Baba Who? Babalú!

Almost every time I have visited the Church of San Lázaro in Rincón around his feast day, I have encountered the same thin, reserved woman. After greeting her many times and leaving alms on her humble altar in front of the church, I finally sat down next to her and struck up a conversation. Iris Hernández-Salazar has been a devotee of San Lázaro since she became seriously ill at age seven. Her mother had made ocha while pregnant with Iris, so there was always a special bond between Iris and the orichas. When she became ill, her father made a promise to San Lázaro: if the Old Man would cure Iris, her father would acquire a statue of the saint and place in the family’s living room in Rincón. Well, it worked, and Iris grew up with the statue in the house. “I speak to him as if he were a person. He gives me much peace, tranquility, and much love. He even responds to me. I feel him within me. But I have never made another promise. San Lázaro is very great.” In a tradition of i...

Last year I focused on the more public aspects of Cuban veneration for Babalú-Ayé at this time of year, writing about the spectacular festival celebrated at Rincón , but this year I want to draw attention to the more localized, more particular manifestations of that devotion. At the house of Armando Zulueta --Omí Toké, they are already preparing. They are planning a trip to the cemetery to cool the graves of Armando and his godmother Octavia--Jundesi. They are organzing the Lucumí and Arará drummers they need to play at the house. They are certainly worrying about how they will feed the hundred or more people who will enter the house. They are looking for an old goat to give to the Old Man and they are looking for a large pig to give to Nanú. They are buying dry white wine and rum, and they are toasting dried corn. The money they have in hand determines much of what is possible, but they do continue honor Babalú-Ayé with an elaborate set of ceremonies. Later this week, I will des...

On the way to Rincón, pilgrims move along the road in the dark. Often you cannot see them, but the sounds they make are unforgettable, if hard to describe. People drag themselves across the asphalt, scraping their clothes and their flesh against the hard pavement as they lurch forward. The huge effort of dragging their own dead weight makes them pant or gasp when they rest. Bleeding from open wounds on their hands and legs, they sometimes moan as they push on. The groaning in the darkness makes your skin crawl. The mute and private quality of this pain is hard to escape. The body suffers mutely or at least without words, as author Elaine Scary has pointed out in her book, Bodies in Pain . Because pain is an internal experience, it is impossible to make reference to shared or objective features. Words for this pain or the suffering of illness are hard to find, but not impossible. People do talk about what is happening to them, if only in short sentences: “It hurts.” “My knees are b...

Often parents will make the most extreme promises when their children are sick and they need a miracle. It is not uncommon to see an adult moving along the ground accompanied by a child, who is also acting out her devotion: parents promise to go to Rincón on their backs, dragging themselves, or crawling, and they promise to take their children with them if they survive. They go to pay their debt to the spirit who has delivered them. Within the Afro-Cuban world, all things have their origins in the spiritual and historical precedents laid out in the odu, the divination signs that contain proverbs, formulaic advice, prescribed ceremonies, specific offerings, allegorical folktales, and myths. The idea of the promise was "born" in the odu Oché-Odí. It says, "El que paga su deunda queda franco--the one who pays his debt is free." The odu also includes a story that details how devotion can change the attitude of the gods: in the land of Otá, Oyá was the que...

Tonight pilgrims are flooding the streets of Rincón. Some have flown into Havana from overseas and traveled the 39 kilometers to the little town. Some have walked from their homes in Santiago, and some have walked from Bejucal, the next town over. The police close the main road to cars around dusk, and so walking is the best way to arrive. But the walking is so central to the enterprise that no one calls it a pilgrimage. Rather they call it the "caminata," roughly the special walk. It is important to notice that all the popular images of San Lázaro show him walking on his crutches on a road that leads toward a distant tower. All the stories about Babalú-Ayé also include his walking long distances. In the end most everyone in Rincón will walk to the church. Some people promise to push a "carretilla," a little cart. Like the modest altar for alms, these improvised and portable points of praise ususally include a statue of San Lázaro. Often he wears a cloak ma...

Here is an example of a humble altar for alms set up at the Church of San Lázaro. The base is sackcloth, the preferred fabric of penitents in general and Babalú in particular. On it sit four similar statues of San Lázaro, each with companion dogs, purple loin cloth, and crutches. This altar also includes an image of Nuestra Señora de la Caridad, Our Lady of Charity, the patron saint of Cuba. Common offerings to San Lázaro include flowers and cigars. There are candles to light the way. These altars line the sidewalk all the way up to the entrance of the church, and other pilgrims drop coins at each one as they pass by.

Already people have begun to arrive in Rincón and sit outside the Church of San Lázaro. They come, they create simple altars with candles, an image of the saint, and a candle, and they wait for people to leave them with alms. Juan Carlos was one such character I met in 2002. This is the story he told me: In 2000, he had gotten very drunk. When the police were called, he got into a "bronca" with them--this word deserves its own book, but it can be translated roughly as a brawl. In the process, he punched a policeman in the face. While this is not a good thing to do anywhere, it is really short-sighted in Cuba. He was arrested and sentenced to fifteen years in jail. Juan Carlos became a resident of a prison ironically called "Innocence." The terrible food and hard labor were taking their toll on him, as you can see. He had bribed the warden 100 pesos to give him a pass for three days, and he spent the entire time seated in front of the church, waiting for al...

Every year on December 16th, thousands of people descend on the town of Rincón to wait for San Lázaro at his namesake church. Fidel never cracked down hard on the San Lázaro festival, and like so many other strange anomalies of the Cuban Revolution, no one really knows why. Called miraculous, mysterious, and good, San Lázaro is known for healing the sick and rewarding the humble. Every year on December 16th, thousands of people travel past the AIDS sanitarium Fidel built to the little church in Rincón, where the leprosarium has sat since 1923. In the maddening crowd—the matazón, some go by horse cart, some walk, some have push-cart altars for San Lázaro. Some go on their knees, and a few extremists drag themselves. All of them seek transcendence of some kind—or at least a break in the monotony of life under the Revolution. Everywhere people display the image of the saint on estampillas, prayer cards, posters, and statues. Everywhere people are imitating the saint in one way or anot...