Electric Santería: Despedidas

Electric Santería RACIAL AND SEXUAL ASSEMBLAGES O F T R A N S N AT I O N A L R E L I G I O N

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús

Preface Despedidas

Alfredo Calvo Cano was born and died in Matanzas, Cuba. A life-long practitioner of several African-inspired Cuban religions, Alfredo bore many titles.1 He was olú batá, owner of the sacred batá drums; tata mayombero, a palo-congo elder; iyamba, a leader in an abakuá men’s religious society; obá oriaté, a consecrator of Santería, and high priest of the oricha (deity) Aganyú. He was the head of a complex “house of saints” (casa de santo) that practiced multiple Afro-Cuban religions. Although he never left the island, he traveled more than anyone I knew. Playing Afro-Cuban drums from town to town, he was an itinerant godfather, caring for children in different cities, and with godchildren (ahijados) who came from across the world for his religious expertise. While his carnet de identidad (Cuban identity card) listed April 24, 1930, as his date of birth, others disputed this, claiming that he had “taken five years off ” when he registered himself. As if traveling through time as well as territory, for all the years I knew him, he was always “seventy-six.” After four years in which he failed to advance to seven-seven, I teased him that if “seventy-six” was young, then he must really be old. Alfredo, eyes twinkling, pursed his lips in a smile that wrinkled his aged but smooth dark brown skin and chuckled at his own unknowable age. When I learned that Alfredo, a man legendary for his strength and good health, was gravely ill, I was shocked. Those who knew and loved him had planned to be in Cuba for his priesthood initiation day xi

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(cumpleaños de santo) celebration. Unfortunately, I, like several of his godchildren from Mexico and the United States, arrived too late. At the end of August 2011 I arrived in Cuba to observe Alfredo’s death rituals instead of what would have been the sixty-sixth year of his priesthood.

Regla, the mother of one set of his children, who had known him longer and more intimately than most, swore to me that Alfredo was born in 1925. So Alfredo was either eighty-one or eighty-six on August 26, 2011, the day he died. Had he lived four more days, he would have celebrated sixty-six years as a priest of the oricha Aganyú.2 Since beginning field research on Santería in Cuba in 2002, I have spent most of my time in Alfredo’s “house of saints.” Alfredo was godfather to many Cubans and foreigners, most of whom addressed him as “padrino.” It is difficult to tally his initiates because Padrino Alfredo felt it was wrong to “count heads.” Unlike many Santería priests who proudly proclaim the exact number of “crowns” (priests) they have initiated, Padrino Alfredo told me that counting “took away lives.” The only way to estimate the number he initiated was by counting the notebooks (libretas) that record the “signs” (odu) of new priests as they begin their life paths (caminos) as santeros. The godchild usually copies one libreta, but the primary notebook stays with the godparent. At the time of his death, Alfredo had over seven hundred libretas—but those were only the ones he had kept. Toward his later years he would sometimes send the iyawó (new priest) home to copy their libreta, and it would never return. He was never too strict at tracking down libretas, so there is no way to be exact.

However, given that most priests’ initiate anywhere from zero to forty crowns over their lifetime (with forty being a hefty number), over seven hundred initiates is an astonishing tally. Needless to say, Alfredo was an exceptional example of Santería productivity, and his influence across global oricha worlds is immeasurable.

Like the oricha Aganyú whom he served and embodied, Alfredo can also be described as a transatlantic traveler.3 He did not have to physically leave Cuba to be constantly moving. He was always on the go, working rituals in different small towns across the island, with famous godchildren in Havana, Santiago, Sancti Spiritus, Cárdenas, and Colón. The priests he spiritually “birthed” live in near and distant places; their corresponding oricha, in the sacred stones (otán) he had given them, also travel and live with them in Mexico, Canada, Spain, England, Brazil, and the United

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States. Several CDs and DVDs document Alfredo’s spiritual power and religious expertise.4 Like other religious elders, Alfredo’s presence continues to affect both through new media technologies and through his transnational connections. His godchildren play his DVDs and CDs, conjuring his presence and invoking his teachings. These recordings, played in small tenements in Matanzas and Havana, are also bought, uploaded, and shared among practitioners who have never stepped foot in Matanzas.

With the increasing uses of new media technology, spirits, oricha, and even practitioners are understood to travel through television screens, and practitioners are sometimes possessed as they watch ritual videos. During an online chat, a young twenty-something priest in New York City told me that he was possessed with his oricha while watching a video online. He sent me a link to what he described as “the most powerful Ocha [oricha] stuff ” he had ever seen. It was a clip from Padrino Alfredo’s DVD where he was singing to the oricha Changó. The young man had no idea that he was sending me a link to my own godfather. He had never traveled to Cuba or been possessed through a television screen, but since watching Alfredo’s video he told me, “I’m going for sure. To Matanzas.”

“Santería-regla Ocha is no longer the religion of a particular ethnic group, but the spiritualistic response to the socioeconomic and cultural necessities of people with different educational or cultural backgrounds” (Pollack-Eltz 2001, 121). Rather than attempt to understand Cuban identity or nationalisms through Santería, this book examines the multilateral construction and circulation of transnational religious assemblages. Religion, I suggest, becomes a key tool for intervening in transnational framings of Santería and is especially useful for exploring larger questions of how Cuban nationals and American-based religious travelers are producing religious cosmopolitanisms (Beliso-De Jesús 2013a). Combinations of diverse national, racial, sexual, gender, and socioeconomic positionalities of practitioners situate this religious experience transnationally.5 Electric Santería explores the transnational experience of this religion in what I call “copresences”—the spirits, deities (oricha), priests, video technology, and religious travelers that operate in contemporary transnational networks as active spiritual agents. Drawing on Santería philosophies of movement, this book examines the experience of these copresences in the everyday lives of transnational practice—how they are sensed in transnational places and different historical moments, and how practitioners

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must negotiate the politics of race, gender, sexuality, imperialism, and religious travel that are implicated in these feelings. I argue fi rst that different religious notions of being (ontology) transform practitioners’ everyday experiences and lives. Second, by understanding Santería’s relationship with copresences, Electric Santería calls for an alternative understanding of media and transnationalism. By moving away from a representational analysis to one of assemblages, I suggest we can hold in tension how conceptions of being complicate the politics of race, gender, and sexuality in transnational religions. The prose of the text reflects the complexity of the various copresences that electrify transnational Santería. I deploy different writing styles to highlight the academic, spiritual, and political projects that compete and collide in this religious practice. Writing through copresences allows me to disrupt the fi xity of any singular ethnographic present or historical moment. This book takes us on a tour of the sensual experience and transnational practice of this moving religion.