precisely positions the religion as

one that exemplifies challenge to imposed definitions of what it means to be Cuban

(Helg 1995; de la Fuente 2001; Guerra 2005; Martínez Heredia 2009).

Palo adherents self-identifying as “African” in Cuba’s current sociopolitical reality

offer a strong example of identity construction born out of opposition to oppression. The

making of religious families that include other worldly agents stands as a definitive

statement to counter the racialized silences of Cuban history, especially as related to

the Oriente location. What Palo in the Oriente location also represents is the type of

unsilencing that Trouillot and Long call for, a reorienting to understand alternative

modes of history production. Palo worshipers’ construction of religious spaces to enact

their relationships with spirits, particularly the dead of Oriente, produces a new way to

consider the “making of [historical] sources; the making of archives”; the retrieval of the

facts from those archives in narratives; and the community’s retrospection and the

meaning-making they construct about being African descendants in Cuba.

  25
 In the building of sacred spaces to engage other worldly agents, Palo worshipers

are reconstructing “ceremonial centers” in their living environments. Long defines a

“ceremonial center” as

the site of the revelation of sacrality; it sets forth the possibility for the
effective use of space...The urban community may occupy the site of the
ceremonial center or be founded at some distance from it; in any case, the
ceremonial center is the power that generates the creation and
sustenance of every other form of the space of the urban environment…A
particular urban form identified with the ceremonial center becomes the
locus of power and thus creates all the areas around it as peripheries,
dependent upon the power of the center. The relationship between the
center and the periphery fluctuates between the centrifugal and the
centripetal dynamics of power. Power moves from the center to the
periphery and then back to the center. Power is authenticated to the
extent that it participates with the center, and all powers and meanings at
the periphery must seek their legitimatization through their participation in
the center (Long 2004: 92).

Here Long gives us a way to frame Palo worshipers use of space in their urban locale of

Los Hoyos. However, what he also brings to the fore is how the “ceremonial center”

serves as the life-force that infuses the city location with sacred power. What Palo

worshipers and others maintain is that the forested spaces of Oriente are the

ceremonial center for Cuba. The environments of Oriente are the nuclei of sacrality

because they served as the sanctuary for colonial Cuba’s subaltern agents of resistance,

who were the ritual and social ancestors of the island nation. The physical mountainous

landscape of Oriente is also the locality where the human world and Other World

converge. Palo worshipers use the flora and fauna of Oriente to construct spaces that

engage members of their spirit genealogy to access as well as replenish their identity

archive. The annals for Palo practitioners’ identity are coalesced and contained within

their sacred-space assemblages. By using these locations to commune with members

  26
of their spirit network, Palo practitioners retrieved the narratives of their ritual ancestors

to create their own self-definitions as African-descended Cubans. Such activities

simultaneously reposition the historical narratives of the island as well as re-form the

contemporary reality of practitioners; their history, their lives are voiced and unsilenced.

In this way, “Oriente as the land of the dead” refers to how Cuba’s ancestral subaltern

are remembered; their bones, their spirits cry out and Palo worshipers receive, respond,

and create their “African” identity from these “transmissions” (Johnson 2009).

Joseph Roach’s volume Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance

succinctly addresses how spaces, particularly urban spaces, are recruited in the service

of archive creation and memory retrieval when he writes:

Cities of the dead are primarily for the living. They exist not only as
artifacts, such as cemeteries and commemorative landmarks, but also as
behaviors. They endure, in other words, as occasions for memory and
invention…the memories of some particular times and places have
become embodied in and through performances (Roach 1996: xi).

Palo worshipers use their created locations of sacrality within Los Hoyos to transform

the location to enact considerations of what it means to be “African.” For Palo adherents

their understanding of “homeland” emerges from their connections to Cuba made

possible through the care of their genealogy of spirit others.

Genealogy

In his concluding chapter to the edited volume The Cultural Analysis of Kinship:

The Legacy of David M. Schneider, Ward H. Goodenough offers a clarifying definition of

genealogy, stating;

A genealogy does not necessarily show how people are biologically

related; it is a ramifying chain of parent-child links and marital ties that are

  27
 recognized as such by members of a society under study in accordance
with their cultural criteria for doing so. Biological pedigrees may be needed
for the genetic study of inherited diseases, but they are not the
genealogies used in ethnographic practice by cultural anthropologists for
getting at principles of family and kinship organization…Indeed, one can
construct a genealogy out of any relationship that is recursively
reproduced through time (Goodenough 2001: 207).

Goodenough’s statement resuscitates the study of how groups assign meanings

to the ties that bind them together. While the writing of David Schneider disrupted long

held understandings and approaches to studying human connections in the 1970s, his

dismantling of kinship did underscore the need to make studies about the connections

between human groups inclusive of local comprehensions of relatedness. That is

precisely what Goodenough’s assertion guides us to: that understanding the principles

that inform relatedness frames the ways “group” and “other” are constructed.

Within the early waves of the Atlantic crossing of Africans, and up until

emancipation was complete throughout the western hemisphere at the close of the

nineteenth century, family among Africans and their descendants was not institutionally

recognized throughout slave-holding societies (Berlin 1998: 3-14; Berlin 2003: 9). Given

this historical reality, authors have reflected on ways to understand social units early

members within this diaspora employed to sustain themselves. Stephen Palmié has

proposed that within the Americas, the creation of affinity groups based on the

recomposition of African ethnic groupings in social spaces of the Atlantic, or

ethnogenesis, is one way to understand how groups within the African Diaspora

organize kinship when ties to blood kin and ancestral lands have been irrevocably

severed (Palmié 1993: 346-348). Within ethnogenesis, affiliation is determined by ritual

initiation into an African inspired religion. The work of Niara Sudarkasa treats how

  28
African descendants reassembled themselves into new collectives, not necessarily

related by blood ties but the use of principles such as “respect for elders and reciprocity”

to define and implement social roles that nurtured individuals and groups (Sudarkasa

2007: 40).

What Palo worshipers assert through their construction of a spirit genealogy is

that kinship is mediated by ritualistically becoming bound to the physical location of

Oriente and the spirit entities whose remains are part of the landscape. In this way, the

establishing of kinship with the dead establishes kinship relationships among the living

of the Palo worship community. The recovery of family connections occurs not merely

by initiation into the worship community, but through the supplicants’ blood pact

established with the dead (James Figarola 2006b: 239-232; Johnson 2009). C. Nadia

Seremetakis’s work on death within Inner Mani, like the questions asserted by Vincent

Brown about the power of death in how cultural groups imagine themselves and others,

reminds us that to revalorize the dead is to understand social community. Seremetakis

writes;

To talk of death is to really talk about kinship, inheritance, the fertility of

women, the social power of men. These issues, however, can be
overused by theorists to void death of any indigenous content in order to
treat death as an empty stage for a variety of other social dramas
(emphasis in the original, Seremetakis 1991: 13).

Palo worshipers of this study employ their spirit genealogy to substantiate “generations

of experience” of their subaltern ancestors in Oriente. The narratives of Palo adherents’

relationships with spirits of the land reclaim the content of their ritual ancestors, and in

so doing deconstruct the silencing of fact creation, the making of archives, and the

making of narratives through fact retrieval, all in sustained attempts to reclaim history

  29
and self-define in their contemporary social circumstances. Palo worshipers’ creation of

family as mediated through relationships with spirits binds them to not only to the land,

but also to inherited generational understandings of self-defined freedom, and how it is

to be kept alive. In this way, practitioners of Palo in Los Hoyos continue to perform in

contemporary Cuba what Ira Berlin summarizes as a similar experience for generations

of U.S. African Americans after emancipation;

Whether they pressed for civil rights or mechanic lien laws, access to land
or to public accommodations, their actions reflected the generations of
captivity as well as the revolutionary changes that accompanied
emancipation. The freedom generation could no more escape its past than
previous generations of black men and women. Like those who came
before them, they too had no desire to deny their history, only to transform
it in the spirit of the revolutionary possibilities presented by emancipation.
Their successes––and failures––would resonate into the twenty-first
century (Berlin 2003: 270).

Through the life of their religious practice, Palo worshipers demonstrate how

communities within the Atlantic diaspora of African people employ generational

experiences of social exclusion and marginality to rescript their current social

circumstances in a fashion that allows them to be affirmed in their own identity as

“African” within Cuba.

  30
 CHAPTER 2:
METHODS

  31
Introduction

This chapter is a discussion of research methods used to collect data for the

dissertation. The investigation focused on one contemporary community of practitioners

of the Cuban religious tradition of Palo Monte/Mayombe in the eastern city of Santiago

de Cuba. In this chapter, I discuss my research affiliations that enabled me to study the

religious practices of observers of Palo Monte/Mayombe, clarify how and why I chose

the site and the community, discuss selected data gathering techniques and types of

data they elicited, and present how I recorded information gathered. I conclude with a

discussion of problems that arose during the research process.

My choice of research methods was those more closely associated with

qualitative field research in the discipline of anthropology and the interdisciplinary

academic arena of African American & African Studies (AAAS). The four-field approach

distinctive to U.S. anthropology prioritizes understanding the human behaviors from a

biological, sociocultural, and linguistic perspective, as well as through the archeological

products they create (see Haviser 1999; Blakey 2001; Borofsky 2002; Goodenough

2002; Baba and Hill 2006; Fennell 2007a; Fennell 2007b). These multidimensional yet

focused approaches to comprehending the human species led me to consider

documentary and archeological sources that provided data for understanding and

contextualizing the earliest people in Cuba, the Taíno AmerIndians, who laid the

foundations of Cuba’s socio-cultural and historical development (Domínguez 1984;

Sued-Badillo 2003b; Sued-Badillo 2003a). Documentary and archeological sources

were equally helpful in providing understandings about for the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries for different African ethnic populations, particularly the Kongolese,

  32
that also inhabited locations within the island’s eastern/Oriente region at the earliest

period of the nation’s formation.

AAAS shares U.S. anthropology’s inclusive approach to studying human groups,

with a particular emphasis on historicizing African descendants as active social agents

in the annals of human history (Drake 1987: 1-42; Hamilton 2007: ix-41; DuBois [1903]

1994). An interdisciplinary approach to systematic studies of the creative lifeway’s of

African descendants was originally encouraged by William Edward Burghardt DuBois in

the U.S. at the turn of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century (for example see

DuBois 1903; DuBois [1899] 2007; DuBois [1903] 1994: 53-67). DuBois was a

pathbreaker, and proposed a foundational vision for the field of AAAS when he

advocated interdisciplinary scholarship as an imperative for comprehending life

experiences of African descendants throughout the globe. DuBois’ contention was

lodged in the premise that African descendend populations were systematically

excluded of from the human record, and inventive ways were needed to recaputre and

give voice to their experiences (DuBois 1903; Drescher 1994: 361-367; DuBois [1903]

1994). Ensuing AAAS researchers and scholars have agreed with DuBois’s proposition,

particularly as they considered training students (Kilson 1973; Anderson 2001; Gordon

2001; Woodson [1933]1998). While this academic arena has yet to standardize a

specific set of research methods for investigating the lives of African-descended people,

the interdisciplinary approach remains a hallmark and mandate for those serious about

studying the lives of these populations. Implicit within works of earlier writers addressing

the productive lives of African descendants is prioritizing and focusing on contextual

details of their creation (Whitten and Torres 1998; Yelvington 2006a). As part of this

  33
continuing legacy, I too have made prioritizing African descendants’ intentional cultural

creations, over time and geographic space, foundational to the theoretical orientation of

the dissertation.

As I combined methods and perspectives of anthropology and AAAS, I

conducted a systematic review of historical and archeological literatures as an initial

process of my investigation before actually visiting the research site. I found that the

review of primary and secondary documents complemented anthropology’s qualitative

data-gathering techniques. I used AAAS understandings of African descendants’

proactive behaviors regarding their liberation––an understanding captured in the

concept of “collective intentionality”––when reviewing documents associated with

Santiago de Cuba Palo Monte/Mayombe practitioners’ construction of multifaceted

religious and social networks.

Research Affiliations

Hortense Powdermaker, a renowned pioneer in anthropological research within

the African Diaspora, proposed that conducting field research as a member of a team,

especially an interdisciplinary and/or cross-disciplinary one, could be a most effective

strategy. She suggested that such teamwork “makes possible a many-sided approach

to complex problems and offers the stimulation of ideas exchanged while in the field”

(Powdermaker 1966: 114). This perspective is one shared and used by members of the

African Atlantic Research Team (AART), housed at Michigan State University and

directed by Jualynne E. Dodson. I am a long-term member of AART and, since 2003,

have collaborated with them as lead research assistant for both domestic and

  34
international investigative projects, particularly in the Team’s primary research site of

Oriente.

The African Atlantic Research Team is a cross-disciplinary community of

students, faculty, and community members interested in the lifeways of African

descendants and communities with whom those descendants share social space and

position. Those affiliated with AART represent academic fields of sociology,

anthropology, African American & African Studies, history, and plant biology. It was my

alignment with the Team, and its long-term Cuba research presence and experience

that allowed me entrée and flexibility in negotiating the dissertation’s field research site

as Team members had been cultivating the location for some fifteen years before I

began the dissertation research. I was able to participate in the cooperative

investigative approaches and benefit from the Team’s in-country reputation and

professional networks. This was especially true regarding AART’s collaborations with

research community respondents and professionals of Casa del Caribe (Casa)–the

4
foremost research organization within eastern Cuba . The partnership between AART

and Casa has continued for some twenty years and demonstrates the effectiveness of

my entrée and rapport with in-country researchers, leaders and members of Oriente’s

Africa-inspired religious communities.

In 2003, I began collaborating with both AART and Casa researchers on a long-

term investigation of sacred spaces constructed by practitioners from four of Cuba’s

distinctive religious traditions practiced in Oriente. As part of the pre-dissertation

                                                                                                               
4
I will not use specific names of research collaborators in order to maintain
confidentiality as well as out of respect for the delicate and nuanced political relations
between Cuba and the U.S. Instead, I will identify Casa researchers numerically.

  35
research process, and before formally initiating the dissertation research, I conducted

interviews and engaged in participations and observations during the 2003, 2004 and

2006 field sessions carried out during the months of June and July. These experiences

facilitated my creation of a dissertation project focused on spirit engagement and

religious genealogy construction among observers of Palo Monte/Mayombe and the

effect of these activities on their identity.

The pre-dissertation, cross-cultural research exposures also sensitized me to

Oriente’s local language, social customs, and distinctive ritual protocols for six of Cuba’s

seven Africa-inspired religions practiced in the region. Further, the on-site pre-

dissertation sessions allowed me to refine my understandings about and use of field

research techniques. These sessions also allowed me to select appropriate

investigative methods, pre-test my interview style, refine the research focus, and create

conceptual categories that could aid analysis.

One cultural practice that I learned during the pre-research activities and that

was particularly central to the dissertation research was making time to regularly visit

respondents and their neighbors. The African Atlantic Research Team terms this

practice “hospitality visits,” the extended time we made to sit with individual neighbors

and families in the research site, sharing food and drink, and engaging in light

conversation about health and the life happenings of community members. Often such

settings/sittings provided opportunities for spontaneous focus groups to develop. My

entrée and rapport for discussing intimacies of religious life and practices was

established in these early exposures and familiarities with people within the various

Africa-inspired religious communities. I found that sharing the “mundane” of the

  36
everyday with community members did much to enhance my rapport and their

confidanza, the respectful trust people entrust to another who they believe will

safeguard and represent their integrity and wellbeing (Johnson 2010). Hospitality visits

also allowed Casa personnel, research respondents, and general community members

throughout Santiago de Cuba to become aware and receptive to my presence as a

student several years before I began the dissertation investigation. The openness and

hospitality towards me continued throughout dissertation data-gathering sessions.

For the formal portion of the dissertation research, I was in the field June to

August in 2008 and 2009, and during a final field session, from December 2009 to

February 2010, for a total of nine months. This type of division of field research into

several seasons proved more advantageous for me due to increased travel restrictions

from both the U.S and Cuban governments. Time in between field sessions also

allowed me time to reflect upon the data in order to enhance my understandings about

Palo observers’ spirit encounters, and religious family making and how such

arrangements and activities affected their identity.

Site and Population Selection

My systematic review of primary and secondary historical documents on Cuba’s

colonial circumstances continually provided data on how the eastern/Oriente region was

a distinctive cultural site within the island. This was where original contact and

exchange between indigenous AmerIndians and Europeans and later multiple ethnic

African populations occurred (Sued-Badillo 2003b: 259-265; Pérez 2011: 10-14). The

documentary review also revealed that in 1522, enslaved AmerIndians and Africans in

  37
Oriente combined their efforts in organizing and successfully raided the Spanish

settlement of Bayamo (Dodson 2008). Such joint activities were not uncommon, and

these self-liberation activities were critical to the dissertation’s proposition that the Taíno

and early imported Africans had reciprocal exchanges and collaborative relations that

led to the construction of new religious ritual behaviors. The documentary information

demonstrated that I could locate my investigation in Oriente to potentially reveal the

early creation of such rituals––rituals that influenced contemporary Palo practitioners

perform and claim are part of the inherited religious legacy from contact between the

Taíno and Africans, specifically Kongolese individuals. The literature also revealed that

Oriente was a viable research site in which to study Palo Monte/Mayombe.

Until the latter part of the twentieth century, practitioners of Cuba’s distinct, Africa

inspired religions were violently persecuted by succeeding governmental

administrations and state authorities (Helg 1995: 108-116; Ayorinde 2004: 15-18).

Historically members of these religious communities rarely acknowledged their

participation and most traditions were practiced clandestinely. Contemporarily there is

an increased awareness and lessening of negative attitudes: however, Palo

Monte/Mayombe devotees remain exceptionally protective and taciturn about their

membership and religious activities. Such reservations if not suspicions stem from

centuries of virulent persecution and defamation campaigns carried out by Spanish,

Cuban, and U.S. occupying authorities (Helg 1995; Sawyer 2006; Hearn 2008). Under

such social conditions, Palo practitioners learned and are ritualistically instructed to

conceal their religion in order to protect their belief system and affiliated members. The

result has been a meager if not absent amount of quantifiable data on the number and

  38
location of Palo practitioners. At the time I conducted the research, Cuban researchers

had no way to identify the total number of practitioners of Cuba’s distinctive religious

traditions; they have yet to produce a systematic census of religious believers in general

and have yet to produce data on the number of practitioners of Palo Monte/Mayombe

specifically. Foreigners are especially prohibited from independently gathering large-

scale numerical information on island inhabitants, which means that I was not able to

establish the universal number of Palo Monte/Mayombe practitioners in Oriente.

Despite such difficulties, yet because of the rich potential to gain insights into

spirit engagement among Palo practitioners as members of an African Diasporal

community, I chose to conduct research among Palo practitioners and to do so in the

largest city in the eastern region, Santiago de Cuba. Seven of the 18-some members of

Casa del Caribe’s investigative team responsible for studying African-inspired religions

also reported that the city is known for having a large concentration of Palo devotees

(James Figarola 2006b; James Figarola 2006a).

My choice of site, research population, and methods of entrée and rapport-

building proved to be beneficial. Palo practitioners’ familiarity with me, my relationships,

and my work led them to know that I would respect their sacred lifestyle and maintain

their confianza. Consequently, I will not reveal specific ritual details within this

dissertation but will concentrate on procedures where I was a researching observer,

participant, and interviewer, and data collected during those encounters with those

techniques.

  39
Data Collecting Methods

I began my data collection with in-depth conversations among professional

colleagues at Casa del Caribe. Casa has had designated researchers of “popular

religions” since its beginning in 1984 (Dodson and Johnson 2009). The professional and

student staff has produced a focused body of literature on Cuba’s distinct religions as

practiced in Oriente. My relationship with Casa, as well as literature, allowed me to

discern that Palo is clearly well known among religious practitioners in Santiago de

Cuba (Johnson 2008; Johnson 2009; Johnson 2010). I then began to look for a sample

population in Santiago de Cuba.

The sample population, from which I would select a case study, was based upon

the snowball sampling technique (Berg 1995: 36; Bernard 2002: 185). I asked

individuals who participated in festival activities of Casa del Caribe if they knew of Palo

practitioners and/or a Palo worship house. I spoke with more than 250 Santiago citizens,

including doctors, farmers, teachers, musicians, bartenders, university students,

construction workers, lawyers, nurses, engineers, street cleaners, public health workers,

and others. There were several referrals––some successful, some not so successful––

but eventually I identified a pool of 25 potential respondents for interviews and small

focus groups. More important, there was consensus among this random review that the

most prominent Santiago Palo community was based with a family in the city’s Los

5
Hoyos neighborhood.

                                                                                                               
5
I am not certain if the success of this process indicates Cubans’ increased comfort
level in talking about Palo or that my credentials and familiarity allowed them to feel
secure in speaking with me.

  40
 Los Hoyos (the holes) is a neighborhood dating from Santiago’s colonial period

noted for its location down the hill from the city’s colonial governmental and residential

center district. The location is significant because rain and other waters run away from

the city center, down the hill to Los Hoyos. The holes that formed from water settling

were rarely repaired, and the residents have historically been poor and African

descendants. The neighborhood was renamed “Los Olmos” after the success of the

1959 revolution but usage of the older and more affectionate name Los Hoyos persists

among residents and others throughout the city.

Historically and contemporarily, the neighborhood is known to be a center of

exceptionally potent ritual work with at least five of Cuba’s distinct religious practices.

More than half of the individuals with whom I spoke, though forthcoming about Palo,

expressed negative surprise about my interest in the tradition. Their surprised and

somewhat recoiling responses suggested to me that though Casa del Caribe continues

its active educational programs to educate the Cuban population about its distinctive

African heritage and Regla Palo Monte as a part of that religious history, there is a

continuing discomfort about the religious practice held by a general population (Dodson

and Johnson 2009). Nevertheless, I selected the Los Hoyos neighborhood, the referred

Palo religious household, and its network of members as the case study for the

dissertation investigation. I lived, worked, and listened inside of this community of Palo

members in order to gain clarity about the making of a Palo religious genealogy based

on engagement of a variety of spirits and how this shaped devotees self understanding.

  41
The Case

The identified Palo worship community of Los Hoyos is well known to Palo

practitioners throughout Cuba and has maintained an esteemed local reputation across

the region for its exceedingly successful ritual work with spirit beings. An estimate of its

initiated members would be over 1,000. While this is a conservative number of the full

worship community of the case study, my dissertation research was with all those who

came to the central worship house in Los Hoyos with regularity and were regular

participants in the worship community’s ceremonies. The central worship house is

where their leader usually conducts the majority of most ritual work and most important

ceremonies. The religious community leader, several practitioners, and the leader’s

blood relatives reside within the house while other members live throughout the Los

Hoyos neighborhood, the city of Santiago, other regions of Cuba, and internationally. I

could not include every Palo member of the community in my study so I limited the final

research case to approximately 50 individuals who sustained close ties to the worship

community through their participation in significant ceremonies. This was the sample

group indicative of Santiago Palo practitioners and, according to six senior researchers

at Casa Caribe, representative of the larger Oriente practicing population.

The research case study group included leaders, initiated practitioners active in

the community’s ceremonial activities, initiated members with occasional participation in

such events, and individuals related to the Palo leaders by birth or marriage. The blood

and married family members were regularly participants in the majority of the worship

community’s religious activities even though they were not formally initiated into the

Palo tradition. Demographically, the selected research group included 19 women and

  42
31 men. The women’s ages ranged from 50 to 70 while the men’s ages were 26 to 78;

all participants could read and write and had completed secondary education, while six

had master’s degrees and one held a PhD.

After identifying these members and particulars of their backgrounds, I was

prepared to gather more information regarding the formation of the devotee

community’s spirits and religious genealogy. For the data collection, I employed

systematic observation, participation observation, individual and group interviews, and

life history data-gathering techniques.

Observations and Participation

Because of the performative nature of the events, I combined techniques of

systematic observations and participant observation when attending Palo public and

private activities. I utilized the method of participant observation when it would have

been obtrusive to merely observe, which was usually determined when a Cuban

participant drew me into the action. When not participating, I was systematic about

observations of the ceremonies and ritual activities. My systematic observations

consisted of watching and mentally making note of what I saw and heard. For example,

I made note of the number of people involved, the physicality of the spaces, and their

decorative distinctions, as well as the adornments of participants, their body movements,

and other descriptive affects.

Observing participation was more demanding because I was required to be

involved with activities even as I was the researcher. On these occasions, for example,

it often was not possible to record what I saw and heard at the instant it occurred

because of the requirements of ritual participation. However, making such systematic

  43
mental notes served to help improve my observation and participation skills as data

collection proceeded. After a number of observational and participatory encounters, I

was able to develop categories for collecting and recording the data. This meant that my

data collection through these methods was systematic and thereby enhanced the ability

of others to repeat my work.

The participation observation and systematic observations methods allowed me

to collect data that gave perspective to what Palo practitioners actually do in their

religious work and how they went about engaging their spirit members. These two

methods also provided information about the times and locations where ritual

procedures of the Palo worship community would occur, not to mention opportunities to

gather demographics.

I attended a minimum of 15 public ceremonies and some 25 private ceremonies

over the course of the dissertation research. Public ceremonies were demarcated by

whether people not initiated into Palo, and/or non-members of the worship community,

were allowed to attend along with initiated members and observe ritual proceedings.

Private events were those when only initiates and select invited individuals were able to

attend. An average of 100 to 150 or more individuals could attend a public ceremony,

including individuals with no affiliation but who came to observe “and be refreshed” by

the ceremonial proceedings (Johnson 2008). Private ceremonies, on the other hand,

could have anywhere from three to 20 individuals present. My consistent participation at

Palo public and private ceremonies allowed me to learn about the details of the

religion’s ritual protocols and how these fit within the making of the community’s

  44
religious genealogy and individual devotees’ understandings about themselves as

African descendants in Cuba.

The physical space in which Palo ceremonies took place was a pivotal first

category among those used to record information. I made notes on where the activities

occurred and detailed the physical characteristics of the location. For example, I noted

the composition of ceremonial spaces, types of objects present, and how they were

arranged. I looked for prominent colors or materials within a space and whether

materials were from nature or manufactured. When appropriate, I took photographs of

spaces most often before rituals began. Colors were a significant component of Palo

sacred space construction and contributed to the symbolic meaning and visual

dynamics, as certain color combinations represent spirit beings (Dubin 1990). The

photographs I took serve as “visual note” supplements for observational and

participatory observational data (Clandinin and Connelly 1994). By detailing physical

surroundings and context of ceremonial and ritual spaces, I learned to understand how

practitioners represented different activities in different locations as well as the

significance practitioners associated with their religious practice.

Time was another category by which I recorded and organized data. I was

careful to record the time of day each activity began and finished and the type of

behavior(s) that indicated opening and closing of activities. Soon, I could recognize and

note phases of an activity and what type of behavior delineated the phases. These data

would be used to establish any relationship between time, sequencing of activities, and

potential spirit communication. A third category guiding observational and participatory

data collection was attendees at public and private events of the worship community. I

  45
observed gender differences of leaders, and participants, their approximate age, and

any distinguishing or characteristic behaviors: for example, a limp, a missing limb, or

others. Once I became aware of initiated members of the worship community,

eventually I could record their membership status.

Similarly important were where event participants were positioned within the

ceremonial space, their gender and their approximate age. I recorded the total number

of attendees, their gender, the roles they performed, their degree of participation, and

their arrival and departure times. These data allowed me to identify patterns to

attendance at activities, as well as age or gender patterns, and to develop insights to

the community’s organizational structure, which would later clarify genealogical

relationships.

Palo ceremonial events are sensory activities and experiences (Johnson 2010).

Sacred spaces of the tradition are assembled from naturally occurring and human-made

objects that emit smells, have a diversity of texture and colors, and are soft, hard, or

squishy to the touch. These characteristics required me to use my sensory abilities as I

observed and participated in each type of ceremonial proceeding. I recorded any

changes I could sense in the atmosphere created in relationship to the space. I detailed

if there was music and/or singing during an event, and if there was food, drink, or

another ingestible substances shared during the communal ritual sessions.

Interviews

I employed individual and group interview methods with informal and formal

formats. These methods provided substantive information regarding how observers of

Palo consider spirits as participating community members and the religious procedures

  46
undertaken to maintain a collaborative network of practitioners and spirit beings.

Individual interviews also provided data that gave insights concerning how practitioners

understand how Palo affects their perspectives about themselves as African-

descended Cubans. At the same time, individual and group interviewing techniques

stimulated respondents to report on their family histories. Combined, the interviews

revealed how community members acquired their individual sense of self and group

identity as related to their Spirit-beings groupings. This was most helpful in providing

clarity and dynamics about spirit engagements as part of Palo devotees’ religious reality,

linked to Oriente’s distinct sociohistorical context. Such insights helped clarify how Palo

supplicants presented and articulated their spirit genealogy through the assembling of

sacred spaces and the verbal invocation and transmission of their religious lineage.

Interview data also brought voice to how these Palo worship community members

discussed their identities as African-descended Cubans in Oriente.

Individual: I conducted interviews of two hours or more each with a total of 15

persons; four females ages 45 to 70, and 11 males ages between 22 to 78. During the

course of these interviews, I was also able to collect data about members of the male

leadership of the Palo worship community who had died. This gave me data for an

additional three individuals to add to my charting of the worship community’s Palo spirit

genealogy (see spirit genealogy in Chapter 5, Figure 7, p.147). Interestingly, it was the

female members of the sample who were able to provide this data along with

information about who within the research community would be amiable to speaking

with me for what the community came to know as “tu tesis” (your thesis). For these

semi-formal interviews, I pre-identified topics, some specific questions, and often a

  47
designated but flexible sequence for asking the questions. For informal individual

interviews, I maintained topical areas but allowed respondents to cover these within a

conversational format. I did not rigidly adhere to an interview questionnaire, and found

that informal interviews often provided details about a topic, idea, event, or individual

that I may not have considered.

Interestingly, women were the community members best able to provide the data

on the male leadership, as well as links to other Palo worship community members.

Women with seniority in the worship community were also able to explain the

biographies of spirit members of the community’s genealogy and the human ritual

descendants of the collective, and the interconnections between living and ancestral

members. The power afforded to senior females inherent in safe guarding the details of

the religious family networks history aligns with assertions by Evelyn Higginbotham and

Jualynne E. Dodson about leadership among female African descendants within

religious organizations, specifically Protestant Christian denominations (Higginbotham

1993; Dodson 2002). These authors assert that within the institution of the “Black

Church” within the United States, the political and even economic power, and decision

making of religious collectivities resides with the women of the group. Further, while the

visible and public power is most often associated with and represented by men, the

invisible power of women is what maintains the groups’ sacred history, along with

logistical and principled course of action of the belief-community.

While Higginbotham and Dodson’s work focuses on the power of African

descended women within Protestant Christianity, the presence of the political and

spiritual power of women within African-inspired traditions is on the increase, and while I

  48
was not solely focused on women and power for this project, my data do support

emerging studies about women, African-inspired religions and power (Brown 2001;

Johnson 2002; Ochoa 2007; Ashcraft-Eason, et al. 2010).

Groups: Formal group interviews and formal individual interviews were

topically focused, and as such, I did not develop a sequential questionnaire. I was able

to conduct a minimum of 15 formal groups among Palo practitioners as well as the un-

initiated blood family members of the Palo leadership during the course of the data-

collection sessions. Participants in these interviews usually shared a common

characteristic e.g., generational peers, gender, age, religious role, etc. Informal groups,

on the other hand, often could not be controlled by me and usually occurred episodically

and spontaneously. These sessions regularly occurred in respondents’ homes and

usually emerged during hospitality visits, visits wherein my intent was to connect with

community members without a specific agenda. As respondents were familiar with me

as a student-researcher, they often initiated conversations about their religious activity

or “work” with spirits, which would begin an informal group interview. My work with the

informal interview groups led me to the last data-gathering method life histories.

Life Histories

I used the technique of collecting life histories among respondents during formal

and informal interviews, as well as during group sessions. The life histories began with

asking questions that focused on an individual’s personal demographic specifics; place

of birth; mother’s and father’s birthplaces; number of siblings; number of aunts, uncles,

and cousins; family household moves; where blood-related family members lived, as far

back as great-great grandparents; and what religious tradition, if any had been practiced.

  49
 In addition to blood relatives’ lineages and geographic connections, life history

interviews provided data on how Palo practitioners organized their life narratives in

relationship to when they first began encountering spirit beings, and/or when they were

initiated into Palo. As such, I began to incorporate the date, location and details about

when, how, and why practitioners began to engage with spirit being(s). Another

significant category guiding data-collection was the question: What were the motivating

factors and/or inspirations that caused practitioners’ to begin building ceremonial sites

to facilitate their encounters with spirit being(s)?. As in interview sessions, I took jotted

notes to record details: however, I would stop and lay my notebook aside when

practitioners wanted to speak about some of the more intimate details regarding the con

permiso, the social contacts they had formed with spirits.

The methods I selected provided a range of tools by which I could study Palo

practitioners understanding and engagement of spirit others as members of religious

family lineages, and how such relationships framed devotees’ identities. In particular, I

needed to place a strong emphasis on being receptive to the type of sensory

experiences practitioners encounter with their spirit familiars. The qualitative methods I

selected allowed me to “listen with my body” in ways that were not only culturally

sensitive, but also provided access to data that would otherwise would not be made

available. Had I used a standardized written questionnaire, people would have been

reticent if not completely closed, about sharing the intimate details of their relationships

with their spirit family members. The selected methods and my implementation of these

research techniques with a focus on Palo practitioners’ intentionality permitted me to

  50
“make sense of another’s life” in a manner that was respectful of the multiple fields of

seen and unseen action where their reality occurred (Denzin 1994: 512).

The strategy of “listening with my body” became a key technique in data-

gathering and cultivated practitioners’ trust as they taught me how to engage my sense

of smell, taste, touch and vision for a stronger comprehension of their experiences and

understandings with the spirit familiars of their religious practice. In essence, the

conceptualization of this research strategy of “listening with the body” emerged

organically from the Palo worshipers. I initially adopted the process to help orient my

observations, participations, and interviewing with Palo practitioners. This type of

intensive and energetic investment is a methodological approach introduced by

practitioners to researchers of the African Atlantic Research Team. I learned the

techniques and adjusted with it overtime for dissertation data collection (Dodson and

Zaid 2012). This approach to data collection aligns with Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s well-

argued contention, which states:

For indigenous and other marginalized communities, research ethics is at

a very basic level about establishing, maintaining, and nurturing reciprocal
and respectful relationships, not just among people as individuals but also
with people as individuals, as collectives, as members of communities,
and with humans who live in and with other entities in the environment.
The abilities to enter preexisting relationships; to build, maintain, and
nurture relationships; and to strengthen connectivity are important
research skills in the indigenous arena. They require critical sensitivity and
reciprocity of spirit by a researcher (Smith 2005: 97).

The process and action of “listening with my body” during the research of Palo in Los

Hoyos follows Smith’s critical assessment that researchers need adjust their own

“codes of conduct” as an “exercise of ‘bottom-up’ or ‘community-up’ defin[ions] of ethical

behaviors” that define parameters of respect. In the case of my work, the worship

  51
community summarized the interactive and collaborative exchange in the research

process as confianza. In addition to inviting me to share tobacco and rum as part of the

practitioners’ hospitality ritual, they regularly invited me to smell plants, study the

specific shapes and colors of items, such as rocks, sticks, and earth. They explained

how they collected the materials and their significance to the spirit forces, encouraging

me to ask questions, exclaiming “¿viste?” [do you see, do you understand?]. They

appreciated my willingness to get actively involved in their didactic instruction about

Palo and their active engagement of spirits; they valued my “listening with my body,”

and were exceptionally receptive of my work, and routinely spoke of the confianza in me.

Recording

I attempted to be non-obtrusive during all data collecting sessions, which meant I

rarely wrote any type of notes during data gathering activities. Rather, I recorded

observational and participation notes in field journals after each event or activity at my

residence and away from respondents. There were occasions when, at respondents’

insistence, I wrote short scratch or jotting notes during an interview session “so that [I]

could remember and learn” (Jackson 1990: 17-31; Emerson, et al. 1995). Otherwise, I

categorically organized interview responses in my mind––in headnotes––and did full

write-ups at the end of each day or as soon as possible after the session (Ottenberg

1990: 144).

When I had prior permission to do so, I took still photos of spaces before

activities but did not employ other mechanical data-collecting devices: for example, tape

recorders or videos. Rather, I assumed a standpoint of focused listening that

practitioners often commented was a better strategy and that “with my body” in order “to

  52
know” increased their confianza/trust in me. The issue of confianza was a recurring

theme among the Palo practitioners of Los Hoyos. They often spoke of how confianza is

cultivated and why it is significant to them in the building of a religious family network. I

discuss this idea further in the data chapter because it was important to the Palo

worshipers.

I employed a technique of “debriefing” learned as a member of the AART after

recording data. Debriefing refers to the process Team members use to collectively

review what we have experienced in the field and consider it in relationship to

information from our preparatory field research work and working concepts. Debriefing

serves as our pre-analysis of the data while in the field. This process allows us to review

the data and revise our research questions, or our field research methods. Debriefing

equally provides a forum for us to discuss any type of tensions that can and do develop

when conducting cross-cultural research. Debriefing also provides us an opportunity to

recognize gaps in our data collection and attempt to address those voids before leaving

the site, or perhaps what questions we need to hold over for our next field session. We

attempt to conduct our debriefing meetings with as many of the researchers present as

is possible. This means that we will review our activities during or immediately after

shared meals. Holding our sessions at these specific times trains researchers to begin

reflecting on their experiences to report at the collective gatherings.

Debriefing has at least four features that organically emerge and develop during

our sessions, which I also employed during the dissertation research field sessions:

• Data review

• Concept review

  53
 • Reflection

• Implications

When I was alone in the site I followed AART’s same debriefing process, reviewing

data, my concepts, and my reflections and implications on my long walks back to my in-

country housing from the field site. These systematic critical reflection periods also

allowed me time to construct and/or refine research categories and questions, and to

identify potential questions for new interviews. The technique of debriefing also allowed

me to think about and come up with creative responses to problems that emerged

during research encounters.

Technology: Rather than rely on technology recordings, I mostly relied upon a

cribbing notation system for recording interview data and later transcribed these into

full-length field journal entries when I returned to my residence. The approach enhanced

respondents’ trust and made them more willing to share aspects of sacred practices and

introduce me to other practitioners or their family members. During the data-collection,

Palo practitioners as well as Casa researchers reacted quite demonstratively when they

would ask if I had an audio recorder for interviews and I would reply in the negative. I

had found when I attempted to use an audio recorder that individuals were quite self-

conscious about the interview and were not forthcoming about their practices. Years of

experience within the site had also alerted me to how community members understood

academics as tourists eager to exploit the religious content of Cuba’s distinctive

religions for personal gain. Often I witnessed other foreign academics inappropriately

inserting themselves, and/or audio or video equipment inside the middle of religious

activities, unseeing and perhaps uncaring, of how their actions were being responded to

  54
by Cubans. By taking an observational stance in such situations, I could see the

negative distain on individuals’ faces.

Also, I have experienced how Cuban immigration officials respond when students

are too enthusiastic with their recording devices, which draw a great deal of suspicious

attention to the students’ activities (Johnson 2008). Moreover, in a social context that

does not have the same level of access to material goods and technological devices,

possessing and openly using such items can stimulate if not exaggerate, distrust

towards foreigners. This also carries an additional liability of making oneself a target of

solicitation if not petty theft (Johnson 2004). My exposure along with other members of

AART to the types of behaviors and responses to individuals with technology has made

me choose to limit my own use of and reliance on technology, though I will use make

use of a limited number of life images to “set the scene” of ritual activities. Otherwise, I

place great primacy on interactions unfiltered through technology, and that has in turn

seemed to be an effective way in which to engage Palo practitioners on the intimacy of

their private relationships with spirit beings.

Problems

National Politics: Political tensions between Cuba and the United States are

long-standing and affected all aspects of the dissertation research. The U.S. has

maintained an embargo against Cuba since 1960. In order to travel to my Oriente site, I

always had to secure specific licensing permissions from the U.S. Office of Foreign

Asset Control (OFAC) prior to my travel. The process is arduous, and most often, I did

not know if I had been granted permission until a few days prior to the scheduled

departure from the U.S. With permission from OFAC, entering Cuba, and being allowed

  55
to stay in country as a foreign researcher from the U.S. proved increasingly challenging

because of the ever-fluctuating stipulations and conditions of an OFAC license.

Continuously, I had to be aware of national and international political tensions and how

they affected the research site and dynamics of the process.

Locational Limitations: Cuba’s limited technological infrastructure also meant

that research appointments were best scheduled and confirmed during face-to-face

encounters. This limitation produced numerous cancellations and alterations to any

given day of research activities, much in line with how other field researchers have

described the “ups and downs” of conducting research cross-culturally (Powdermaker

1966; Geertz 1973; Sanjek 1990; Bernard 2000).

During the years of the study, as political tensions increased between the two

governments, there were difficulties in logistical planning. I consistently had problems

negotiating financial penalties levied against converting the U.S. dollar into Cuba’s two

monetary systems. I regularly found it a challenge to secure suitable housing that could

facilitate the particularities of my research work.

Health issues, too, were a recurring challenge as, in addition to not being

accustomed to the Cuban environment, I have several physical conditions (allergies and

related asthma, dehydration). At times, I physically did not respond well physically to

some of Santiago’s environments, like the prevalence of animals in family homes and

the intense heat. I was ill during several days of a research session.

Rapport: Conducting research in Cuba as a citizen of the United States

presents special issues related to political tensions between the two governments. As

just such a researcher, I was regularly under scrutiny by Cubans, officials, and citizens.

  56
To contradict these impressions, I employed AART’s approach to “hospitality visits.” I

visited Palo practitioners of the worship group and in the Los Hoyos neighborhood. I

made hospitality visits to Palo members of the Los Hoyos worship house, other

residents of the Los Hoyos neighborhood, and leaders of other Cuban religious

traditions who lived in the area, as well as visits to Casa del Caribe personnel. These

visits occurred during each data gathering session in the field and often included

sharing meals and beverages, and/or sitting casually with family members or close

friends during daily activities with no outward appearance of data collection.

Occasionally, I brought small items for the household such as tobacco, rum, candles,

matches, cooking oil, flowers or other items that are in short supply in Cuba when I felt

moved to do so. The exchange of small gifts fit into the culturally normative practices of

sharing and reciprocity, while having the unintended effect of enhancing my

collaborative relationships in the site.

This approach to developing and enhancing rapport in the research site also

served to help counter balance generalized prejudices about foreign researchers as

exploitative of religious practitioners and their sacred objects and knowledge. One elder

woman respondent summed the attitude about foreign researchers by saying, “They

come to steal our things and put them in museums in their countries.” A second older

female demonstrated this discomfort by avoiding my request for an interview for several

weeks until she learned that I would not be recording the session with a mechanical

device; instead, I would be “listening with my body.” Hospitality visits focused on

interactions and time spent with women also helped lessen gender tensions with them.

Spending time with the women of the community opened up opportunities to collect data

  57
on gender as well as refine my understandings about how community’s spirit genealogy

shaped their identity construction.

Cross-Cultural Issues

Language: A major challenge of the research into Palo within Cuba was the

issue of the plural languages that operated in Oriente, in Santiago, and in the site

among supplications of multiple religious practices. Beyond learning Spanish, I had to

become familiar with the Oriente variant of the language as well as with what

respondents termed “Congo”––a combination of Kikongo ritual language and everyday

Spanish communications, and the code switching that occurred between these two

languages. I had to learn Spanish and the various idiomatic expressions of Oriente

Spanish and Congo in order to communicate effectively in general social and religious

circumstances. It took me some five years to reach an acceptable level of competence

in the language distinctions, including accompanying culturally specific body gestures.

Gender: Cuban norms of gender behavior are also filtered through Oriente’s

regionally distinctive cultural behaviors as well as those associated with religious

tradition. This proved challenging for my research and it took a number of years before

Santiago citizens and members of my case study accepted me as a professional female

researcher, over 23, unmarried, from the U.S., Black, and with no children. The

combination of such social positions in one person did not translate well within the

region’s cultural and gender norms. For example, it is not culturally appropriate for

single women to be out alone after sunset. This would mean that the times I had to

conduct interviews was restricted to daylight hours, however, because people have jobs

  58
and family responsibilities that consume the majority of their day, I had to insert my

research work into the confines of their schedule before sunset.

I continually had to demonstrate, not merely verbally articulate that I was aware

of and respectful of these norms. The visible public power of the community is most

often positioned with men. Therefore, when I had to interview male leaders and spend

time with them I had to ensure that I counter- balanced those sessions with spending

hospitality time with women to behaviorally demonstrate that my intentions were strictly

professional, in spite of ongoing advances from men. Over time I learned how to

effectively stave off unwanted male attention by incorporating the concept of “discipline”

into how I would describe why I limited my time with men, would leave events early, or

not attend at all; it was counter to my discipline to do these things (“no es mi disciplina

para hacer eso”). My consistent behavior, over time and multiple site visits, helped to

curtail male advances and diminish social tensions with female community members.

The concept and behavioral demonstration of discipline was well respected

within the site, as culturally it is expected that each individual learn how to live and

behave in a disciplined way that benefits the collective. The concept of discipline also

had great cache among Palo practitioners in that they believe it takes great personal

discipline to adhere to the type of lifestyle that their spirit familiars dictate. Indeed, they

believe that in order to service their spirits appropriately, it takes great “sacrifice” to

discipline one’s behaviors as well as garner resources enough to care for one’s living

and non-living family members.

Ritual Protocol: Distinct ritual protocols exist for all Cuban religious traditions

and these had to be learned in order to establish entrée and maintain rapport with all

  59
neighborhood members as well as practitioners of Cuba’s distinctive religions. In

addition to greeting individual study participants, I also had to pay respects to their

sacred spaces using the appropriate ritual protocol to begin any conversation within

their home settings. It took years and ongoing exposure within the field site to develop

proficiency with these rituals. However, taking the time and effort to learn these sacred

protocols enhanced my rapport with respondents thereby enhancing the data collection

process and allowing me to clarify the meanings Palo worshipers assigned to their spirit

genealogy as a significant referent for their self-understandings of being African-

descended Cubans.

  60
 CHAPTER 3:
CUBA’S SOCIOHISTORICAL CONTEXT

“African meets Indian, now the African is Indian”

Palo/Monte Mayombe chant

  61
Introduction

Today’s devotees of Palo continue to report that the complex of their religious

tradition descends from combined religious knowledge and activities of Taíno and

Kongo ancestors as handed down to their Cuban progeny across several generations.

Research participant Eva (see Appendix) further suggested that when individuals are

initiated into the Palo worship community, they become “blood” relatives with other

supplicants as well as with the lead spirit entities of the collective, and joined with the

land. These levels of relatedness and genealogy-making are accomplished through

rituals of “ingesting” elements derived from Oriente’s natural landscape. Eva explained

that when Palo devotees come into contact with the products of the earth where the

dead are buried, the “ambiance” of the dead’s wisdom rises and is embodied by Palo

devotees. The “ambiance” Eva refers to suggests that Palo devotees live a sentient

experience in which the entire social sphere is permeated, and at times punctuated, by

non-living others (Johnson 2010).

Palo worshipers’ prioritizing of spirits in the structuring of their current social

identity means that the history informing such understandings is a central component to

comprehending their construction of the community’s spirit genealogy. This chapter

considers the historical details of how Cuba’s subaltern communities created spaces

and social practices that provide new insight about cultural formations within the island

nation during its early colonial development. I suggest that ultimately Palo devotees’

inherited understandings about spirits and historical social figures within Oriente reveal

hidden narrations about identity that become more accessible through the study of how

the region’s religious lineages were created and maintained. The fullness of the

  62
discussion is warranted in that a fundamental assumption of the dissertation research

was that AmerIndians and Africans, specifically Taíno and Kongolese, encountered

each other in the island’s eastern region and began the embryonic creations that

created the social space for the formation of Palo Monte/Mayombe religious lineages,

and in some sense, began construction of a Cuban identity.

There are several factors that have shaped the formation of the spirit genealogy

of the Palo worship community in Oriente, not the least of which is lodged in the

diversity of the island’s natural, bio-diverse geographic zones that helped shape social

development within Cuba from initial European contact and conquest and through the

three-centuries-long colonial period. The chapter presents geographic information as

well as examining salient political contours and social movements that have shaped the

island-nation during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and how this has affected

the development of Palo in the Oriente region.

Geography

Cuba is the largest island nation of the Caribbean’s Greater Antilles, the larger

islands of the area, and it is located between 74° to 85° west longitude and 19º40´ to

23°30´. The island is framed by three bodies of water; the Atlantic Ocean in the east,

the Gulf of Mexico to the northwest, and the Caribbean Sea in the south. The Gulf

Stream is the river-like body of oceanic waters that begins in the Caribbean, ends in the

Northern Atlantic, and was an important natural navigational phenomenon that helped

bring the Spanish to Cuba (Thomas 1997; Eltis and Richardson 2010). The Gulf Stream

also was significant to colonial authorities’ decision to move the island capital from the

  63
eastern city of Santiago de Cuba to Havana in the western portion of the island

(Thomas 1998; Pérez 2011).

Figure 1 Contemporary map of Cuba. For interpretation of the references to color

in this and all other figures, the reader is referred to the electronic version of this
dissertation.

The island is 750 miles in length, 22 miles wide at its most western tip, and 124

miles wide at its greatest width in the east. The island’s landscape includes a mixture of

grassland savannahs with small, widely spaced trees and mountains. The highest of the

mountain ranges is the Oriente Sierra Maestras in the east. There are some 200 natural

harbors, bays, and inlets throughout the island’s 2,500 miles of seacoast. Mountain

ranges, plains, and rivers provided natural boundaries for the island’s six historic

jurisdictions or provinces established by the Spanish in the middle of the seventeenth

century, which and continued until after the 1959 success of the Cuban Revolution. The

six provinces were Pinar del Río, Havana, Matanzas, Las Villas, Camagüey, and

Oriente.

  64
 In 1973, the six traditional provinces were rezoned into fourteen divisions of the

island’s sociopolitical operations. However, the original geographic parameters created

social distinctions and boundaries over the course of the nation’s centuries of existence.

These social peculiarities include cultural and linguistic variations that continue to

present pronounced differences between provinces, which continue to serve as regional

markers in contemporary Cuba. For example, individuals of today’s eastern provinces

continue to be referred to as “orientales” and are known by the linguistic marker of

eliminating ending consonants in their spoken language. This feature of eliminating

and/or modifying hard consonant sounds, along with eliminating the fricative “th,” is also

a common trait among populations throughout the Americas who employ African

linguistic grammatical structures (Barrutia and Schwegler 1994: 213-226; Fuentes

Guerra and Schwegler 2005: 48-110).

The Taíno cultural community encountered the 1492 arrival of Christopher

Columbus and other conquistadores under Spanish authority. By 1512, Baracoa, the

first European settlement, was organized on the northeastern end of the island. The

Spanish founded other settlements throughout the island, including Bayamo in 1513;

Trinidad, Sancti Spíritus, Havana, and Puerto Príncipe in 1514; and Santiago de Cuba

in 1515. Santiago served as the colonial capital until 1630, when the seat of power was

transplanted to the western province and city of Havana. European nations interested in

creating a colonial empire based on large-scale mono-crops at the turn of the sixteenth

century were desirous of Cuba’s naturally diverse environment. Its human resources

were also coveted by early empire-seeking nations (Thomas 1998: 1-26; Pérez 2011:

38-43). Interest in the island increased when tobacco and sugar cultivation proved

  65
profitable in Cuba’s western region; the central provinces’ large soil-rich savannah

conditions supported sugar-based agriculture; and cattle ranching continued to be

successful. The eastern/Oriente region has had the most varied environmental

conditions for supporting extensive fruit, vegetable, coffee, and sugar cultivation as well

as cattle ranching.

Between 1502 and 1630, Oriente served as the geographic context in which the

nation’s first struggles for social power began. In the early years of the colony, battles

occurred between the conquering Spanish and the AmerIndians and imported

individuals extracted from Africa. It was within this cultural mixture of contact, exchange,

and grappling for human dignity that the beginnings of new cultural life, and thereby

religious practices, were constructed. While the Cuban national project begins in

Oriente, the foundations of that project stem from struggles between the Spanish

conquistadors and the AmerIndian population that had long-standing complex societies

concentrated in the eastern area of Cuba before Europeans’ arrival in the fifteenth and

sixteenth centuries. In order to understand Palo worshipers’ creation of a spirit

genealogy, it is necessary to reconsider the “moments of fact creation” for religious

realities in Oriente. In that respect, it is necessary to retrieve what is known about Taíno

narratives of human existence in a social world populated by spirit others.

  66
New Knowledge about Taínos

6
The 1960s academic and political movement to bring Black Studies into U.S.

higher education was a movement to study and represent the cultural integrity and

intentionality of African descendants’ lives and contributions within national and

international contexts. The movement(s) had profound effects and altered historically

white colleges and university campuses as well as most U.S. academic arenas (Kilson

1973; Drake 1980; Drake 1987; Harris, et al. 1990; Anderson 2001; Holloway and

Keppel 2007; Pritchett 2010; Mintz and Price [1976] 1992). Renewed investigations into

what were once considered closed historical research questions have been an indirect

product of Black Studies’ programs and departments in locations of higher learning. For

example, archeologists and historians have returned to texts and data on indigenous

populations of the Americas to thoroughly comprehend the cultural integrity of these

societies of first communities in the Americas (Schmidt and Patterson 1995; Kiddy

1999; Garofalo 2006; O'Toole 2006). This has given us better understandings about

societies of fifteenth-century AmerIndians who received Europeans in the Caribbean

(Sued-Badillo 1995).

The Taíno AmerIndians occupied the eastern region of Cuba and maintained an

intricate religious system as part of their social structure, before Christopher Columbus

and before the importation of Africans beginning in the sixteenth century. The Taíno

cosmic world consisted of humans, spirits associated with natural phenomena, spirits of
                                                                                                               
6
The nomenclature of Black Studies, African American & African Studies, and Africana
Studies reflects an ever-changing U.S. socio-political atmosphere in which the field is
situated. Black Studies refers to the early years of the field’s formation within historically
white universities and colleges, approximately 1968 until the early to mid-1980s. From
this point forward I will be using African American & African Studies (AAAS) to reflect
current understandings about the academic field.

  67
familial dead, and entities existing inside of plants, rocks, and animals. During the

earliest contact between the Taíno and Spanish, Fray Ramón Pané produced the first

known European written description of the Taíno religious system, which appeared in

Fernando Columbus’s biography about the exploits of his father. While limited by

ethnocentric depictions of the AmerIndians, Pané’s descriptions provide valuable details

on the cosmic orientation of Indian groups living throughout the Caribbean’s Greater

Antilles (Pané and Arrom 1999; Abulafia 2009: 131-137). Historian David Abulafia

provides a qualifying and clarifying contextualization of Fray Pané’s comprehension of

the Taíno cosmic orientation when he writes:

Ramón Pané provided a window into the mental world of the Taíno
Indians. This is a record of a vanished people; it is extremely precious.
That said, it is also a record of European failure to understand what was
being said; part of its interest lies in the bewilderment Pané felt when he
heard old men and women retail Taíno stories of the creation of man and
the sea, or when he witnessed their shamans [sic] having what were
supposed to be two-way conversations with the recently deceased. In
other words, it is a record of both the Taíno and the European mentality.
Pané attempted to describe Taíno myths by fitting them within a structure
that any European would expect to find…[Taíno] conception of the
material world and its relationship to the world of the dead and spirits was
so different from that of medieval Christians, Jews or Muslims that Pané
was well and truly puzzled…[For the Taíno] past and present were
intertwined, just as the living and dead, man (sic) and the animal world
were intertwined (Abulafia 2009: 137-138).

Abulafia’s lengthy description adequately reports and analyzes several important

dimensions of the Taíno belief system that are relevant to the dissertation research.

Abulafia draws attention to four significant principles of Taíno cosmic orientation

that concern the universe and its organization: the existence of spirits; humans’ ability

to communicate with such entities; the integrative nature of time modalities, specifically

between the past and present; and that human and non-human worlds are interwoven

  68
and reciprocally interdependent (Abulafia 2009: 137-139). His discussion is equally

useful for clarifying the cultural curtailing and/or distortions of Taíno belief system as

explained by Euro-centric categories for religious and cultural traditions not like their

own.

Abulafia’s more recent presentation and analysis is exceptionally important,

because it allows current scholars to better accomplish what historian of religions

Charles H. Long and anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot assert is necessary if we

intend to understand history from the perspective of those who have been silenced

(Long 1995: 61-69; Trouillot 1995: 1-30). In this instance, by reading through the

qualifiers of the Frey to distance himself from the Taíno’s origin stories, we are able to

piece together the context and content of Taíno comprehensions about the order of the

universe (Long 1995: 31-39). These discussions of silencing partner well with Abulafia’s

reading of Frey Pané’s account of Taíno beliefs in that we can see that the “moment” of

fact creation and “archiving” of non-Christian religious worlds contains distortions that

originate from a recorder of history who did not comprehend nor prioritize how Taíno

communities understood their religious reality.

The Frey’s record is equally burdened by the ethnocentrism of his own social

world, thereby compounding misconceptions about Taíno sacred reality. However,

Trouillot’s understanding of silencing is where the focus of African American & African

Studies is most potent in helping scholars recover meanings that silenced communities

assign to their social worlds. The process of retrieving and revealing new facts and

reflecting on those materials in new ways that allows previously hidden data

significance. That is the necessary type of “crawling back” mandated to engage the

  69
integrity of silenced peoples’ life ways. The following is an example of such “crawling

back” through history to engage the integrity of the life practices of the Taíno cultural

community in their own terms as it foregrounds Palo worshipers’ engagement of spirits

to demarcate themselves as “African” in today’s Cuba.

Early Autochthonous Populations

Historians and archeologists have concluded that the first AmerIndian

7
populations to occupy Cuba were the Ciboney , who were on the island in

approximately 1000 B.C.E. Ciboney communities are believed to have had two different

migrations to Cuba over the course of two

thousands years. While it is unknown where

the Ciboney originated, it is speculated that

they used Cuba to transit between locations in

what was to become known as the Yucatán

Peninsula, Florida and Jamaica (Domínguez Figure 2 Taíno archeology dig with
pottery and conches remains,
1984; Torres-Cuevas 2007; Pérez 2011: 13- Banes Cuba. smj 2006 ©

19).  

The first wave of Ciboney migrants, known as the Guaybo Blanco, located their

settlements mainly in the western coastal portions of Cuba in Las Villas, Matanzas,

Havana, Pinar del Río and a small island off the cost of Pinar del Río, Isle of Pines. The

                                                                                                               
7
The literature discussing Cuban AmerIndians does not clarify if the names scholars
used to categorize them are/were equal to what the groups used to identify themselves.
Additional archival research is needed to clarify how these names came to be a part of
the written record.

  70
Guaybo Blanco lived in open-air transitory camps, along ravines and cliffs, and inside

caves. The second wave of Ciboney migration, the Cayo Redondo, arrived about 2000

B.C.E. and was situated in Cuba’s eastern portions. Archeological evidence suggests

that both waves of Ciboney migrants lived in small family clustering clans and

maintained a seminomadic life style, dependent on fishing and collecting plant and

animal food resources, from the surrounding environment (Pérez 2011: 10-14).

Communities of Ciboney continued to live throughout Cuba and were slowly

displaced from the eastern region by the next family of AmerIndian migrants, the

Arawak. The first groups of Arawak to the island were the Sub-Taíno, beginning in the

ninth century. It is believed that the Sub-Taíno cultural community originated in South

America and settled in Cuba as part of their inter-island transit throughout the

Caribbean, wherein they maintained intricate trade networks (Harrington, et al. 1935;

Keegan 1992; Sued-Badillo 1992b; Sued-Badillo 2003b; Sued-Badillo 2003a). The Sub-

Taíno maintained larger settlements throughout the island, yet preferred to concentrate

their villages along the northeastern coast of Cuba. Their villages consisted of

multifamily houses called bohíos (see Figure 3), arranged around a central rectangle

area, a baety. These villages could contain upwards of 2,000 inhabitants. The Sub-

Taíno subsisted on marine life, wild plants, and hunted animals, and crops cultivated on

small plots. They built intricate, submerged coastline holding pens for fish, turtles, and

conches, keeping upward of several thousand animals enclosed for a community’s use.

Archeological evidence suggests that the Sub-Taíno held property communally and

were well organized under a local leader cacica (female) or cacique (male). They

cultivated cotton to make a variety of household goods such as mattresses, cord,

  71
hammocks, fishing line, etc. (Domínguez 1984). Tobacco also was carefully grown for

use in religious ceremonies. Intricate carvings, beadwork, and adornment items have

been found at Cuban sites known to have been used by Sub-Taíno societies (Guarch-

Delmonte 2003: 93-133; Pérez 2011: 10-14).

A second group of Taíno migrants came to Cuba in the mid-fourteenth century

from the island of Hispaniola, current-day Haití and the Dominican Republic. This

migratory wave continued to live inside the established social structures of the first

inhabitants: They maintained large multifamily villages, continued patterns of

subsistence lifestyles, and sociocultural practices anchored in an intricate religious

system based on communal engagement of supernatural forces and spirits of the

community’s dead. However, the second wave of Taíno social and cultural expansion in

Cuba was truncated and brought to closure in 1492 with the arrival of Christopher

Columbus’s opportunist explorations (Sued-Badillo 1992a).

Taíno settlements on Hispaniola were more extensive than within Cuba, and

provided some of the strongest resistance to Spanish presence in the Caribbean. In fact,

in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries large federations of cacicas and

caciques countered the invasion of the Spanish with intensive and extensive attacks

using forces numbering in the tens of thousands. Some Taíno fled to Cuba to regroup

their forces and continue launching assaults against Spanish encroachment (Sued-

Badillo 2003a; Pérez 2011: 15-25). One cacique by the name of Hatuey continues to be

celebrated contemporarily as a symbol of resistance to domination throughout Cuba,

especially in Oriente, the site of his stronghold. Hatuey and his forces had begun their

war against the Spanish in Haití, yet withdrew to regroup in Cuba. Hatuey was

  72
eventually caught and burned at the stake, remaining defiant till the end, refusing

conversion to Catholicism, “especially when he was told the Spanish would be in

Heaven”(Johnson 2006).

Sociopolitical Life and Religion

Fifteenth-century Europeans encountered thriving Taíno communities within the

larger islands of the Caribbean, with the densest populations living in what we now

know as Haití, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Though not as densely

populated as its neighboring islands, eastern Cuba was a sizable Taíno stronghold. The

Taíno had intricately organized cacicazgos, autonomous political areas based on a

matrilineal kinship system that functioned within and across islands. The most powerful

individuals and the central core of the social system were cacicas and caciques chiefs.

These leaders were thought to be imbued with superhuman qualities and able to

marshal community members and cosmic power to enact and enforce social order. The

political leaders of a cacicazgos could be women or men, though the power of position

was solely transmitted through female lines of a ruling family. There is a recorded

example of a woman who married a cacique of another society but after the death of her

cacique brother, she returned to her home to assume authority as a cacica of the

cacicazgos (Sued-Badillo 2003b: 262-263).

The cacica or cacique of a Taíno community was the only member who could

practice polygamy, having as many as twenty or thirty marriage partnerships. Kinship

was paramount among these groups of AmerIndians, and raids to capture women and

thereby absorb the power and territory of their families was a regular practice that would

initiate intergroup warfare. The raids made ongoing warfare a normative phenomenon

  73
throughout the islands. However, warfare could be mitigated by the formation of

guaytiao, pacts of eternal friendship between cacicas and caciques. New consideration

of the written and archeological data suggests that in the early years of contact with

Europeans, the cacicas’ or caciques’ practice of giving wives to the explorers was a

series of attempts to form guaytiaos that would commit the new comers to alliances

against enemy cacicas or caciques (Sued-Badillo 2003b: 261).

A single cacica or cacique could have several thousand if not several hundred

thousand subjects within her/his domain,

organized in a tightly structured social

hierarchy. There were no standing armed

forces but cacica or caciques could call upon

their subjects for war, for tribute, and/or to

complete large agricultural or public works Figure 3 Replica of Taíno bohío

houses, Banes, Cuba. smj 2006
©
projects, such as roads, irrigation dikes, and agricultural terraces. At the time of contact

with Europeans there were more than 100 Taíno cacicas and caciques operating in and

among islands of the Greater Antilles (Sued-Badillo 2003b: 287). Cuba specifically was

known to have some 17 cacicas and/or caciques that over saw cacicazgos of up to

2,000 inhabitants (Sued-Badillo 2003b: 259-279). The cacique’s living quarters, which

were round residential buildings made of palm leaves with conical shaped thatched

roofs and called bohíos, were positioned with the baety, the space in front of the cacicas

or caciques living quarters, where ceremonies, or cojobas, and important community

  74
gathering occurred. Villages were loosely organized around this central rectangle space

of the baety.

Archeological evidence suggests that Taíno villages were organized close to the

sea, as its products provided a cornerstone of food resources and village economy.

Conches were of primary importance as this marine shell animal provided food, material

for adornment, the manufacture of tools for daily survival, and implements of war. In

addition to marine life, Taíno communities subsisted on fruit, especially the guayaba,

and cultivated tubers and grains. Their diets were supplemented by wild plants and

animals––chiefly hutiyas, a tree-dwelling rodent––harvested from forested areas

surrounding a village (Domínguez 1984). In the context of re-viewed information and

revised understandings about Taíno social life, there also is

new written evidence of their belief system.

The religious system of Taíno AmerIndians

understood a revered Supreme Creative Being of virginal

birth from a mother associated with the natural phenomenon

of the ocean and sea. Taíno’s also placed primacy on

engaging spirits, supra-natural ones and spirits of their dead Figure 4 Large
replica of a zemís in
family members. They represented supra-natural spirits in the the courtyard of El
Museo de Banes,
form of carved wooden figurines called zemíses. Banes, Cuba. smj
2006 ©
Archeological evidence suggests that zemíses were

understood to contain the spirit-essence of trees from which they were carved, and as

such, took on an “elite status…in the complex relationship between the physical and

symbolic landscapes of the Taíno” (Saunders 1996: 811). Village members designated

  75
spaces in individual living quarters for the zemís(es) to live along side family members

(Bisnauth 1996: 131-144; Sued-Badillo 2003b: 265; Abulafia 2009: 137-138). In addition

to creating space in bohíos for zemíses, interaction with the statues of spirits included

providing them with designated food items for their ethereal consumption.

Several recent authors have reported that the bones of the Taíno dead were kept

in gourds or terra cotta pots in designated spaces inside the households of living family

members (Domínguez 1984; Saunders 1996; Torres-Cuevas 2007). Such a practice is

consistent with newer understandings about the cosmic orientation of Taíno culture as

the remains of their dead were regularly used in ritual practices (Saunders 1996;

Keegan 2007; Torres-Cuevas 2007; Keegan 2008). There also is archeological

evidence to suggest that contact between Taíno and their spirit familiars was facilitated

by the ingestion of cohiba, a white powered substance derived from tobacco. This

recent information about Taíno beliefs and practices regarding categories of spirits

allows insight into what types of beliefs and practices were present in the social

universe of the Taíno, and what would be echoed by the Palo Monte/Mayombe religious

collective: that there is an active spirit universe that intersects with the social world of

humans, and that the products of the land can be recruited to facilitate those

relationships.

Taíno and Religion: Recent academic review and re-assessment of Taíno life

and culture allow me to surmise that the physical representations of zemíses beings, as

well as the remains of the dead within households, were a means of spiritually

populating living spaces with nonseen members of Taíno kinship groups. The powers of

a kinship group extended beyond the living to include categories of other worldly beings

  76
as members of the social group, and the social power of a cacicazgos community was

only potent and effective when regularly companioned with Other World power. Such

comprehensions about relatedness set the early cultural parameters for how Palo

supplicants would come to comprehend spirits as active and functioning community

members.

Spirits of dead Taíno members, zemíses, and living family and other human

community members all “populated” AmerIndian society. Spirits were in intimate

physical and interactive relationship with daily lives of community members. They were

set into place inside of Taíno collectivities, not distanced from the everyday reality of a

living community. This Taíno inclusivity of those who had died and those that were

super natural was direct action that demonstrated reciprocal interconnectedness

between all community members. Individuals and categories of all actors in the spirit

social world had responsibilities if not obligations toward the others in the collective

environment. At a minimum, members of Taíno societies were responsible to locate

representations of spirit beings in living quarters and activities, attend to sprits’

“physical” representations by sharing food, and actively seek communication with the

otherworldly entities. Tobacco-derived substances facilitated the communication

(Bisnauth 1996: 4; Pané and Arrom 1999; Abulafia 2009: 140).

In any village, the physical boundary between the human world and the world of

spirits was the edge of the cacica or cacique––spiritual and social leader’s––domain.

This was usually at the beginning of the wild-forested areas and signifies how animal

and plant sources could be incorporated into the world of the living. By collecting and

importing flora and fauna into human social spaces, the Taíno infused the power of the

  77
spirit world into those spaces. These activities were a cultural priority and a foundation

of religious creation in Oriente, placing social emphasis on the realms of non-human,

ethereal others. For those who would come to know Oriente as “home,” the sacred

power known to be in statues, bones, rocks, etc. could be recruited and activated to

reassert and restructure sacred kinship systems. Here the evidence also points to how

individuals could place substances drawn from the land into circulation during

interactions with the various actors of the kinship system to bond and re-bond the living

community to the land. The recruitment of the natural world to mediate relations

between the human and spirit work is also reflected within the interview statements of

Palo worshipers who understand that the wisdom of the land is equally transmitted

through their constructed sacred ceremonial spaces even as their spirit familiars

communicate with them. Antonio, the last male leader of the Palo worship community,

commented on “how rocks contain the ambiance of the earth—that all things of nature

have life,” and when he picks one such natural element up and holds it, he “asks [the

object] if it belongs to a spirit” (Johnson 2009).

Interestingly, little scholarship––including anthropological works––explicitly treats

how the social position of cacicas or caciques affected Taíno religious understandings,

though some note that these leaders held religious power. This is puzzling, given that

the cacicas or cacique’s role as an extra-ordinary human was particularly important in

Taíno religious world. My assessment is that through emphasis on kinship systems and

the centrality of cacicas and caciques to Taíno social order, these leaders represented

the long-term medium through which the Other World guidance could be channeled,

received, and acted upon in a cacicazgos community. This understanding could explain

  78
why the systematic violent elimination of the caciques by the Spanish conquistadors

and their agents––priests and settlers––wreaked havoc on Taíno social systems. The

destruction of cacicas or caciques throughout the first half of the sixteenth century, to

make way for Spanish exploitation of the Caribbean region and its people, meant that

Taíno individuals central to kinship networks and alliances were destroyed. It also

meant that power and guidance from the Other World was severed. The imprisonment

of Taíno on encomienda, proto-plantations constructed by the Spanish, further

dismantled social life as they were forcibly removed from their bohío, the batey, and the

edge of the Other World, all sites of sacrality. The destruction of these key social figures

severed the living connections between the Taíno and their spirit familiars, and in so

doing, decimated the core relationships that maintained Taíno social order. However,

instead of completely silencing Taíno social and religious narratives, the transfer of the

ancestral wisdom of how to maintain the bonds between the human and spirit world

through using multivocal elements of nature was transferred to the newest and reluctant

arrivals to Cuba: the Africans.

The composite of these new and recent understandings helps us better set the

social context of early Cuba into which imported sixteenth-century Kongo Africans

arrived. Additional comprehensions about the Taíno socioreligious structure are doubly

informative for this dissertation project as they add veracity to articulations made by

contemporary practitioners of Palo believers in Oriente. However, there also is a

necessity to detail life, beliefs, and practices of the first Kongo Africans who

encountered Cuba and its AmerIndian inhabitants.

  79
The Kongolese Presence

At the turn of the sixteenth century, the predatory Spanish began using members

of the Taíno population as enslaved labor and concubines after systematically

eradicating their cacicazgos communities. The surviving members were forced to

relocate and live on encomiendas, Cuba’s pre-plantation arrangements, in which the

AmerIndians were completely dependent on the Spanish for their food and shelter

(Rouse 1992; Keegan 2007). The strange new living arrangements coupled with

exploitative work patterns and exposure to new diseases that caused further destruction

to native communities. However, these new realities faced by Taíno were met with

unrelenting resistance (Rivera-Pagán 2003: 316-337; Sued-Badillo 2003b: 280-291).

Intra-island warfare throughout the Caribbean continued against invading

Spanish forces. Individuals and groups ran away from Spanish enslavement and staged

individual and collective rebellions, such as intentionally killing themselves to join the

Other World rather than live in enslavement (Rivera-Pagán 2003: 329-338; Sued-Badillo

2003a: 274-286; Abulafia 2009: 192-198). Nevertheless, the Spanish decimated the

Taíno and other indigenous populations by the middle of the sixteenth century (Rouse

1992). The Spanish were intent on establishing their European understandings of social

structure, culture, and religious priorities and preferences to the new colony. Even after

the first generation of European contact, Cuban Taíno society had been completely

disrupted and fragmented.

Since the early fifteenth century, the Portuguese had experimented with enslaved

labor on plantations in the Canary Islands. For the most part, these laborers for the

enterprises on the Canary Islands were from areas drawn from groups within the Kongo

  80
Kingdom territory. Individuals from varieties of ethnic groups contained within this

kingdom, including some of their mulatto descendants, were used as enslaved labor on

the Islands and then later exported throughout sectors of Spanish and Portuguese

societies (Sued-Badillo 1992a; Inikori and Engerman 1994: 1-21; Thomas 1997: 114-

149; Pané and Arrom 1999; Mendes 2008: 63-79; Abulafia 2009: 65-114).

At the close of the fifteenth century, the use of people captured from Africa was

seen as an effective way to replace Taíno labor in plantation, mining, domestic, and

skilled labor enterprises. The Spanish priest, Father Bartolomé de las Casas, who

participated in and witnessed the systematic destruction of the Cuban Taíno and their

cultural system, eventually petitioned the Papacy of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth

century to end enslavement and genocide of AmerIndians, and turn to a more reliable

labor pool of people extracted from Africa (Sued-Badillo 1992a; Pané and Arrom 1999).

The burgeoning trade in Africans was seen as a reliable replacement labor pool

and the Church, including Las Casas, supported the exchange (Sued-Badillo 1992a;

Pané and Arrom 1999). By 1502, the dual Spanish Kings, Isabel and Ferdinand

authorized the importation of Africans to the Americas, and African populations quickly

became the replacement labor force for Cuba (Sued-Badillo 1992a: 77; Palmer 1997:

13). Individuals drawn from the regions from and surrounding the Kongo Kingdom were

the numerical majority of captives that the Portuguese transported to the Americas

during these early years. At the time, the Kongo Kingdom covered areas contemporarily

known as Gabon, Angola, the Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Portuguese had long-established political, social, and economic

relationships within this African kingdom and held a monopoly on the burgeoning trans-

  81
Atlantic importation of Africans from the sixteen through the mid-eighteenth centuries

(Thornton 1998b; Thornton 1998a: 43-71; Hall 2005: 144-164; Eltis and Richardson

2008: 1-22). Warfare and political maneuvering within the Kongo Kingdom continued to

produce streams of captives for the forced relocation sites across the Atlantic.

Individuals known to possess efficacious religious knowledge and spiritual power were

exported to the New World of the Americas (Thornton 1998b: 199-214; Thornton 1998a;

Heywood 2002: 91-105; Thornton 2002: 73-83). While there were many different ethnic

groups within the Kingdom’s boundaries, it was the BaKongo ethnic members of the

Kongo Kingdom who accounted for the majority of Africans imported to Oriente (Valdes

1988; Díaz 2000: 113; Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler 2005: 33-37; Hall 2005: 67-68;

Heywood and Thornton 2007; Dodson 2008: 27-32). The prevalence of BaKongo

ethnics as the predominate number of African people imported to the Oriente region is

significant. Recent linguistic study of the ritual language of Palo Monte in Oriente has

revealed that the prevalence of Palo religious communities in the eastern province can

be linked to the predominance of BaKongo speakers of Kikongo in the area. Moreover,

the “crystallization of [Palo] practices” as conducted in the ritual language of Kikongo

suggests that the most “orthodox forms of [Palo] rituals are maintained in the eastern

region of Cuba (Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler 2005: 30-38).

Historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s work provides details about the importation of

African ethnic groups to the Caribbean, revising and expanding earlier speculations

about the social realities of Africans and their descendants during the centuries-long

transatlantic exchanges. Midlo Hall extended the original 1975 propositions of Sidney

Mintz and Richard Price and proposed that instead of completely fragmented crowds of

  82
individuals, specific ethnic grouping of Africans made specialized contributions to social

formations in the Americas. She and others began focusing attention on the significance

of late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth-century Kongo captives to the cultural presence,

imprint, and formations across the Atlantic. Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler add

additional refinement and insight to how such cultural creative processes occurred

within Oriente by suggesting that the numeric concentration and dominance of the

BaKongo in the area meant that the cultural content these social actors contributed

would be heavily influential in the area.

John Thornton and Linda Marinda Heywood’s scholarship provides details of the

nature of the type of cultural influence that the BaKongo Kikongo-speaking ethnic

grouping could have contributed, particularly regarding issues significant to this

dissertation project. These authors helped clarify the prominence of ancestral insight to

the lives of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Kongolese and the type of rituals used to

access such knowledge (Thornton 1998b; Heywood and Thornton 2007). Thornton’s

1998 volume on the Kongolese Saint Anthony, Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, a fifteenth-

century Kongolese woman of noble birth, provides an even more detailed discussion of

the potency of ancestral revelation in directing political and social action of the living

significant to my work. In the Kongolese social world Dona Beatriz occupied, the

Ngangas, “medium[s] to the Other World,” were responsible for bridging the physical

distance between the Other World of spirits and the material world where the living

belonged (Thornton 1998a: 53-56).

Nganga derives from the Kikongo word meaning “knowledge” and/or “skill” but is

specifically related to expertise in religious activities. In the case of Kongolese social

  83
fabric, the “knowledge” and “skill” to transcend the material world and be in contact and

communion with other worldly beings was the skill of an Nganga. Individuals recognized

and anointed as Ngangas formed kimpasi societies to address the social needs of a

community. A kimpasi collective was independent and locally operated, though

members of individual kimpasies would share camaraderie among themselves. Each

kimpasi society had physical lodging space set apart from the community and

constructed on the margins of a village’s physical boundaries. By locating the kimpasi

encampment at the edge of the human social realm “in the wild,” Ngangas were

unencumbered by human social constraints as they negotiated boundaries between the

world of the spirits and the material world. As Thornton reported about access to the

Other World, Ngangas could:

Be diviners who read the patterns made by throwing stones or tossed-up

strings, or they could interpret dreams that they or other people had. They
might see visions or hear voices, all of which were means the Other World
used to communicate with This World. Ngangas could also be possessed
[sic] by beings from the Other World. A possessed Nganga, such as
Nganga Ngombo, would go into a trance, either through taking special
drugs or, more commonly, through various forms of hypnosis induced by
drumming, dancing, or simply rhythmic chanting and hand clapping. Once
this state was achieved, some being from the Other World would enter the
Nganga’s head, and then use his or her vocal cords to speak. In this way,
ordinary people without special gifts could hear the words of those in the
Other World. They could ask questions of the spirit and receive answers
(Thornton 1998a: 54).

This lengthy summary of an Nganga’s responsibilities is poignant for it delivers the

significance and importance of Ngangas to the normal functioning of the fifteenth-and

sixteenth-century Kongo community.

Part of individuals’ religious practices within the Kongo Kingdom was the

emphasis on communicating with spirits in order to receive revelatory information to

  84
negotiate their political and social relationships (Thornton 1998b: 13; Thornton 1998a).

As is normative for human cultural behavior, they organized their social world based on

activity and/or input from other worldly spirits. This was a significant understanding

among fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Kongo Kingdom inhabitants transplanted across

the Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, Thornton highlights the type of normal behavioral

activities associated with the religious realities of individuals forcibly exported from the

Kongo Kingdom during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In his work on Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and in subsequent writing, Thornton

draws our attention to the fact that the political maneuvering and upheaval that marked

the Kongo Kingdom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created steady streams

of captives to be exported across the Atlantic. Ngangas had a high degree of

exportation because of their roles inside disrupting communities’ sociocultural and

political functioning. They would have been significant participants in the religious

knowledge of warring factions. Winners in such battles would immediately ship Ngangas

out of the area to life-long exile in the Americas (Thornton 1998b; Heywood and

Thornton 2007: 68-69).

Exportation and elimination of the Ngangas could mean successful domination

because critical links between the wisdom of the Other World and the human world had

been severed (Thornton 1998b; Thornton 1998a; Thornton 1999; Cavazzi, et al. 2010).

However, documentary evidence suggests that exile to the Americas did not end

Kongolese reliance on religious expertise and abilities nor did it end the role or activities

of Ngangas. In Cuba and particularly in Oriente, it suggests that instead the Nganga’s

  85
knowledge was transplanted, transformed, and given new meaning when Kongolese

came in contact with the Taíno in the new social circumstances of enslavement.

Connections: The significance of introducing Kongolese enslaved laborers

into Cuba’s social development during the earliest centuries is that the remaining

enslaved Taíno found that the social norms that guided their behaviors were closely

aligned with Africans practices. Though both cultural groups were enslaved, they

maintained the ability to recompose social order inclusive of ideas and practices about

the integration of living and spirit entities. In some ways, this equaled a new foundation

of independence and self-rule for the two, now-uniting groups. The joint precedent

served as a significant referent for continued action, particularly rebellion and religious

practice. It was also a significant referent for all of Cuba’s social and political identity

development.

Ethnic boundaries were also more flexible because the radically new social

circumstances of Africans and remaining native population were not inclusive of their

social or cultural needs. Ethnic and cultural distinctions known in Africa transformed and

expanded in the Americas, and group affiliation was established by way of ritual

initiation. Stephen Palmíe has discussed this additive approach to community network-

building among Africans and their descendants in the Americas as “ethnogenesis”

(Palmié 1993). While Midlo Hall and Palmíe provide details from more urban spaces

where Africans and their descendants were active contributors to colonial society, I find

their work equally useful to speculate about the social exchanges between Africans, the

native population, and their descendants that were not part of the visible exchanges in

European-sanctioned social spaces.

  86
 As the Spanish colonial system expanded in the sixteenth century, the numbers

of the enslaved people began to shift, and Africans, specifically those drawn from the

boundaries of the Kongo Kingdom, began to outnumber and then replace Cuba’s native

populations as the primary labor pool in households, small-scale agricultural operations,

and animal husbandry. However, the numerically dominant Africans also continued their

resistance efforts, fighting and self-liberating in the same manner as the remaining

Taíno populations. Oriente’s isolation from the power centers of the island also created

an even greater sense of social distance from the Spanish metropole. Self– and group

liberation activities from enslavement became the norm in Oriente from as early as 1535,

when a joint raid by a Taíno and African coalition fighting force attacked the Spanish

settlement of Bayamo and razed it to the ground. Such sustained raids and armed

resistance by the subjugated populations against the Spanish settlers in Oriente was set

against a social backdrop of clandestine trade, privateering, and self-rule. Even as

Spanish colonials in the east pleaded for reinforcements to combat the banded

AmerIndian and African forces who harassed colonial settlements, the petitions were

relatively unanswered (Thomas 1998: 37-38; Pérez 2011: 30-44).

Most significantly, some Africans and Taínos escaped to the mountainous terrain

of the Sierra Maestras in Oriente and formed palenque communities; free and self-

defined settlements of people who had escaped bondage (Dodson 2008: 86-87). It is

estimated that a minimum of 300 palenques existed in the eastern mountain ranges,

with an average of 250 members, but often times numbering in the hundreds if not

thousands (Franco 1973: 29-32; Duharte 1986; Dodson 2008: 29-31). Evidence of the

successful collaborations between AmerIndians and Africans is documented in colonial

  87
records that chart systematic raids and sustained warfare by palenque communities on

Spanish settlements in Oriente from approximately 1533 to 1871 (Franco 1973: 29).

The new information about the numerical make up of the palenques would have been

skewed towards the BaKongo cultural proclivities, suggesting that the practices of these

inhabitants would have been reflective of intensive influence from members of this

ethnic grouping. At the turn of the sixteenth century, the Taíno populations had suffered

significant losses due to maltreatment, disease, and radical assaults on their way of life.

Africans became the numerical majority both in palenques and as the enslaved labor

force throughout Oriente. The numerical majority of the Africans over time suggests that

palenque micro-societies would become neo-African in character, with strong influences

from the Kongolese. The grappling for social power and presence that occurred in

Oriente in the formation of the Cuban colony had thousands of causalities. Many other

thousands were lost within the continental space of Africa and in the transit to the island

colony. These dead joined the familial categories of others who died after living through

the early centuries of nation building in the island. The interring of the remains of these

individuals and their mixed-race progeny over the course of several generations

designated Oriente as the “consecrated” ground of the nation.

Collaborative associations between the Taíno and Kongolese members suggests

that the combined ideas, beliefs and behaviors of these groups set the “baseline” for

cultural comprehensions as well as ritual activity among newly transplanted Africans

and their descendants, which would be incorporated into the sociocultural fabric of

Oriente. Historian Jalil Sued-Badillo best summarizes the interchange between the

Taíno and African groups as this:

  88
 The principal mixing of races that occurred in the sixteenth century was
between indigenes and blacks [sic]. It is important to recognize this
because it fell to blacks to keep alive for posterity much of the culture of
the indigene peoples. The native order of life—agriculture on small plots,
living in bohíos, the medical secrets of the native flora, fishing and
gathering techniques, something of the old religion and even of ancestral
values—had to be maintained by a line that was in some real sense
foreign to it all. But even more important—love of freedom had to be kept
alive as well. Given the system of exploitation under which both races
worked, colour [sic] had no meaning (Sued-Badillo 2003b: 286).

Sued-Badillo highlights critical aspects of the cooperative nature of the interactions

between the remaining Taíno’s and newly imported Africans in the sixteenth century

that have remained relatively unexplored. First, that the racial and ethnic intermixing

occurred most often between the Taíno and imported Africans in the early colonial years.

The shared social position of enslavement, resistance to labor bondage, and “love of

freedom” would have provided strong incentive for the AmerIndians and Africans to join

their lives. I would add to Sued-Badillo’s summation that overlapping comprehensions

about the material world of humans overlapping with the world of spirit beings, and the

need for human attention to ritualistically maintain such relationships could also serve

as a point for fueling comprehensions and practices of “freedom.”

In addition to the perspective of self-liberation, community creation, and

empowerment, the united efforts of the two groups imprinted Oriente with an ethos that

prioritized the inclusion of spirit beings in the everyday reality of subsequent generations.

This attitudinal position is best encapsulated by a local idiom, “Oriente is the land of the

dead” (Johnson 2004; Johnson 2008; Johnson 2009). Casa researcher # 2 confirmed

the integrative ritual partnering by the early collaborative alliances between the native

and African-descended populations, particularly in the arena of spirit engagement, that

is seen in contemporary Palo practice in Oriente, when he stated:

  89
 The philosophy (of Palo) is African; and the rituals and symbols (bones in
a basket, tobacco and powders) of the native populations were adopted.
Fundamentally, African practices are additive and adaptive based on the
effectiveness of the exchange between the spirits and people. The dead
are the essence of religion in Oriente; the intimate connection between life
and death is negotiated by the TaTa’s work with the nganga (Johnson
8
2008).

Cosmic Commonalities:

The once-enslaved Taíno and Africans who fled to the mountains of Oriente

combined their overlapping comprehensions about the dead and natural phenomena.

These shared understandings about the universe’s order provided the basis for the

formation of new ritual practices reflecting the new and shared social reality of each

group. In addition to intersecting appreciations about the dead and supernatural beings,

the two groups also held an understanding that forested areas were sacred reservoirs

containing the creative essence of the universe in the form of plants, rocks, soil, animals,

etc. (Franco 1973; Thompson, et al. 1981; Luaces 2002; Johnson 2004; Torres-Cuevas

2007; Johnson 2008; Johnson 2009).

Each group believed that a successful and vibrant community consisted of a wide

variety of spirits, including but not limited to supernatural beings associated with natural

phenomena, ancestral spirits, and the recently dead. The Taíno and Kongo African

populations shared an understanding that these non-material entities were intimate

members of their social world. Spirit members of the community were to be engaged

ritualistically and re-membered into the material world of the living (Dodson 2008: 71-

74). That is to say, that the spirits’ membership in the collective was to be regularly

                                                                                                               
8
The definition of a “TaTa” will be presented in chapter 4 along with clarification of
nganga spelled with a lowercase “n.”

  90
reaffirmed through ritual activities to include these entities into the social lives of the

living. The purpose of such exchanges reflected each group’s understanding that spirits

have experiential wisdom about the nature of human worlds as well as dimensions of

the universe beyond human comprehension.

By engaging spirit members, Taíno and Kongo individuals could collectively

access ancestral wisdom about how to negotiate their social reality as well as their

connections within a universe beyond their human capacities. In this regard, each group

prioritized exchanges with the ancestral dead by utilizing their skeletal remains. Each

group would have had expertise about how to engage ethereal entities and shared

those skills to commune with spirits. For example, the native populations brought

understandings about the flora and fauna of the land and how to use them for rituals to

invoke spirit beings to commune with the living. Tobacco and the hutiya were two such

key biological elements from Taíno religious practices that became part of these ritual

exchanges. Such understandings and behaviors of spirit engagement and emplacement

would have been familiar to the newly imported Kongo people. A reverence for the dead

and the continuation of the presence of the dead as part of the social activity of the

living also held a key position in the principels of the early Kongolese imported to Cuba.

What is of critical significance for the focus of this dissertation research is that the

remaining AmerIndian population and the newly imported African populations had

comprehensions about other worldly beings as entities that could and should be brought

into the physical and social reality of humans. Even before they came into forced

contact with each other in Oriente, each community had designated geographic

locations, living space, social role(s), and specialized behavioral practices dedicated to

  91
communing with other worldly beings within their societies. The priority of communing

with spirit entities as members of the living community in such particularized ways

became an early and significant social behavior that imprinted itself in the social fabric

within the east.

The two populations would have melded their rituals into ceremonial complexes

and assembled spaces inclusive of material goods from their natural and social

environment that reflected aspects of the spirit entities they collectively engaged. That is

to suggest that significant spirit others of the two communities would be jointly re-

membered through ritual processes—brought back to simultaneously occupy the natural

world of humans. Such communing experiences between the sixteenth-century Taíno

and Kongolese groups would have facilitated the creation of a religious world that

assisted members of these populations in negotiating the trauma of the disruptions to

their social lives and symbolic worlds. More importantly, such companioned interactions

to engage the ancestors via elements of newly created home space would respond to

their innate human need to perform their religious world in their own terms.

I propose that shared perspectives about the sacrality of the natural landscape

space and how to use it to integrate the reality of human being with that of spirit beings

was a key component to how the AmerIndians and Africans combined their religious

worlds. That both the Taíno and the Kongolese understood forested spaces as the

gateway to the Other World was critical for developing rituals that drew upon materials

from the natural world to invite different spirit beings into the reality of these human

groups.

  92
 Within reported activities among sixteenth-century Taíno and Kongo populations,

we can see the emergence of the foundations for a newly constructed religious world

inclusive of shared comprehensions about and ritual activities that engaged the land, its

products, and the remains of the ancestral dead. These composite understandings and

ritual activities provided cornerstones of religious world creation inspired by the land, its

products, and the remains of the ancestral dead. All of these pre-cursor ideas, beliefs

and ritual activities were transmitted to the racially mixed generations of Oriente, Cuba

and in the twentieth century, would be officially organized into the formal practice of

Palo Mayombe (James Figarola, et al. 1999; Luaces 2002; Dodson 2008; Johnson

2008).

The foundational expectation of spirit engagement initiated and maintained by

AmerIndian and African populations in Oriente during the early years of the Cuban

colony set the precedent of incorporating ideas and religious practices of additional

9
migrating populations. In the late 1700s, French criollos fleeing the Haitian Revolution

migrated to Cuba, bringing their captive African-descended labor force and technical

advances in sugar, coffee and tobacco production with them. Africans and African

descendants brought to Cuba from the newly liberated island of Haití continued

engaging loa, supra-natural spirits and ancestral dead through the ritual practices of

Voodoo/Vodú (Millet and Alarcón 1998: 104-123; Dodson 2008: 104-123). Spiritualism

was another tradition that flourished in eastern Cuba at the turn of the nineteenth

century. Spiritualism, or Espiritísmo and its variants, was imported from the United

                                                                                                               
9
Criollo refers to those individuals born in the Americas during the colonial era,
regardless of their race or ethnicity.

  93
States and based on French Spiritualism practices. Spiritualism centered on

communicating with spirits of recently dead intimates through séances.

The importation patterns of Africans to Cuba changed over time as intra- and

inter-empire grappling shifted circumstances in Western Africa and among other nations

participating in the larger trans-Atlantic trade in humans (Gemery and Hogendorn 1974;

Drescher 1994; Palmer 1997; Thomas 1997; Eltis and Richardson 2008). Notably, by

the mid-1830s, people drawn from the Yoruba Empire were pressed into the

transatlantic exportation of Africans, shifting the ethnic makeup of Cuba’s Africa-born

population (Lovejoy and Trotman 2002: 55-79; Falola and Childs 2004; Hall 2005).

Cuba’s primary ports of importation and exportation had been relocated from Oriente to

the Havana and Matanzas provinces in response to these global economic and political

transformations. These structural changes repositioned colonial interests away from the

near-inaccessible eastern/Oriente region. From the early seventeenth century forward,

Havana and the western provinces would be known as Cuba’s seat of political,

economic and social power.

In 1803, the Haitian Revolution came to fruition, which saw the successful

toppling of French colonial dominance and racialized enslavement by people of African

descent (Trouillot 1995; James [1963] 1998). The success of the first Black Republic in

the Americas powerfully affected all colonial systems in the hemisphere. Haití

introduced a counterstatement to racialized rule and enslavement, which had been the

normative social structuring from the early sixteenth century forward. The Haitían

Revolution also induced change in the economic system of the Americas. The fall of

San Domingue’s (now Haití’s) French-run sugar plantation system in 1803 meant that

  94
Europe had to find a new supplier for its sugar addition. Cuba served as the colonial

inheritor of sugar production for North America and Europe. Cuba assumed the

responsibilities of sugar production for the Western world, and with it, redoubled the

intensive exploitation of African bodies for labor. Franklin Knight estimated that

enslaved individuals working on sugar plantations, or ignecios, had an expected life

span of seven years (Knight 1970: 73-84).

The majority of sugar production in Cuba took place on the open plains of the

western and central portion of the island. Some sugar production took place in Oriente,

but not on the same scale. What each region throughout Cuba did share during the

nineteenth century was revolt and rebellion of enslaved Africans and their increasing

number of descendants. A case in point is the sustained self-liberation efforts of African-

descended people during in the Las Escalares period of uprising from the late 1820s to

1844. During the Las Escalares period of rebellion, well-organized units of people of

African lineage launched a series of attacks against their enslavers. A woman, Carlotta,

and co-conspirators, Manuel and Felipe, mounted one well-known campaign in the

providence of Matanzas. The uprising lasted for several days, moving from one

plantation to the next. It was eventually brutally suppressed. As part of their torture and

punishment for collaboration with the rebelling forces, individuals were tied to ladders

and whipped nearly to death, giving the period of rebellion its infamous name, “Las

Escalares” (The Ladders) (Saco and Ortiz 1938; Ortiz 1975; Palmié 2002; Johnson

2006). It must be remembered that individual action to find freedom continued

throughout the nineteenth century, and it was well known that if enslaved individuals in

the west or central sections of the island could get to Oriente, they could join up with the

  95
palenque community network and live freely (Montejo and Barnet 1968: 43-47; Johnson

2006). Moreover, the social conditions of self-referencing rule, continual challenges to

Spanish colonials authority, and ongoing racialized enslavement continued in Oriente,

even as these newer episodes of social upheaval were instigated in the west and

central portions of the island.

In 1868, activities to bring about the end of enslavement intersected with the

aspirations of Cuba’s European criollos for independence movement from Spain. Carlos

Manuel Céspedes, a Spanish criollo plantation owner immediately enlisted the help of

the enslaved African-descended population and raised the first call to rebellion against

the Spanish metropole in the mountains of Oriente by freeing and recruiting the

enslaved workers to fight in the war against Spain. Céspedes declared Cuba was to be

free for all Cubans, and he along with the newly freed African Cubans on his plantation

conducted a ceremony to launch the new alliance and the call to war against Spain

(Ferrer 1999: 15-35). Of significant importance, individuals living in the palenques and

communities under palenque-protection joined the

official multiracial freedom forces.

Momentum for the 1868 Cuban independence

movement spread throughout eastern Cuba, and the

rebelling forces advanced throughout the island to

eventually unseat the Spanish forces in 1898 in Figure 5 Guermond

Moncada’s ritual elements.
Havana (Montejo and Barnet 1968; Foner 1977; smj 2009 ©

Ferrer 1999). Antonio Maceo and Guermond Moncada were two free Cubans of African

lineage who were key leaders during Cuba’s protracted independence struggle from

  96
1868 forward. Each man was born and raised in the historic neighborhood of Los Hoyos.

Moncada was an active practitioner of ritual practices that engaged the dead, and held

an active nganga during the 1868 to 1898 independence movement (Johnson 2008).

One of Moncada’s direct descendants continues to maintain his sacred ritual materials.

Maceo and Moncada along with other free Cubans of African lineage, organized

multiracial fighting forces composed of free and enslaved individuals. In 1878, when

Spanish racialized propaganda was successful in having white creole leadership sign a

treaty to end aggressions to end enslavement and prevent Cuba from becoming

another Black Republic like Haití, General Maceo refused to capitulate. Instead, Maceo

and those loyal to him and the cause for a free Cuba went into exile and marshaled

support to reignite the Cuban independence movement in 1878 (Foner 1977; Ferrer

1999).

Historically and contemporarily, Los Hoyos has been a seedbed for rebellion

against European-dominated power structures within Cuba. The neighborhood was also

the center of religious activity of all varieties, and continues to be an acknowledged

ceremonial center of the city (Dodson 2008; Johnson 2009; Johnson 2010). I situated

the dissertation research in the neighborhood of Los Hoyos because of the central role

it and members of its population played in the socio-historical context of Cuban religious

formation and identity formation. Los Hoyos residents continue to celebrate their

neighborhood as a strong hold that has created generations of individuals committed to

Cuba’s self-rule. In telling the family history of the Palo worship community, one

interviewee Sophia, the matriarch of the blood-related family members of the Palo

worship community, recounted how both her maternal and paternal grand fathers fought

  97
in the independence wars. This is to suggest that the blood family members of the Palo

worship community were linked to the local and national history of social struggles for

freedom and independence as these took shape in Oriente. That is to say that her

family has a long-standing and intimate involvement with the shaping of politics in the

Oriente region. Contemporarily the impact of the family on social relations has occurred

in the arena of religion, most notably through the family’s effective ritual work with spirits

within Palo.

In 1898, Cuba was formally recognized as a free republic, but the struggle to end

colonial rule had not officially ended within the island nation. Months before

independence leadership had declared Cuba’s independence from Spain, a U.S.

warship was blown up in the harbor of Havana, and the U.S. invaded Santiago de Cuba,

declaring war on Spain. Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders and Black U.S.

regiments organized during the Civil War invaded Santiago de Cuba, attacking

recalcitrant pockets of Spanish soldiers along with battle-worn Cuban units (Brock 1998;

Traxel 1998; de la Fuente 2001; Bronfman 2004). The U.S. intervention in 1898

replaced the Spanish as political, economic, and social overseers, realizing a long-held

aspiration of U.S. President Thomas Jefferson; for the U.S. to own Cuba and its natural

and human resources.

During the early republic years, Cuba struggled to organize a functioning

independent political and economic system, as corruption was the norm, and

international businesses and politics continued to hold sway over the internal

organization. One potent example of external demands dictating Cuba’s system was the

1912 race massacre in Oriente. The Partído de Independente de Color (Independent

  98
Colored Party) was formed in 1907 by Black veterans from the War of Independence.

Members of PIC organized to protest persistent exclusion of Blacks from the

government and social benefits of Cuba’s First Republic. The exclusion had occurred

even as Blacks had fought in all wars that led to Cuban independence from colonial rule.

In response to PIC, the Cuban government, at the threat of invasion from the U.S.,

massacred some 3,000 African-descended associates of the PIC in 1912 after they had

gathered in La Maya, a small predominately Black town in Oriente (Montejo and Barnet

1968: 215-218; Helg 1995; Castíllo Bueno 1996: 48-54; Castro Fernández 2008;

Martínez Heredia 2009: 318-323).

After the massacre, political organizations based on race were outlawed, and a

particularized form of “color blindness” became the national rhetoric, even as racialized

discrimination had been the cultural norm for four centuries. Cuba’s race relations were

further strained by the U.S. imposition of its own legalized form of segregation, ushered

into U.S. law in 1896’s Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling. The double layering

of segregation and exclusion based on phenotype made equal participation in Cuba’s

new social order nearly nonexistent for Black Cubans. Race-based society-wide

exclusions along with the twentieth-century Whitening Campaigns of the Southern

Hemisphere of the Atlantic (Helg 1990: 37-43; de la Fuente 2001: 23-44) made any

associations, overt or otherwise, with Africa or an “African” identity in Cuba nearly

impossible. Harassment, imprisonment, police raids on sacred spaces and even

lynching of leadership of African-inspired religions was normative, and continued

throughout the Republic years (Helg 1995).

  99
 However, despite the state-sanctioned tyranny, communities that continued to

practice Africa-inspired traditions persisted and continued to flourish. Beginning in the

1920s a young U.S.- and Spanish-trained criminologist, Don Fernando Ortíz, began to

study the social and cultural lives of African descendants. Indeed, Melville Herskovits

had extensive correspondence with Ortíz, which influenced his own scholarship on

African “retentions” within the Atlantic Diaspora of Africans (Yelvington 2006a). While

Ortíz and the majority of his students focused on the western regions of Cuba, R.

Lachatañeré proposed that research conducted in the Oriente region would hold more

content and understandings about African inspirations in Cuban culture (Lachatañeré

1992). The work of this dissertation falls within the scope of a growing English-language

scholarship that focuses on Oriente and its Africa-inspired practices (Zaid 2006; Wirtz

2007; Dodson 2008; Dodson and Johnson 2009; Ashcraft-Eason, et al. 2010).

Cuba’s racial dynamics and subsequently, religious dynamics went relatively

unchanged from the Republic years up until 1963. While Protestantism and Catholicism

were practiced, and indeed Catholicism was recognized as the “official” national religion,

practitioners of Cuba’s African-inspired religions continued to be the numerical majority,

with more than 75 percent of the population practicing one or more of the traditions

(Ayorinde 2004; Sawyer 2006; Hearn 2008). The Cuban Revolution, initiated in 1953 in

the outskirts of Santiago and coming to completion in 1959, ushered in national

structural adjustments, and health, land, and educational access for all citizens became

a priority. Along with these social reforms, race-based and gender discrimination was

made illegal nationally (Smith and Padula 1996; Thomas 1998; Gleijeses 2002;

Guevara and Deutschmann 2003). During the 1953 struggle, as was the case during

  100
the 1868 movement, Black Cubans would account for the majority of the fighting forces.

This strong representation of African descendants in the 1953 movement, as with the

other armed struggles of the nation, had to do with their potential for social freedoms

and equal participation.

In the year’s following the 1959 Revolution, Black Cubans enjoyed more access

to the nation’s educational, employment, housing, and medical resources than during

any other time of the nation’s five-hundred-year history. However, the 1991 fall of the

former Soviet Union, Cuba’s key economic supporter, sent the island-nation’s gross

national product plummeting to a $-11.9 million dollars (Johnson 2004; Johnson 2008).

With the loss of the main importer of its sugar, Cuba has had to restructure its economic

system for the second time in the last fifty years to meet its social needs. Even as this

second structural adjustment has had severe implications for Cuba’s national project,

several key items significant to the dissertation research continue to garner attention.

The increase of tourism has brought in much-needed capital: however, with increased

tourist presence and demands, racialized preferencing is making a resurgence.

Land of the Dead

The geographic isolation from the rest of the island by the island’s largest

mountain range meant that that all “orientales” (easterners) were left to struggle to exist

as best they were able in the “backwater” region of Cuba. Oriente’s existence on the

margins of Cuba’s society entrenched a sense of independent cultural and political

awareness throughout the region that continued to influence the island’s sociopolitical

development throughout the colonial era, throughout the years of the republic, and

  101
contemporarily. Oriente’s increasing isolation created distinctive cultural expressions,

which marked the region as

the most Cuban region of all of Cuba, less susceptible to outside

influences, more committed to ways local and traditional. The factors
contribute to making Oriente the source and site of recurring revolutionary
stirrings. It was distant from authority, its communities were often
inaccessible to authorities, and its residents were typically scornful of
authority. It was in Oriente that Cuba’s principal revolutionary struggles
originated, beginning with the wars for independence in the nineteenth
century through the rebellion led by Fidel Castro in the 1950’s (Pérez
2011: 9).

However, even as Pérez credits the eastern region as “the most Cuban region,” and the

center of “recurring revolutionary stirrings,” his analysis remains near-silent on dynamic

social encounters and economic conditions that contributed to Oriente’s emergence as

the island’s archetypical province. I would expand Peréz’s observation about Oriente’s

distinctiveness by asserting that it was the established history of Cuba’s subalterns’

protracted struggle for self-definition and their resilient insistence on maintaining a

social world that included their spirit familiars that frames the region’s contributions to

Cuba’s nation building project. In this respect, the physical geography of Oriente has

become imbued with alternative chronicles about the generational legacies of freedom

from physical bondage, as represented by the skeletal remains of the first orientales

who sought their own forms of identity, and by the forested spaces of the Sierra

Maestras as the ritual and spiritual reservoirs of the Other World.

In December of 2011, members of the African Atlantic Research Team received

a delegation of Cuban academics––Drs. Barbara Danzic, Director of Cuba’s National

Libraries, and Isabel Hernandez Campos, Director of the Museum of Matanzas

Providence––that added credence to the significance of Oriente’s position in the social

  102
memory of the nation. In these conversations, Dr. Danzic affirmed that when

practitioners of Cuba’s distinctive religions in the western portions of the island are

asked “where is the most sacred space of Cuba…they will tell you always Oriente—

10
Oriente is the consecrated ground. ” Contemporary Palo practitioners encapsulate

their comprehension of the sacrality of Oriente as “African meets Indian, now the African

is Indian” (Johnson 2008; Johnson 2009).

I would further assert that Palo sacred spaces serve as alternative archives that

incorporate representations of spirit beings and the natural elements of the Other World.

Palo ritual spaces reflect the inherited wisdom from the Taíno about the sacred

sanctuary of the forest and exist as the social archives that document the struggle of

subaltern communities in eastern Cuba to reconstruct and maintain sacred family units.

Palo worshipers’ maintenance of their ritual spaces and activities to commune with the

ancestral spirits of Oriente is a project of un-silencing because through their religious

practice, Palo devotees incorporate the social history of the location in their everyday

activities of remembrance and consultation. The next chapter will provide an overview of

the spiritual orientation of Palo Monte/Mayombe that informs the religious practice and

sacred genealogy construction of its practitioners, which reveal the hidden histories of

the ritual ancestors of Palo Monte/Mayombe in Santiago de Cuba.

                                                                                                               
10
The conversation between Drs. Danzic and Hernandez took place on December 12,
2011 in 101 Morrill Hall, then offices of the AART. In attendance were Dr. Gwendolyn
Midlo Hall, AART Director Dr. Jualynne E. Dodson, and Team members Crystal Eddins,
William Escalante, and Alexandra Gelbard.

  103
 CHAPTER 4:
SPIRITUAL FOUNDATIONS
OF
PALO MONTE/MAYOMBE

  104
Introduction

Reglas Congo refers to those religious traditions that are based in the ritual and

linguistic traditions inherited from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century areas of

11
Kongolese Kingdom . Throughout the island nation’s history, supplicants of Palo

Monte, one of the Reglas Congo, have consistently experienced virulent forms of

persecution and violence and the practices continue to be among the most

misunderstood of religious activities in Cuba. However, the silencing and suppression of

Congo traditions have not gone unnoticed or unaddressed. Emerging archeological and

written archival materials are beginning to provide details on how sixteenth- and

seventeenth-century Kongo Kingdom Africans provided the foundation to Africa-based

cultural activity in the Americas (García 1995; Fennell 2007b: 199-232; Mendes 2008;

Thompson [1983] 1984: 103-158). The intent of this chapter is to provide a better

understanding of the religious tradition of Palo Monte as expressed in Oriente with

emphasis on components central to the dissertation: spirit entities, time, revelation, and

sacred-space construction. Discussion of these components encompasses assumptions

from which I produced the dissertation’s case study of Palo Monte in Santiago de Cuba.

                                                                                                               
11
Both Spanish and English literature treating cultural features inspired from areas now
known as Gabon, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola use “c” to refer to
things derived from Kongolese influences. I will use “c” when referring to aspects of
Palo Monte religious reality and “k” when referring to sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century Kongolese people.

  105
Roots of Palo Monte

12
Palo Monte is one subdivided practice line of the larger religious family

complex known as Reglas de Congo (Bolívar Arostegui and Villegas 1998). The family

incorporates several lines of religious practice inspired and/or derived from cultural

traditions of the earliest Africans first imported to Cuba’s eastern regions. The

nomenclature refers to the convergence of several key linguistic and sociohistorical

characteristics. Colloquially, the family group, and the affiliated religious line of practice

that is the focus of this dissertation, are known as Congo and Palo. The name Palo

Monte/Mayombe encapsulates that tradition’s African ritual and linguistic origins as

drawn from socioreligious experiences of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century enslaved

Kongolese individuals and their biological and ritually affiliated descendants in Cuba. An

effective way to understand Reglas Congo is to use the analogy of a forest. Reglas

Congo is the forest, yet the forest is composed of individual trees. Palo Monte is one of

those trees and Mayombe is but one branch of that tree. The use of the “slash” between

Palo Monte/Mayombe throughout this document is to reflect the relationship of “branch”

to the “tree,” and the “tree” to the “forest” of Reglas Congo.

Not all early African importees were Kongolese by birth or by way of cultural

socialization but the commonality of their subjugating experiences as captive laborers to

and in colonies of the Americas rapidly created affinity groups (Sudarkasa 2007: 35)

                                                                                                               
12
The community of the case study use language of Mayombe. However, for clarity I
will use Palo Monte/Mayombe to disrupt the negative connotations colloquially assigned
to the Mayombe line of ritual practice.

  106
 13
based on “Old World” cultural resources . Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, building on

the pioneering work of anthropologist Melville Herskovits, provide an excellent treatise

on such a blending of cultural practices and identities, which they term “creolization”

(Mintz and Price [1976] 1992: ix). They affirm that the creolization process was

necessary in order for colonial laborers to survive and prevail in the Americas’ new

geopolitical and cultural worlds. Stephen Palmié discusses this “New World” process of

African identity creation as “ethnogenesis,” suggesting that for continental descendants

it reflects collective affiliations that are reconstructed and/or created African groups

whose starting points are a shared social reality (Palmié 1993). His proposition lodges

the collective affiliations or groupings in Cuba’s urban areas, and other writers concur

with Palmié (Rushing 1992; Howard 1998).

Palmié established that the ethnogenetic process is most likely found in urban

areas of the African Diaspora, and that Cuba presents a strong exemplary case in point.

However, the numerical dominance of the Kongolese in the earliest centuries of the

eastern regions of the island colony could offer insight into the creation of affinity groups

in other than urban centers. David Eltis and David Richardson’s Atlas of the

Transatlantic Slave Trade estimates that between 1501 and 1700, some 1,251,900

people were imported from regions of the Kongo Kingdom (Eltis and Richardson 2010:

89). The numerical dominance of individuals familiar with Kongolese-based

                                                                                                               
13
Within the continent of Africa, contact between Kongolese, Dahome, Yoruba, and
other distinct African civilizations had already begun the sharing of cultural as well as
spiritual understandings. Experiences of contact, sharing, and adaptation in the
Americas were not original; only the subjugating variety of enslavement was new (Midlo
Hall, 2005; Thornton and Heywood 2007).

  107
religocultural mores is a significant insight into rituals, rites, and cosmic understandings

that later shaped the religious complex of Palo Monte (Díaz 2000: 113).

I have already discussed that early alliances between Taíno and Kongo African

captives in eastern Cuba occurred quickly, evidenced by joint raids of such eastern

cities as Baracoa in 1522 and Bayamo in 1537. These self-liberating activities of the

remaining Taíno AmerIndians and captive Kongolese Africans also joined to comprise

freedom zones of palenques––settlements of runaways in the Sierra Maestras of

Oriente. However, the liberation and “love of freedom” was but one common feature of

each community.

Spiritual Foundations of Palo

The contact and encounter in Oriente, Cuba of Kongolese Africans and Taíno

AmerIndians allowed the two cultural groups to comprehend their shared, common

awareness about the world, not merely their mutual sociopolitical status as enslaved

under Spanish rule. As the previous chapter introduced, the Taíno AmerIndians and

Africans imported from areas under the cultural influence of the Kongolese Kingdom

mutually comprehended forested spaces of their environment as exceptionally sacred

locations. The forest was that space that demarcated the world of living beings from the

world of primordial spirits and all ancestral dead. All naturally occurring elements of the

forested space were infused with strong power and potent essence imparted by a

Supreme Creative Force, an essence, and force beyond that given to living humans.

This understanding is intimately part of contemporary Palo belief and practice.

Palo practitioners ground the awareness about the cosmic world with ordered

comprehension derived from Kongolese sacred understandings of existence. They

  108
know Nz/(Inz)ambi as the single Creative Force of the entire universe and all in it that

was not created by humans––and even some human creations are at the influence,

direction, and effect of Nz/(Inz)ambi (James Figarola 2006b: 59-68). Every being and

aspect that is in the universe contains animating essence provided by Nz/(Inz)ambi.

Plants, rocks and other parts of the universe considered “inanimate” also are imbued

with Nz/(Inz)ambi essence of creation. This orientation goes further to maintain that the

universe is not merely populated by living beings that have discernable material

essence. There also are categories of ethereal beings or spirits who occupy spaces

throughout the universe. Just as living beings can, for example, be divided into warm-

blooded and cold-blooded or two-legged and four-legged, these otherworldly beings of

Palo are divided into four categories; mpungos, nfumbi, ndoquis and the Yet-To-Be-

Born.

Mpungos are supernatural beings, divine spirits directly responsible for the

environmental phenomena in which the living and humans reside. Ndoquis are the

ancestral spirits of those who have lived in the material world that humans occupy, but

who have died during times that no living humans can remember, times lost to human

memory. Nfumbi are the living-dead spirits, the ethereal beings of those deceased

individuals who have biographies known by living persons. The living-dead beings are

spirits of individuals who have died but whose life experiences have not been forgotten,

and whose spirits have yet to pass into the divine or ancestral Other World. Nfumbi are

the closest to human beings in that they have experiential knowledge of what it means

to exist in the historical material world of humans as well as in the Other World. There

also are other spirits among the world of the living-dead; they are those of the Yet-To-

  109
Be-Born. These ethereal beings are entities who have not yet occupied the human

realm and who reside in the otherworld of the living-dead.

The mpungos and nfumbi categories of Palo spirits have the ability and

responsibility to permeate and occupy the human material realm. Their Nz/(Inz)ambi-

appointed responsibilities and power are designed to gain the attention of human beings

in order to advise, correct, and assist them in living a life that is in balance with the order

of the universe: the cosmic order. Inside this orientation that maintains spirits as active

social agents, human beings’ individual and collective responsibility is to maintain

positive relationships with the totality of the universal order, including with animate and

inanimate beings. That is to say, human beings must develop positive relationships with

other humans in addition to with all plants and animals, spirit beings of all varieties, and

the cosmos beyond human control (Mbiti 1990; James Figarola 2006b). Such

relationships can take shape as prayers, sacrificial abstinence, rituals, and/or rites

where humans systematically perform activities of acknowledgement and reverence

with objects (Cabrera 1986; Bockie 1993; Bettelheim 2001; Palmié 2002; Ochoa 2007).

Within this perspective, such relationships toward the cosmos can include taking time to

notice and acknowledge the interconnectedness of creation aspects within the individual

self, within the wider practicing community, and ultimately within other human beings.

Although Palo practitioners understand that not all humans practice the same religious

tradition, the commonality of being human is sufficient for them to know and act upon

the fact that there are enduring bonds between all humans.

In order to maintain positive relationships with the totality of creation, Palo

practitioner maintain the belief that spirit entities, particularly mpungos and nfumbi, have

  110
the specific task, as designated by Nz/(Inz)ambi, to guide, assist, and reprimand

practitioners as is necessary to maintain positive balance within the/a Palo community,

and within humanity at large. The category of spirits of the Yet-To-Be Born are charged

with the obligation of ensuring humans are in the appropriate places to receive and

acknowledge their birth when their spirit comes within and takes shape in a physical

body (Mbiti 1990; James Figarola 2006b).

Time
Practitioners of Palo understand and organize their lives around the idea that

living things, humans, and spirit beings coexist in a reality of temporal fluidity. In this

reality, time is not linear, with a beginning or end. Time is conceptualized as being

saturated with experiences of the total universe that are unknown to humans, yet

understood by mpungo spirits. John Mbiti’s groundbreaking text discusses the time

continuum within African philosophy and his discussion is quite appropriate for putting

parameters to Palo practitioners’ understanding of indefinite and continued processes of

existence. Mbiti suggests that time among African-descended people is most concerned

with what is past and what is available in the current moment. The past is of greatest

importance in that it is the collective stock of knowledge into which all aspects of the

cosmos are absorbed and from which all beings can draw wisdom (Mbiti 1990: 15-28).

For example, the earth has its own inherent wisdom due to the longevity of its existence,

as do creatures that are part of its bionetworks. Humans, as the more recent additions

to the earth, have the most to learn and enact to integrate themselves as active

members of a cosmic ecosystem.

Time is a composition of events that have already taken place as well as of

potential experiences and actions that are in the processes of performance or

  111
actualization. The future is not considered with great concern, in that the nearness of

current activity is prioritized over the abstraction of what is to come in a distant and yet-

to-be-determined reality. There is no belief in events, people, or spirits “evolving” to

some fixed point of preferred existence. Such prioritizing of the current over future

circumstances reflects Palo practitioner’ understandings that working to create balance

with one’s thoughts and actions is of utmost concern.

Casa del Caribe researcher number #4 explained Palo practitioners’

arrangement of time as “a philosophy of life put into practice.” Humans as part of this

practice-of-living are introduced to the world through birth, are responsible to be active

participants in engaging the universe, and discern lessons brought forward from

primordial time in the form of messages from the Other World. Humans can find insights

for how the universe came into existence, human life, life-after-death cycles, and the

development of their religious customs through communications transmitted from the

Other World. Communication activities are pivotal to the practice of Palo and

practitioners maintain contact with spirit others in order to sustain the communication

requirement of their religious tradition.

Living with Spirits

Continual interaction and engagement of and with the Other World is a

paramount part of the intricately interwoven reality that Palo devotees occupy. Mpongo

and nfumbi spirits can and do visit the world of the living when humans create the

appropriate atmospheres for spirit intercessions. Within their everyday reality and during

ceremonial contexts, Palo practitioners create and maintain “communication bridges”

(Mbiti 1990: 25) where the material world is made receptive for spirits to enter and

  112
assist in performing ritual activities. The exchanges with mpungos and nfumbi spirits

can take the form of small-and/or large-scale rituals of communication, singing, dancing,

drumming, and actions of sacrifice.

It is through ongoing consultation with the mpungos and nfumbi, and through

careful observation of one’s day-to-day reality, that imbalances between self and

relationships throughout creation can be discerned and acted upon. Imbalances can

originate from any source, as Palo practitioner believe that both positive and negative

energies can influence action throughout the universe. However, negative energies are

not designated as being non-sacred or “profane,” as Nz/(Inz)ambi created all aspects of

creation (Johnson 2008). Sacrifice among Palo practitioners can take the form of giving

up negative behaviors, ideas, foods, liquids, and prized possessions.

Sacrifice within the religious tradition of Palo Monte/Mayombe is the willingness

to make intentional effort to surrender/submit an action or object on one’s behalf in

order to live in an integrative fashion with the cosmic order. Animal sacrifice is one form

of surrendering/submitting that has received enhanced attention and is a recurring

feature among several African-inspired religions throughout the Atlantic African

Diaspora. Palo animal sacrifice is undertaken when large-scale imbalances need to be

addressed in a fashion that requires only the most sacred of essences to return the

current of energy back to a positive relationship. Through the offering of blood, the most

sacred of Nz/(Inz)ambi’s animated essences, humans can affect the balancing of

relationships under their purview. However, it is only through ongoing consultation and

fellowship with spirits that Palo devotees can access the type of wisdom necessary to

know when sacrifice is required and to live in balance with the universe’s rhythms.

  113
 A second arena of human-spirit engagement that is of primary importance is

active communion between members of the material world and those of the nonmaterial

Other World. This form of spirit communication occurs when practitioners’ bodies are

“borrowed” by an mpungo or nfumbi spirit in order that the spirit can fellowship directly

with humans of the religious community. The act of spirits cosharing a human body is

an intimate activity where the practitioner has learned how to suspend her or his

consciousness in order that a spirit can use her or his physical body to have “face-to-

face” interaction with members of the worship community. Samuel recounted how

“spirits come in dreams or during ‘trances’. During ‘trances,’ they do not speak well

because they are dead. The consciousness of the person goes to a little place in the

head (indicated by him pressing his finger tips to his skull) and the spirit is in the body

completely” (Johnson 2009).

The spirits are “re-membered,” returned/brought from planes of the Other World

and its knowledge pools into direct contact with the Palo community. Not only does “re-

membering” bring spirits into the human realm, but it helps practitioners to recall the

bond between the past and the present; it recalls and even asserts new knowledge from

the Other World into the lives of the living. When the purposeful actions of Palo

practitioners bring the realms into clearer association with each other, the connection

between living and non-living community members is re-established for a time.

When mpungo or nfumbi spirits enter the historical material world by way of

claiming or “mounting” their “horses”––human bodies––they reveal knowledge and

wisdom from the spirit realms, realms beyond human activity. This is a revelation that

  114
humans, in turn, use to interpret and activate influence in the lives of the living. In his

discussion of revelation, John K. Thornton defines the phenomenon as:

A piece of information about the other world [sic], its nature, or its intention
that is perceptible to people in this world through one or another channel.
Revelations provide this world with its window on the constructing a
general understanding of the nature of the other world and its inhabitants
(a philosophy), a clear perception of its desires and intentions for people
to obey (a religion), and a larger picture of the workings and history of both
worlds (a cosmology). It is thus through revelations that religions are
formed, and it is also through them that they change (Thornton 1998b:
238; Thornton 1998a).

Thornton’s discussion proficiently encapsulates the roles of human and spiritual actors

within the religious tradition of Palo. Revelation enjoys a privileged place within the

practice of Palo, as it is from and within these reciprocal relationships with spirits that

the genealogy is constructed, maintained, and transformed.

Rituals assist in the production of Palo ceremonial space that induces revelations,

and the revelations bolster the stock of collective memory that supplicants draw upon

and refer back to in times of individual or community need. Thereby, rituals help

preserve group solidarity in the material and spiritual realms. Victor Turner proposes

that ritual is not only a “concentration of referents” but is,

in addition, a fusion of the powers believed to be inherent in the persons,

objects, relationships, events, and histories represented by ritual symbols.
It is a mobilization of energies as well as messages. In this respect, the
objects and activities in point are not merely things that stand for other
things or something abstract, they participate in the powers and virtues
they represent (Turner 1977: 189).

The multivalent ritual actions are recruited to mobilize the meaning system of Palo

Monte and to act on practitioners’ particular ideas, wishes, responsibilities, and needs.

As Turner discusses, humans access the time of the realm of spirits through rituals

wherein music, ritual language, dance movements, food elements, and animal sacrifices

  115
that help alter the physical settings of human-dominated spaces in order to invite spirits

into direct communion with humans. Drumming, singing and dance ceremonial settings

serve beyond creating ambiance to be liturgical activities conducted within the ritual

language, and are articulated vocally and through the body to inform and reinforce

ethical orientations of religious supplicants. The liturgical aspects also help to regulate

bodily practices to continue maintaining balance relationships with the Other World.

Historian Rachel Harding adds an important aspect to understandings about the

prevalence of communing with spirit beings through body cohabitation among African

descendants in the Atlantic, suggesting:

Candomblé, and African American alternative orientation more generally,

became a premier location for the engagement of this corporeally
contested identity. It is significant that so many of the alternative spaces of
blackness relate to physical orientation work, dance, escape, behavioral
comportment, gesture, ritual, etc. because the body has been the prime
site of the degradation and Americanization of black [sic] identity through
its commodification, enslavement, and signification. Candomblé can be
understood as a ceremony, a performance of the reclamation of the body
by a pan-African collectivity, a circle of Spirits and New World (emphasis
in the original Harding 2000: 154).

Harding’s asserts that spirit mountings allow practitioners of Africa-inspired religions to

reclaim their bodies, not as sites of generational violence, but as actual sites of

liberation. In the case of Palo practitioners, spirit mountings represent the reconnection

to primordial sources of the universe’s wisdom that allows them to imagine and rescript

their humanity using positive self-referents. By living with spirits, Palo supplicants are

able to reaffirm their spiritual foundations, which serve as their centers of moral

authority not bounded in the limits of their racialized social circumstances. Such

understandings and actions allow practitioners to create self-defined understandings

about themselves. Mateo quoted Antonio’s discussion about spirits during his interview,

  116
stating that, “the mufundi are not a fantasy. Religion is for the poor, not the rich.”

(Johnson 2010).

Membership & Leadership

Individual initiates within Regla de Palo are known as paleras/os

(feminine/masculine distinctions), or ngangaleros. Some individuals have the knowledge

of how to combine individual and other spiritual essences to create channels of

communication and interaction between spirits, creation, and humans. They are known

as Ngangas. One female respondent of my research project noted that the spiritual

potency of Palo Monte/Mayombe is linked to the fact that a sacred pact is formed

directly between Nz/(Inz)ambi and an individual during the initiation process.

It has long been assumed that part of the long-held aversion of the general

Cuban public to Regla Palo Monte and its practitioners is the involvement of a small

blood sacrifice from the neophyte and the use of the skeletal remains of humans and

other animals (Luaces 2002; Johnson 2004; Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler 2005).

Initiates can advance their training within the tradition and ascend within a carefully

ranked system of responsibilities. Women and men hold positions within Regla Palo

Monte leadership, though men are more visible in public forms. The public positioning of

men is common throughout the Americas within African descendants’ religious

organizations. However, as noted in the methods chapter, some literature asserts that

the specialized power of women is no less effective and perhaps holds sway over

religious communities’ decision making (Higginbotham 1993; Ashcraft-Eason, et al.

2010; Dodson 2010).

  117
 Nganga, with a capital “N,” refers to an individual who has mastered the ritual

knowledge of Palo, whereas nganga with a lowercase “n” refers to the physical sacred

spaces of Palo. A male individual who has mastered special designated abilities to

initiate, facilitate, and interpret communication with and from spirits is designated as a

TaTa Nganga. The female leadership in Palo is called Madre Nganga, as well as Madre

Nkisi. There are additional ranked positions within the religious tradition, but specifics of

these distinctions were beyond the scope of the dissertation’s research focus. However,

whether female or male, an Nganga is an individual who has been consecrated to

communicate within and on behalf of the Other World, so these individuals in and of

themselves are “sacred vessels” just as ngangas are “sacred vessels.”

Sacred Spaces

Practitioners of Palo Monte/Mayombe sustain their engagements with categories

of spirit others through using nkisi, material objects and substances that contain

concentrated power from Nz/(Inz)ambi. Nkisi can be drawn from the natural created

world, such as rocks, plants, sticks, soil, remains of humans, and animals. Nkisi can

also be manufactured objects associated with the social history of Cuba, such as chains,

iron cauldrons, crosses, etc. Practitioners understand nkisi as items and substances

imbued with small portions of the universe’s creative essence, which is power. When

nkisi are arranged together within Palo ceremonial spaces, they become minkisi,

multiple nkisi functioning in concert to alter the atmosphere of a ceremonial space and

make it receptive to revelatory communications with and from spirits. Individual nkisi

and collective minkisi are employed by Palo practitioners to communicate, receive, and

  118
commune with different spirit beings, except the Yet-To-Be-Born (Bockie 1993: 10-19;

James Figarola 2006b: 288-297).

The central minkisi complex that prevails inside Palo ritual activities is an nganga,

a cast-iron cauldron containing multiple nkisi brought together to respond to a

supernatural spirit force affiliated with a naturally occurring phenomenon: thunder, rain,

the forest, animals of the forest, etc. The spirit within an nganga has a primary assistant

spirit. The assistant spirit is called a prenda or the “dog of the” nganga. The role of the

prenda spirit is to serve as messenger of an nganga’s primary mpungo spirit, and is

responsible to carry out tasks that the

mpungo spirit may assign to aid the

community of Palo adherents (Palmié 2002;

Johnson 2008). Before his death in

2009, research participant Antonio, the TaTa

Nganga of the Palo worship community,

reported that “Africans held the

Figure 6 Primary Ngangas of the Palo
fundamentals [of the nganga] in their
worship community, decorated for
ceremonial work. smj 2009 ©
stomachs,” and, as they were

transplanted from Africa, they “vomited them up when they arrived in Cuba,” and now,

“the fundamentals are housed within the nganga” (Johnson 2009). A TaTa Nganga

transmits the exact nature and combination of an nganga’s fundamentals to those who

apprentice him in the religious tradition. Knowledge held by TaTa Nganga can take

decades to learn and master. One semiformal interview respondent likened the ability

  119
and expertise of effectively working within the religious tradition as fuerza, power that is

the ability to make things happen (Johnson 2010).

Palo sacred spaces are a dynamic and multivocal layering of a large array of

textures, smells, sights, and sounds. All elements contained within a space are

organized to work collaboratively with the variety of Nz/(Inz)ambi given essence to

facilitate Palo devotees’ communication between the visible human world and the

invisible spirit worlds . During one ritual feeding of the dead, or feeding of the spirits, the

incantations at the beginning of the ceremony were sung by another TaTa that was part

of the worship community, welcoming spirits and practitioners to the ceremony and

ritual space. He sang, “Buena noche mi limba…buena noche ngangaleros… [Good

night my Africans, good night paleros].” He continued, singing, “Since I was a pikanini

[sic], I was here with this mpungo.” Those present responded to the call with “Since I

was a chicitico [little child], I was here with this mpungo.” When the welcome had been

sung and the energy of the space sufficiently charged with the singing and drumming,

Antonio stepped in, transiting from the prelude of the ceremony to the formal invocation

of the spirits of the sacred space, by addressing the ngangas, stating that “All are

assembled here, your Africans, this night”(Johnson 2008). This excerpt demonstrates

how the Palo worship community engages the spirits contained within the ngangas to

witness and reflect the enactment of their “African” identity.

The most fundamental sacred space for Palo devotees is the forest, the “de sao,”

as it contains the latent universal power that can be activated within constructed Palo

ceremonial spaces. Members of the study community took great pains to recreate “de

sao” spaces inside their homes, alongside their ngangas where they perform ritual work.

  120
During my interviews with research participants Yvonne and Mateo, Thomas had come

by for different elements to complete spiritual work with his African spirits. Both reached

into different bags and spaces tucked into corners around their spiritual spaces to

produce the little bits of earth, wood, and elements Thomas asked for (Johnson 2010).

During one field session, Antonio took a colleague from the African Atlantic

Research Team and me on a walk throughout the city to assist in gathering items for his

ceremonial work. As we walked throughout the city, the TaTa would pause, pointing out

plants that were part of the cultivated shrubbery that lined the streets. He commented

on healing properties contained in each plant. He would select a few and tell us the

plants name in Spanish, sometimes accompanied with its Congo name in Kikongo;

allow us to smell it; and then picked some to store inside the baskets we carried for him.

Our scouting party of three continued walking throughout city streets, occasionally

stopping at different homes of Antonio’s hijados (godchildren), and have coffee or water

along the way back to his nganga. Occasionally the TaTa Nganga would have us wait

while he inspected different types of animals for sacrifice—goats, chickens, pigeons—

and he would inquire about their prices. At the end of our walk, and upon returning to

the worship house, he went straight to the room with the arrangement of several

ngangas, throwing open the doors and calling into the room “hello people!!” The TaTa

then placed some of the leaves we had gathered in front of the picture of his uncle,

Esteban, the worship community’s first TaTa Nganga who died in 2003, saying “we

always remember you” (Johnson 2008). In addition to fresh plants and animals brought

by this leader into the Palo worship house, a readily available supply of pigeons and

  121
chickens, sometimes accompanied by a pig or goat, were kept in the back patio area of

the designated “de sao” area of the house (Johnson 2008).

Mateo recounted how he and Antonio would also go great distances to forested

areas surrounding the city of Santiago to collect soil, plants, rocks, branches, and

animals. These items are stored in or near areas near several ngangas of the worship

house in the “de sao” area. Other palero/as replicated the process of looking for and/or

gathering objects for their individual ceremonial/sacred spaces. As I conducted the five

semiformal interviews with different Palo respondents, a steady stream of individuals

politely interrupted the interviews to speak with the interviewee(s). The visitor would

either deliver such objects as soil, holy water, chickens, or figurines for a palero’s

spiritual work, their sacred space, or they would discuss how and where to collect items

for ritual activities. At the conclusion of their interaction, the interviewee palero/a would

explain to me the objects’ purpose and significance (Johnson 2008; Johnson 2009). To

be clear, not all palera/os have ngangas or the knowledge-power to create one. While

their initiation into Palo serves as their beginning introduction to a “Congo way of life”

the practitioner must apprentice with a TaTa Nganga or Madre Nganga to learn about

“the power to make things happen” (Dodson 2008: 103).

The extensive time and labor Palo practitioners expend altering their homes to

accommodate their ritual spaces are poignant examples of the creation of “ceremonial

centers.” I suggest that the Palo worship community of the case study prioritizes

forested spaces as its ceremonial centers and brings resources from the forest as well

as from around the city-scape to recreate “de sao” in their home settings. While their

homes are in an urban area, the source of the Palo worship community’s religious

  122
power is grounded in the forest as the access point to/for the Other World. The human

Ngangas and ritual ngangas serve as ceremonial communication bridges to the spirit

world. That the primary site of the community’s ritual work is located in Los Hoyos is not

as central to the community’s religious power as its ability to recreate in its ceremonial

spaces access to the sanctuary of the Other World, the “de sao.”

The Palo ceremonial center of this case study in the urban locality of Los Hoyos

takes on enhanced significance in that it recruits the power of the Other World as

contained within natural elements from “de sao” to be combined with creative power of

the Other World that is received during visits from spirits. Instead of the ceremonial

center and human creative energies being prioritized, we see the created world beyond

human manipulation serving as the sanctuary of knowledge and power. That is to say

that “de sao,” as the access point to the Other World, is employed to draw the wisdom

of the created world and universes into the current reality of Palo practitioners. The

intimacy of the relationships Palo practitioners forge and sustain with mpungo and

nfumbi spirits ensures that avenues of access to the stored pools of the knowledge of

the cosmos remain strong. The creation of ceremonial spaces equally keeps the human

world keyed to receive spirit representatives that serve as both the foundation and wise

members of the Palo worship community. The next chapter will discuss practitioners’

construction of a spirit genealogy and the meanings they assign to the interactive

relationships with spirit beings, which assist worship community members with enacting

their “African” identity.

  123
 CHAPTER 5:
Palo Worship Community

  124
 Spirits are able to assist people with distinguishing what is bad and what is
good, and they transmit information about actions that are good and bad
because they can see the universe wherever they are in it whenever they
want. Spirits’ ties with the universe are wider and everywhere. They
transmit messages through the bodies of people or through dreams. The
dead, muertos, those who once had bodies, are about to decompose and
rise and associate with the universe and assist God—because God is at
the top. [These entities] are part of the earth, things in nature and you
have to ask permission to take from it—for example, when you cut a tree,
you need to ask permission to take it, and to pay because nothing is for
free…When a body is put into the ground, the ascent of the body through
decomposition allows the spirit to rise and permeate other spaces and
aspects of nature, of the universe. That is why spirits of the departed are
able to reach out in dreams and create connections with the living
because they permeate the world. Sleep is a state where humans are
open to receive during [their] dreams. Eva’s discussion of spirits (Johnson
2010).

Introduction

This chapter presents understandings that members of the Palo worship

community maintain about their spirit familiars as privileged participants in the everyday

reality of humans. The data also suggest that Palo practitioners engage their spirit

others in ways that allow these human agents to maintain an alternative historical

record that that affirms their identity as African descendants in Cuba. The lived reality

that Palo worshipers create in concert with their spirit others presents Palo as a tradition

that contains the inherited legacy of the spiritual wisdom of the nations founding

subaltern communities.

Formal Organization of Palo in Oriente

Previous chapters provided evidence of Kongolese and Taíno mutual sacred

ritual activities that were transmitted to new generations in Cuba’s eastern region.

These discussions also clarified the overlap in spiritual and cosmic orientation between

Kongo and Taíno cultural groups. However, those ritual and cosmic, if not

  125
epistemological, understandings had yet to be formalized into a cohesive set of

practices and awarenesses of a group of people about questions of ultimate existence–

issues pertaining to life and death. As previous authors have demonstrated, religion is

created when a collective demonstrates its beliefs through ritual activities keyed to

engage aspects of ultimate existence. The questions, therefore, are: When, what, and

how did Palo become formally organized as a religion in Oriente?

The formal organization of Palo did not occur in eastern Cuba until early in the

twentieth century, when an African-descended man named Reynerio Pérez migrated

from the western Matanzas region, near Havana, to Oriente. Little is known about

Pérez’s life before he arrived in Oriente but Casa and AART researchers do feel that he

arrived in the area as part of governmental forces assigned to the region to confront

members of the Partído de Independente de Color (PIC), the Independent Colored

Party (Zaid 2006). The PIC evolved at the turn of the twentieth century into an

organized protest by African-descended Cuban men who served in leadership and other

positions during Cuba’s 1895 War of Independence from Spain. These war veterans

found themselves, and other persons of color structured out of Cuba’s new Republic’s

social order and holding no places in the leadership despite the fact that soldiers of

color were the majority of fighters in number (Montejo and Barnet 1968; Helg 1995;

Martínez Heredia 2009).

The racialized segregation, while not new within Cuba’s social system, took on a

more virulent form after the United States’s 1898 intervention in the island nation’s

military actions. The U.S. subverted Cuba’s decades-long military campaigns for

independence from Spain, and ultimately excluded Cubans from signing the treaty. This

  126
action made Cuba a de facto U.S. colony. The 1898 date holds double significance

because it was only two years after the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme U.S. Court

decision that legalized racial segregation in the United States. This newer form of racial

segregation was exported and implemented in all territories under U.S control, including

Cuba. As the new Cuban Republic began to take shape under the watchful eye of the

U.S., the PIC organized to protest its members’ exclusion from the new government

infrastructure. In 1912, the PIC called for an organizational gathering in La Maya,

Oriente, a small town on the outskirts of the city of Santiago de Cuba. The U.S.

instructed the Republic’s President, José Miguel Gómez, under direct control of the U.S.

governor, to eliminate the growing PIC protest or risk another U.S intervention Cuban

forces were sent to La Maya to curtail the PIC’s efforts, and the encounter resulted in

the massacre of more than 3,000 African-descended persons, whether or not they were

members and supporters of PIC (Whitney 2001: 17-21; Guerra 2005: 217-242; Castro

Fernández 2008).

From that point forward, raced based political parties were outlawed in Cuba and

a new era of persecution increased and intensified especially against citizens affiliated

with African-inspired religious traditions. It is unknown if and/or how Reynerio Pérez’s

life intersected with the PIC and events surrounding its organization: however, his living

descendants and Cuban scholars affirm that he was from the Matanzas region and that

he migrated to Oriente in the first decades of the twentieth century. It is also affirmed

that Pérez held superior ritual expertise in at least two, if not more, African-inspired

religious practices, including Palo and Regla de Ocha/Lucumí.

  127
 Soon after his arrival, Pérez settled in the Los Hoyos neighborhood of Santiago

de Cuba. Los Hoyos was already a seedbed of African-inspired religious activity and

Pérez quickly became known and sought after for his powerfully effective work with

spirits. He organized a centro, a spiritual center where individuals could gather to

receive systematic training about how to engage and work with spirits. While his was

not the only centro in Santiago, it soon became recognized as one of the most powerful,

as Pérez and his students’ demonstrated knowledge of how to create and maintain

relationships with spirits in order to work on behalf of humans seeking otherworldly

guidance. Casa del Caribe researchers have cited Pérez’s centro as the first one to

bring systematic ritual knowledge of Palo Monte/Mayombe to Oriente (Dodson 2008).

Pérez began initiating individuals into his Oriente-constructed lineage of spirit

beings, beginning with the supranatural spirit-force that resided in his nganga. The

spirit-force of Pérez’s nganga served as the “rama (branch)” of Oriente’s formally

organized Palo communities or genealogical lines. Respondents in my research

reported that Pérez’s nganga served as the parent nganga for Santiago de Cuba, and

some felt this was true for all of Oriente (Johnson 2010). Data from the dissertation

research was gathered from practitioners of one of the Palo Monte/Mayombe spiritual

lineages in the city of Santiago de Cuba. It was a branch of practicing spiritual family

members from one line belonging to Reynerio Pérez’s initiated hijado and protégé,

Esteban, uncle to Antonio and previous TaTa Nganga of the community until his death

in 2003. Casa researcher #4 commented that Esteban had developed one of the

strongest “branches” of Palo in Oriente (Johnson 2010). Esteban had a national and

international reputation for being quite knowledgeable and effective in his work with

  128
spirits. Esteban had an equally strong reputation for advocacy dedicated to

strengthening and improving the historically Black neighborhood of Los Hoyos. He also

was known for championing the religious practices of its inhabitants and expanded his

work to national and international practicing arenas as well as to academic forums. One

of Esteban’s main goals was to demonstratively bring dignity to African-inspired

religocultural creations and to African-descended communities in Oriente. He asserted

that this could be done through educating a wider audience about these distinctive

religions (Dodson 2008; Dodson and Johnson 2009: 190-192).

Research participants Eva, Yvonne, Mateo, Fernando, and Daniel helped explain

the spirits who were incorporated into Esteban’s religious genealogy, portions of which

are presented in Figure 7 in this chapter. They reported that Esteban had an intimate

and intense comprehension concerning local spirits as well as superior knowledge of

ritual protocols associated with several other distinctly Cuban religions, even before he

began his studies with Reynerio Pérez. Significantly, as Sophia, his older sister and

family matriarch recounted, Esteban was born and raised in the city of Santiago de

Cuba. His extended birth family had a long-term residency in Oriente, particularly in the

area surrounding the eastern town of El Cobre, a town known both for its religious

potency for several of Cuba’s religious traditions and as a site of African resistance

during the early colonial era (Díaz 2000; Johnson 2009). Sophia, though not initiated

into Palo, preserves the details of the family’s blood ancestry as well as an overview of

the spiritual work conducted within the family. She discussed how members of

Esteban’s biological family members resided in or near Santiago de Cuba and/or in the

mountainous region just beyond the city, and “[their] uncles were ‘espiritistas,’ and

  129
practiced a type of spiritualism of “familiar” spirits, of their ancestors, “not Palo.” Sophia

recounted, “Everyone has their guide, protector and Africans,” and more uncles on her

mother’s side were espiritistas as were her parents. “Familiar spirits are of blood, of the

person. However, the songs that are the strongest are the Africans, like Ma Rufina,

Pase Rio, Pa Folco” (Johnson 2009). As a child, Esteban began interacting with spirits

and grew to be well known for his organic understanding of how to engage spirits of the

dead whose material remains were once interred within the Oriente landscape (Zaid

2006; Johnson 2009).

As noted in the chapter on methods, I selected Esteban’s community as the Palo

Monte/Mayombe case study because within the city of Santiago de Cuba, this Palo

Monte/Mayombe religious network is well known for its effective work with spirits.

Esteban’s effective and serious work with spirits, coupled with his approach to

educating the larger community about the integrity of African-inspired traditions in

Oriente, attracted many individuals to him for consultation and spiritual guidance, even

as a young teenager. In 2009, Esteban’s nephew and protégé Antonio estimated that

Esteban had some 2,000 individual godchildren located throughout Cuba, the

Caribbean, South America, Europe, and the U.S.

As Esteban sought to enhance his work with spirits he was soon referred to

Reynerio Pérez, who quickly discerned that the young man possessed a distinct gift and

awareness about spirit engagement, and began to train the young man in the formal

ritual protocols of Palo and Regla de Lucumí/Ocha (Zaid 2006). Long before his death

in 2002, Esteban was able to create a far-reaching spiritual family network, and a

cornerstone of his religious family was Palo Monte/Mayombe. Palo worship community

  130
members also confirmed the normative practice of how older community residents

helped them recognize their own spiritual inclinations, and taught these practitioners

how to effectively communicate and/or “work” with spirits long before Pérez arrived in

Oriente. Yvonne recounted how an older woman, after observing her behavior, said that

she needed to get someone to help her work with her spirits to maintain her health.

Mateo detailed how when he was younger, he “felt a calling in my heart to begin my

spiritual work,” and as a child he would help maintain the “altar” spaces of his

grandmother, “putting up fruit and candles,” and credits his grandmother with beginning

his spiritual training. Fernando reminisced about how his grandfather was “a palero, but

he died before he was about to teach me. I have been able to develop my capacities

when I came to the Palo worship house and began working with Antonio.” Samuel noted

that the centros, the specialized spiritual schools, were established and continue to be

held by someone versed in the ritual protocol of specific religious traditions to “help

people understand how to live with their spirits and how to control their trances [when

spirits mount an individual’s body and take over the body’s thoughts and actions] when

they are in the street, in the house. One of the most powerful centros is in Guantanamo,

run by a woman” (Johnson 2009).

Esteban was one such individual who had the ability to be in trance as part of his

communication processes with spirits. With instructions from Reynerio Pérez, Esteban

combined his organic comprehensions about Oriente spirits with the formal ritual

behaviors and knowledge of Palo (Johnson 2009; Johnson 2010). Under Pérez’s

tutorage, Esteban became one of the most prominent TaTa Ngangas throughout

Oriente and in Cuba, and was sought out nationally and internationally for his

  131
exceptionally effective work with spirits associated with Palo Monte/Mayombe, in

addition to his knowledge about local spirits (Johnson 2009). Esteban had found ways

to effectively practice integration between Cuba’s religious traditions in the realms of

spirit communications, which resonated with people throughout the city of Santiago de

Cuba and Oriente. Observers of Palo reported that “religious” people always had their

own personal spirits and communicated with them (Johnson 2009). Fernando explained

14
that each group of spirits work as a “cielo —a group of confidants that support and

care for one another. For example, [the mpungo of the nganga] and Pa Abran are family,

they work together, but they form a part of a cielo, compatriots that have amicable

exchanges with the spirits of [the Palo community’s] house.”

Yvonne, an older woman within the Palo worship community related the history

of how “Reynerio brought the knowledge of the prendas [spirit assisting the primary

spirit-force residing in an nganga] from Matanzas and gave that knowledge to Esteban.

Esteban developed Palo in this area—his was the first prenda born here, in this earth

[indicating Oriente].” Another worshiper affiliated with the collective, Ivor, stated that

“receiving a prenda from someone is what interconnects the ramas—different branches

of Palo in the area. Reynerio brought [the knowledge of Palo] to the area and he saw

the potential in Esteban; however, he said what you have now is not doing anything for

you, so he made Esteban a prenda for his nganga” (Johnson 2010). Yvonne’s and

Ivor’s statements also confirmed what Casa researchers and other neighborhood

community members had asserted: Esteban was responsible for the “branch” of Palo
                                                                                                               
14
Palo observers had several different names to indicate particular collectives of spirits,
including cielo, commission, and team. I use the particular language practitioners used
with an appreciation that they were referring to groups of spirits associated with the
worship community.

  132
“planted” by Peréz in Oriente. Even as the formal practice of the Palo Monte/Mayombe

line was ritualistically “planted” in Santiago by Peréz and entrusted to Esteban, Esteban

continued to partner the formal work of Palo spirits with the spirit work with local spirits

he had inherited and been familiar with in his formative years.

As an example of Esteban’s integrative approach to spirit engagement, I found

that many of the respondents kept specialized ritual elements specifically designated for

their African spirits, that they associated with the Oriente location. These sacred

arrangements were constructed inside of terracotta bowls or small iron cauldrons

containing many of the same elements as an nganga, serving as “houses” for African

spirits. Respondents called these assemblages cazuelas, and Antonio discussed these

constructed sacred spaces as “the identity of a muertos, an identity of the spirit of a

muertos—[my African], we are brothers, he communicates with me.” Yvonne and

Thomas recounted how “everyone has an African, it is born with you,” and when

Yvonne has an event at her house, she brings her African down so he can watch over

the house, because “the Africans always walk with you” (Johnson 2009). The intimate

companioning worshipers attributed to the relationships they maintained with their

Africans suggested to me that this particular category of spirit had significant, if not

privileged, positions within the worship community’s religious genealogy.

I propose that cazuelas were proto-ngangas, assemblages of elements from the

forested spaces along with material remains of the dead that reflected aspects drawn

from recomposed Taíno and Kongolese practices of physically representing the

presence of the community dead among living family members. Cazuelas were placed

alongside ngangas and actively incorporated into Palo ritual processes. Twelve

  133
respondents from the interview sample maintained relationships with African spirits, and

kept their cazuelas alongside of their ngangas as key members of their spirit genealogy

(Johnson 2009; Johnson 2010). Practitioners also kept other African spirits inside of or

close to their Palo ritual spaces, represented by dolls, which, similarly to cazuelas and

ngangas, also contained minkisi. Respondents commented that each African had

formed con permisos, sacred covenants between the worshiper and their spirits, with

each entity possessing its own identity and biography, known only to the individual Palo

practitioner.

Palo Worship Community Leadership

One male, the TaTa Nganga, and one female, the Yayi, typically guide the Palo

Monte/Mayombe worship community, with ranking membership making collective

decisions when necessary about the community’s functioning. Though I had

speculations about the identity of the Yayi, I was not able to confirm it during the

research. Both female and male worship community members served in long-standing

and ranked positions in relationship to the primary TaTa. The length of time members’

had been initiated within the collective, their individual amount of ritual knowledge, and

their ability to effectively work with spirit familiars on their own established their ranking

within the collective. People could only advance in position once they had developed

proficiency in the ritual language and ritual protocol, and demonstrated mastery enough

to effectively assist with ceremonies during formal public and private ceremonies.

Equally, an individual had to acquire specific elements to accompany and support their

advancing religious responsibilities and social role. For example, before an individual

could acquire an nganga, she or he had to learn about each element, natural or

  134
otherwise, that belonged within the nganga; its significance; its physical and

metaphysical properties; and how it related to the work with spirits (Johnson 2009).

At the time of the dissertation research, one of Esteban’s nephews, Antonio, lead

the Palo Monte/Mayombe religious work of the community until his sudden death in

September 2009. Antonio was identified as having the ability to work with spirits when

he was five years old. His mother, Sophia, relayed how one day in preschool he called

for his spirits to come save him. At that point, Antonio had educational and spiritual

teachers come to the house to tutor him as he was easily mounted with spirits. Esteban

received permission from Sophia to continue Antonio’s tutelage in spirit work (Johnson

2009).

Antonio’s passing was a monumental loss for the Palo community of the case

study as well as for the larger network of Palo worship houses throughout Oriente. His

knowledge base and wisdom about Palo, as well as several other Cuban religions, were

well beyond his 36 years of life, and as such, he was regularly brought in to consult with

other leaders throughout Oriente because of his expertise and position. Antonio had

also inherited all of Esteban’s godchildren, in addition to his own, as well as Esteban’s

political leadership position within the Los Hoyos neighborhood and among Palo houses

throughout the city. Equally significant, Antonio had inherited all of his uncle’s spirits. It

was this connection with the inheritance of spirit relationships that alerted me to the

need to further probe the issue of relationships between practitioners of Palo and their

spirits. I then set about creating a genealogy of relationships between Palo practitioners

and the spirits they considered significant others. Over the course of the research, I was

  135
able to construct a sample of the interrelationships between the Palo leadership,

general members, and some of the spirits individuals maintained.

El Mundo Espiritual: The Making of Spirit Genealogy

As discussed in the chapter on the spirit foundations of Palo Monte/Mayombe,

Oriente’s distinguishing social ethos is the prevalence of spirit beings. The Palo

Monte/Mayombe case study community provided one example of the prevalence of this

understanding about multiple spirit-actors as part of the human social world. Devotees

of Palo in this worship community proposed that different categories of spirits occupy

the physical and metaphysical dimensions of the universe, yet they “reside” in el mundo

espiritual, the spiritual world. Samuel, who had inherited spiritual responsibilities within

the religious family for another religious tradition, carefully delineated the different types

of ethereal beings members of the collective engaged and the nature of the social

responsibilities ascribed to them, asserting:

The first thing to understand is that they [spirits] are all dead, and the
language[s] of spirit and muertos refer to the same thing. [There are]
protectors, guides, Africans, and general muertos. Protectors and guides
can be blood related or related to someone through marriage. These types
of spirits were once living humans. They are like Superman, rushing into a
situation to resolve it for the living family members. A person’s relationship
with spirits will always exist (Johnson 2010).

Samuel’s description of spirits speaks to the intimacy of how practitioners think of

them: as trusted and loving others who can and will intercede on the practitioner’s

behalf, like “Superman.” Even as each practitioner had a unique array of spirit familiars

in his or her own personal portion/spirit commission of the genealogy, consistent

categories of spirits began to emerge. The recurring categories of spirits included a

  136
guide, a protector, an African, a supernatural spirit force, and sometimes an auxiliary

spirit, an entity that served as an “usher” to organize what spirits could “mount” a

practitioner’s body and when an individual is between trances. Guiding spirits were

usually blood-related familial dead who served as confidants and trusted life advisors.

Most often, a guide was a grandmother, great aunt, uncle, grandfather, mother, father,

or another respected individual in a practitioner’s life. A protector spirit could also be a

deceased blood relative or other significant individual spirit charged with keeping the

Palo practtioner safe from any type of harm (physical, mental, spiritual) or any type of

misfortune. Palo adherents kept the deceased individual’s personal artifacts such as a

book, statue, clothes, or picture alongside a glass of water within some portion of their

sacred spaces. Samuel explained:

[Spirits] lead people through the good and bad of life. They help their
children, to protect them. There are also some very bad spirits, like in life.
You have to feed your spirits, a little rum a little tobacco, or coffee, just like
what you have [to eat]. You think of them too, and give them some. They
have the energy to work with you—they are nourished. They can also heal.
They can see things/conditions that need healing—you have a problem
here, have that checked, do this with this plant (Johnson 2009).

It became clear that Palo observers took great care to include space and make

time to cultivate their relationships with all of their spirits, interacting with these ethereal

confidants as they would an individual person with whom they had a cherished

relationship. Mateo best summarized such intimate associations with spirit others as

this; “The spirits are to maintain the light of a person, and when you love something, you

do it with faith”(Johnson 2010).

Practitioners’ continual attendance to the needs and desires of the dead also

created an atmosphere where the living could be continuously available to receive

  137
messages and/or advice from their guides and protector spirits. A practitioner’s

supernatural spirit force also offered protection and guidance, and could operate as the

intercessory caregiver between the individual and the rest of the cosmos. Each person,

and thereby practitioner, is also known to be born under the protection and tutelage of

one specific supernatural being, shares personality characteristics with that particular

spirit, and has an affinity for the types of material attributes associated with the spirit-

force. For example, Juan was affiliated with the spirit-force Sarabanda, the entity

responsible for community protection, iron, and the forest. The practitioner was well

known within the community for his attentive care of neighbors and children, serving as

a protective presence during large-scale ceremonial events, sitting quietly to the side,

ensuring everyone and everything remained safe. The practitioner’s serving in this

capacity was seen as quite normal and natural, given that he was the son of Sarabanda.

Whenever I arrived to a formal interview session with an individual, I would

present small gifts to the spirit space first, leaving a candle or cigar for the familial dead.

This type of action seemed to put people at ease before we began the interview. On

more than one occasion, when I had brought Yvonne, Eva, or Sophia flowers, they

would place them in front of pictures of departed loved ones, or within the sacred space.

In a similar fashion, when I brought small sweets for the children, the gifts were first

offered to or set aside for the spirits of the family. Family members also took some type

of action to mark the days of a departed loved one’s birth and death. Eva discussed

how she would not go to the cemetery to visit the graveside, but instead take a little bit

of beer, rum, and tobacco and set them to the side for the loved one. These encounters

began to demonstrate that practitioner’s understood their deceased loved ones to

  138
continually occupy and perform significant roles within their life, and therefore were

engaged not necessarily out of fear of retribution or from an overwhelming sense of

obligation, but rather from a deep sense of affection and mutually sustained support.

In addition to sustaining small- and large-scale ritual activities to engage spirit

familiars, respondents also used their spirit genealogy and their personal roles within

these networks to create bonds with other Palo practitioners. It was quite common for

members of the Palo worship community to call on one another throughout the week, if

not daily to share the recent news in their lives as well as to consult with one another to

accomplish their work with spirits. Members would come by and take the noontime meal

with other members, share other food and drink, or alternatively request or offer

substances or objects each other could use in their religious work; I observed different

types of water, small chickens, types of earth or sticks being exchanged. When such

transactions would occur, the receiving respondent would politely interrupt the interview

and offer the visitor some rum to suplar, to spray rum over the nganga and cazuela

elements to politely greet the spirits of the individual practitioner.

Often, the conversation between the Palo worship community members would

include in-depth discussions about the needs of their spirits, and how the practitioner

was seeking out resources to meet those needs (Johnson 2008; Johnson 2009;

Johnson 2010). After observing such exchanges, I began to incorporate small gifts for

the practitioner’s sacred space to be presented discreetly before I began interviews. I

would bring cigars, matches, candles, or flowers, and place them next to the

respondent’s ritual elements to use at their discretion. Before beginning an interview, it

was common for the practitioner to use one of these gifts immediately to initiate

  139
conversation, such as lighting the cigar to smoke between us or lighting a candle in front

of her or his ritual space. Later Yvonne and Juan told me that such actions allowed the

spirits to be included in the conversation (Johnson 2009).

During the course of four individual interviews, other members of the Palo

network stopped by a respondent’s house, and spontaneous focus groups would

develop, centered on the topic of Palo and spirit affiliations within the religious tradition.

One topic that emerged during these encounters was distinctions between Oriente and

the western areas of the island. In the process of discussing how the individual adherent

had become affiliated with Esteban’s spiritual network. I learned that Thomas had

traveled to Havana to do some spiritual work on behalf of another individual, stating

that: “Over there [in the western portion of the island] they only have one spirit, an Indio,

and the Indio does not speak to them. No, no, no, no!! I need all my spirits, the spirits of

Oriente, I cannot function without them!” Yvonne looked on approvingly, repeating “only

one?!,” and chuckling in agreement with Juan. Their shared perspective about the

necessity of keeping a multitude of spirits from Oriente added an additional dimension

to Oriente as the land of the dead.

The responsibility for reciprocity and care for other members needs increased

with elevated leadership responsibilities. It was incumbent upon ranking paleras/os to

be present and attend to the needs of visitors to the Palo worship community’s primary

house whenever there were large-scale ceremonial events. Female and male members

were responsible for dressing and cooking sacrificial animals after Palo ceremonies,

and then serving each person present, regardless of their membership status, so that

the fuerza or power, of the sacrifice could be ingested. Before palera/os who assisted

  140
left the ceremony house, the TaTa Nganga distributed additional meat to them. If a

neighborhood family or one in the Palo worship needed supplemental food rations, the

TaTa was responsible to meet the survival needs of others. What became clear was

that the religious network did more than provide for its members’ spiritual welfare; it also

provided social avenues of support to meet their material needs. However, the mutual

aid that Palo members received was not exclusive to only the worship community’s

membership. The resources that members brought into the network, and/or received

from it also went to support others in the wider community, both extending and

enhancing the avenues of reciprocity.

Evidence of the extended responsibilities of paleros came when neighbors would

come to their houses asking for food or another type of material help during an interview

session. I rarely saw an incident when some type of assistance was not given. Antonio

provided a case in point when he and I were scheduled to have an interview at 11:00

a.m. Instead, he was called away by someone needing food in another neighborhood.

He had taken the time to take food to them and settle the family. Our interview did not

get underway until 9:00 p.m that same day. These sharing activities that originate inside

of the religious network at the human/spirit and practitioner/practitioner levels suggest

that when the needs of the spiritual family and wider community are not met by the

social order, they are able to supplement those needs through the established avenues

of the worship community network.

Such support was particularly important because many associated with the Palo

worship community did not have access to the same type of hard currency resources

that are available to individuals working within the tourism sector. As I discuss in the

  141
conclusion, racial discrimination based on African phenotype is on the increase, as

North American and Western European tourists import their own racial standards to be

catered to and serviced within Cuba. This means that the social marginalization of

African-descended Cubans is making a resurgence, and some food staples, appliances,

household goods, some types of clothing, and other such imported necessities that

must be purchased in the hard currency of the tourist market are becoming harder to

obtain. The mutual aid that the Palo worship community provides for its members and

their extended network become as critical component in ensuring individuals’ welfare.

Creating Confianza: Building Family:

Each interviewee shared the story of how he or she became part of the Palo

collective. In each case, there was some type of stimulation in their daily life that

compelled them to begin relationships with spirits. As they were each brought into

contact with Esteban’s religious family, they began and/or furthered their spirit education

by being introduced into Palo Monte/Mayombe. Yvonne recounted how she had seen

an image in a dream and went to a Palo ceremony at Esteban’s house. When she

heard the drum rhythms, her right leg began to tremble in time with the drums. She

attempted to stop the movement, but it continued. Before long, she was mounted with a

spirit and her body was prostrate before the nganga. Esteban called for Antonio to bring

him some specialized chalk to pass over her body to bring her back to herself.

Afterward, Esteban told Yvonne that he wanted to speak with her about this thing. She

asked Esteban, “Did I do something wrong?” “Quite the opposite!” She was then

initiated into Palo. Mateo also stated that he received a “good transmission” (dream)

  142
about being initiated so he agreed to go through the ceremony. However, when the time

came, he did not go because he got scared. He went to the Palo worship house three

hours late intentionally. Antonio embraced him, comforting Mateo as he cried, saying,

“When the time is right, you will come, and we will do it.” Then one day Mateo felt

something calling him to the Palo house. The ceremonial space was all prepared for

him to be initiated. Antonio told him, “Pa Falco told me you were coming.” After his

initiation, Mateo said he could “feel more, I hear songs in my dreams…an African spirit

came to him and said, bring these things with you. As my spiritual work advanced in

Palo things were effective in my life, in school for example”(Johnson 2010).

As Eva’s quote at the beginning of the chapter says, these individuals offer

additional examples of how states of dreaming and the types of messages that occur

during dream sequences are thought to be spirit transmissions that provide Palo

worshipers with ways to align their waking activities with the wisdom of the spirit world.

Interestingly, practitioners had an attitude of acceptance towards whatever messages

came in their dreams, that the directives received were to be acted upon because they

trusted the advice that was received. Practitioners ascribed the aspects of confianza to

their spirit beings; however, Palo worshipers also talked about how their confianza in

spirits is enhanced because of the nature of the con permiso/covenants that the

ethereal entities initiated with the practitioner.

Eva credited the depth of the con permisos with spirits in Palo to the fact that

“Palo is the one tradition that you bleed for, sacrifice for [during initiation]; it is a pact

with God.” She went on to explain that the family that is made through Palo, with the

spirits and with other practitioners, who becomes “blood” relatives (Dodson 2008: 98).

  143
Worshipers understood that the community bonds between worshipers and with the

community’s spirits are associations that require personal sacrifice physically, but also

behaviorally. Practitioners understood that through their initiation, they are physically

committed to relationships that obligate them to care for “family members” materially as

well as spiritually. Ivor gave this explanation and example; “Spirits are the ultimate

authorities on who you can and cannot have faith in. For example, if someone stole

something and wouldn’t confess, you can put them before the prenda and the prenda

will tell you. Then you can reject this person from the community because they have

broken the confianza of the collective” (Johnson 2010). An additional dimension to the

creating of the Palo worship network of humans and spirits was the cultivation of

relationships with elements drawn from nature, from the physical landscape of Oriente,

which in turn establishes lines of interconnectedness between the practitioners and their

spirits as mediated through the material artifacts of the land.

In one of the last interviews I had with Antonio, he described the exchanges

between the spiritual world and the world of humans as one wherein there are different

“frequencies” of transmission from el mundo espiritual to the world of humans. Each

human being has several different spirits that watch over him or her and accompany the

individual through life. The spirits are responsible for sending out vibrations to the

human world, and it is the vocational call, or “commission” of the spiritual leader, to read,

understand, translate, and act upon the spirit’s transmissions until the leader’s call to

serve the living and spirit members of the community ends on earth upon death.

Practitioners’ adjustments for this type of transfer and/or expansion of a person’s

religious role upon their death became apparent when the names of the recently dead

  144
Palo leadership were included in prayers of invocation before private and public

ceremonies (Johnson 2009; Johnson 2010).

Figure 7 depicts a portion of the Palo worship community’s spirit genealogy,

positing members of the collective whom I was able to interview as well as those

members who participated in spontaneous focus groups. Note where Reynerio Peréz

sits at the top left with a directional arrow connecting to Esteban. The directional red

arrows depict who initiated whom into the Palo collective, and are therefore known as

the “godfathers” of the individual of the collective. Each individual would have one

primary and one secondary “godfather” responsible to communicate with the spirits on

behalf of that individual to ensure their emotional wellbeing, but also to apprentice

inviduals to assist them with understanding and cultivating their own relationships. The

directional green arrows indicate which ngangas “birthed” another nganga, as each of

these sacred spaces maintain an identity independent from the human being who

attends to it, with its own central spirit force and attendant spirit, the prenda.

While all members of the collective are related to the spirits of the leadership––in

this case, the male leader who initiated them––individual practitioners also maintain

their own individual sets of spirits. That is to say that everyone is related to Esteban’s

nganga and his African, Pa Abran, as well as being related to each other through these

same entities, so that Pa Abran is their spirit father while Esteban is their godfather, and

they are “sisters and brothers” in religion, taking on responsibilities of care for newer

Palo members, regardless of the chronology of the Palo observers. What is prioritized

among adherents is the level of experience and wisdom garnered from their

relationships with the spirits of the collective, and the extent to which an individual

  145
carries out her or his religious duties in tending to her or his individual spirits. Not all

members have a full array of spirit others; some have certain spirit relationships and not

others, and the presence or absence of such bonds is highly individualized and

personal. The independent spirit familars of each member attend to the practitioner, his

or her’s blood family members, and his or her intimate associates upon the request of

the practitioner, so that the particular spirits of one person are thought to not necessarily

intervene in the activities of another practitioner, but instead have “casual” aquaintances

with individuals. Eva explained that, “What is mine is mine, and what is theirs is theirs,”

as she explained the relationships between spirits and individuals. However, if the

leadership spirits of the community communicated with the particular spirit comission of

an individual, “that was another thing” because, as Samuel clarifiied, spirits have a

“vista that is larger and can see the ways things are and want to share that with their

children, care for them. Spirits have the vista of truth” (Johnson 2010).

  146
  
Figure 7 Spirit genealogy of Interviewees

  147
 Spirits in Motion: Activating the Genealogy:

Each research participant had their own individual stories about how their spirits,

particularly their African spirits sought them out to develop a con permiso between

themselves and the spirit. Some practitioners reported that their “Africans” came to

them in times of crisis, during dreams, or would be more mischievous in attempting to

garner a practitioner’s attention, being disruptive enough in their daily interactions to

press the practitioner to seek advice about how to respond to the spirit’s overt

assertions. Respondents commented on how once they had decided to respond to the

spirits, they began to learn more about who the “African” was when he or she was living,

and his or her personal preferences. In turn, the, the practitioners stated how they kept

the secrets of the spirits, never revealing the spirits’ formal names because such

violation would disrupt the con permiso of the spirit, and the confidanza of the

community (Johnson 2009; Johnson 2010). Jorge discussed how “[spirits] help save

someone, they help with spirituality, materially, with the peace of life, harmony,

happiness, tranquility, unification, and [the] power of life. The different ways [to

accomplish] these things is by asking the prenda and it will direct the person as to which

type of work needs to be done” (Johnson 2010).

A key development of the research came practitioners discussed the category of

African spirits. The data that emerged suggested that Africans, specifically Congo

Africans, were ethereal others that “anchored” an individual’s spirit commission. In the

case study community, Esteban’s African served as the anchoring community member

for the living practitioners as well as all of the individual spirits of each practitioner.

  148
Samuel, explained the significance of the African spirit who over saw the entire worship

community, both living and dead, as this; “Every family needs a boss” (Johnson 2009).

African spirits, also known as muertos or ndoquis or nfumbi were discussed by

Palo practitioner as individual Africans who were either dislocated from their homelands

in Africa during the time of enslavement, or alternatively those of African lineage who

were born into enslavement in Cuba. Continental-born Africans who were brought to

Cuba were called bozales, Spanish for arms, to signify the type of labor they would

perform in the colony. Bozal was the pidgin these individuals would have spoken, a

linguistic fusion between Kikongo and Spanish (Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler 2005),

and is the type of language these types of African spirits speak in when they mount a

Palo practitioner’s body. Those of African lineage born within Cuba were called criollos;

signifying individuals who were born within the New World (Knight 1970; Palmer 1997).

Criollo spirits use more Spanish when embodied by a practitioner, yet the spirit’s

communication with practitioners would be peppered with Kikongo, while African-born

spirits would speak more Kikongo with a smattering of Spanish.

The key “boss” African spirit of the Palo worship community was known by

15
practitioners to be Pa Abran a male Kongolese man who was born in African and

brought to Cuba in the earliest years of the colony’s formation. Practitioners understood

the Congo spirit to be brave and have affinity to a certain plant, as the plant came to

represent the spirit’s strength. When Pa Abran came down and mounted an individual,

most usually the male leader of the case study Palo worship community, the embodied

                                                                                                               
15
I use a pseudonym for this spirit, as using its distinctive names could be used to
identify practitioners who maintain ritual relationships with this entity.

  149
spirit would dispense advice, lecture, joke, and commune with practitioners, while

drinking a bit of water, and some rum, and smoking a cigar.

During one public ceremony in 2006, Pa Abran spirit-mounted the body of

Antonio and began to hug people present, speaking to them in bozal. A member fluent

in bozal translated the spirit’s words into Spanish so that other people present could

understand. Suddenly, an older woman stepped in front of the spirit, hands on hips,

then raised a finger that she used to stab the air, emphatically telling the spirit that he

must do something with his child, her grandson, because the grandson was

misbehaving quite badly, “like a little devil!”

Pa Abran tilted his head to the side, quietly taking in the grandmother’s words.

The spirit called for the child to be brought to him, and sat down, gently taking the child

into his lap. The spirit asked the child if this account of his behavior was true, and the

child, wide-eyed nodded. Pa Abran spoke gently, telling him that his behavior was not

acceptable, that he must not worry his grandmother. The spirit then dictated to those

members attending him a list of the type of elements that were needed to conduct a

small ceremony with the grandmother and grandchild to correct the situation. The

grandmother thanked the spirit; the boy kissed the spirit on the cheek at the spirit’s

urging and slid down from his lap. The spirit carried on joking and advising those who

sought his input and direction (Johnson 2006). This encounter provides an example of

the type of consultation work spirits could and would conduct with members of the Palo

worship community.

During the spirit mountings of Pa Abran, a specialized headdress would be

placed on the head of the individual who had come to embody the spirit. The headdress

  150
was fashioned from feathers and band in the style of Plains U.S. Native Americans.

Casa researcher #2 suggested that the use of symbols signifying U.S. Native

Americans in religious activity in Cuba could be attributed to the fact that by the mid-

sixteenth century, whole communities of Cuba’s AmerIndian populations no longer

existed. However, the AmerIndian populations of Cuba continue to hold esteemed

positions as wise spirits as they were the first humans on the island and carry the

wisdom of the land and its memories. Whenever a member of the Palo worship

community was in “trance” with Pa Abran or Pa Flaco, a red handkerchief would be

placed around the shoulders of the embodied spirit (Johnson 2008). In his

autobiography, Esteban Montejo, an ex-enslaved man, recounted how significant the

red handkerchiefs were to the enslaved because the cloths could be used as protection

from the sun as well as for adornment (Montejo and Barnet 1968: 30-32). Practitioners’

use of the headdress to represent the wisdom of the AmerIndians and the red

handkerchief for the enslaved Africans reflects their understanding that it is from these

ancestral beings that their religious and identity narratives are contained. By

ritualistically accessing and communing with their spirit familiars, Palo worshipers re-

member themselves to the to the sanctified spaces of Oriente which has been marked

as their homeland through the ritual engagement of the space and its spirits. Antonio

along with four other members of the sample interview pool, emphatically insisted that

“everyone has an African” in spite of any ancestral racial difference that could be

physically observed (Johnson 2006; Johnson 2009; Johnson 2010). Palo practitioner in

the study attributed the presence of an African to each individual, regardless of

  151
racial/ethnic background, because they understand that “it is the African ancestors that

move us forward”(Johnson 2008; Johnson 2009).

During Palo ceremonies, if a spirit descended to commune with the living in the

form of a spirit mounting, practitioners would provide objects and/or food goods the

nfumbi enjoyed during life, usually tobacco and rum. On one such occasion, the spirit of

Pa Abran mounted a female member of the Palo network. The spirit, now re-membered

back to the Palo collective and embodied by the woman, took up a handful of leafy

branches, sprinkled perfumed water on them and stalked through the house, waiving

the branches over the group of assembled members and AART researchers. The spirit

of Pa Abran then called “his” children to him—those who had been initiated into his

religious genealogy of Palo, and told them to place their hands upon him to be blessed.

I found three key features of Palo practitioners’ spirit genealogy. The first feature

included actions of reciprocity to maintain familial bonds between practitioners and

spirits; maintaining the community’s principles of con permiso and confidanza; principles

which also set the parameters of how to live an “African” life style. Members of the

worship community were accountable based on their religious affinity with Palo

Monte/Mayombe. Secondly, the engagement of African spirits was central to Palo

worshipers’ understanding of how to enact their sense of identity, because of the

archival ritual knowledge these entities held about how to live self-defined ways of

freedom in Oriente. In the rapidly changing social environment of contemporary Cuba

where shifts of race-based preferencing are looming, Palo worshipers commune and

consult with the spirit members of their genealogy as a way to keep present sites and

actions of liberation that is part of practitioners’ inherited legacy. Finally, these

  152
collective narratives coupled with the maintenance of family networks composed of

humans and spirit entities, along with the construction of sacred centers from the bones

of their ancestral dead and products of the de sao in Los Hoyos assisted Palo

adherents with making Oriente their “homeland.” Oriente as the “land of the dead” in

essence reshapes, even as it allows supplications to remember and create a narrative

of, “Africa” in this site within the Atlantic world.

  153
 CHAPTER 6:
CONCLUSIONS

  154
Concluding Thoughts:

Palo practitioners of the worship community suggested that the native wisdom of

the Taíno AmerIndian population provided the genealogical as well as ritual knowledge

foundations to their practice of Palo Monte/Mayombe. Palo members credited the Taíno

populations as their ritual ancestors, suggesting that the “Indians” were the first to live in

the land of Cuba; therefore, they were the ancestral spirits who contained the

foundational knowledge of how to engage the natural resources of the land of Oriente.

Practitioners understood that the Taíno passed along invaluable sacred knowledge

about how to live within the geography of Oriente to the imported Africans, who also ran

away and shared free spaces of living with the native population in Oriente during the

formative years of the Cuban colony.

I found that practitioners recounted their contemporary understanding of Palo as

“the ways of our ancestors.” When I inquired further, as to which ancestors they were

referring to, individuals would continually state the Africans. However, they were also

quick to say that it was the indios (Indians) [sic], who taught the Africans how to use the

land. For practitioners, the type of relationship between these sets of ancestors

continued to be a central component of their understandings about Palo: They

understand that the AmerIndians imparted the knowledge to the Africans, and it was

these social actors who maintained the traditions related to plant use to invoke

collaborative relationships with the spirits.

The encapsulation of ritual knowledge inside of practices that utilize the natural

land elements is in agreement with Jalil Sued-Badillo’s assertion that it was the “most

foreign” of individuals who were able to sustain and transmit the ritual knowledge

  155
archives of the Taínos. In essence, the Palo members’ chant that states, “African meets

Indian and now the African is Indian” demonstrates Sued-Badillo’s assertion that it was

the imported Africans and their progeny that sustained aspects derived from Taíno

cultural traditions.

Practitioners accomplish their sense of “rootedness” in the land through

constructing sacred sites inside of their homes or, alternatively, rely on the ceremonial

center of the Palo leadership to facilitate communications with the spirit-guides of the

TaTa Nganga through his nganga. Palo practitioners of this collective will use products

from nature as well as crafted artifacts from Cuba’s social history to both construct their

sacred spaces and conduct ritual activities directed at the constructed sacred spaces. A

recurring goal of such activities is to communicate with spirit others to garner insight,

protection, and guidance in the supplicants’ social surroundings. The advice garnered

from the spirit beings is used to negotiate the practitioners’ current social world

experiences as well as shape and/or integrate them within the universe’s order, which is

both inclusive of and simultaneously beyond human realms of knowing. Palo

practitioners believe that only key spirit others can successfully translate the world of

the living into effective ways of knowing because of such entities’ experience within the

human historical material world and their experiences within el mundo espiritual the

spirit Other World.

Knowledge about the land and how to use its elements becomes pivotal for Palo

practitioners, in that it is through these substances and the knowledge of how to

successfully manipulate nature’s elements that devotees can activate and maintain their

relationships with spirits. Moreover, knowledge about the plants and animals of the

  156
space allows practitioners to use natural products to treat everyday physical and

spiritual health aliments of each individual. Palo worshipers would also use

combinations of natural substances to intervene and redirect spiritual misalignments

they understood as negatively affecting social relations in the material reality as well as

the interactive relationships with their intimate spirit-others––such as the encounter

between Pa Abran and the grandmother who consulted the spirit about her grandson’s

behavior. Ivor suggested that it was also possible for Palo worshipers to engage the

prenda to establish who in the community had violated the confidanza of an individual

member. The use of the spirits of the genealogy in mundane and everyday matters

speaks to the importance practitioners place on the roles spirits perform as social and

moral authorities for the community. Indeed, the social relationships practitioners

maintain with each other are negotiated through the principles that are channeled

through their engagement with spirit beings.

The inherited intimate relationship Palo practitioners maintain with the Oriente

location as part of their religious work is significant because they recognize this specific

location as the physical crucible of their religious genealogy creation. Worshipers

propose that the spirits of the Africans who were enslaved, lived, and died in Oriente are

the key figures within the community’s religious family. The privileged position

worshipers assign to African spirits like Pa Abran is lodged in the historical time such

entities occupied, the time of collaborative resistance by the remaining AmerIndians and

the newly imported Africans. Palo supplicants’ emphasis on the African spirits suggests

that the legacy of living inside the forested spaces of Oriente in self-defined

communities of the palenques serves as a significant historical referent for informing

  157
supplicants’ “African” identity. The attention they give to maintaining this distinct identity

in contemporary Cuba illustrates one of the key definitional conditions of a diaspora:

that minority members hold a degree of doubt of their acceptance in their current social

reality.

Cuba’s development as a nation through all of its historical periods provides

evidence of this marginality. Even with the inroads the Cuban state has made in making

racial and gender discrimination illegal, centuries of sociocultural exclusions cannot be

eradicated with legislation. Moreover, the increase of tourism to bolster the Cuban

economy, in attempts to minimize the effects of the U.S. embargo, reinfuses hegemonic

race-based preferencing back into Cuba’s social contexts to cater to North American

and Western European conceptions of race. As such, there has been a resurgence in

negative depictions of African descendants in the popular art of the nation, where

distorted images of Black Cubans are sold throughout the island, even in its finer hotels

(Dodson and Johnson 2009; Johnson 2010). While Cubans struggle to reclaim and

reconcile the racialized social violence of their past, like the events of the 1912

massacre, and the nuances of contemporary racialized marginalization, the Palo

worship community is accessing its own reservoirs of positive identity assertion and

historical memory of self-liberation; the community is communing with its spirits.

However, what is significant about the Palo worship community’s engagement of

the ancestral spirits of Oriente is that they have inscribed their comprehensions of a

“homeland” onto the geographic landscape of the eastern region. That is to suggest that

for these Palo adherents, their homeland is where their ritually inherited and biological

ancestors reside: in the physical spaces of Oriente. Such comprehensions expand

  158
earlier ideas about the mythic return to a home of origin outside of the geographic

boundaries of Africa. The return for Palo worshipers is continual, if not daily, as their

comprehensions about Africa are informed by their ritual annals as contained in the

sacred spaces of the ngangas. Palo worshipers’ “African” identity is lodged in the

sociohistorical experiences of and their religious creations inside of, Cuba. Palo

practitioners’ construction of a religious genealogy that incorporates spirit entities whose

skeletal remains are interred within Oriente inscribes the location as their sacred

ceremonial center, which in turn allows them to employ alternative archives to assert

their own narratives of identity and community into Cuba’s contemporary social reality.

Devotees’ recounting of their experiences with their “African” spirits is an affirmative

claiming of association and kinship with ethereal others whose struggle for self-

definition has marked the eastern region, “the land of the dead” as the “most Cuban” of

all of the nation’s provinces. The annals of that are maintained inside of Palo ritual

spaces and inside of the knowledge-based of the worship community’s spirit genealogy

present active and current testament to the type of unsilencing that can occur when

“bones cry out” inside of the diaspora of Africans in the Atlantic.

  159
 APPENDIX

  160
 Table 1: Palo Worship Community Interviewees, 1 of 2

Age Education Nganga African

Name
Spirit
Peréz ? ? Yes ?
Esteban Approx. Unknown Yes Yes
54 at
death
Antonio 36 at Vocational Yes Yes
death Training
Samuel 45 Vocational Yes Yes
Training
Eva 54 Master’s No Yes
Jorge 34 Vocational Yes No
Training
Ivor 35 Vocational No No
Training
Tomás 25 Vocational No Yes
Training
Yvonne 54 Master’s Yes Yes
Daniel 21 Vocational Yes No
Training
Margarita 63 Master’s Yes Yes
Juan 53 Vocational Yes Yes
Training
Rachel 74 Unknown Yes Yes
Pedro 75 Unknown Yes Yes
Renaldo 60 Unknown Yes No
Mateo 29 Vocational Yes Yes
Training
Fernando 54 Master’s No* No
*Responsible for maintaining the Palo worship community’s ceremonial space and for
the ritual elements’ safety.

  161
 Table 2: Palo Worship Community Interviewees, 2 of 2

Guide Protector Additional Multiple

Name Spirit Spirit Spirits Religious
Practices
Peréz ? ? ? ?
Esteban Yes Yes Yes Yes
Antonio Yes Yes Yes Yes
Samuel Yes Yes Yes Yes
Eva Yes Yes Yes Yes
Jorge No No No Yes
Ivor No No No Yes
Tomás Yes Yes Yes Yes
Yvonne Yes Yes Yes Yes
Daniel Yes Yes Yes Yes
Margarita Yes Yes Yes Yes
Juan Yes Yes Yes Yes
Rachel Yes Yes Yes Yes
Pedro Yes Yes Yes Yes
Renaldo No No No No
Mateo Yes Yes Yes Yes
Fernando Yes Yes No Yes

  162
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

  163
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abulafia, David
2009 The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Anderson, Talmadge
2001 Black Studies: Overview and Theoretical Perspectives. In The African
American Studies Reader. J. Nathaniel Norment, ed. Pp. 380-390. Durham, NC:
Carolina Academic Press.

Ashcraft-Eason, Lillian, Darnise C. Martin, and Oyeronke Olademo

2010 Women and New and Africana Religions. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

Ayorinde, Christine
2004 Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution, and National Identity. Gainesville, FL:
University Press of Florida.

Baba, Marietta L., and Carole E. Hill

2006 What's in the Name 'Applied Anthropology'? An Encounter with Global
Practice. The Globalization of Anthropology NAPA Bulletin #25:176-207.

Barrutia, Richard, and Armin Schwegler

1994 Fonética y Fonologia Españolas, second edition. Hoboken, NJ: John
Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Bellegarde-Smith, Patrick
2005 Fragments of Bone: Neo-African Religions in a New World. Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press.

Berg, Bruce L.
1995 Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences. Boston, MA: Allyn
and Bacon.

  164
Berlin, Ira
1998 Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North
America. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

—
2003 Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Bernard, H. Russell
2000 Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology. Walnut Creek, CA:
AltaMira Press.

—
2002 Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative
Approaches. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Bettelheim, Judith
2001 Palo Monte Mayombe and its Influence on Cuban Contemporary Art.
African Arts 34(2):36-49.

—
2005 Caribbean Espiritismo (Spiritist) Alters: The Indian and the Congo. The Art
Bulletin 87(2):312-330.

Bisnauth, Dale
1996 History of Religions in the Caribbean. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc.

Blakey, Michael L.
2001 Bioarchaeology of the African Diaspora in the Americas: Its Origins and
Scope. Annual Review of Anthropology 30:387-422.

Bockie, Simon
1993 Death and the Invisible Powers: The World of Kongo Belief. Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press.

Bolívar Arostegui, Natalia, and Carmen Gonzalez Diaz de Villegas

1998 Ta Makuende Yaya y Las Reglas de Palo Monte. Habana, Cuba: Union
de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba.

  165
Borofsky, Robert
2002 The Four Subfields: Anthropologists as Mythmakers. American
Anthropologist 104(2):463-480.

Brock, Lisa
1998 Between Race and Empire: African-Americas and Cubans Before the
Cuban Revolution. D.C. Fuertes, ed. Pp. 298. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.

Bronfman, Alejandra Marina

2004 Measures of Equality: Social Science, Citizenship, and Race in Cuba,
1902-1940. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Brown, David H.
2003 Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Brown, Karen McCarthy

2001 Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. M. Juergensmeyer, transl.
Berkley, CA: University of California Press.

Brown, Vincent
2008 The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cabrera, Lydia
1986 Reglas de Congo: Palo Monte Mayombe. Miami, FL: Ediciones Universal.

Castíllo Bueno, María de los Reyes

1996 The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century. A. McLean,
transl. La Habana, Cuba: Prolibros.

Castro Fernández, Silvio

2008 La Masacre de los Independientes de Color en 1912. La Habana, Cuba:
Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.

Cavazzi, Giovanni Antonio, Linda Marinda Heywood, and John K. Thornton

2010 Njinga, reine d'Angola: la relation d'Antonio Cavazi de Montecuccolo
(1687). Paris, France: Chandeigne.

  166
Clandinin, D. Jean, and F. Michael Connelly
1994 Personal Experience Methods. In Handbook of Qualitative Research.
N.K.D.a.Y.S. Lincoln, ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Clifford, James
1994 Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology 9(3):302-338.

Cohen, Robin
2008 Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London, U.K.: Routledge.

de la Fuente, Alejandro
2001 A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Denzin, Norman K.
1994 The Art and Politics of Interpretation. In Handbook of Qualitative Research.
N.K.D.Y.S. Lincoln, ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Díaz, María Elena

2000 The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating
Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670-1780. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Dodson, Jualynne
2008 Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba. Albuquerque,
NM: University of New Mexico Press.

Dodson, Jualynne E.
2002 Engendering Church: Women, Power, and the AME Church. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield.

—
2010 African Descendent Women and Religion: Diaspora. In Women and New
and Africana Religions. L. Ashcraft-Eason, D.C. Martin, and O. Olademo, eds.
Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

Dodson, Jualynne E., and Shanti Ali Zaid

2012 Alternative Approaches to Long-term Religious Research: The AFrican

Atlantic Research Team and Data-Gathering in Cuba. In Innovative methods in
the Study of Religion. L. Woodhead, ed. London, U.K.: Oxford University Press.

  167
Dodson, Jualynne, and Sonya Maria Johnson
2009 Interacting with Spirits: Intangible Practices in Oriente Cuba. Sharing
Culture 2009: International Conference on Intangible Heritage, Pico Island,
Azores, Portugal, Pico Island, Azores, Portugal, 2009. Green Lines Institute for
Sustainable Development..

Domínguez, Lourdes
1984 Arqueologia: Colonial Cubana Dos Estudios. La Habana: Editorial de
Ciencias Sociales.

Drake, St Clair
1987 Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology,
volumes I & II. Los Angeles, CA: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of
California.

—
1993 Diaspora Studies and Pan-Africanism. In Global Dimensions of the African
Diaspora. second edition edition. J.E. Harris, ed. Washington, D.C.: Howard
Universtiy Press.

Drake, St. Clair

1980 Anthropology and the Black Experience. The Black Scholar 11(7):2-31.

Drescher, Seymour
1994 The Ending of the Slave Trade and the Evolution of European Scientific
Racism. In The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and
Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe, second edition. J.E.I.a.S.L.
Engerman, ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

DuBois, W. E. B.
[1899] 2007 The Philadelphia Negro: "Together with a Special Report on
Domestic Service by Isabel Eaton". [Philadelphia, PA] New York, NY:
[Philadelphia, Published for the University] Cosmo, Inc.

  168
DuBois, W.E.B
1903 The Negro Church: Report of a Social Study Made Under the Direction of
Atlantic University; Together with the Proceedings of the Eighth Conference for
the Study of Negro Problem, Held at Atlanta University, May 26th, 1903.
Atlanta, GA: Atlanta University Press.

—
[1903] 1994 The Souls of Black Folk [unabridged]. Mineola, NY: Dover Thrift
Editions.

Duharte, Jiménez, Rafael

1986 La Rebeldía Esclava en el Regíon Oriental de Cuba (1533-1868).
Santiago de Cuba, Cuba: DOR Comité Provincial del Partído.

Eltis, David, and David Richardson, eds.

2008 Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade
Database. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

—
2010 Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.

Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw, eds.

1995 Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Falola, Toyin, and Matt D. Childs

2004 The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press.

Fennell, Christopher
2007a Crossroads and Cosmologies: Diasporas and Ethnogenesis in the New
World. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.

Fennell, Christopher C.
2007b BaKongo Identity and Symbolic Expression in the Americas. In
Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora. A.O.a.T. Falola, ed.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

  169
Ferrer, Ada
1999 Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898. Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Foner, Philip S.
1977 Antonio Maceo: The "Bronze Titan" of Cuba's Struggle for Independence.
New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.

Franco, José Luciano

1973 Los Palenques de Los Negros Cimarrones. La Habana: Comisión de
Activistas de Historia.

Fuentes Guerra, Jesús, and Armin Schwegler

2005 Lengua y Ritos del Palo Monte Mayombe: Dioses Cubanos y Sus Fuentes
Africanas. Madrid, Spain: Iberoamericana.

García, Jesús Alberto

1995 La Diaspora de los Kongos en las Américas y los Caribes. Caracas.
Columbia, Venezuela: Dirección de Desarrollo Regional de la Fundación
Afroamericana: Editorial APICUM : UNESCO.

Garofalo, Leo
2006 Conjuring the Coco and the Inca: The Andeanization of Lima's Afro-
Peruvian Ritual. The Americas Special Issue: The African Diaspora in the
Colonial Andes(63):53-80.

Geertz, Clifford
1973 The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York, NY: Basic
Books.

Gemery, Henry A., and Jan S. Hogendorn

1974 The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Tentative Economic Model. The Journal of
African History 15(2):223-246.

Gleijeses, Piero
2002 Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976. Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

  170
Goodenough, Ward H.
2001 Conclusion: Muddles in Schneider's Model. In The Cultural Analysis of
Kinship: The Legacy of David M. Schneider. R. Feinberg and M. Ottenheimer,
eds. Pp. 205-218. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

—
2002 Anthropology in the 20th Century and Beyond. American Anthropologist
104(2):423-440.

Gordon, Vivian V.
2001 The Coming of Age of Black Studies. In The African American Studies
Reader. J. Nathaniel Norment, ed. Pp. 212-220. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic
Press.

Guarch-Delmonte, José M.
2003 The First Caribbean People: Part I: The Palaeoindians in Cuba and the
Circum-Caribbean. In General History of the Caribbean, volume I: Autochthonous
Societies. J. Sued-Badillo, ed. London, UK: UNESCO Publishing.

Guerra, Lillian
2005 The Myth of Jose Marti: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-
Century Cuba. L.A.P. Jr, transl. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press.

Guevara, Ernesto, and David Deutschmann

2003 Che Guevara Reader. Havana, Cuba. New York, NY: Centro de Estudios
Che Guevara;Ocean Press.

Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo

2005 Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Hamilton, Ruth Simms, ed.

2007 Routes of Passage: Rethinking the African Diaspora. East Lansing, MI:
Michigan State University Press.

Harding, Rachel
2000 A Refuge in Thunder: Candomble and Alternative Spaces of Blackness.
J.M. Darlene Clark Hine, Jr. and G. David Barry, transl. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press.

  171
Harrington, M. R., Fernando Ortiz, and Adriáno del Valle
1935 Cuba antes de Colón. Habana,: Cultural.

Harris, Joseph E., ed.

1993 Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora. Washington, D.C.: Howard
University Press.

Harris, Robert L., Darlene Clark Hine, and Nellie Y. McKay

1990 Three Essays: Black Studies in the United States.29 p.

Haviser, Jay B.
1999 African Sites: Archaeology in the Caribbean. Princeton, NJ: Markus
Weiner Publishers;Ian Randle Publishers.

Hearn, Adrian H.
2008 Cuba: Religion, Social Capital, and Development. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.

Helg, Aline
1990 Race in Argentina and Cuba, 1880-1930: Theory, Policies, and Popular
Reaction In The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940. R. Graham, ed.
Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

—
1995 Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886-1912.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Heywood, Linda Marinda

2002 Portuguese into African: The Eighteenth-Century Central African
Background to Atlantic Creole Cultures. In Central Africans and Cultural
Transformations in the American Diaspora. L.M. Heywood, ed. Pp. 91-116. New
York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Heywood, Linda Marinda, and John K. Thornton

2007 Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas,
1585-1660. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

  172
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks
1993 Righteous Discontent the Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church,
1880-1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Holloway, Jonathan Scott, and Ben Keppel, eds.

2007 Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought
in the Twentieth Century. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Howard, Philip A.
1998 Changing History : Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the
Nineteenth Century. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.

Hu-Dehart, Evelyn
2005 "Afterword: Brief Meditation on Diaspora Studies." Modern Drama 48, no.
2:428-439.

Hua, Anh
2005 Diaspora and Cultural Memory. In Diaspora, Memory, and Identity: A
Search for Home. V. Agnew, ed. Pp. 308. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto
Press.

Inikori, J. E., and Stanley L. Engerman

1994 The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in
Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Inikori, Joseph E.
2001 Slaves or Serfs? A Comparative Study of Slavery and Serfdom in Europe
and Africa. In The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities. I.
Okpewho, C.B. Davies, and A.A. Mazrui, eds. Pp. 49-75. Bloomington, Indiana,
IN: Indiana University Press.

Jackson, Jean E.
1990 "I Am A Fieldnote": Fieldnotes as a Symbol of Professional Identity. In
Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology. R. Sanjek, ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.

James, C. L. R.
[1963] 1998 The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo
Revolution, second edition, revised. New York, NY: Vintage Books. First
published by Random House, Inc.

  173
James Figarola, Joel
2006a Cuba: La Gran Nganga (Algunas Prácticas de la Brujería). Santiago de
Cuba, Cuba: Ediciones Caseron: Comité Provincial de la UNEAC.

—
2006b La Brujería Cubana: El Palo Monte: Aproximación al Pensamiento
Abstracto de la Cubanía. Santiago de Cuba, Cuba: Editorial Oriente.

James Figarola, Joel, UNESCO. Caracas Office, and Unidad Regional de Ciencias
Sociales y Humanas para América Latina.
1999 Los Sistemas Mágico-Religiosos Cubanos: Principios Rectores.
Venezuela: UNESCO-Caracas: Unidad Regional de Ciencias Socialaes y
Humanas para América Latina y el Caribe.

Johnson, Paul Christopher

2002 Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomble.
Oxford, U.K: Oxford University Press.

Johnson, Sonya Maria

2004 Field Research Journal. Anthropology and African American & African
Studies. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University.

—
2006 Field Research Journal. Anthropology and African American & African
Studies. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University

—
2008 Field Research Journal. Anthropology and African American & African
Studies. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University.

—
2009 Field Research Journal. Anthropology and African American & African
Studies. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University.

—
2010 Field Research Journal. Anthropology and African American & African
Studies. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University.

  174
Keegan, William F.
1992 The People Who Discovered Columbus: The Prehistory of the Bahamas.
Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.

—
2007 Taíno Indian Myth and Practice: The Arrival of the Stranger King.
Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.

Keegan, William F. and Lisabeth A. Carlson

2008 Talking Taíno: Essays on Caribbean Natural History from a Native
Perspecitve. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press.

Kiddy, Elizabeth W.
1999 Ethnic and Racial Identity in the Brotherhoods of the Rosary of Minas
Gerais, 1700-1830. The Americas 56(2):221-252.

Kilson, Martin
1973 "Reflections on Structure and Content in Black Studies". Journal of Black
Studies 3(3):297-314.

Knight, Franklin W.
1970 Slave Society in Cuba During the Nineteenth Century. Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press.

Lachatañeré, R.
1992 El Sistema Religioso de los Afrocubanos. La Habana, Cuba: Editorial de
Ciencias Sociales.

Lachatañeré, R., and Christine Ayorinde

2006 Afro-Cuban Myths: Yemayá and Other Orishas. Princeton, NJ: M. Wiener
Publishers.

Levy, Andre
2000 Diasporas Through Anthropological Lenses: Contexts of Postmodernity.
Diaspora 9 (1):137-157.

Lewis, Bernard
1990 Race and Slavery in the Middle East: A Historical Enquiry. Oxford, U.K:
Oxford University Press.

  175
Lincoln, C. Eric , and Lawrence H. Mamiya
1994 The Black Church in the African American Experience. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.

Long, Charles H.
1995 Significations : Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of
Religion. Aurora, CO: The Davis Group.

—
2000 Perspectives for a Study of African American Religion. In Down by the
Riverside: Readings in African American Religions. L.G. Murphy, ed. Pp. 9-19.
New York, NY: New York University Press.

—
2004 A Postcolonial Meaning of Religion: Some Reflections from the Indigenous
World. In Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity. J.K.
Olupona, ed. Pp. 89-98. New York, NY: Routledge.

Lovejoy, Paul E., and David Vincent Trotman

2002 Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora. London,
U.K: Continuum.

Luaces, Abelardo Larduet

2002 La Nganga: Centro de Culto Palero. Santiago de Cuba, Cuba: Instituto
Cubano del Libro, Centro Del Libro y la Literatura.

Martínez Heredia, Fernando

2009 Fundación del Partído Independiente de Color. In Raza y Racismo.
E.P.a.M. Lueiro, ed. Pp. 318-324. La Habana, Cuba: Editorial Caminos.

Matory, J. Lorand
2005 Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the
Afro-Brazilian Candomble. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mbiti, John S.
1990 African Religions & Philosophy. Oxford, U.K: Heinemann.

  176
Mendes, António de Almeida
2008 The Foundations of the System: A Reassessment of the Slave Trade to
the Spanish Americas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. In Extending
the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. D.E.a.D.
Richardson, ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Mikelsons, Nancy B.
2005 Homage to Eva Fernandez Bravo, Espiritista Cruzado. In Fragments of
Bone: Neo-African Religions in a New World. P. Bellegarde-Smith, ed. Pp. 224--
250. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Millet, José , and Alexis Alarcón

1998 El Vodú en Cuba. Santiago de Cuba, Cuba: Editorial Oriente.

Mintz, Sidney, and Richard Price

[1976] 1992 [An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past] The Birth
of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. [Philadelphia, PA]
Boston, MA: [Institue for the Study of Human Issues] Beacon Press Books.

Montejo, Esteban, and Miguel Barnet

1968 The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

O'Toole, Rachel Sarah

2006 "In A War Against the Spanish": Andean Protection and African
Resistance on the Northern Peruvian Coast. The Americas 63 (Special Issue:
The African Diaspora in the Colonial Andes):19-52.

Ochoa, Todd Ramon

2007 "VERSIONS OF THE DEAD: Kalunga, Cuban-Kongo Materiality, and
Ethnography." Cultural Anthropology 22(4):473-500.

Ortiz, Fernando
1975 Los Negros Esclavos. La Habana, Cuba: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.

—
[1947] 1995 Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. F.t.S.b.H.D. Onis, transl.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  177
Ottenberg, Simon
1990 Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text. In
Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology. R. Sanjek, ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.

Palmer, Colin A.
1997 The Slave Trade, African Slavers and the Demography of the Caribbean
to 1750. In General History of the Caribbean. F.W. Knight, ed. Pp. 9-44. Hong
Kong, China: UNESCO Publishing.

Palmié, Stephan
1993 Ethnogenetic Processes and Cultural Transfer in Afro-American Slave
Populations. In Slavery in the Americas. W. Binder, ed. Pp. 337-363. Wurzburg,
Germany: Konigshausen & Neumann.

—
2002 Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity & Tradition.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Pané, Ramón, and José Juan Arrom

1999 An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians: Chronicles of the New World
Encounter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Paris, Peter
1995 The Spirituality of African Peoples: The Search for a Common Moral
Discourse. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

Patterson, Tiffany Ruby, and Robin D. G. Kelley

2000 Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making
of the Modern World. African Studies Review 43 (1, Special Issue on the
Diaspora):11-45.

Pérez, Louis A.
2011 Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution. New York, NY: Oxford University
Press.

Powdermaker, Hortense
1966 Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist. New York, NY: W. W.
Norton.

  178
Pritchett, James A.
2010 "Where Next in African Diaspora Studies?". Ruth Simms Hamilton
Fellowship Award's Symposium, East Lansing, MI, 2010, pp. 22-42. The African
Atlantic Research Team and The Graduate Program in African American &
African Studies.

Rivera-Pagán, Luis N.
2003 Freedom and Servitude: Indigenous Slavery and the Spanish Conquest in
the Caribbean. In General History of the Caribbean Volume I: Autochthonous
Societies. J. Sued-Badillo, ed. London, U.K: UNESCO Publishing.

Roach, Joseph
1996 Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York, NY: Columbia
University Press.

Rouse, Irving
1992 The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Routon, Kenneth
2008 Conjuring the Past: Slavery and the Historical Imagination in Cuba.
American Ethnologist 25 (4):632-649.

Rushing, Fannie
1992 Cabildos de Nación, Sociedades de la Raza de Color: AfroCuban
Participation in Slave Emancipation and Cuban Independence 1865-1895. In
History, Vol. PhD. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

Saco, José Antonio, and Fernando Ortiz

1938 Historia de la Esclavitud de la Raza Africana en el Nuevo Mundo y en
Especial en los Países Americo-Hispanos. Habana,: Cultural, s.a.

Safran, William
1991 "Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return".
Diaspora 1(1):83-99.

Sahoo, Ajaya Kumar , and Brij Maharaj

2007 Introduction--Globalization, Migration, Transnationalism and Diasporas:
Some Critical Reflections. In Sociology of Diaspora: A Reader. A.K.S.a.B.
Maharaj, ed. Pp. 1-20. New Delhi, India: Prem Rawat for Rawat Publications.

  179
Sanjek, Roger, ed.
1990 Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.

Saunders, Nicholas J. and Dorrick Gray

1996 Zemís, Trees, and Symboic Landscapes: Three Taíno Carvings from
Jamaica. Antiquity 70:801-812.

Sawyer, Mark Q.
2006 Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba. New York, NY: Cambridge
University Press.

Schmidt, Peter R., and Thomas Carl Patterson

1995 Making Alternative Histories: The Practice of Archaeology and History in
Non-Western Settings. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press;
Distributed by the University of Washington Press.

Seremetakis, C. Nadia
1991 The Last Word : Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.

Shepperson, George
1993 African Diaspora: Concept and Context. In Global Dimensions of the
African Diaspora. second edition. J. Harris, ed. Pp. 41-49. Washington, D.C.:
Howard University Press.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai

2005 On Tricky Ground: Researching the Native in the Age of Uncertainty. In
The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, third edition. N.K. Denzin and Y.S.
Lincoln, eds. Pp. 85-107. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Smith, Lois M., and Alfred Padula

1996 Sex and Revolution: Women in Socialist Cuba. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.

Sokefeld, Martin
2004 Religion or Culture? Concepts of Identity in the Alevi Diaspora. In
Diaspora, Identity and Religion: New Directions in Theory and Research W.
Kokot, T. Khachig, and C. Alfonso, eds. Pp. 133-155. London, U.K: Routledge.

  180
Sudarkasa, Niara
2007 Interpreting the African heritage in African American Family Organization.
In Black Families 4th edition. H.P. McAdoo, ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications.

Sued-Badillo, Jalil
1992a Christopher Columbus and the Enslavement of the Amerindians in the
Caribbean (Columbus and the New World Order 1492-1992). Monthly Review
44(3):71-103.

—
1992b Facing Up to Caribbean History. American Antiquity 57 (4):599-607.

—
1995 The Theme of the Indigenous in the National Projects of the Hispanic
Caribbean. In Making Alternative Histories: The Practice of Archaeology and
History in Non-Western Settings. P.R.S.a.T.C. Patterson, ed. Pp. 25-46. Santa
Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

—, ed. 2003a General History of the Caribbean Volume I: Autochthonous Societies.

London, U.K: UNESCO Publishing.

—
2003b "The Indigenous Societies at the Time of Conquest.". In General History of
the Caribbean Volume I: Autochthonous Societies. J. Sued-Badillo, ed. Pp. 259-
291. London, U.K: UNESCO Publishing.

Thomas, Hugh
1997 The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870. New
York, NY: A Touchstone Book Published by Simon & Schuster.

—
1998 Cuba, or, The Pursuit of Freedom. New York: Da Capo Press.

Thompson, Robert Farris

[1983] 1984 Flash of the Spirit : African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy.
New York, NY: [Random House] Vintage Books.

  181
Thompson, Robert Farris, Joseph Cornet, and National Gallery of Art
1981 The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds. Washington
D.C.: National Gallery of Art.

Thornton, John K.
1998a The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian
Movement, 1684-1706. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press.

—
2002 Religious and Ceremonial Life in the Kongo and Mbundu Areas, 1500-
1700. In Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora.
L.M. Heywood, ed. Pp. 71-90. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Thornton, John Kelly

1998b Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800.
Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press.

—
1999 Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500-1800. London: UCL Press.

Torres-Cuevas, Eduardo and Oscar Loyola Vega

2007 Historia de Cuba, 1492-1898: Formación y Liberación de la Nación.
Habana, Cuba: Editorial Pueblo y Educación

Traxel, David
1998 1898 The Birth of the American Century. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph
1992 The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory.
Annual Review of Anthropology 21:19-42.

—
1995 Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA:
Beacon Press.

Turner, Victor
1977 Symbols in African Ritual. In Symbolic Anthropology: A Reader in the
Study of Symbols and Meanings. D.S.K. Janet L. Dolgin, and David M. Schneider,
ed. New York: Columbia University Press.

  182
Valdes, Rafael L. Lopez
1988 Las Religiones de Origen Africano Durante la Republicia NeoColonial en
Cuba. Del Caribe 12.

Whitney, Robert
2001 State and Revolution in Cuba : Mass Mobilization and Political Change,
1920-1940. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Whitten, Norman E. Jr., and Arlene Torres, eds.

1998 Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean: Social Dynamics and
Cultural Transformations. Volume I & II. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press.

Wirtz, Kristina
2007 "Deep Language and Diasporic Culture: Learning to Speak the "Toungue
of the Orishas" in Cuban Santeria." American Ethnologist 34 (1):108-126.

Woodson, Carter Godwin

[1933]1998 The Mis-education of the Negro. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Yelvington, Kevin A.
2006a Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora. Santa Fe, NM:
School of American Research Press;James Currey.

—
2006b The Invention of Africa in Latin America and the Caribbean: Political
Discourse and Anthropological Praxis, 1920-1940. In Afro-Atlantic Dialogues:
Anthropology in the Diaspora. K.A. Yelvington, ed. Pp. 35-82. Santa Fe: NM:
School of American Research Press.

Zaid, Shanti
2006 Life in the Land of the Dead: Reynerio Pérez, Vicente Portuondo Martín,
and Twentieth Century Religious Practice in Santiago de Cuba Senior Honor's
Thesis, History. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University.

Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe

2010 African Diasporas: Toward a Global History. African Studies Review 53
(1):1-19.

  183