Afro-Cuban Religious Experience: Cultural Reflections In Narrative

"An important contribution to the field of Afro-Cuban beliefs and its impact on contemporary Cuban literature."--Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Thomas B. Walton, Jr. Memorial Professor, Amherst College African-based religion plays a prominent role in the Cuban imagination and national identity. In this semiotic, postmodern, and interdisciplinary study, Eugenio Matibag reveals the ways in which 20th-century literary texts unlock the mysteries of Afro-Cuban belief systems. During the colonial period, the West Africans who were transported to Cuba and forced into slavery reinvented their African religions. They combined them with Catholicism to create a distinctive Afro-Cuban religious culture, one that offered a basis for collective identity and an avenue of psychic resistance to oppression. Using a vast number of texts that include stories and myths as well as manuals and guidebooks on belief and practice, Eugenio Matibag surveys the rituals, doctrines, and cultural origins of four major Afro-Cuban religious traditions--Santeria, Naniguismo, Palo Monte, and Vaudou. The list of Afro-Cubanist authors that he studies reads like a modern Who's Who of Cuban letters and includes Fernando Ortiz, Alejo Carpentier, Lydia Cabrera, Dora Alonso, Miguel Barnet, and Manuel Cofino, all writers who incorporate elements of religious ritual, myth, or doctrine into their writings. Matibag's analysis of their literary texts examines both social perspectives on religion and religion's life-affirming, often subversive role in society. Quoting an Afro-Cuban proverb that reflects this opposition, he writes, "Una cosa piensa el caballo y otra el que lo ensilla"--the horse thinks one thing and he who saddles him, another. Eugenio Matibag is associate professor of Spanish at Iowa State University. He has published articles in Hispamerica, Journal of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Journal of Caribbean Studies, Revista Hispanica Moderna, and Postmodern Culture.