Afro-Cuban Catholicisms

This chapter focuses on Afro-Cuban Catholic beliefs and practices, taking an historical approach and bringing the reader up to the contemporary moment. As the chapter will demonstrate, people of African descent in Cuba have developed politically sophisticated and multivalent responses to Catholicism as ecclesia docens—the Church hierarchy in its authoritative teaching function—and to the Church as an institutional structure. Likewise, practitioners of transnational Afro-Cuban West and Central African–inspired religions have been embedded in complex relationships with Catholic theology writ large and its social inscription within the power structures of local parishes while grappling with Catholicism as a hegemonic source of cultural value. This chapter pays special attention to a mi manera (“in my own way”)—Catholics who draw on a rich and familiar history of prerevolutionary idiomatic expression in which women have been dominant and powerful figures.