ABSTRACT

This presentation examines the challenges of preserving Afro-Cuban religious traditions within the context of folkloric performance in post-Revolutionary Cuba. The paper will focus on the significant role of the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba in preserving and performing the religious songs and dances of Cuba’s African heritage, and will draw on fieldwork in Havana performed between 1989 and 2003. The paper considers several questions: What was the original mandate of the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional with regard to preserving Cuba’s performance traditions, and is this mandate still applicable today? After the marked increase in Regla de Ocha religious practice during the 1980s and 1990s, is state sponsorship still necessary to preserve this religious tradition, or is it thriving on its own? Are staged renditions of religious ceremonies the best way to preserve endangered religious performance traditions? Is foreign tourism a viable way to preserve intangible culture in general, and Afro-Cuban religious traditions in particular? How might we evaluate other options?

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dominique Cyrille, Gustav Michaux-Vignes, and the organizers of Médiathèque Caraïbe and Festival Gwoka for inviting me to participate in the fourth annual symposium of Caribbean ethnomusicology. It is a great pleasure to be here, and I greatly appreciate the hospitality of the conference organizers.

Context of the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional

I will begin with a history of how the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba was created, with the hope that understanding the past might help elucidate both the present and the future. This history takes place in the context of Cuba’s 1959 Revolution, and it is Revolutionary policy that plays a great role not only in shaping the nature of cultural preservation in Cuba in the successive decades of the twentieth century, but in defining what exactly should be preserved. As a result, this Caribbean case study is unique for two reasons: it emerges from the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and it emphasizes Cuba’s African-based performance traditions.

The Conjunto Folklórico Nacional, founded in 1962, is Cuba’s premier folkloric ensemble, and represents the performance traditions of the entire country, with an emphasis on Cuba’s African-based genres, such as rumba, comparsa, and the performance traditions associated with Afro-Cuban religions – namely, Regla de Ocha, Palo Monte, Arará, Tumba Francesa, and Abakwá. In the 1960s and 1970s, the ensemble’s performances came to symbolize an important aspect of Revolutionary culture – the promotion of Cuba’s African heritage – at home and abroad. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the group became associated with Cuba’s foreign tourism initiatives, and its mandate changed considerably. Understanding how this group was conceptualized – part research, part spectacle, part science, part folklore – is important to understanding how the group has developed and survived to the present day. I’ll include in this paper excerpts from ethnographic interviews, writings from the time of the group’s founding, and my own analysis to elucidate the original context of the group and its subsequent development. Some of the ethnographic material was excerpted from my book, Divine Utterances (Hagedorn 2001).
A brief history of the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba, with specific reference to Afro-Cuban performance traditions

Imagine the first few years after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. For those Cubans who stayed, the atmosphere was full of excitement and possibilities. The Revolution’s stated goals of eradicating racism and promoting equality were taken seriously, and Revolutionary Cubans were ready to meet these challenges. Cuban intellectuals were particularly responsive to the rhetoric of the Revolution, and joined with artists and musicians to actively perform these goals.
Argeliers León, noted Cuban musicologist and the director of the Department of Folklore, was one of the intellectuals who incorporated Revolutionary goals into his professional life. From October 1960 through May 1961, León organized a series of seminars on the interpretation, approach, and analysis of “folklore,” which León and other Revolutionary intellectuals defined primarily as Afro-Cuban religious practices. (By contrast, Cuba’s performance traditions of Spanish origin were referred to as música campesina.) León and his students performed ethnographic research among Havana’s Afro-Cuban religious communities with the hopes of realizing two goals: publishing articles in the journals Actas del Folklore and Etnología y Folklore; and staging certain Afro-Cuban religious rituals in a theatricalized context.

León described these staged rituals as “authentic” ethnographic performances, presented in the same spirit as the first public performance of batá drums of Regla de Ocha in 1936, sponsored by León’s mentor, Fernando Ortíz. Under León's direction, the Department of Folklore focused most of its resources on researching and making public presentations about Cuba’s African heritage. It was the first state-supported organization to present public performances of Afro-Cuban religious rituals in Cuba, and, perhaps more significant, to rely on the expertise of informants who were religious practitioners.
John Dumoulin, who became a researcher with the Cuban Academy of Sciences, described the process of creating theatre from Afro-Cuban religious ceremonies in a 1962 article:
In spite of the evident artistic values to be found in the [Afro-Cuban] religious fiestas, their isolation from the theatre was complete….Now that the Cuban Revolution signals the collapse of the traditional prejudices, we see a new integration of folk art materials in the theatre….The principle effort has so far been concentrated in bringing to the theatre the best artistic elements (not, of course, the cults as a whole) and recreating them there, simulating insofar as possible the folk atmosphere. The Folklore Department of the National Theatre, directed by Argeliers León, has already presented a series of very stimulating folk art productions. (Dumoulin 1962: 65–66) [emphasis added]

The most remarkable of these early performances was held in 1964, and represented the performance traditions of the Abakwá, a male secret society with its roots in the fierce all-male “Leopard societies” of the Calabar region of West Africa. Known in Cuba for the extreme secrecy of their initiation practices, most of the members of the Abakwá were a tight-knit group of dockworkers in the northwestern provinces of Havana and Matanzas. Abakwá firmas (sacred drawings indicating deities), made public for the first time, were drawn by a leader of one of the Abakwá potencias (lodges) for inclusion in the 1964 program of the Concierto Abakwá. In an October 1990 interview, León attributed the authenticity of this performance to the knowledgeable participation of the audience:
The toques [rhythms] were the same, the songs were the same [as they would be in a ritual context] . . . because the public that attended understood these songs. This created a very interesting effect, which was that in the middle of a song or a presentation, there was a dialogue between the "officiant" performer and the audience members who were believers. The foreigners really liked this. And it was especially notable in the Abakwá performances. . . . In the plante [Abakwá initiation ceremony], there were blacks who participated in this performance as if it were real. . . We used informants who were believers, very much involved in the religion. . . . [emphasis added]

According to León, each of his presentations in the early 1960s was performed by the appropriate religious specialists: priests of Ocha for the Ocha performances, priests of Palo Monte for the Palo Monte performances, initiates of Abakwá for the Abakwá performances, etc.), and this specialized knowledge heightened the ethnographic authenticity of his presentations. In an August 1992 interview, renowned choreographer and dancer Ramiro Guerra recalled working with Ocha practitioners on stage in the 1960s:
In the early days the performers had to be told: "Stop! Enough already! Change the tune!" They had no sense of theatre, no sense of audience interest levels. They were just doing what comes naturally, so to speak, and if a toque or canto for Yemaya was lasting thirty minutes or an hour, it never occurred to them to stop it. We–the choreographers, the folklorists, the dramaturgs–had to shape that raw material, that raw energy into theatre. [emphasis added]

Though short-lived, León’s seminar Afro-Cuban folklore produced the next generation of scholars in Afro-Cuban studies, including Rogelio Martínez-Furé (artistic director of the Conjunto Folklórico for several decades), Rafael L. López-Valdés (senior researcher and director of the Cuban Ethnographic Atlas project, Cuban Academy of Sciences, until 1993), and Miguel Barnet (noted author).
In December 1961, the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore was founded, to be housed a few months later in the newly created Cuban Academy of Sciences. The Department of Folklore was disbanded, and León became the director of the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore. This institutional move created an important cultural shift in how “folklore” was regarded – from “culture” to “science.” The heady days of the Department of Folklore were gone. With this institutional shift came a new seriousness with which Cuba’s folk traditions were researched. But it also meant that the staged performances of Afro-Cuban religious rituals would be presented by a new entity, the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional.

Founded in early 1962, the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba was directed by Rogelio Martínez Furé, an alumnus of León’s folklore seminar, and Rodolfo Reyes Cortés, a well-known Mexican choreographer and dancer. According to Martínez Furé, the Conjunto Folklórico was founded in order to “satisfy the need of the Cuban people for an institution capable of retrieving Cuba’s music and dance traditions for integration into the new national culture.” Rafael L. López Valdés, a researcher with the Cuban Academy of Sciences from 1962 to 1993, described the intellectual impact of this institutional separation on León's original unified vision in a December 1991 interview:
As of 1962, the two lines that had previously been joined, that is, the investigative line and the "spectacle" line, were now institutionally separated. On the one hand, there was the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore…which already had an investigative character. On the other hand, there was the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional, which already had as its goal the mounting of spectacles. So during this entire period, the dancers and musicians were not aficionados, that is, they had not taken dance classes and such. Rather, they were simply townspeople of these same religious groups [Ocha, Palo Monte, Abakwá], like Nieves Fresneda, a Santera who was a daughter of Yemayá. So, old Santeras and younger people, too–Lázaro Ross, and Jesús Pérez, the famous batá player–all of these people were practitioners. Emilio O'Farrill was a practitioner of Palo Monte. This whole group of people was organized choreographically, and presented the spectacles as part of a choreographic and theatrical concept.

As the Conjunto Folklórico developed into a professional ensemble, the same group of people performed for each presentation. No longer ritual specialists, the Conjunto Folklórico performers learned the songs and dances in Cuba's prestigious arts schools, from master musicians and dancers who were typically unconnected with the religious roots of these Afro-Cuban performance traditions. The espectáculos of the Conjunto Folklórico privileged aesthetic effect over ethnographic detail, so that the simple variations of ritual dress were transformed into matching costumes, one person’s gestural tropes were performed by the entire troupe, and short repeated refrains replaced longer improvisatory ritual interactions.
These decisions were based on theatrical logic – that is, how to convey the core of a genre or an event to an audience that may be ignorant of its context. John Dumoulin noted a “lack of comprehension” regarding certain Afro-Cuban ritual practices among religious practitioners as well as among outsiders:
“Lack of comprehension is in this case a problem which begins in the cults themselves, since most initiates do not know the dialect well. This is so marked that frequently it will be only a small minority who understand completely the song they are singing. This is a condition which could not subsist in the theatre.” (Dumoulin 1962: 74)

And further:
“Argeliers León has helped to remedy many of these difficulties by scrupulous composition of his productions, and by including extensive explanatory notes in their programs. Nevertheless, it is apparent that the spectator cannot at once become familiar with the artistic subtleties of these cults, nor understand at once their position within traditional Cuban society. It is to be expected that, with the incorporation of folk themes and dances in works of drama and dance conceived directly for the theatre, the Cuban public will become increasingly conscious of the importance of this material for its own culture, and of the necessity to come to grips with the complexities of the original source.” (Dumoulin 1962: 75)

Conclusion

I turn now to a summary of what Dumoulin calls “the complexities of the original source” and public culture in Cuba in the twentieth century. Beginning with Fernando Ortíz’s sponsorship of the 1936 ethnographic conference, public and exoticized representations of Afro-Cuban religious ceremonies continued throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Popular magazines published full-page articles (complete with photographs) on the religious processions for Yemayá and Ochún in Regla, drumming ceremonies in Guanabacoa, and the pilgrimage to Rincón. Ortíz continued publishing books and articles on Afro-Cuban culture throughout the first half of the twentieth century, many of them ethnographic analyses of Afro-Cuban religious ceremonies. In the early 1960s, with the founding of the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional, the public face of Afro-Cuban religious performance was secularized and pushed outward even further by the new Cuban government. The songs, rhythms, and dances used to summon orichas and other Afro-Cuban deities were encouraged and showcased as dramatic spectacles, while their religious context was greatly deemphasized. As a result, theatricalized renditions of these religious ceremonies became the main public representation of Afro-Cuban religious traditions for several decades. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the ubiquity and popularity of folkloric representations of Afro-Cuban religious performance created a renewed interest in the religions themselves, inadvertently leading to a sharp increase in the number of initiates and practitioners in Afro-Cuban religious traditions. During the early 1990s, the Cuban government created institutions such as the Yoruba Cultural Association (which estimates that 65% of Cuba’s 11 million people practice African religious traditions [Boadle 2003]), and appointed a handful of priests and priestesses to be the official representatives of Afro-Cuban religions in Cuba. Some of these official representatives also participated in government initiatives linking foreign tourism and Afro-Cuban religious practices.

In early twenty-first-century Cuba, there is the omnipresent sense that a substantial part of Afro-Cuban religious performance may be for outsiders – tourists, scholars, itinerant travelers, or even governmental representatives who may be working on a new tourist initiative. I wonder whether it might be instructive to look back to the early days of the Cuban Revolution and to the ethnographic research and performances of the Department of Folklore. What made that project enduring and valuable was its reliance on the full collaboration and support of the religious community. Will we see a state-sponsored Abakwá potencia? A Palo cauldron for the city of Havana? My hope is that Afro-Cuban religions turn their attentions inward, toward their own communities for regeneration and recuperation, and that state involvement nurtures this interiority.

References

Boadle, Anthony. 2003. “Yoruba deity worshipers open congress in Havana.” Reuters News Service. Havana Journal. 11 July.

Dumoulin, John. 1962. “The Participative Art of the Afrocuban Religions.” Abhandlungen und Berichte des Staatlichen Museums für Volkerkunde Dresden. Berlin. Vol. 21. Pp. 63–77.

Hagedorn, Katherine. 2001. Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santería. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

TIMELINE for the foundation of the CFNC (emphasis on the early 1960s)
Katherine Hagedorn (Pomona College) – 4th Ethnomusicology Symposium

1936: First public performance of Afro-Cuban batá drums (associated with Regla de Ocha), during ethnographic conference in Havana on Afro-Cuban religions, sponsored by Cuban ethnologist Fernando Ortíz

1940s: Fernando Ortíz’s informal seminars on Afro-Cuban culture, attended by musicologist Argeliers León, among others

January 1959: triumph of Cuban Revolution

March–June 1959: Isabel Monal and other Revolutionary intellectuals establish TEATRO NACIONAL, which consists of five departments: symphonic music, choral music, dance, theatre, and folklore

Summer 1960: Argeliers León named Director of DEPARTMENT OF FOLKLORE

October 1960–May 1961: Argeliers León conducts seminars on Afro-Cuban “folklore,” modeled on Fernando Ortíz’s seminars; León’s students include

Winter 1960–1961: student papers from León’s seminars are published in Actas del Folklore, a journal published by the Department of Folklore

December 1961: INSTITUTE OF ETHNOLOGY AND FOLKLORE is founded under the auspices of the Council of Culture (a branch of the Ministry of Education)

January 1962: Argeliers León named Director of Institute of Ethnology and Folklore

March 1962: CUBAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES is created by governmental decree

March 1962: same governmental decree that creates Cuban Academy of Sciences also transfers Institute of Ethnology and Folklore from Council of Culture to Academy of Sciences

April 1962: CONJUNTO FOLKLORICO NACIONAL DE CUBA (CFNC) is founded; directed by folklorist Rogelio Martínez Furé (alumnus of León’s Afro-Cuban folklore seminars) and choreographer Rodolfo Reyes Cortés (well-known Mexican dance director)

Fall 1962: scholar John Dumoulin witnesses Argeliers León’s ethnographic performances as well as early performances of CFNC, and writes descriptive and admiring article entitled “The Participative Art of the Afro-Cuban Religions” for German journal on folk art

January 1963: institutional separation between León’s Institute of Ethnology and Folklore and Martínez-Furé’s Conjunto Folklórico Nacional is complete