Santería

On the series

In the dim glow of candlelit rooms in Havana and Santiago, I have watched Santería unfold as a living, breathing testament to resilience. Born from the collision of West African Yoruba spirituality and Spanish Catholicism, it is a faith of adaptation-where Catholic saints veil the faces of orishas like Changó, Yemayá, and Ochún. My lens has lingered on makeshift altars crowded with offerings: ripe mangoes, cigars, coins, and blood-streaked stones, each object a silent prayer. During ceremonies, the air thickens with cigar smoke and the relentless pulse of batá drums, and I have seen worshippers, dressed in brilliant whites or the bead-strung collares of their guardian orisha, slip into trance as the divine momentarily borrows their bodies.

Yet Santería is not spectacle; it is survival and identity. In the faces of santeros and santeras, I see a quiet defiance -a refusal to let ancestral memory be erased by slavery, colonialism, or modernity’s indifference. I have stood at the edge of riverbanks at dawn, watching offerings of fruit and flowers float away as whispers to Ochún. To document Santería is to witness Cuba itself: layered, rhythmic, wounded, and luminous, holding fast to invisible worlds that still shape the visible one.

Available as 1/1sEach photograph in this Cuba series is released as a one-of-one NFT. View and collect the Spirit of Cuba Collection on OpenSea.