Cubans seek solutions and comfort in Santeria

From a two-room concrete house on the outskirts of Cuba’s capital, the thunder of wooden drums can be heard in the streets.

The neighbors gather at the door and the children climb a fence to look inside. They watch as dozens of Cubans dressed in white and African beads make offerings at a bright blue altar that takes up half a room, asking for luck, protection and good health.

While almost 70% of the 670 million Latin Americans consider themselves Catholic, in Cuba, Santeria is the name of the game.

A fusion of African religions and Catholicism, Santeria was one of the few religious practices to quietly endure decades of bans and stigma by the communist government.

Now, as that stigma gradually fades and the country enters a time of economic, political and immigration crisis, the religion is growing in popularity and spreading to new demographics.

Every day the religion grows a little more, said Mandy Arrazcaeta, 30, among the crowd of people at her home dancing and making offerings at the altar to a plastic doll representing the Yoruba deity Yemaya. Right now, Santeria in the country is a kind of stronghold.

Santeria was born as a form of silent resistance among the black communities of the island. The religion dates back centuries, when Spanish settlers brought hundreds of thousands of African slaves.

While the Spanish tried to force Catholicism on the slaves, the Africans brought their own religions, mostly from West Africa, which they would camouflage by attaching their deities—orishas—to Catholic saints.

Cuba’s patron saint, Our Lady of Charity, for example, was fused with the golden deity Oshún.

While there are hundreds of orishas in Santeria, practitioners, known as santeros, generally worship only a handful and connect with them through rituals and offerings.

It is estimated that millions of people around the world practice Santeria, although definitive numbers, especially in Cuba, are difficult to pin down due to the informal nature of the religion. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom estimates that 70% in Cuba practice some version of Santeria or similar African religions.

What is clear from the altars that dot homes across the island and the many Cubans in Havana dressed in white, worn by Santeros their first year after conversion to represent rebirth, is that Santeria has captured the Cuban consciousness. .

Following the Cuban revolution in the 1950s, Fidel Castro dismantled religious structures and expelled priests who criticized his rule. Religion, famously described by the communist philosopher Karl Marx as “the opium of the people,” was virtually banned.

Catholicism, heavily dependent on church meetings and the hierarchy, withered away.

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