Forbidden Altar: An Aleyo's (Nonbeliver's) Attraction to Santeria (2001)

That summer of 1971, instead of threading steel pipes at Uncle Manny's plumbing supply store for just $3 a day, I was selling subscriptions to The Miami Herald in Little Havana. satchel heavy with rolled-up newspapers, I knocked on the door of a bungalow. A man with curly hair and dark sunglasses answered, ?Qu6 quieres? What do you want? He was dressed all in white except for a yellow silk scarf. I could see a necklace of yellow and white beads beneath his t-shirt. He seemed strange to me, sinister even. What I saw inside the house was stranger still. A five-foot Lady of Charity of Cobre, Cuba's patron saint, stood in the middle of the living room, her blue cape embroidered with silver filaments, her golden crown decorated with faux gems. I was accustomed to seeing large statues like this one in a church but never inside someone's home. Also, the Virgin was not surrounded by the familiar votary candles but by pots of cooked food, as well as by tropical fruits and vegetables like coconuts and ripe plantains. Today I would have recognized her as Oshun, the goddess of and the river, whose sacred color is yellow. As a twelve-year-old boy, however, I felt uncomfortable, fearful. When I returned home I told my Cuban mother what I had seen, and she explained that the man wore la vestimenta, the vestments, of a Santero, a word I had not heard before. She warned me that Santeros were evil people, that they practiced witchcraft. Stay away from them, she said, they will turn you into a zombie. Heeding her warning, I avoided going into any home that had an altar with either a glass of water or a red apple next to a saint, which were, according to her, unequivocal signs of Santeros trying to pass off as Catholics. For decades I, like mama, remained ignorant and suspicious of this faith, and it was not until five years ago when I began to do research on Cuba (for the purpose of writing my creative dissertation) that I experienced the sublime beauty of this AfroCuban spirituality, that I understood too the necessity of confronting the racism of my community, one that has been for too long ignored. Indeed, not all Cubans want to dance la rumba of racial harmony. Above all, I should add, in doing this research I was fortunate to have received the most precious gift of all: that of inspiration. Thus, as unlikely as it would have seemed ten years ago, I, the grandson of Spaniards and criollos, developed into a poet of an AfroCuban aesthetics. Before I discuss the poetry, allow me to explain (as generally as one can) what Santeria is. Like candomble in Brazil and vodoun in Haiti, Santeria is, according to Joseph M. Murphy, a symbiosis of Africa and Europe (124), that is, a religion that fuses elements of Catholic and Yoruba spirituality. This syncretism was crucial to its survival in the hostile environment of the Cuban barracoon because it allowed the slaves to secretly worship their gods, called orishas, disguised as Catholic saints. By tricking their masters into believing they were praying to, for example, the Virgin Mary or Saint Barbara, rather than Yemaya or Shang6, the newly baptized slaves kept their religion alive ... in a great struggle for freedom (Murphy 116). African men and women, Murphy goes on to say, built a spiritual oasis where there was power, respect, and love (117). To this day, because of their courageous and clever resistance to white authority, we find descendants like the Cuban poet Pedro Perez Sarduy describing a childhood filled with Yoruba chants. They came to me at the dinner table, they came to me in bed, he says. My grandmother lullabied in this way (Garcia-Pinto 31; my translation). Besides this sacred music, most often played with goat-skin drums and gongs, Santeria encompasses other modes of worship, such as animal sacrifice; communal dancing; offerings of food; beaded necklaces worn by devotees; spiritual cleansing by roots, herbs, and other plants; the casting of cowry shells for divination; and elaborate initiation rites. …