On the Sudden Spirituality of Cubans

Verónica Vega

By Caridad

HAVANA TIMES — Some say all thoughts travel through space as vibrations and produce a reaction somewhere – like prayers with or without words that are somehow heard by a thinking universe.

Some days ago, I bought an anthology of Cuban poems and was very much surprised to find two pieces dedicated to God (God with a capital, yes).

I clearly recall the two authors – Luisa Perez de Zambrana and Placido – from my years at school, where I was an outstanding student (at least in my Spanish and Literature classes).

The first question that came to mind was why, in my ninth-grade Cuban literature textbook, I never came across verses like these:

How beautiful it would be, all-powerful God,
to live in the heart
of a world peopled only
by the just and the good! [i]

Or these:

I cannot deceive you, oh merciful God,
for your eternal wisdom
can see through my body and my soul,
as through the air and the clear transparency,
troubled, as my humiliated innocence,
that impious slander should beat their palms…[ii]

Memory inevitably took me back to 1995, when I accompanied a foreign friend of mine to a radio station, where he was to speak on a type of Bhakti meditation. Seconds before the interview, the journalist who helped us stressed that certain words were strictly forbidden and could not be pronounced on the air: god, soul and spirit. Days later, I was asked to introduce a lecture at the National Theater in Havana and, out of pure rebelliousness, I started saying: “When God made man….”

I wanted to see if this noun would indeed cause a scandal. Nothing happened. The audience and employees respectfully listened to my remarks and some people approached me afterwards, moved by my words. Three years later, very close to the theater, the image of Jesus Christ was used to cover the facade of a building and the secular, socialist square became the stage of a Catholic liturgy.

Since then, I’ve noticed how the occasional program or film with a non-materialistic worldview makes its way to Cuban television. I have also been witness to an increasingly flexible vocabulary in the media. Finding two profoundly devotional poems written by authors that I recall so well from my adolescence made me wish that those verses had acted as a counterbalance to the atheism I was instilled with by my education. I would have liked to have had the choice to forget them, remember them or perhaps learn them by heart, as I spontaneously did with the rhyming verses of Becquer and even fragments of the Mio Cid.

Getting back to the intro to my post, the book I bought, titled Rayo de Luz (“Lightbeam”), with a prologue by Leonardo Padura, is a response to the question I asked myself weeks ago, when I ran into a collection of old volumes and encyclopedias my mother owned as a child among my books. In its frail pages, which dealt with topics as different as physics, biology, history, fairy tales and games, I saw several sections devoted to poetry. These included entries on Cuban poets, and the topics addressed did not exclude religious contemplation.

I asked myself why the books I read in my childhood never expressed concerns of that nature, not even at a time when I began wondering about the origin of life the mystery of death.

The question I ask myself now is whether now, after the book fair dedicated to India (that land of profound mysticism) and the perfect occasion to recall that Cubans have a soul and some even believe in God (literally) is over, “beams of light” (past or present) will continue to pierce through, or whether we will have to wait another half century to be able to unfold our spiritual side.
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[i] Luisa Pérez de Zambrana, fragmento de “A Dios”

[ii] Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido) fragmento de “Plegaria a Dios”

Veronica Vega

Veronica Vega: I believe that truth has power and the word can and should be an extension of the truth. I think that is also the role of Art and the media. I consider myself an artist, but above all, a seeker and defender of the Truth as an essential element of what sustains human existence and consciousness. I believe that Cuba can and must change and that websites like Havana Times contribute to that necessary change.

4 thoughts on “On the Sudden Spirituality of Cubans

  • Of course what I wrote is gibberish to the likes of you 🙂 I write in a kabbalistic text in which every letter has at least 10,000 meanings lol
    Seriously, Huey Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party, wrote in later years that it was wrong for communists to dismiss religion and that instead we must engage dialectically with it. Do I believe the world is 6000 years old? Do I believe in history full stop? There is only the now.

  • It starts out as an innocuous belief in some obscure someone who controls our lives and ends up in the supernatural gibberish in George’s two posts .
    In other parts of the world these beliefs in nonexistent gods leads to things like suicide bombings which no one outside of the deeply religious would contemplate undertaking.
    Religion poisons everything .
    Go to You Tube and watch:
    ” Christianity is false and immoral: Hitchens
    It will be a very enlightening 12 minutes and 59 seconds for you .
    I have it on my favorites and re-watch it………… when the spirit moves me .

  • Veronica, think carefully, we in Cyprus are All connected, are Communist party has a dedicated following of about 33% making it the largest party on the island, yet we are running out of material ideas and supporting the right. (CR)ISIS is on our doorstep. I’m trying to teach you Islam before it’s too late x

  • At the pinicle of materialism the logical-positivists tried to do away with infinity completely, they found they could not, mathematics became impossible. Some scholars have suggested that the current century will see the return of spirituality. But materialism has its purpose, whilst I conkur with Erasmo about the need to burn spelling ruiz to the ground, excuse the pun, burning books is not the way. The secret that the Greeks revealed to the Jews and later the Muslims was that each letter has at least 40,000 meanings. With this in mind one should not dare to even open the Koran or Torah, though some of you have a cultural affinity with the Bible that might allow you to see clearly, at any rate it is not necessary to be either Jewish or Muslim. The greatest miracle of Christ was to make us all Jews, at least those of us who found our way through him, for before Christ we were descended from the Titans, and after Christ, we all became children of Adam (sas) and Eve (sas), beni Adam as the Muslims say. Salam.

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