Worldview, the Orichas, and Santería: Africa to Cuba and Beyond (review)

Abstract

Mercedes Cros Sandoval, Worldview, the Orichas, and Santeria: Africa to Cuba and Beyond. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. 417 pp.The study of the role and contributions of particular African civilizations toward the creation of regional cultures in the New World is still in its infancy. As an academic pursuit, there are numerous complexities and obstacles to be dealt with, especially for historians. Unlike other immigrants, until the latter half of the nineteenth century, Africans were forcibly brought to the New World as slaves, bringing with them their decisive influence on the development of New World cultures and societies.Mercedes Cros Sandoval's recently published Worldview, the Orichas, and Santeria: Africa to Cuba and Beyond, is an important contribution to the growing body of serious literature on the influence of the Yoruba in the Americas. This almost-encyclopedic book consists of twenty-four chapters, divided into three parts. Sandoval wrote that in the past, she and other scholars had given primary emphasis to syncretic processes and less consideration to the worldview assumptions underlying those processes. She stresses mat, on the basis of her current analysis, worldview approaches explain transculturative processes that support cultural continuities in the face of change. In her opinion, they better explain those ideas of meaning that allow people to continue on an identifiable sociostructural path that also allows variations while preserving a fundamental meaning-system (xxxiv).Furthermore, Sandoval confronts me theories of other scholars who have maintained that Lukumi religion in Cuba, and by extension all African religions in the New World, were religions of resistance. She emphasizes that the process tiiat gave birth to the new courses taken by Lukumi religion in Cuba did not result from cultural resistance. Instead, its vitality depended on its ability to find meaning in alien cultural and religious environments, and subsequently apply these in a manner that would appeal to the new cultures it encountered on the island. Most influential in the process were the numerous similarities that existed in terms of the worldviews and religious ideologies of the Lukumi and the Spanish and their Cuban descendants. In Sandoval's own words, Para entender esto hay que entender la religiosidad de los cubanos (to understand this one has to understand Cuban religiosity) (personal conversation with Sandoval, February 2007).In the first chapters, Sandoval discusses the development and structure of Lukumi religion in Yorubaland and in Cuba. She provides the historical background for Yorubaland and West Africa, as well as for colonial and republican Cuba. Her overview of Cuban society, and especially her discussion of republican Cuba, is exceptional.A vital contribution to this first section is the transcription of Sandoval's interviews with Florencio Baro, an Afro-Cuban from the region of Carlos Rojas in the province of Matanzas. Although Baro's family was originally from Cuba's Oriente Province, me Baro surname is relatively common in Matanzas, and especially prevalent among devotees of Lukumi and Arara religions. Baro was not ordained into the priesthood, but his narrative provides considerable support for Sandoval's thesis because the small town of Carlos Rojas was an important enclave for Afro-Cubans. As such, the retention of Afro-Cuban culture, and especially religion, was vital. Clearly, as Baro's account stressed, the mystical aura of African religions permeated all facets of life in Carlos Rojas.Unmistakably, Baro's narrative confirms that Lukumi religion in Cuba was not a single, uniform practice, but rather a composite of numerous and heterogeneous regional practices. These traditions, as Sandoval stresses, often included non-Lukumi and non-African elements. Baro's narrative confirms - as Sandoval clearly emphasizes - that the strong urban nature of the Lukumi-Yoruba people, still prevalent to this day, was an important factor in me development and dissemination of the dominant form of this religion in Cuba, as exemplified by the gradual growth and dominance of the Havana ritual and worship patterns in me rest of the island. …