Photography and Knowledge Production in the Cabildo de Regla: Methodological Considerations

June 2, 2021

Written by Alexandra P. Gelbard

Originally Published on June 1, 2021

Photographs provide a key function within the Cabildo de Regla project in both understanding the historical tradition and documenting its re-initiation. Archival materials, especially photographs, serve as visual prompts to illuminate the few descriptive accounts provided by both written and oral history sources. Photographs provide a “two-dimensional representation of scenes captured with lenses and frozen in a fraction of a second. From the instant of exposure, the photograph recedes into the distance of time.”¹ Photographs capture momentary frames that help shape the production of historical narratives but are also subjected to the intention of the photographer. They allow us to visually imagine the temporal layers of a space tracing a lineage connecting our identities within a specific boundary we conceptualize as place. This medium facilitates our ability to see selections of people within an ever-forming past, but in that process, allows the dynamics of power to reveal themselves showing much more than just the bound moment of time captured on photo paper brought to fruition by emulsive alchemy.

When I initially met with Raisa and Juan, director and curator at the Museum Regla in May of 2016, they showed me the photographs of famous Cuban photographer Roberto Salas, who documented what would ultimately be the last Cabildo de Yemaya processional of the 20th century on September 9, 1961. We discussed the existing research, particularly that of Pedro Cosme Baños, historian and founding director of the Regla Museum. Although Cosme Baños had done tremendous research on the history of Regla’s African presence and cabildos, he never really shared his work and passed away before he could publish a lot of it. With the idea that I would return in September with a professional photographer to capture high-quality visual images of the processional, Juan asked that there be a mix of descriptive documentary, artistic, and replicative images of archival photographs. His idea was to take the images of the past, and attempt to replicate them in the present, a technique called “rephotograph” creating a “photographic diptych that spans an intervening period of time […] act[ing] like bookends to the time in between, and the combination raises questions about what is not seen as well as what is seen in either photo.”² We’ve incorporated this technique throughout the 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 processionals.

Image of the processional of the Cabildo de Yemaya from inside the Regla Government building sometime in the 1930s-50s. The photographer and specific date are unknown. Photo from the Museum of Regla archives.

Rephoto image of the 2018 Cabildo de Regla Processional from inside the Regla Government building where Ochun is visible. Photo by Ained Cala, 2018.

Image of the old Cabildo de Yemaya processional leaving the cemetery sometime between the 1930s-50s. The photographer and specific date are unknown. Photo from the Museum of Regla archives.

Rephoto image from 2019 of the Cabildo de Regla as it leaves the cemetery. Photo by Ained Cala, 2019.

The use of photography in this project can be thought of in three overlapping arenas: as an archive for the community, as artistic interpretations, and as a visual data set for qualitative research. Our team members, Amberly Alene Ellis of Film for the People (photography and video), Ained Cala (photography and video), Yoandry Valdes (video), and myself (photography and video) embrace these intentions simultaneously. The photographic approaches of both Amberly and Ained encapsulate artistic and documentary styles; they both also center the people, creations, and the integrity of the people of the African Diaspora in their individual work as artists. This orientation was important to me in building a team because of the larger dynamics of exotification that permeates photographic portrayals of Cuba and its African Diasporic influences.

The relationship between photography and Cuba maintains historical and contemporary complexities; a thorough discussion of these dynamics is beyond the scope of this essay, though some key aspects are engaged here. Part of Cuba’s exotified marketing to the world is as a “photographer’s dream,” with photography tourism trips advertised throughout the internet. Pop-up photography exhibitions, photography books, and documentaries can be found throughout North America and Europe. One young girl who lives along El Prado in Havana, a popular walkway with benches and trees leading from the capital building down to the Malecon (seafront), recounted to a colleague of mine that she consistently has foreign tourists taking her photo without her consent. She articulated that the Prado is the closest and widest space for her and her friends to play out of the house and street, but that tourists constantly photograph them, which she doesn’t like at all.³ Over the last two years, both Cubans from the island and more so, Cuban Americans have permeated Instagram as influencers, visually portraying some of the “standard” imagery of Cuba: the classic Ford cars, views of Havana’s Malecon (seawall), and old buildings. Reflections of “Afro-Cuba” through scenes at Callejon Hamel,⁴ folkloric presentations of Orisha, batá tambores, Abakuá Iremes historically described as ñañigos,⁵ rumba performances, and older Black Cuban women smoking thick cigars adorned in collares—or “santería beads” as they are typically described in the hundreds of magazine articles and blog sites perpetuating generalized and sometimes inaccurate descriptions of Cuba’s African Diasporic history. These women now situate themselves along popular tourist areas of Old Havana charging up to the equivalent of $20 to have their photo taken as tourism has become the primary GDP for Cuba since the mid-2000s, and their portraits are some of the most common visual images appearing in internet searches on Afro-Cuban, -religion, -folklore, and -women.

Photography, the social sciences, and the Initiation of AfroCuban Studies

Photography, as a methodological tool, arose at the same time as the discipline of sociology around the late 1830s; both facilitated the documentation of, “observable quantifiable facts, recorded by scientists and experts, would one day offer [hu]man[s] such a total knowledge about nature and society that [t]he[y] would be able to order them both.”⁶ By the 1860’s, photography became a popular documentation tool used by journalists to reflect social realities. Within the burgeoning disciplines of anthropology and sociology, photographic catalogs were also used to legitimate scientific racism, colonization, and manifest destiny. Since large amounts of data could be gathered from photographic images, it became a popular data-gathering technique, especially as anthropology informed colonizing governments about the populations and land they sought to exploit.⁷. In the case of Cuba, one example can be found in a two-volume set called Our Islands and Their People as Seen with Camera and Pencil (1899) produced by U.S. Major-General Joseph Wheeler, which served as a visual catalog of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawaii. These large books, ”combines high art with descriptive and statistical fact of the greatest practical value […] and with the wonder-producing possibilities of those possessions” in the aftermath of the Spanish-(Cuban)-American War.“⁸ Photographic series produced by North American and European photographers contributed a visual exploration of “exotic” spaces and places throughout the mid-19th through 20th centuries, amplifying the well-established Euro-Western “travel narrative” genre, which:

Gave [the] European [and North American] reading public a sense of ownership, entitlement, and familiarity with respect to the distant parts of the world that were being explored, invaded, invested in, and colonized. Travel books were very popular. They created a sense of curiosity, excitement, adventure, and even moral fervor about European [and North American] expansionism […] one of the key instruments that made people “at home” in Europe feel part of a planetary project; a key instrument, in other words, in creating the “domestic subject” of empire.⁹

While many of these same exploitive and exotifying dynamics are still evoked today within travel photography in Cuba, it does not define all photographers or visitors. Beginning in the early 20th century, but really taking hold in the late 1940s, Anthropologists and sociologists began to challenge the exploitive nature of photography within their respective disciplines. Ethical questions and standards are discussed within publicly accessible magazines and journals; while there are many people who do evoke ethical standards for consent and privacy, there are also many who don’t.

Within Cuba, the use of photography became an integral part of justifying the scientific and biologistic racism that dominated the Eurocentric worldview and became a tool used in the criminalization of Black Cubans and African-inspired practices.¹⁰ Henri Dumont, a medical doctor who studied enslaved Black Cubans laboring on plantations throughout the Havana and Matanzas provinces of Western Cuba from 1864-1866 to develop immunization practices, began utilizing “ethnographic” research methods in his approach, which ultimately caught the attention of the Anthropological Society of Paris. Dumont is credited with being the first to use photography as a tool to “classify” racial typologies of African Diaspora members in Cuba. This data was then used in the initial formation of Cuba’s anthropology program as a baseline data set expanded upon by the initial scholars embracing Lombrosian ideology, such as Fernando Ortiz and his “disciple,” Israel Castellanos.¹¹

As discussed in the historical blog, the cabildo processional tradition of Regla was a critical site for researchers in the bifurcation and compartmentalization of African ways of life into Afro-Cuban Folklore (as culture) and Afro-Cuban Religion. Fernando Ortiz, the Cuban lawyer turned social scientist, began his study of Cuba’s African influences at the beginning of its independence in the twentieth century. He initially embraced the Lombrosian school of thought, “characterized by a social Darwinism that considered popular culture to be savage, archaic, and disassociated from the scientific and social progress that defined the educated sector of society.”¹² In turn, this framework perpetuated white supremacist ideologies of Black criminality and scientific racism, and criminalized expressions of Africanity. This process intertwined the initial formation of Cuba’s social science programs with police persecution of African-inspired religious practices; the catalog of ritual items confiscated in these police raids became the foundation for the Department of Anthropology’s artifact collection. But the use of photography in this process also came to be a central component in both the criminal persecutions and anthropological study of Cuba’s African-inspired religious practices.

One of the most well-known contributors to this process was Israel Castellanos. Some refer to him as a disciple of Ortiz, others as a colleague, ultimately Castellanos was emphatically committed to the Lombrosian criminality framework, becoming the most prominent criminologist of Cuba.¹³ Castellanos used photography as a key method for his anthropometric approach to biologistic racism and sociocultural classifications of Black Cubans; this included a “positivist obsession” embodied within the 1929 publication of La delincuencia femenina en Cuba. Estadisticas judiciales, penitenciaras y clinicas gráficas criminológicas (Female Delinquency in Cuba. Judicial Statistics, Penitentiaries, and Clinical Graphics of Criminology), a study of criminality and women that used 400 photographs taken to analyze their bio-physical presentations.¹⁴ For Castellanos, “photography appears as a transparent writing of nature [it] becomes the only mediation between the ‘natural’ reality of types and classes and the truth of science as systemization and hierarchization of these categories.”¹⁵ Castellanos used Alphonse Bertillon’s approach for criminal identification, integrating photography, anthropometry, quantitative statistics, and physiognomy; this required a “standardized” photographic frame with front and profile shots to create concise images for analysis. His consistent writing perpetuated an association between African-inspired religious practices and criminality, also fostering an obsessive maligning of one of the most visible advocates for the legitimacy and integrity of Lucumí practice: Silvestre Erice. Upon Erice’s death in September 1915, Castellanos took the opportunity to further espouse “painfully condescending and racist remarks” about Erice at the moment of his death, and again within Castellanos’ memoir. It is unclear if Castellanos and/or the press published photos of Erice’s body from his funeral, however, the disrespect towards Erice in the press would be rampant enough that it would trigger similar feelings amongst the Lucumí community over thirty years later at the funeral for Pepa Herrera-Echú Bí.¹⁶ Castellanos’ fixation on race, gender, sexuality, and criminality through the use of a systematized method for studying photographs ultimately failed in its goal to prove biological factors of criminality, yet his “penitentiary anthropology” continued to be embedded within the Cuban system minimally through 1959.¹⁷The rhetoric inflicted violence on not only the people who appeared within the images but also upon the larger community of practitioners of Lucumí religion.

Although Ortiz’s first publication of Los Negros Brujos in 1906 became a handbook for the criminal persecution of Black Cubans and Africanity, sometime in the early 1910s Ortiz began trying to shift his intellectual perspective toward cultural relativism. This perspective was common within the anthropological discourse of the time as a response to Euro-Western universality. Although the intention was there, the specific process of how Ortiz shifted away from the biologistic racism embedded within Lombrosian criminality and how it manifested empirically is subjectively interpreted by how much leeway one can give to the process of resocializing one’s worldview within a white supremacy framework. To extricate one’s taken-for-granted assumptions and value judgments when one has been socialized from within the hegemonic worldview of a given social order, especially when that worldview is embedded in white supremacy, takes time and active, self-reflection to address unconscious bias. The process of what we now call reflexivity, to honestly and critically engage in self-awareness to understand one’s positionality, the integrated processes of critically engaging in cognitive self-awareness to understand how one is socially situated, viewed, perceived within the world, is an essential part of understanding how one impacts the process of research. While this has become standard practice in qualitative field research, it did not yet exist in the early part of the 20th century. In examining these processes of knowledge production, it is an important dynamic to situate and understand in its absence when excavating the formulations of ideas that have now become canonized within studies of Cuba’s African presence.

Considered the initiator of Afro-Cuban Studies, Ortiz centered research on the African-inspired cultural expressions present in Cuba. After meeting Fernando Guerra, secretary of the Sociedad de Protección Mutua y Recreo del Culto Africano Lucumí, Sta “Bárbara” in 1909, letter correspondence between the two in 1911, shows the attempt to appeal incorporating Ortiz into the organizational framework by offering him the position of honorary president, the same honorific given to Adechina in the late 19th century. Ortiz also provided advice on how to legally acquire authorization to conduct rituals with the use of batá drums and not be raided by the police. Within this correspondence, Guerra began using the language of “Christian Lucumí morality” to both situate the Lucumí practice as a respectable and legal religion under the Cuba constitution and as Stephan Palmié argues, “shrewdly maneuvering to co-opt Ortiz’s considerable public authority and inscribe their Sociedades’ beliefs and ritual practices into a larger project of self-consciously modern Cuban nation-building.” Although it appears Ortiz had already begun his intellectual position prior to the 1912 Partido Independiente de Color (PIC) (Independent Party of Color) uprising and the subsequent massacre of at least 3,000 Black Cubans, the aftermath marks a point of his turn. In a 1914 response to salacious attempts by the press to discredit Ortiz for visiting the Lucumí cabildos of Guerra and Silvestre Erice, Guerra announced to the press that Ortiz had indeed spent time within the ritual context of the Lucumí “without dirtying his white hands” in order to incorporate the Lucumí into the nationhood project, although Ortiz never fully commented on the extent of his involvement within that ritual context.¹⁸ Ortiz’s publications in the 1920s through the mid-1930s still included maligning commentary reflecting a position that African-inspired religious and cultural forms like Lucumí/Regla de Ocha (Santería) and the conga-comparsa street processionals were “cultural regressions.”¹⁹ Julio Le Riverend’s analysis of Ortiz’s work argues the shift solidified in 1925 when Ortiz began framing Cuba’s African-inspired practices within a nationalistic approach.²⁰ Yet in 1926, at the bequest of newly elected President Gerardo Machado—who was an ardent supporter of social science as a catalyst for modernity and especially the study of criminology—Ortiz produced a new penal code for Cuba, centering positivist Italian criminology as guiding policy.²¹ Although Ortiz did shift his scholarship towards recognizing and advocating for the African component of Cuban culture to become respected, that change also deserves to be contextualized within the larger context of the Afrocubanismo movement.²² Ortiz’s work defining the African contribution to Cuba’s national identity and culture ultimately situated the Lucumí at the top of a hierarchy while still maintaining that practices associated with Cuba’s West Central African population—generalized as Congos— and the Abakuá as still “primitive” and regressive.

Between the period of 1916 and the early 1930s, Ortiz actively engaged with a plethora of Lucumí communities, attending ceremonies and events. Ortiz must have connected with Pepa Herrera-Echú Bí sometime between 1911 and 1916, attending the processional of the Cabildos Yemaya in Regla once it began its 20th-century iteration in 1921.²³ The association with Echú Bí and her community was central to Ortiz’s understanding and writings about Lucumí, but more specifically about the batá drums. In 1923, Ortiz founded the Sociedad del Folklore Cubano, in conjunction with the journal Archivos del Folklore Cubano. This journal published the work of the “most illustrious members of Cuba’s intelligencia” but ultimately did not receive financial support from the Cuban government, going defunct in 1930.²⁴ While this journal demarcated the first publications dedicated to Afro-Cuban Studies, comprising nearly one-fourth of its published material.²⁵ In 1937, Ortiz founded the Sociedad de Estudios Afrocubanos (Society of Afrocuban Studies) and the organization’s journal Estudios Afrocubanos (Afrocuban Studies) with a specific focus on the relationship between Black Cubans and national culture, but unfortunately faced, “long pauses in production, including a four-year hiatus between 1941 and 1944, incomplete studies, deficient finances, a relatively significant circle of readers, and a change in the main editorship.” Notable members, in addition to Ortiz serving as its president, included Nicolás Guillén, Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, Israel Castellanos, Amadeo Roldán, Ramón Guirao, and Romulo Lachateñere.²⁶

*The cover of the “Sociedad de Estudios Afrocubanos” journal. Photo by Alexandra P. Gelbard, 2013.*

In conjunction with Ortiz’s continuing attempts to shift his worldview and scholarship, two key events in the late 1930s through the end of the 1940s demonstrated the approach he would now take in articulating the relationship of the African Diaspora within Cuba, its impact on national, and social identities. First, the May 30, 1937, presentation of the batá and accompanying lecture at the Insitución Hispanocubana de Cultura marked the first time the batá drums played in an institutionally recognized “high culture” context, by Eurocentric standards, featuring drummers Pablo Roche-Okilápka, Raúl Díaz, and a third drummer who was either Trinidad Torregrosa or Jesus Perez (there are conflicting reports), but all associated with Echú Bí’s community.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. “Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz lecturing on Afro-Cuban music, assisted by three Black Cuban drummers playing batá drums, before a White audience in Havana, Cuba, on May 30, 1937” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed May 4, 2021. *https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/160580f0-b0d2-0133-0439-00505686a51c*

Additionally, 4 akpuóns (ritually consecrated singers), and a twenty-person chorus identified as the Luluyonkori troupe also performed.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. “Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz presenting a Luluyonkori troupe of Cuban Black and mixed-race singers, dancers and drummers to demonstrate the African cultural traits in the Black population of Cuba, before a White audience in Havana, Cuba, May 30, 1937” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed May 4, 2021. *https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/788570e0-b0d1-0133-0271-00505686a51c*

Ortiz’s presentation situated the batá drums and Lucumí as, “the most civilized in West Africa […] the most advanced religion, and their myths and arts have given rise to ideas about their intimate relations with the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean.”²⁷

The second event occurred on November 28, 1939, when Ortiz delivered a lecture to members of the Iota-Eta fraternity at the University of Havana called “The Human Factors of Cubanidad.”²⁸ In this presentation, Ortiz introduced his conceptual definitions of cubanidad, cubanía, and the now sedimented metaphor of Cuban identity and social formation, the ajiaco stew. Here, Ortiz defined cubanidad as, “the specific quality of a culture, the culture of Cuba […] a condition of the soul, a complex of feelings, ideas, and attitudes.” A paragraph later, Ortiz begins to flush out the concept of cubanía: “a cubanidad that is full, felt, conscious, and desired; a responsible cubanidad, a cubanidad with the three virtues said to be theological: faith, hope, and love.”²⁹ He then introduced the metaphor of the ajiaco to describe this process of Cuba’s social formation as a continuously cooking:

Heterogeneous conglomerate of diverse races and cultures […] that stir up, mix with each other and disintegrate into one single social bubbling. And there, on the bottom of the pot, is a new mass already settled out, produced by the elements that, when they disintegrated into the historic boil, were laying down as sediments their most tenacious essences in a rich and deliciously-garnished mixture. It already has its own character of creation. Mestizaje of kitchens, mestizaje of races, mestizaje of cultures. Dense broth of civilization that boils up on the Caribbean cookfire.³⁰

The following year in 1940, Ortiz published Contrapunto Cubano del tabaco y el azúcar introducing the concept of transculturation, which solidified this mestizaje concept and ajiaco metaphor into the Western hemispheric social science discourse of the mid-twentieth century. In a conversation ultimately driven by U.S. anthropology to understand social formation processes of African-derived cultural expressions within the Americas, Melville Herskovits subsequently introduced the concepts of acculturation, assimilation, and syncretism.³¹ In response to these ideas, Ortiz introduced the concept of transculturation as an alternative to acculturation, which he argued did not fully capture the “highly varied phenomena that have come about in Cuba as a result of the extremely complex transmutations of culture that have taken place here.” He defined transculturation as a series of “intermeshed” processes, which involves, “the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as deculturation […] the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called neoculturation.”³² In the description of this process, the first phase involved the formation of general categories defined as Spanish, African, Native (Indian), and Chinese, created from a multitude of populations within each category. However, he frames the process of creating these categories within “deculturation” and situates equitable “loss” and “trauma” amongst them all, including those Iberians and Europeans whose heritage still maintained hegemonic power.

This concept and the formation of the African category, encompass generalizable regions on the African continent. These include Senegambia/Upper Guinea; the West African “Gold Coast”; the Bight of Benin/Cross River Region; West Central Africa; and South Eastern Africa/Mozambique, included thousands of autonomous identity groups, which became subsumed into larger categories and/or had categories imposed upon them. Furthermore, this included African Diasporic groups from the West African Coastal islands (such as Cape Verde or Sao Tomé), AfroIberians, and from within the Americas (such as Haiti and Jamaica). In the current scholarship on these African Diaspora identities sometimes their Africanity is negated, such as in the case of AfroIberians for example, with an assumption that because their last port of embarkation was within the European continent, this equated assimilation into Hispanic ways of being, therefore negating their Africanity.³³ These processes of diasporic movement, which sociologist Ruth Simms Hamilton describes as the circulatoriness phenomenon, are complex and historically nuanced aspects of understanding the broader African Diaspora as a global phenomenon.³⁴ Understanding the “routes of passage” that catalyzed the dispersion and processes of (re)forming identities within the diaspora, including within Cuba, deserves a more nuanced analysis than the term “intermeshed transculturation” suggests.

As Ortiz continued to research and publish on this transculturation concept, Afro-Cuban culture, and Afro-Cuban religion, Regla would continue to be a key locale for his research as he positioned himself as a gatekeeper between the Lucumí community and the larger Hispano-Cuban-Creole hegemonic order. An article in the July 27, 1947, issue of Bohemia magazine describing the events of Pepa Herrera-Echú Bí’s death rites in 1947, notes Ortiz in attendance at her cabildo house, placing him just inside the doorway of the home, but not within the ritual activity conducted in her honor. Given the immense crowds of the Lucumí community in addition to spectators, this positioning of Ortiz is a strong reflection of his relationship to the larger Lucumí community: as a gatekeeper to the outside, but just inside the door of the Lucumí’s world. According to the article, Ortiz was asked to speak once the funeral moved from the cabildo to the cemetery, where he spoke of her honesty, integrity, the “purity of her beliefs, and charitable spirit.” Ortiz’s words framed their relationship as a great friendship spanning over thirty years, and that she had always “spoken to him, with great confidence about the religious traditions of the Lucumí.”³⁵ This act and his words have been taken to be the prevailing understanding of Ortiz’s positionality and rapport based on his articulation with both Echú Bí and the Lucumí community. However, Oba Miguel “Willie” Ramos states:

The bond between Ortiz and Eshú’bí, if oral historians are correct, was never a close one, though he benefited from the relationship in several ways. Eshú’bí is remembered as a very quiet, inexpressive woman, who would not speak unless it was necessary. Like her ancestors, she was just as mysterious and secretive about religious details and ritual knowledge. It is doubtful that she collaborated with Ortiz, as she seldom shared any information with her own godchildren. Opportunistically, at Eshú’bí’s funeral, Ortiz posed for a photograph before the casket, in front of a floral arrangement that he had sent. In addition, photos were taken of Eschú’bí in her casket, reminiscent of what his colleague Israel Castellanos had done when Silvestre Erice passed. For the Lucumís, the pictures were very distasteful, but for Ortiz, these could have served various purposes, as it placed him in his role as an ethnographer at the funeral of one of Cuba’s last connections to Africa and the Lucumí ancestors.³⁶

While Ortiz’s public portrayal of his relationship with Echú Bí clearly contradicted the perception of Ramos’s interview respondents who were members of the Regla Lucumí practitioner community, it appears that Ortiz’s self-described positionality and rapport were not necessarily an accurate one as Ortiz’s actions at the funeral demonstrate the use of photography as a mechanism to prove legitimacy regardless of the community’s wishes. The Bohemia article also published a large, close-up photograph of Echú Bí laying in her coffin at the funeral, which was likely viewed as disrespectful as well, particularly since the press and photography played such a critical role in the criminalization and exploitation of Black Cubans.

There are two other scholars at this time who deserve discussion within the initial formation of Afro-Cuban Studies, due to their relationship to Regla as a research site, and the use of photography: Romulo Lachatañeré and Lydia Cabrera. While Ortiz may have established a path for Afro-Cuban Studies, his focus on culture and clear bias towards the religiosity of African Diasporic phenomena within Cuba, expressed as the continued use of the term “brujeria” was ultimately challenged by first Lachatañeré and then Cabrera in their respective work³⁷ (even with the problematics within Cabrera’s later corpus of writing).

Romulo Lachatañeré, the grandson of Cuban Independence War General Flor Crombet, was born in Oriente (eastern) Cuba in 1909 and moved to Havana in 1927 to study pharmacology at the University of Havana, from which he graduated in 1929. While in Havana and working at the Institute for Venereal Diseases, Lachatañeré became an organizer for the Cuban Communist Party. At this time, he also developed interest in the active research program on Afro-Cuban culture and religion through his friendship with Nicolás Guillén, one of the central figures and initiators of the Afrocubanismo movement.³⁸

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. “Romulo Lachatañeré, self-portrait” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed June 1, 2021. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/a536ff51-9089-86cf-e040-e00a18067f1b

Lachatañeré joined the Society for Afrocuban Studies in 1936, the same year as his first publications in the journal Adelante.³⁹ These ethnographic-fiction pieces interpreted Lucumí spirituality within a literary form in line with similar production found within the Afrocubanismo movement, and would serve as the basis for his first book, ¡Oh Mio, Yemaya!: cuentos y cantos negros (1938).⁴⁰ The patakis (spiritual parables used within ritual practices) were almost all derived from a single Iyalorisha of Yemaya in Regla.⁴¹ With the book dedicated to Panchita Cardenas⁴² the references back to Regla are clear, emphasizing its importance as a site for research. In this year, Lachatañeré also left for the U.S. after being arrested and imprisoned under the Machado regime, moving to New York City where his scholarship and identity reconfigured within a framework of African Diasporic and AfroLatinidad.⁴³

While in New York, Lachatañeré published the original version of “El sistema religioso de los lucumís y otras influencias africanas en Cuba” in volume 3 of Estudios Afrocubanos, released across three volumes of the journal in 1939, 1940, and 1945-46.⁴⁴ In this work, Lachatañeré first critiqued the racism inherent within Ortiz’s writing on African-inspired religious practices, in particular, the use of “brujería” and correctly frames it as “discriminatory.”⁴⁵ Rather than humble himself to his own contributions in perpetuating the racism and violence associated with the term, Ortiz opted into an explanatory rationalization absolving himself.⁴⁶ Lachatañeré then published the Manual de santería in 1941, in addition to many other essays. By the time of Wilfredo Lam’s 1949 visit to New York, Lachatañeré had also developed a serious interest in photography, incorporating it into his research on the African Diasporic presence in New York and Puerto Rico. Tragically, Lachatañeré died in a plane crash leaving Puerto Rico on April 11, 1952.⁴⁷ His legacy remains an essential part of scholarship on Cuba’s African presence, Afrolatinidad, and the African Diaspora.

Lydia Cabrera also became one of the most well-known contributors to Afro-Cuban studies, though there are significant debates amongst scholars since the 1950s as to the methodological legitimacy of her work despite its rampant popularity and accessibility.⁴⁸ While many have written about her, and her work is easily found, she did not focus her research on Regla. As a wealthy, white, privileged Cuban woman, Cabrera’s attraction to “exotic primitivism” began during her experiences in Paris during the 1920s-30s. Her experiences with Black Cubans began with her nanny, Tata Tula, and a seamstress Teresa-Omí Tomí, who would become one of Cabrera’s key respondents in her ethnographic research.⁴⁹ Most of her ethnographic work centered in Pogolotti, the racially mixed working-class suburban neighborhood near the wealthy white neighborhood of La Quinta San José in Mariano. Due to her connection to Fernando Ortiz (her brother-in-law), and her father’s career in publishing, she was around the burgeoning scene of those positioned as intellectuals at the core of the formation of Afro-Cuban Studies, even attending the inauguration of the Sociedad de Folklore Cubano in 1923.⁵⁰ Cabrera published her first book, Les contes nègres de Cuba (1936), a collection of fictional interpretations of African-based parables set as “rustic Cubans and the occasional talking animal” presented as folklore, or as Cabrera herself stated, “[the book was] a re-encounter with the world of fantasy of [her] early childhood.”⁵¹This volume was subsequently re-published in Spanish as Cuentos negros de Cuba (1940).⁵² Ortiz found this contribution valuable because of the way he conceptualized folkloric expressions as a manifestation of Cubanidad and therefore Cuban nationhood.⁵³ Cabrera began her ethnographic research in Cuba from 1937 until 1948. She stated, “I went out of my way not to read the anthropologists. I was afraid of being influenced by specialists, of trying to see of find things that were not in the island’s living documents: our blacks.”⁵⁴ Her legacy remains polarizing; on the one hand, she is portrayed as someone who, “quickly learned how to be a participant among her Afro-Cuban informers rather than the “white” person who just wanted information,”⁵⁵ an understandable interpretation given the realities of positivistic anthropology surrounding her. Others view her work as severely problematic, perpetuating colorblind racism.

Any further analysis of Cabrera’s impact on Afro-Cuban Studies guides this essay further away from its focus on Regla, knowledge production, and photography within research methodology. However, two final aspects about Cabrera in relation to these themes deserve mention. The first is the existence of photographs taken of Cabrera with her informants accessible online through the Cuban Heritage Collection (CHC) at the University of Miami’s digital collections.⁵⁶ Nine photographs of “informants” are publicly accessible through this digital collection and are included below. Five are of individuals pictured alone labeled as informants, and four photos include Cabrera with research informants. Of the five individual photos, only one person is identified by name: J.S. Baró (top left). Of the four that include Cabrera, two include the other person’s name: Saibeke and Odedei. The four photos where Cabrera appears “in action,” serving as visual proof of her relationships with Black Cubans, or as in the case of the photo with Saibeke, that he was there with her in her home office. These photos always center Cabrera, both in the framing of the image, but also in the descriptions. One taken in Pogolotti in 1930 features Cabrera in focus but looking away from the camera (See photos below, bottom right). She’s standing behind Odedei, who is sitting out of focus but looking straight at the photographer. Another, which appears to be from the 1950s and serves as the cover photo for the Cabrera Collection on the CHC website, is taking notes during an interview (See photos below, bottom center). Another, also published in Rodríguez-Mangual’s book, depicts Cabrera talking and gesturing with a group of Black Cubans labeled as her informants.⁵⁷ A final “action” photo reflects Cabrera sitting at her home office desk with Saibeke sitting at a desk and chair that appears too small for him on the right side of the photo. We don’t see his face, though his name is included in the description, as he is turned towards Cabrera, who is seated in a relational position to him depicting authority and power from behind her desk. Although interpretations of photographs can be highly subjective, they give insight and proof of Cabrera’s activities, attempting to offer her legitimacy within the world of Afro-Cuban religious practitioners. Whether or not she actually did is another story. But questions remain. Who were the unnamed people featured in the images? How did they connect with Cabrera? Who took the photographs? Were they staged or taken in legitimate moments of data collection? Cabrera’s 1957 encounter with Pierre Verger sheds some light on these questions, but further research can expand her intentions in photographing her “informants”. However, one thing does remain clear, that Cabrera recognized the value of photographic documentation and contemporarily they are used to give her legitimacy despite the lack of formal or systematic social scientific methodology in her writings.

University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection."J.S. Baró, Lydia Cabrera's informant" Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. https://merrick.library.miami.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/chc0339/id/5118/rec/454 — University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection.”J.S. Baró, Lydia Cabrera’s informant” Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. https://merrick.library.miami.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/chc0339/id/5118/rec/454

University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection."Lydia Cabrera's Informant" Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. — University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection.”Lydia Cabrera’s Informant” Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. https://merrick.library.miami.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/chc0339/id/5143/rec/725

University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection. "Old lady dressed with white santería dress" Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. — University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection. “Old lady dressed with white santería dress” Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. https://digitalcollections.library.miami.edu/digital/collection/chc0339/id/5108/rec/424

University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection. "Lydia Cabrera with informant Saibeke in Quinta San José House" Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. — University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection. “Lydia Cabrera with informant Saibeke in Quinta San José House” Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. https://merrick.library.miami.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/chc0339/id/4947/rec/714

University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection. " Lydia Cabrera (second from right) with a group of informants" Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. — University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection. “Lydia Cabrera (second from right) with a group of informants” Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. https://digitalcollections.library.miami.edu/digital/collection/chc0339/id/1674/rec/10

University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection. "Lydia Cabrera sitting under a tree with an informant" Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. — University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection. “Lydia Cabrera sitting under a tree with an informant” Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. https://digitalcollections.library.miami.edu/digital/collection/chc0339/id/1640/rec/11

University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection."Lydia Cabrera standing with the Iyalocha Odedei Havana, Cuba, 1930" Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. — University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection.”Lydia Cabrera standing with the Iyalocha Odedei Havana, Cuba, 1930″ Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. https://merrick.library.miami.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/chc0339/id/1685/rec/699

Top left: University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection.”J.S. Baró, Lydia Cabrera’s informant” Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. https://merrick.library.miami.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/chc0339/id/5118/rec/454

Top center: University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection.”Lydia Cabrera’s Informant” Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. https://merrick.library.miami.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/chc0339/id/5143/rec/725

Top right: University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection.”Lydia Cabrera’s Informant” Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. https://merrick.library.miami.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/chc0339/id/4975/rec/723

Center left: University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection.”Lydia Cabrera’s Informant” Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. https://merrick.library.miami.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/chc0339/id/4999/rec/724

Center center: University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection. “Old lady dressed with white santería dress” Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. https://digitalcollections.library.miami.edu/digital/collection/chc0339/id/5108/rec/424

Center right: University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection. “Lydia Cabrera with informant Saibeke in Quinta San José House” Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. https://merrick.library.miami.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/chc0339/id/4947/rec/714

Bottom left: University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection. ” Lydia Cabrera (second from right) with a group of informants” Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. https://digitalcollections.library.miami.edu/digital/collection/chc0339/id/1674/rec/10

Bottom center: University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection. “Lydia Cabrera sitting under a tree with an informant” Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. https://digitalcollections.library.miami.edu/digital/collection/chc0339/id/1640/rec/11

Bottom right: University of Miami Library, Cuban Heritage Collection.”Lydia Cabrera standing with the Iyalocha Odedei Havana, Cuba, 1930″ Lydia Cabrera Collection. Accessed April 2, 2021. https://merrick.library.miami.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/chc0339/id/1685/rec/699

In 1957, French-born photographer, ethnographer, researcher, and Babalawo (initiated in Nigeria) Pierre Fatumbi Verger (1902-1996) traveled to Cuba. Verger began traveling throughout the world as a photographer in 1932, with a focus on so-called “exotic” locations (in particular the French colonies), producing photographic images that supported colonial ideologies and imaginaries. In 1940, he arrived in Brazil, where his life and career would transform after meeting Roger Bastide and other French scholars teaching at the Universidade de Saō Paulo; people who introduced him to the African presence in the province of Bahia. He began photographing Candomblé rituals and communities typically barred from outsiders, which effectively launched his career as an ethnographer; in 1948 this afforded him a grant to study indigenous West African religious practices and their connections to Brazil. The relationships Verger developed first in Brazil with the Bahian Candomblé community, and especially the Ilê Opó Afonjá where he was given a red and white beaded necklace (ileke/eleke) associating Verger with the Orisha/Orixá Shangó/Xangô. This facilitated his access to the Orisha and Vodun West African religious communities and prompting his 1949 initiation into the worshipping communities of Shango in Ifahin and Sakete soon after his arrival to Dahomey, and his 1953 initiation as a Babalawo in Ketu, Nigeria.⁵⁸

In 1957, Verger visited Cuba where he connected with Lydia Cabrera. He traveled with her to Matanzas, where it appears he met some of her informants, photographing them. It appears that Verger took the group photograph published in Rodríguez-Mangual’s book discussed previously and seen above (see bottom left and bottom center photographs), as two of the people in the group photos appear within individual portrait shots in Verger’s Cuba book wearing the exact same outfits, in addition to the photographic quality appearing the same way. The accompanying note within Verger’s book (written by Cabrera) gives a general description of the African presence in Cuba and associates Matanzas with the Lucumís, indicating that these respondents might have been from Jovellanos, where the Lucumí practices are quite strong. The note then mentions Verger’s ability to communicate in Yoruba with the Iyalocha of Yemaya appearing in the top image and the Olocha of Ogun appearing in the bottom photo.⁵⁹ This context illuminates possibilities as to Cabrera’s intention for bringing Verger to Matanzas, and for participating in a photo shoot with her research informants; the two people who appear in the book also seem to have consented to have their images captured as well.

Cabrera and Verger also attended the September processional events within Regla.⁶⁰There is some conflation of the Virgin of Regla and Cabildo Yemaya processionals presented within the book of Verger’s Cuba photographs published the following year in 1958, which is understandable to an extent because of the way the Virgin of Regla and Yemaya are “syncretized” as one entity, in addition to the sequential days of their processional in those days. In the book, five photographs are presented as a spread, with four “street scenes” on the left side and one processional scene on the right. Comparing the photograph samples published on the Pierre Verger Foundation website, at least one of the photographs (Note 80) listed in the book as a “Havana Street Scene” is actually from Regla, as the same photo is published on the Verger Foundation Website archive under “Regla”. It’s highly likely that the other three photos are from Regla as well, given the grouping pattern of the photographs throughout the book, and indicators in the backgrounds of the photos that appear to be Regla. The photograph on the right side, labeled with note number 81, identifies the photo as “The Virgin of Regla Processional” with the following description:

FESTIVAL OF THE VIRGIN OF REGLA. In the little town of Regla, separated from Havana by the harbour, the festival of Our Lady of Regla is celebrated annually by everyone connected with the sea: the fishermen, the sailors and the longshoremen. In 1714, when declaring Our Lady of Regla the patroness of the harbour, Marquis de la Torre placed the silver keys of the port at the feet of the statue. Every year, for the past two centuries, a multitude of believers have celebrated this festival. Crowds of negroes pay homage to the Virgin, honouring at the same time Our Lady of Regla and Yemayá-Olokun, the goddess of the sea. The celebrations commence at midnight on September 8 and in every dwelling, however humble, altars are set up candles lit and animals sacrificed. Iyalochas, Olochas and Babalows (priests and priestesses of Orisha and Yoruba gods) surrounded by their faithful worship all night and hear high mass in the morning. The two ancient and famous sects, Lucumís (Yoruba) and Iléorishas, carry in procession Christian images of the Virgin to the church to honour the statue of Our Lady of Regla. Then the parish priest receives the procession which proceeds to the port bearing the statue of the patroness. On arrival at the shore, Yoruba hymns are chanted and the three batá drums are beaten. At the waterside, all the believers of African descent wash their faces and arms in seawater and swallow there mouthfuls of it. Such water, according to their primitive belief, possesses miraculous powers that special day. Still singing, dancing and sounding drums, the believers in procession follow the statue to the civic authorities and then to the dead in the cemetery. The crowd in the procession dances without a pause until nightfall.⁶¹

The notes for this volume were written by Lydia Cabrera and are printed in French, Spanish, and English at the end of the book. Comparing the three versions, assuming Cabrera wrote the original in Spanish, both the French and English versions contain notable differences in the presentation of information. The French and English versions omit information presented in the original Spanish and impose racist language. It ironically perpetuates the same positivistic ideas about Afro-Cuban religion that Cabrera sought to challenge. Below is the Spanish version of note 81 with my own translation following it, trying to adhere to the original Spanish intention and phrasing as close as possible:

LA PROCESION DE LA VIRGEN DE REGLA. En el pueblo de Regla, separado de La Habana por la bahía, se celebra anualmente la popularísima fiesta de la Virgen bajo la advocación de Nuestra Señora de Regla. El pueblo, unas cuantas casuchas de pescadores, en el siglo XVIII, surgió en torno a un santuario que había elevado un peregrino, a fines del siglo anterior, con las limosnas que recogía. Modesto oratorio con techo de palma y una pintura de la Virgen, fue destruído por un huracán, en 1692, y otro devoto, Martín de Coyendo, le ofrendó a Nuestra Señora una nueva ermita, que pudo construir y terminar en 1694. La Virgen de Regla era ferverosamente adorada por toda la gente de mar, pescadores, marinos, y trabajadores del puerto. En 1714, declarada Patrona de la bahía de La Habana, el Capitán General Marques de la Torre, solemnemente, puso a los pies de la imagen la emblemática llave de plata del puerto. Las fiestas que entonces se instituyeron no han dejado de llevar a los dos veces centenaria ermita de Regla, una muchedumbre imponente de fieles de todos colores y categorías, y son interesantes por el sincretismo del culto que el pueblo negro y mestizo de Cuba rinde a la Patrona de La Habana, que para los descendientes de africanos es al mismo tiempo, o no ha dejado de ser, a pesar de su apariencia cristiana, la diosa del mar yoruba, Yemayá-Olokun. Comienza la fiesta, para las gentes del pueblo, la víspera del 8 de septiembre a las doce de la noche, y no solamente en Regla, en toda la Isla, donde la devoción a Nuestra Señora de Regla,–lo mismo que decir Yemayá—es muy profunda, se encienden los altares jamás ausentes de las casas populares por muy pobres que sean y se sacrifican aves y animales a las piedras sagradas en que la diosa se materializa y recibe las ofrendas de sus adoradores. Después de velar noche entera, Iyalochas, Olochas, y Babalows, (sacerdotes de ambos sexos de los Orishas o “Santos” yorubas), e innumerables sectarios de estos cultos, asisten a la gran misa que se celebra en la ermita, cuyas puertas permanecen abiertas todo el día a un público incesante. Los dos famosos antiguos Cabildos lucumís, (yoruba) o Ilé-orishas, –“Casas de Santos”—de Regla, llevan en procesión sus imágenes católicas de la Virgen, a “saludar” a la Virgen de la Iglesia despedidas por el cura, que los acompaña hasta la puerta, la procesión las conduce al par batiendo los tres tambores batá y cantando en yoruba. En la orilla, Olorishas y Iyalochas, y la multitud compacta que sigue la procesión se purifican con ramas o yerbas que la misma diosa prescribe a través del adivino o de sus “caballos”—mediums–, y se lavan en el mar la cara y los brazos, lanzándose a la espalda chorros de agua; deberán beberse tres buches del agua salada que ese día está cargada de “aché”, de propiedades benéficas. Del mar, sin dejar de cantar, de bailar y de tocar los tambores, de dirigen al Ayunamiento; la Virgen va a saludar y a cumplir con las Autoridades, como en tiempos de la Colonia que toleraba con benevolencia las costumbres y creencias de los africanos, y luego a saludar a los muertos, a los Antepasados al cementerio viejo, que ya no existe, un campo yermo, a gran distancia del nuevo, donde se saluda a los Muertos contemporáneos, situado en una loma. En un largo recorrido de tres horas, durante el cual, la Virgen, llevada en andas, se detiene a la puerta de la casa de cada Olocha o “Santero”, que son muy numerosas y ante todas las que poseen un altar, para recibir un homenaje de coco y agua… La procesión, que es un baile continuo, termina al atardecer.

THE PROCESSION OF THE VIRGIN OF REGLA. In the town of Regla, separated from Havana by the bay, the very popular feast of the Virgin is celebrated annually under the invocation of Our Lady of Regla. In the 18th century, the town arose around a few fishermen’s huts and a sanctuary built by a pilgrim with the alms he collected at the end of the previous century. The modest prayer center with a palm roof and a painting of the Virgin was destroyed by a hurricane in 1692, and another devotee, Martín de Coyendo, offered Our Lady a new chapel, which he was able to build and finish in 1694. The Virgin of Regla was fervently adored by all seafarers, fishermen, sailors, and port workers. In 1714, declared Patron Saint of the Bay of Havana, Captain General Marques de la Torre solemnly placed the emblematic silver key of the port at the feet of the image. The festivities that were then instituted have not ceased to bring to the twice centenary chapel of Regla, an imposing crowd of faithful of all colors and categories and are interesting for the syncretism of the cult that the black and mixed people of Cuba render to the Patroness of Havana, which for the descendants of Africans is at the same time, or has not ceased to be, despite its Christian appearance, the Yoruba sea goddess, Yemayá-Olokun. For the people of the town, the celebration begins on the eve of September 8 at midnight, not only in Regla, but throughout the Island, where the devotion to Our Lady of Regla, –considered the same as Yemayá-is very extensive, the altars are activated and never absent from the popular, yet very poor houses, which sacrifice birds and animals to the sacred stones in which the goddess materializes and offerings of her worshippers. After an all-night vigil, Iyalochas, Olochas, and Babalows, (priests of both sexes of the Orishas or Yoruba “Saints”), and innumerable members of these cults, attend the great mass celebrated in the hermitage, whose doors remain open all day to an incessant public. The two famous ancient Cabildos lucumís, (yoruba) or Ilé-orishas, — “Houses of Saints”– of Regla, bring in the procession of their catholic images of the Virgin to “greet” the Virgin of the Church, [and then are] dismissed by the priest, who accompanies them to the door, [continuing] the procession [which] leads them to the sea beating the three batá drums and singing in yoruba. On the shore, Olorishas and Iyalochas, and the compact multitude that follows the procession purify themselves with branches or herbs that the same goddess prescribes through the diviner or her “horses”–mediums–, and they wash their faces and arms in the sea, throwing jets of water on their backs; they must drink three mouthfuls of the salty water since the day is loaded with “aché”, beneficial properties. From the sea, without stopping the singing, dancing and playing the drums, they go to the Government house; the Virgin goes to greet and comply with the Authorities, as in times of the Colony that tolerated with benevolence the customs and beliefs of the Africans, and then [the processional goes] to greet the dead, the Ancestors at the old cemetery, which no longer exists. A barren field, at a great distance from the new [cemetery], where the contemporary Dead are greeted, located on a hill. In a long journey of three hours, during which, the Virgin, carried on a platform, stops at the door of the house of each Olocha or “Santero”, which are very numerous and before all those who have an altar, to receive a tribute of coconut and water… The procession, which is a continuous dance, ends at sunset.

It is clear from the photographs (both those in the book and on the foundation website) that Verger and Cabrera documented and described the cabildo processionals and not a church-led event. Verger’s photographs of the processional include photos where more than one Catholic Saint image is included, which would not have been the case for the church processional. Examining these photographs illuminates details previously not part of the existing written record, such as the description of cleansing rituals with the ocean water. An additional detail that necessitates further research, is the division of labor and gender roles within the processional. From the accessed photographs, which include Verger’s and later on in 1961, the photographs by Roberto Salas, men are the ones carrying the processional litters⁶² and a woman—presumably a Iyalocha—walks between the front two wooden bars. In some of the photographs the woman is holding on to the two wooden bars with her eyes closed in focused concentration as if baring the weight of the Orisha on her back. The publicly accessible Verger photographs can be found here:

https://www.pierreverger.org/en/photograph-collection/photo-library/category/666-virgem-de-regla.html

The second set of photographs, the ones most visible and the initial ones used in the re-initiation process, were those taken by Roberto Salas in 1961. The New-York born, Cuban-American photographer returned to the island just after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and was one of the photographers tasked with visually documenting the societal implementation of the Cuban Revolution. A 20-year-old Salas was dispatched by his newspaper office Periodico Revolución to photograph the Cabildo of Yemaya processional, not knowing what the processional was about, or that it would be the last processional of the 20th century—no human did. He was directed to contact a “santera” (Iyalorisha) who turned out to be Susana Cantero. After Cantero consulted with Orisha for permission to see if Salas would be able to photograph the initial private ceremony within her Ilé house, the Orisha approved. He captured images of that process, and most of the processional with the exception of the final part occuring at the cemetary. He stated in the YouTube video linked below, that he didn’t know about that final phase, so he left before the processional concluded.

These photographs of “The Last Cabildo of Yemaya” as Salas has titled them, have been exhibited twice: the first in 2008 in an exhibition dedicated to the work of Salas, and the second in 2017 as part of The von Christierson Collection exhibit “Without Masks: Contemporary Afro-Cuba Art” alongside 37 other Cuban artists of various mediums.

https://www.withoutmasks.org/exhibitions/7-without-masks-at-museo-nacional-de-bellas-artes-curated-by-orlando-hernandez/overview/

The catalog for the 2017 exhibit can be downloaded here:

https://www.withoutmasks.org/publications/4

The catalog for the 2008 exhibition “El Ultimo Cabildo de Yemaya,” which contains different essays from the 2017 version and is only translated into Spanish, can be found here:

http://eleda.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/pdf/ElUltimoCabildoDeYemaya_Salas.pdf

An interview with Salas about that day, and the process of forming the 2017 exhibition can be found here:

“El Ultimo Cabildo de Yemaya” Interview with Roberto Salas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD4jV6YJz0U&t=4s

It should be noted that the Spanish translation that appears in the video seems to skip multiple sentences. I have provided a transcript for that interview in Spanish here and one in English here.

The current iteration of the Cabildo de Regla has already garnered at least five researchers working collaboratively with the Museum of Regla and organizers. All of us are either from Regla and/or are practitioners of Regla de Ocha. The dissemination of this research has already begun through publications, a dissertation, and multiple conference presentations in forums such as Festival del Caribe in Santiago de Cuba, the Fernando Ortiz Casa de Africa in Santiago de Cuba on African and African American Culture, the Latino/a Studies Association, and the Caribbean Studies Association. Additionally, in 2019 several of us participated on a panel about the Cabildo de Regla at a municipal conference on Regla’s history and culture.

Photography and Research Methodology in the Cabildo de Regla Project

Until the point where I began participating in the Regla project, my research on Santiago de Cuba’s conga processionals relied upon naturalistic, qualitative, ethnographic research. Cameras were typically a distraction given that Cuban’s access to technology was minimal until the introduction and popularization of cell phones around 2013. Furthermore, one of my dissertation results analyzed the influence of foreign photographers and documentary crews as well as how the presence of a camera altered people’s behavior and interactions within these spaces. But for the Regla project, since the community specifically articulated their desire for a photographic archive, I decided to try and maintain my own naturalistic ethnographic approach and rely upon a photographer brought into the project to capture the images. While this initial collaboration with the photographer I brought from the U.S. in 2016 did not work out, I decided that from here on out I needed to change my approach, picking up the camera myself, and working with women who I knew I could trust.

Building a (close) to all women media team aligned with the Cabildo de Regla’s intention to also re-center women within the Ocha spiritual practice, and thus far it has worked well. Amberly Alene Ellis of Flim for the People began working on the project in 2017 and has continued for the 2018, and 2019 processionals. Ained Cala joined us in 2018 and 2019 to amplify the coverage. After tension arose during the 2017 processional because I got too close to the batá drums, out of respect for that gendered boundary, and in order to respectfully document the dynamics in and around the drums, we needed a male videographer to capture that important part of the processional.⁶³ Yoandry Valdes has filled that role well for the 2018 and 2019 processionals. Each team member brings their own distinctive artistic style to the collaboration. They have seen the archival photographs and have an idea of what “rephotograph” shots to attempt. I instruct them to follow their artistic and documentary inclination. Having an idea of their individual styles at this point, I try and anticipate any gaps, but knowing that Amberly tends to capture more close up portrait style images, while Ained easily gets up on rooftops to capture the long processional shots, I try to make sure I capture the larger settings and interactive dynamics within the processional with a mix of long and close up shots in addition to sequences of movement, reminiscent of Mead and Bateson’s photographic sequencing approach to capture images of Balinese dance. The day after the processional, I collect the files from each team member, and we debrief about their experiences, observations, and reflections. I also edit and watermark the photos. We have a contract that allows usage of the images for research, archival, and exhibition purposes with credit to each photographer, though each documentarian owns the rights to their particular photographs; this is why each image included in the virtual exhibition maintains the watermark.⁶⁴

Although we are in collaboration with the organizers of the event and provide a set of high-quality images for the public archive, there is still a dynamic where we are contending with community members seeking to capture their own images with their personal cellphones. Furthermore, there has been a significant increase in independent photographers attending the event in 2019. Some are known to the community and are in contact with the organizers, others are not. In 2019, one of the cabildo’s organizers attended a workshop training on photo voice methodology, led by Jack Vertovec of the Global and Sociocultural Studies department at Florida International University. The Cabildo de Regla organizers are now looking to incorporate this methodology into their project as it grows and evolves.

Positionality

As this essay generally reflects on the role of Regla’s cabildo processional tradition within the foundational period of AfroCuban Studies through the intersection of photography, knowledge production, and research methodology, it is important to recognize the shifting methodological practices that now apply to current research. Knowledge production is not a static process, nor should it be. This re-initiation period and the spectrum of positionalities found amongst the various researchers currently participating alongside the project organizers have the opportunity to contribute new insight and perspectives. The inclusion of positionality and reflexivity, methodological processes imbued within qualitative analysis since the mid-1980s with the rise of the “fourth moment” of qualitative research in addition to the initiation of both feminist methodology and intersectionality, offers the possibility for an exciting and innovative collaborative research process with the community.⁶⁵ This process is much more than simply recognizing one’s interconnected identity categories, but also recognizes how they operate and influence interactions and experiences within a field site.⁶⁶

Within Cuban society, my positionality involves the realities of my identity components as a cis-gendered white woman from the United States, who is typically perceived as heterosexual.⁶⁷. As of this essay’s publication date, I’ve made 27 trips to Cuba since 2002, staying anywhere from five days to three months. I learned about and experienced Cuba from the perspective of Santiago, the second-largest city on the island and the largest in the Oriente (eastern) region. Within Santiago, I conducted my doctoral dissertation research on the African presence, the formation of the neighborhood of Los Hoyos as an African Diaspora community of consciousness, and the social purpose of conga, the “traditional popular culture” component originating from the cabildo processional tradition within that particular locale. The majority of the time I am in Cuba as a researcher,⁶⁸ yet, within casual encounters with people, and moving through the streets, people justifiably assume I’m a tourist and treat me as such unless I intentionally clarify my reason for being in Cuba or explicitly state that I am a researcher. However, even then I am usually treated as if I have no knowledge of Cuba. It should be clarified that these inquiring encounters typically happen with men who assume I am initially there to engage in sex tourism, or upon an initial line of questioning, usually assume that I have no knowledge of my subject area.

Walking down the streets of Cuba, I am understandably seen as a foreigner first and foremost. Dress and appearance influence that assessment particularly within areas where tourists are typically seen, and it is normative to walk down the street in those areas hearing kissing or whistling sounds, in addition to questions about where I come from. Where tourists are not usually present, that type of interaction is much less. Within these spaces, episodic encounters have occurred where I am initially perceived as Cuban. However, as soon as I begin speaking more than a few sentences, despite having a decent Cuban Spanish language accent, people quickly realize I am a foreigner. One such encounter occurred in 2017 as I took an almendron⁶⁹ from the center of Havana out to Regla late at night. I sat in the middle seat, with a Cuban man on my left and a Cuban woman on my right; when the driver asked me where I wanted to be let out, the man to my left leaned over and whispered into my ear, “You’re a foreigner? I thought you were a Cubana, so now I won’t speak to you in the way I was planning to, you deserve respect.” This glaring example of how my foreignness and whiteness operated simultaneously to shift the man’s behavior and situate me within a privileged context exemplifies a dynamic of how I am seen within the larger social sphere to how Cuban women can be juxtaposed with white foreign women. However, many colleagues who are Black women from the U.S. have different experiences with the ways their Blackness and foreignness operate within paralleled gendered interactions.⁷⁰ Furthermore, because I was in a non-tourist setting, a social space typically relegated to Cubans, the privilege and “gifted respect” he afforded me demonstrate one facet of what I typically encounter moving about spaces that sit outside of the tourism zones.

Although Regla does experience visits from tourists, they are typically relegated to the waterfront area because of the church and museum. Since my involvement in the Regla project involves photography, I usually carry my camera as I walk 20 minutes from the lancha (the ferry that crosses Havana Bay and serves as the quickest mode of transportation between Regla and Old Havana). As a result, for the first two years of this project community members assumed I was only a photographer. As I’d walk down the street in Regla, camera in hand, community members would ask me to take their photo saying, “ah la fotografa volvió” (the photographer returned!). Only men ask me to take their photo; women would shy away saying they needed time to prepare and dress. I’ve also photographed groups of teenage boys hanging around a particular area of my route with their emphatic request to post the pictures on Facebook in addition to the Regla boys baseball team (per their request), sending back copies of the photographs whenever possible.

It wasn’t until November 2017 that those outside of the immediate organizing circle came to know me as also a practitioner and researcher. I briefly returned to Regla for a few days delivering the 2017 video (seen in the “Re-initiating Tradition” blog post) and ran into one of the processional participants, a Babalawo who carries the Orisha, as he and another Babalawo were searching through a grassy field area looking for specific herbs for ritual use. They told me to meet them at another community member’s house up the block and wait to show them the trailer. It turned out to be the home of several of the processional participants who were preparing to begin a ritual initiation in the Palo, the ritual practice associated with the Congo/West Central African/Bantu presence in Cuba. They asked if I knew what it meant and through our conversation, we all came to realize that they had only seen me as an outsider photographer, assuming I had no knowledge about the context, religious practices, nor that I was a scholar. I am a practitioner of African-inspired Cuban religious traditions and initiated as an Iyalocha, though it is not a part of my positionality that I flaunt to garner legitimacy or access. It is deeply personal yet also an integral part of why I do the kind of research I do. In this case, they invited me to participate in the ritual activities as a representative of the practitioner community in Santiago where I was initiated in Palo, and asked me more about my research project, responding affirmatively. They were also happy because I had come back to deliver copies of the visual materials demonstrating reciprocity, rather than the extractive modalities they’d come to expect from some of the photographers and researchers they’d encountered. In the years since, every time I visit Regla (which up until the pandemic was at least three times a year if not more), people respond with surprise statements of “you’re back!” because the assumption is that researchers come, do their work, and rarely return. This of course is not true for everyone who’s done research work in Regla, nor of all photographers, but this is an unfortunate dynamic that exists across Cuba.

Research Practice and the Cabildo de Regla: Looking to the Future

One of the most rewarding and challenging aspects of participating in this project amidst a field of other researchers and practitioners is the way we have an opportunity to produce knowledge that amplifies the cyclical process of knowledge production in Cuba. This process, initially proposed by Cuban scholar Joel James, one of the founders of the Casa del Caribe research house in Santiago de Cuba and further developed by both Abelardo Larduet Luaces (also a Casa del Caribe scholar-practitioner) and Jalane Schmidt, situates two dimensions of knowledge production: sabiduría as local community wisdom, and conocimiento as “official elite” institutionalized knowledge. These work in tandem to produce the essence of the “Cuba Profunda” (Profound Cuba), a concept presented by Armando Hart that evolved from Ortiz’s conceptualization of cubanía.⁷¹ The various research projects in the works foster an opportunity to illuminate the intricate and nuanced dynamics of this process, especially since Regla was such an important space for the initial cannon of research within AfroCuban Studies.

Bibliography

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• Berry, Maya J., Claudia Chávez Argüelles, Shanya Cordis, Sarah Ihmoud, and Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada. 2017. “Toward a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender, Race, and Violence in the Field.” Cultural Anthropology 32 (4): 537–65.

• Bronfman, Alejandra. 2007. “The Allure of Technology: Photographs, Statistics and the Elusive Female Criminal in 1930s Cuba.” Gender & History 19 (1): 60–77.

—————. 2004. Measures of Equality : Social Science, Citizenship, and Race in Cuba, 1902-1940. Envisioning Cuba. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

• Cass, Jeremy Leeds. 2004. “Fashioning Afrocuba: Fernando Ortiz and the Advent of Afrocuban Studies, 1906-1957.” Doctor of Philosophy (Hispanic Studies), Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/gradschool_diss/375/.

• Castellanos, Jorge. 2006. “Introduction, Romulo Lachatañeré: Pioneer of Afro-Cuban Studies.” In Afro-Cuban Myths: Yemayá and Other Orishas, translated by Chrstine Ayorinde, vii–xviii. Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener Publications.

• De Olivares, José. 1899. Our Islands and Their People as Seen with Camera and Pencil. Vol. 1. 2 vols. St. Louis: N.D. Thompson Publishing Company.

• Denzin, Norman K, and Yvonna S Lincoln. 1994. “Introduction: Entering the Field of Qualitative Research.” In Handbook of Qualitative Research, 1–17. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

• Garcia Dominguez, Bernardo A. 2011. “On Transculturation in Cuba: A Study of Race, Religion and Revolution.” Doctor of Philosophy (Sociology), Toronto, Ontario, Canada: York University.

• Hamilton, Ruth Simms, ed. 2007. Routes of Passage: Rethinking the African Diaspora. Vol. 1. ADRP Series 1. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press.

• Harper, Douglas. 2015. “Visual Methods in the Social Sciences.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 181–83. Elsevier.

• Herskovits, Melville J. 1938. Acculturation; The Study of Culture Contact. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.

• Hoffman-Jeep, Lynda. 2005. “Creating Ethnography: Zora Neale Hurston and Lydia Cabrera.” African American Review 39 (3): 337–53.

• Klett, Mark. 2011. “Repeat Photography in Landscape Research.” In The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods, edited by Eric Margolis and Luc Pauwels, 114–31. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd.

• Laforcade, Geoffroy de. 2017. “Fugitive and Dissonant: Memory, Space, and the Aesthetics of Public Art in Havana’s Callejón de Hamel.” Afro-Hispanic Review 36 (2): 95–108.

• Le Riverend, Julio. 1973. Orbita de Fernando Ortiz. La Habana: Insituto Cubano del Libro.

• López, Antonio. 2012. Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America. New York and London: New York U.

• Margolis, Eric, and Jeremy Rowe. 2011. “Methodological Approaches to Disclosing Historic Photographs.” In The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods, edited by Eric Margolis and Luc Pauwels. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications Ltd.

• Merriam, Alan P. 1964. “Melville Jean Herskovits 1895-1963.” American Anthropologist 66 (1): 83–109.

• Moore, Robin. 1994. “Representations of Afrocuban Expressive Culture in the Writings of Fernando Ortiz.” Latin American Music Review / Revista de Música Latinoamericana 15 (1): 32–54.

• Ortiz, Fernando. 1995. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

———. 2014. “The Human Factors of Cubanidad.” Translated by João Felipe Gonçalves and Gregory Duff Morton. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 445–80.

• Palmié, Stephan. 2002. Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

———. 2013. The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

• Pavez Ojeda, Jorge. 2009. “El retrato de los «negros brujos»: Los archivos visuales de la antropología afrocubana (1900-1920).” Aisthesis 46 (December): 83–110.

• Portal, Hermina del. 1947. “¡Echubi Ha Muerto!” Bohemia, July 27, 1947.

• Pratt, Mary Louise. 2008. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Second Edition. London: Routledge Press.

• Ramos, Miguel W. 2013. “Lucumí (Yoruba) Culture in Cuba: A Reevaluation (1830S -1940s).” Doctor of Philosophy History, Florida International University. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/966/

• Redfield, Robert, Ralph Linton, and Melville J Herskovits. 1936. “Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation.” American Anthropologist 38 (1): 149–52.

• Robertson, Jennifer Ellen. 2002. “Reflexivity Redux: A Pithy Polemic on ‘Positionality’” Anthropological Quarterly 75 (4): 785–92.

• Rodríguez-Mangual, Edna M. 2004. Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity. Envisioning Cuba. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

• Schmidt, Jalane D. 2015. Cachita’s Streets: The Virgin of Charity, Race, and Revolution in Cuba. The Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

• Shefferman, David A. 2016. Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography. Edited by Franklin W. Knight and Henry Louis Gates. New York: Oxford University Press.

• Verger, Pierre. 1958. Cuba: 196 Photographs. La Habana: La Casa Belga

End Notes

1
Margolis & Rowe 2011:337
2
Klett 2011:114.
3
Personal correspondence with Dr.Takkara Brunson, 2018.
4
Callejon Hamel, described as a, “bold, guerrilla appropriation of public space” is a small street covered in artistic murals and sculptures, that runs parallel to San Lázaro in the Central Havana neighborhood of Cayo Hueso, known as a predominantly Black, working class neighborhood, where many famous Cuban rumberos and musicians were born and raised. Cuban artist Salvador González Escalona, a self-taught artist began transforming this Callejon (a smaller street, bigger than an alleyway but smaller than a regular street) in the 1990s at the end of the Cuban Special Period into a dedicated public expression of Afro-Cuban culture and religion. This space began hosting Sunday rumbas in 1993 and became a space for Cuban and foreign musicians to play. It is now a major tourist attraction featuring a café and consistent Afro-Cuban folkloric performances. See de Laforcade 2017. Tragically, Salvador González passed away in April of 2021 due to COVID-19 complications.
5
This term arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century amongst Cuban ethnographers and law enforcement officers, which defined the Abakuá as “members of a shadowy cult whose practices were purported to be linked to African religion and superstitious beliefs.” This notion became intermeshed with a legal definition of ñañiguismo, the criminalization of Black Cubans, and African-inspired practices Bronfman 2004: 18, 20-22, 54-56.
6
Margolis & Rowe 2011:338, citing Berger & Mohr 1982:99.
7
Harper 2015:181-182
8
Publisher’s Preface” 1899: no pagination.
9
Pratt 2008 (1992): 2.
10
Todd Ochoa introduced the language of “African-inspired” to describe cultural and religious practices of Cuba’s African Diasporic peoples as an alternative to the politically charged “Afro-Cuban” terminology developed by Ortiz. As discussed throughout the blog posts, the Regla cabildo processional was one site from which he formed those conceptualizations.
11
Pavez Ojeda 2009:84-90.
12
Rodríguez-Mangual 2004:29.
13
Bronfman 2007: 60-63.
14
Pavez Ojeda 2009:106. Also see Bronfman 2007.
15
Pavez Ojeda 2009:96. My translation.
16
Palmié 2002: 256-259; Ramos 2013:507.
17
Bronfman 2004: 128; 2007: 65, 73-74.
18
Palmié 2002:248-254; 2013:54-55.
19
Moore 1994: 36-37.
20
Moore 1994:38 citing Le Riverend 1973:22.
21
Bronfman 2007:60-62. Positivist Italian criminology is marked by a shift that centers on the individual (criminal) rather than the act (crime), which, “rejected the notion of the free will of the criminal and replaced it with the view that the criminal was both constrained and impelled by environmental, biological, and psychological factors.” In this approach, Ortiz focused on the use of systematic anthropological methods for gathering data on convicted inmates. This was inspired and supported by Israel Castellanos (Bronfman 2004:124-127).
22
Afrocubanismo was an artistic and humanities movement that began in the 1920’s producing art, music, literature, and poetry centering Cuba’s African contributions to its national culture. For more information, See Robin Moore 1997.
23
Palmié 2013:56; the 1947 article in Bohemia magazine by Hermina Del Portal recounting Echú Bí’s death and funeral recounts Ortiz’s speech, wherein he states he’d been friends with her for over thirty years. That would situate the beginning of their association sometime in the 1911-1916 period.
24
Bronfman 2004: 114-115.
25
Cass 2004: 78-83.
26
Cass 2004:121-124.
27
Palmié 2013: 57.
28
See the 2014 translation by João Felipe Gonçalves and Gregory Duff Morton.
29
Ortiz: 2014 (1939): 457-460.
30
Ortiz 2014 (1939): 460-463.
31
Acculturation is defined as the process of incorporating one distinctive human group into the cultural practices of another. Assimilation describes the process of absorption of one entity into another, used in a parallel context to describe the acculturation processes, but is not limited to human beings. Rather, it speaks to biologistic processes as well, such as the incorporation of nutrients into leaves. Syncretism refers to the process of merging distinctive practices where components of each are still recognized. Herskovits 1938; Redfield, Linton, and Herskovits 1936. This decades-long research agenda was prompted by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, who invested research funding towards the study of race relations in post-Reconstruction United States. Herskovits then expanded the research focus on the African Diaspora and its relationship to the Americas, writing on the U.S., Suriname, Haiti, Benin, Brazil, Ghana, Nigeria, and Trinidad. He subsequently founded the department of African Studies at Northwestern University with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. See Merriam 1964.
32
Ortiz 1995(1940): 98, 102-103.
33
I discuss this process further in my forthcoming articles and book manuscript.
34
Hamilton (2007) proposed a paradigm of global social forces that situate the study of the African Diaspora. Recognizing global predictive patterns manifested in locally distinctive ways. The circulatoriness phenomenon defines the conditions of dispersion and the impact of movement on the demographics and identities of African Diaspora members.
35
Del Portal 1947:72.
36
Ramos 2013:507.
37
García Dominguez 2004: 393.
38
López 2012: 123-124.
39
Shefferman 2016; https://www.ecured.cu/Adelante
40
López 2012: 125.
41
Castellanos 2006: x.
42
,Cardenas is discussed further in the historical essay. She became one of the Iyalorishas who continued the Cabildo Yemaya processional tradition after the death of Echú Bí and maintained a sacred space to Yemaya in her home down the block from the Church of Regla. This space is still maintained by her descendants to this day.
43
See López 2012: Chapter 3, “Supplementary Careers, Boricua Identifications” for a thorough and insightful analysis of Lachatañere’s experiences within the spaces of New York and U.S. military service in formulating this shift.
44
This essay, among many others, was republished in 1961 Actas de Folklore.
45
Cass 2004: 126-128; See López 2012: 126-129 on how Lachatañeré engaged in the peer review process, and how he was advised by Herskovits on how to address the racism within Ortiz’s writings within “scholarly protocol.”
46
Cass 2004:128-131.
47
López 2012: 121-123.
48
Palmié 2013:58-59.
49
Rodríguez-Mangual 2004:8, 73.
50
Rodríguez-Mangual 2004:8-9.
51
Hoffman-Jeep 2005:340 citing Ana María Simó. Lydia Cabrera: An Intimate Portrait. New York: Intar Latin American Gallery, 1988, pg. 4.
52
Cass 2004:135. The 1936 edition was published in French and released in Paris, then republished in Cuba in 1940.
53
Cass 2004:137.
54
Cited in Cass 2004: 153 who derives Cabrera’s statement from Rosario Hiriart’s book, Lydia Cabrera: Vida hecha arte. New York: Eliseo Torres, 1978, pg. 74.
55
Rodríguez-Mangual 2004:12, 71.
56
Future research will hopefully encounter additional photographs within the CHC collections.
57
Rodríguez-Mangual 2004: 105.
58
Araújo 2013: 113-117.
59
Comparing the photos in Verger’s book Cuba: 196 Photos (1958) no pagination, associated with notes 129-130 labeled “Tipos Populares—Country Folk” appear to be the same people and same photographic stylings as the photograph published in Rodríguez-Mangual (2004:105) cited from the Cuban Heritage Collection, described in the previous paragraph and footnote 55.
60
Palmié 2013: 68-69. In 2011, the Casa de las Americas in Havana featured a conference and exposition of his photography titled, “Coneciones Caribeñas: Homenaje a Pierre Verger en Cuba.” http://www.pierreverger.org/en/photograph-collection/exhibits/2011-exposicao/conexiones-caribenas-homenagem-a-pierre-verger-em-cuba.html
61
Verger 1958: Fn 81 (no pagination). Lydia Cabrera is credited with writing the preface and notes of this volume.
62
Litters are the wooden platforms used to carry the Orisha/Saint images.
63
Women who still menstruate are not allowed to be too close to the consecrated batá drums.
64
When we are ready to hold an in-person exhibition, the printed photographs will not have a watermark and instead be displayed with an information card. We had prepared for an in-person exhibition and all the materials are in Regla: the photographs, information cards, mount board, etc. We felt it to be necessary for the first in-person exhibition be in Regla and to center the community. However, we have not been able to find an exhibition space within the community. The Museum of Regla continues to have ongoing problems with their roof, amplified by the 2017 hurricane and the 2019 tornado rendering the building unsafe for public access. One of the art galleries we reached out to owned by a foreigner, explicitly denied our request stating that they had no interest in contributing to the community. Amidst a rapidly gentrifying Regla, I fear this may be the norm, rather than the exception. Just before the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak, we were beginning to speak with the one Cuban-owned gallery in Regla, someone who does engage in community-based work and especially for children. However, as of the date of this essay’s publication, the COVID-19 pandemic has paused the Cabildo de Regla processional. Hopefully it will resume soon.
65
Denzin & Lincoln 1994:9-10.
66
See Robertson 2002.
67
My sexuality is interpreted by others based on the type of dress I use. For a long time, my hair was cut very short and if I wore a t-shirt and pants, I was perceived as gay. If I dress in more “feminine” interpreted clothing I am perceived as heterosexual. This is relevant because of the intersecting gendered and sexuality norms of Cuba, the way I appeal to Cuban men, and how that subsequently influences my relationship to Cuban women
68
Conducting research in Cuba is a complex navigation of two different government regulations and visa restrictions. While you are legally allowed to conduct certain types of research in Cuba traveling on a tourist visa, other methodological techniques and activities are prohibited unless there under a research visa. Simultaneously, I have to navigate the US Treasure department regulations, under which I travel for professional research. While I may travel to Cuba under a Cuban tourism visa, limiting my activities to appease those parameters, I have only rarely engaged in tourism activities and have never made a whole trip engaging in solely those types of spaces and experiences.
69
This term refers to a shared taxi that runs an established route picking up and dropping off passengers along the way. The word eludes to the almond shape of the car, since they are American cars from the 1950s and 60s.
70
It is important to clarify that the simultaneous positions being white and foreign elicits a different experience from my colleagues who are Black women from the U.S. For one example, see Berry, Chávez Argüelles, Cordis, Ihmoud, and Velásquez Estrada 2017:544-548.
71
Schmidt 2015: 4-5.

Photography and Knowledge Production in the Cabildo de Regla: Methodological Considerations

Photography, the social sciences, and the Initiation of AfroCuban Studies

Photography and Research Methodology in the Cabildo de Regla Project

Positionality

Research Practice and the Cabildo de Regla: Looking to the Future

Bibliography

End Notes

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