#  Divination, Ritual, and “Miraculous Cures” in Afro-Cuban Religions  

 



This project focuses on “miraculous cures” at the intersection of Afro-Cuban religion and modern medicine and asks how to better understand and theorize contemporary ritual healing through religious practice. The South Florida hub of Afro-Cuban religious practices and healing is central to these traditions, of which Lucumí (or Santería, or La Regla de Ocha) is one of the most popular. In the late twentieth century, biomedical institutions examined how to incorporate “culture” into medical training through the Cultural Competence paradigm. While this paradigm attempted to account for a variety of different religious traditions, it medicalized and reframed Lucumí practice as a mental healthcare system. This project challenges such reductive framings.

Lucumí is the Cuban incarnation of the Indigenous West African Yoruba religion—a robust religious system with a complex divination component and an extensive body of rituals. Both divination and ritual are used to balance devotees’ relationships with spirits and spiritual forces that can disrupt health and well-being when out of balance. In many cases, divination and ritual complement clinical interventions, aiding doctors’ effectiveness in diagnosing and treating patients.

However, there are also instances where devotees experience healing independent of biomedicine. This project examines such miraculous cures among Lucumí devotees, arguing that they trouble the late twentieth century reframing that served to medicalize and contain Lucumí. Through ethnographic research, this project demystifies the phenomenon of miraculous cures within the Lucumí community and consequently provides a theoretical framework to approach an understanding of comparable transcendental phenomena.

*Project point person:* [*Eugenia Rainey*](/people/eugenia-rainey "Eugenia Rainey")