Cuban espiritismo de cordón in the Special Period

Record summary

Espiritismo de cordón is a Cuban healing and mediumistic tradition involving collective movement, chanting, cleansing and communication with spirits. Ethnographic work from the 1990s and 2000s records intermediary beings, guides and protective entities in a setting shaped by Catholic, African-derived and spiritist vocabularies. It matters for comparison because religious authority is enacted through bodily ritual and received messages rather than a single apparition narrative. The tradition’s local forms differ, and descriptions of spirits as angels may be analytical translations rather than practitioners’ exact categories.