Santa Isabel de las Lajas
The settlement of Santa Isabel de las Lajas dates to 1800 but it was officially founded in 1824. Esteban settled in the town after the war and took part in the 1912 black revolt protesting the exclusion of blacks from national political culture. He lived in Lajas at the same time as Coronel Simeon Armenteros and other members of the Partido Independiente de Color, the national party leading the revolts. Most of the violence of the uprising took place in eastern Cuba, around Santiago, but a few bands of Independentistas stirred the pot in the Province of Santa Clara; one band attacked the northern region around Sagua la Grande and the other, led by Armenteros attacked the communication infrastructure of Cienfuegos between May and July 1912. Estaban was in this group. The uprising was quickly crushed. Esteban survived to tell the tale.[1]
If there was ever a man who loved what he did and where he did it, it is the director of the Benny Moré museum in Lajas.
“I love Lajas,” he repeated more than once in the few hours we spent together, often followed by “I love Benny More.”
He gestures out the door, “Come on. Let me show you my town.”
My low energy level and high dehydration level make me feel like a miniature version of myself, but I can’t refuse. Dual speakers secured above the door of the museum, the kind that look like megaphones and blow your hair back with sound, blare, to the edge of sound distortion, Benny singing Santa Isabel de las Lajas, the song he wrote to commemorate his town using its Christian name.
We walk towards the central plaza/square which throbs with live music and vibrates with a flurry of activity in red and white. Young school children, pioneros, in their red and white uniforms, dance and play percussion instruments to, you guessed it, a Cuban rhythm. Some with batons dancing in a circle, others wailing on the snare drums and timbales.
“There is the main church,” he says pointing past the music to the other side of the square. “It’s Catholic. But really, the new temples are the ones that are growing.”
“What kind of temples?” I ask.
“Different Christian groups. I’m no expert in Christian religions. People set them up in their own houses. Down that street,” he points, “where we’re headed, two houses have regular reunions. Started a couple of years ago.”
We headed to the cemetery to see the marble tomb of Benny More. Moré was known as El Barbaro del Ritmo(the Madman of Rhythm). He started locally, made a name for himself in Central America and by the 1950s was internationally known as the most popular male singer in Cuban. Had it not been for his fear of flying, developed after running into the unfortunate luck of experiencing three plane accidents while touring Central America, he would have been a huge star. As it was, he is known and revered in the U.S. and throughout Latin America for his pitch perfect soulful mastery of boleros, sons and mambo rhythms. One of his most famous songs, which I heard him singing as I walked out of the museum, immortalized his hometown in Cuban popular culture.
Lajas, mi rincón querido
pueblo donde yo nací,
Lajas, traigo para ti
este, mi cantar sentido.
Siempre fuiste distinguido
por tus actos tan sinceros
tus hijos, son caballeros
y tus mujeres altivas
por eso grito que viva
mi Lajas con sus lajeros.[2]
My host shakes his head as he talked about Benny.
“Lajas is getting short changed,” he laments. “Cienfuegos wants to claim him. He helped the Orquesta Aragon get started in Cienfuegos and for that they claim him. They have a statue on El Prado and museum to him too. And since they’re the capital of the province, they dominate. But we’re the one that know him the best. The tourists that go to Cienfuegos...I’m sure that they all think he’s from there.” He shakes his head with as somber an attitude as he can muster, “More was a born and raised Lajero.”
To show me how true that was, we jump on a passing horse drawn buggy and headed to the Casino Congo San Antonio in the barrio La Guinea where Benny More was raised. The casino, or cabildo as the Congo place of worship is also known, was built in 1886 in the barrio La Guinea by former slaves from the Tomas Terry sugar mill in Caracas who settled in Lajas. Benny’s family belonged to the Congo ethnic group that had such a powerful presence in this region. In all of Cienfuegos Province and Villa Clara too, the director assures me, the Congos ruled, echoing what Estaban mentioned to Miguel about Villa Clara being known as the “Congeria,” back in the day. Benny heard the music of the casino as a kid, says my guide.
“All the rhythms of the bodies and the drums and all the instruments every night practically of his young life,” he says excitedly. “The dances, the singing and dancing of the bantu rhythms of the makuta, all played a part in the development of Benny’s musical sensitivity.”
I remember that my historian friend from Cienfuegos, Orlando, wrote about the Moré line and its linkages to afro-Cuban rituals. “The mother of Benny Morè, Patricia, is the daughter of the first leader of the Congos in Lajas,” he told me. “She moved Benny into the barrio La Guinea when he was five or six. From then on, the Casino and its ritual life influence him very strongly.”
The Santera in charge of the Cabildo, at least who seems in charge, stands like a colorful totem at the door of the Cabilido when we drive up. Next to her is a white man in a neatly pressed guayabera. After a quick word with the museum director, she asks me to follow her into the ritual room. The original drums of the 19th Century makuto rituals stand in the corner and are played once a year during the June 12 and 13 celebrations to San Antonio, she explains letting her palm of her right hand clear the air in front of the drums. She is dressed in a long leopard skin pattern dress with a black head binding and a necklace dangling with blue, white and brown quartz and jewels. To the right of the drums, a six-foot statue of St. Anthony brought from Italy by Tomas Terry in 1880s stands above a blue altar layered with flowers in vases.
The director of the Cienfuegos Benny More museum, the man in the guayabera at the door, is visiting the Casino. I get the impression that all of the frustration expressed by my host, about how Cienfuegos has coopted Benny More, are personified in this director of the Cienfuegos museum. He talks eagerly about the walk.
“Orlando told me all about it,” he says. “It’s fascinating. Just what we need.”
The Santera leads me outside by the arm.
“I want you to see the entrance rock. The sacred rock,” She points to a large, polished grey stone next to the wooden steps leading from the street to the porch of the casino.
“Coming in, you touch it, kiss it. Acknowledge it however you want,” she says. “It’s the custom. This is the Piedra del Santo Patron. It was brought from Africa by one of our slave ancestors.”
Ignoring how unlikely it is that a slave managed to tuck a holy stone in his luggage while being dragged off in chains from the homeland, I run my hand over the smooth stone. How many hundreds of thousands of people have touched this stone? It reminds me of the column at the entrance of the Santiago cathedral in Spain where pilgrims place their hands on the deeply indented base of the column and touch their head three times on the column body to let the genius of the cathedral architect penetrate their brain. After millions of hands touching the column, an inverted stone palm that seemed to fit all hands has emerged to welcome visitors.
“I will see you in a few days,” says the director of the Benny More museum in Cienfuegos. He and my Lajas host did not exchange a word the entire time. The Benny Moré rivalry runs deep, it seems.
We make our way back to the administrative offices of Cultura and freshen enough to feel normal in a bathroom where all plumbing works as intended, including mine. The cold sweats that accompanied my stomach cramps persist though, and I avoid liquids. It worked, as far as reducing my visits to the toilet, but I feel inordinately beaten up, like I have been used as a batá drum for an all-night San Antonio celebration.
I tell the promotora of Lajas that I would like to walk to Ciego.
“Forget about that,” she says. “You look very weak and I’m under orders to put you on transportation.”
“Ok. But can you find me a mule that can pull me along the same terraplén that I would walk?”
“That we can do. Stay in the air conditioning here and I’ll set it up.”
***
Within half an hour I am sitting behind a mule’s ass on my way to Ciego Montero. A staffer from Cultura rides with me and the driver.
[1] Esteban makes an appearance in Barnet’s second testimonial novel, Canción de Raquel (1969). Some of the interview material not included in Biography of a Run Away Slave is included in Canción to highlight the racist policies of the new, U.S. controlled government of the early Cuban Republic (the so called pseudo Republic). Esteban speaks of his participation in the uprising: “And what the hell did they think—that we were going to surrender peacefully, that we were going to hand in our weapons and pull down our pants? Nothing of the sort…But when was it that in this country the people were offered a program more democratic than that of the Independientes de Color, when we fought hand to hand to gain benefits for blacks and came out of the war barefooted and in rags, hungry…”
[2] “Lajas, my dear corner of the world/town where I was born/Lajas, I bring to you/My song with feeling/You were always distinguished/for your sincerity/your men are gentlemen/and your women haughty/that's why I yell long live/my Lajas with its lajeros” (author’s lame translation)
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