by Jalane D. Schmidt
When revolutionary Cuba’s governmental cultural policy apparatus cast Afro-Cuban religions as “folklore,” certain religious forms, especially Santería, gained visibility in scholarly investigations, publications, documentary films, and state-sponsored cultural programming. Since the 1990s these discursive treatments of Santería have been monetized by the Cuban tourism industry and state-owned manufacturers and repackaged as merchandise that garners the attention and revenues of Cuban consumers and international visitors. This “ethno-business” produces a paradox: Afro-Cuban popular religions—long admired by the nation’s intellectual and artistic avant-garde as subaltern cultural rebuttals of dominant Cuban bourgeois opinion and U.S. economic pressures alike—are now promoted and consumed in a manner that conforms to neoliberal logic. The Cuban state confronts the challenges of late socialism with the methods of late capitalism. To some extent, the commodification of Afro-Cuban religions acts to fortify and extend revolutionary cultural policy.
