Palmira
The square of Palmira is a spacious, gleaming public space. It has few trees so it is not a place to go for shade but its soft pastel color in the bright blue day made the heat bearable. We skirted the plaza heading past the bici taxis and the cafes and bars and restaurants and kiosks and line of consumers waiting their turn, down to the first Cabildo, la Sociedad de Cristo Babalu Aye/San Lazaro, a long, freshly painted pink stucco building at the end of the street with red and white wooden posts supporting the equally long front porch. The director knocks on the white door. I stand a few feet back. Felipe Capote Sevilla, the president of the sociedad answer. The museum director warned me that he was not the most sociable of men, taciturn and serious looking but not to let that bother me.
“He’s that way with everybody,” she said.
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| Photo by Julio Larramendi https://www.juliolarramendi.com/es |
But when he greets us and the director tells him who I am, and that I’d like to pay my respects to the altar, he opens his grin and the door wide.
The altar, as tall as the high twelve-foot ceiling, stands against the right wall coming into the house. Santa Barbara rests on high, in her red and white robe, with Yemaya in her ocean blue dress and the ornate, yellow Ochun flanking just a head down. San Lazaro hobbling in his rags, a small red Chango and other colorful Orishas completed the pantheon. Fresh yellow sunflowers fill the vase at the foot. Against the back wall leading to the patio stretches a large banner: La Sociedad de Cristo Babalu Aye.
“They have events here often,” says the director. “It’s quiet now but the place explodes with music and dancing. Maybe someday you’ll be around for a fiesta.”
Felipe nods and smiles. As we leave, I turn to take Felipe’s picture against the door of the Cabildo. He wakes up to that.
“No. Por favor,” he says. “No tengo zapatos.” I have no shoes, he said pointing down at his feet.
He is wearing house slippers. Chancletas de casa.
“No debe ser asi.” Shouldn’t be this way.
I assure him that I’d take the picture from the waist up and he agrees.
A few blocks away stands La Sociedad Santa Barbara (Chango). The president of the Sociedad, a strong, large black man, NFL fullback size, lives across the side street from the Cabildo. He sat on a lawn chair near his front door wearing a New York Yankee T-shirt. Juan Gonzalez has been the president of the Sociedad for years.
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| By Julio Larramendi https://www.juliolarramendi.com/es |
“Welcome,” he says in English. “Go look, please.” He waves us over to the Cabildo.
He rises, painfully, from the chair and ambles with a notable limp. I asked the director about it as we cross the street. He had a terrible accident that destroyed his feet.
“You should have seen him a year ago,” she says. “He was a great baseball player. But the accident destroyed him. I think the Cabildo kept him alive.”
Santa Barbara, golden crowned, reigned in the large red and white high ceiling room. No doubt about it. A life size statue dominated the altar with Yemana and Ochun on pedestals to her right and left. Fresh red flowers in vases surround the pedestals. The symbol of the cabildo, a long sword crossed over a double-bladed axe, in red paint on the wall. Juan Gonzalez posed proudly in front of the altar. I take his picture. This is his house too.
He invites us back for coffee. The “Pelotero frustrado,” he describes himself as we sipped coffee in his living room.
A frustrated ball player, “That’s what I am,” he smiles. “I had a great future. Everyone said. Everyone except the ones that count.”
He points with his head across the street. Spread on the dining room table were caracoles; the divination tools of santeros. I do not ask, thinking it might be bad form, but it was obvious he was doing a consulta, a reading for himself or others.
He insists on trying out his English but stumbles. Many English speakers come to have their Santo done by him, he says in Spanish. “So I’ve picked up something.” “Thank you very much” was all that he could get out that I did not have to ask him to please repeat. I like Juan Gonzalez. He has a dignified humility about him. His damaged body radiates peace.
We continue our tour of the cabildos of Palmira to The Sociedad de San Roque, a few blocks away. The strong smell of coffee floats out a side window around the corner with the sound of men talking. A young woman peeks out the side door and recognizes the museum director.
“Can we come in? We have a visitor interested in offering his respects.”
“Claro que si. Por aquí,” she says and signaled for us to come through the kitchen. We walked through the internal patio, red terracotta floor tiles contrast strikingly with green plants and the blue, yellow, green tables and utensils. On the floor of the central patio sleeps a hairless Chinese dog, dark ash brown skin.
“They cure diseases,” says the museum director. “Especially allergies. That’s what they say.”
Especially if you are allergic to dog hair, I bet, I think to myself.
Adjacent to the altar room, eight men dressed in white prepare for a tambor, a drumming ceremony. They look up from their drums to greet us with smiles, but all attention focused on their drums.
“Bendiciones,” I say, softly walking through.
In the center up high on the altar is San Roque, or Saint Roch as he was named in French; the healer of the plague, the patron of dogs and falsely accused people. In the orisha pantheon, he is the vessel of Oke, the Orisha of hills and mountains. On the lower right was a figure in green. Ochosi, syncretized with Saint Norbert, is represented in a green tunic with a red sash, a knife in one hand and a scale, representing justice, in the other. He looks rather frayed, like a small doll who just stepped in as a stunt double for GI Joe in a savage dirt battle, but there he is. Cimarrones pleaded to Ochosi seeking his aid to escape from the rancheador and the white masters.
***
Back at the museum, the director asks me if I had a flash drive.
“I can dump some articles on Palmira into it if you do.”
She opens about a dozen windows on her ten-year-old computer, each indicating a dump of a file to the flash drive.
While waiting the eternity for the file dump to finish, I set up shop on the large wooden table in the office and work on my notes. Another staffer sits at her desk across from me and quizzes me about the States.
“Everything is very expensive, right? But there’s always something to do if you have the money, right? You can work as many jobs as you want, right?”
She has family in Florida and often considered leaving herself.
“It’s hard to stay here when I see what my family is doing in Miami. It’s so boring here. Never anything new. Never. Never. Nothing to do. Ever.”
This is a middle-aged woman, rubia de botella, a bottle blonde. She rolls her eyes to emphasize the boredom that she experiences, her tone lethargic. Her posture is defeated, leaning heavily on the table, even while seated. Her face is expressionless as she talked about emigrating, mouth moving while the rest of her face holds its shape, like one of those animated collages where lips maneuver on the Mona Lisa.
“You want to leave because you’re bored?” I ask, thinking there had to be some other reasons.
But she sticks to her story. She wants to leave this boring place where nothing new ever happens, where there is nothing to do. Where work and life and people bore her. Where, and here we peel back the onion a bit, she has no money and no way to change her days from one to the other. Everything, she says, is predictable. Always. Forever.
***
The director sighs at the computer screen filled with transferring files.
“While this is happening, let’s go visit the last Cabildo. The president is a special person. Let’s see if we can get in.”
The Cabildo Congo, Sociedad San Antonio, is in a private home. While the other three cabildos in Palmira followed the Regla de Ocha (Lukumi) tradition, the Sociedad San Antonio followed the Palo Monte tradition, as did other Congo cabildos. Back in Sagua la Grande, I received a Palero blessing at the Cabildo Kunalumbo, also dedicated to San Antonio. Here, in Palmira I want to be sure to see the San Antonio Cabildo. My mother, a completely dedicated Catholic, expressed a special love for San Antonio. Perhaps it is because thinking of San Antonio reminded her of traveling with my father. She recounted once while traveling in Italy with my father, the train stopped in Padua. My mother wanted to get off and visit the cathedral and light a candle to the relics of San Antonio. My father, who could be stubborn for no apparent reason, refused to leave the train. Long story short, my mother never forgot that event and always regretted not having lit a candle to his relics. Even with an overlay of African spirituality, I am sure that she would look at the statue of San Antonio in a Palo Monte cabildo and cross herself in prayer.
The altar at the Cabildo has three tiers, with a life size statue of San Antonio at the center of the third tier, his silver aura almost touching the roof. The statue and the altar had been in the family, in that house and in this same corner if the house since 1904. The current guardian was the son of the last one, and the grandson of the one before that. He is very protective of the space and when he answered the door needed to be convinced by the director to let me inside to pay my respects. San Antonio dominates the altar. He carries a baby Jesus dressed in white in one hand and small bouquet of white flowers in the other. Smaller status of Santa Barbara, Our Lady of Charity and other saints populated the lower tiers of the altar. On the floor are two well-worn ceremonial drums and a rainbow of vased flowers brilliant along the white wall. A ceramic profile of an American Indian in an elaborate headdress, cigar store style, hangs on the wall to San Antonio’s left
As I leave, I convinced him to allow me to take a picture. He glances at my bracelet and slightly bows.
“Bendiciones,” I say. Thinking back on it, he might have been waiting for me to offer some money for the honor. The thought crosses my mind, but it might offend him if I offered. It’s hard to know what to do sometimes.
My hostel for the night is not a hostel. Officially, they should not be renting at all, to foreigners or Cubans.
“We’re working on the paperwork now,” says the man of the house as we sit in rocking chairs facing the kitchen and the open-air center of the house.
“For now, we only rent to friends.”
He smiles slyly, a little embarrassed to tell me that my room is not ready. “The couple said they’d be out by now but...”
So we chat while the tryst runs its course.
“This is our family home.”
His in-laws live downstairs while he and his wife rent the two extra rooms in their upstairs area.
“This Camino,” he says after hearing my description of the project. “This could be a good thing for the town. Tourists always pass us by. Except for the religions in town, no one is interested in Palmira.”
This family is among the top five percenters economically, is my guess. They belong to the growing middle class (remember this is 2016) that is poised to take advantage of the growing tourist sector. Unfortunately, they are off the beaten tourist path, which is fairly narrow as it is in Cuba. But they are lucky. They have a local and well nurtured economic base. My host talks about the land they own on the outskirts of town where they have pigs and other animals that bring them a good income.
“We’re doing good,” he says as a way to wind down the discussion, “But we want to do better.”
This kind of desire to do better is what drives social change.
He gets up from his aluminum rocker. The red plastic stretch bands leaving a mark on the back of his thigh. At the end of the hallway in the upstairs patio he points to the house next door. We stand overlooking the pigpen behind the house.
“The smell is bad sometimes, but they have a good income from those pigs. Good income.” He rubs the thumb and two fingers of his right hand together. “Good income.”
The couple in my room take their sweet, damned time. I showered in a bathroom next to the kitchen while waiting and eat the delicious fish soup that the promotora cultural brought me. By the time I finally got into the bedroom I am beyond ready to relax, even though the room feels like an oven. I undress and lay on the bed, too hot to move. The smallest of windows up high above my head let the good money aroma from the pigpen filter into the room. Random roosters battled it out for hen house privileges nearby. Two swiveling fans cranked up to the max pushed masses of hot air against me in waves. I sleep soundly till dawn.
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