Abakua is a Havana and Matanzas institution before it is anything else, rooted in the dock districts, in Regla and Guanabacoa, and in the working port. Its most public face is the ireme, the masked and costumed dancer who appears at ceremonies and in the street, moving in a stooped, sweeping manner that is instantly recognisable in Cuba and widely photographed.
Its musical influence is very large and very well documented. The society maintains a drum ensemble with a specific set of instruments and rhythms, and those rhythms fed directly into Cuban popular music: the abakua patterns are audible in rumba, and a number of the musicians who carried Cuban music into jazz and into the wider world were initiates. That line of transmission is one of the reasons the society is known far outside the island.
Its history with the state has been difficult. Colonial authorities banned it and prosecuted members, the press of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated it with criminality, and campaigns of suppression followed; later scholarship has substantially revised that picture and read the campaigns in the light of what they were reacting to.
What is not set out here is deliberate. Abakua is oath-bound. Its ritual register and the material spoken in it, and the drawn signs that carry authority within it, are held by the potencias and their titleholders. The atlas neither reproduces them nor invents a substitute, and names the practice as closed rather than reconstructing it.