[Critical notes]

Joel James Figarola, Sobre muertos y dioses, Gedisa, Mexico, 2016, 107 p (1st ed.
1989, Ediciones Caseró n, Santiago de Cuba).

by
Armelle Lefebvre

“The fact is that, contrary to what happened in Brazil, according to my informants, [those] who
returned to Africa were few. And not for lack of love for their native country, which continued to
live in their hearts with such powerful force that they turned Cuba into an African country.”

—Lydia Cabrera (The Kongo Rule: The Palo Monte Mayombe Wisdom Society —English translation
by Donato Fhunsu).

Despite the echo they find among Caribbean specialists, the work of Joel James
Figarola, a major figure in Cuban anthropology, remains in an undeserved
confinement.
These notes (in the margins of a French translation of this collection) intend to
introduce the reader to Afro-Cuban anthropology and to the work of Joel James,
whose originality animates the two disconcertingly deep essays which make up
Sobre muertos y dioses ("On the Dead and the Gods").

International research on Cuba - "cubanology" - is more than ever focused on

grasping this strange and always fiery land, but the significance of its socialism,
the relevance of the revolution which still marks the country, its "Special Period
in Time of Peace" inaugurated with the fall of the USSR – and never ended – and
finally its so dynamic "popular culture", imprinted with religious spirituality, all
add up to a multiplicity that defies predictions.

There is no doubt that Afro-Cuban religions, of which a Cuban historian once

argued that their historic triumph over Catholicism had enabled the triumph of
the Revolution (Carbonell 1961), now occupy an unheard-of place in this late
socialism. At the same time, they flourish just as much in the vast environment
popularised by Fredric Jameson under the label of late capitalism.
After evolving in different contexts which mixed or alternated deculturalization,
clandestinity, exclusion and recruitment all through Cuban colonial and
postcolonial history, Afro-Cuban cults turned several decades ago into a
mechanism of economic capture which is at the source of a new prosperity for
the country – hence the deep polemic that inhabits them on the subject of
speculation which some consider to be a form of jinetería, or prostitution
(cultural and religious in this case).
In fact spirituality, like all areas (also "special") of Cuban social life, is
unfortunately "metallised" through the impact of international tourism, which
brings the Cuban population – almost under house arrest – into contact with the
average visitor who, not content with spending in a day what is more than a
year’s salary for a Cuban (between $15 and $25 per month), is also a consumer
of conformity and authenticity.
Afro-Cuban cults also reach, through the exemplary case of the most visible of
these, santería, proportions now going well beyond expansion via the Cuban
diaspora alone: many foreigners who come to be initiated Cuba become
sacerdotes (priests) at home, from Mexico to Ukraine, and in their turn they send
their ahijados (godsons) "to make the saint" and become santeros in Cuba, who
will sometimes orient themselves towards the other Afro-Cuban cults to which
the Regla de Ocha is connected.
This effusion envelops a movement of professionalization on a planetary scale
which makes new santeros the "brokers" of a spiritual capital and
"intermediaries between the local and the transnational" (Benitez-Rojo 2005;
Romberg 2005). To the extent that, among the studies in a field that has
developed in close, if not symbiotic, connection with this phenomenon of
religious globality, ethnographic approaches to transnational santero networks
and their accompanying mechanisms have been deployed, whether these be the
impact of spiritual tourism on the competitive dynamic amongst religious actors,
or the feedback effects of relocalizations which modifies Cuban traditions, with
issues of authenticity, transgression and labelling grafted onto "diasporization"
(Looking at the evolution of French research throughout the last fifteen or
twenty years, see the works of Kali Argyriadis, Stefania Capone, Emma Gobin,
Géraldine Morel for American territories, Cuba, Florida, Mexico, etc.). Moreover,
Cuban research has not wanted to be outdone, as the DESR published 1 in 2004 a
collection on religious globalization and neoliberalism.
An analysis of Afro-Cuban cults and their rapid expansion does, however, raise
difficulties that are not exhausted by either the emphasis on their
commodification or their institutionalization via the constitutional amendment
of 1992, which set up a religious tolerance that allowed international research an
easy approach to Cuba.
In a certain polarization with this aspect of international research, Cuban
anthropology – sharing with the population as a whole and with the Afro-Cuban
religions themselves a common fate, a confinement that has as a consequence the
central character of the territory – looked further into Afrodescendant
spirituality and identity on the territorial and social level that is consubstantial
to them (the distance from origins intensified the spatial orientation).
It has thus come closer on many occasions to a culture from below, claimed as
such.
For despite the many criticisms from which it cannot be freed, Afrocubanism, a
cultural phenomenon which appeared at the start of the 20 th century (Arredondo
1938; Moore 1997), constitutes an environment that links the literate classes
and intellectuals to ever more popular classes: Afrodescendants, formerly
labelled a "marginal" class, who are identified by their attachment to a culture
rather than by shades of colour – to the extent that it is the case in Cuba that a
“Black” can be white (jabao).
It was through this empathic movement that Cuban anthropology was built up
despite the blind spot of racism (which has long been declared eradicated from
Cuba: Sawyer 2006; de la Fuente 2007; Morales Domínguez 2008; Law 2012;
Clealand 2018) and that emerged an understanding of the social constitution of

1
Department of Socio-religious Studies of the Centre for Psychological and Sociological Research
in Havana.
the Afrodescendant subject and his religious sociability, that is, a propensity to
associate and a socialisation of which Afro-Cuban cults are the heart.
No one both experienced and conceived such an opening better than Joel James.
The biographical aspect and the cultural impact of his research teach us that
active commitment has methodological and cognitive consequences, that
enhancement and distance are in every respect in opposition to one another,
including on an epistemological level, and that small communities, in particular
the most remote, represent the constitutive mode of socialisation of Cuban
society, through a process which Joel James identified as a syncretic
"communication complex".

Afro-Cuban religion includes not only the regla de ocha (cult of the orichas or
santería), but also the palo or regla conga and its cult of the dead, the
ineradicable abakuá, a secret male brotherhood of mutual support which, like a
rare species, cannot be cultivated outside Cuba and only exists in Matanzas and
Havana, or spiritism, or also vodú from the East of the island (Oriente) or arará
and iyesa from Mantanzas.
These "rules" or "orders", which hark back to various "African embryos" (above
all the cultural systems known as lucumí-yoruba and congo-bantu), did not mix
here. Their complexity lies in their close links, similarities and discrepancies.
While they are intertwined in practice, they are not intertwined according to any
arrangement, although such an arrangement is in no way systematized; they are
likely to refer to each other by prescriptions (the officiating priest of one can
suggest to a follower or a consultant an initiation to another cult) depending on
vital circumstances, and constantly interfere with the believer, while an
individual's degrees of familiarity with different cults varies: religion is not
simply part of the social fabric in Cuba, it constitutes it, in varying degrees and
according to a differentiation as subtle and varied as the social fabric itself.
For just as each of the magico-religious Afro-Cuban systems imprints its mark on
social life, so it rubs off on others. As Joel James suggests, in these systems,
coming from particularly vulnerable sectors of the population, the essential and
phenomenal aspects are related and in conflict: thus cosmogonic and dogmatic
formulations reach saturation point at certain times - which for the author
correspond to the concept of limit - when an exchange activity is triggered.
One of the most interesting demonstrations in the work consists of highlighting
and showing perfectly how and why the various magico-religious Afro-Cuban
systems, while remaining clear and distinct, make up a whole from the point of
view of the believer, and describing this "communication complex established
between the different religions" (p. 37).

While the idea of syncretism has been given numerous definitions, the one used
here is more empathetic and more faithful, even though the author does not
expand on all its implications. The distinctive feature of systems whose capacity
for adaptation is based on the conflict between dogmatism and vital
circumstances, enables us to glimpse a form of flexible social structure in which a
hierarchy of knowledge allows members to be integrated and keeps them in
their place, while at the same time accepting their conflicting redefinition of it
and thus the rivalries this sets up.

The most important point, however, lies elsewhere. The great strength of this
essay is the marking of religious social changes and their identification in events
of the time. They are attributable to the combination of intermediate and
competing realities created by the believer, amongst which is the "aspired
reality", which "emphasizes the attitude, even the struggle towards a better
situation" (p. 42, our italics).
Research in the field carried out by Joel James and his teams over the course of
several decades thus allow us to anticipate, as early as the 1980s, what is in the
current staging of daily life in Cuba, la lucha, known as an emic concept which
sums up survival as practised by Cubans and which has for several decades been
the subject of various approaches by cubanologists, tempted to give up on their
too agile prey in favour of its shining shadow, Cuban speech.
Political sociology, in its approaches to la lucha (Bloch 2006, 2011) or to the
process of acceptance or protest at work in Cuban society (Geoffray 2015), has
barely looked at the connection between this daily routine in the crisis and the
rise of Afro-Cuban cults.
Specialists of Afro-Cuban religions, more alive to a link between the real,
informal economy (which underlies the so-called lucha) and the growth in
initiations, consider accusations of commodification as merely conventional
charges; they have instead cited ostentation, spending and "speculation",
attitudes identified with those prevailing in poor neighbourhoods (Holbraad
2004), showing a definite lack of sociological finesse coupled with a lack of
understanding of the inhabitants (reparteros) of these areas and their
relationship with Afro-Cuban religions. The bias, which consists in overtaking
the posture of the new Cuban impoverished middle classes in inner cities, now
inspired by strategies previously reserved for the "marginalised" and becoming
involved, with the ease of slumming, with a culture that was previously kept
apart, leads to an under-estimation of the devotion which the people of African
descent in these slum areas (barrios marginales) attach to their culture.

This is what Joel James’ work is about, as are his hypotheses on "aspired reality"
and "multiple representation", in order to understand the ethical factor linked to
improvement in the social position and prosperity of the individual, and to testify
to its presence in the sincere practice of Afro-Cuban cults (which, without in any
way inhibiting the most illegal social practices, or even the most immoral ones in
use, still point to another, and in this sense ethical path, that of prosperity and
possessions). His work is dedicated:

To the santeros, paleros, ougan and spiritualists of my country who believe in what
they do and do it for the good.

Re-edited by his daughter for Gedisa in Mexico, this important piece - which
comes out of Cuba for the first time - aims to contribute to providing a
framework for an anthropology of Caribbean man.
This small book, with a great (and deceptive) simplicity of tone, is infused with
and nourished by the whole work of the author, Anibal Joel James Figarola
(1942-2006): anthropologist, philosopher, historian, writer, story teller, cultural
activist – and not forgetting that he was also a fighter. This work, like the
researcher’s life, is a contribution to the complex problem of the history of Cuba
and to the gnawing question of the African core of Cuban culture and society:
because ever since José Martí, Cuban national idea has rested on the moment of
reconciliation between former masters and slaves against Spain, through the
common struggle for independence. However, the integration of the latter
together with their culture, made part of the community, become folklore,
enlisted or considered residual, remains problematic, as the best Cuban
historians and intellectuals (Alberto Arredondo, Walterio Carbonell, Gustavo
Urrutia, Juan René Betancourt, Carlos Moore, among others) have tried to clarify
(Helg 2005, de la Fuente 2007, Fernandez Robaira 2015).
Sobre muertos y dioses ("On the Dead and the Gods 2") must therefore be
appreciated in consideration of this weight of Afrocubanism, of which Joel James
was both the promoter and defender, a great specialist in national history and its
heroes as well as of popular culture and the underestimated contributions of
populations of Haitian or Congo-Bantu origins.

If our author regularly loses his reader at the turn of a reasoning which borders
on an aside to anthropological and philosophical traditions, he almost
immediately brings him back by insights which this very reasoning uses to drill
down into the social construction of the believer's reality, and which make the
book, unusual by virtue of its method, its aims and its subject, a necessary tool
for anyone interested in the cults of the New World. When it was published in
1988 it was the first written result of a unique research programme, carried out
over thirty years in the eastern province of Cuba, which is the closest to Haiti and
thus offers an on-going perspective on inter-Caribbean migration.

A recent bibliography, by José Millet, one of the members of the odyssey which
led to the founding of the Casa del Caribe and the festival of the same name, as
well as an interview given to Librinsula by Alexis Alarcó n, another of his
companions who was his mentor in the Sierra Maestra, remark upon the
numerous expeditions made by his teams closely involved with humble Haitian
communities in Cuba, in the heart of the Sierra Maestra; bringing to light the
contribution of these invisible people to cubanía by revealing the very real
existence of vodú (of Haitian origin) in Cuba and by gradually integrating
musicians and groups from these communities with the activities of the Casa del
Caribe which was set up to promote and represent Caribbean culture.

The complexity displayed in the two essays of the collection is thus indicative of
the admiration by this researcher and pioneer for the philosophical nature of the
magico-religious Afro-Cuban systems, totally minoritized in Cuban society of the
1980s.
As José Millet emphasises in his biography (2018) Joel James Figarola's great
theoretical ambition in relation to the non-systematized philosophy of Afro-
Cuban cults, was to take from their practices their abstract thought and
principles: his "ethno-ontology of Cubanity", half way between ethnophilosophy

2
All the quotations are translated from a French edition of the work to be published shortly.
and the ontological approach of contemporary anthropology, remained oriented
towards a "practical philosophy".

... In mathematics, there are principles, lines, points... as in music, painting,

philosophy... In monotheistic countries, they are made into mountains; but
within the most community-minded Afro-Cuban peoples, veritable
conservatories of the rules and principles of Afro-Cuban magico-religious
systems, they are expressed by sketching a few steps, a few gestures, chatting.

Most of the inhabitants of these communities, neighbourhoods and villages are

not musicians, but they feel and know a great deal more about rhythms than the
most advanced and educated musicologist. Like practical mathematicians they
step out ceremonial toques. Here, that is what la religión is: the living Afro-Cuban
culture, practical philosophy, an understanding arrived at through the slightest of
gestures or intentions.
The rules, which everyone recognizes because they govern everyday life, allow
them to imbue gestures – ritual or derived from ritual – with meaning. Daily life
and religion are indistinct, or their connection is so intimate that they merge.

It was this Cuban practical philosophy, driven through different channels of

expression, that I recognized immediately as the object of this little book, bought
in Mexico when it came out. In these concise texts, the responsibility for
shedding light on the crystal clear gesture described therein demands a brief
mention: the praxis, given the task of bringing together what will turn out to be a
growing tide of descriptions that are so precise and relevant that they give life to
“magico-religious Afro-Cuban systems”, and seem at times particularly
fascinating, real epiphanies.

The two essays in this collection are given stature by the ambition to understand
how the imagination organises ceremonial systems and ritual moments, and how
it is part of the kinds of belief and relationship to reality.
Let us try, therefore to sketch out not so much the reasoning involved and the
scholarly discussion which is modestly covered, but rather the theoretical
substance and consistency of the ideas set out.
Beginning with that of multiple representation: representation, essential to and
preceding action, is imaginary; in the context of human praxis as usually
established, defined and accepted as normal, subject to the teleological
imperative of action, the aim is to “seek by selection a unique or at least
prevailing representation” (p. 57).
In contrast, at the heart of the praxis of magico-religious Afro-Cuban systems,
multiple representation is, according to the somewhat paradoxical formula
proposed by Joel James, accepted as a final reality.
The principle of multiple representation thus established at the heart of Afro-
Cuban cults shifts or revises the idea of representation as regards pragmatism by
leaving the way unusually open to the imagination.
The essence of the essay entitled "The Principle of Multiple Representation" (El
principio de representación múltiple) lies in the demonstration of its modalities
through aspects well known to each of the systems, and its organizational and
cognitive role is illustrated by particularly rich material, especially as regards
Cuban vodú, for which there is a highly detailed synopsis of a service of
"cleaning", in which, like a sacred form of luxury, the ornamental capture of
brilliance is practised, invoking the glory of its innumerable sparkling facets.

Multiplicity is expressed3 in each of the first four "rules" present in the Cuban
Oriente (osha, conga, vodú, espiritismo de cordón) "in a wide range of
manifestations, from entities plastically conceived so as to imitate the human
silhouette to varied ways of naming the same mystical or ritual element,
including in many crystallizations through which the supra-terrestrial force
presents itself to the brain of the believer either awake or asleep" (p. 58).
A decisive and conspicuous aspect of the regla de ocha is that the orisha is
accepted in its entirety, whether in an anthropomorphically moulded
reproduction or by means of its name or objects referring to it. In the conga rule,
the n’ganga is seen as corporeality, but also "represented" by a jealously guarded
secret signature, and is reaffirmed by reproducing itself in new manifestations.
In the vodú service analyzed by Joel James, communication between participants
follows the rules of "the effect of reflection ", in which one seeks "not the image
of the object - the initial gesture - but the image of the representation of the
object, not seen directly, but received as reflected in the concomitant depth of a
mirror" (p. 66).
Flames ignite other flames, spray, splashes, smoke, reflections, gestures,
movements, positions all acquire the imitative dimension "of an echo or
reflection very close to multiple representation" (p. 71).
Following from the principle of multiple representation is the idea that the
relationship between the represented and representation is not fixed: if "the
object needs its images to manifest the most hidden of its properties" and if the
object (represented) is static, its representations on the other hand have
complete freedom "to grow or shrink and establish relations with the outside
world, independently of the behaviour of the represented object" (p. 74).
Thus two virtues are gained through and by representation: the represented
object depends on its representation to be known or recognized; representation

3
Thus (p. 59), we find in the regla de ocha, 16 anthropomorphic representations of Yemaya, the
goddess of salt water, and more than 20 of Eleggua. Chango is here seen indiscriminately as
either man or woman, and the 16 letters of the divination system are represented equally by
their denomination and by their combinations of 256 signs. In the palo, the “nganga”, the
repository of forces, is a whole as well as parts of that whole (here on page 60 we find the only
explicit reference: The Golden Bough by Frazer, which seems significant from a great admirer of
Wittgenstein). It “represents” its components – and in particular the dead man whose remains it
contains and who works for it – and the identity between it and its possessor. Vodú examples can
be seen in the profusion of animal and vegetable forms of the lwas, as well as in the violently
agonistic patronymic power of the various ways in which the believer names himself, taking both
an original patuá name received in Haiti or in Cuba at the start of the 20 th century, the Spanish
name given by the slave-owners, colonists or landowners with whom he arrived from Haiti, and the
name eventually received in the vodú; and finally in an imitative, gestural language itself also
based on the symmetrical plurality of the representation. Furthermore, in cordón spiritism, the
fourth “order” or “rule”, which stems from the same principle, it is the collective which prevails,
as is shown in the gestural and rhythmic transmission by repetitive movements and incantations
that allow the “current” to flow.
has a life independent of the object, and this life, although fixed in the
temporality of the represented (object), is not subject to it.

The principle of multiple representation informs the structure and organisation -

so as to be recognised - of each reiterated, substitutive and cumulative exchange,
projection, reflection, redundancy and correspondence, in which the forms,
names, writings, gestures, actions, objects and elements all refer to one another
and multiply, where everything represents everything else to saturation point.
In the magical language established by multiple representation there reigns, with
no regard to the principle of resemblance, a general functional equivalence
(p. 74).
At the heart of this language in which naming occupies a special place:

In Cuban magico-religious systems, naming is equivalent to representing because,

unlike what happens in strictly secular social conventions, the name is granted not
only the extent of a distinctive reference or mark, but also the total attributes of the
supra-human corporeality apprehended in its full integrity and with the fullness of its
transcendence. The name is given those specifications which, outside the limits of the
religious orders we are dealing with, are the exclusive competence of the
corporeality.
This is possible, and even obligatory, precisely because the extraterrestrial
corporeality in question does not exist, is not direct, evident and cannot be tangibly
taken hold of. The impossibility of irreversible evidence is the cause of multiple
representation. The raison d'être of this category, and in part of its rank as a guiding
principle within the religious crystallizations we are dealing with, lies in the need for
recognition on the part of practitioners [...] solely by the mechanism of successive
approximations.(p. 92-93, our italics)

Indeed and "since the superhuman corporeality in question does not exist, is not
direct, evident and cannot be tangibly taken hold of". The purpose of multiple
representation thus lies in the cognitive condition of the practitioners; indeed,
recognition of the supra-human corporeality only works through a mechanism of
"successive approximations", which may present as a system of repetition,
notably in songs.
In the ritual experience that is organised in magico-religious systems, the
practitioner exposes himself to the influence of repetition in order gradually to
approach and come to know, through asymptotic saturation, a reality devoid of
evidence.

The other essay in this collection, entitled "Inquiries into Gods and the Dead",
Indagaciones sobre dioses y muertos, moves away from the mode of constitution
of belief in reality (the search for certainty as the aim of knowledge, in pragmatic
terms) in order to examine the types of reality of the believer.
It is a text in motion which begins by informing the reader about the essential
diversity of the four orders or rules present in the East of the country (the Cuban
Oriente) by giving him details about the different hierarchies there, their clearly
delineated origins, their distinct geographical spread, their locations, the
contexts in which their very dissimilar apparitions occur, the main features –
sharply individualised – of each of the religious systems, and finally the different
natures of the worshiped entities.
The regla de Osha – otherwise known as santería – of Yorubá descent refers to
present-day Nigeria and Benin. It incorporates a fixed pantheon of divinities (17
according to some, 21 for others) which are one and many - the concept of "path"
(camino), being reminiscent to the ways of being of each orisha, similar to that of
the "advocations" (the circumstances, places and characteristics of the
manifestations of saints) of Christian saints. The santería, fertile in rites, is
notable for its clear hierarchy, the complexity of its divination system and for the
relationship of the initiate to his orisha.

The second magico-religious system, the regla conga or regla de palo monte, has
its origins in the northern zone of Angola, and comes from :

The union - almost certainly forged in the bellies of slave ships - of three different
African cultural forms: the cult of iron and metal fetishes of the ironworkers guild
– made up of men only and with a ban on the transmission of secrets – spread
quite widely amongst western quicongos; the healing rites of the quimbandeiros
[bantu], maintaining the clearest and closest link with the mysteries of the forest,
and the pre-eminence of the spell casters or nganguleros of the villages of the
interior zone of the great Congo Basin, who managed to make themselves
arbitrators with the most important role in social life. (p. 29)

The third rule, or order, is vodú brought by Haitian slaves whose masters fled
insurgent Haiti, and whose Cuban characteristics are highlighted here, both the
hierarchy of the pantheon of lwas and in the internal relationship between the
sub-rules petró and rada.
Finally, the fourth "rule", espiritismo de cordón, the aim of which is to reconcile
the living and the dead, is linked to the trauma of the 1868-78 war:

In the mambises prefectures, where a very large number of the insurrectionary

but unarmed civil population – made up of former slave owners and their former
domestic slaves, who continued to serve their masters despite the abolition
decreed by the Republic in arms – were murdered on a large scale in attacks by
the Spanish [...] the panic induced by the massacres which occurred with great
frequency as well as by the withdrawal of Cuban troops [...] gave rise to a well-
founded sense of insecurity and danger, provoking a collective hysteria which was
calmed by the celebration of the cordón, when white men joined hands, guided by
their former congo slaves to invoke the spirits, both near and far, and learn
through them the fate of their relatives or friends in battle or hiding deep in the
scrublands. (p. 33)

After convincing the reader of their inflexible diversity, Joel James notes the
absence of the pure form of each of the four orders, reminding us that the social
classes subject to the insecurity that led to the Caribbean magico-religious
systems, needed them to be highly adaptable.
The information given thus becomes meaningful when one understands the
interaction and exchanges between these systems, which gave rise to their
current configuration as it acts on the believer.
He puts forward a hypothesis about this stage. The building of a ceremonial
dogma “would reach a saturation point” when "tensions between tradition and
vital constraints" are manifested, and between "the believer's consciousness and
the structure of the theoretical presuppositions of belief which act upon his
conscience" (p. 35).
So if such systems were to become fixed, they would alienate themselves from
their "raison d'être for the human beings who held to them" (p. 36); a conflict or
split of this kind forced them to open up. This dynamic of syncretic cults,
observable in history, distinguishes them from both embryos brought from
Africa and Christianity (p. 36).
These elements allowed the researcher, strengthened by long-term fieldwork, to
establish that "we are in the middle of a phase of exchange between syncretic
cults". Better still: "we can give approximate, distinct dates for the beginning […]
of these exchanges in consonance with the complex of communication set up
between them" (p. 37). Social causes alone remained out of reach; Joel James
looks for them them in divination.
In his abrupt manner, he addresses (p. 38-39) the questions that must be asked
about the solutions that divination provides for the believer: what is the average
distance between the act of divination and obtaining an answer? What is the
breadth of the answer in each system? What are the differences projected by
divination according to whether it is addressing the present, the past or the
future, and finally what role can divinatory rites play alongside other pragmatic
cultural practices?
The practical function of divination as "the personal guardian and defence of the
believer", makes it likely "always to come out in favour of the individual, even
when making the most fateful or tragic predictions.” (p. 40). Joel James
maintains, however, that it does not rely upon a total denial of sensory reality, or
upon an imagined reality independent of factual reality, even if it neither looks
for nor needs any confirmation in factual reality.
In place of an imaginative subjection, and even if this had formerly been the case,
such a substitution of imagined reality for factual reality is decreasing, at least in
the area studied, in regard to which the field studies carried out by the Casa del
Caribe systematically addressed this aspect, for:

In its place arises - or at least we see arising - a kind of parallel presence between
factual reality and other realities no less factual even though they are intangible,
which at the time we called an aspired reality.
This aspired reality, which is one thing in the congo, another in yoruba,
another in vodú, and yet another in cordón, this reality can be assumed as
an idea of the perfect [...] and as a whole, it contains an ethicity which did
not undermine the attributes which in each case are granted to entities
held to be divine. (p. 41-42)

The aspired reality at work in current Afro-Cuban magico-religious systems is not

a substitute for factual reality, but stems from within it:

"It emphasises the attitude, one may even say the struggle for a better situation,
one which is almost always conceived of in social terms and comprises […] an
implicit criterion of perfection" (p. 42, our italics).
Thus, prosperity and the ethics of struggle (lucha) for it are part of an aspiration
which pervades the social reality of the believer, in a way which if not common to
the various rules, at least eases the exchange between them.
The role given here to the field and observation, far less classic than in the other
essay, must be highlighted, as well as the extrapolation which its diachrony
naturally opens up. One may indeed assume, behind this description of a
dimension of nascent aspired reality in the years from 1970 to 1980, the
following sequence: from being wholly clandestine, then criticized as a backward
element of Cuban society, the status of the Cuban descendant of Africans both as
a subject and as a person, turned gradually towards development and fitted into
a social and economic position.

The daily competition between realities - or ways of understanding reality

through imagination - which themselves never reached the level of ritual
practices, heralded, according to Joel James, a "confrontation between the major
conceptual adjustment and the concrete mechanisms of ceremonial solution"
(p. 42) noted again and again in studies of Afro-Cuban systems.

By contrast, in rites or ceremonies and all the more so in trances or possession,

the follower’s time passes in the present (p. 43); not because the past and the
future do not play their part, but because they are subject to the present. The
fusion of time in a hypertrophied, metaphysical and primitive present is the
crucible of the forces which will be at work:

The transmutation which is achieved through magical procedures is

effective independently of what may happen subsequently in external,
factual reality. Once the ceremonial is completed and the magical elements
fuse or crystallize, the looked-for change is achieved without the need for
external verification. (p. 44)

It is through the strength of this present that the domination of imagination is

established, the wild belief in what the imagination produces is established.
Represented reality annihilates factual reality in a complete epoché or in temporal
confusion. In represented reality nothing owns its materiality; it is the exact
opposite of factual reality and is even opposed to the aspired reality that it has
created. Materiality no longer exists at all. As in this striking passage:

A glass is not a glass, a candle is not a candle, a slit goat is not a slit goat, a
bonfire is not a bonfire, a tree is not a tree, the ground is not the ground, the wind
is not the wind, the river is not the river, man is not man, life is not life, death is
not death. (p. 45)

The keystone of the work is this gradual involvement of the spiritual in the
material which culminates in represented realities, each of which is organised
into a network of relationships in which the believer projects himself:
hierarchical and triangulated communities linking him to the entities and to the
other followers, equals or superiors, but above all a mystic space where the Gods
and the Dead communicate, negotiate and approach the living.
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