Santería

Luis Rivera’s maternal kin, the Ortegas, were humble folk— tenant farmers, truck drivers, peddlers—all virtually or totally illiterate. The Riveras, his father’s side, were all professionals— doctors, pharmacists, professors—educated in France and Spain. Not surprisingly, the two sides of the family had few interests in common, seldom mixing socially and privately bad-mouthing each other, the Ortegas calling the Riveras lijosos, snobs, and the Riveras dismissing the Ortegas as chusma, rabble. The only reason Luis father had married across class lines, Luis later learned, was that he sought to improve the Rivera gene pool with hardy peasant stock.

Yet despite their social differences, both sides Luis family were believers of Santería, a blend of the polytheism of early Spanish colonists and voodoo cults introduced by African slaves. Save for a free-thinker or two, the Ortegas and Riveras professed to be good Catholics, attending mass on holidays, marrying in the Church, baptizing their newborn, lavishly celebrating their children’s First Communion and crossing themselves reflexively, yet none had ever read or clearly heard the word of Christ.

To most Cubans the Bible was a big, ornate book they watched the priest ceremoniously bring out from a cabinet during mass, genuflect before it, kiss it, read from it in a monotonic, mysterious language, genuflect and kiss it again, and then put back in its cabinet, a clear signal to the congregation that only ordained priests were spiritually qualified to touch, much less read that book; and the Jesus the priests presented to them, a resurrected being dwelling somewhere up in Heaven, was just too abstract and remote for the average Cuban to warm up to. And to play it safe--the Church’s long history of spiritual cleansing by dismembering, roasting, boiling and deep-frying in oil apparently still current in the collective subconscious--they prudently worshipped their polytheistic deities in the guise of Catholic saints and virgins. The two main vírgenes in Cuba were and the black Santa Bárbara the white Caridad del Cobre.

When the Communists took over in Cuba, party indoctrinators at first tried to disabuse the people of their traditional Santería and supplant it with Marxism, but to no avail. The people stoically played the hand that fate had dealt them, but for solace and guidance they continued to rely on the deities of their ancestors. If Jesus the Savior was too abstract, Karl Marx the economist was insufferably boring. The indoctrinators eventually gave up, allowing the people to keep their Santería, and even promoting it as an effective means of alleviating the misery visited upon them by the failed Socialist Utopia. The opiate of the masses, Cuban style.

But in the end, most of the indoctrinators themselves converted to Santería, if they weren’t closet believers already. Fidel Castro was reputed to be a believer, it not a santo himself. Portraits of the Máximo Líder, an aura of light emanating from his head, was, and still is, common fixture in many Cuban homes. If the man is ever deposed in life or discredited after death, the owners of the pictures would simply trash them and replace them with images of the next great santo.

( The author recalls A Cuban professor at an American University who kept in her home an altar to the martyred Kennedy brothers, their photo portraits illuminated by candles and, set between them, a Crucifix and an effigy of the Caridad del Cobre.)

The appeal of the lesser deities of Santeria is that they’re so easy to access. They dwell right here on earth, among us the living. White, black, mulatto, educated and ignorant, rich and poor, Cubans from all walks of life believe in Santos who can be induced, or, if necessary, bribed into assisting them in their worldly affairs, be it to land a job, win the lottery, or cure an illness. And if one needs to avenge a wrong or harm an enemy, there were plenty of demons available for the job. This dark side of Santería is called Brujería, and those with the gift for prescribing curses and evoking demons, are called brujos. The demons, though, are never depicted in visual form, but their presences are vividly felt in rituals and fetishes. Cubans who secretly oppose Castro express their discontent by not hanging up pictures him in their homes. To them, the Máximo Líder is the nation’s number one brujo.

Another advantage of believing in santos is that being so much like humans, they are prone to make mistakes and can therefore be blamed and reviled if their intercessions backfire, as is usually the case.

On Luis’ father’s side of the family, the well-educated Riveras, the santos of choice were a dignified version of the Virgin Mary and a San Juan that looked more like a scholarly rabbi than the suffering saints of Catholic tradition. On his mother’s side, the unlettered Ortegas, the saint of choice was San Lázaro, not the famous Lazarus that Jesus raised from the dead, but an obscure leper briefly mentioned in Luke 16:13. Depicted as a miserable wretch clad in rags leaning on a makeshift crutch, with two equally miserable-looking dogs licking at the lesions on his bony legs, the effigy of San Lázaro dominated the main bedroom room of the Rivera home. When Luis’s mother wanted something, however trivial or mean-spirited, she would kneel before her San Lázaro and beseech his assistance. If he didn’t comply, which he rarely did, she would cuss him out and threaten to smash his effigy and replace him with a more competent saint. But she never did. An hour later she would be back kneeling before the altar begging the saint’s forgiveness.

As a smart-ass teen with an exaggerated rebellious streak, Luis was given to mocking mock the faith of his mom and aunts. “Superstition! That’s all this is, Señoras. This santo of yours can neither help nor hurt you. Look at him. Nothing but a lump of plaster. How can you possibly worship it.” At which his mom and aunts would cross themselves and beseech San Lázaro to ignore him. “He’s just a kid. Some day he’ll grow up and understand.”

Yet Luis was no atheist. From merely noting the orderly laws of the natural world around him, he sensed that there had to be a God, a Creator of some sort, who got things started and kept them going. But flush as he was with the carpe diem spirit of youth, he never gave much thought to this God or Creator. That is, until he immigrated to the United States and served four years in the Marines, the last two in the crucible of Vietnam. Luckily, he came out of the war relatively unscathed. Though the casualty rate of his demolition unit was considerably higher than average, the only injuries he sustained was a sprained ankle and a busted eardrum.

Back home, seeking explanations for horrors he had witnessed and willingly took part in during the War, he attended a number of churches: Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Anglican, Pentecostal, Assembly of God, Latter Day Saints, and lots of revival meetings. At night, in the solitude of his rented mobile home, he perused the Scriptures, hoping to connect with the Creator or with Him who was said to be his Son. But, strangely, the more churches and revival meetings he attended and the more he perused the Scriptures, the more vividly he recalled the saints and demons of his Cuban Santería.

Then one Sunday in church he had an epiphany. It was one of those politically correct services where the sermon was simultaneously transliterated into sign language, even though no one in the congregation was deaf or even hard of hearing. The preacher was well into his sermon when a baby that had been sleeping on its mother’s breast woke up and started babbling as babies charmingly do. The preacher, though, didn’t see the charm in it. He stopped preaching and, much irritated, signaled to the mother to leave the sanctuary. The mother took her baby and meekly did as told, her body language saying, “I’m so sorry.”

After the service, Luis strode up to the pulpit and confronted the preacher, quoting Mark 13 to him: “Let the children come to me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of God.” And before the startled preacher could respond, Luis lectured him in his pissed-off Spanish accent: “Mr. Preacher, I say unto you, if you can’t grasp the meaning of these simple words, then you should find yourself another line of work.”

Luis now realized why his search in conventional religion for the true Creator kept leading him back to the saints and demons his ancestral Santería. The scene he witnessed in church that day, and in most other churches he had attended, was sham Christianity. Though no clerical authority prohibited them from reading the Bible, those churchgoers decked out in their Sunday best, a-praying and a-swaying and singing in unison, had not taken the trouble to read, much less comprehend, the entire book. Selected passages taken out of context, if that, was all they knew. The God and Jesus they thought they were worshipping was really the proverbial golden calf. Their preachers, their pastors, their buildings, their bureaucracies, their music, their props, their costumes, their festivals, their man-made theology, that was what they really, the icons without the meaning behind them, idolatry clear and simple, in blatant violation of the First Commandment.

Luis Rivera went on to become a math professor, marry one of his grad students, sire four boys and three girls, build his own house, and write some forty articles on religion, all of which flatly rejected by every journal he submitted them to. An excerpt from one of the articles read:

”The super devout of the so-called great religions, Christianity and Islam, in particular, are more prone to getting sucked in by Satan. The higher they reach toward an almighty God, the more they strive to grasp the Ultimate Truth, the holier they hold their convictions, the more likely they are to lose touch with their individual humanity and meld with others of the same ilk into an evil force. The individualistic, near-human deities of Santeria, on the other hand, prevents believers from straying too far from common sense and the material world, no matter how wildly they express their faith. They may attend animated séances to contact the soul of a dead relatives, or crawl miles to a shrine to beseech a saint’s favor, but the probability of their instituting an Inquisition or embarking on a witch hunt or a Jihad is not likely. Though some are not are not above committing murder--for vengeance, jealousy, money or some other personal reason--few will advocate for the wholesale extermination of an entire race or nation. So all in all, the superstitions of voodoo, Santería and such are more consistent with the simple teachings of Jesus than are the convoluted doctrines of organized religion.”

Luis Rivera was lucky. Had he been born in fifteenth-century Spain, he would have been one those poor wretches dismembered, roasted, boiled or deep-fried in oil.