Yankee Come Home

by William Craig

  Everyone in Cuba knows one or more of the many legends. They’re told in countless variants, and their often contradictory details speak for the transformational collages of New World identity, the multifarious truths of being Cuban: black, Indian, mulatto, and white; Taino, Spaniard, and African; conqueror, conquered, and slave. The stories you tell depend upon who you think you are when you say yo soy (“I am”), whether you identify with the language you speak or the music you hear or the number and names of the gods to whom you pray.

  One story says the Virgin stayed up in the forests and mountains, hiding as the Spanish killed Indians until the island was “almost entirely deserted,” in Las Casas’s report. In one variation on this theme, this protectress of the Indians was hidden in a cave and washed out into Nipe Bay by a storm.

  A storm dominates the iconography and popular conception of the miracle in Nipe Bay. It catches the canoe out in the middle of the bay. While the two Indian men paddle desperately, the slave boy gets on his knees and leads them in prayer. The Holy Mother herself appears in the sky above them, announces herself in so many words—Yo soy la Virgen de la Caridad—and calms the storm before sending the awed trio her image to share with the world.

  But if you look at the countless prints, paintings, carvings, and other artworks depicting this stormy scene, you’ll notice fascinating variations. A canoe. Two Indians—feathers in hair, breechcloths, beads—and one black boy. Two aindiados—Indian-looking, but not necessarily Indian—and a coffee-colored mulatto boy. A sturdy rowboat, apparently borrowed from the Grand Banks cod fishery. Two white guys, one of whom looks as if he’s dressed for the Canada fur trade, and a boy so black he’s purple. Three whites, one of them blond. A Euro Virgin robed in her traditional Euro-Catholic colors of white and blue. A café au lait Virgin in yellow and white. A West African Virgin swathed in glorious cloth of gold.

  White Cubans who identify strongly with their Spanish heritage may tell a version of the missing-century story that features Ojeda as a tough, brave, and pious knight; in some tellings, a Spaniard hides la Virgen in the cave to protect her from Indian desecrators until she can miraculously arrange to have herself delivered to the Castilian-looking gentlemen rowing in the bay.

  Far more popular—with Cubans of all shades, but especially with those who identify with the historic struggles of black cubanos—are images of the Virgin muy morena, quite black, and robed in yellow. In this guise, she is not only Mary, the Mother of Jesus, but also Ochún, the Yoruban goddess of love and femininity.

  West Africans brought to Cuba as slaves were forbidden to worship their own gods, but clever at blending their traditional beliefs with Catholic dogma and ritual. Their greatest ally in preserving African spirituality was Catholicism’s crowded pantheon of saints. They looked for consonances between African gods and Christian saints, finding connections in legend and attributes, symbols and powers.

  For example, people from the Yoruba nation of what is now Nigeria saw an avatar of Babalú-Ayé, an orisha or deity who can inflict or cure terrible illnesses such as smallpox, in St. Lazarus, the beggar “full of sores” who lies at the gate of the rich man in Jesus’ parable (John 16:19–31). The rich man wouldn’t spare Lazarus even “the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table,” and as the beggar lay helpless, “the dogs came and licked his sores.” Babalú-Ayé is depicted as an old, sick man covered in smallpox sores, leaning on a staff; St. Lazarus is usually portrayed as a sick old man, pursued by dogs as he hobbles on a crutch. It was easy for Africans to syncretize god and saint, to pray to Babalú-Ayé through devotion to St. Lazarus.

  Slaves and their descendants created numerous syncretistic faith traditions in Cuba, including palo, vodú, and muertéra bembé de sao. All these traditions focus on maintaining a spiritual connection to ancestors and the collective past. The best known, outside Cuba, is Santería, “the way of the saints,” an Afro-Catholic synthesis strongly based in Yoruban religious culture and language. (Perhaps the world’s most famous syncretis religion of the African diaspora is Haitian voudon, a tradition popularized and thoroughly misunderstood as “voodoo.” Cuban vodú reflects the close connection between Oriente and Haiti.) The development of santería and other traditions enabled Africans to weave their sustaining beliefs through the traumatic experience of slavery as integral elements of the blended black and white and Indian cultures that became Cuba.

  Ochún is sometimes called the Yoruban Aphrodite. She is the goddess of feminine sexuality and sensual love, of love in its earthiest sense, including not only the dance of desire but also the glorious travail that comes of it: the protectress of women in pregnancy and labor, the goddess who understands the erotic spell at the heart of marriage and family. Like Aphrodite, she’s crazy for a god of masculine power—though her lover, the thunder warrior Changó, is not as single-minded a soul as the Greek war god, Ares. Unlike Aphrodite, Ochún seems to stop more fights than she starts; her power of joyous enticement and healing release can reconcile opposite natures and even angry enemies. She has sympathy for prisoners, the poor, and anyone whose life is a struggle.

  It might seem impossible to blend the identities of a love goddess and the Virgin of Charity, but consider their connections.

  For one, there’s the water connection: Ochún’s home in the river and la Virgen morena’s journey across the waves of Nipe Bay. While Our Lady’s raiment was unsoiled by the storm-wake espuma, the legend says that’s a miracle precisely because she is standing on a plank that is very much in the drink. Her arrival across the bay is reminiscent of the birth of the goddess Botticelli arranged on the half shell, and Ochún is said to have been born in a beautiful concha, a shell, where the river meets the sea. (Concha is also Latin slang for female genitalia.)

  Then there’s copper. Before copper lost its status as a precious or mystically powerful metal, it was sacred to Ochún. Her love of the color yellow is now associated with gold, but Africans brought to Cuba probably preserved the link between the love goddess and el cobre. And the legends of la Virgen morena include stories that she was unhappy at the Barajagua cattle ranch and later at Quarry Hill, expressing her displeasure by disappearing from locked churches. Since her trinity of lights guided the people to place her on Cerro de la Mina, she has never run away, clearly indicating her desire to be as close as possible to the copper and los cobreros, the miners.

  El Cobre has been in operation since about 1530, but by the 1630s the private mining concession was so neglected that its slave and free black population were living more or less on their own in the mining settlement’s ruins. Looking after themselves, they appropriated abandoned property and began making decisions through their own town councils. They shared sueños of freedom, and their sense of a communal identity was expressed in the legendary apparition of Our Lady of Charity, a New World Ochún. She pushed the image of Santiago—St. James, Spain’s patron saint—out of the top spot in the church of Santiago del Prado, and the cobreros claimed the town as their own, as El Cobre.

  It took Spain until 1670 to notice the mines’ neglect and seize the business and its slaves as crown property. The cobreros became esclavos del rey, “royal slaves,” a little-understood class of Spanish slaves who seem to have experienced special burdens and privileges.

  In 1673, when the crown ordered the sale of El Cobre slaves, it specified that families should be kept together and that prices should be set low enough to encourage slaves’ hopes of buying their own freedom; the next year, the king halted the sales but continued to extend royal slaves the right to buy themselves. Then, in 1677, the crown decreed that El Cobre’s strongest and most skilled royal slaves be rounded up and transferred to the fortification of Havana.

  The king’s order stipulated that enough El Cobre slaves be left to assist in the defense of Santiago de Cuba—a patriotic duty they had performed in the past. The peculiar status of royal slaves is also suggested by the fact that the esclavos of El Cobre petitioned the king for exemption from this levy.


  The petition was signed by Juan Moreno, now an old man, recently made capitán of the El Cobre community. He may not have been a real military leader, but he was renowned in Oriente as one of the three witnesses to Our Lady of Charity’s miraculous apparition. Moreno referred to El Cobre as a pueblo, a real civic entity under the Virgin’s patronage, and argued for keeping it whole by allowing its royal slaves to stay with their wives, families, and friends, where they would willingly serve as a bulwark in Santiago’s western defenses.

  When the petition wasn’t answered, the royal slaves of El Cobre ran into the manigua, the bush, to hide from any attempt at a roundup. At that, the colonial official who had stonewalled their plea acknowledged the reality of the situation by declaring “in the name of His Majesty that no one will be removed from [El Cobre] against his will.” This concession of the royal slaves’ implied right to choose where they live was a step on the way to El Cobre’s becoming the island’s first and only black-governed, royally chartered pueblo.

  The people credited Our Lady of Charity with protecting them as they claimed and defended rights to property and better working conditions. Her cult continued to spread. In 1731, when officials attempted to reassert control over the cobreros as crown property, they once again took to the hills, rallying behind the militia banner that declared them to be loyal subjects and adopting the Virgin as their protectress.

  By the time of the Ten Years’ War, Our Lady of Charity and Remedies of El Cobre was a symbol of freedom and a patron saint to the people of Oriente and their rebel army. Her image was carried on battle flags, and the rebels’ ultimate victory was credited to her prayers. The Veterans of the War of Independence petitioned the Vatican to have her declared the patroness of Cuba; Benedict XV did so in 1916, and John Paul II crowned her again, not by fiat but in person, in his 1998 visit to Santiago de Cuba.

  The cobreros’ determination to be free inspired el Monumento al Cimmarón, the “Monument to the Runaway Slave,” a UNESCO-sponsored artwork on a hill above El Cobre. You have to hike a ways into the bush to find this twenty-foot-tall statue of anthropomorphic shapes expressing both anguish and defiance. The statue’s base incorporates a nganga, a ritual castiron cauldron often associated with palo, another New World syncretist faith tradition, this one rooted not in Yoruba but in Kongo culture. The Cimmarón’s symbolic nganga combines abstract metal shapes suggesting attributes of palo gods with natural objects including cattle skulls.

  The Monumento was initially intended for a site down in the town, but a local spiritual practitioner heard from a force that insisted on the hilltop site. The practitioner also created a sacred space halfway up the monument trail, an outdoor altar incorporating symbolic objects—bones, images and offerings—and a ceiba tree.

  The tall, broad-crowned ceiba, also known as the kapok or silk-cotton tree, has magical power in every Latin American syncretist tradition, and is the New World substitute for trees revered in West Africa. In Cuba, great ceibas are often the focus of neighborhood religious practices. Santeros sacrifice white chickens over their roots, and the faithful leave gifts. Ancestors’ spirits rest in the ceiba’s deep shade. Like Our Lady’s basilica, the ceiba is a temple, the essential setting for all kinds of magic rituals; in some traditions it is known as Fortuna Mundo, the tree of destiny. Reaching from earth to the sky, the ceiba intercedes between the worlds of men and gods. Not surprisingly, this intercessor is a female, nurturing spirit; the bark of the ceiba is believed to be able to make barren women fertile. The ceiba is Mary’s tree, Ochún’s tree, the tree of life.

  Our Lady of Charity’s role as the loving mother of all cubanos is emphasized by the multicomplected trio of sailors in her iconic image. Red, black, white: they’re all mixed up from one print or painting to another, and though one of the three was named Rodrigo, popular culture long ago elided their individualities as los tres Juanes, “the three Juans,” a trio of Everymen.

  Cachita is there for every Cuban, whether they understand her as Yoruban goddess or Nazarene saint. There’s even a subtly abstracted nganga in her sanctuary at the back of the basilica. She knows that mercy doesn’t have a color, and that Cuba’s history of misrule has crushed plenty of white people, too. Ochún is most helpful to those most in need. With her power of reconciliation, she helps cubanos transmute suffering into hope, cruelty into communion. Santería is a faith rooted in remembrance, in honoring the ancestors’ suffering and transcendence. Our Lady of Charity’s blurred, bloody, and miraculous origin is the story of Cuba’s coming-to-be, and millions of Cubans still seek her aid in prayers for a better future.

  In the chamber of miracles, I lit my candles from the flames of other people’s prayers. I pushed their bases into the matrix of white and yellow wax puddled on the marble altar. Then I knelt and prayed.

  Mass had started up out in the great nave, and echoes of singing and chanting filled this sanctuary, covering tourists’ whispered conversations and granting a measure of privacy to those of us who lingered on our knees.

  I’d always done my grown-up praying to a pretty abstract God, a Christ whose historical veracity (or lack thereof) didn’t bother me in the least: a principle, not a personality. And I’ve never been any good at that advanced practice of prayer called meditation, at moving my mind down a single, almost-empty track toward an encounter with wisdom. But people with a lot less faith than I possess have been moved by a visit to El Cobre. In the miracle room, I found it surprisingly easy to “Hail Mary,” and to continue the conversation by calling her attention to Peter, focusing on that one connection until I’d asked Cachita to protect him in every way I could imagine. Then I thought of his father and my mother, of my wife, Kathy, and all our children, of my siblings and their children, recalling their faces one by one. It was as if I were making introductions at a big reunion, moving down the family line in the company of a wondrously kind new friend, a dark-skinned lady in yellow who smiled for every face and name.

  Chapter 4

  EL MORRO I: TOSSING OUT THE FIRST BALL

  From the moment the two Taino caciques strutted out onto the field, puffing huge tabacs, it was obvious they didn’t know the first thing about béisbol. Sure, they looked kingly in their shiny skirts and jewelry, paint and feathers, but they swung their bats at balls lying on the infield grass like they were trying to invent pre-Columbian golf. A squad of umpires rushed out to teach them the game, but the Indians just didn’t get it. Why can’t the batter catch the ball and run? Every play broke down in slapstick misunderstandings, and finally the senior ump ejected the Taino from the game. He delivered his verdict with a ritual hop, skip, and flailing swing, and twenty-five thousand bleacher-seat fans echoed his “You’re outta here!” shout.

  So did everyone in the bar at the Restaurante El Morro, where I was hanging out with Faribundo and Luis, the bus guys, and anyone from the restaurant staff who could stiff his or her tables for a few minutes to watch the opening ceremonies to Cuba’s forty-fifth Serie Nacional de Béisbol, the first game of the 2005–6 season.

  After the basilica, we’d gotten back on the bus and driven to the cliff-lined Caribbean coast for a tour of El Castillo de San Pedro de la Roca, the Castle of St. Peter of the Rock, better known as El Morro. The tour hadn’t gotten very far before the travel-weary chorus broke for lunch.

  The fortress, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a long walk from the nearest village, so the Restaurante El Morro has the tourist trade locked up. The restaurant is no worse than most state-run tourist eateries. The day’s menu was exactly the same as it had been on my last visit, four years earlier: shredded-cabbage salad, venerable oven-fried chicken, and a gummy rendition of the black-beans-and-white-rice combo known as moros y cristianos (“Moors and Christians”). On a trip to the men’s room, I’d noticed what was on the bar’s TV; when I got back to my table, I bolted lunch and joined the béisbol fans.

  The season starter is always a major event, featuring a celebratory pageant, speeches, and patriotic
fanfare. This year’s pageant had begun with these clownish “Indians,” played by a couple of dark-skinned cubanos acting out a dumb show of anachronistic culture clash. The umpire’s climactic shout was amplified by more than a million viewers, in a nation of just eleven million. In Cuba, unlike the U.S.A., baseball is still and absolutely the national pastime, the one great game.

  And today’s game was not only the season opener also but a face-off between Havana’s Industriales and the Avispas of Santiago de Cuba.

  Industriales refers to “industrial workers,” the demographic allegedly represented by this team founded by the government’s National Institute for Sports, Physical Education, and Recreation (INDER) in 1962. The Revolution reorganized Cuban baseball on an amateur but subsidized basis, creating two Havana teams, Industriales and Metropolitanos. Like the early New York Mets, however, Havana’s Metropolitans have long been a sad-sack outfit. Industriales is the Cuban game’s Yankees analog.

  Santiago de Cuba’s Avispas (Wasps) play the part of the Boston Red Sox, minus the eighty-six-year losing streak. They don’t win the series as often as Havana, but they hold their own. The crimson-capped Wasps are the beloved underdogs, and when they play royal-blue Industriales, much of the nation roots red.

  Even better, today’s game was being played in Santiago’s Estadio Guillermón Moncada, the stadium named for yet another Santiago-born general of the nineteenth-century wars of independence. Famed as both a leader of troops and as the man who killed a Spanish slave-catcher in single combat, Guillermo (“William”) Moncada was tall, broad, and strong. It’s typically Cuban to have given the stadium his nickname, Guillermón, which means something like “Big Willy.” Santiago won the last Serie Nacional, so the Wasps had the honor of hosting the new season’s opener—and the benefit of home-team advantage. The Estadio Guillermón Moncada is only about twenty blocks from the Hotel Meliá; if I’d been in Santiago, I probably could have heard the capacity crowd’s great shout from up on the hotel roof.