Rodrigo's Decision to Leave Santería is a crisis of belief and belonging: a prominent babalao concludes that the practice to which he has devoted much of his life has made him a servant of evil, and resolves that only a Catholic vocation can offer a way out. The decision is not presented as a simple change of affiliation. It threatens his place in Cuban society, unsettles his understanding of his own spiritual authority, and leaves him reading even an accidental injury as a possible sign of punishment.

A Public Religious Role

Rodrigo is introduced as a babalao, a Yoruba priest whose standing reaches beyond private devotion. He is known for making annual predictions on December 31 about the coming year in Cuba and elsewhere. In his community, people recognize and greet him with deference; when he arrives at a scene under the Catholic priest’s supervision, the crowd treats his presence as important as the priest’s. The priest is wary of African-derived rites, yet his own Cuban upbringing leaves him respectful of older beliefs. Rodrigo therefore occupies a religious world in which Catholic authority and Santería practice may be mistrusted by one another while both retain social force.

That standing makes Rodrigo’s later hesitation concrete. He tells Loïc and Laurence that he has held important functions in Santería for many years and is known, followed, and listened to. A babalao, as he understands his position, is an institution in Cuba, surrounded by both respect and fear. Leaving would mean more than changing his private convictions: he fears becoming a pariah in the society that has recognized his authority. The choice pits spiritual survival against the public identity and communal place built through his ministry.

The Change in His Understanding

Rodrigo attributes his change of direction to repeated conversations with Aurelio, whom he describes as a revealer and guide. Aurelio’s experience first unsettles him, then gradually illuminates what he had taken for granted. Rodrigo says that he began to question the whole orientation of his life and his adherence to Santería. The account makes the change a process of reflection and increasing doubt, rather than a sudden rejection prompted by a single argument.

The conclusion he reaches is stark: what he had understood as Yoruba oracles, he now believes, was the voice of Satan. He describes himself as having become, without realizing it, a servant of the devil, a sorcerer, and a damned soul. These are Rodrigo’s convictions as he confesses them, not a neutral description of Santería. The shift is decisive because it reverses the meaning of his former religious work: what had seemed to him a source of spiritual knowledge now appears as participation in the power he most needs to escape.

Aurelio’s influence operates through example as well as conversation. The narration explains that Aurelio, formerly involved in Satanism, had humbled himself by kneeling before a consecrated representative of the Church, the priest in Nueva Gerona who had been his mother’s confessor. He sought confession, forgiveness, and absolution, hoping to break the chains by which evil had held him. Aurelio warned Rodrigo that release was not easy once Satan had taken possession, and that a person might even believe himself to be serving God while unknowingly serving the devil. Rodrigo’s movement toward Catholicism is thus shaped by Aurelio’s claim that prayer and reliance on Christ are necessary for spiritual liberation.

A Choice with Social and Spiritual Costs

Rodrigo identifies a narrow alternative: to become a Catholic priest or a monk. He presents neither as a casual possibility nor as an already completed transition, but as the only route he can see to save his soul. He repeats the necessity of the choice as if trying to make its conclusion hold firm in his own mind. His words reveal the pressure of the decision: he must leave a religious office that has brought him public standing, yet he fears that remaining in it would endanger his spiritual salvation.

The crisis also touches the way Rodrigo thinks about moral agency. Aurelio has told him that people may have a seemingly normal self and a demonic one, and that the passage from one to the other can escape conscious awareness. Rodrigo connects this warning to his own past: if he has served evil without knowing it, sincere intention alone cannot guarantee that he has acted rightly. The possibility of an unseen change within the self makes his decision feel urgent, while also explaining why he sees his former oracles as more than a mistaken interpretation.

The Cameo and the Wounded Eye

Rodrigo’s religious re-evaluation is linked to the cameo around which the surrounding events turn. In an earlier encounter, he treated the stone as a concentration of harmful currents moving through the air that year, comparing its function to a lightning rod that gathers and conducts malevolent charges. He proposed putting it in quarantine. This episode establishes how he interpreted the object within his Santería practice; later, after his conversations with Aurelio, the same spiritual framework is implicated in his fear that he has served evil. The cameo is the point to which the narration returns as Rodrigo’s confession brings his religious choice back to where the crisis began.

He also associates the crisis with a fall that drove his right eye into a cactus. The injury is serious, and he does not yet know whether he will lose the eye; the extent of damage to the iris remains to be determined. Rodrigo suspects that the accident may be a punishment for distancing himself from Santería and abandoning his magical ministry. The account preserves the uncertainty: the injury has a physical cause, while its meaning as divine or demonic retribution belongs to Rodrigo’s troubled interpretation. His decision is therefore neither a settled conversion nor an uncomplicated escape. He has identified the path he believes he must take, but the social consequences, the state of his eye, and the spiritual meaning of the events remain unresolved.