Jorge’s Predicament: Bringing Glory to the Ancestors
For more than six years, Jorge has been doing a roaring trade in selling human bones he has pilfered from various cemeteries across Havana. According to him, his best sellers are the complete skulls and femurs of Chinese males. When he can acquire them, they net him approximately US$20 apiece, about the equivalent of a month’s wages for a Cuban government worker. “They are becoming harder to get. Sometimes I find them with hair still attached, which gets me a bit more money…every brujo [wizard] wants un muerto chino [a Chinese spirit]. Why? They work so hard and there is nothing they aren’t willing to do. If you really want to mess someone up, send un chino after them. When they came to Cuba to cut cane, they used the mocha [machete] to kill their superiors and even themselves if they lost face. Imagine a machete at the neck! Brutal. I am saying
‘they’, but I really should say ‘we’ as I am part Chinese”.
Jorge’s paternal grandfather had migrated from Guangdong in 1902 and had married an Afro-Cuban woman whose parents were brought to the island as slaves. Jorge comes from a line of paleros, practitioners of Bakongo religion, and he had also been initiated as a priest of the Lukumi orisha, Shangó. In his house in Guanabacoa, which he shares with his wife and three children, he maintains a shrine for an inherited Sanfancón, the Chinese-Cuban god of war, whose statue stands sentry to the large wooden bowl that contains the consecrated emblems – stones, celts, wooden axes, and cowries – of his Shangó. On his roof, in a small metal shed, Jorge keeps his prenda de palo, Coyumbe, and in yet another part of the house is a box, tightly wrapped like a parcel in white cloth
and tied with a thin rope to which is attached a waxed paper seal with elaborate Chinese writing on it. These are the remains of his paternal grandfather’s bones that were legally disinterred from one of the main cemeteries that otherwise act as Jorge’s warehouse for his “merchandise”. His Chinese abuelo [grandfather] had left money and detailed
instructions for his remains to be returned to the southern Chinese village of his birth, his grandfather’s desired final resting place. That was his dying wish, and by completing it, Jorge would be complying with the Chinese filial goal of “bringing glory to the
ancestors”.
Jorge is waiting for the papers to be issued from the Chinese association in Havana’s Chinatown to advise him of an opening when the next round of Chinese remains will be repatriated, which he estimates may happen in the next year or so.
Apparently, there is a considerable waiting list, with dozens of Chinese-Cuban families safeguarding such packages in their homes; eager to send their ancestors’ remains to a homeland otherwise inaccessible to many of the living generation. In the meantime, his grandfather is safe in Jorge’s house. Jorge is adamant that his grandfather’s bones will not end up in the possession of a palero or santero where human remains are sometimes used for ritual purposes. No matter how bad things may be or get living in Cuba, such a fate is unthinkable to Jorge, and it would be the height of disrespect. I could tell he was offended that I would even ask about such a thing and I regretted it instantly.
Jorge is well aware of the paradox he lives by: being part Chinese and selling Chinese bones that will be used in a religion he also practices. The religious use of these Chinese remains is antithetical to the expressed wishes of Chinese who had migrated as laborers and who probably imagined would spend their last years in China rather than
dying in Cuba. Jorge’s words belie a great deal of emotion when expressing what he feels he must do to survive, to care for his family, and also to do right by his Chinese ancestors and heritage. Jorge adroitly explains that living in Cuba is the ultimate paradox, where each action must be weighed against its own consequences and that these are the “things of life”.
This is why Jorge prefers to sell his bones to foreigners, not only because the
“yumas”, as he refers to them, pay more money for the quarry but also because it allays the ambivalence of his own positionality, as the trade could easily be regarded as the selling of his ancestors; his family. Jorge refers not only to Americans, when he speaks of las yumas – its original definition – but to all foreigners that come to the island in ever growing numbers for the specific purpose of seeking Afro-Cuban religion, an unpredicted yet lucrative business for many in Cuba. “I feel a bit better when I sell one to a yuma, that way I know these spirits get to leave this island, something they could not do when they were alive.” Jorge explains that the craniums and femurs are often used in prendas, Kongo-derived magico-medicinal assemblages that are spiritually reanimated for work by the spirit of the deceased. The spirit does the work on the behalf of the palero, whether it is for healing or harming. It is a form of indenture in the afterlife, and the antithesis of resting in peace. Bones are also ground up and used in inshe or “works” relating to some Lukumi orisha and rituals that are connected with the mysteries of death and dying, and the full range of Afro-Cuban religious uses means that fresh supplies of bones are always in demand.
Jorge has witnessed a steady rise in his business from such foreign-derived trade, and they are playing an increasingly important economic role since the Soviet collapse
and Cuba’s growing reliance on tourist dollars, euros and pounds. Jorge’s actions belie what many Cubans call a doble cara, expressing the ability, and necessity to have “two faces”, or seemingly contradictory stances or beliefs. The need to profess conflicting standpoints depending on the situation and audience has developed in earnest following the incredibly difficult and austere decade of the 1990s, still very much at the forefront of Cuban minds and continues to inflect strategies for day-to-day survival. Jorge’s
precarious positionality with regard to Chinese identity, his religious practices, the need for economic survival, and morality all weigh heavily on his mind and heart, and he expresses this in terms of being in the fight, “estamos en la lucha”. Jorge’s startling narrative and its associated clandestine bone trade speaks of a Cuban religious setting in which Chinese people, or at least ideas of being Chinese have a unique, subtle, yet
integral presence; “el chino no descansa” Jorge explains with a harried sigh, “the Chinese man does not rest.”
The current state of affairs in Cuba is indicative of a complex story of cultural and religious syncretism (a concept that is defined in depth in Chapter III) that sets various standards and imaginaries for diasporas in Cuba and their related ethnic and cultural intersections. These ideas have met and melded into a landscape; both real and
metaphorical and are comprised of contrasts and selective Orientalist-inspired imports.
People and their objects circulate, collide, and adapt to produce new iterations of existing experiences and practices. I examine in the present research how massive inflows of Chinese from indenture and later, as waves of free migration, led to prolonged and intimate contact with Afro-Cuban people, culminating in rich intertwined concepts of religious practices.
I became invested in the topic after observing first hand, a startling and
spectacular array of imagery of Chinese gods, symbols, narratives, implements, practices, and foods in the unlikeliest of settings: Afro-Cuban orisha shrines, their rituals, and celebrations. I first travelled to Cuba in 2005, having completed a Masters dissertation on Afro-diasporic religious communities in Europe at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. I was eager to see for myself the living, tropical crucible that has seemingly generated and sustained a global florescence of orisha practitioners. Cuba was envisioned as the spiritual birthplace of countless Lukumi practitioners in Europe and North America, even though many of the practitioners I had met had never visited said island, nor had any plans to do so. What struck me the most in Cuba was encountering many Lukumi priests that could easily have been my close biological relatives. These priests were phenotypically (or stereotypically) Chinese/Asian looking, and occupying prestigious and vociferous positions within their religious
communities and fields of praxis. While there are Cuban-born olorisha (orisha priests) of every perceivable ethnicity and phenotype, there is a sizable and prominent corps of olorisha, babalawo, Abakuá, paleros, and espiritistas that take immense pride in their Chinese heritage. Perhaps admixture is to be expected in religious traditions in diaspora, yet it was glaringly absent from their attendant literatures.
On a practical note, to prepare myself for this study, I completed several years of Spanish language training prior to fieldwork to have the ability to converse freely with my interlocutors without the need of a translator. The travels to Cuba I had made before commencing fieldwork proper helped to acclimatize my ear to the rigors of “Cuban”
Spanish and the religious settings in which I would conduct my research. Both the
language and ritual practices encountered contained vernaculars, which could not be pre-emptively prepared for or readily taught outside of the country. My early exposure to these settings eased my entrance into the lives and practices of Chinese-Cuban orisha worshippers.
Research Objectives
I set the stage for the present study by first examining existing literature for instances of the Chinese in Cuba and their particular and peculiar histories from indenture to the present day. I attend to the intersections of transnationalism, diasporic experience, and culture contact that have produced new religious expressions and by providing ethnographic examples and lived experiences, I explore what can be called Afro-Chinese religiosity in Cuba. Central to the research enterprise is the requirement that I reframe the existing conceptualizations of a slippery and elusive theory – syncretism – upon which much of the material here follows. I do this ethnographically, offering evidence and consequently developing a conceptual framework that illuminates not simply the products but also the processes of religious synthesis and how such syncretism occurs
inter-diasporically, between two ethnic groups, such as the Chinese and African experiences related here. My proposed framework is a stark departure from previous theorizing that has explored religious syncretism in terms of disjointed and imbalanced power relations, i.e., the abstract, dominant and imposing Catholic Church and the marginalized, new world practices of African “primitive” and Chinese “folk” religions. The plundering of graves in Cuba belies a complex juncture of race, religion and identities that occurs in Cuba. The vignette above hinges on the imagined “power” of what constitutes the
Chinese: not just in Afro-Cuban religiosity, but also in Cuba at large. The idea of the Chinese feature heavily in economies of religion, in mainstream ascriptions and adoptions of meaning, as well as their subjectivities within both national and transnational milieux.
My dissertation expands current scholarly discourse by examining how Chinese and Lukumi religious practices (see glossary of terms, Appendix I) have converged to shape new diasporic religious phenomena on the island. I investigate how a seemingly ambiguous and amorphous group of males from China came to have a massive and wide-ranging impact on Afro-Cuban religion that has, thus far, eluded academic examination.
My ethnographic research explores contact and lived experiences of Chinese and black descendants in Cuba, an occurrence that forever changed the social and cultural horizons of the country, which is echoed in their constitutive diasporas. Over the course of
different waves of migrations and their popular sentiments of their presence historically vacillating between tolerance and exclusion, the Chinese have been viewed as transitory guests or temporary residents that were required for work but not desired for
immigration.
The machinations of indenture or contractual labor set these Chinese inflows apart from any other ethnic or social group present in Cuba, and their propensity to stay (or inability to leave), to settle and marry non-Chinese was an unwelcome surprise to the colonial regime. Both Spanish and later, Cuban political action, targeted anti-Chinese strictures and legislation that sought to thwart their imagined amoral and regressive cultural influence on the nation state’s identity making processes.
These works were the baseline upon which ethnic labels became increasingly reified, sidestepping the issue of creolization and hybrid turns in ethnogenesis. Cuban culture and religiosity are produced and reproduced in transcultural models by the popular macro-level trope of the ajiaco, the Caribbean equivalent of a racial melting pot.
Perhaps another, more apt culinary-derived example would be to account for and explore each component of a mise en place, and follow the trajectory of events of each ingredient and their relevant combinations. Good ethnographic study, much like haute cuisine, insists on full use of and explicit reference to provenance, timing, skill and training.
The starting point for my work has been based on the observation that the lives of Chinese and their descendants in Cuba have largely been ignored in important
discussions of the Caribbean. The place and influence of the Chinese in Afro-Cuban religion is virtually unknown and undocumented. What spaces do the Chinese occupy in discourses of “African diasporic religion?” Not many, if the investigator is solely
oriented to the schism of subjugated African influences juxtaposed to European penetration and dominance. Important discussions relating to situating the Chinese are erased as a result, and by recognizing the limits of skewed African diasporic discourse, a space is made for reconsidering all constitutive ethnic elements in religious production.
Indeed, such a procedure calls for a refocus, starting with the admission that African cultural heritage, in a new setting, has to be defined in less concrete and reified terms than those previously adopted in nineteenth and twentieth century Afro-Atlantic acculturating paradigms. My approach centers interdiasporic strategies of reconciling distinct religious practices and I reevaluate these activities of religion making, restituting such actors from their marginalized positionality. I focus on interdiasporic intersections
to illuminate better the underlying consistencies and internal cultural dynamism (Mintz and Price 1992, 10).
What sets this study apart from a general headcount of the various identifications of practitioners and Cuban religious compositions, is its focus on the degree to which the Chinese are present and active, in terms of the priesthood, in material
culture/iconography, institutions, and emic narratives in the instance of Afro-diasporic religion. Similarly, the literature and related language that deals with African presence in Cuba have been carefully codified as part of a selective, transcultural process, a scholarly enterprise initiated by a handful of academics that expertly treated black presence and experience as a homogenous entity within their conceptual models of achievement and integration. Existing studies have maintained an “Africanizing” religious paradigm in the Caribbean and Latin America that is premised on a discourse of “Africa” that was
invented and incorporated in the European, colonial project (Yelvington 2001). The dominant view of diasporic religions in the Americas presupposes a linear past of amorphous cultural traits and knowledge that combined in a wholesale fashion with co-existing cultures to produce a vague cultural mass, described perfectly in transculturating terms as a stew or casserole. The pressing need for a sharper lens of cultural and religious understanding explores the idea of cooking religious history (Palmié 2013).
There are many official and officious discourses that circulate about Cuba, its people and diaspora[s]. In the case of the 125,000 plus Chinese that first arrived as indentures to the island and later as free migrants, is a sudden and significant addition to any country, and especially so in Cuba given its extant demographics and geography. The Chinese of Cuba and their descendants have gained very little academic attention in the
166 years they have been present, and their greater impact and influence has been largely ignored. The existence/presence of the Chinese in Cuba has often been reduced to little more than a footnote, or an inclusion in the odd statistic, with little in the way of
explanation or theoretical and cultural understanding. Notable exceptions are the recent work by Kathleen López (2005; 2008; 2009 and 2013) Evelyn Hu-DeHart (1992; 1994;
2004 and 2010) and Lisa Yun (2004 and 2008) in English, as well as Antonio Chuffat Latour (1927), Juan Pérez de la Riva (1967 and 2000), and José Baltar Rodríguez (1997) in Spanish. My work is synergistic to the rare few published works invoked here, and it is the first to focus specifically on Afro-Chinese diasporic religiosity. What the Chinese contributed to Cuban culture, how they made their lives, how their identities have been forged and assigned, all operate within a discourse that vacillates between two poles. One pole evokes romanticized, ahistorical notions of an orientalist, atavistic fantasy of opiates, martial arts, and sensual pleasure, and – at the other extreme – as predisposed to
submission and humility (Yun 2004).
My work draws focus on Chinese and African syncretisms, a dialog that has been overshadowed in favor of European and Christian cultural contacts. In so doing I break from the tendency to explore Afro-diasporic religiosity solely in terms of Africa and a tireless search for “imported” or “retained” religious practices and knowledge and instead I attend to the interactions of Chinese and African derived diasporas in Cuba, which have been thus far treated as separate and isolated. I assert that such an approach offers a better understanding of diasporic religious interaction and I offer a departure from measures and descriptions of Afro-diasporic religiosity within discourses that places Europe and
Christianity – through their religious affiliation – as responsible for their elicitation and existence.
How could it be that Afro-Cuban religiosity, that has such a highly visible and lauded Chinese presence and influence at its core, is resolutely ignored in the literature?
Perhaps the reason for this invisibility lies within the theoretical limits of the reigning epistemological lenses used to examine the Caribbean and Latin America, their cultures and religious practices. Academia and its assembled scribes are not immune to
inadvertently flawed or un-critiqued ways of understanding, especially in marginalized and relatively new avenues of research concerning this present study.
I opened this chapter with the story of the plundering of Chinese bones for use in Afro-Cuban ritual that reveal intricate connections between African and Chinese
diasporas, sometimes united in the same body. The story underscores first the need for greater understanding of the ways in which the Cuban-Chinese and Afro-Cubans are represented, their unions and strategies for living in Cuba that both defines and obviates discourse on race and interconnections. Perhaps the idea of the Chinese as having malefic powers is not just a skin-deep association, but also one that uncovers deep-rooted fear of
diasporas, sometimes united in the same body. The story underscores first the need for greater understanding of the ways in which the Cuban-Chinese and Afro-Cubans are represented, their unions and strategies for living in Cuba that both defines and obviates discourse on race and interconnections. Perhaps the idea of the Chinese as having malefic powers is not just a skin-deep association, but also one that uncovers deep-rooted fear of