Hidden Powers Of State In The Cuban Imagination [Paperback]

A valuable contribution to scholarship in Cuban studies and the study of religion in the Americas. Routon goes beyond other works in analyzing the Cuban capacity for combining apparently incompatible beliefs such as socialism and various Afro-Cuban practices. He also provides a number of important insights into the processes by which magical and ritual idioms of power feed the political imagery and exercise of power in Cuba, and vice versa. --Christine Ayorinde, author of Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution, and National Identity

A fascinating, timely, and deftly balanced account of the power of magic and the state in revolutionary Cuba. This compelling and evocative book transports readers to the secret and mysterious alleys of religious and political workings, the ritual production of selective historical memory, and the current statecraft of religious appropriations. --Raquel Romberg, author of Healing Dramas: Divination and Magic in Modern Puerto Rico

Hidden Powers of the State in the Cuban Imagination is a remarkable achievement. Rather than delivering yet another ethnography of an objectified entity called Afro-Cuban religion, Routon opens up fresh and illuminating perspectives on the historical complexity and contemporary volatility of the semiotics of a world in which the experientially occult nature of power has become coextensive with the experience of the powers of the occult. --Stephan Palmie, University of Chicago

Despite its hard-nosed emphasis on the demystifying realism of Marxist-Leninist ideology, the political imagery of the Cuban revolution--and the state that followed--conjures up its own magical seductions and fantasies of power. In this fascinating account, Kenneth Routon shows how magic practices and political culture are entangled in Cuba in unusual and intimate ways.

Routon describes not only how the monumentality of the state arouses magical sensibilities and popular images of its hilãC