Cuban Santeria and Tourism

1. Cuban Santeria and Tourism • By: Berta Gonzalez

2. Introduction • I will explore and present some of the ways in which Santeria was marketed to tourists by the Cuban and American governments, both before and after the Revolution. • The marketing strategies used since Cuba’s tourism boom in the early 20th century further marginalized the practitioners of Santeria, which were predominantly Afro-Cubans. • The relationship between Santeria and Rumba, and how Rumba was highly commercialized and mass-produced. • Santeria’s contrast with Voodoo, which was portrayed as representative of the national culture; Santeria was strictly limited to the lower classes and only marketed by the governments of Cuba and the US for economic profits.

3. Quick Facts: Santeria 101 • Religion that combines Roman Catholicism with West African Yoruba religious beliefs. • Also called Regla de Ocha • One God known as Olorun or Olodumare (owner of Heaven). • Eight main deities, or Orishas: Shango, Eleggua, Ogun, Oshosi, Obatala, Oya, Oshun, Yemaya, and Shango. • The Orishas serve as the intermediaries between humans and God. • Practitioners of Santeria perform rituals, ceremonies, and prayers in order to gain or maintain their Ache. • Orishas grant practitioners Ache, the beautiful, mystical, divine energy of life that comes from Olorun, or God.

4. Santeria’s Arrival in Cuba: • The slave trade forced many Yoruba people to work on sugar plantations in Cuba. • Slaves of Yoruba origin called “Lucumi” in Cuba • Slaves were forced to convert to Catholicism, but most still practiced their traditional religion clandestinely • The Lucumi people saw many parallels between Yoruba religious practices and Roman Catholicism, often comparing their deities with Catholic saints. • Mostly an oral tradition • At times compared with Haitian Voodoo or Brazilian Candomble (Gonzalez)

5. Marginalization of Practioners • Santeria, as well as Rumba, is “associated with blackness; it is often portrayed as a particularly potent symbol of the masses and working-class identity...” (Bodenheimer) • Rumba was a popular dance form that emerged in Cuba between the 1920s and 1950s which was “distinctly African and dismissed contemptuously by the Cuban middle class” (Perez, 199). • Rumba “conjured up exactly what many North Americans traveled to Cuba for...the quintessential representation of the primitive, the exotic, and the erotic” (Perez, 201). • Rumba was a manifestation of Afro-Cuban culture and was inspired out of the same dances that were used in Santeria. • Practitioners of Santeria were marginalized before and after the Revolution, both socially and politically. • “Historically, colonial and government ‘spies’ used cameras to document, monitor, and criminalize Afro-Cuban communities” (Beliso-De Jesus) • “In the early decades of the Revolution, police often broke up rumba parties and Afro-Cuban religious ceremonies in private homes...” (Bodenheimer). • “Until the early 1990s Afro-Cuban religious practices were heavily marginalized within the context of an official policy of “scientific atheism...” (Bodenheimer) • Santeria is an example of how those who were oppressed resisted against all hierarchies

6. Santeria and Tourism: • Santeria became a tourist attraction in Cuba before the Revolution, although it flourished mostly after the Revolution (1959). • The Cuban government advertises Santeria-related attractions in brochures and packages, referred to as Ochatur or Santurismo (Ocha Tour/ Santeria Tourism) (Hagedorn) • “Hagedorn highlights the irony entailed in a Marxist government’s sponsoring of religious initiations now that Santería has become a tourist attraction and source of income, a seemingly contradictory move by a state that regularly harassed and imprisoned Afro-Cuban religious practitioners in the 1970s and 1980s...” (Bodenheimer) • “...while Afro-Cuban culture, music, and religion almost single-handedly nourish the cultural tourism industry, black Cubans—many of whom are the religious and musical practitioners themselves—have seen the least economic gains from the influx of tourist dollars...” (Bodenheimer).

7. Santeria and Tourism: • Many travel to Cuba to become initiated into the religion. The price of a priesthood initiation in the US can be $20,000, while in Cuba it is about $2,000 (Beliso de Jesus) • Many of the Santeria-related tourist attractions in Cuba hire locals whose “appearance matches the representations that foreign tourists have of what is ‘Afro-Cuban’ ” (Argyriadis) • “‘They have sought to make the country appear more ‘European’ [by hiring primarily light-skinned Cubans within the tourist industry] and at the same time utilize Afro-Cuban culture as an exotic allure” (Bodenheimer) • Taking tourists to the main sites of Afro-Cuban culture oftentimes leads into “illegal propositions,” such as tourists purchasing cigars, drugs, and sex services (Beliso de Jesus)

8. Sample Advertisements/ Representations

9. Sample Advertisements/ Representations

10. Sample Advertisements/ Representations

11. Works Cited: • Araujo, Ana Lucia. "Welcome the Diaspora: Slave Trade Heritage Tourism and the Public Memory of Slavery." Ethnologies 32.2 (2010): 145-78. • Argyriadis, Kali. "Speculators and Santuristas: The Development of Afro-Cuban Cultural Tourism and the Accusation of Religious Commercialism." Tourist Studies 8.2 (2008): 249-65. • Beliso de Jesus, Aisha. "Religious Cosmopolitanisms: Media, Transnational Santería, and Travel between the United States and Cuba." American Ethnologist 40.4 (2013): 704-20.: • Bodenheimer, Rebecca M. "National Symbol Or "a Black Thing"?: Rumba and Racial Politics in Cuba in the Era of Cultural Tourism." Black Music Research Journal 33.2 (2013): 177-205. • Gonzalez, M. "Cuba's Lost History." Policy Review.165 (2011): 55-67.: • Hagedorn, Katherine J. Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santería. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. • Pérez, Louis A. On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality and Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.