This article discusses the recent historiography of religion from the traditional field of church history. The emphasis shifts from the institutional and official to the quotidian and informal. The stress on popular religiosity comes across in the debate over syncretism discussed in the first section of the article. Did Catholicism absorb African and indigenous beliefs, in practice if not theologically, to form a sort of Latin American spiritual stew, as the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz once put it? Did this synthesis become more Christian with time? Did non-European belief systems survive relatively unadulterated, particularly in the understanding of the divine rather than form, as some revisionists proposed? Popular religiosity also occupies a central position in the historical debate about secularism, the nature of millenarianism, and the spread of Protestantism during the national period.

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Th is article explores the contrasting careers of two Spiritist healers, one Spanish-born and the other Afro-Cuban. It suggests that the prosecution of the black man-god (Hilario Mustelier) and the public celebration of the ministry of the Spaniard (Juan Manso) attest to the consolidation of a political rationality burgeoning in Cuba at the turn of the twentieth century. Under this regime, government officials and journalists sought to alter the conditions that gave rise to 'fanaticism' to promote the modernization of the nascent republic. Following a discussion of the notions of race and culture underpinning Cuban discourses of progress, the article offers a critique of the scholarly literature dealing with Afro-Cuban religions and syncretism.

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