It is during the ceremony known as asiento that the oricha determined to be one’s guardian is seated inside one’s head. The ritual seals a fundamental bond of consciousness between human and spirit. From that moment forward the devotee no longer needs to listen for the call of the oricha because the voice is her very self.
For days Daniel had been inviting me to a cajón, a term I know only in its relation to the box drums he keeps stacked in the corner of Miriela’s dining room. Now we are rushing to get there on time. Yolersi is still folding his mat as Daniel pulls his drums out into the curb where Jorge Luis and Misael, a drummer I recognize from the performance at the Callejón, are waiting in a peso taxi.
It is Jorge Luis who explains what we’re on our way to do. A woman named Cristina who lives in the town of Regla is getting ready to celebrate the anniversary of making santo, becoming a daughter of Yemayá [the Ocean Mother Goddess—the Eds.]. Tomorrow there will be a birthday party, but the festivities begin today with the purification ceremony known as the cajón, which is named after the drums that will be used to call the oricha into the room.
I sit in the backseat with the drummers. Daniel’s red drums nestle between us like the taxi’s fifth passenger as we wind our way to the ferry that will take us across the harbor to Regla.
As we shove off to sea, I imagine the ship that brought my parents to Cuba sixty years ago as it set anchor in these same waters. It would have squeezed through the Spanish fortresses that line the jaws of the harbor—El Morro and Lacabaña in the northern stretch, Castillo de la Punta to the south—the three garrisons holding my parents gently in their teeth before releasing them into the Bay. I can almost hear my parents gasp as they catch their first glimpse of the island. Before them, Havana would have spread her shores, a dazzling paradise framed by blue seas and royal palms. To the west on the periphery of their vision lie the swanky hotels and nightclubs of Vedado where movie stars and mobsters come to play. To the east, the town of Regla.
When I’d asked Marta and Miriam about Regla, they’d spoken in quiet tones. Its residents were said either to be great priests or dangerous thieves, depending upon who was reporting.
“A town of witches,” Marta had cautioned.
“A center of great mysteries,” Daniel now promises. It’s in the town of Regla that Santería priests and Babalawo have made their homes since the 1880s. Here where the streets are said to thrum with the rhythms of batá drums and incantations. Here that the ájè are said to live.
And it is here among them where the Black Madonna, Our Lady of Regla, rules over harbor and town. Like Our Lady of Charity, Our Lady of Regla is a mother who is too expansive to confine herself to one religion. She is an incarnation both of Mary, Stella Maris, Catholic star of the seas, and the Yoruban queen of the seas, Ochún’s mother, Yemayá. And it is her church in Regla, like Our Lady’s in El Cobre, that is the focal point of her devotion.
Daniel tells me how the inhabitants of Regla say she swims the length
and breadth of her bay at night. The fishermen have seen her—a mermaid with mother-of-pearl scales and silvery hair. Her eyes, they say, are round and white, her dark irises fringed in lashes. They describe how the stars light her skin as she swims. By morning, she has resumed her place in the sanctuary and can be found there standing erect and still—her forehead still wet with perspiration from the exertion of her nocturnal swims, her robes still dripping from the sea.
I like to think that she and my mother might have spotted one another across the harbor. That my mother might have heard the voice of the great sea goddess inviting her to join her in her nightly swims. Know herself as a woman clothed in stars and sea; a woman with the power to come and go as she pleased, revel in the fullness of herself as she dips between worlds…
When we dock in Regla, the drummers and I thread our way through dirt streets and alleyways, stopping occasionally to ask for directions. Above us clouds turn black with the rains that threaten to break at any moment. Residents duck for cover, leaving the narrow streets empty, the only sign of life an occasional bicycle parked outside a house. Even the sanctuary feels dark and deserted as we pass by. The ivory statue of Our Lady of Regla outside its doors takes on a gray hue that reflects the gloom of the day.
We find the house we’re looking for just as the first rain hits. We are, as Daniel feared, late. Cristina is waiting for us in the doorway, already dressed in the colors of her saint: a blue and white skirt and tank top, white footless tights and headscarf. A pair of bright yellow sandals are the only interruption in the sea goddess’s template of blue and white.
Like Daniel’s comadre Miriela, Cristina has undergone the asiento ceremony in which she has aligned her head and spirit with Yamayá. But whereas Miriela is still completing her first year of making santo, Cristina is years in. The rituals that will take place today and tomorrow mark the anniversary date when she first became an oloricha of the sea goddess. These celebrations are a way to strengthen the bond she sealed during the asiento ceremony to demonstrate her devotion, and invite Yemayá to dance with her.
Cristina leads us through a narrow strip of kitchen that takes us to the main room of the house. A square no more than 10 x 20 feet, the room serves as living room as well as shrine. Its shelves and glass- doored cabinet are filled with soperas and statues dedicated to the saints, and every piece of furniture except for a table set in the middle of the room has been cleaned for the ceremony about to take place.
Cristina is a hurricane of activity, directing family members to bring
us bottled water and soda and cups, setting the table with plates of chicken and rice and avocado. We are honored guests, Daniel explains. No matter that we’re late. The drummers who play the consecrated drums that bring down the oricha must be fed.
When we finish our meal, the crew and guests click into place. Cristina calls for two men to remove the table. She sweeps the floors and smooths her skirts. The drummers move to the chairs Cristina has set for them against a wall. Family and neighbors migrate from the kitchen to the main room. There they hug the walls, leaving the center of the room clear. I search for a place as far as possible from the activity, settling on a spot near Cristina’s teenaged children at the back of the room. Her daughter, dressed in a miniskirt and an off-the- shoulder tee with the letters “Diva” spelled out in rhinestones, moves between checking a pink smartphone and admiring her reflection in the glass doors of the cabinet that houses the saints. The girl’s brother, his hair cut into a Mohawk he’s dyed red and black, sits on the stairs behind us busying himself with an MP3 player.
From the front of the room, a stout gray-haired woman who David tells me is the santera in charge instructs us to cleanse our faces and hands with herbs and perfume water. She leads us in a call and response of the Padre Nuestro, then cedes the room to the drummers: Daniel and Misael on the cajones, Jorge Luis on clave and agogo. The instruments sound out the invitation for the oricha to join us.
The men close their eyes as they feel their way into the rhythms that call Elluga to enter the room and open the threshold between worlds. Jorge Luis lights a cigar, blowing smoke to tease the deity into the room.
Cristina kicks off her shoes and begins to dance. There is nothing performative about the way she moves. Unlike the structured steps I’ve learned with Lourdes and Zunilda, Cristina’s first steps are slow and tentative—not the result of studying an official lexicon but rather an extension of her own sensibility as she feels her way into the pulse and cadence of the goddess.
The drummers lead the way. Over the next hours they will transform. Gone will be the men I traveled across the harbor with on the ferry, the ones who joked and argued as they dragged their drums behind them. What I’ll see in their place is something moving through them: another throat informing the tongues that alternate between Lucumi and Spanish chants. Their voices sing out at a greater volume than is required in such a small space. Their hands strike their instruments in intensifying waves.
Cristina too is changed. This woman who moments ago served us lunch, who directed the moving of furniture and the sweeping of floors, the woman who is in charge of everything, now submits to something only she can see—a latent image of the goddess impressed at the time of initiation that reveals itself fully to her now.
I can tell the instant the spirit catches her. Cristina throws her head back and laughs, and when she looks out at us again her eyes are wide and bright, as if she were suddenly able to take in more of the world. I remember this look from the dancers I saw nine years earlier with Lourdes. Their eyes had swelled as if to accommodate the inner vision of the spirits that rose to mount their limbs, climbing them like trees until they came to rest in their heads. I could still recall how every affectation of those dancers’ worldly selves had dropped away as they made way for the oricha now moving through them.
It’s not just Cristina’s eyes that are changed. She stumbles through the room as if drunk, her limbs loose, as if they no longer require the support of mortal bones. And when she dances, she dances as Yemayá, lifting her skirts as if they were sails or oars.
The crowd claps their encouragement, and people mark time with their feet as they follow Cristina across the threshold. Jorge Luis relights his cigar, puffing up a line of smoke like incense into a room already hazy from other cigar and cigarette smoke. Cristina reels along the wall, coaxing men and women into the center of the room to dance with her. They are dancing now, as their ancestors once did in Ile-Ife, in the beginning of time. Even Cristina’s children put down their electronics to join.
I watch the circle of dancers before me, wondering what it was that allowed them to drop the veil of skin and gesture, invite the gods to dance with and through them. I am both surprised and disappointed at how shy I feel. Since I’d arrived nearly two weeks ago, I’d been hoping I might witness a Santeria ceremony. Now that I’m here I feel painfully self-conscious. Terrified I might be called upon to leave my safe place at the back of the room and join in.
There’s a break in the drumming—a signal that it is time for Yemayá to rest after the long journey from Orun. The santera offers Cristina a drink of water to help clear her throat. Together, they walk around the room, the old woman’s arm draped around Cristina’s shoulder like a boxing coach.
When she’s ready for the next round, Cristina breaks away to circle the room on her own. She touches the faces of her children, hugs one of the men. When she gets to me, she grazes my forehead, almost lovingly, her fingers moving like those of a priest as she marks me with the sign of the cross. Her eyes widen as if to take in more of me. I feel something shift inside me, something blooming at the root of my spine. Its voice, if it had one, tells me not to be afraid.
Hour after hour the drummers fill the room with the call of their voices and hands. Hour after hour Cristina answers with the drumming of her feet and the circling of her skirts. The crowd ebbs and flows with her tide, waving more smoke into an already cramped space. I vacillate between feeling caught up in the happenings and feeling them wash over me. The drummers’ hands rise and fall as Cristina’s feet rhythmically hit the ground; her blue and white skirts whip the air. Voices. Drums. Feet. Hands. The borders of my own body begin to feel as if they are taking on unreliable dimensions. A mole on my forearm I’ve never noticed before seems to grow before my eyes. I watch it pulsate. I can’t breathe. Choking on something that may or may not be smoke, I push past the blur of dancing limbs, through the kitchen door, and into the alley to clear my head.
Outside, the rain falls in solid sheets, and the slender overhang of the roof provides only a little protection from the monsoon that soaks the hem of my skirt and feet. I lean against the wall of the house and feel the concrete damp against my back. I am not the only one who has come outside for air. Around me, hands and faces move in and out of focus and cigarette smoke mixes with rain. Cristina’s daughter shivers next to me in her miniskirt and Diva top. If I weren’t so dizzy, I might ask her how it feels to see her mother mounted by her oricha….
Inside the house the dancers are still dancing, the drummers still drumming. The shape and sound of them reach me as if from very far away. I need to make my way to them before I pass out, I think, let Daniel or Jorge Luis know that I’m not feeling well.
I expect the drummers to be angry when I interrupt them, but Jorge Luis takes one look at me and gives me his chair. Daniel leans over me. “You’re cold and pallid,” he tells me, touching my face. The santera douses my head and neck with perfume water, prays over a glass of water she instructs me to throw on myself, brings me fresh water to drink. As if from the other side of a tunnel, I hear the slap of Cristina’s feet on the floor. “Ah, ah!” she cries in a voice that rides the line between ecstasy and pain. And then my dizziness lifts and I feel myself returning to the room.
Cristina too is coming back to herself, barely able to stand from exhaustion as she regains her awareness. After hours of demonstrating her devotion to Yemayá— calling the sea goddess to dance with her, recommitting before family and friends to the bond she first sealed with the divinity during the asiento ceremony—
Cristina has reached some sort of climax. The old woman walks her in circles, talking her down. “Not everything can be accomplished in one day,” I hear her say and I’m not sure if she’s talking to Cristina or to me. After nearly four hours the drummers launch into their closing rhythms, the ones that sound their final praises to the oricha before petitioning Eleggua to usher in the spirits back to the invisible world. And then all is quiet. The men pick up their drums. The old woman returns to the front of the room. She leads us in a final blessing, calling out for the good to follow each of us, then herds what’s left of the crowd into the kitchen where she ladles soup and orange soda into plastic cups for us, signaling our re-entry back into the world of ordinary things. ◆
Reprinted by kind permission from My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle by Rebe Huntman, published by Monkfish Book Publishing Company, 2025.
Excerpted from Parabola’s Fall 2024 issue, THE WAY OF MAGIC.