Parallel Faiths of Jesus and African Deities Meld in Cuba

Pope John Paul II gently placed a tiny, jewel-encrusted crown on the 18-inch-high figure before him, then lovingly draped a golden rosary on her hand. And with that simple act in a public square at noon Saturday, tens of thousands of Cubans erupted in unison:

“Long live our Virgin of Charity! Long live our patron saint! Long live the queen of Cuba!”

It was a moment that electrified Cuba’s Roman Catholics, bringing tears of joy to a multitude of believers, from this eastern city to the nation’s capital, about 465 miles to the northwest.

But in the very same instant that the pope crowned the beloved saint of Cuba’s Catholic believers, his blessing also swept through the souls of millions of Cubans who have never prayed to Jesus Christ.

For them, the small wooden figure in Santiago’s Antonio Maceo Plaza was not the Virgin Mary--who, legend has it, miraculously appeared to three fishermen just above the waves off the Cuban coast nearly 400 years ago, becoming a singular symbol of faith for Cuba’s devout Catholics.

For them--the followers of the Afro-Cuban religion Santeria--the statue is Ochun, the flirtatious deity who was sent by Orofi across the oceans from Central Africa to protect the slaves in the copper mines and cane fields of the New World.

And for them, the pope had crowned Santeria’s goddess of beauty, sexuality, promiscuity and the river, one of the main Orisha deities presiding over a religion that guides the lives of millions here.

At the moment of coronation, Aurora Ibanez Sanchez, 73, clutched the yellow Santeria beads around her neck and cried. “Ochun is my mother,” she said later. “She is also the Virgin of Charity.”

Island’s Curious Form of Religious Syncretism

The parallel faiths--and the occasional ironies in their juxtaposition--are among the world’s most curious forms of religious syncretism. It is a convergence of religious iconography, born of colonial repression, that flourished through the 400 years of Spanish rule and the 30 years, ending in 1992, during which Communist Cuba was officially an atheist state.

But Saturday’s simultaneous papal coronation of both patron saint and pagan goddess came amid a broad and growing political debate within Cuba’s Catholic Church about whether--or how--to separate Catholicism from Afro-Cuban religions that have a powerful hold on Cuba’s deeply spiritual culture.

At a time when the pope’s visit has galvanized and emboldened the church, the debate is a critical one for the Cuban clergy and the future of their church after the pope leaves Cuba today.

For the church, separating the faiths or trying to co-opt Santeria risks alienating millions. But Cuba’s prelate, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, appears to be running that risk.

Adopting a distinctly conservative line toward Santeria and several other Afro-Cuban sects, which include Yoruba, Palo Mayombe and the secret Society of Abakua, Ortega has sought to play down Santeria’s influence and power.

“Journalists ask us whether ‘African cults’ constitute the biggest religion in Cuba,” the cardinal said in a homily in July. “Setting apart the confusion between beliefs and folklore on the one hand and true religious faith on the other, if they will ask us which is the strongest religion in Cuba, I would not hesitate in saying that it is the church founded by our Lord Jesus Christ, that of Peter and Paul.”

At a news conference last week, the cardinal took a more conciliatory tone. He stressed that he views adherents of Santeria and other sects as an integral part of Cuba’s Catholic Church.

The country’s Catholic churches contain statues that are worshiped daily by both faiths. Many Catholic saints have mirror-image counterparts in Santeria. But the devotees who flock to churches to worship Ochun, Obbatala, Chango, Babalu Aye and dozens of other deities ignore most of Catholicism’s morality, values, doctrine and prayer.

Santeria requires that its priests and priestesses be baptized as Catholics and includes its own brand of spiritual Masses. But there are few other liturgical similarities.

“What happened was the slaves brought their own deities from Africa, but they had to hide them from the dominant class,” said Natalia Bolivar, a prominent Cuban anthropologist and author of eight books on the subject. “So the people began to mask their deities within the images of the Catholic saints.

“But they only masked them. It was a self-defense of their gods. It was not true syncretism.”

Bolivar is especially critical of the cardinal and the daily practices of the church, in which parish priests and nuns in the sanctuaries that hold the most sacred icons of Santeria have been advised to discourage Afro-Cuban worship.

For example, at Havana’s sanctuary of Santa Barbara, whose mirror image is the god Chango, Father Oscar Perez was compelled by official church policy to raise half a dozen saints from floor shrines onto wall platforms--to make it more difficult for adherents of Santeria to practice rites that require offerings to be placed at the feet of their gods.

And nuns at the Havana area’s Church of San Lazaro, whose twin is Babalu Aye, accompany each blessing of water taken from the church’s holy spring with instructions that it not be used for Santeria rites.

‘These Two Religions Are Not Incompatible’

Critics of the cardinal’s conservative line say any attempt to diminish Santeria’s sway here is fraught with disaster.

“These two religions are not incompatible,” Bolivar said. “But the Catholic Church is trying to make them incompatible. By saying such things, Cardinal Ortega is destroying an important balance.”

At the grass roots, however, many of Cuba’s clergy have taken a far more lenient stance.

Perez maintains a second Santa Barbara shrine alongside the principal statue in the church, conceding that many people come only to worship Chango. Other clergymen say many pilgrims worship only Ochun at the Virgin of Charity’s permanent shrine in the village of El Cobre near Santiago--from which it was removed for only the fourth time in 400 years when it journeyed to Santiago on Saturday.

Among the most compelling illustrations of Cuban syncretism is the sanctuary of San Lazaro, next to the leper colony that John Paul also visited Saturday, 15 miles southwest of Havana. There, Maria Elena Garcia Castro, a Spanish Cuban nun, has lived with the convergence of the faiths every day for eight years.

San Lazaro and Babalu Aye present themselves to believers through similar statues in separate shrines in the church. The San Lazaro figure in the center of the church draws the Catholics; an almost identical image to the left draws the devotees of Babalu Aye.

“People offer hair, fingernails, cigars, rum, even goats. Last year, I received four goats in one day,” Sister Maria Elena said of the Babalu Aye shrine as she stood beside its altar.

At least a dozen times a day, devotees of both faiths approach the nun to bless plastic or glass bottles filled with water from the spring behind the church. She follows each blessing with orders that the water is to be placed in wounds, not drunk or sprinkled about as it is in Santeria.

“This is a sanctuary to San Lazaro, the friend of the sick. Our mission is to centralize the Christian faith,” she said. “The idea is to help them understand that the saints are intermediaries between the people and God. They are not gods in and of themselves.”

But that approach has done little to dissuade the multitude drawn to the sanctuary each week.

Flowers and Coins Offered to Babalu Aye

Barbara Perez and her husband, Miguel Toledo, are a case in point. They rode bicycles for an hour and a half to reach the sanctuary on Jan. 17--the 17th being the holiest day of every month to pray to saint or deity. Perez lifted her shirt, showing a foot-long scar on her stomach, to explain why she had come. The Santeria beads around her neck explained to whom she had come.

“I don’t understand much about the Catholic religion,” she said. Rather, she came to offer flowers, candles and coins to Babalu Aye. And she did so, Perez said, because she could not afford the costly rituals that her Santeria priest--or babalao--had recommended.

The babalaos often suggest strict rituals, involving goats and other animals, that are far out of reach of average Cuban salaries. In extreme cases, they prescribe a yearlong regimen to become a “saint,” a process that Barbara Perez said would have cost her more than $700--impossible on her husband’s meager income from selling pigeons.

But at a time when Cardinal Ortega has spoken of “the daily miracles” that the Catholic faith brings, a maintenance worker who came to see Babalu Aye with a burlap bag over his left foot recently gave witness to his own.

Identifying himself only as Jose “El Chino,” he explained that his foot had been mangled in a traffic accident when his taxi driver fell asleep at the wheel. An orthopedic surgeon, he said, told him the injury would take at least four years to heal. That was six months ago, he said.

“The first thing I did when I got out of the hospital was to come here to pray to Babalu Aye. Now look,” Jose said, showing off a healthy foot and only a slight limp.

“What can I say? When you have to believe, you have to believe.”

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Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux in Santiago and Times researcher Dolly Mascarenas in Havana contributed to this story.