How Cuban culture filled a void after 30 years of longing

Rebe Huntman was 10 years old when her family holidayed in Oaxaca, Mexico. She and Mimi, her mother, played in the water just off the Puerto Angel beach, but rip tides carried them out into deep water.

“Beneath those waves the world slows,” she writes in “My Mother in Havana.” “Our legs and arms glimmer pale and strangely illuminated, as if they no longer belong to us. And then we burst to the surface where everything is churning — the waves darker, all sound coming as if from the other side of a tunnel. My mother’s chest presses into my back. Her arms wrap around my waist. Both of us are coughing salt water in exchange for air. We don’t die that day. Either way, though, she’s not letting go.”

(Monkfish)

Mimi is forced to let go by cancer, when Huntman is 19. After struggling with her mother’s death, the author pushes herself into a series of notable accomplishments. Chief among them is her success as a dancer and serving as the director of Chicago’s Danza Viva Center for World Dance, Art & Music. She marries, has a child, divorces and finds new love.

And then, in 2013, on the cusp of turning 50 and the 30-year anniversary of Mimi’s death, Huntman resurfaces in churning waters of grief, writing that she “longed for her. Deeply. Desperately. Shamefully. If I could barely remember her, if so much of her was lost, then what was I longing for?”

How can she grieve a woman whom she realizes she barely knew? Her most accessible memory is the one in which her mother protected her when they were drowning. As she moves into the long-delayed work of grieving, Huntman recovers other details, including her mother’s passion for dance, which she practiced in their living room. Who was this woman, who loved to tango and performed fiery pasos dobles?

Huntman is similarly drawn to the rhythms of the South American and Caribbean dances, especially Afro-Cuban culture. But at her center is disconnection. Her white, Midwestern parents flirted with different flavors of Christianity, but Huntman finds no comfort within a theological framework of body-spirit duality. Grief is physical. Huntman misses the bodily comfort of a mother’s touch. She also finds that Christianity’s division between spirit and body, and further binaries that split humanity by biological sex, denigrate the female body.

She is drawn to Yoruba theology, the religion held by large numbers of enslaved Africans forcibly brought to the Caribbean. Among its deities, the Orisha, is Oshun. Oshun is the feminine spirit of fertility, and of water, the giver of all life. In Cuba, Yoruba theology is contained within Vodú, a variant of Santeria in which dance is incorporated into rituals. Side by side with Santeria in Cuba is Catholicism. The island’s patron saint is another mother who had clutched her child as they rode the ocean waves. Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre had her origin stories in the 1600s. A wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, holding her infant in her arms, was rescued from the ocean. Brought back to the land, this Black Madonna became a source of miracles, and her shrine draws pilgrims to seek her blessings.

Huntman devotes herself to studies of these representations of a divine feminine, seeking a religious epiphany that will allow her to erase the boundaries created by death. But she also seeks to reintegrate her own mind-body division, to understand herself as a whole being in which her woman’s body is connected to a sacred feminine.

And so Huntman makes a pilgrimage to Cuba. Her parents had once taken a trip to Cuba in the 1950s, and Huntman uses details from that trip to imagine Mimi as a young woman, a chance to know who Mimi was before children and the changes brought by experiences and time.

Huntman learns new dances from a santera, who teaches her how to dance during ceremonies. And she studies with other santeros, readying herself for initiation into Santeria. At these rituals, for which she has obtained informed consent from other participants, she intimately details her initiation. But in writing down the experiences, she veers dangerously close to becoming the participant-observer now infamous from another era’s anthropological writings.

Perhaps this is the perpetual problem of explaining the mysteries of the spiritual realm to others. Can a constructed language describe the sublime, or the religious ecstasy that lies beyond the rational? Huntman recognizes that magic and mystery that transcend the accepted boundaries of reality can be interpreted as madness by those outside the experiences.

Huntman isn’t so much interested in dismantling gender and biological sex as a binary; she seeks a space for the veneration of the divine mother. And although she finds in the worship of the sacred feminine a counter to patriarchal conceptions in monotheism, at times, such a conception of femaleness and its inseparability from the maternal chafed. It maintained a duality, one in which fertility was essential to her understanding of such a spirit.

How do we make meaning out of tragedy? For Huntman, it is a spiritual journey, one that she chronicles as a devoted daughter. In Our Lady and Oshun, Huntman finds connection to the whole person who was her mother. Still, I wondered whether Mimi might have recognized herself in this tale. She is a woman rescued from the waves, a wooden icon, who by the power of belief, becomes the mother her daughter can venerate and adore.

Lorraine Berry is a writer and critic in Oregon. @lorraineberry.bsky.social