Havana Read online

  In a perfect example of transculturation, the practices of several African religions have fused with those of Spanish Catholicism to create what might be the most widely practiced religion in secular Havana. The dolls represent the spirits of ancestors; the flags and beads display the favorite colors of various African spirits. The spirits all have favorite colors. A follower of Changó wears red and white beads and a follower of the wise Orula wears green and yellow. These beads are very commonly seen in Havana. The paper bags under the ceiba, the silk-cotton tree, hold offerings to African spirits, orishas. The splash of rum on the floor is an offering to an orisha.

  The ceiba tree, the symbol of Havana, is sacred to both African and European worshippers. The Spanish believed the tree was blessed by the Virgin Mary, because it offered her shade. Africans took it as a substitute for the African baobab tree, which also has big roots with deep crevices. The bark is used in African religions for medicinal teas, and the leaves are used for magic potions such as love spells.

  Offerings under the royal palm, the straight and tall symbol of Cuba, are made to the West African orisha, Changó, who lives in royal palms and likes the color red but is also fond of bananas. Changó is associated with lightning, and the tall palms sometimes act as lightning rods. When the top is blown off a palm, someone invariably says, “¡Changó!”

  There are three popular African-derived religions in Havana. The circle with the two crossed arrows most commonly seen on walls in Cayo Hueso represents the “four cardinal points of the universe,” as found in the Palo Monte religion, which comes from Central Africa. The most popular African religion in Havana is Santería, the Cuban version of Lucumí, which is the religion of the Yoruba who today live in Nigeria. In Africa, the Yoruba are thought to have one of the richest cultures. Palo Monte ceremonies take place at night and involve consuming large amounts of rum and beating large, deep drums, while Santería ceremonies are performed in daylight, with heavy drinking discouraged, and the drums small and two-sided, tapped in intricate rhythms.

  There is a third popular African religion in Havana, Arará, which had a larger influence in Haiti. Arará was the religion of the kingdom of Dahomey, which was established in 1600 in what is today Benin and was dominated by the Fon people. It had been one of several strong independent West African states. The Yoruba had had another one. But Europeans eventually destroyed them all, Dahomey being defeated by the late nineteenth century.

  In all three religions there is a God, but there are also many spirits, orishas, that have tremendous powers. God, known in Yoruba as Olodumare, is all-powerful, has always existed, and is largely incomprehensible. The orishas were created by God and have human failings such as anger, jealousy, and greed. Each orisha has his or her own personality. Unlike God, they are accessible, and can be appeased and even won over through offerings.

  To truly connect with a spirit in any of these three religions, the worshipper must invite the spirit to possess his or her body through ritual dancing. The process is extraordinary to observe. As the spirit takes over, not only does the style of dancing change from the dancer’s style to that of the spirit, but the facial expressions, gestures, voice, and entire personality of the worshipper are transformed as well. In many instances this transformation appears faked, but sometimes it seems as if some other force has taken over with a disturbing intensity, and it is very difficult to bring the worshipper back.

  In Havana, many people—white, mixed, and black—practice all three of these religions and also Roman Catholicism, following an African attitude that all religions are useful and you employ whatever is best for the task at hand. Cuba is supposed to be a secular society, and in Havana this point is often made. But while Habaneros are not drawn to religious institutions, they seem very drawn to beliefs. In his novella El Juego de la Viola (Leapfrog), contemporary Habanero writer Guillermo Rosales wrote about a boy who starts to say, “I swear to God,” and then realizes that it makes no sense, since he doesn’t believe in God. His father suggests that he swear on Father Stalin. You have to swear on something.

  When Desi Arnaz, a.k.a. Ricky Ricardo, sang “Babalú” with his big drum, few Americans—though every Cuban—understood that he was singing a song to the orisha Babalú Ayé, healer of the sick. His choice of a Palo Monte drum may have been based more on dramatic effect than religious preference.

  In Havana, most everything is suspected of having hidden African meaning. In 1926, earth was dug up in a central Havana park to plant a silk-cotton tree to commemorate a Pan-American Conference. The meaning of that was much debated; some suggested that the earth was actually dug up for the Palo Monte spirit Sarabanda, for whom earth is gathered. And why is the statue of José Martí surrounded by exactly twenty-eight royal palms? Is Changó guarding Martí? Why twenty-eight? Numerology is very important, with each orisha having an assigned number.

  In Cuba, African culture was perhaps better preserved than in other former slave-holding countries. In the seventeenth century, European slavers stirred up animosities between tribes or nations in Africa so that they would go to war, take prisoners, and sell those prisoners into slavery. In West Africa, the Fon of Dahomey went to war with the Yoruba, defeating them, and a huge number of Yoruba were sent to Cuba and other slave colonies.

  In Cuba, slavers had the same idea: if the tribal identities among slaves were kept strong, they would attack one another and could not unite. So they established tribal organizations called cabildos. Tribal traditions and culture were suppressed everywhere else, but they were encouraged within the cabildos. The whites regarded them as organizations to help them divide and conquer the island’s black population. But black people saw the cabildos as centers for the preservation of their culture—their language, music, and religion. These organizations particularly flourished in Havana, making the city a center for African culture. The Yoruba cabildo in Havana was particularly vibrant, and rather than try to suppress other ethnic groups, it fostered rebellion against the white establishment, most famously in the early-nineteenth-century Aponte uprising.

  In addition to cabildos, there were the Abekuá, secret societies formed to preserve African culture. As the free population grew, these organizations tried to look out for the economic interests of their members. Abekuá were especially powerful among the large free black population of Havana and controlled certain fields of urban labor, such as dock work, as well as certain neighborhoods, such as Regla, where the docks were and where most dockworkers lived.

  Until the revolution came to power, with its negative view of all religion, Catholicism ruled the island, and African religions, like most elements of African culture, were suppressed outside of the cabildos. Transculturation, which subsumed African practices within the framework of Catholicism, occurred easily, because Catholicism has much in common with African religion. Catholicism has a God with three manifestations—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, since 1962 known as the Holy Spirit—and beneath this, a huge pantheon of spirits in the form of saints and various manifestations of the Virgin Mary. As in African religions, each of these has a distinct personality and interests. Saint Francis loves animals, Saint Lazarus heals the sick.

  At the edge of Havana lies a pretty little eighteenth-century shrine to Saint Lazarus. Every day people go there with a bad leg, a heart condition, AIDS, or some other ailment and ask the saint to heal them. But since Babalú Ayé also heals the sick, an undetermined number at the shrine go there to beseech Babalú and not Lazarus.

  In 1989, I visited the shrine and asked the mother superior, an elderly woman named Isabel Valdéz Perez, who had lived most of her life at the shrine, how she felt about its being used for African worship. She said, “They change the names of the saints—they call San Lazaro Babalú Ayé and Santa Barbara something else. It isn’t Christian. Christianity is Christ and the sacraments. But they are good religious people. Because they believe so much in God. They sacrifice animals.” Here she wrinkled her face as though she had just bitten into a l
ime. “But I can’t say ‘No, you can’t do that.’ Those necklaces aren’t from God, but if they want to believe that with a necklace they can communicate with God, there is nothing bad in that. If you reject a man of God for different customs, what kind of Christianity is that?”

  Actually, it is the kind of Christianity that the Catholic Church practiced before the revolution, when they had power. But they could never stop worshippers from secretly bringing their African beliefs to church.

  Even in Santería ceremonies that don’t include Catholic practices, the various orishas are represented by images of corresponding Catholic saints. In Cuba, Babalú Ayé looks like Lazarus, and Changó looks like Santa Barbara. Oggún, who likes the colors green and black, and looks after wars and—conveniently for war victims—also hospitals, looks like Saint Peter. Yemayá, one of the most important orisha, the symbol of womanhood and maternity and also the sea, who loves the colors blue and white, is also the Virgin of Regla. This manifestation of the Virgin Mary, who has always been black (as, of course, is Yemayá), began in fourth-century Spain. She is the patron saint of Regla, the tough and weathered community on the east side of Havana Bay.

  Catholics rejoice that even under Communist rule, Catholicism still lives in Havana with the huge pilgrimage to the Virgin of Regla every September 7. This ignores the fact—no longer a secret—that many of the pilgrims are there to worship Yemayá.

  Women in Regla often wear blue-and-white gowns for Yemayá, and men dress in white for Obatalá, who looks after fatherhood and is also Our Lady of Mercy, celebrated in a church across the harbor in Habana Vieja.

  Whites in Cuba are frequently involved in African religions, as well as those of Europe. This transculturation works well in a society where few are purely European or purely white, and where it is increasingly difficult to say what anyone’s ethnicity is. As Guillén wrote in 1931:

  Vale más callarse, amigos,

  y no menear la cuestión;

  porque venimos de lejos,

  y andamos de dos en dos.

  It’s better to keep quiet, friend,

  and not bring up the subject;

  since we all come from far away,

  and walk together two by two.

  •

  The priests of Santería, babalawos, are highly respected members of their community. Even after the revolution eliminated all private enterprise, the fees they collected for ceremonies and other sessions—in the case of animal sacrifice, substantial fees—were overlooked by the government. An Habanero might save for a year or two to be able to pay for a ceremony.

  Babalawos study for years and, in addition to having knowledge of the ancient religion, must be able to speak Yoruba, the language of the orishas. In the 1980s, I used to visit a babalawo in Guanabacoa who, although only in his seventies, had learned the religion and language from his African-born grandfather, a Yoruba who had been sold into slavery.

  I also used to visit a babalawo in Cayo Hueso. “Cayo Hueso” means “bone key,” and in this land where everything is suspected of having a secret African meaning, that is an intriguing name for a neighborhood celebrated for its practitioners of Palo Monte and Santería. But in fact the name comes from the nineteenth-century Key West Cubans who moved back to this neighborhood. Cubans call Key West “Cayo Hueso”—simply because hueso happens to sound like “west.”

  The babalawo lived with his wife in one of several three- and four-story buildings that looked as if they would blow over in the next hurricane. And indeed, in 1970 a government inspector had come and told the residents that their building was unsound and was being condemned, and that they were to be moved to newer housing. But the residents were never moved, and the building still stood. As I climbed the steep, narrow, tilting staircase, it was difficult not to think about the twenty years the residents had been waiting for a new building. I also noticed that, as in most Havana apartments, the building’s ceilings were twenty feet high—good for cooling hot air, but dangerous for living beneath, as pieces of loosening plaster had a long way to go before crashing onto the floor.

  But this babalawo has some privileges from the government. As with other African religion leaders, he was allowed to practice his business of offering ceremonies and advice for a price.

  One hot summer day in 1989, we got into his toothless friend’s 1941 Chevy. To have one of these confiscated American cars usually meant that you were in the government’s good graces, but a ’41 Chevy is not a ’58 Buick. It was a true cafetero, belching and bubbling along, with a stick shift that could only claw out two forward gears.

  We were headed for a farm in Havana, which was good, because I was certain that this Chevy would never make it to the countryside. This was a special farm; it provided sacrificial animals for babalawos. “Without sacrifice there is nothing,” the babalawo told me, and I knew he was not talking about the same kind of sacrifice that the revolution kept asking for.

  Ritual killing is not easy. A little brown head can easily be twisted off a dove, but killing a chicken is more complicated, and a goat really takes some practiced technique. Our destination, an urban farm in a small backyard, had chickens, doves, goats, even turtles—Changó likes turtles. I was happy to see that there were no dogs. Oggún likes dogs, and they are sacrificed in Nigeria, but Oggún has to understand that no matter how African these Habaneros may be, they love dogs too much. Still, the babalawo told me, there had been some “extreme cases” in Cuba.

  The farm’s owner, a tall man with long, white silken hair and a kindly face, said that the business had been in his family for seventy years. When I asked him if it was secret or if the government sanctioned it, he shrugged ambiguously.

  You really never know what you will find in Havana.

  ELEVEN

  Frozen in the Tropics

  Es ciudad en sombras, hecha para la explotacíon de las sombras . . .

  It is a city in shadows, made for the exploitation of the shadows . . .

  — ALEJO CARPENTIER, La Ciudad de Las Columnas (1970)

  Havana, to be truthful, is a mess. The sidewalks are cracked and broken, as are most of the streets. Walls are blackened from too much sunlight, whitened from too much salt air, and reddened like rust in places where there is no metal. Then there are the various molds, mildews, and other growths that flourish in warm tropical dampness and come in a variety of colors. Where there is wood, it is being eaten by termites that drill holes with seeming randomness and leave little piles of sawdust behind. With structures sagging on their sturdy columns, sunken roofs, stained gargoyles, and cracked and blackened stone ornaments, Havana looks like the remnants of an ancient civilization in need of teams of archaeologists to sift through the rubble to see what can be found.

  Elegant, sweeping staircases have lost their banisters. Some hang at odd angles and appear to have only days left before they fall. Buildings are regularly condemned as unsafe—according to the government, fourteen thousand buildings are condemned every year. Squatters sometimes live in them anyway. There are buildings missing stairways, missing roofs, missing walls. The government estimates that 20 percent of the population lives in housing that has been deemed “precarious.” It is a reality that is reflected in literature—most contemporary Havana fiction is about people living in or somehow using abandoned buildings.

  The city loses buildings every day. Habaneros seek uses for whatever survives. Some houses have collapsed, and only their facades remain. Rather than tear them down, Habaneros look for ways to use them—as with the restaurant La Imprenta, set among ruins. There are few wrecking crews or removal projects. In the center of Regla is the elaborate facade of a nineteenth-century theater. The theater is gone, but the facade awaits someone to build something behind it.

  One of the remarkable features of Havana architecture is its balconies, made “de fragantes barandas de hierro, como flores extrañas, secas entre páginas” (out of fragrant iron railings, like strange flowers dried between pages), as the twentieth-century
Havana poet Eliseo Diego put it.

  Havana balconies were meant to be beautiful spots from which to steal a little evening breeze and hang over to look down to the streets. But now the decorative masonry is black, the walls are peeling, and the colored panes of glass that once surrounded doorways and windows have mostly fallen out, leaving wooden geometric skeletons behind, with only an occasional deep blue or red triangle to remind one of what once was there.

  Balconies almost always have plants on them, usually in pots but sometimes growing straight out of the stone floor and rising more than a story, as if the rotting building were becoming organic enough to support more life than just mold and lichens.

  Havana balconies never had much room for people, but now they have even less. They almost always have a line of laundry drying, because in this electricity-deprived city, clothes dryers are rare. Then there are the bright plastic children’s toys, a bicycle or two, a broken-down machine in mid-repair. Sometimes there is a small coop or two for raising chickens. In earlier times, the balconies often housed roosters bred for cockfights. Nineteenth-century railroad regulations stated: “The hand baggage of a gentleman shall consist of one hatbox, one satchel, and one fighting rooster.” Today cages more likely contain chickens for eating.

  There are electric wires draped over buildings, stretched from one building to another, flopping out the windows, drooping down to the balcony and back in another window, making the city look like a seated marionette with loose strings.

  •

  Since the revolution, the government has embarked on only a handful of projects to provide more housing. A few charmless blocks epitomizing the socialist ideal of “worker housing” were built.

  Regla is a beat-up area of one- and two-story houses, the older ones ancient, crumbling, and made of wood, and a few model Soviet-built workers’ homes, concrete two-story apartment buildings for good party members. It also has an oil refinery whose bright flames curl into the tropical sky and can be seen as far away as Vedado. Regla has a reputation as a good Communist neighborhood. One of the few uprisings in Havana to overthrow Batista was in Regla.