Colón Cemetery is the setting for a brief but charged meeting in Havana: at dusk, Loïc and Laurence wait at its entrance before being driven to a Santeria ceremony in a popular neighborhood. The cemetery is not the ceremony’s venue; it serves instead as the departure point, made resonant by Manuel’s invocation of Oya, its guardian deity.

Setting and Rendezvous

The meeting takes place at the entrance to Havana’s great cemetery as daylight fades. A blue Mercury with a long hood, dating from the 1950s, arrives to collect Loïc and Laurence and take them onward. The specific choice of this meeting place anchors their excursion in the city’s geography without confusing the cemetery with the neighborhood where the ceremony is held.

Oya and the Cemetery Gate

Manuel invokes Oya, the divinity who guards the cemetery entrance, to set the scene within the religious understanding of Santeria. His explanation makes the gate more than a practical meeting point: it is a boundary watched over by a spiritual presence. That framing prepares the visitors for a ceremony shaped by Yoruba-derived belief and practice, while remaining Manuel’s account of how the place is protected.

From the Cemetery to the Ceremony

The cemetery is the first stop on an excursion whose main attraction for Loïc and Laurence is the ritual gathering, not Havana’s historical districts, which both have visited before. Their journey continues by car to a crowded popular quarter, where sacred bata drums accompany a dance in honor of Yemaya. There they meet Rodrigo Lerbier, Manuel’s cousin and a babalao. The sequence distinguishes the quiet cemetery entrance from the public, musical ceremony that follows.

Narrative Significance

The rendezvous gives the religious episode a threshold structure: the visitors assemble beside a cemetery gate associated with Oya, then travel into a neighborhood where the orishas are honored through dance and music. The date sharpens the contrast. On the evening of March 20, as bombs fall on Baghdad, Loïc and Laurence watch the ceremony in Havana. The cemetery thus marks the beginning of an encounter with a local sacred tradition set against a wider scene of violence, without itself becoming the site of either the ritual or the conflict.