Santería

Santería in the novel is both a lived Cuban religious tradition and the ground of a spiritual crisis: its ceremonies command communal respect, while the babalao Rodrigo Lerbier eventually concludes that the oracles he served were not what he believed them to be. The narrative gives the practice concrete social and ritual presence before setting Rodrigo’s painful reconsideration against the Catholic faith he comes to see as his sole path to salvation.

Religious Practice and Public Standing

The novel connects Santería with Yoruba religion and its officiants, including the babalao, a Yoruba priest. Manuel explains the tradition to Loïc through conversations about Cuban religious practice; he also tells him that his cousin Rodrigo is a babalao. The two men grew up in Cárdenas, and Rodrigo’s French ancestry is reflected in his name. The personal link between Manuel and Rodrigo leads Loïc and Laurence from curiosity about Santería to a ceremony in Havana.

Rodrigo’s standing is not confined to the religious community. During an earlier crisis, he rushes toward a house after hearing a woman cry that a stone is the devil’s eye. A Catholic priest has barred entry while the police are awaited, but Rodrigo asks to enter because he senses something malign has happened. The priest knows him and, despite the Catholic clergy’s wariness of rites rooted in African animist religions, recognizes that he too was raised in Cuba amid respect for ancient beliefs. People in the crowd greet Rodrigo with deference; in their eyes, the babalao’s presence matters as much as the priest’s. The scene places distinct religious authorities side by side without making either socially invisible.

Ceremony and Shared Religious Space

The ceremony Loïc and Laurence attend takes place in a Havana neighborhood on the evening of March 20, while the United States is bombing Baghdad. They arrive at the Colón Cemetery, where Manuel has arranged to meet them, and travel onward in an old blue Mercury. Manuel invokes Oya, the divinity who guards cemetery gates, to set the scene in Santería’s terms. The journey thus moves between ordinary city streets and a setting already marked by sacred protection.

At the gathering, sacred bata drums sound around an improvised stage. Their hourglass shape and attributed power to communicate with divinities make music part of the ceremony’s religious action, not merely accompaniment. A dancer in a wide blue dress represents Yemaya, the orisha honored that night and a divinity of the waters. Manuel explains that the orishas are demigods associated with nature, sent by the supreme divinity, Olorun, to help human beings. The dancer’s turning blue and white skirts, the drums, and the answering songs give the ceremony a vivid communal form; the atmosphere is at once solemn and joyful.

Loïc watches with curiosity and amusement, although the ceremony also recalls Régis’s posthumous admonitions to him. The contrast registers his divided response: he is drawn to the performance and its rhythm even as he carries an inherited Christian unease about what he is seeing. Rodrigo occupies the ceremony’s center among drummers and singers, dressed in white and treated with evident solemnity. For Loïc, the gathering makes Manuel’s account immediate: Santería is not an abstract topic but a practice sustained by ritual, performers, officiants, and an assembled public.

The Cameo and Rodrigo’s Religious Authority

Rodrigo’s religious role also shapes his response to the mysterious stone. He identifies it as a concentration of the year’s harmful forces, comparing its action to a lightning rod that gathers and conducts malign discharges. He proposes putting it into quarantine. The explanation places the object within a spiritual account of danger: the stone does not simply possess monetary value but is understood as a focus through which destructive influences may gather. Rodrigo also works as a jeweler, giving him a professional as well as religious connection to the object.

This interpretation gains a darker consequence as the story develops. Rodrigo associates the grave injury to his right eye, sustained in a fall and a collision with a cactus, with the occult forces surrounding the cameo. He does not know whether he will lose the eye or how badly its iris is damaged. He suspects the injury may be punishment for moving away from Santería and abandoning his magical ministry. The text presents this as Rodrigo’s interpretation, not as an independently established explanation, and the uncertainty of his sight mirrors the uncertainty of his religious understanding.

Doubt, Conversion, and the Limits of Certainty

Aurelio’s disappearance after the cameo’s theft becomes the beginning of Rodrigo’s deeper crisis. Rodrigo had been his spiritual mentor and felt a special affection for the young aspirant, almost as for a son. When Aurelio vanishes, Rodrigo asks people in Santería and elsewhere about him, worries that the police may have arrested him, and travels to Cayo Largo in an unsuccessful effort to find him. Only eleven years later does Aurelio reappear and tell Rodrigo that he stole the cameo for a newly established Masonic lodge. The task had been presented to him as a mission to neutralize a cursed object; after leaving Cuba, however, Aurelio was drawn into secretive rites, moved from Santería to Palo Mayombe, and eventually came to worship Satan. His later confession and return toward Christianity profoundly affect Rodrigo.

Rodrigo says Aurelio has become a revealer and guide for him. The experience forces him to question his whole life and his adherence to Santería, including the oracles he had taken to be Yoruba. In Rodrigo’s changed understanding, those oracles had been the voice of Satan, and he had become, without realizing it, a servant of the devil. He struggles not only with belief but with the social cost of leaving a tradition in which he has held an important, widely recognized office. He describes a babalao as an institution in Cuba, surrounded by both respect and fear, and says that such a figure can be more revered than a Catholic priest.

His conclusion is stark: after sacrificing to demons, he believes he has no choice but to become a Catholic priest or monk to save his soul and his social standing. The novel does not present this as a detached account of Santería’s doctrines; it is Rodrigo’s anguished judgment, formed under the influence of Aurelio’s testimony and his own spiritual fear. Santería is therefore portrayed through two registers at once: as a public, embodied tradition with ceremonies and respected religious leaders, and as the object of a personal crisis in which Rodrigo recasts his former vocation as service to evil. The distance between the community’s reverence for the babalao and Rodrigo’s repudiation of his own ministry gives that crisis its force.