Spirit Histories and the Lack of Them: Toward an Understanding of the Plastic Cosmos in Cuban Creole Spiritism

It is tempting to regard Cuba’s spirit denizens as “national caricatures” (Routon 2010: 115) at best, “moral artefacts of the colonial and postcolonial imagination” (ibid); at worst, reifications of persistent racist stereotypes that too easily associate the non-European components of Cuban history to anti-modernity. Practitioners of Cuban creole espiritismo certainly seem foster this image. Mediums across Havana are wont to describe entities from the same identity-clusters in conspicuously similar terms. For instance, the African spirits, invariably referred to as “Congos”, are generally seen as temperamental and witchcraft-savvy, whereas the “Indios” commonly associated to nature and battle. Archetypical descriptions such as these are the staple of espiritista rites, designed to articulate the stories of people with those of spirits. But rarely are the latter complete, historically specific or fully credible; and neither are they meant to be for espiritistas. In this paper I argue that the relative homogeneity in Cuban muertos’ biographies owes itself not to a simplification of history, but to a sophisticated cosmology of the Self, which is at once a theory of spirit-person relations. This model of Self, arguably forged from Kardecist conceptions of ascension and liberation, on the one hand, and Afro-Cuban ontologies of agency on the other, posits certain muertos as components of persons, extensions even, both reflecting personal trajectories (ancestry, for eg.) as well as affording particular paths of action and destiny. But in this dynamic, muertos are also trickster-like: they shape shift, transform into other spirits, and tune their appearances to the medium´s psychological landscape, becoming symbols. Cuban Espiritismo presents us with a plastic cosmos where spirits are less figments of a national imagination taken literally, than the means by which social history is parsed through idiosyncratic, individual Selves. They become, in other words, languages-cum-vehicles for personalized histories.