Atlantic Perspectives: Places, Spirits and Heritage

By Markus Balkenhol and Ruy Llera Blanes

Focusing on mobility, religion, and belonging, the volume contributes to transatlantic anthropology and history by bringing together religion, cultural heritage and placemaking in the Atlantic world. The entanglements of these domains are ethnographically scrutinized to perceive the connections and disconnections of specific places which, despite a common history, are today very different in terms of secular regimes and the presence of religion in the public sphere. Ideally suited to a variety of scholars and students in different fields, Atlantic Perspectives will lead to new debates and conversations throughout the fields of anthropology, religion and history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Nov 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789204841

Book preview

Chapter 1

Silent Histories

Deadly Chinos and the Memorialization of a Chinese Imaginary through Afro-Cuban Religions

Diana Espírito Santo

Introduction

Paul Johnson argues that ‘spirit possession describes the idea of being spoken-through, but it has itself always been spoken through too, ventriloquizing a series of positions … The trick will be to also hear who and what is speaking (or dancing) sideways and in translation’ (Johnson 2011: 419), particularly in the context of the Afro-Atlantic religions he studies. What is, however, the ‘Afro-Atlantic’, and its roster of entities, if not an ontological project designed and stabilized by certain communities, some more visible, and some more ‘local’, than others? And what do spirits and possession say about these variable communities and their historical representations? Inherent to any ritual system with covert as well as overt power relations are its invisible actants, particularly in the cosmologically and ritually fluid Afro-Cuban religions. Afro-Cuban spirit mediumship religions deal in transversal spirit identities that have constituted the Cuban historical labour force and its imagined selves and others – for instance, European, African, Indigenous, and even Arab spirits. Its underbelly lies in the twentieth century – prostitutes, casino owners, guapos, spirits of those who lived off the street, as well as its bureaucratic pantheons, which have recently included spirits of early Communist Party members. We could say that at stake in an investigation of the appearance of these new regimes of spiritual knowledge and the existential possibilities they afford, is the question of how Cuba’s recent history is somehow recycled and recreated under unpredictable forms of authority and embodiment, and what moral topographies result thereof, national and otherwise.

But other, parallel historical registers have had an equal or greater importance in Cuba’s spirit universe, as well as some of its Afro-Cuban religious history. One of these is the category of Chinese spirits, espiritus or muertos Chinos. Chinese indenture or ‘coolie labour’ made it to Cuba from the mid nineteenth century because of the forced end of African slavery on colonial sugar and coffee plantations. They were ‘contracted’ on an eight-year basis, but only 50 per cent of the imported Chinese survived this tenure. The coolie trade began in 1847, with 206 Chinese arriving from Manila; it was uninterrupted until 1874, by which time over 120,000 had arrived. Nearly all were men, and hardly any returned to China (Hu-DeHart and López 2008: 14). Labourers were beaten, deprived of basic rights and food, and forced to work extremely long hours.

But while this indentured labour was followed by another seventy years of free immigration, when the Chinese became a relatively commercial, prosperous and urban community (ibid.), the chino still occupied an extremely ambiguous role in Cuban perceptions of racial and social status. The Chinese were construed as neither racially ‘black’, nor fully socially ‘white’. Historian Joseph Dorsey argues that ‘contradictions between the legality of social privilege and the reality of social degradation complicated processes of Chinese alienation and assimilation in Cuba in ways that bear little resemblance to Asian experiences elsewhere in the Americas’ (Dorsey 2004: 20). In particular, the marginalization of the Chinese ‘mimicked forms directed against Africans’ (ibid.: 22). Indeed, as one of my interlocutors told me, ‘where there is [sic] Chinese, there is always something African behind’. While there is ample recent historical and ethnographic evidence that the Chinese did marry and integrate into Afro-Cuban religious families, shaping both the cosmology and material culture of Santería, for instance, which worships the Cuban-Yoruba oricha gods (Tsang 2015), there is more ambiguity at the level of representations of the muerto Chino in the Cuban imagination. My purpose in this chapter is not to examine the historical dimensions of Chinese culture in Afro-Cuban religious practices as such, but rather to begin to come to terms with a particular imagining and imaging of el Chino in the spiritual-scape more broadly, which in general empowers the persona of the Chinese ‘man-spirit’, while representing him as hardworking, suspicious, rancorous, mysterious and, most importantly, capable of powerful sorcery.

These representations are less impactful in Santería than they are in the spirit practices of ‘espiritismo’, a creole mediumship tradition associated with nineteenth-century Euro-American spiritualism, and Palo Monte, an umbrella term for an array of heterogeneous magical practices associated with Bantu-speaking slaves in Cuba. Both of these practices deal immediately with the realm of the often hidden, opaque dead. It is tempting to understand the existence of Chinese spirits in both spheres of religious practice as betraying ‘intra-connective’ cosmoses, as Don Handelman (2008: 182) would say, translated in this ethnographic context into the productive appropriation of difference. The dominant Afro-Cuban spirit cosmologies seem to share this characteristic propensity to absorb and encompass ‘otherness’, producing novel ontological forms and connections. But it would not be incorrect to understand Cuban history as having ‘absorbed’ and ‘digested’ the Chinese in ways that are both more familiar and more marginal than spirits of other ethnicities. On the one hand, muertos Chinos are far from the largely anonymous non-family beings that are worked by Espiritistas and Paleros: rather, their ‘appearance’ is generally based on kin relations (distant or not), or on geographical contiguities between person and spirit. On the other hand, the Chinos are popularly understood as peculiarly potent entities. Furthermore, they are not simply rare but constitute the largely unspoken registers of witchcraft in religious parlance. It is for this reason that they are positioned at frictious angles to an Afro-Cuban ontology of connective muertos, producing their own forms of embodiment and historical knowledge.

In a recent article on the anthropology of history, Stephan Palmié and Charles Stewart set out to deconstruct some of the principles of Western historiography and the ways in which we can anthropologically turn history on itself, making it an object of inquiry. For one, we could question a ‘linear uniform causality’ (Palmié and Stewart 2016: 212) in any number of ethnographic ways. In one of these, historical knowledge is ‘derived not from diligent and painstaking research and reconstruction, but through revelation, mantic technique, oneiric, prophetic, or otherwise inspired (instead of rationally contrived) forms of knowledge production’ (ibid.: 213). Thus, in the 1830s on the island of Naxos in Greece, for example, people had dreams about the Virgin Mary telling them where to dig for buried items, which were then duly found after a few years (ibid.). Hence, in this ethnographic case analysed by Stewart (2012), oneiric knowledge had ontological effects. Another inviolable principle in normative historiography is sequential irreversibility (Palmié and Stewart 2016: 215) – a chronological code. Time moves forward, not backwards. But as the authors, and on a separate occasion Palmié (2006), have argued, the Cuban Palero’s work tool – a composite power object called a nganga – a cauldron-type piece where the initiate assembles entities as diverse as bones of a person, sticks, stones, plants, railway nails, knives, chains, and the blood of animal sacrifice, can ‘come to document a sort of history that chronicles the nganga owner’s agency and mystical pursuits’ (Palmié and Stewart 2016: 217). The contents of a nganga constitute a ‘pattern that cascades across time and (social) space in a historicity that appears to defy any and all Western modes of temporal, physical, and even metaphysical common sense’ (ibid.). According to the authors, each nganga is a kind of ‘chronotopic constellation of its own’ (ibid.: 216).

In this chapter, I will argue that the muertos Chinos essentially comprise a cosmology within a broader Atlantic cosmology, one with chronotopic singularities, following both Palmié and Stewart (2016) and Kristina Wirtz (2011). In her analysis of religious and folklore performances in eastern Cuba, Wirtz looks at how a ‘romanticizing and exoticizing cloak of nostalgia is wrapped around certain figures and performances marked as African’ (Wirtz 2011: 16). She argues that blackness in Cuba is temporalized into what she calls ‘timeless past still among us’, a chronotope that condenses notions of blackness, history and identity into a powerful racializing discourse that enacts Cuba’s colonial past (ibid.: 11). Thus, certain performances assign ‘blackness’ to a perpetually available ‘historical present’ (ibid.: 16), doing so through different perspectives, inflections, discourses, and even religious songs. I believe that it is not just the ‘African’ which is reproduced in chronotopic fashion, but el Chino as well. Cuban racialized representations of the ‘Chinese’ (male) in a popular, public sphere of parlance, literature, television and Afro-Cuban religion, portray him as powerful, secretive and recalcitrant – a wielder of the deadliest magic, regardless of whether or not this is historically accurate. This ethnographic example alerts us to the dangers of models of straightforward historical memory and commemoration for explaining possession-centred practices, suggesting instead that the production of cosmology and heritage can occur on multiple referential, conceptual and experiential levels – some more concrete, others more abstract. Both cosmological enclosure and open-endedness seem to function here in equal measure.

Imagining the ‘Chinese’

My first attempts at contacting practitioners of Palo Monte who worked with Chinese spirits were failures, albeit revealing ones. One palero in Bejucal, a traditionally religious neighbourhood in Havana, suddenly changed his mind when I called him to say that I was on my way to meet him for our interview. ‘Listen to me,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I understood you well yesterday’, referring to a call in which he had explicitly told me he worked cosas Chinas (meaning, Chinese muertos). ‘I only work African spirits, not Chinese. Anyone who tells you otherwise is giving you a cuento Chino’, by which he meant pulling the wool over my eyes. I had another failure with someone I had established contact with in Barrio Chino, Havana’s Chinatown. Maria Lam, an Afro-Chinese owner of a series of restaurants, had told me on the phone that she had a padrino (a religious godfather) who worked Chinese Palo Monte; but when I went to see her, the number had mysteriously disappeared from her phone.

While Leonel, a highly experienced Santero in his mid-50s and with whom I have been friends for twelve years, would understand these reluctances as evidence of Chinese-things-not-spoken-of (and indeed, it was he who first alerted me to the ‘notoriety’ [mala fama] of espíritus Chinos in Cuba), Pedro, one of my closest interlocutors in Cuba, puzzled by my interest in muertos Chinos in my last fieldtrip to Havana, hazarded an educated guess on how the association between el Chino and magic was forged in the public imagination in the first place. For one, he told me, there was a recent episode of Trás la Huella, a long-running Cuban police detective series, in which one of the protagonists was investigating a case of stolen bones from the Chinese cemetery in Havana, which he attributed to the efforts of a practitioner of Palo Monte to confection a magical ‘Chinese nganga’. The idea that began to circulate was that a normal African nganga, when ‘charged’ with the bones of a Chinese person, was exceptionally potent. According to Pedro, such a thing had never been heard of before, and it gained rapid notoriety.

Added to this is a much older reference made by Cuba’s master ethnographer, Lydia Cabrera, who published her seminal El Monte in the 1950s, based on detailed ethnography as well as stories and narratives of religious interlocutors, and which has become a kind of bible for practitioners. I translate:

Chinese sorcery is so hermetic, that Calazán Herrera – his name will appear continually throughout these pages – who has, for those who wish to know, ‘walked the whole of the island’, has never been able to penetrate any of their secrets or learn anything from them. Only that they sometimes eat a paste made of bat meat into which goes the ground eyes and brains of the creatures, excellent for conserving one’s sight; that with an owl they confection a very powerful venom; that the lamp they light to Sanfancón illuminates, but doesn’t burn; that they always have behind the door a recipient full of magical water that they throw onto the back of a person they want to do harm to; and that they feed their muertos very well. (Cabrera 1954: 24)

While Cabrera’s informant is long dead, the idea that there are Chinese secrets that not even the keenest of interlocutors can access has become an enduring myth, shrouding the ‘Chinese’ with religious secrecy. Indeed, Josimar, a middle-aged Afro-Cuban palero I am relatively close to, confirms – second hand – this curious magical imagery alluded to in Cabrera’s text, allying it to the complicity of African spirits.

Paleros will rarely tell you they work with Chinese spirits. Our ‘identity cards’ are the ‘African’ spirits and gods, Tiembla-Tierra, Madre de Agua, and so forth. But sometimes paleros ‘cross’ the prendas (ngangas) to do a ‘job’. It’s important that it’s the African element that people see, el espiritu negro, so that, for example, we can have a prenda Africana with a Chinese spirit. That way people can’t anticipate the Chino, because he goes ‘behind’ the African. The African fools the victim.

For Josimar, muertos Chinos are the ultimate battle weapons, to be drawn when all else fails. For Leonel too, these muertos are the most efficient and deadly of all Cuban spirits. He was initiated at seventeen years of age in Santería, and says that back then his religious elders spoke more candidly of such things.

There was a black man in Guanabacoa, who must’ve been around seventy years old, and these elders always had their concepts of the Chinos, and he used to say that if you happened to have a Chinese spirit and you sent it to someone else, it’s their downfall, it’s the worst thing that can happen to you. And that’s why I think people say, metaphorically, oye, quitame ese chino que tengo atrás (take away that Chino that I have behind me).

However, neither Josimar nor Leonel worked a nganga China, nor could point me in the direction of anyone who directly did. So, where was I to find these muertos Chinos? Was it a mistake to look for Chinese magical heritage within Palo Monte and espiritismo? Was I looking for something imaginal, literally?

The notion that the Chinese and their descendants in Cuba paid homage in elaborate ways to their ancestors is well documented (Pérez Fernandez and Rodriguez González 2008: 143; also, Baltar Rodriguez 1997). But how do we get from that fact to the idea that the Chinese wielded magic of the ‘African’ kind, especially in the light of Cuba’s recent history? From 1959 onwards, the deterioration in diplomatic ties between Cuba and China as well as the beginning of the new Revolution’s anti-capitalist measures, inevitably signalled the exodus of the last direct Chinese descendants from Cuba, leading to the quasi-disintegration of an already elderly and fragile community (Eng Menéndez 2004: 5). While some of its cultural and patrimonial capital was rebuilt after this period, especially from the end of the 1980s (ibid.: 9), Havana’s Chinatown is now known as a ‘Chinatown without Chinese’ (López 2013: 237), and its remaining Chinese newspaper in danger of extinction (ibid.: 239). I believe that given a clearly fading public understanding of the historical import of Chinese culture in Cuba, we could should look for the emergence, and indeed maintenance, of the Chinese ‘chronotope’ – which allies Chinese ethnicity to magical prowess – in the historical alliance between the Chinese and the African elements of Cuban society, and in which the former played a much more ambiguous role. As Dorsey well observes, ‘by socioeconomic and sociocultural fiat, Chinese contract labor made it necessary to create white men who were not, black men who were not, Spanish subjects who were not, and homosexuals who were not’ (Dorsey 2004: 41). The ‘Chinamen’ who were not would thus become central to the narrative of brujería at the heart of Afro-Cuban religious perceptions of magical potency.

In an article on the idea of freedom implicit in the Cuba Commission Report, an attempted intervention by the Chinese government to gather data on its overseas subjects and their working conditions in 1876, Sean Metzger argues that the ‘coolie trade generally unsettles the Atlantic as an analytic zone, and specifically shifts the terms under which freedom might be understood’ (Metzger 2008: 106). In this Atlantic seascape, he says, in which the terms of freedom for Caribbean subjects have almost always been articulated through discourses of liberalism and governance between the European metropoles and the colonies (ibid.: 105), the immigrant Chinese population comes up awkwardly. The question for Metzger is ‘how freedom might be understood differently in a seascape where shifting populations include those who cannot be assumed to have absorbed republican ideals’ (ibid.). Based on twelve hundred depositions, the Cuba Commission Report foregrounded the shift from a slave to a contract labour economy. But contrary to Enlightenment ideals of rights-bearing individuals, the contract ‘functioned as an instrument of surveillance that apprehended particular people and contributed to their enslavement by making bodies highly visible as property’ (Lisa Yun 2008: 127 in Metzger 2008: 106–7). Metzger argues, following Yun, that the promise of obtaining freedom created a paper chase that plunged them into a bureaucratic system of freedom deferrals instead (ibid.: 107), creating of the contract a paradox with only the appearance of corporeal liberty. It is no wonder that indentured Chinese labourers had some of the highest suicide rates in the region. Between 1850 and 1872, five hundred coolies took their own lives every year, compared to an annual average of thirty-five slaves (Dorsey 2004: 26).

This also fermented bridges with the African slaves and their resistance to oppression, at least until 1886, when slavery was finally abolished, which is not to say that there were no frictions or fights between coolies and Africans. Indeed, as Dorsey argues, contract labour was not meant to undermine slavery: ‘Coolies were used to supplement African captives in the face of British opposition to the Atlantic slave trade, and to facilitate the gradual transition from slave to free labor’ (Dorsey 2004: 22–23). Thus, coolies were not just ‘improperly white’, they were ‘improperly free’ as well (ibid.: 23). The Chinese were also expert murderers on the sugar and coffee plantations they laboured on. Dorsey cites that between 1856 and 1874, there were 314 cases of homicide involving 445 Chinese litigants, the majority of which were prosecuted (ibid.: 27). Many homicides were carried out in alliance with slaves.

The coolies tried hard to advance in a system designed to disaffect and discriminate them. Because of the stark difference in numbers between imported men and women, Chinese men were never expected to reproduce; Cuban society curiously portrayed the coolie as homosexual, rather than virile, a definition probably stemming from early representations of the coolie as passive and docile. Even now, many Cubans who are depreciative of Raul Castro call him la china vieja, the old China woman, alluding to his supposed (or imagined) homosexuality. But as Kathleen López shows, the Chinese did form interracial marriages, mostly with black and mulatto Cuban women, which to some measure assisted the transition from bondage to free wage earners, or even entrepreneurs (López 2008: 60), and where possible, they also bought the freedom of their enslaved lovers or wives. López argues that while during indenture, Chinese labourers had close to no access to social networks, given the rupture from their homeland and the lack of patronage in their new home, in a post-indenture period alliances multiplied as relationships were formed (ibid.: 65). ‘Across the Americas’, she says, ‘the overlapping African and Asian diasporas produced new dynamics during the age of emancipation’ (ibid.: 69), making claims about class and caste in society, discrimination, and the rights to business spaces, among others (ibid.). Furthermore, as Martin Tsang describes in his thesis on the influence of the Chinese on the development of what was to become Santería, ‘Afro-Cuban religion’ is not an encompassing enough term to designate la regla de ocha and its multifarious sources. A Chinese cultural import has been ascertained to some measure in all ‘Afro-Cuban’ religions, yet ‘Afro-Cuba’ remains a binary term of European and African mutual influences, which ‘makes no Asian or indigenous connections apparent’ (Tsang 2015: 11).

Tsang is explicitly critical of well-known Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz’s famous concept of ‘transculturation’, developed in his Cuban Counterpoint of 1947, where the Chinese barely feature in the ‘constructive enterprise’ imagined by Ortiz (Tsang 2015: 2). Cuba was not a cultural and racial melting pot (with a few solid pieces) as Ortiz had envisaged in his understanding of the nation; rather, some communities were left out altogether of Ortiz’s metaphor of the delicious Cuban stew, the ajiaco, which described a sentiment of ‘Cubanness’. Indeed, López argues that Ortiz cast out both the Japanese and the Chinese element of the Cuban nation, accusing them of being spies, and generally undesirable: ‘[I]n addition to being physically different from Europeans and Africans, they were degenerate and morally questionable’ (López 2013: 210). José Marti, Cuba’s patron poet, Republican politician and freedom fighter during the colonial war against Spain, particularly dismissed the Chinese. His main aim was independence from the colony but also the establishment of a racial equality between whites and blacks (ibid.: 126). The Chinese element of the equation only got in the way.

Although these founding fathers wished to paint the Cuban Chinese as irrelevant, thousands of coolies and contract-free Chinese joined the ranks of the insurgents and independence fighters, particularly in the ten years war, from 1868 to 1878. They thus helped to achieve the independence that Martí so hoped for. Enrique Cirules argues that the Chinese were not just valiant warriors under the ranks of generals such as Máximo Gomez, and mambi chiefs such as Agramonte, Calixto Garcia and Maceo, but they were also known as experienced guerrilla fighters, having fought other wars in China (Cirules 2000: 29). He defends the popular Cuban notion that when many were caught, imprisoned and tortured by the enemy, not a single one would talk. It is well known, he continues, that the Chinese were experts at infiltrating villages and procuring supplies of clothes, food and medicine for their fellow mambises, in the harshest of times (ibid.: 30). They also independently knew of medicine, plants and herbs, knowledge of which served them well in battle scenarios. However, Cirules also recognizes that the integration of the Chinese in Cuba was a silent and anonymous affair, and often a humiliating one (ibid.: 29). In any case, in popular culture and parlance the Chinese were quickly associated with impossible situations, with mistrust and suspicion, with things beyond remedy. Sergio Valdés Bernal (2000: 67–68) enumerates several popular Cuban sayings that attest to this: no creer ni en un velorio chino (to not believe even in a Chinese funeral), used to affirm suspicion towards something or someone; no lo salva ni un medico chino (they will not be saved even by a Chinese doctor), used to reinstate the irremediable character of a situation; tirar una chinita, which means to assault someone verbally in a subtle way; tener un chino pegado (to have a Chinaman stuck on you), used to describe someone’s bad luck. Part of the reason for this perceived mutual mistrust between Cuba’s Chinese community and the rest of its citizens is the fact that, unlike other immigrant communities, the former managed to preserve much of its linguistic and cultural heritage for a while, mostly at the cost of its conscious isolation from mainstream society (ibid.: