The Cabildo Processions of Regla: Orisha Parade

[Olùkọ́ Ọbádélé]

The Cabildo Processions of Regla: Orishas on Parade

The following is an excerpt from “The Empire Beats On: Oyo, Batá Drums, and Hegemony in Nineteenth-Century Cuba.” Masters Thesis. Miami: Florida International University, 2000 (Ch. V).

In Cuba, cabildos had existed since the 1500s. Sandoval wrote that the first African cofradía for which documentation exists in Cuba was formed in 1598.[vi] In 1691, the Arará purchased a lot on Compostela street in Havana where their first cabildo was founded. To the present, that lot is still known as el solar de los Arará (the Arará’s lot).[vii] Still, the African population of the island at this time was not a significant one and would not become so until sometime later. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cabildos were not as meaningful as they would be after the eighteenth-century sugar boom. As the African population of the island grew in the latter eighteenth century, cabildos served various purposes. The colonial authorities and Spanish legislation initially favored the establishment of the cabildos for the amusement of the slave population of the island. Initially, they were meant to be a means of social control, a type of pressure-releasing valve that helped alleviate the tensions between the masters and the slaves. Africans gathered in their cabildos, when allowed to, on holidays so that they could dance according to the “customs of their nations.”

For the most part, cabildos were organized by slaves or manumitted Africans belonging to the same ethnic affiliation. They seem to have been very popular in the urban areas. For the Africans, the cabildo served many purposes. Howard has emphasized that the cabildos were crucial in the retention of the slave’s humanity and overcoming social injustices. As mutual-aid societies, they would collect money or pool resources to assist a member in times of illness or death and often to help manumit a compatriot. Probably, the cabildos also served as sanctuaries for fugitive slaves. Although Howard’s argument that the cabildos were not just “groups of Africans meeting to sing and dance to the music of their respective cultures” is obviously valid, it cannot be denied that one of the most important functions of the cabildo was religious in nature.

Cabildos were the African “churches,” the place where they could consult the deities and ancestors who accompanied them on the forced voyage. For those slaves who clung to their African religious traditions as one of the few means of succor at their disposal, the cabildo represented a piece of Africa in hostile territory that would keep alive their faith and hopes for change. As Sandoval has written, the cabildos were “the institutions that made viable the conservation of the idiosyncracy, religion and culture of each African nation.” Simultaneously, the cabildos constantly invigorated the identities that Western acculturation tried to eradicate. The Yoruba batá, the Bantú Nganga, and the Carabalí iremé were all used in the cabildos not only in their original religious context but also as methods of resistance that inhibited the bitter processes of deculturation and acculturation and alleviated the humiliation and sense of dehumanization associated with slavery. The songs, dances, and drum rhythms played for African deities in a land so hostile to Africans were as much religious as they were inherent mechanisms by which to keep alive their Africanness. In this sense, then, the cabildo was also the center of African resistance to Spanish cultural hegemony.

For white Spanish and Cuban society, the cabildos were necessary but barbaric institutions that they would much rather not have had to see or hear. By the late 1700s, they were beginning to worry the master class. Various articles of the 1792 Bando de Buen Gobierno y Policia were addressed at controlling the cabildos and their members. Article 39 claimed to attend to the complaints about cabildos located on streets inhabited by “honest neighbors who justly complain about the discomfort occasioned by the coarse and unpleasant sounds of their [African’s] instruments. . . . I order that within one year counting from today, all the cabildos move to the edges of the city.”[xv] Ensuing legislation in the nineteenth century reinforced many of these prohibitions.[xvi]

By the nineteenth century, all the cabildos were located outside the walls that enclosed the city of Havana. For the whites, this meant that they would not have to hear the “infernal noises”[xvii] that resulted from the African celebrations. For the Africans, this expulsion from the inner city was a blessing in disguise for it afforded them a degree of privacy that they would otherwise not have had. As such, this was an additional asset to forestall acculturation and facilitate the transmission of African culture. Outside the city walls, the cabildos were not as restrained as they were within the city and therefore had more opportunity to conserve cultural aspects that would not have endured as vibrantly under the ever-watchful eyes of Cuban.

Occasionally, cabildos cradled plots for slave insurrections. The Aponte Conspiracy of 1812 was born in the famous Lukumí cabildo Changó Tedún. José Antonio Aponte is believed to have been a priest of Shangó and the director of the cabildo when the conspiracy was being planned. Aponte is credited with having been the “first Cuban who dreamt of the beautiful inspiration of rebelling against Spanish dominion.” In 1843, before the barbarity that resulted from the discovery of the Escalera Conspiracy, tension seems to have been affecting the cabildos. On November 19, the regent for the district of Puerto Príncipe was alarmed by the creation of a cabildo in his district that had been founded by 1,200 slaves. He warned them that “the piety of our sovereigns permitted slaves to celebrate on specific times of the year, as a respite to soften their luck; but do not forget to adopt all those precautions that lead to avoid the inversion of your good intentions, a grace so generously accorded.”

By the turn of the century, cabildos were practically a dying breed. In 1884, the procession to celebrate the Epiphany, something that had been practiced by many cabildos for decades, was outlawed. In 1887, legislation required that the cabildos obtain official recognition and licenses. Another law in April of 1888 forbade that cabildos organize in the typical colonial style and demanded that instead they be organized as societies or organizations following the established laws for Cuban societies.

In the twentieth century, though the cabildo as a mutual aid society seems to have diminished if not disappeared, olorishas continued parading the Lukumí orishas through the town of Regla in Havana under the guise of Catholic images. Regla was an important Lukumí enclave in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Cuba. Many Lukumí traditions that survived in Cuba came into the island through Regla’s port. There were two cabildo processions in Regla that achieved great fame: Ño Remigio Herrera, Adeshina’s cabildo Yemayá, and the cabildo of Susana Cantero, Omí Toké. The former's was inherited by his daughter Josefa Herrera, Eshú Bí, better known as Pepa, and it is through Pepa that the procession gains eminence. Omí Toké was a creole of Kalabari and Lukumí descent, who had been ordained to Yemojá in Palmira around 1900 by Andrea Trujillo, Ewiyimí. She was one of Regla’s most respected iyalorishas. Eshubí passed away in July of 1947, and Omí Toké died in August of 1948. Until their deaths, these two priestesses competed yearly to surpass each other’s procession.

The processions started at Regla’s church, in the far northwestern corner of the town. There, what appeared to be four Catholic saints’ images were set before the altar, and the priest would hold mass and pronounce his blessings, sprinkling the images, the drums, and the crowd with holy water. In the church’s doorway, the cabildo directors would cast obi, one of the Lukumí oracles, to assess the deities’ satisfaction with the Catholic rite before marching onward. After the oracle confirmed that the orishas’ were pleased, the faithful would cross the street to the bay front, where they would again consult the oracle and offer their respects to Yemojá and Olokún at the ocean. Devotees deposited offerings into the water for these orishas as the batá drums played and the crowd responded to chants and praises to the deities. Possession by the orishas occurred very frequently during this ritual and the divinities often joined their devotees in the celebration.

From the bay, the procession marched through the town on foot, heading straight down Maceo Street, led by the batá drums. On the way, the cabildo made stops at the police station, the mayor’s office, and the homes of important olorishas who lived in the town. There were no conflicts with the local authorities because the permits for the processions automatically arrived every year to the Mayor’s office in the town’s municipality from the Capitol in Havana without the olorishas having to ask for them. At each doorway, they would consult the oracle and play a tribute to the house and its inhabitants, singing and drumming praises for humans and orishas: if an olorisha lived in the house, he or she would have obi ready for casting by the doorway. Once the cabildo paid tribute to the tutelary deities of the house, and obi had responded in a favorable manner, the homaged olorisha would then join the crowd of marchers as they continued to parade down the long and narrow street of the port town. The procession ended at the entrance to Regla’s cemetery, on the other end of the town. It was about two miles from the point of departure to the cemetery gates, with many stops along the way. Olorishas from all over the island traveled yearly to Regla for the event.

Because of the need to conceal their religious practices and comply with the society’s mandate that all citizens be good Catholics, devotees in the cabildo carried statues of four catholic saints through the town: Our Lady of Mercy, representing Obatalá; Our Lady of Charity, representing Oshún; Our Lady of Regla, representing Yemojá; and Saint Barbara, representing Shangó. They had transformed these statues into “white” manifestations of the orishas through ritual consecrations. To individuals foreign to the culture and the religion, by all outward appearances the statues were nothing more than the representation of Catholic saints; for the Olorishas, these saints were the deities of Yorubaland represented through a new medium. The faithful paraded these statues through Regla on handbarrows that rested on their shoulders. They adorned them with elaborate floral arrangements, and expensive lace, metallic, and hand-embroidered panels. The men carried the images representing Yemojá and Obatalá and the women carried Oshún and Shangó.