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...

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...