El Monte: Notes on the Religions, Magic, and Folklore of the Black and Creole People of Cuba

by Lydia Cabrera, David Font-Navarrete (Translator)

First published in Cuba in 1954 and appearing here in English for the first time, Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte is a foundational and iconic study of Afro-Cuban religious and cultural traditions. Drawing on conversations with elderly Afro-Cuban priests who were one or two generations away from the transatlantic slave trade, Cabrera combines ethnography, history, folklore, literature, and botany to provide a panoramic account of the multifaceted influence of Afro-Atlantic cultures in Cuba. Cabrera details the natural and spiritual landscape of the Cuban monte (forest, wilderness) and discusses hundreds of herbs and the constellations of deities, sacred rites, and knowledge that envelop them. The result is a complex spiritual and medicinal architecture of Afro-Cuban cultures. This new edition of what is often referred to as “the Santería bible” includes a new foreword, introduction, and translator notes. As a seminal work in the study of the African diaspora that has profoundly impacted numerous fields, Cabrera’s magnum opus is essential for scholars, activists, and religious devotees of Afro-Cuban traditions alike.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Mythology, Religion, Anthropology

680 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

Reviews

[Judith · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece.

[Ranald · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extensive exposition of Afro-Cuban religious beliefs layed out in a rambling, irrational framework. A classic of the genre!! Incidentally, the author is queer.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another masterpiece from Latin America left tragically untranslated. EL MONTE by the late Cuban author Lydia Cabrera (she and I just missed meeting each other when I taught at Bowdoin College in Maine) might be subtitled "When Jesus Came to Forest Gods Went Away". This compendium of Afro-Cuban myths, legends, languages, music and songs, "without interpretation" Cabrera informs us, is a guide for the uninitiated into the world of African religions that survived the Middle Passage of the slave trade that brought some 400,000 slaves to Cuba from Benin, Angola, the Gold Coast and the Congo in the nineteenth century. Runaway slaves, secret religious societies and cabildos, slave and free black social clubs, kept the light of Africa burning in the Cuban interior, "el monte", or "the bush" not only under slavery but even while Cabrera researched this secret world in the 1940s. Though Cabrera claimed she had not political agenda, this encyclopedia of a dark world is a testimony to resistance against Christianity and the pro-American Cuban republic of 1902-1959. The African sees in the woods a whole world different from the whites and the city folk. Inside the bush the enchanted realm of sympathetic magic, spells cast for good and evil, herbs and incantations to cure disease, fertility cults praising and preserving male prowess and the sanctity of the womb, drums beating in defiance of the master, animals slaughtered to appease the gods, never died. The earth is still a demon haunted place and the devotees of Afro-Cuban religion, Santeria, work hard to keep it that way. The babalao is political chief, medicine man and pontiff. Women are crucial to this religion of the forest. They, and not the men, bring the young, and occasional city dweller, into the arms of the African saints. Cabrera gives no sense of a "triste tropiques". She makes no apology for venturing into el monte, nor does she hint this magical land is in danger from civilization. EL MONTE is the last gasp of a fading order, whether Cabrera and the santeros are aware of it or not. Get thee to a Spanish-English dictionary and read this sentimental book.

[Morgan M. Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic for a reason. I hope this translator continues to her other books.

[Frank]

El Monte