Santería

Origins

Before the eighteenth century, only a small number of Yorubas were enslaved and brought into Cuba. But during the eighteenth-century boom in sugar production and at the height of the slave trade, the number of Yorubas brought into Cuba increased dramatically. Between 1840 and 1870, the last period of Cuba's involvement in slave trading, more than one third of all the Africans brought there were Yorubas.

Because Cuba's Catholic church was closely allied with the national government and because Catholicism was the only religion that was legal while Cuba remained a Spanish colony, once Africans were in Cuba, they all—including the Yorubas—came under pressure to convert to Catholicism and abandon their traditional religions. The Catholic Church's strategy was to guide Africans gradually toward a complete conversion to Christianity but to tolerate some mixing of African and Catholic practices along the way. To this end, the Catholic Church founded Afro-Catholic fraternities in cities with sizable African populations. The fraternities, called cabildos, were mutual aid societies for people from the same African ethnic background. The Yoruba-based cabildos were an institutional basis for what would later become known as Santería (Spanish for worship of the saints).

At the same time as they preserved African traditions, the cabildos also promoted Catholic instruction and participation in the church's public festivals. In the late nineteenth century, however, when it became clear that the cabildos’African religious traditions—even in their mixed and modified forms—were not about to disappear, the Catholic Church and the colonial government joined hands to try and stamp them out. The Catholic Church cut its ties to the cabildos, the government passed oppressive legislation against them, and the police clamped down on them, too, treating involvement in the Afro-Cuban religions as a criminal activity. In response, the cabildos went underground, and Santería worship became clandestine.

During this era of suppression, Santería was influenced by the spiritist doctrines of Hippolyte Rivail. Rivail's books had begun appearing in Cuba as early as the 1850s, but between 1870 and 1880, his writings spread like a tidal wave throughout the French and Spanish Caribbean and into Central and South America. Writing under the pen name Allan Kardec, this French engineer proclaimed the revelation of an updated, scientistic spiritualism. His books described the results of positive investigations of the spirit world that others could also carry through mediumistic séances, and he preached an ethic emphasizing suffering, charity, and spiritual development. All this had been dictated to him by spirits.

Kardecan spiritism, or Espiritismo as it came to be called, first took hold among literate, highly placed Cuban Creoles who wanted independence from Spain and were alienated from the Spanish-dominated Catholic Church, but it eventually worked its way down to the urban masses and out into the countryside. Even though Santería had been transmitted primarily by oral tradition since at least the 18th century, and even though Rivail's books had to be smuggled into Cuba because they were illegal, his writings still had an impact on the development of Santería. Some Santería priests came to view apprenticeship as a spiritist medium as a necessary prerequisite for the practice of their religion. They became adept in both systems and adopted some of Espiritismo's healing techniques. By the twentieth century, Santería had spread beyond Yorubas and Yoruba descendants and was being practiced by Creoles and Whites as well.

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