Wed, 4 Jun 2003 07:53:20 -0700 (PDT)
Cuban sacrifices

The swiss girl Anuk that I described a few days ago (the girl that lives with the family that had a turtle in their sink, and then almost fainted while we were walking . .etc.) apparently has some sort of parasite. I believe that it is some sort of worms or something that she coiuld see crawling in her feces in the toilet bowel. Apparently she has been eating food that was washed in normal tap water, and has tried to live like a normal cuba (stupidly). Anyway her family is quite interesting, and here is a little story.

Yesterday Anuk had arranged for her "cuban mother" to show us (me & some other students) the graveyard here, and to explain various things about it.The name of the religion that her family practices is called Santeria, and it is a mixture of voodo and cristianity. Because of their fascination with the dead, we thought that it would be interesting to get a tour with her (cuban) family.

Anuk showed up at my place (which is where we typically meet) at about 2:00, but without her cuban mother. She then explained, that she had left her house because there was a religious ceremony going on that involved her cuban mother and cuban father, and some sort of priest. She left in the middle of it because she couldn't stand watching it any more (and therefore we didn't have her mother with us to be a tour guide). Here is her description of the religious ceremony:

There was an altar set up in her familys living room (where she lives), and it had a whole bunch of vases (the kind that used to hold peoples ashes) set up around an altar (apparently her family steals them from the graveyard .. I'll talk more about that later). As they were kneeling on a stuffed (toy) animal the priest guy first sprayed coconut juice all around the room, and they started doing some sort of chanting in some african language that she couldn't understand. Then out came the live chickens ... well, you can imagine what happened next .... they literally ripped the heads off of, and sprayed blood all around the alter, and on the priest (she said none got on her). At that point, she didn't know what was going to happen next, but she had the impression that it was even worse than what she had already seen, so she left (without our tour guide ... how selfish!!).

Then we went to the graveyard, and it was really interesting. One of the security guards gave us a guided tour, even though he is not allowed to talke to foreigners. He took us to many interesting parts of the cemetary, and explained a bunch of different things ... For the majority of people (i.e. non rich people) , they only get to rent their grave for 2 years, and then afterwards, their bones are removed, put in a box, and moved to a building in the graveyard. The building is made of concrete, and doesn't have a door to open ... i.e you can just walk in. In the building there are concrete boxes stacked about 12 high, row after row, with names and dates inscribed on the side of each one. Some of them were open, and you could see the bones inside ... some of the skulls had hair on them. It was a little disgusting, but pretty interesting too. Apparently some people who practice the Santeria religion go to the graveyard and steal some of the bones for their religious ceremonies.

Outside of building, one of the normal graves had a human skull sitting on top of it, and another grave had a dead dog in a plastic bag sitting on it. I belive that the dead dog had something to do with Santeria.

I now have more pictures of dead cubans, than I do of living ones, since yesterday was the first day that I brought out my camera.