KENNETH ROUTON

Christopher Newport University

Conjuring the past:
Slavery and the historical imagination in Cuba
A B S T R A C T
In this article, I examine the ritual mimesis of
slavery in Cuban Palo Monte. Here, the past is not
just a temporally situated arena in which to stake
claims of identity and belonging but an invisible
repository of material remains, objects, and
substances whose magical capacities can be tapped
to expand ones power to act on the world. My
analysis not only addresses how marginalized ritual
communities ingeniously defy those forces that
conspire to silence the slave past and, thus, reduce
the worlds rst system of globalization to a
historical phantom. I also pay particular attention
to how recent efforts by scholars, nation-states, and
international aid organizations attempting to
reverse this silence engender their own politics of
memory that either ignore or seriously distort how
local groups represent the ghost. [ritual, historical
memory, slavery, fetishism, Cuba]
O
ne muggy Sunday afternoon in a working-class barrio of Guan-
abacoa, a municipality of the city of Havana, a ritual party for
the dead (esta para los muertos) took place in the cult house of
a local mayombero, a self-identied sorcerer (brujero) and spirit
mediumof the Afro-Cuban ritual formation palo monte (lit. stick
bush), whom I call Arca no.
1
After a couple of hours of meticulous ritual
work by those present, the muerto they were attempting to summon had
still failed to make an appearance. The musicians, a ragtag ensemble of lo-
cal paloinitiates hastily recruitedthat morning, continuedtrading places at
the large box drum, congas, and hoe blade (guataca). Losing his patience,
Arca no began pacing back and forth, occasionally entering the small clos-
etlike space off the main room of the house in which he kept his spirit doll
(kini kini) and his nganga, the magically charged iron cauldron around
which all cult activity in palo revolves. Lets go, old man! [Vamos viejo!],
he shouted, Get on with it! [Dale!]. Finally, as a new singer took the lead,
the body of the mayombero displayed the rst signs of possession (e.g.,
convulsions, sudden vocal outbursts, heavy breathing, and drooling), and
the activity in the room, which only moments before had bordered on a
kind of dismal automatism, began to swell with fervor.
The lead singer quickly moved close to the mayombero, who now stood
in the middle of the room rubbing his face. A few of the other musicians
then gathered around him as the singer, raising his voice in a noticeably
more aggressive register, intoned the rst of a series of haunting refrains
intended to hasten the arrival of the muerto:
Lead singer: Im going, Im going to the mountain!
Chorus: Slave driver, release the dogs!
Lead singer: Hes not going to get me!
Chorus: Let the dogs loose on the runaway slave!
2
What began as an ostensibly benign ceremony in honor of the muertos
suddenly became charged with the violent imagery of a plantation over-
seer and his ravenous dogs, poised to chase down a slave in ight. The
body of the mayombero soon dropped to the oor, overtaken by the spirit
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 632649, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. C
2008 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00102.x
Conjuring history

American Ethnologist
of a 19th-century Congo runaway slave (cimarr on) franti-
cally gasping for air: The spirits of runaway slaves, one
medium casually remarked, are always out of breath; they
always come running in order to escape the overseer and
his dogs.
3
Reluctant to emerge from his otherworldly hid-
ing place, Arca nos runaway slave spirit hadtobe forcedinto
attending the party made in his honor through an appeal
to the terrorizing imagery of a colonial slave hunt. Face-
down on the oor, the embodied spirit writhed about in
one place with his arms rmly pressed against the length
of his torso in a manner eerily reminiscent of the boca bajo,
a disciplinary tactic that required a slave to lie facedown on
the ground while receiving lashes. One of the ritual assis-
tants then gently laid the blade of a machete on each of the
spirits shoulders, extending downward at an angle across
his back. The spirit soon recovered himself, stood up, and
proceeded to give counsel to everyone present in a mixed
speech consisting of bozal, the broken Spanish spoken by
newly arrived African slaves on the island, and the Cuban
variant of Kikongo (see Castellanos 1990).
It may be tempting, as my original eld notes of that
ritual episode suggest, to say that Arca no and the other par-
ticipants that day were remembering slavery. The ritual
simulation of a colonial slave hunt in Cuba might, then, res-
onate with the way in which, as Rosalind Shawnotes for the
Temne of Sierra Leone, the slave trade is forgotten as his-
tory but remembered as spirits (2002:9). But one question
I raise here is whether it makes good ethnographic sense
to gloss such phenomena in terms that foreground mem-
ory. After all, as David Berliner asks, Can we really remem-
ber something that we did not experience? Can someone
remember the slave trade? (2005:208).
4
Perhaps a more
phenomenologically sensitive way to approach such ritual
performances is to see them as constitutive of a kind of vi-
carious memory (Teski and Climo 1995). One might, there-
fore, examine the extent to which the memories of his-
torical others become real for present generations through
ritually stylized forms of social mimesis. But, then again,
something altogether different could be at work here: what
Michael Taussig (1987) points to in his discussion of his-
tory as sorcery, that is, the way that certain historical
events are sometimes reied as magically empowered im-
agery capable of both causing misfortune and expanding
peoples power to act on the world.
The relevance of questions concerning the memory of
slavery is, nevertheless, especially acute givenvarious forms
of institutionalized erasure that have tended to vaporize the
slave past, reducing historys rst system of globalization
to a phantom. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot once remarked,
Slavery here is a ghost, both the past and the living pres-
ence; and the problem of historical representation is how
to represent the ghost (1995:146147). My purpose in this
article, however, is not merely to ethnographically disen-
tangle the meanings of such ritual evocations of slavery by
demonstrating how, as essentially embodied forms of social
praxis, they ingeniously defy those forces that conspire to
silence such violent histories. Rather, I also call attention to
how recent efforts by scholars, nation-states, and interna-
tional organizations attempting to reverse this silence en-
gender their own politics of memory, which either ignore
or seriously distort how local collectivities represent the
ghost. In Cuba, such issues are not only entangled in rep-
resentations that draw parallels between black maroon re-
sistance in the colonial period and the political ideology of
the 1959 revolution but also muddled by the cultural poli-
tics of post-Soviet Cuban society. Recent efforts to reinvigo-
rate grassroots support for the revolution and bolster a cul-
ture of resistance inanera of material scarcity by harnessing
the islands Afro-Cuban religions to the ideological agendas
of the state have produced some rather peculiar juxtaposi-
tions between ritual and revolutionary visions of the slave
past.
The following analysis is based on 18 months of ethno-
graphic eldwork I carried out in Havana, Cuba, between
2003 and 2006. Because no ofcial studies exist that would
offer reliable statistical data, the actual demographics of the
Afro-Cuban religious community remain unclear.
5
When I
asked informants and friends to speculate on the number
of palo adepts, however, the most typical reply I received
was that the paleros, a generic term used to refer to palo
sorcerers (brujos) and spirit mediums, are all around [an-
dan por todos los lados]; that is, they can be found in all
neighborhoods in all parts of the country. Information I col-
lected from just ve cult houses in San Miguel del Padr on
and Guanabacoa revealed a total of 904 initiates. On the ba-
sis of my very informal and limited survey, it would not be
far-fetched to assume that there are at least tens of thou-
sands of palo initiates on the island, a number that does
not include all those who periodically commission palo rit-
ual services. The vast majority of initiates among the ve
cult houses I surveyed (n = 775) came from just one house,
that of Guillermo Bisonsi Luna Brava. This cult house, how-
ever, had an unusually high number of initiates. The re-
maining four houses had only 1078 ritual godchildren
(ajihados) each. Together, these ve cult houses counted
613 men and 291 women among their ranks. Black and mu-
latto men made up the vast majority of adepts in these ve
cult houses.
Although I occasionally make reference to this larger
community of adepts, much of what follows is based on
ethnographic research conducted at two principal palo cult
houses in the city of Havana. The main difference distin-
guishing the tata nganga, or father of nganga, of each of
these cult houses was generation, one of the most signif-
icant social divisions of contemporary postrevolutionary
Cuban society. I worked extensively with these two men.
The older of the two, Arca no, was born before the revolution
and, as I eventually learned, is entirely unable to read and
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Volume 35 Number 4 November 2008
write. Arca no, therefore, neither keeps handwritten ritual
notebooks (libretas) containing magical signatures (rmas)
and formulas nor has any familiarity with the published lit-
erature on palo available at local bookstores, street-vendor
kiosks, or cultural institutions such as museums. His knowl-
edge of and skill in palo magic and ritual are his lifes great
work and a treasured source of pride, which became quite
clear to me after I listened to him express his disappoint-
ment with his sons disinterest in his ritual expertise and
labor.
Wuicho, the other mayombero I worked with exten-
sively, was born after the 1959 revolution, received a stan-
dard revolutionary education, and, after several years of
performing commissioned work as both a rumba and rit-
ual singer, is now undergoing extensive training to become
a babalao (an if a divination priest) in addition to engag-
ing in palo cult activities. Wuicho did, in fact, keep ritual
notebooks and was familiar with some of the better-known
published accounts of Afro-Cuban religions on the island.
The generational divide between these two ritual special-
ists, therefore, offers a particularly promising methodologi-
cal window through which to begin to understand not only
the ways in which contemporary mayomberos construe the
relationship between ritually stylized visions of the slave
past and the post-Soviet present but also how that relation-
ship may or may not be shaped by revolutionary education
and ideology.
Enshrining resistance
A decade before his death on June 27, 2006, Joel James
Figarola, esteemed writer and then-director of the Casa del
Caribe cultural center inSantiagode Cuba, made a stunning
proposition regarding the material culture of palo on the
island. In an article entitled La Brujera Cubana (Cuban
WitchcraftSorcery), James Figarola called on the Cuban
revolutionary state to declare the islands nganga, veterans
of thousands of battles on earth and in heaven (1996:114),
national cultural patrimony. Aware that even the sugges-
tion that ritual fetishes such as the nganga, which contain,
among other things, purloined or otherwise illegally pro-
cured human remains, should be ofcially counted as part
of the nations cultural heritage would be met with derision,
if not outright scorn, James Figarola attempted to embel-
lish his argument by appealing to revolutionary sensibili-
ties. The chain of ngangas, or the ritual genealogies that
link these sacred objects, which apparently stretches as far
back as the mid18th century, he argued, parallels the de-
velopment of Cuban nationality since the protoplantation-
ist period. The terms and conditions of the binding pacts
made between the owners of nganga and spirits of the dead
(nfumbi, sing. fumbi), James Figarola continued, crystal-
lize a whole structure of relations that have varied through-
out Cuban history and generally reect the development
of social relations recounted in revolutionary historiogra-
phy; that is, they mirror the long historical struggle that led
the nation out of a recurring condition of subjugation (slav-
ery, colonialism, and neocolonial rule) to one of true inde-
pendence and equality with the 1959 revolution and subse-
quent socialist reforms.
During the colonial era, according to James Figarola,
the pacts between the owners of nganga and the dead were
made to help the individual endure the brutal conditions
of slavery or the perils associated with marronage, and, in
the republic, they served as a means of defense against neo-
colonial forms of economic exploitation and racial discrim-
ination. It was only after the 1959 revolution that such pacts
came to facilitate religious improvement and ascent to
the transcendent (James Figarola 1996:123). The nganga,
James Figarola (1996:114124) suggested, metaphorically
condense not only the islands social history but also its rev-
olutionary ethos.
However much the ethnographic material I present be-
low casts doubt on James Figarolas ingenious discovery
that the inexorable laws of the dialectic are at work in-
side the nganga, the timing of his proposition was noth-
ing less than fortuitous. The UNEducational, Scientic, and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Slave Route Project had
been ofcially launched only two years before, and its main
priorities had been discussed by the specially appointed In-
ternational Scientic Committee (ISC) in Matanzas, Cuba,
in December 1995.
6
James Figarolas (1996) call on the revo-
lutionary state to declare the islands nganga national cul-
tural patrimony was realized, if in a somewhat modied
form, in one of the rst of the Slave Route Projects most
tangible achievements.
7
On July 7, 1997, Cuban and for-
eign dignitaries, artists and academicians, and members of
the local community gathered together atop a mountain
in El Cobre (Santiago de Cuba) for the unveiling of Cuban
artist Alberto Lescays Monumento al Cimarr on(Monument
to the Runaway Slave).
8
According to Pedro P erez Sarduy
(2001), the site was chosenpartly inhonor of the royal slaves
of El Cobre, who, between 1731 and 1800, fought Spanish
troops until the crown was forced to concede them their
freedom, making their struggle one of the rst victorious
slave rebellions in the Caribbean. A 20-foot-tall monument,
Lescays copper sculpture depicts a runaway slave standing
in a giant nganga, constructed using an iron cauldron re-
covered from a local sugar plantation (ingenio) and similar
to the usually smaller ones used by palo adepts all over the
island. The runaway slaves gure rises vertically toward the
sky. He possesses a horses head, and his hand, extended
upward, has the form of a bird about to take ight, im-
agery that evokes local lore about the runaway slaves use of
shape-shifting powers to avoid recapture by slave hunters
and slave-hunting militias.
Although, for Lescay, the sculpture was merely a
symbol of the tenacity of African culture in Cuba, the
634
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American Ethnologist
monument has since taken on a spiritual signicance for
some local residents. DoudouDi` ene, who was present at the
unveiling, foreshadowed the mystical allure the monument
would soon come to hold in the imagination of some lo-
cal religious devotees. The most visible monuments in this
place, Di` ene stated, are the church of the Virgin of Charity
and this monument to the runaway slave. Both monuments
have a mystical meaning. I believe deeply that the runaway
slaves are here now, inside us, to help us (Casa del Caribe
1997). The 1995 display of excavated human remains in El
Cobre, which some local residents believe to be those of
a runaway slave, and the presence of the Monumento al
Cimarr on appear to have prompted emergent forms of rit-
ual praxis among local community members. The monu-
ment, for example, has not only become a ritual site for
some local residents in recent years but female spirit medi-
ums (espiritistas), who once excluded such crude, un-
evolved, dark spirit entities from their practice, have
also now begun incorporating runaway slave spirits into
their commissions (comisiones), groupings of spirits that
they consult on a regular basis (Schmidt 2005:185191).
9
Moreover, during the annual Fiesta del Fuego, the mon-
ument is subject to ritual propitiations referred to as the
delivery of the mpaka (entrega de la mpaka). This cere-
mony is attended by local and national representatives of
government-licensed cultural institutions and their inter-
national guests and by community members. It involves the
construction by a local palero of an mpaka, a commonly
used clairvoyant device that consists of a bulls horn stuffed
with magically charged substances and sealed with a mirror
and wax, and its placement in the symbolic nganga of the
monument to mark the beginning of the festival and bless
its proceedings and participants (Gainza Chac on 2006).
If, by encapsulating a whole structure of relations that
have changed over time, the nganga can be said to con-
dense the islands social history, then the Monumento al
Cimarr on also performs its own particular kind of historical
compression, one no less magical in its constitution than
that of the nkisi (a term referring to fetish objects, in gen-
eral). The Brazilian poet Thiago de Melo, one of the distin-
guished foreign guests at the sculptures unveiling, alluded
to this in his comments that day: The runaway slave is not
only a sign of rebellion. . . . I learned that the runaway slave
accompanies the very spirit of the Cuban people and all of
those that seek its sovereign afrmation (Casa del Caribe
1997). De Melo not only reveals the ideological work that
Lescays monument is called on to perform but does so by
appealing to a familiar, romantic trope of revolutionary dis-
course as a whole, that is, the ideological identication be-
tween forms of slave resistance like marronage and the po-
litical culture of the 1959 revolution.
Shortly after the 1959 revolution, to cite a familiar ex-
ample of this connection, Miguel Barnets Biography of a
Runaway Slave (1994), an oral history of maroon life based
on interviews with the former runaway slave Esteban Mon-
tejo, provided a powerful image for revolutionary politics.
As Matt D. Childs notes, Barnets retelling of the early ex-
periences of Montejo, a runaway who sought the solitary
existence of life in the woods instead of the disciplined la-
bor regime of the plantation, resonated and served as a
metaphor for the Cuban political experience of the 1960s
(2004:295). What appears to be unique about the use of
this imagery in post-Soviet Cuba is its expansion to include
not only revolutionary political culture but also the histori-
cal experience of the nation as a whole. More recently, as
P erez Sarduy and Jean Stubbs note, all of Cuba has been
likened to a palenque (a maroon, or runaway slave, settle-
ment) (2000:7). James Figarola provided what is perhaps
the most striking example of this analogy. Cubans, he
writes,
are always in a cultural and social condition of mar-
ronage, of attack, of escape against . . . that which
constrains their self-realization, and this disposi-
tion of guerrilla marronage [apalencamiento], these
means of cultural defense, of defense against imposed
death. . . which came about during slavery, were devel-
oped, redened, and consolidated time and time again.
[James Figarola 1999:56]
As a bastion of limitless resolve, resistance, and self-
determination, Cuba is represented in statements such as
these as a kind of maroon nation, vowing eternal ight from
the global snares of neoliberal imperialism.
The Monumento al Cimarr on reinforces such imagery.
The monument is not only productive of an image of the
slaves magic as a viable force of resistance and liberation
but it also metaphorically extends that power to the revo-
lutionary nation-state. The effect is that the political mar-
ronage of the Cuban state is made to appear genealogically
linked to and sanctied by the magical forms of resistance
employed by African slaves and their descendants on the is-
land. Given that palo was often maligned by the revolution-
ary vanguard as out of the step with socialist modernity, it
is patently ironic that the state today extols the virtues of
slave resistance, whether mundane or mystical, especially
now that it nds itself marooned in a sea of global cap-
italism. The attempt by some revolutionary ofcials and
scholars to assimilate palos ritual poetics of history to the
states resistance against capitalist imperialism is produc-
tive of some rather peculiar metaphorics. James Figarola
(2006), for instance, was able to make the audacious claim
in a posthumous publication that the Cuban nation itself
is a great nganga. These selective and domesticated ob-
jectications of palo ritual imagery by revolutionary of-
cials and scholars exemplify one of the emergent paradoxes
of late-socialist Cuban society: the socialist fetishization of
Afro-Cuban fetishism.
635
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Volume 35 Number 4 November 2008
This much is obvious. What is less obvious, however, is
the extent to which revolutionary appropriations might be
nding their way back intothe local religious imaginationin
post-Soviet Cuban society. My focus in the remainder of this
article, then, is on how palo spirit mediums and sorcerers
themselves represent the ghost, that is, how the relation-
ship between the present and the slave past is poeticized
in palo cosmology and ritual. Spectral images of the slave
past in palo, my research suggests, do not settle well with
the moralizing discourse and ideological agendas of revo-
lutionary scholars, state ofcials, and international aid or-
ganizations like UNESCO. Palo, I argue, does not so much
memorialize as mimic the social predations and power ar-
rangements associated with the institution of slavery. Palo
sorcerers and spirit mediums circumscribe and take the
past captive, appropriating its awesome magical capacity to
bolster the power and efcacy of ritual labor in the present.
Nevertheless, there are indications that at least some adepts
may be incorporating revolutionary reications of the slave
past into their own local ritual poetics of history.
Cosmologies of the slave trade
After writhing about on the oor for several minutes, the
19th-century runaway congoslave animating Arca nos body
that summer afternoon in 2004 arose and began demand-
ing tobacco and rum. These would be his only rewards for
risking recapture. Manuel, the pseudonym by which he
was known to everyone except Arca no, who alone knew
his real name, walked with a noticeable limp, caused by
the shackles that were still attached to his ankle when he
ed the plantation. He therefore needed to use a special
cane to keep from falling. The runaway slave moved slowly
around the room followed closely by Arca nos mother, who
translated everything he said. He gave random bits of ad-
vice to various participants, stopping only to sip rum from
a small gourd or to take a long drag from the cigar given
to him. These moments of silence were sometimes lled
by the musicians, who would seize the opportunity to
break into a quick song. Manuel tolerated these musi-
cal punctuations, but he suddenly called for quiet after a
teenage friend of Arca nos son entered the house. As every-
one present would soon learn, the teenager had recently
had several brushes with the law for hustling (jineteando)
foreign tourists and stealing from friends and neighbors.
Manuel grabbed the visibly frightened teenager by
the arm, made him spread his legs, and proceeded to be-
rate him and barrage him with questions for several min-
utes in front of everyone. He said that a dark spirit of the
dead (un muerto oscuro) belonging to a Jewish nganga, of
the kind used for black magic, had stuck itself to the boy,
sent there by someone envious that he had family abroad
in Hialeah (Miami).
10
Hadnt the boy been waiting to re-
ceive papers to go live there? Didnt he suspect the jeal-
ousy and envy of some of his acquaintances as a result?
Hadnt he suddenly resorted to hustling and stealing for
apparently no good reason? Hadnt he grown so impatient
that he had been trying to convince Arca nos son to help
him build an inner-tube raft [balsa] and risk their lives on
the treacherous seas between here and Miami? Manuel
then grabbed some white chalk and began drawing a mag-
ical signature (rma) on the oor behind the boy, pouring
aguardiente along its lines from a small clay pitcher (said
to be the kind slaves drank water from). Standing behind
the boy, Manuel placed the clay pitcher containing the re-
mainder of the liquor on the oor and lit the signature on
re, which produced a very sudden and loud explosion as it
reached the pitcher. This miniature explosion was intended
to cast off the malevolent spirit attached to the boy and
send it back to its owner. The dark spirit, which, in this case,
was not the spirit of a slave but of someone recently dead
who had nevertheless been forced or contracted into magi-
cal servitude in an act of predatory sorcery, was almost cer-
tainly tied by shackles andchains to the Jewish nganga
fromwhich it was sent. To what extent the ironies of this im-
promptu exorcism in socialist Cuba (i.e., one involving the
spirit of a 19th-century runaway slave who liberates a young
boy fromthe mystical predations of an enslaved spirit of the
dead under the sorcerous command of a fellow comrade)
were apparent to anyone other than me is a matter about
which I can only speculate.
Nevertheless, anthropologists and historians have long
noted that a variety of local cosmologies throughout the
Afro-Atlantic world link magic and witchcraft with the
forced or contracted deployment of persons or spirits in
a phantomlike second universe, in which they perform
various kinds of labor for their living proprietors. This im-
agery clearly resonates with the history of the transat-
lantic slave trade and the labor regime of plantation slav-
ery (Austen 1993:92; MacGaffey 1986:62; Matory 2007;
McCalister 2002:103; Palmi e 2002:174; Shaw2002). One par-
ticularly dramatic example of this resonance comes from
west-central Africa, where witches are said to steal peo-
ples souls and then transport them across the Atlantic,
where they are forced to work in U.S. factories (MacGaffey
1986:62). In Haiti, zonbis are gures magically dispossessed
of their own volition; their souls are captured and impris-
oned in bottles and then ordered around by whip-wielding
sorcerers (McCalister 2002:103). The class of spirits known
as ex u in Brazil, referred to as slaves or people of the
roads and associated with the illicit activities of urban
street life, are placed under the command of sorcerers
through the use of spells and imprecations (Brazeal 2007;
Hayes 2007:284). To what extent slavery was incorporated
by preexisting magical idioms as opposed to being produc-
tive of them remains a matter of speculation. Nevertheless,
such ritual images and practices are read by some schol-
ars as implicit indictments of the deleterious effects of the
636
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American Ethnologist
conquest, colonialism, slavery, and neocolonial rule as well
as local idioms for the contemporary work of transnational
or global capitalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Shaw
1997; Taussig 1997).
During her eldwork in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s,
the Cuban ethnographer Lydia Cabrera came across a sim-
ilar set of phantasmagoric images evoking the labor regime
of plantation slavery, military command, and wage labor
in the fetish objects known as nganga or prendas (lit. jew-
els), earthenware pots or tripod iron cauldrons resembling
those that were once used to boil sugarcane. Her infor-
mants described the spirit forces of the various plant sub-
stances and animal remains used in the construction of
these fetishes as slave gangs (cuadrillas de esclavos), a
workforce (dotaci on), and subalterns (subalternos). The
plants and animals that made up this subaltern slave work-
force were supervised by a spirit of the dead referred to as
the overseer (mayoral), the general of the forces (gen-
eral de las fuerzas), and the boss (jefe). The entire assem-
blage of spirit forces and entities, however, was subject to
the command of the owner, that is, the living person in
possession of the nganga. Moreover, these subjugated spirit
forces were also said to occasionally rebel (revirar; see
Cabrera 1983:131). The specter of chattel slavery thus looms
large in palo cosmology ritual and may help explain its infa-
mous reputation on the island as a dark world of morally
dubious magic and sorcery. In contrast to that character-
izing the better-documented ochaif a cults of santera, in-
teraction with the occult world of spirits and other super-
natural forces in palo is based not on a relation of spiritual
reciprocity but on a mystical relation of command in which
ritually stylized coercion, cunning, and fear tactics play a
central role in accomplishing specic tasks.
The transatlantic roots of palo monte, or the reglas de
congo (congo cults), are traced to Bantu-speaking slaves
and their descendants on the island. It, therefore perhaps,
does not come as much of a surprise that the historical
emergence of palo as an organized cult has been linked by
some scholars to the intensication of sugar production on
the island during the 19th century. The Cuban linguist Jesus
Fuentes Guerra (2002), for example, argues that the regla
de palo monte rst emerged as an organized cult and sub-
sequently expanded at exactly the time of the sugar boomin
Cubas south-central zone, between 1835 and 1862, which
was made possible by the increase of slave labor coming
mostly from the lower Congo (see also Fuentes Guerra and
Schwegler 2005:36). Although this scenario is entirely plau-
sible, the material history of congo-derived cults on the is-
land would appear to call into question the simplicity of
such conjectures. James Figarola (1996:114), for instance,
claimedthat the oldest nganga that he was aware of datedto
the 18th century.
11
Other authors claim the earliest nganga
on the island were Mananga in Pinar del Ro around
1806 and Ngundu Batalla S acara Empe no in Guanabo
(Havana province) around 1812 (Bolvar Arostegu and Daz
de Villegas 1998:2022). My purpose in mentioning these
assertions by Cuban researchers is not to settle once and
for all questions concerning when and where on the island
palo came into existence as an organized cult. Rather, the
point is to suggest that palo clearly emerged out of a histori-
cal context considerably shaped by the colonial sugar econ-
omy and that cult organization likely had multiple origins
and centers on the island.
By the turn of the 20th century, palo had most certainly
developed into an organized cult. As a spirit-possession cult
in which the spirits of slaves and maroons gure promi-
nently and as a unique idiom of magic focusing on the
manipulation and control of the dead (muertos) through
the medium of various fetish objects generically referred
to as nkisi, palo differs signicantly from ochaif a (san-
tera). Devotees of the orichas or saints (santos) are, for
the most part, entirely dependent on the whims and de-
sires of these royal-like divinities and rely on a spiritual
model of reciprocity to gain access to the their assistance,
counsel, and spiritual power. Palo adepts, in contrast, en-
ter into contractual relationships with the spirits of the re-
cently dead. These spirits are expected to submit to and
carry out the demands of the living, for which they receive
some kind of symbolic payment that ideally keeps them in
a relation of dependency on their owners. Palo cults are or-
ganized around a knowledgeable elder generally known as
tata nkisi, that is, father of nkisi, or variously as palero, may-
ombero, brillumbero, or kimbisero, depending on the par-
ticular ritual branch to which they trace their roots in the
religion. The local reputations of individual tata nkisi de-
pend on the extent of their mastery of a muerto, the ef-
cacy and power of their brujera (magic or sorcery), the
number of years they have spent practicing the religion, or
the number of ritual godchildren they have formally initi-
ated into their cult house. Although both men and women
can be adepts, those who have been formally initiated tend
overwhelmingly to be male. Perhaps because the cults sa-
cred narratives (kutuguangos) tend to betray a spirit of
misogyny (Matibag 1996:176) and because its ceremonies
are notably more aggressive in tone than those of ochaif a
or espiritismo, expressing an ethos of mystical domination,
many of the initiatedwomenwithwhomI spoke considered
palo monte to be a cosa de hombre, a mans thing.
As Stephan Palmi e (2002:159200) so cogently argues,
palo magically condenses and redeploys a particular set
of historical experiences linked to slavery, marronage, and
wage labor. The owner of an nganga is a mystical en-
trepreneur commanding a labor force by contract or cap-
ture (Palmi e 2002:168). This phantom labor force is re-
cruited among the spirits (nfumbi, muertos) of the recently
dead that inhabit local cemeteries; they are either con-
tracted, conned, or stolen and then relocated and impris-
oned within the nganga. There, they are subject to the
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Volume 35 Number 4 November 2008
authoritative command of their owners and work on com-
mission; that is, they receive payment inthe formof blood
sacrice only after they have completed some task. Ritual
evocations of slavery are further reinforced in procedures
designed to activate these fetish objects. The nganga, as
Fernando Ortiz (1958:851) notes, are sometimes insulted,
spit on, or ogged as a way of forcing them to work or carry
out a given task. Cabrera notes, for instance, that when the
dead took possession of her informants they began a set of
rites described as moving around the sugar mill, the pur-
pose of which was to clear ritual space of any impurities or
twisted intentions (1979:142).
Images of military reconnaissance are also salient. For
example, the owners of nganga sometimes acquire the char-
acter of generals in command of spirit forces who act
as scouts, spies, or sentries in charge of maintaining the
perimeters of ritual space or certain circumscribed areas
of urban space (Brown 1989:376). The presence of such
imagery is likely related to the historical experience of
marronage and the defensive strategies intended to pro-
tect runaway slaves from recapture by slave hunters and
more-organized slave-hunting militias. Some evidence also
suggests that the ritual salience of such military metaphors
may be associated with or otherwise reinforced by the rit-
ual activities of congo maroon communities in the east-
ern regions of Cuba during the struggles against Spanish
colonial rule in the latter half of the 19th century, regard-
less of the still-unsettled question of whether or under what
conditions they actually supported the insurgents (Palmi e
2002:185188; Roa 1950; Thompson 1983:125).
The question I raise below is whether one gains any
theoretical ground by describing the sedimentation of tem-
porally removed historical processes in ritual imagery and
bodily practices in terms that foreground memory. As the
ethnographic research presented below suggests, the lin-
gering presence of the past that these ritual practices ma-
terialize seems to be constituted not so much of muted
or nondiscursive forms of recollection (cf. Shaw 2002) as of
implicit knowledge about social relations and power. Crit-
ical attention to implicit knowledge, as Taussig suggests,
enables an understanding of how the past lingers in the
present as a haunting, phantomlike presence that is some-
times objectied by the living as magically empowered im-
agery capable of causing as well as relieving misfortune
(1987:367). Yet my sense is that ritual images of slave spir-
its and fetishes like the nganga do not so much crystallize
history as sorcery as they fashion a kind of sorcery out
of history. Palo spirit mediums and sorcerers mimic slav-
ery and, in doing so, attempt to harness the fetish power
of the slave past to contemporary projects and goals. Palo,
then, provides an idiom through which the socially delete-
rious effects of violence and depersonalization vis-` a-vis the
agency of objects and objectication are expressed (Palmi e
2002:250, 2006).
Sugars ghosts: Or, the alterity of history
Palo spirits of slaves and maroons were referred to by my
informants as bozales, a word used in the colonial era
for those African slaves who were just off the boat, so
to speak, able only to speak broken, rudimentary Spanish
and entirely unfamiliar with social life in the colony. These
bozales were described as crude, brutish, and unciv-
ilized but, at the same time, as empowered by extraordi-
nary gifts of clairvoyance and magical prowess. The spirits
of the bozales are, thus, subject to a familiar series of para-
doxical attributions of power that have their roots in colo-
nialism. Earlier anthropologists, for example, noted the ex-
tent to which magical powers tend be delimited topograph-
ically (Mauss and Hubert 1972:3839); that is, magical ca-
pacities are mapped onto the social landscape insuch a way
that isolated, marginal, or inferior races or cultures are as-
cribed a reputation for sorcery (Tylor 1974). Those groups
within colonial society who occupied the lowest rungs of
the social hierarchy because of their alleged wildness, or
proximity to nature, and their savagery, for example, were
oftenbelieved likely by the elite classes to possess extraordi-
nary powers to harm, heal, and signicantly alter the course
of misery and afiction (Taussig 1998:446). The bozal spir-
its of Cuba represent the sedimentation of these paradox-
ical colonial attributions of power; although their coarse,
brutish, and backward nature is in keeping with their sta-
tus as slaves or maroons, it also bolsters their reputation as
gifted sorcerers in possession of secret, esoteric power and
knowledge.
When I met rst Arca no in the summer of 2004, he had
been a practicing mayombero for some 31 years and had
long since developed a working relationship with the 19th-
century congo slave-turned-maroon known as Manuel.
After several weeks of my diplomatic nagging, Arca no nally
agreed to help answer my questions about all those sugar
mill spirits and runaway slaves, as he put it. One afternoon,
when Arca no was mounted (possessed), the spirit of the
runaway slave Manuel suddenly called for me. Wheres
the worldly pants [foreign man], the white man [mundele]?
My horse [i.e., Arca no] tells me you want to know my his-
tory. Is that true or false? Thats true, I said. Ill share
my history with you but you have to treat it with respect.
You cant just go around telling everyone without caution.
As Arca nos mother translated his bozal speech, an often-
impossible blur of arcane words and fragmented syntax,
Manuel took a knife to his mouth and proceeded to cut
his tongue until drops of blood fell from his lip into a plate
in his lap:
I was born in Mozambique and taken from my people
when I was 18 years old. They took me to a sugar plan-
tation in Baracoa, El Central Australia, where I labored
for many years in the renery. They called me Manuel
638
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American Ethnologist
Noche Oscuro [Manuel Dark Night]. Thats because I
would always wander off in the bush at night and get
lost. You see I was a rebel, a maroon. When I set off
for the mountain I was still in shackles. Thats why my
left leg is dead. I spent the rest of my life on the moun-
tain. I lived to be 115 years old. My secret is buried be-
neath the silk cottonwood tree [ceiba]. What more do
you want with me, mundele?
I was still in shackles, he had said, as blood dripped
onto his lap. What some colonial authorities once charac-
terized as an afiction, the tendency for some slaves to re-
sist their enslavement by running off into the surround-
ing woods and mountains, is described here as a natural
propensity to rebel by wandering inthe bushand seeking its
transformative power. The bush, for many black Cubans
faced with the violence of slavery, referred not only to ex-
trasocial space or those out-of-the-way places where the
spirits dwelled but also to those spaces promising freedom
and escape fromthe tortures and dehumanizing conditions
of plantation life. As one congo-Cuban proverb puts it, The
white mans power is the whip; the black mans are the spir-
its and the bush (Daz Fabelo 1974:33). In this sense, his-
torical experiences linked to slavery spilled over into local
cosmology, lling undomesticated magical spaces like the
bush with a corpus of urgent existential meanings.
When Arca no was just a boy, he too would often wan-
der off in the bush (el monte) at night and get lost, hypno-
tized by its fantastic forms, cacophony of sounds, mysteri-
ous odors, and shadowy gures. His mothers worried calls
could not break the feverish hold these nightly sojourns had
on her son. She and others would go looking for him, and
he would nally emerge out of the darkness, limping and
complaining of sharp pains in his leg. The doctors at the
polyclinic who examined Arca no were never able to detect
anything out of the ordinary in his physical constitution.
They assured his mother that the boy was in perfectly good
health. But the nightly wanderings and phantom aches and
pains continued. Arca nos mother, a spirit medium herself,
decided to organize spiritual masses (misas espirituales) to
nd out if her sons mysterious behavior might be the result
of some invisible agency. What Arca no eventually learned
from those sessions was that he was experiencing the vicar-
ious meanderings and sufferings of a 19th-century congo
slave-turned-maroon who had been a great sorcerer in his
lifetime. Because contact with the dead is fraught with dan-
ger, it must be ritually managed to ensure that it is not
harmful to the deads living host. Arca no thus began regu-
larly attending sessions with his mother to learn about this
phantomof the cane elds andbush before eventually be-
coming marked (rayado), or formally initiated, into palo.
Wuicho, a mayombero from central Havana, had a
comparable set of experiences. When he was just nine
years old and was lying in his bed one night in his familys
small apartment in an urban neighborhood (solar), there
suddenly appeared before him the image of a very dark-
skinned black man, of very rough features, eyes wide open,
guano [palm leaf] hat, looking at me xedly and with great
seriousness but without intending to harmme. Sometimes
Wuicho would tremble with chills or experience strong pal-
pitations, like something had seized me without allowing
me to speak. Because the doctors knew nothing about
sorcery, Wuichos mother began taking him to spiritual
schools (spiritist centers), where the strange sensations
passed through him with even more intensity. It was then
that he was rst mounted by the spirit of someone dead.
It was all very fast and strange, he explained, when you
start to feel in your body all of the sensations that a per-
son felt in their life and much more the symptoms that per-
son felt in their last days like gasping for air. This particular
spirit, the very one who appeared to himin his bed when he
was a little boy, was Joaqun, the spirit of a runaway slave
who shares afnities with Sarabanda, an mpungu, or palo
nature spirit associated with iron and, by extension, iron
objects such as machetes and all they are used for, such as
cutting cane and as weapons in slave uprisings (Daz Fabelo
1974:133).
Wuicho later recalled his encounter with another run-
away slave spirit. One day, he went walking alone through
the cane elds of Camag uey and got lost. He arrived at an
abandoned sugar mill and had the strange sense of hav-
ing been there before. Yet, because this was his rst trip
to Camag uey, he could not possibly have been there be-
fore. He remembered a dream he had in which the spirit
of a runaway slave appeared to him, and he wondered if
the dream and his mysterious sense of d ej` a vu were linked.
Wuicho began asking the locals if the mill had, in fact,
been a place where slaves once labored, and, to his sur-
prise, their descriptions matched what the runaway slave
had conveyed in his dream. The spirit in question was
Francisco, an African-born runaway congo slave who had
arrived in Camag uey via Haiti, a terribly impulsive and
brutish character who, nonetheless, had a great knowl-
edge of sorcery. Wuicho soon developed a relationship
with Franciscos elder sister, Mara Caridad, a very re-
ned woman who not only knew much about the world of
the whites because she had been a domestic slave but also
was particularly skilled at preparing magical powders. Her
brother would occasionally come out of the bush and she
took care of him by giving him food and affection.
At one level, stories about slave spirits can be read as
indictments of the brutality and terror associated with life
onthe islands sugar estates. One female medium, for exam-
ple, spoke of her protector spirit, Mariaregla, an African-
born female slave who worked on the Mercedes sugar es-
tate. Mariaregla had been pregnant with twins but lost
them through miscarriage after receiving a brutal lashing
from the plantation overseer, and the pains associated with
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Volume 35 Number 4 November 2008
the loss still occasionally manifest themselves in the belly of
her living host. When mounted by his 19th-century congo
maroon spirit Manuel, Arca no, the spirits horse, limps
and has to use a ritually adorned cane to keep from losing
his balance, the spirit inside frequently complaining about
the pain caused by the shackles that cut into his esh. At
times, Manuel would beg for the shackles to be removed
only to be reminded that they already had been. What these
examples illustrate is the extent to which spirit possession
lays bare the affective power of history as a more tangible
presence in the sensible body (Hale 1997:393; Stoller 1994).
Yet the experiences of mediums like Arca no and Wui-
cho reveal much more. The feverish meanderings of a child
in the bush at night or the dreamlike sense of having been
there before, as when Wuicho was confronted with the un-
familiar ruins of the sugar mill, recall what Ren e Devischhas
describedas a kindof initiation, leading to a rebirthinto al-
terity or the elsewhere. . . . [The] sorcerers highly developed
capacities of passion, scent or sight allow him passage to
this alterity which he enjoys, sensing it rather than concep-
tualising it (1999:66). It is through this highly sensual pro-
cess of solitary wandering and getting lost among the night
shadows of the bush or the ghostly remains of an aban-
doned sugar estate that the sorcerer, in a sense, becomes
his own other. Like the phantom limb described by Mau-
rice Merleau-Ponty (1962), the past manifests itself here as a
spectral presence in the body of the sorcerer, expressing the
proximate alterity of history through sensorial rather than
conceptual or textual registers. The phenomenology of the
sorcerers experience and ritual praxis is fundamental to
this experience. By submitting to these visitations and cul-
tivating their spiritual sensibilities and gifts of clairvoyance,
mediums incorporate themselves into a whole chain of
spirits that reaches far back into the slave past. They thus
mend the historical ruptures and silences that keep present
generations alienated fromthe terrors of the nations past.
Conjuring the slave past
As the above examples illustrate, palos embodied history
has not become so internalized as second nature that it has
been forgotten as such (Bourdieu 1990:56). Contemporary
adepts are clearly aware that imagery recalling the histori-
cal experience of slavery is at the heart of palo ritual praxis.
Yet palo adepts employ this imagery in ways that do not
so much memorialize the slave past as harness its mag-
ical capacities to specic ritual tasks in the present. The
slave spirits, for example, constitute only one dimension
of the mayomberos ritual praxis. More than just mediums
of African-born and creole slave and maroon spirits, may-
omberos are also sorcerers who frequent local cemeteries
in search of spirits to purchase, steal, or con out of the grave
and then subject to magical enslavement in the nganga.
The questionthat hangs like a shadowover this subject,
that is, whether the often-macabre stories describing sor-
cerers who harvest human bones from local cemeteries un-
der the cover of darkness are merely orientalizing ctions or
depictions of bona de ritual praxis, was settled for me one
early summer morning when I accompanied Arca no and an
unlicensed taxi driver to a local cemetery. The taxi driver
had commissioned Arca nos magic to catch a spirit of the
dead (coger un muerto), a euphemism for what essentially
constitutes an act of mystical predation. El Gordo (the Fat
Man), as the taxi driver was known, had asked Arca no to
ensorcell (embrujar) the lover of his estranged wife. Despite
repeated warnings from Arca no that such acts of predatory
sorcery were unpredictable and risky because they could al-
ways turn away from their intended victim and stick (pe-
gar) to the instigator, instead, aficting him or her with all
kinds of misfortune and cosmic retribution, El Gordo re-
mained unswayed. He was convinced sorcery (brujera) was
the only thing that could break the powerful seductive hold
El Tipo (the Guy), as he called him, exerted over his wife. El
Tipo was a high-ranking military ofcial who not only was
in a position to take bribes and, thus, supplement his mea-
ger government salary but also had access to coveted con-
sumer goods conscated from foreign tourists at the Jos e
Mart National Airport. El Gordo thus believed that his es-
tranged wife had left him not because he had failed as a
husband but because she had been seduced by the mate-
rial comforts El Tipo could offer her. El Gordos story reects
a typical source of anxiety for many Cubans in the post-
Soviet present, that is, the pervasive sense of doubt that al-
truistic love and social benecence are possible in an age
of scarce resources and opportunities (Hern andez-Reguant
2002:385).
We arrived at the cemetery not under the cover of dark-
ness but in the full light of the early morning sun. Arca no
approached an older white man who was sitting outside
the gate, and they soon began trading phrases in what ap-
peared to be a kind of impromptu test of each others rit-
ual knowledge and prowess. It turned out that the old man
was a grave digger and also a mayombero, an apparently
common combination among those who need to protect
themselves from the occupational hazards of working so
closely with the dead. We followed the old man inside the
gate to anolder grave that hadrecently beendug upto make
room for others. Human remains, however, in the form of
small fragments, still remained. Arca no worked quickly. He
rst drew the signature of the whirlwind on the sidewalk in
front of the grave, and in the center of it he placed a piece
of paper with El Tipos name on it, his photograph, and a
piece of bone from the recently disinterred cadaver, a way
of luring the dead out of the grave because they always go
looking for what is theirs [siempre andan buscando por lo
suyo]. He then lit a white candle in the center of the draw-
ing and began chanting, blowing black-market rum on the
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American Ethnologist
signature and into the pit of the grave. After pouring more
rum onto the spiraling line of the signature, the road or
path (camino) along which the dead would soon travel,
he placed the rumbottle near the point where the signature
beganand set re to the signature. The ame quickly moved
out from the direction of the grave and into the bottle, cre-
ating a small explosion. Arca no hurriedly capped the bottle.
The dead had been tricked out of the grave and captured.
Forced out of the ground in search of what is theirs, the
dead are caught by directing them into and imprisoning
them within containing devices such as rum bottles.
Arca no then began singing while he ripped the paper
bearing El Tipos name into ve pieces and tied four of the
pieces around four candles using corn husks. He placed the
four wrapped candles in a square on top of the signature
and then blew chamba, a ritual drink containing magically
imbued substances, onto the signature and into the grave.
When he had nished, he forcefully threw the four paper-
wrapped candles into the four corners of the pit. Finally, he
grabbed a handful of soil from the grave, which he placed
inside a plastic bag along with El Tipos photo, the rum,
the chamba, and the remaining piece of paper. As we left,
Arca no told El Gordo to give the grave diggermayombero
10 pesos, about $0.40, enough for a pack of cigarettes.
Although, in this particular instance, the purpose of the
ritual was only to catch one of the dead and send him off
on a kind of freelance mission, similar ritual procedures
are employed to uproot the dead from the cemetery and
transport them to the nganga, where they perform various
kinds of mystical labor for their owners.
12
Although it would
appear that mucholder mayomberos trace the construction
of the rst nganga to Africa in narratives that have noth-
ing to do with forced servitude (Gonz alez Garca 2000:114
115), my informants directly linked the creation of the rst
nganga on the island to slavery.
13
Arca no, for example, ex-
plicitly traced the mythical rst nganga to marronage. A
slave by the name of Congocorama, he told me, escaped
from his owners and ran off into the surrounding bush (el
monte), where he captured the mystical powers of nature.
The rst nganga, then, according to Arca nos narrative, was
nature itself, but because he was always on the move, Con-
gocorama constructed an mpaka, which he stuffed with
magically imbued substances, including human remains,
and sealed with a mirror using candle wax. The mpaka was
the rst nkisi object on the island. Wuicho, by contrast, de-
scribed how a dramatic episode of violent slave revolt con-
spired to bring these fetish objects into existence:
The rst fundamento [fetish object, lit. fundamental],
nganga, Luwanba, was mounted in Camag uey. A black
Congo slave in a moment of rage killed the mayoral.
He was tired of his abuse and so he took his machete
from him and severed his head. Theres a song that
says, Mambele mayoral . . . mambele, mambele may-
oral . . . mambele; he killed the mayoral with his own
machete and used his head to serve his own needs.
How? He used the head of the mayoral in his funda-
mento. . . . They got the skulls of the mayorales, of the
whites, so it would be a representation of what they
were like in those times.
Here, the hierarchy of power associated with plantation
slavery is recast as a mystical chain of command in which
the slavesorcerer becomes the owner of a phantom la-
bor force controlled by the spirit of the abusive overseer he
rst slays in an act of violent resistance and then magically
resurrects and contracts for work in his nganga. Whether
recounting real or imagined events, such narratives sug-
gest that the spectacular terror associated with plantation
slavery (cf. Brown 2003) might nd one of its most stunning
examples of ritual mimesis inCubanpalo. It is certainly pos-
sible that the ritual use of mutilatedhumanremains or body
parts may have constituted ingenious attempts to capture
some of the power associated with the spectacular violence
and disciplinary regime of plantation slavery, such as pub-
lic displays of the severed heads of rebel slaves, by imitating
this brutality in ritual praxis.
14
I nd it striking and even peculiar that anything even
remotely resembling narratives like Arcanos and Wuichos
has not appeared in the comparatively extensive litera-
ture on palo until fairly recently. James Figarola is the only
Cuban scholar that, to my knowledge, has ever alluded to
the possibility that such originary acts of resistance against
slavery guredinthe magical constitutionof the nganga. He
makes these assertions only in his later publications, dating
to the late 1990s, and he derides the Cuban social sciences
for ignoring the fact that the earliest nganga on the is-
land contained the remains of overseers, slave masters, and
traders (James Figarola 1996:124). Yet the literature on palo
before the Special Period contains no references to the rit-
ual use of the remains of these colonial agents. The only ref-
erence to the ritual use of the remains of prominent white
social actors comes fromone of Cabreras informants some-
time in the 1940s or 1950s. This informant suggested that,
during the republic, the skulls of white elites were among
the most highly valued human remains for ritual use in the
nganga. He mentioned an acquaintance, for instance, who
was in the possession of the remains of a great mundele,
or white person: a little bone for which the acquaintance
paid dearly (Cabrera 1983:132). The informant went on to
explain that the skulls of white cadavers were highly prized
not only for their intelligence but also for greatly expand-
ing the eld of power in which the nganga was able to ma-
neuver and act:
Before, the sorcery of the black man did not always
catch up with the white man. He needed to put a lit-
tle piece of the white man in the cauldron. Today,
they put the two brains [skulls] together. . . . Now they
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Volume 35 Number 4 November 2008
are equals according to that constitution [the consti-
tution of the republic that notionally promoted lib-
eral values such as racial equality through legal pro-
visions]. And the Prenda kills the white just it does
the black. [You] will understand that if I ask a white
man to knock down another white man, that it shake
him hard for me, hell play the fool; the white man
will not go. . . . And the black man does the same thing
as the white when he does not want to harm an-
other like himself. . . . Two kiyumbas, two chocozue-
las. There are mayomberos who have nothing more
than mundele, and their nganga never catch mundele.
[Cabrera 1983:132133]
The phenomenology of race relations in both the
colony and the republic reverberates here in the structure
of mystical relations embodied by the nganga. Because the
spirit of a person would never cooperate in a mystical at-
tack on another of his or her own race, it was necessary
to expand the eld of power largely circumscribed by race
by placing the remains of both white and black cadavers in
the nganga, nowequals according to that constitution. Yet
the remains of powerful priesthealers, spirit mediums, and
sorcerers of color were also highly prized, even as early as
the latter half of the 19th century. The remains of the fa-
mous Andr es Facundo Cristo de los Dolores Petit, for ex-
ample, were rumored to have been relocated from the old
colonial cemetery in Guanabacoa to the Espada cemetery
in Havana to protect them from enemies who coveted his
skull (Cabrera 1979:2). Nevertheless, given the absence of
concrete references to the bodily remains of overseers, slave
owners, or traders in the earlier ethnographic literature,
one might provisionally conclude that the contemporary
salience of ritual discourse and imagery linking palos his-
torical origins to romanticized visions of slave resistance is
a more recent development.
Another striking image recalling slavery conjured up
in palo spirit-possession ceremonies is the plantation bell.
We sing a song here, Arca no noted, Its calling me; its
calling me; the bereta bell is calling me [Me est a llamando,
me est a llamando, me est a llamando la campana de la
bereta]. The song is a reference to a dialogue between the
runaway slave Congocorama and the overseer who goes
off with his dogs to hunt him down. Congocorama hears
the slave driver ringing the bereta bells, Arca no contin-
ued, which were used to wake up slaves and call them to
work. Somewhere in the mountains, the overseer releases
the dogs on the runaway slave, but other slaves who are
accompanying the overseer trick him by saying that they
have seen the maroon running off in the opposite direc-
tion. The bell marking the rhythm of the endless tasks,
Manuel MorenoFraginals writes, was like a sacredandpro-
fane symbol of the sugar mill. Just as a church without a bell
tower was inconceivable, so with mills and coffee planta-
tions (1976:148149). The bells of the islands sugar mills
punctuated the everyday rhythms of slave life; they served
as a system of communication for everything from waking
slaves up for predawn work to announcing the departure of
one of their number for the mill cemetery. In Arca nos nar-
rative, the plantation bell takes on additional meaning. As
the slave driver goes out looking for the runaway slave, he
deliberately rings the plantation bell, a form of hypnotiz-
ing aural terror to which slaves were habituated and that
is intended here to lure the runaway back. Like the spirit-
hunting dogs mentioned at the beginning of this article, the
haunting sounds of the plantation bell that once echoed
throughout the cane elds and surrounding areas of the
sugar estates are today invoked in ritual song to frighten the
spirits of runaway slaves out of their hiding places and press
them into ritual service.
The ritual mimesis of slavery is, then, at the heart of
the mystical relations of command that characterize palo.
This imagery is further reinforced by the dense materiality
and semantic complexity of the nganga. The vertically ar-
ranged sticks that line the perimeter of these ritual fetishes,
as David H. Brown (1989:373374) perceptively notes, not
only evoke images of the Cuban bush or wilderness but also
may serve as material metaphors for the palenques (forti-
ed maroon settlements) built by runaway slaves on the is-
land. Yet the imagery evoked innarratives like Wuichos sug-
gests a different interpretation: that is, the nganga may not
constitute symbolic palenques as much as they do micro-
cosmic slave plantations. The vertical alignment of sticks,
then, might just as well recall the palisades that were some-
times built on the grounds of sugar estates to better con-
trol and monitor the movements of slaves, preventing them
from eeing to the surrounding hills and blocking the ac-
cess of agitators who might incite the slaves to rebel (see
Singleton 2001). Nevertheless, ritual imagery evoking the
runaway slaves precarious life inthe bush does, infact, pro-
vide some of the most striking examples of the kind of im-
plicit knowledge about social predation and the circulation
of power that characterizes palo magic and sorcery.
I conclude this section by calling attention to one par-
ticularly signicant feature of palo ritual praxis that has
beenoverlookedinthe scholarly literature: that is, the imag-
inative, magical use of soil and how this relates to im-
agery associated with colonial slave hunts and their use of
specially trained dogs for tracking down runaway slaves.
15
Soil is a crucial ingredient in all nganga. Arca nos nganga,
Tiembla Tierra (Shakes Earth), for example, is stuffed with
soil taken from 21 different places: the bush, savannah,
hill, palm tree, silk cottonwood tree, river, beach, an anthill,
crossroads, his house, a Catholic church, polyclinic, hospi-
tal, police station, court tribunal, prison, cemetery, seven
tombs (siete tumbas), funeral home, and the slave quarters
of the plantation in Baracoa where Manuel once labored
in the sugar renery. What is so striking about Arca nos
nganga, however, is that it does not just compress salient
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American Ethnologist
features of the local rural and urban landscape. This mag-
ical cartography also condenses a more global or transna-
tional geography. Arca no claims that his nganga contains
soil taken from at least seven locations abroad: Ethiopia,
Nigeria, Angola, Haiti, the Canary Islands, Hialeah (Miami),
and New York. To some extent, the inclusion of these soils
represents a spatial compression of the migratory circuits
that dene both Cuban history and the more recent di-
aspora that began with the 1959 revolution. The nganga,
then, turn out to be much more than just microcosmic
plantations or symbolic runaway-slave settlements. Rather,
the nganga are stunning magical constructions of a more-
encompassing global spacetime compression in which
salient geographies of the present are transposed within a
cosmological structure that mirrors the historical landscape
of power associated with the institution of slavery.
The soil collected and packed tightly in the nganga
serves as a kind of olfactory map, providing the spirits of
the dead residing inside with a sense of location or orien-
tation, enabling them to navigate unfamiliar terrain by lit-
erally smelling their way to their destination. The central-
ity of imagery associated with olfaction in palo ritual praxis
betrays some rather striking genealogical links to colonial
slave hunts on the island. Professional slave hunters, for
instance, were often accompanied by infernal dogs who
paralyzed the runaway slave with fright. With their infal-
lible sense of smell, these dogs would follow the scent to
the mountains, the forest, and the hills and invariably dis-
cover and attack them (Cabrera 1979:43). The spirit of the
dead residing in the nganga was sometimes referred to as a
dog (perro) by my informants. Some explain such imagery
in ways that clearly recall the whole economy of chase and
capture associated with colonial slave hunts on the island:
Why do we call it a dog? Because the spirit of the dead
[muerto], like a dog, follows the scent of the signatures
[rmas; i.e., ideographic signs written in chalk or tal-
cum powder] . . . and also because he follows the com-
mands of the other spirit, the overseer. Hes there to
serve the other. And when I draw signatures and say,
Go see what such-and-such is doing. He goes tied
by a chain. Because, look, if I order him to go to, I
dont know, Pepe Cojos house, Pepe Cojo could have
the same thing as me and he could, through the mirror
of the mpaka, capture the image of the dead. He could
wind up imprisoned in the mirror.
In some ways, then, sorcery operates like a magical
slave hunt; like the runaway slaves who were always in
danger of being caught by slave hunters and their infer-
nal dogs, the spirit dogs that are the dead are always at
risk of being caught by rival sorcerers and imprisoned in
their nganga. The dogs, then, have to be magically tied
to their owners nganga by invisible chains (cadenas), not
unlike the manner in which the slave was sometimes liter-
ally shackled to the sugar plantation.
16
Palo and the post-Soviet present
The ritual imagery associated with palo not only illustrates
the sedimentation of the slave past in contemporary forms
of magic, sorcery, and spirit mediumship but also contin-
ues to be a powerful idiom for expressing local ideas and
perceptions about social predation and the circulation of
power in the post-Soviet present. This imagery, for example,
sometimes directly implicates political culture. Rumors of
various Cuban generals, politicians, and presidents, for ex-
ample, who commission the magic of palo sorcerers or em-
ploy their own nganga for explicitly political ends are fairly
well documented in the literature (e.g., Cabrera 1983:193
194; Miller 2000:47, 2004; Orozco and Bolvar 1998:487
488). Some rumors describing contemporary dabblings in
the occult by Cuban leaders predictably map onto political
sentiments toward the current regime. For example, one ru-
mor is that Cubas alleged political backwardness and Fidel
Castros remarkable political survival over the past several
decades are attributable to a spell cast on the country by
former dictatorgeneral Gerardo Machado after the nganga
he buried in the Park of Pan-American Fraternity was aban-
doned when he ed the country after the 1933 military coup
(Cino 2005). Another rumor is that the state imports bulls
from abroad not only to provide beef to tourist hotels but
also to feed the nganga that Castro uses to protect himself
from his enemies.
The occult imagery associated with palo not only feeds
the political imaginary but also provides a particularly rich
idiom for moral commentary concerning social predation
in the post-Soviet present. The links between palo and
the deteriorating socioeconomic and moral conditions of
the Special Period are perhaps most succinctly expressed
in the song El Tren by the enormously popular Cuban
timba group Los Van Van. After alluding to the moral de-
railment of social relations in the post-Soviet present by
declaring, No one cares about anyone else; The care for
others is over [Nadie quiere a nadie; Se acab o el querer],
the singer exclaims, With me, no! With the nganga! [Con-
migo, no! Con la nganga!], warning his foes that messing
with him would constitute a direct assault on his nganga,
an offense with potentially dangerous consequences. What
popular cultural expressions such as these suggest is that
the corrosion of socialist values that many link to the ma-
terial scarcity and deprivation of the present has made it
increasingly necessary to defend oneself against nefarious
acts of social predation by seeking magical forms of protec-
tion. Palo constitutes one of the most valued resources for
this kind of magical labor in contemporary Cuban society
and one that continues to be expressed in terms that em-
phasize forms of both mystical subjugation and retaliation.
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Volume 35 Number 4 November 2008
I close this article with a brief example from my eld-
work that vividly illustrates the extent to which palo pro-
vides a powerful idiom through which to both express and
address the moral derailment of social relations in the post-
Soviet present. The moral repercussions associated with
reckless acts of social predation are clear in the case of
Salazar, a mayombero with a particularly infamous local
reputation for alcohol abuse and morally dubious ritual ac-
tivities. Salazar had been a gifted sorcerer, but in recent
years he began spending much of his time and money con-
suming the black-market rum Cubans call train spark
(chispa de tren). He was also said to have become increas-
ingly envious of a neighbor and occasional drinking buddy
who had recently been befriended by a Spanish tourist. One
day, the two had an argument over money after spend-
ing much of the afternoon drinking at a local outdoor bar.
Salazar felt that his friend was obligated to pay the bill be-
cause he was the one getting rich by hustling the Spanish
tourist, hustling being a very common form of social pre-
dation in the post-Soviet present, but his friend insisted
they split the costs. Infuriated by what he perceived as a
selsh unwillingness on the part of his neighbor to share
his gains from hustling, Salazar later told his ritual god-
father (padrino) that he planned to get even by prepar-
ing some malevolent magic (trabajo malo) for his friend;
that is, Salazar would attempt to ensorcell his neighbor. His
padrino warned himnot to do it because it would end badly
for him, but Salazar ignored his advice. Arca no recounted
the story:
One morning he woke up fast and the rst thing he
did was construct a model hearse [carret on] and paint
it black. He then made a doll using black cloth and
stuffed it with the bones of a cadaver; soil from a
nearby hospital, funeral home, cemetery, and the back
patio of his friends house. He placed the doll in the
model hearse and waited until midnight. At midnight
he placed a candle on the four street corners surround-
ing the mans house and with a rope pulled the hearse
around the block, encircling the house. When he re-
turned he left the hearse on the sidewalk leading to his
friends house and placed the doll in his nganga.
The following day, Salazars friend was drinking in a lo-
cal outdoor bar and got into a ght. Things took a turn for
the worse when some of his opponents friends ganged up
on him. They ended up stabbing him to death with a knife.
Tormented by what had happened, Salazar began drink-
ing more heavily and, nally, one day, in a drunken stupor,
he poured chispa de tren over his nganga and lit it with a
match, severely burning the object he felt was responsible
for his woes. Later that very same day, he slipped on the
sidewalk, hit his head on the concrete, and died. Salazars
alcoholism and reckless use of magical power had caused
him to lose control of his nganga. The spirit of the dead
residing there revolted and, after gaining the upper hand,
had turned on its owner in a dramatic act of mystical retal-
iation. This story recalls what eventually happened to the
taxi driver I mentioned in the previous section of this arti-
cle. When I last saw him, El Gordo was getting around on
a rusty old Chinese bicycle. He had lost his car, which had
been his primary source of income, had been forced to sell
his furniture and television, and had abandoned his hope of
traveling to the United States because of his nancial prob-
lems. The aggressive magic and sorcery that he had asked
Arca no to perform to get his wife back had turned around
and stuck to him (se le vir o y peg o), instead. In the end,
El Gordo had only managed to ensorcell himself. It would
seem, then, that the spirits of the dead that come to acquire
something of the character of slaves in palo magic and sor-
cery do, indeed, sometimes revolt.
Conclusion
Palo ingeniously reimagines imagery associated with the
historical experience of slavery as a model of spiritual power
in the present. As spirit mediums, mayomberos reawaken
the slave past by channeling the spirits of slaves and ma-
roons and, thus, demonstrate the affective power and prox-
imate alterity of history as a tangible presence in the hu-
man body. As sorcerers, they attempt to incite the slave past
and harness it to specic tasks in the present through forms
of highly stylized ritual mimesis. These two arenas of ritual
praxis demonstrate that palo adepts evoke the slave past
in ways that do not so much foreground memory as they
betray how memory and history interact in the constitu-
tion of implicit knowledge concerning the hidden workings
and circulation of power in the present. Palo is, neverthe-
less, deeply entangled in the global politics of memory as-
sociated with public projects acknowledging the historical
signicance of the transatlantic slave trade and commem-
orating acts of slave resistance. In Cuba, scholarly inter-
ventions and international initiatives such as the UNESCO
Slave Route Project are ltered through revolutionary ideol-
ogy in such a way that state policies enshrining resistance
against capitalist annexation appear magically linked to
and sanctied by forms of slave resistance, however much
their appropriation of ritual imagery associated with palo
may substitute what are essentially presentist claims on the
past for dubious assertions of ethnographic fact. The partic-
ular way in which palo represents the ghost dramatically
diverges from the moralizing tenor and ideological agenda
of such ofcial commemorations of slavery as the Monu-
mento al Cimarr on. Some contemporary adepts appear to
be reimagining the historical origins of this ritual formation
in ways that directly incorporate romantic revolutionary
reications of slave resistance. Thus, the socialist fetishiza-
tion of Afro-Cuban fetishes like the nganga is reincorpo-
rated into local ritual discourse and imagery. Nevertheless,
644
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American Ethnologist
palo remains a powerful ritual idiomthrough which histori-
cal memory of the slave past as well as contemporary social
anxieties concerning social predation and the circulation
of power nd their expression, and it provides the strategic
means by which they are addressed.
Notes
Acknowledgments. I gratefully acknowledge support from the
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program
for ethnographic eld research in Havana, Cuba. While working
on later drafts of the manuscript, I was supported by an Andrew
W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for the Ameri-
cas, Wesleyan University. Special thanks go to David Sutton, Liza
McAlister, Jonathan Hill, John McCall, Ann Wightman, and Claire
Potter for reading and commenting on earlier versions. I am also
grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and editorial staff at AE
for engaging so thoroughly with my work and for offering their
valuable insights and suggestions.
1. The spirit-possession ceremony I describe here took place in
July 2004. My informant, who practiced a branch of the reglas de
congo, or Bantu-derived magicoreligious practices referred to on
the island as palo monte mayombe, explicitly rejected the more
vernacular term palero as a ritual title because, for him, it evoked
the frivolous image of someone who plays with sticks. He, in-
stead, preferred to be called a mayombero, which, for him, con-
veyed the more serious character of his ritual work and more accu-
rately reected the particular branch of palo monte, or the reglas
de congo, that he practiced. Although this informant gave me per-
mission to use his real name, I have chosen to use a pseudonym
so that my contextualization and interpretation of his ritual activ-
ities cannot be confused with any kind of political positioning on
his part.
2. All translations from Spanish are my own unless otherwise
noted. The actual lines in Spanish were:
Lead singer: Me voy, me voy pal monte!
Chorus: Suelta lo perro, mayoral!
Lead singer: No me agarra!
Chorus: Suelta lo perro al cimarr on!
Although these song phrases are not typical of what is referred to as
a puya, the ritually stylized set of verbal abuses meant to incite
the spirits into descending or mounting (possessing) the bod-
ies of their devotees, I was told that they were, indeed, meant as a
provocation. When someone doesnt want to cooperate and ghts
withthe dead to keepthemfromtaking over their body, Arca no ex-
plained, we sing that song to provoke the dead, to call them with
more force. I was unable to nd any documentation of this song
in the published literature on palo monte. During a segment, how-
ever, of Luis A. Soto and Tato Qui noness (1991) documentary lm
Nganga Kiyangala: Congo Religion in Cuba, the song is performed
in Enrique Hern andez Armenteross (Enriquitos) Los Hijos de
San L azaro, a temple house located in La Jata, Guanabacoa. In the
lm, the song also appears to directly provoke possession. The par-
ticipant falls to the ground, facedown, arms tightly pressed against
his torso, and wiggles his way into another room, after which the
door is closed to the camera.
3. This spirit medium actually said, los bozales, los cimar-
rones, not only referring to those African slaves who were just off
the boat, so to speak, that is, those who had only recently arrived on
the island as slaves, but also to those who had managed to escape
the forced labor regime of the plantation by eeing to and hiding
themselves inthe bush (el monte). The word bozal was a derogatory
term used by Spanish slavers to refer to both newly arrived African
slaves and the mangled Spanish they spoke. During the colonial pe-
riod, bozal and criollo (creole, meaning island born) were oppos-
ing terms in an emerging system of racialized social classication.
Whereas the bozales were considered by the ruling class to be un-
civilized brutes, the criollos were described in comparatively civ-
ilizing terms because they spoke more uent Spanish and exhib-
ited some of the social characteristics that would come to dene
the emerging colony. Among those religious devotees with whom
I worked, the spirits of runaway slaves were always described not
only as bozales but also as congos. My informants often collapsed
the terms bozal, cimarr on, and congo to refer to one and the same
thing: a crude (crudo), brutish (bruto) runaway congo slave who
made up for the lack of a civilized demeanor through his or her sta-
tus as the bearer of great magical power.
4. The poetics and politics of memory are not only of general an-
thropological interest (e.g., see Connerton 1989) but also have re-
ceived attention lately by scholars doing research on Africa and the
African diaspora (e.g., see Apter and Derby in press; Bongie 2001;
Brown 1999; Fabre and OMeally 1994; Fields 1994; P erez Sarduy
and Stubbs 2000; Shaw 2002; Trouillot 1997).
5. The Ministerio del Interior (MININT) and other government
departments likely have demographic data on these cult groups,
but so far they have not released such information. Some of the re-
search ndings of the investigators belonging to the Departamento
de Estudios Sociorreligiosos (Department of Socioreligious Studies
[DESR]) are available in the public domain (see Arg uelles Mederos
and Hodge Limonta 1991; Ayorinde 2004).
6. The impetus for the project, according to Doudou Di` ene, di-
rector of the Department of Intercultural Dialogue and Pluralism
for a Culture of Peace (DIDPCP), the UNESCO ofce that super-
vises the project, was the realization that, despite being historys
rst system of globalization (2000:1), slavery continues to be sys-
tematically shrouded in silence and ignorance. As part of its effort
to end the silence surrounding the slave trade, the UNESCO Slave
Route Project launched its Programme on the Memory of Slav-
ery and the Diaspora. This program consists of two major compo-
nents. The rst is a joint effort by UNESCO and the World Tourism
Organization (WTO) to identify, restore and promote sites, build-
ings, and places of memory linked to the slave trade and slavery in
order to develop a tourist trade focused on remembrance and to
promote economic development through tourism (Di ene 2000:4).
The second objective is to set up museums of slavery to educate the
public on the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of Africans
and the peoples of the African diaspora. Supervision, coordina-
tion, and follow-up of the project are overseen by the DIDPCP. The
DIDPCP consists of the 40-member ISC and various national com-
mittees. As of 2000, the ISC had conducted four formal meetings
(Ouidah, Benin, in 1994; Matanzas, Cuba, in 1995; Cabinda, An-
gola, in 1996; and Lisbon, Portugal, in 1998). The project is funded
by UNESCO and various countries, institutions, and individuals
(e.g., Norway and Italy have made signicant contributions to the
project) and has several components, for example, documentation
(preservation of archival documentation, book publishing, compi-
lationof databanks, and thematic research), education(production
of teaching materials and lms), cultural tourism (preparation of
museum exhibits, restoration of slave sites, and establishment of
travel routes that link Europe, the Americas, and West Africa), and
art (support of lmprojects andfestivals like carnival inSantiago de
Cuba).
7. The Cuban National Council of Cultural Patrimony (CNPC)
launched it own local initiative, The Slave Route in Cuba, to
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Volume 35 Number 4 November 2008
coincide with the UNESCO project, to rescue and value the
cultural impact of this heartwrenching, dehumanizing phe-
nomenon that was, nevertheless, an inseparable and indispens-
able nutrient in the forging of nationality. The CNPC is charged
withthe task of realizing the project, whichit has done by devising a
form of inventory in which the classication of sites follows a con-
structive typology made available to all through a database. The
Equipos T ecnicos de Monumentos y los T ecnicos de los Museos
has identied 632 places, including sugar mills, coffee plantations,
cemeteries, mutual-aid societies, fortied runaway-slave settle-
ments (palenques), and temple houses, that have been understud-
ied perhaps because of their inaccessibility (see Acosta Reyes 2001;
Comit e Cubano de La Ruta del Esclavo 2001). The Fernando Or-
tiz Foundation (FOF), headed by Miguel Barnet, who also happens
to be Cubas UNESCO representative, has been the agglutinating
entity that has given this project a national scale. Cuban journals
like Bohemia have published articles about the project since 1994.
A special issue of the FOF journal Catauro dedicated to the slave
route was published in 2001 (see Fundaci on Fernando Ortiz 2001).
In collaboration with the UNESCOSlave Trade Archives Project, the
National Archives of the Republic of Cuba (ARNAC) digitized thou-
sands of documents related to the slave trade and has made them
available on the Internet. For more on Cubas Slave Route Museum
in Matanzas, see Flikke 2006.
8. Lescays Monumento al Cimarr on was a joint project that
brought together the Cuban Ministry of Culture, the local and in-
ternational organizing committees for the UNESCO Slave Route
Project, and the Casa del Caribe research institute in Santiago de
Cuba. The project was nancedby UNESCOandthe provincial gov-
ernment of Santiago de Cuba. Its construction was carried out by
the Fundaci on Caguayo para las Artes Monumentales y Aplicadas
with the help of local copper miners and other residents. Among
those present at the unveiling were Abel Prieto (Cuban minister
of culture), Juan Carlos Robinson Agramonte (rst secretary of the
Provincial Committee of the Cuban Communist Party in Santiago
de Cuba), as well as other government ofcials and party represen-
tatives, UNESCOs Di` ene, Brazilianpoet Thiago de Melo, Lescay, the
Cuban folkloric group Cabildo Cimarr on, local residents, and re-
searchers from the Casa del Caribe, including foreign researchers
afliated with this research institute at the time. I would like to
thank Nilson Acosta Reyes, vice president of monuments of the
National Council of Cultural Patrimony, and Olga Rufns Machin
at the UNESCO Regional Ofce of Latin American and Caribbean
Culture in Cuba for providing information on Lescays monument
and Cubas participation in the UNESCO Slave Route project.
9. I thank Jalane Schmidt for sharing with me her experience of
the unveiling of Lescays Monumento al Cimarr on and for calling
to my attention some of the ways in which this event and others
reveal the multiple layers of meaning embedded within the sacred
landscape of El Cobre (see Schmidt 2005:195191).
10. Adepts of palo monte distinguish between two main types of
nganga by using the terms Christian and Jewish. Thus, a Christian
nganga is one that has been baptized with holy water from a lo-
cal Catholic church and is allegedly used for benevolent ritual pur-
poses. The Jewish nganga, however, are not baptized and are
allegedly used for malevolent work. The term Jewish, then, is only
used to mean non-Christian in this context (see Cabrera 1979:23,
121; see also Ballard 2005).
11. James Figarola (2006:56) was referring to the original
mother nganga of the Vititi Congo Saca Empe no family of
nganga, which was mounted sometime in the middle of the 18th
century in Guanabacoa (see also Larduet 2002:45). Nevertheless,
James Figarola argues that this does not mean that palo monte
as such came into existence in that period and in that location.
He suggests that palo had, in fact, existed in Guanabacoa as a
free and spontaneous practice lacking an established hierarchi-
cal structure since the latter half of the 16th century and that it only
developed into an organized cult in that region of the country when
Reynerio P erez arrived in Santiago de Cuba fromMatanzas with his
nganga Brama con Brama sometime between 1910 and 1912.
12. The nganga is constructed using either a clay pot or tripod
iron cauldron, depending on the particular mpungu with which
it is associated, which is then stuffed with a bewildering array of
vegetable, animal, and human remains; minerals; soil from vari-
ous locations; certain manufactured objects; and other magically
charged substances. The nganga is a master fetish, a composite
magical device that derives its awesome fetish power by incorpo-
rating a litany of lesser magically imbued substances and spirit
entities. Briey, its construction begins with the drawing in the bot-
tom of the pot or cauldron of a cosmogram consisting of two per-
pendicular lines to form quadrants representing the four winds
of the cosmos. At the center and four extremities of this cross are
placed ve coins. A section of sugarcane lled with seawater, sand,
and quicksilver and sealed using candle wax is placed off to one
side. The cadaver of a small dog, a stone (matari), and human re-
mains, usually a cranium and bones from the hands and feet, oc-
cupy the center of the cosmogram. Various types of tightly packed
sticks (palos) are then arranged vertically along the perimeter of
the nganga to form a kind of cordon. A variety of pungent, aro-
matic plant substances (e.g., chiles, black pepper, garlic, onion,
ginger, and cinnamon) are then sprinkled inside. Atop this are
placed different kinds of insects (e.g., termite, spider, and cen-
tipede), the heads of birds (e.g., hummingbird and birds of prey,
such as turkey buzzard and owl), nocturnal ying mammals (bat),
and reptiles (e.g., water snake and chameleon). Soil gathered from
several distinct locations is packed inside the nganga, keeping its
contents xed, and certain manufactured objects, such as knives,
daggers, machetes, shackles or handcuffs, and even pistols, are
sometimes stuck or pressed into the soil. Sometimes the sticks lin-
ing the perimeter are wrapped with cloth or plastic and the exter-
nal surface of the nganga is encircled with a metal chain, proce-
dures that act to further reinforce containment. The nganga is then
buried, rst in a cemetery and then in some undomesticated place
(el monte), where it absorbs the sedimented energies embedded in
the ground of these locations. Finally, the nganga is disinterred and
taken home, where the mayombero performs a set of rites designed
to activate the forces residing inside. The mayombero must then
prove (hacer prueba) the nganga by ordering it to perform some
ritual task that, if completed, serves as conrmation of its magical
efcacy and power (Cabrera 1983:123124).
13. The earliest type of nkisi objects Cabreras (1983:124129) in-
formants remembered, for example, were pieces of cloth or hand-
kerchiefs, known variously as macuto, boumba, s acu-s acu, envolto-
rio, saco, or jolongo, in which were wrapped magically charged
substances and spirit entities. Similar magical substances may
have been used to consecrate stones and human skulls placed in
more permanent structures such as tree trunks and may even have
been ground into special powders that were rubbed into the body
through small incisions (James Figarola 2006:2931). In any case,
given that they were small and easily concealed, it is likely that
the macutos and similar objects were the rst kind of nkisi objects
used by slaves and their descendants in Cuba. What is almost cer-
tain is that the practice of placing such magical substances in the
considerably larger and less-mobile tripod iron cauldrons called
nganga, as is the custom today, was largely the invention of ur-
ban black creoles; it was perhaps meant to compete with the elabo-
rate altar displays of the emerging ochaif a cults (Cabrera 1983:129;
James Figarola 2006:31).
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14. Cubas colonial sugar estates were, as one French visitor to
the island wrote in 1817, theaters of frightening abuse (Cabrera
1979:31). Plantation owners and overseers resorted to various spec-
tacular forms of terror to punishtheir humanproperty, but one that
bears particular resonance with the above narrative is the mutila-
tion and beheading of rebel slaves. As early as 1533, several fugitive
slaves who were caught and taken to Bayamo were executed, quar-
tered, and their heads placed in the public plaza to serve as a lesson
to others (Barnet et al. 2003:66). During the 1844 slave uprising
in Matanzas, a free mulatto accused of conspiracy was mutilated,
his head posted in the most public place of the town of his birth
(Paquette 1988:243). A similar gruesome scene concludes Tom as
Guti errez Aleas (1976) famous lm La

Ultima Cena (The Last Sup-
per). After taking advantage of their ownermasters paternal af-
fection and drunkenness by eeing the estate, runaway slaves are
eventually caught and then decapitated, their rotting heads sitting
atop tall poles stuck in the ground as the lm credits roll. In 1815, a
group of runaway slaves living in the El Frijol settlement in eastern
Cuba used the body of one of their members killed in an attack by a
slave-hunting militia for magicoreligious purposes (La Rosa Corzo
2003:181). During the second attack on the settlement the follow-
ing year, the slave hunters came across a human skull hanging from
a tree; the skull belonged to a maroon named Ram on whose mar-
row and hair were used to make false prophecies (La Rosa Corzo
2003:271).
15. Esteban Montejo mentioned the use of soil by congo slaves
on a sugar plantation in Flor de Sagua during the 1870s. When the
master punisheda slave, Montejo recounted, all the others picked
up a little dirt and put it in the pot [nganga]. With that dirt they
were able to bring about what they wanted. And the master fell ill
or some harm came to his family because while the dirt was in the
pot, the master was a prisoner inthere, and not eventhe devil could
get him out. That was the Congo peoples revenge on the master
(Barnet 1994:2728).
16. The threat of having ones spirit dogs caught by another
sorcerer is further elaboratedby the use of magical devices that may
have their roots in the historical experience associated with mar-
ronage. Arca nos spies, for example, include two railroad spikes
containing nfumbi that anchor a small chain on his doorstep. Be-
fore the performance of all major rituals, Arca no stuffs corn husks
with various powders and nfumbi, ties them, and strategically
places them on the street corners around the house. These magi-
cally charged railroad spikes and corn husks warn the mayombero
of enemy movement. After the waves of government repression be-
gan during the early republican period, these mystical spies also
became indispensable in protecting mayomberos from police ha-
rassment, warning them of the movement and proximity of law-
enforcement ofcers (see Bettelheim 2001).
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accepted March 20, 2008
nal version submitted March 11, 2008
Kenneth Routon
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Center for the Americas
Wesleyan University
255 High St.
Middletown, CT 06459
krouton@wesleyan.edu
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Christopher Newport University
Newport News, VA 23606
649