Caribbean Diaspora in the USA: Diversity of Caribbean Religions in New York City

Caribbean Religions in New York City 71
not the only Afro-Cuban religion on the island though it is the most visible and most
popular. In a similar way to the Yoruba-Orisha Baptist Church, Santería is based on
Yoruba tradition because of a large number of Yoruba who were enslaved and sent to
Cuba at the end of the eighteenth century.
George Bandon divides the history of Santería into five periods. The first phase,
called by Brandon the African and Pre-Santería period (until 1760), includes the
formation of Yoruba city-states and the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade.
Shortly after the Spanish conquest in 1492 Cuba experienced an economic boom
based on sugar production where enslaved Africans and suppressed indigenous
people had to work side by side. After approximately three-quarters of a century
Spain lost its interest in sugar and focused more on South America and its gold
resources. Freed slaves as well as indigenous and White settlers were able to avoid
public control and started to settle in the centre of the island. The result was the birth
of a peasant population with a rural economy (Brandon 1993: 4). This period led to
the existence of a relatively homogeneous Creole culture.
The second phase, between 1760 and 1870, the early Santería period, started with
a sugar boom that led to increased importation of enslaved people and as a result
to the establishment of a racist slave system. Together with Africans a significant
number of indigenous people from Yucatán were imported as well as Chinese
workers, but Africans, in particular from the Benin area, constituted the largest
group. The owners of large sugar, coffee and tobacco estates became rulers of the
new society which was divided into classes. The Roman Catholic Church began
to evangelize the enslaved Africans and an early version of Santería developed
(Brandon 1993: 5). The Spanish government used the church to pacify the slaves
and allowed the mixing of Yoruba deities and Catholic saints, which, in the end,
led to the creation of new Afro-Catholic religions. Already in 1598 the first Black
cofradía, a kind of lay brotherhood, had been founded. This was protected by the
church in Cuba and enabled the enslaved Africans to gather together in order to
worship saints with dancing and singing. In the second phase, these associations
gained more importance under the pressure of the first massive slave imports. After
a while the cofradías developed into cabildos de nación, social associations whose
main function was the religious education of their members (see Sandoval 1975: 45,
Palmié 1991: 106–8 and Schmidt 1995: 251–3).
The third phase, between 1870 and 1959, is the transformative period in which
Santería was finally construed as a predominant Yoruba-Spiritist-Catholic mixture
(Brandon 1993: 5). 63 Shortly before the abolition of slavery, when the resistance became
stronger and stronger, the pressure on cabildos de nación increased until every public
procession became prohibited. After the abolition of slavery in 1886 they lost their
religious status and, as a result, the protection of the Roman Catholic Church. When
most former slaves migrated from the countryside to urban centres, they transformed
the cabildos de nación into small house temples, the casas de santos.
63 Spiritism is a French system of belief in spirits based on the beliefs of Allan Kardec,
which spread among White Cubans during the nineteenth century before it started to influence
the Afro-Cuban religion.