Document Type
Dissertation
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Major/Program
History
First Advisor's Name
Sherry Johnson
First Advisor's Committee Title
Committee Chair
Second Advisor's Name
Leslie Northup
Third Advisor's Name
María del Mar Logroño
Fourth Advisor's Name
Noble David Cook
Keywords
Lucumi religion, Yoruba religion, Afro-Cuban religion, Fernando Ortiz, Cuba and De-Africanization, Cuba, Afro-Cuba, Orisha religion, Santeria, Congo peoples in Cuba, Carabali peoples in Cuba, Lucumi peoples in Cuba, Abakuá society, Ñañigos, Anti-witchcraft campaigns Cuba
Date of Defense
11-1-2013
Abstract
The status, roles, and interactions of three dominant African ethnic groups and their descendants in Cuba significantly influenced the island’s cubanidad (national identity): the Lucumís (Yoruba), the Congos (Bantú speakers from Central West Africa), and the Carabalís (from the region of Calabar). These three groups, enslaved on the island, coexisted, each group confronting obstacles that threatened their way of life and cultural identities. Through covert resistance, cultural appropriation, and accommodation, all three, but especially the Lucumís, laid deep roots in the nineteenth century that came to fruition in the twentieth.
During the early 1900s, Cuba confronted numerous pressures, internal and external. Under the pretense of a quest for national identity and modernity, Afro-Cubans and African cultures and religion came under political, social, and intellectual attack. Race was an undeniable element in these conflicts. While all three groups were oppressed equally, only the Lucumís fought back, contesting accusations of backwardness, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and brujería (witchcraft), exaggerated by the sensationalistic media, often with the police’s and legal system’s complicity. Unlike the covert character of earlier epochs’ responses to oppression, in the twentieth century Lucumí resistance was overt and outspoken, publically refuting the accusations levied against African religions.
Although these struggles had unintended consequences for the Lucumís, they gave birth to cubanidad’s African component. With the help of Fernando Ortiz, the Lucumí were situated at the pinnacle of a hierarchical pyramid, stratifying African religious complexes based on civilizational advancement, but at a costly price. Social ascent denigrated Lucumí religion to the status of folklore, depriving it of its status as a bona fide religious complex. To the present, Lucumí religious descendants, in Cuba and, after 1959, in many other areas of the world, are still contesting this contradiction in terms: an elevated downgrade.
Identifier
FI13120402
Recommended Citation
Ramos, Miguel, "Lucumí (Yoruba) Culture in Cuba: A Reevaluation (1830S -1940s)" (2013). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 966.
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/966
Included in
African History Commons, Cultural History Commons, History of Religion Commons, Latin American History Commons, Oral History Commons, Other Religion Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons
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