Two Volumes. 1386 pages. 164 tables. 660 photographs. Sold only as a set.
Adeshina’s Cuba is a comprehensive history of the Lukumí religion on the island, 1820-1959. In Cuba, the Yorùbá were known as the Lukumí. Based on more than thirty-five years of oral and archival research (1991-2025), this work reveals the secret history that the Spanish slave colony, the modern Cuban Republic, and the Communist Revolution sought to erase. It is a rich study for scholars, students, and African Diaspora descendants.
Volume I is a deeply researched history of Adeshina's world in slavery and freedom and his crucial alliances and accomplishments in Regla, Havana, and Matanzas. Learn about the great ancestors Atanda, Ifa Bi, Ifa Omi, Ade Bi, Aigoro, Yeye T' Olokun, Lagueni (Matilde Zayas), Teresa Ariosa, Latuan, Belen Gonzalez, and many, many more. Hundreds of ritual and family genealogies of Babalawos and Olorishas (Orisha priests) document the founding and growth of the Lukumí religion over more than 150 years. All in secret.
Volume II is a celebration of African Diaspora family history and biography. It reveals the sacred lives of Ifá and Osha priests and priestesses (Babalawos and Olorishas) in more than 250 biographical essays, organized lineage by lineage, from Havana and Matanzas to Palmira and Santiago de Cuba. The biographies are detailed essays, and together they represent an unprecedented achievement in the African Diaspora literature.
Scholarly Praise for Adeshina's Cuba
This is a truly astonishing book, written with unusual honesty and respect. It is the proof of what a gifted, eminently patient, historically minded anthropologist can accomplish. Adeshina’s Cuba should quickly take its place among the most lasting works in Afro-Cuban studies and rank high among all studies ever made of the trajectories and legacies of captured and enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas.
-- Richard Price, Duane A. and Virginia S. Dittman Professor Emeritus, Collage of William and Mary.
Brown’s work demonstrates how history is created from the bottom up by the agency of generations of ordinary people living their lives as religious devotees despite shifting currents of opposition, persecution, exploitation and indifference. A magnificent achievement.
-- George Brandon, Professor Emeritus, City University of New York.
Adeshina’s Cuba is a monument of long-term, dogged fieldwork and archival labor that will be a gift to practitioners and researchers of Afro-Cuban religions alike for generations to come… This is a book that does more than merely genuflect to the idea of decolonizing the archive; it actually takes part in mediating and maintaining the sacred powers it interprets and describes. In that sense, it is itself a moyuba, the science and art of calling ‘the names.’ I’ve never seen anything like it.
-- Paul Christopher Johnson, Professor, Department of History and Department of Afroamerican, and African Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
The deeply contextualized ritual genealogies enable one to see the detailed social networks and broader social trends forged through ritual initiations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This outstanding work of scholarship includes extensive religious material culture and documentation such as ceremonial objects, slave records, and sacred objects and sites. This treasure trove enables a level of unprecedented precision for the cultural history of Afro-Cuban ritual life in the African Diaspora.
-- Lauren Derby, Bradford Burns Professor of Latin American History, University of California, Los Angeles.
Please allow 2 weeks for delivery.
Important Advisory: Do not send money to anyone trying to sell you this book on any other platform or by direct message. Purchase it here only from me personally, David Brown, and ask for my credentials--I will send you a proper invoice. Each book is signed by the author and embossed for authenticity. It may also be for sale on the official AsheExpress Facebook page.
The Lukumí will understand $189.05 as my derecho for seven years of writing.
