Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.7.2.0270
• Published date: 01 December 2015
• Date: 01 December 2015
• Pages: 270338216-272
• Author: Paul Barrett

270 BOOK REVIEWS

InternatIonal Journal of Cuban StudIeS 7.2 WInter 2015

Diana Espirito Santo, Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in

Cuban Espiritismo (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015) cloth

338pp. ISBN: 9780813060781

Kristine Juncker, Afro-Cuban Religious Arts: Popular Expressions of Cultural

Inheritance in Espiritismo and Santería (Gainesville, FL: University Press of

Florida, 2014) cloth 216pp. ISBN: 9780813049700

Reviewed by Paul Barrett

If you thought that religious practices in Cuba were more or less the same as in

the rest of Central and South America, these two books published by University

Press of Florida quickly dispel these misapprehensions.

Although Cuba’s most widespread religion is Christianity, primarily Roman

Catholicism, in some cases it has been greatly reshaped by syncretism. As is

widely known, the most popular of these syncretic religions is Santería, which

combines the Yoruba religion of the African slaves with Catholicism and some

Native American elements. It includes the worship of the Orisha – head guard-

ians – and religious beliefs of the Yoruba and Bantu people who inhabited what

is now Southern Nigeria, Senegal and Guinea Coast. These are combined with

elements of Roman Catholicism. Arriving as slaves in the Caribbean, Santerians

preserved the elements of their religion by equating each Orisha of their tradi-

tional religions with a corresponding Christian Saint. However, as well as the

syncretic religions, what is less widely known is a widespread adherence to a

form of communicating with the spirit world known as espiritismo.

Diana Espirito Santo’s book Developing the Dead, first, takes this on with a

confidence which is based on extensive fieldwork among espiritistas and their

patrons in Havana, and she makes the compelling espiritistas that Spiritist prac-

tices are basically a project of developing the self. Diana’s name in itself is inter-

esting, meaning Holy Spirit, and I presume that this is not a nom de plume. But,

for me, the project of developing the self is a concept that is not an easy one to

grasp. However, Diana, assistant professor of social anthropology at the Institute

of Sociology, Pontifical, Universidad Catolica de Chile, has taken on the subject

with confidence and puts the whole topic with great ease into the political frame-

work of Cuba, right from the early days of the revolution, through the desperate

days of Cuba’s break with the Soviet Union after its break-up, right to the pres-

ent day. I found explaining this political background to be extremely useful,

especially how, initially, all forms of religion were frowned upon by the socialist

government, principally because the Catholic Church in Cuba colluded with the

US in smuggling out children from the island so that they would not be con-