Incorporating the Chinese into Afro-Cuban Religions

Because of the language barrier between Chinese-Cubans and non-Chinese Cubans and the inability of non-Chinese Cubans to understand Chinese customs, the Chinese in Cuba were often seen to possess mysterious magical powers, considered to be worse and more powerful than any of the syncretic religions of Cuba. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the significant cultural differences between Afro-Cubans and Chinese-Cubans caused the slaves to look at the Chinese contract laborers with perplexity, and the Afro-Cubans tried to explain these practices through their own magical-religious lenses in a way that mythologized the Chinese-Cubans. These images of the Chinese-Cuban would continue to spread themselves to the rest of the population through oral history, enriched by popular imagination (Baltar Rodríguez 1997:177). According to interpretations based on Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), it may be said that the wills and intentions of some of the Afro-Cubans to understand their Chinese compatriots certainly resulted in an interesting incorporation of their imagined powers of the Chinese into their own religion. Their oral tradition allowed this Orientalized image of the Chinese to spread to other sectors of Cuban society. Even today, in dark practices that have been integrated into Santería, the skull of a chino is said to be an important component (Baltar Rodríguez 1997:177).