The Cameo Theft is the removal of a feared jewel from the Yoruba temple in Cárdenas where Rodrigo Lerbier had left it in March 2003. Its disappearance remained unexplained for eleven years, until Aurelio returned and admitted that he had taken it as an initiation task for a Masonic lodge. The revelation turns a local mystery about a supposedly cursed object into part of Aurelio’s account of manipulation, spiritual corruption, and eventual return to Rodrigo.

The Cameo and Its Custody

The theft follows the cameo’s unsettling reputation. In Touladi, news that a jewel had been taken to a grave had stirred the village, and stories about the stone circulated amid competing legends and rumors. Later, in Cárdenas, Rodrigo encountered another public disturbance around it: an elderly woman cried that the stone was the devil’s eye, and he recognized in the outcry the possibility of harmful magic. The local priest, though wary of Yoruba rites, allowed Rodrigo into the house; people in the crowd treated the babalao’s presence with a respect comparable to that accorded the Catholic priest.

Rodrigo regarded the jewel as a concentration of harmful forces, like a lightning rod drawing and directing them. He proposed putting it in quarantine, and it came to be kept in the modest Yoruba temple in Cárdenas. This was not simply a secure place to store an object: in Rodrigo’s understanding, the temple was a means of containing a spiritually dangerous stone. His later recollection establishes the circumstances that made the theft possible. He had brought the cameo from the capital and placed it in the temple before dawn, then went to sleep for a few hours at his mother’s home.

The Theft and Its Delayed Discovery

Looking back, Rodrigo realized that the break-in could have happened shortly after he deposited the jewel. The day had not yet properly begun; someone who had followed him could have entered the temple while it was still dark and the streets were empty. At first he wondered whether the thief had acted out of greed, or had known that the cameo had never been declared to the authorities and that Rodrigo was not, in a strict legal sense, its rightful owner. He eventually suspected that the culprit must have known his movements and the events surrounding the stone’s earlier passage through Cárdenas.

Rodrigo searched for answers for days, questioning people who might know Aurelio in the Santería community or elsewhere. He did not know Aurelio’s family, whose parents came from Isla de la Juventud, but tried to contact them and even traveled to Cayo Largo under another pretext. The inquiries did not resolve the suspicion. Aurelio had worked at a hotel in Varadero and had previously worked with his parents on Cayo Largo; then he disappeared. Eleven years passed before he came back to Rodrigo’s Havana home, in a disheveled and distressed state, and identified himself.

Aurelio’s Confession

Aurelio confirmed that he had taken the cameo, but said he had done so for a newly established Masonic lodge in Cuba. Its founders, who seemed to have protection within the Castro regime, had pressed him to join, promising advantages that included the possibility of leaving Cuba and traveling abroad. The lodge was closely connected to the Grand Lodge of Cuba in Exile in Miami. Its members assured him that he could remain a Yoruba officiant while also becoming a Freemason, and that men of high rank belonged to both traditions.

The lodge’s initiation test was to steal the cameo and deliver it to its masters. Aurelio was told that the jewel was under the influence of evil powers and might harm society and the world unless the lodge’s collective spiritual force neutralized or redirected it. The theft was presented to him not as ordinary criminal acquisition but as a crucial mission for humanity’s salvation. That claim inverted Rodrigo’s own wish to isolate the stone: the same fear of its supposed power that had led to its safekeeping was used to persuade Aurelio to carry it away.

After crossing into the United States through the lodge’s more or less clandestine network, Aurelio was gradually drawn into a group whose rituals differed from the Santería he had known. He described being indoctrinated and moving into Palo Mayombe, a practice involving the dead and forces of nature, which he said came to be used for darker purposes. In time he sought human blood for rituals and became increasingly feared and respected within the group. Satan took the place of a god and, in Aurelio’s account, of the father he had never had. The cameo theft thus marks the beginning of a much larger departure from his earlier religious life, though Aurelio’s confession does not establish the cameo’s eventual whereabouts.

Aftermath and Significance

The return of Aurelio gives Rodrigo the answer he had pursued since 2003, but does not make the years of uncertainty or the consequences of the theft disappear. Rodrigo had wondered whether the stone’s disappearance might, in one sense, have been a relief: he had wanted to be rid of an object he considered diabolical, and had been unable to return it to his cousin in Québec. Yet the thought that someone had deliberately targeted the jewel kept the loss from becoming a simple release. Aurelio’s confession linked the theft to an organized network and to the transformation of a young Santería postulant into someone who served a darker cult.

Aurelio’s experience also changes Rodrigo’s understanding of his own religious vocation. Rodrigo later described Aurelio as a guide whose suffering and renewed love of Christ had forced him to question his long-standing commitment to Santería. Though he held important, public responsibilities as a babalao in Cuba, he came to fear that he had unknowingly become a servant of evil. The account leaves his decision unresolved: he is still confronting the cost of abandoning a respected role and the possibility of becoming an outcast. The theft therefore has consequences beyond the transfer of a jewel. It becomes the occasion for Aurelio’s confession and for Rodrigo’s painful reconsideration of the spiritual authority he had built his life around.