Cachita's Streets: The Virgin of Charity, Race and Revolution in Cuba by Jalane D. Schmidt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cachita's Streets: The Virgin of Charity, Race and Revolution in Cuba by Jalane D. Schmidt Alison Fraunhar Jalane D. Schmidt, Cachita's Streets: The Virgin of Charity, Race and Revolution in Cuba. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. The title of Jalane D. Schmidt's excellent history of Cachita, as the Virgen de la Caridad de Cobre, Cuba's patron saint, is affectionately known, signals the spatial component of the worship of the saint. The streets of Cuba, from Santiago to Pinar del Río, are the contested ground on which social, ideological, and spiritual identities and faith are performed in this analysis. From the occupation of informal social space to the sanctioned performance of ideology and identity, the streets are the stage where secular political and religious affiliations are formed as well as play out. As Schmidt details in her far-reaching study, since the nineteenth century, religious and state authorities have battled for the hearts and minds of the Cuban people, as they authorize some public acts in some public spaces and foreclose on others, asking which forms of observance can be performed in public? Which behind closed doors? Who gets to be on the streets, and who is forbidden public agency? Who is allowed inside, and who must remain outdoors? The point that Schmidt makes over and over, as the book moves through time from the sixteenth century to the present, is how these positions shift over time in response to different political and social conditions, and how symbols play a key role in mobilizing hearts and minds. Schmidt constructs a historical genealogy of Caridad, ably deploying archival records, tracing the early seventeenth-century origins of the cult of the Virgin in the small town of El Cobre in far-eastern Oriente province (the most remote and among the poorer and blackest of Cuban provinces), the growth of the mythology surrounding her, and the spread of her worship from a regional phenomenon to encompass Havana and western Cuba. The worship of Caridad began among free indigenous and enslaved black Orientales who, in Schmidt's account, proved adroit at navigating colonial and ecclesiastical bureaucracies in Caridad's name. Thus begins the historical account of Caridad's association with blackness and her eventual evolution into the spiritual and national symbol of Cuba. In her careful exegesis of Afro-Cuban religious and spiritual practice, Schmidt avoids a binaristic reading, but she deploys the binaries of inside-outside [End Page 325] and order-spontaneity quite usefully to mark regimes of sanction and authorization. One of the most original moves Schmidt makes is detangling Caridad from Ochun, the Lucumí orisha, or divine being, with whom Caridad shares salient aspects. For many Cubans and Cuban scholars, the doubling of these two seminal figures in Cuban history, spirituality and identity, is accepted as given. Schmidt undertakes the unpacking of their entwined iterations and histories, overwriting the widely accepted reading of religion in Cuba as always-already African with a thin veil of Christianity drawn across it for the strategic purpose of official compliance and self-protection that has dominated the discourse for the past half century. Although the emphasis on Afro-Cuban cultural practices and their contribution to Cuban identity has been vital to overcoming Eurocentric hegemony, Schmidt argues instead that Caridad does not always bear Ochun within, and she marshals an impressive body of research to support a claim that the cult arose out of Christian practice, with the imbrication of African forms of belief and spiritual practice latent until the nineteenth century. Schmidt's point is not to reassert the acculturation model of Afro-Cuban spirituality (common prior to the mid-twentieth century, this model was rooted in Eurocentric scholarship and validated the European contribution to Cuban culture while denigrating the African) but to refine the scholarly record to reflect more accurately the complexity of the preeminent national symbol. In doing this, Schmidt accounts for African-based spiritual practice and other popular forms of worship, especially Lucumí and espiritismo. While Caridad/Ochun is not a central figure in either Espiritismo or Palo Monte—nor the male secret society of Abakua (which Schmidt does not address, although this could have...