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...

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...

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...