The Cuban Revolution Scatters Santeria Into Exile

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Fidel Castro's revolution triumphed in Cuba in 1959, and the mass emigration it triggered through the 1960s carried Santeria's practitioners off the island in numbers no earlier displacement had matched. Cuban exiles left for Mexico and, in far greater numbers, for the United States, settling above all in Miami and New York, cities where growing Cuban communities gave the religion a population dense enough to sustain it away from Cuba for the first time.

Santeria did not travel as a private memory carried by isolated individuals. Priests, initiates and whole ritual lineages left together or reconstituted themselves abroad, rebuilding the houses of worship, the initiation structures and the community networks the religion depended on in Cuba, now transplanted onto American soil among exile communities bound together as much by political displacement as by faith. The source recording this spread names only the 1960s broadly rather than a single precise year, a decade range this atlas carries rather than resolving into an invented date.

What the revolution and its emigration changed for Santeria's spread was permanence outside Cuba. A tradition born from one forced migration, the nineteenth century Atlantic slave trade that had carried Yoruba captives to Cuba, was carried onward by a second, becoming for the first time a durable presence in the American diaspora rather than a religion confined to the island where it had crystallized.