Depending on the wishes of the deceased and the family members, the body is taken either to the cemetery, to the crematorium, or to another province to be buried after the wake. Less people usually attend the burial than the wake: the (matrilateral, patrilateral, affinal, and sometimes ritual) kin as well as the closest friends and colleagues of the deceased are typically present.
(However, it is not unusual for there to be only three of four persons present.) At the cemetery of Colón, the body is usually taken to a Catholic chapel to receive the last sacraments.116 This Catholic observance of the last rites is a favoured practice and represents one of the two most popular Catholic life-cycle rituals in Cuba (the other being Catholic baptism). In addition to the state, the Catholic Church is an important provider of ritual services at the time of death.
A deacon performs the blessing of the body, which is a very rapid and a rather improvised event that does not cost anything to the participants. Advance bookings are not required. Sometimes there is a queue of bodies waiting for a blessing outside the chapel.
The family members of the deceased decide either beforehand or on the spot whether the body will be taken to the chapel. Sometimes the blessing evokes heated arguments amongst the participants, when a part of the family wants to have the body blessed and others refuse to it. At times the situation is resolved so that some go inside the chapel with the body and stand next to it while the deacon performs the rites while those who label themselves as non-religious stay outside. Others may remain somewhere in-between, standing in the doorway of the chapel, half way between the religious and non-religious space, or moving between the two during the rapid, five to ten minute rites.
For some people, such as Caridad, this was the only occasion they ever visited a church (for the funeral of her mother-in-law).
The deacon asks no questions on the religiosity of the deceased when a body is brought in. It does not matter whether the deceased would really be labelled as a Catholic by the Church or not, and Cubans themselves rarely see a problem in combining distinct religious practices. Olga, (a mulata woman in her early fifties and a practitioner of Santería, Palo, Spiritism, and Catholicism),
116 Seventy-eight per cent of Havana’s deceased are buried at Colón (see anonymous 2010). It is possible that this practice is specific to urban Havana for a female informant described to me two recent burials in the Havana province countryside, stating that in neither of the cases there were blessings. She also said that one of the funerals was for her recently deceased grandfather, who had been a member of the Cuban Communist Party – a policeman who resisted any of his children or grandchildren being baptised because it would have fitted badly with the revolutionary ideology – so when he passed away, there was no blessing either.
conceptualised the reason for the performance of Catholic funerary rituals as such: “In the church of the cemetery they do a mass to let God know that you’re going there.” Some of my informants, like Serguei, did not separate Catholic funerary practices from Afro-Cuban and Spiritist religious practices, which are also frequently performed to the deceased and his or her family members at death: “There is something that is done so that the spirit rises to heaven.
You have to do certain prayers so that the spirit does not latch on to the body.
When a person dies, the spirit stays like fragmented; it is as if it doesn’t know whether it’s alive or dead.”117 Most of my informants perceived almost any type of religious rituals as bearing a general blessing and protection upon the person to whom they are performed.118
After the performance of the Catholic blessing, the body is taken to the burial spot in a funerary car. The extreme silence of the procession forms a marked contrast with everyday loudness, chatter, and vivacity: not a word is said, no music or singing performed. The procession is quiet and sad.
Upon arrival at the burial site, the employees of the cemetery open the vault, lift the coffin from the hearse, lower it to the grave, and close the grave. Men pass the wreaths from the hearse to the grave site and they are placed atop the grave. The attendees watch this ceremony silently and when the grave is closed, everyone departs.119 Usually there are no speeches or any type of further ceremonies at the burial.120
However, in Raúl Castro’s wife Vilma Espin’s burial in June 2007, a tape featuring three songs sung by the deceased was played when her ashes were laid to the ground. My informants commented that this was “what she wanted” and that the songs were “lullabies for the children and the grandchildren” and a bolero for Raúl. Here music was Vilma’s way to comfort the loved ones she had left behind – a way to continue caring for them after her death. Death could not put an end to her position as a mother, grandmother, and a spouse.
117 Another male informant told me that this ritual is practiced during nine days after the death: “Nine days with water glasses at home, every day the family prays and every day both the water and the spirit keep elevating.”
118 This view conforms to Hertz’s notion of protecting the body from the specific dangers to which it is exposed dur-ing the intermediary period. Accorddur-ing to Hertz, ritual activity reinforces the ability of the deceased against harmful attacks. (2004: 199-201).
119 However, I attended the funeral of a man where before being lowered into the ground, the coffin was opened so that the grandson of the deceased could fulfil his last wish. The grandson went to stand right next to the grave and poured a bottle of rum into the coffin. He cried all the time and said: “This is the last drink that you and I will take together.” He then took a drink from the bottle and poured the rest of the rum into the coffin. After that he placed the bottle and a small bundle of white flowers inside the coffin, after which the coffin was lowered to the grave. This prac-tice emphasised the deceased’s position as a cherished member of a kin group, a beloved grandfather, and the special connection he had with his grandson, who had been raised by the deceased when his parents had migrated to Miami.
120 If the deceased is an important socialist personality, there are speeches. When speeches take place, they tend to emphasise the deceased’s achievements as a worker and a builder of socialism, stating, for instance, that the deceased was an “exemplary revolutionary” or a “good sugar-worker.” Notable cultural personalities may have music played after the lowering of the coffin to the grave.
On another occasion, I witnessed also a state representation on funerals stressing an individual’s kinship position rather than that of a distinguished socialist. During the evening news, the funeral of a significant state personality was described this way: “People did not say to him that he was an excellent [artist] – which he was. People said to him: “You are my brother, my son, you are a great friend.” Here kinship idiom is employed to display the extraordinary personal worth of the deceased, but not in a manner that would emphasise the value of the deceased as a father, grandfather, uncle, brother, or son in his personal kin relations. Instead, kinship terminology is used to represent the value of the deceased as a compañero to those working with him, as a family member in a ‘socialist kinship group’; here Cuba as a whole (“people”) is represented as the kin into which the deceased is closely integrated. At the same time, the use of a kinship idiom emphasises the value such roles maintain in Cuba.
FIG. 9: A RECENT BURIAL SITE AT THE COLON CEMETERY
I attended a funeral where the deceased man’s son-in-law spoke briefly at the end of the burial. In my opinion, this had to do with his position as someone at the same time ‘far enough’ and ‘close enough’ to the deceased. This is a practice that does away with normal kinship divisions – the son-in-law ceases to be an affine and becomes just “family” instead. This same tendency to turn
‘affines’ into “family” in funerals can be observed in the statement by Caridad (discussed earlier) whose only visit to a church had been when her mother-in-law passed away. Death has the potential to merge together those kinship bonds that are conceived as distinct in day-to-day life.
Death turns affines into family. However at the same time, such distinctions between who is or is not “family” are highly momentous, varying from one context to another. While affines become family during funerals, this should not be understood as a permanent transformation that automatically continues after the ritual. Rather, funeral is a moment where divisions temporarily disappear, but this is not a permanent fusion. Cubans live their lives embedded in networks of social relations and close kinship connections and that is how they die as well. At death, distinctions become temporarily downplayed and all types of links become important.