Author: Marc Frank
HAVANA (Reuters) – In their New Year predictions, senior priests of Cuba’s Afro-Cuban Santeria religion told followers on Thursday to watch their health and spending, take care of their families, beware of crime and drink less alcohol amid a severe economic crisis entering in his sixth year.
“Measures must be taken against the rise of delinquency,” said the Letter of the Year by senior priests, known as Babalawos, from Cuba’s government-recognized Yoruba association, which was publicly unveiled Thursday in Havana.
The letters are prophecies of misfortune, illness and other events and how to deal with them, which followers of Santeria anxiously await each year.
Millions of Cubans practice a religion full of rituals, which combines Catholicism with ancient African beliefs brought to Cuba by slaves.
“Analyze economic investments and their consequences, remove piles of garbage, and care for and respect marital and family integrity,” the letter continues.
The priest’s predictions come after five years of an economic crisis that has hit Cubans with increasing shortages of food, medicine, fuel and other goods amid power and water outages and the breakdown of public transportation and garbage collection.
The island nation’s communist government largely blames US sanctions for the economic crisis, admitting it made mistakes in managing the crisis.
Over the years, several groups have broken away from the association, and some now publish their own letter of the year.
Babalawo Lazaro Cuesta, of the Miguel Febles Padron Letter of the Year Independent Organizing Committee, told a second press conference a few miles (km) away that his message signals many of the same dangers ahead, but also the need for the government to abandon vision and methods that date back to the Cold War. .
“Attachment to the past does not reveal current solutions or plans for the future,” reads the letter and warns of “wrong paths”.
Cuesta, a key priest organizer, said that “the wrong ways are the inadequate decisions we make, the outdated ideas we propose, the wrong way of looking for solutions to the problems that human beings have.”
