"Santeria" lures tourist cash to Cuba

By Catherine Bremer

HAVANA (Reuters) - After a few minutes tossing a string of flat beads and chanting, Rogelio Castellano decides his tourist client is emotionally scarred by an old conflict. Only a $500 ritual goat sacrifice will put it right.

He's insistent. Even after he halves the fee, it's more money than he could make in a year on a Cuban state salary.

A babalawo, or priest, of Cuba's ritual-filled Santeria religion, Castellano wears a gold chain and has a TV and a telephone that stand out from the animal skulls, pigeon blood, melted candle wax and feathers that litter his dingy home.

Such modern accoutrements are testament to a flow of tourists that has made Santeria a lucrative business for some, bringing in foreign currency that makes the difference between a frugal lifestyle or relative wealth in communist-run Cuba.

"I see seven or eight foreigners a week. Germans, Mexicans, Italians, Americans," said Castellano, who spent years studying the African-based faith of ancestral spirits and shrines teeming with fruit, horse hair, ribbons and rum.

"Quite a few come off the cruise ships," he added, grinning to reveal a set of gold-rimmed teeth that most Cubans could not afford.

Whereas a Cuban would pay with a fistful of pesos, a foreigner might spend $20 to meet a priest and $50 on good-luck charms like gravel-filled gourds or plastic bead bracelets.

A full-on initiation ceremony into Santeria, which grew out of the Yoruba religion brought to the Americas by African slaves, would cost a foreigner well over $1,000.

Such prices are normal for Yoruba-style rituals in much of the continent, but they are dizzying in Cuba, where people get by on a state wage of around $15 a month plus whatever they can do on the side.

"It can be a swindle. But not with me. Foreigners have come to me for years," said Castellano, dusting off a feathered clay head which for $10 -- and if one pours rum and honey on it and blows cigar smoke over it -- will keep bad spirits away.

WARM BLOOD

Some seven in 10 Cubans are Santeria followers and consult babalawos, or "santera" priestesses, about health, financial or relationship woes, like followers of Yoruba-based faiths in countries like Haiti and Brazil.

Everyone in Cuba knows somebody whose life was changed forever by a Santeria ritual, which can entail being beaten with herbal plants or sprayed with warm animal blood.

Yet backpackers directed to babalawos by tour guides or taxi drivers invariably pay more than the couple of dollars guide books suggests for a "fast-food" helping of Santeria.

Across the Havana bay in the Santeria-rich port of Regla, santeras greet tourists arriving off a rickety ferryboat.