Governing Man-Gods: Spiritism and the Struggle for Progress in Republican Cuba

Abstract

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.

Hazardous waste: the semiotics of ritual hygiene in Cuban popular religion

“…They undertook great efforts to whiten the population, physically through immigration and culturally through advocating the eradication of black cultural expressions (and violently oppressing Afro‐Cubans who did organize politically – see Helg 1995; Palmié 2002). Organs of state, from public health officials to police to folklorists, applied metaphors of contagion borrowed from the new fields of epidemiology and public hygiene in order to justify criminalizing ‘Afro‐Cuban’ religious practices, even under a constitution guaranteeing freedom of religious expression (see, e.g., Ayorinde 2004; Ortiz 1995 [1906]; Román 2007 a ). For example, in his first book, Cuba's founding father of folklore, Fernando Ortiz, wrote that the occult and superstitious practices of black Cubans were a sign of their evolutionary degeneracy and lack of progress into modernity, and he worried that black ‘atavisms’ were spreading to the lower social classes of white Cubans as well.…”