Santería in a Globalized World: A Study in Afro-Cuban Folkloric Music

38 Pages·2017·0.35 MB·English

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Lawrence University Honors Projects
5-30-2018
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Nathan Montgomery
Lawrence University
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Montgomery, Nathan, "Santería in a Globalized World: A Study in Afro-Cuban Folkloric Music" (2018).
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Nathan Montgomery
4/30/18
IHRTLUHC
SANTERÍA IN A GLOBALIZED
WORLD: A STUDY OF AFRO-CUBAN
FOLKLORIC MUSIC

ABSTRACT
The Yoruban people of modern-day Nigeria worship many deities called orichas by means of
singing, drumming, and dancing. Their aurally preserved artistic traditions are intrinsically
connected to both religious ceremony and everyday life. These forms of worship traveled to the
Americas during the colonial era through the brutal transatlantic slave trade and continued to evolve
beneath racist societal hierarchies implemented by western European nations. Despite severe
oppression, Yoruban slaves in Cuba were able to disguise orichas behind Catholic saints so that they
could still actively worship in public. This initial guise led to a synthesis of religious practice,
language, and artistry that is known today as Santería.
Though continually repressed by multiple regimes, increased accessibility of information,
ease of travel, and an explosion of tourism have catapulted Santería into the global religious
conversation. With practitioners around the world, Santería has become an international religion
that deserves to be studied and respected. With it comes a rich artistic tradition that both preserves
the history of an oppressed people and their indigenous ties to West Africa, and uses a unique

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combination of influences to embody a living communal tradition that is powerful enough to
summon the divine.
I used my Senior Experience Grant to conduct a 30-day research trip to Cuba in July 2017. I
will be speaking about the history of Santería as a world religion in Harper Hall on May 13th at 11am,
sharing insights gleaned from my experience in Cuba and presenting a selection of music that I
learned from primary sources.
INTRODUCTION
In the fall of 2013, I was persuaded to join Tambo Toké, Lawrence University’s Afro-Cuban
ensemble, led by Lawrence alumnus Eli Edelman. In March of 2014, I performed as the lead vocalist
(known as the akpwon) in his senior recital, which featured a thirty-minute arrangement of what I
was told was “Afro-Cuban folkloric music.” I had no previous experience with any Afro-Cuban
tradition, but I decided to take a chance and learn what I could. The recording we produced won a
Downbeat Award for best undergraduate Latin Group and jumpstarted another year-and-a-half of
intense performance in a tradition that I still barely knew anything about. Over time, my continued
involvement with the ensemble fostered the beginnings of the fascination and love I now have for the
diversity and depth of Afro-Cuban traditions and opened my eyes to the musical and historical
importance of studying the spread of West African ritual throughout the Americas.
In 2017 I was awarded a Senior Experience Grant from Lawrence University to execute a 30-
day research trip to Cuba during the month of July. I immersed myself in the musical and religious
communities in Havana and Matanzas. While I learned about traditions such as Ijesa, Arara, Abakwa,
rumba, and son, my focus became Santería, the most prevalent religion of African origin that exists in
Cuba. Specifically, my focus sharpened upon the musical practices of the religion, which consist of
call-and-response songs sung over specific rhythms that are used to evoke and pay tribute to deities
called orichas. In addition to multiple percussion lessons and religious fieldwork, I recorded,
transcribed, and memorized over 150 cantos (songs) for 20 different deities while studying with a

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kind and talented babalawo (a priest in the Santería religion) named Gilberto Morales in Matanzas,
Cuba.
With the material I obtained over the summer, I have now become a co-director of Tambo
Toké. I have been putting forth my best effort to share the small amount of knowledge that I have
with my peers in an attempt to give voice to the culture and share the excitement I feel about the
music.
As an aspiring Twenty-First Century musician and musicologist, I strive to be transparent
throughout this ongoing project. This is my experience with a culture that is not my own. I am
attempting to be as accurate as possible, acknowledging my own biases and the existence of
conflicting information. That being said, I am also allowing my own personal experiences with
Santería traditions to inform my analysis. The purpose of my essay and presentation is to consolidate
my current knowledge of the history, religious context, and contemporary portrayal of Santería and
its artistic rituals, and to present two primary observations.
First, despite an obscured history due to the oppressive institution of slavery, displaced
West African peoples of Yoruban origin shared cultural values and artistic traditions that both
reflected a need to contextualize their existence through ancestral lineage and emphasized the
importance of creating physical community in their immediate space. The inherent qualities of their
decentralized belief systems encouraged these displaced communities to actively connect and
homogenize, preserving ancestral ties while simultaneously adapting and reacting to new
environments on local levels. Hiding their traditions and adapting their language when they needed
to in order to satisfy their oppressive overlords, a communal resilience allowed these Yorubans to
create their own history to a certain extent, resulting in a new syncretic tradition called Santería, a
religion whose values, while uniquely Afro-Cuban, have now spread across the globe. Second,
because sacred rituals have been obscured and appropriated to a certain degree by secular folkloric
performance, it is important to be informed about its religious context to better understand and
connect with the musical tradition. When executed appropriately, the presentation of the artistic

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practices of Santería in the context of secular folklore can be respectful and informative, giving
authentic exposure to the cultural history and contemporary religious practice that it ultimately
represents.
THE AURAL TRADITION OF SANTERÍA AND THE STUDY OF AFRO-CUBAN
CULTURE
“Before the 15th Century, much of the information on African culture had been orally
documented by African elders, encoded in their dance and music activities or forged on
paraphernalia. Exact documented information had also been difficult to locate due to their migratory
lifestyle, [decentralized religious practices,] and the sharing nature of the people” (Badu 2002: 39).
The first individuals who attempted to document West African and Afro-Latin history formally, in
writing, included early European explorers, Christian missionaries, and ambassadors of Islam, all of
who came from codified and centralized religions with written traditions. The sources they produced
are unreliable, and often misleading, due to the biases implicit in their sense of religious or ethnic
nationalism, regarding West African culture as the exotic-yet-inferior. For this reason, it is better to
rely on the West African aural tradition for authentic information: a practice founded by songs,
rhythms, and movements that embody a living history, tell stories of a people and their values, and, if
intended, have the power to summon the divine and communicate with the dead (Badu 2002: 60,
Erel 2017, Morales 2017, Orale 2017). It is important to remember that the diverse cultures and
religions represented by these musical traditions exist both historically and contemporarily and have
never been static (Apter 2013: 365-368).
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CUBAN SLAVERY AND COLONIAL RULE
Before colonial powers had made claim to the Americas, the island of Cuba, like the
surrounding islands of Hispaniola and San Salvador, was populated by a variety of indigenous
communities led by their own set of nobles (Las Casas 1552: 43-47). After his first landing on San
Salvador, Christopher Columbus made his second landing in Cuba on October 28, 1492. In 1511, after
the island’s initial “discovery,” Diego Velázquez landed on the east side of the island at Baracoa and
founded the first Spanish settlements in Cuba. He soon conquered the island, and by 1515 there were

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no fewer than seven Spanish towns, including Havana, founded in 1514, and Santiago, founded in
1515 (Chapman 1927: 25). Because of its location in the Caribbean, Cuba was seen a strategic
position in reference to Spain’s mainland colonies and in the matter of navigating international
relationships with other colonizers from competing nations. The Spanish government knew that
maintaining control of the island was imperative to the success of their empire (Chapman 1927: 25-
26).
The Spaniards enslaved the local populations and also exposed them to new pathogens.
Together, the brutality of slavery and high death rates due to illness quickly decimated the
indigenous population of Cuba. While both the forces of enslavement and disease wreaked havoc on
indigenous peoples, it’s hard to say which had the more deleterious effect. Burkholder and Johnson
argue, however, that slavery was the primary source of the decline of native Cuban populations
(Burkholder and Johnson 2004: 37). In response to this decline of the labor force, the Spaniards
began importing African slaves to replace indigenous workers in the mines and fields as early as
1523 (Chapman 1927: 25). West African slaves were a constant resource for the Spanish empire, at
first forced to extract metals and other natural resources from the island before being consumed by
the sugar industry boom.
Under Spanish rule, Cuba and its sugar trade were tightly controlled and trade took place
primarily in a bilateral fashion between the colony and the Iberian Peninsula. During the period
from 1523 to the middle of the Eighteenth Century, the number of slaves in Cuba was approximately
39,000 at any given time, a modest number in comparison to what was to come (Encyclopedia
Britannica).
In 1762, the British seized control of Cuba, and opened the port of Havana to the global
economy. Free trade revealed to the world the wealth of resources of Cuba (Chapman 1927: 29). In
addition, the English flooded the island with African slaves to develop that economic potential. While
the British held the capital city of Cuba for a little less than a year, they imported approximately
10,000 slaves in that short period, mostly to work on sugar plantations as the global demand for

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sugar soared (Guerra y Sanchez 1964: 45). When the port of Havana was returned to the Spanish in
1763, the nature of conducting business had changed. The population, too, had changed
dramatically. After 1770, Cuba absorbed more than half of the slaves entering Spanish America after
1770, and in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the small island had a population of 96,440
whites, 31,847 free colored, and 44,333 slaves. By 1840, the enslaved West African population had
grown exponentially to about 400,000 individuals (Burkholder and Johnson 2004: 134, Guerra y
Sanchez 1964: 45, Encyclopedia Britannica). During the three-and-a-half centuries that slavery was
legal in Cuba, it is estimated that over one million West Africans were brought to Cuba, and over
sixty-five percent of contemporary Cuban citizens have West African heritage (Encyclopedia
Britannica).
The independence of the American colonies in 1776 birthed another active threat to Spain’s
power in the region. Because of its proximity to the island and a prevalent manifest destiny
mentality, members of the U.S. government had many conflicting opinions on Cuba during the latter
part of the Eighteenth Century and throughout the Nineteenth Century, but the general consensus
was that the U.S. should have as much control over Cuba’s political economy as possible. Many
Americans moved to Cuba and made a lot of money in the sugar industry (Chapman 1927: 65-69).
Slaves continued to be shipped to both countries, with Cuba importing over 600,000 West Africans in
the nineteenth century alone (Encyclopedia Britannica).
After a century of one-dimensional economic exploitation and the insistence of colonial
absolutism from a declining empire, paired with a growing abolitionist movement and a frustrating
economic crisis in 1857, Cuba began to pull away from Spain (Chapman 1927: 29). Wealthy Cuban-
born landowners, angry at Spain that they had no political representation, began to call for Cuban
independence in 1868. With the slavery question in the U.S. settled by the end of its Civil War, both
the U.S. and England helped to foment the independence movement, as well as supporting the
abolition of slavery in favor of adopting newer technologies and hiring migrant workers (Chapman
1927: 61). Because of these momentous pressures, Spain agreed to emancipate Cuban slaves in 1869,
and allow for more representative government, acknowledging the independence of the Cuban

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people without relinquishing the colony. A law in 1870 provided for a gradual emancipation, but was
not adhered to due to the distraction of the Ten Years War, which ended in 1878 with Spain
managing to retain control of the island. In an effort to satisfy Cuba’s aggravated citizens, Spain
passed a law in 1881 to allow for gradual emancipation and by 1886, slavery in Cuba finally ended
(Chapman 1927: 69). Despite a change in the law, nothing could undo the mass displacement and
brutal exploitation of the black West African communities in Cuba, who all the while had strived to
preserve, adapt, and ultimately, advance, their cultural, artistic, and religious practices.
CULTURAL HISTORY OF DISPLACED WEST AFRICANS
The majority of West Africans brought to Cuba came from the same linguistic origin, though
they represented three different ethnicities: the Lucumí, of Yoruba origin, the Carabalí from Calabar,
the Ewe, from the Dahomey Kingdom. While these three groups were culturally distinct, they all
spoke a similar language and shared an original history. A fourth important population of enslaved
persons in Cuba were the Bantu people, who came from the Congo (Castellanos 2005: xiii). Out of
these four ethnic groups, it was the Lucumí who eventually came to represent the dominant Afro-
Cuban culture.
“The Yoruba make up one of the oldest identifiable ethnic groups in Africa, and Yoruba
speaking people of West Africa have cultural roots dating back at least two thousand years (Olopun
and Rey 2008: 4). The Yoruba historically originate from the kingdom of Oyo, which was located in
modern-day Nigeria. Its sacred capital, the city of Ifé, referred to as Ilé-Ifé (ilé meaning home in
Yoruban), was founded in the Fifteenth Century by a large community of Yoruban people who
traveled west after the fall of the Sudanese Songhai Empire. Citizens of the kingdom adhered to a
religion knows as “The Rule of Ifá.” While the modern Yoruban people have cultivated, and are today
still actively encouraging, a transnational Yoruban ethnic identity, this was not always the case. As
the old kingdom of Oyo grew in size, sub-groups of Yoruban speakers left the region to form their
own neighboring kingdoms, cities, and villages (Falola and Childs 2004: 5-12).

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Yoruban religion is practiced at a communal level in the physical space that its believers
occupy. While each subgroup of Yoruban community shares a common origin with every other (the
Rule of Ifá), the traditions of each subgroup are completely decentralized and in no way subject to
any pressures of a higher religious canon beyond each local community. Yoruban mythology, which
“originates from the Rule of Ifá,” is host to over 600 deities called orichas, and, for the most part, each
Yoruban community or kingdom in West Africa chose a specific oricha within the greater divine
community to worship as a protector of their people (González-Wippler 2016 [1989]: 2). When the
Lucumí (one of three main subgroups of Yoruban people that were brought to Cuba) were at their
cultural height, they represented over twenty different West-African communities, each one
worshiping a separate deity with specific songs, rhythms and movements that were aurally
transmitted from generation to generation (Falola and Childs 2004: 5-12). In the colonial era, these
groups formed their own communities that centered around houses called cabildos de nación
“religious sodalities that doubled as social clubs and mutual aid societies.” Inspired by their previous
regionalism, each cabildo acted as a small, neo-African kingdom, usually representing a specific
oricha, equipped with its own flag and set of localized traditions (Apter 2013: 369).
The Ewe people were originally Yorubans who left the city of Ifé and founded the kingdom of
Dahomey (located in between present-day Benin and Togo). They were later expelled from their
kingdom by an attack by the Fon people, another Yoruban subgroup that previously coexisted
peacefully with the Ewe. A large group of displaced Ewe traveled to the coast, some traveling south
and some west. Because of their large numbers and newfound vulnerability, many were taken
prisoner and sold into slavery by European slave traders. The Ewe that escaped ended up settling in
Togo and present day Ghana. Though these communities’ traditions were soon affected by the
presence of Dutch colonial power, the Ewe people still are a prevalent population in Ghana and
maintain their religious practices (Badu 2002: 60-70).
The Ewe that were shipped to Cuba landed at a port in the province of Matanzas. Their
traditions were well represented in colonial-era cabildos and have been maintained to a certain
extent, but the Ewe soon felt the influence of other ethnic traditions, in particular Lucumí. The Ewe

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tradition still survives today, albeit quietly, as the music and religious practice of Arara. While still
representing its Ewe origins, Arara now falls under a larger Lucumí influence, with its practitioners
usually involved in both traditions, rather than just solely Arara. Only two cabildos still practice Arara
and the contemporary music and spiritual collective Afrocuba de Matanzas is one of the few groups
that still performs public demonstrations of Arara’s artistic practices. Today one cannot find any
accurate representation of Arara outside of the province of Matanzas (Orale, 2017).
The Carabalí secret society of Abakwá originated from the kingdom of Calabar, another
community of Yoruban origin that settled just east of the Niger River (Falola and Childs 2004: 20).
Their traditions, while originally completely separate from Lucumí, were also eventually absorbed
into what became a secret society within a much larger group of Lucumí practitioners. Africans were
also brought from many other kingdoms that had originated from Old Oyo, including the Kingdom of
Ijesa, whose traditions were also completely absorbed by Lucumí but whose rhythms and songs are
still performed in certain contexts (Falola and Childs 2004: 5-12).
The Bantu slaves from the Congo had their own unique sets of traditions called Palo Monte
that were, and essentially still are, completely separate from the Yoruban tradition. Bantu religion
and artistic practices are equally deep as those of the Yoruba and were some of the most prevalent
among colonial Afro-Cuban communities, at one point representing a majority of cabildos. In this
essay, my focus is the development of Santería, which arose from the Yoruban—and primarily
Lucumí—ethnic, linguistic, and religious tradition. While Bantu populations still exist in Cuba and
practice their culture today, it was the Lucumí that were able to adapt in the most extreme ways,
absorbing virtually all of the other displaced Oyo-originating West African communities under their
umbrella, while naturally allowing for the same kinds of regional variation that had existed in the Old
World (Apter 2013: 369)
By its very nature, Yoruban cultural tradition—and religion—is syncretic. It freely borrows
and adapts and evolves in new circumstances, migrating to different regions with its practitioners.
Unlike Christianity—or Judaism or Islam—there is no assumption of doctrinal purity. The

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