In the shelved episode “Lucy Tells the Truth,” Lucy was supposed to encourage Ricky to fudge his tax return. In the script, Ricky was going to refuse to cheat. In reality, Desi Arnaz wouldn’t entertain committing the scene to film. He was Cuban Pete, king of the rhumba beat and all, but he insisted on his character’s unwavering American patriotism. He wouldn’t stand for so much as a hint that he could be tempted to shirk his American responsibilities. The bit has become part of television lore, showing how expertly Desi, and therefore Ricky, negotiated Cuban American identity. He could be exotic and introduce audiences to Latin music through the vernacular of frilly sleeves, cardboard coconut trees, painted maracas, and comedic Spanish. He could even speak with a thickly syrupy accent, but he would always be a thoroughly assimilated husband and father. Although his orchestra members attested that Arnaz was a terrible conga player, he always nailed the persona of a good Cuban and an even better American.
My own Cuban American father was never able to transmit the exotic wholesomeness I saw in the Nick at Nite reruns of I Love Lucy. Ricky’s accent was lush and seductive, but my dad’s was jaggedly harsh. Ricky could croon “Babalú,” but my dad would only sometimes hum along to the Tejano radio station. Ricky danced with a smooth subtlety, but I’ve only seen my dad dance once. Ricky would burst into Spanish whenever he was too enraged for English, always with flawless comedic timing, but my dad would let out onomatopoetic glossolalia, as Spanish and English syllables collided into angry nonsense. The version of assimilation I saw on TV was seamless performativity, and the one I saw at home was clumsily incomplete erasure.
I’ve been trying to remember the song that was playing at my cousin DeeDee’s wedding the first and last time I saw my dad salsa. I want to say it was something by Celia Cruz, but if I did, that might be more out of wanting it to be true than out of remembering. Memory sometimes feels less like a threshold between the past and the present and more like a threshold between the real and imagined. What if, when you have no memory, imagination is your only way back from what you’ve forgotten? Back to what you’ve lost, or even what’s been taken?
In that case, I’ll have to imagine the song was “La Vida es un Carnaval” and that Celia Cruz’s throaty belting was what brought everyone out to the floor at DeeDee’s wedding. Up until that song, the music had been the typical fare: Bruno Mars, Black Eyed Peas, the Electric Slide, and so on. But when the guiro and congas started up their steady syncopation, the dance shifted into something more serious. The horn’s blaring melody, just an interval of a minor seventh played in a repetitive off-beat rhythm, signaled the dance floor now belonged to the experts. It was still celebratory, but the floor was cleared of all nieces, nephews, and other amateurs to make room for the ones who knew the steps.
DeeDee’s mom is my dad’s older sister, and, like him, she married an Anglo. This means DeeDee is mixed like I am. In fact, everyone of that generation married non-Cubans, so members of my generation are cultural and racial mixtures of varying proportions and expressions. The only people of full Cuban heritage at the wedding were the ones born on the island. But given how the population of that island is a rangy combination of Spanish, African, and Indigenous peoples who have been mixing together for centuries, Cuban identity is tough to pin down. Add to that rampant racism and colorism, a product of Cuba’s colonial history, and the whole shifty idea of a Cuban ethnicity—by its very nature hybridized, mongrelized, and made-up—begins to come apart. It’s a palimpsest of traditions, styles, ancestors, and homelands, some of which are denied, and others altogether imagined.
Even though I’m only half Cuban, I have the same strong facial features as my dad, the same hard lines as Desi and Celia. When we smile, our faces fissure. Light shines through the broad crack of our mouths, through our narrow squinting, even out of the finer crinkles sparking off the corners of our eyes. These aren’t toothy smiles of straight teeth in a symmetrical crescent. There’s a crudeness to our beauty, a lumpy handsomeness to our good looks. For Celia, when those looks are elaborated on with makeup, wigs, and a deep, gravelly voice, the result is a carnivalesque gorgeousness.
As we half- and quarter-Cubans fell away from the dance floor, the older generation took over with their swirl of motion, and it was one of the most spectacular things I’d ever seen. All of them danced with more ease and fluidity than I’d ever seen a single one of them move with. This I know I’m remembering, not imaging. Even my dad swiveled his hips and wove his steps with a smooth confidence that, if he weren’t my own father, I’d call sexy. This was the same man who never spoke in Spanish to anyone but his older relatives, the same man who labored to shed every vestige of Cuban culture other than his Catholicism, his love of baseball, and his fractured smile, and there he was dancing circles around the others.
My dad came to the US as a teenager as part of the surge of Cuban immigrants in the seventies. He’s never been one to tell stories about growing up in Cuba. Whatever family history I have from his side has been pieced together over decades of reluctantly shared half-memories and minor details like the government-issued deodorant that came in a little jar and had to be dabbed into your armpits like lotion.
One of the few stories my dad ever shared about his childhood was that of the Santero neighbor. He came from a relatively well-off family, or at least the generations before him had been well-off. By the time my dad reached adolescence, the redistribution of wealth under Castro had meant the family’s standing was lost. His father was forced to supplement his income as a professional baseball player by also working as an accountant. My dad, a poor kid in a family that didn’t know how to be poor, was left to scrounge for himself. One afternoon, he and a friend figured out when the neighborhood Santería priest would be out of his house so they could break in and raid it. Once inside, the boys got their hands on a pouch full of coins, money that must have been traded for ritual magic on the purchaser’s behalf. Afraid of whatever magic might be clinging to the coins, my dad and his friend decided the best way to cleanse them would be with urine, so they pissed all over the stolen money before spending it.
*
Though it had deep roots in the blood libel stories of the Middle Ages, the Satanic Panic as we know it began in 1980 with the publication of Michelle Remembers. Co-authored by Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist (and future husband) Lawrence Pazder, the book began with Michelle consulting Lawrence about her recurring nightmares. Through intensive hypnotherapy, Lawrence uncovered that Michelle was repressing memories of the years of abuse at the hands of a Satanic cult. Michelle had suffered sexual and physical abuse throughout these devil-worshipping rites, but she also witnessed animal sacrifice, human sacrifice, and even the summoning of Satan himself in the climactic final ritual. The repressed trauma shaped the contours of her life for years until it was finally unearthed and exorcised with Lawrence’s help. The two-fold claim of the book was horrifying enough to grip the minds of millions of Americans. First, there are Satanists among us, torturing and killing in the name of the devil. And second, you and your loved ones may already be victims of these Satanists and not even remember it happening.
Michelle Remembers’ publication coincided with a handful of other pop culture phenomena that aided in its meteoric rise. The Manson Murders loomed large in the long hangover that followed the progressive movements of the 1960s, and The Exorcist brought demonic possession into the public consciousness with the film’s release in 1973. But it may have been the daytime talk show circuit, beginning with The Phil Donahue Show, that was most instrumental in making buzzwords like recovered memories and Satanic ritual abuse, or SRA, part of the cultural consciousness. These shows didn’t just host Michelle and Lawrence, though. Satanic programming mushroomed to include imitators like Lauren Stratford, con artist and author of Satan’s Underground, so-called “law enforcement experts in SRA,” and self-proclaimed Satanists themselves. Before long, a moral panic fueled by stories of backmasking—Satanic messages played backward in heavy metal songs—and Luciferian imagery in everything from Dungeons and Dragons to ThunderCats began to set in. Geraldo Rivera, Sally Jessy Raphael, Oprah Winfrey, and dozens of others were happy to cash in on the viewership that outlandish tales of SRA garnered. Stratford, with a straight face, told the story of how she was held captive as a baby breeder so that the Satanists would have a steady supply of infants for human sacrifice. No one bothered to verify the story until long after its fuel had been used up to spread the moral panic. By then, Stratford had cashed in and was planning her next con: pretending to be a Holocaust survivor. But that’s for another episode.
The fact is that there was never a shred of corroborating evidence—and we know now that SRA as it was represented never happened—but there didn’t need to be. Satan was everywhere already. A pentagram spray painted on a playground meant Satanic activity. A public restroom where men cruised meant the devil was at work. Any character from any work of fiction with horns or a tail or a free-floating queerness meant kids were being groomed for sexual abuse. No matter how outlandish the accusation, if a kid came forward with a memory of SRA that implicated a parent, a teacher, a coach, or a stranger, someone’s life would be ruined. And if the kid couldn’t keep their story straight, that probably just meant the memory had been repressed and could be unearthed through interrogation and hypnosis.
*
When he came to the United States, my dad brought with him a uniquely Cuban version of the devil. As with the larger construct of Cuban identity, this devil was a hybrid: part memory and part imaginary.
A conservative Catholic family, my dad and his parents prayed fervently for deliverance from Satan’s temptations. To them, the devil fought an ongoing battle against Christ and the saints—a battle he’d eventually lose, but one that waged on in their day-to-day lives, nonetheless. Under Castro, though, Cuba had become a nominally atheist communist nation, so the practice of Catholicism became fraught and dangerous. Unlike most Soviet countries, where all religions were outright banned, Castro saw a way forward in which communism and religion could coexist, but that coexistence was tenuous and would sometimes snap into state-sanctioned violence. For my dad and his family, before they were permitted to leave Cuba for the US, they were put on a watchlist and treated as defectors, enemies of the state. Their home was ransacked multiple times, and the able-bodied men were sent to work on government-run farms. Castro’s fight for socialism was waged on their homes, their bodies, and their religion. So, when they emigrated to the United States, they clung to Catholicism, which meant clinging to the devil.
The devil’s a slippery one, though, and he showed up not just in the church, but in the Santería belief system as well. My dad was never a practitioner of Santería, only a frightened thief peeing on the Santero’s coins, so he was, to some degree, still a believer. Santería is a syncretic religion that was born of the slave trade, resulting from the mixture of West African Yoruba beliefs and rituals with the imagery, mythology, and pageantry of Catholicism. As a result, Santería is also a religion concerned with justice and resistance. Through ritual magic with music, chant, sacrifice, and possession, practitioners seek to invoke and appease the orisha, to recruit the power of gods in a fight against slavery and oppression. This is especially true in the case of Eleguá, the trickster orisha. Eleguá crosses the barriers to power, sometimes correcting injustices and other times just causing trouble, but the religion has always been about questioning authority and disrupting any kind of status quo built on subjugation. Eleguá, with his black and red face and penchant for chaos, shares traits with the Catholic Satan, but he flips those traits into something generative.
The Cuban devil my dad brought with him to the United States had multiple competing sides. That devil embodied West African beliefs as much as the brutal colonization that worked for centuries to quash them. He embodied the resilience of the enslaved and indigenous peoples of Cuba, but he also stood for the crushing violence of white enslavers and settlers. He fought for justice while he was also an instrument for totalitarianism. It’s no wonder that, instead of reckoning with this complex inheritance, my dad denied it altogether. And in a country as xenophobic as America, it was either that or become the devil himself.
I don’t believe it was ever easy for my dad to assimilate, and his total dissimilarity to Ricky proves as much, but I don’t know if he had any other choice but to chip away at the irregular outlines of his identity until it could fit neatly into the ideal immigrant narrative. Modeling himself after Ricky Ricardo may have been the only path forward, and so that’s the version of the American Dream he pursued. As bungled as his performance of the suburban Cuban American husband with the white housewife may have been, it was the performance he committed himself to. That also meant committing to another version of the devil, the version that trickled down to me.
*
In 1983, six years after my dad’s arrival in the US, a Manhattan Beach, California woman became convinced that her two-and-a-half-year-old son was being sexually abused. She believed the abusers were her estranged husband and the boy’s teacher at the McMartin Preschool. The teacher was the grandson of the couple who ran the preschool, and soon those grandparents were implicated in the abuse as well. The little boy told his mom that his teacher also had sex with animals and made him watch, that the grandmother who ran the preschool used a power drill to bore holes in another student’s arms, and that the accused teacher had the power to fly.
No child is equipped to process and narrate sexual abuse in terms an untrained adult can fully understand, so I don’t know how much guilt the boy’s mother should be ascribed for the way she reacted. She went to the police seeking help, believing that her son was being victimized by those she trusted. The record is unclear as to whether the boy stood by his story over the years. At some point, it stopped being his and became his mom’s, and after that, it stopped being hers and instead became everyone’s.
Without enough physical evidence to pursue this little boy’s case, the police decided to send a letter to every parent at the preschool. In that letter, the police explained that they were conducting an investigation into “child molestation” at the hands of the preschool teacher, who was named in the first sentence of the letter. It instructed parents, “Please question your child to see if he or she has been a witness to any crime or if he or she has been a victim,” and then it went on to list all the forms of abuse the children may have been subjected to. Though explicit, the abuses named in the letter were grounded in the horrible realities of the ways adults hurt children. There were no drills, no animals, no flying teachers mentioned, but there were also no guidelines on how to talk to your kids about sexual abuse, just the command to question them.
Three years after the publication of Michelle Remembers and the introduction of SRA into the American vocabulary, the Satanic Panic was primed to explode. Parents came to their kids not knowing how to have these fraught conversations, and kids, as they always do, sought approval from authority figures. These kids were taken to talk with police officers, who knew nothing about how to treat such young children, and everything got worse. When you listen to the kids’ interview tapes, you can hear officers telling them exactly what they’re supposed to say with questions like, “And then did your teacher tie you up?” Lots of kids give the wrong answers, so they’re met with “Are you sure?” or “That’s not what your friend told us.” Barraged with leading questions across long hours of interrogation, the preschoolers told stories of more than abuse—rituals, sacrifices, torture, and the summoning of demons. One child said a giraffe was sacrificed to Satan. Several made claims of abuses that were physically impossible. It’s painful to listen to because it’s possible, somewhere in all those hours of testimony, there’s a true story of a kid who was hurt. You’d be hard-pressed to find it because police claimed that 360 children had been abused in all.
One year after that mom reported her son’s abuse, the McMartin Preschool case went to trial, and so began the main event of the Satanic Panic. Throughout the longest and most expensive criminal trial in the history of the United States, children, parents, and so-called experts in SRA were paraded through the courtroom as lives were ruined over a series of truly bizarre allegations. Any inconsistencies or exaggerations in the children’s testimony, like the one kid who claimed Chuck Norris had participated in the ritual abuse, were explained away by the distortions caused by repression. Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder even met with the parents to explain more about SRA and how it could reshape memory. The trial lasted until 1990 when it was eventually thrown out, but as the defense chipped away at every unfounded accusation, the Satanic Panic was taking even stronger hold.
*
I was born in 1988, the dead center of the Satanic Panic. By then, the McMartin trial itself was in full swing and spinning out of control. The courtroom proceedings themselves weren’t televised, but the reverberating panic and pearl-clutching were broadcast endlessly. The fact a key witness had perjured himself didn’t matter nearly as much as the specials produced by 20/20 and Geraldo Rivera. The country was inside of a full-throated moral panic that took shape as the master-narrative of American culture.
Though it was imaginary, SRA was the invisible current that shaped the lives of kids of my generation; the I Love Lucy on Nick at Nite generation. My parents would never admit it now, but their major parenting choices were informed by the Satanic Panic. We developed elaborate plans involving code words and meeting spots to prevent strangers from abducting us after school, we spread out all the candy on the table after trick-or-treating and checked wrappers for signs of tampering, and we received a vigorous education about the perils of Stranger Danger. At the same time, my parents relentlessly policed my access to media. They never went so far as to ban ThunderCats in the house, but they compiled a long list of video games I couldn’t play, movies I couldn’t see, and CDs I couldn’t spend my allowance on. When my parents found out that my friend’s dad was playing Jane’s Addiction in the car as he drove me home, I wasn’t allowed to see that friend anymore.
My siblings and I were staunchly sheltered from sex, violence, and deviance in media, but we were never allowed to doubt how close to abduction, rape, and murder we actually were. In 1989, Sally Jessy Raphael did an episode on so-called baby breeders who were conscripted to produce infants for sacrifice. There was a follow-up episode on “devil babies,” real-life Rosemary’s babies, in 1991. And in 1996, she guest-starred in an episode of Touched by an Angel, that absurdly popular show about angels intervening in the tawdry affairs of us humans. In our house, daytime talk shows weren’t allowed, but Touched by an Angel played constantly. Sally, Della Reese, and friends carried the message that, even though evil lurked all around, there were always angels angling for our salvation.
This was a uniquely complicated experience as a queer kid. During these years, it was impossible to miss that queerness was lumped in the same category as murder and rape. The media I wasn’t allowed to consume, like the people I was warned about, was called demonic because it betrayed deviant desire, deviant sexiness. I only ever peeked Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies when I spied the back of the VHS case in Blockbuster, but with just a glimpse I could tell that the Satanic and the gay were interchangeable in my parents’ ideology. The message they sent was clear: to be anything but straight was to be truly in league with Satan. When I saw Perry Farrell and Dave Navarro making out with each other in the music video for “Mountain Song” by Jane’s Addiction, I knew I was seeing something that I wasn’t supposed to because my parents told me so. At the same time, I knew I was seeing exactly what I needed to see.
Where was I meant to stand in this battle of good and evil? I didn’t yet have the language to name how I was attracted to boys instead of girls, but it wasn’t just about gender. I was hypnotized by Rob Halford of Judas Priest in his campy leather daddy outfit, not by the backmasked messages in their music, at least as far as I knew. I’ll even confess that I thought the ThunderCats were kind of hot, but it had nothing to do with whatever Luciferian imagery others saw. It had much more to do with the imagery of Panthro’s bulge in his skimpy fetish gear. It was never masculinity itself that I was drawn to, but these skewed forms of masculinity that were undercut by kitschy vulgarity—by devilishness. My desires were as much about style as they were about sex. These men were transgressive because their hypersexuality extended beyond the barriers of gender and acceptability. They were tricksters who slipped through boundaries my parents aimed to erect around my imagination.
The Satanic Panic was instrumental in how I was dispossessed of my Cuban heritage, but my queerness was my weapon against it, my means of reclamation. The moralizing chaos that swept the country over those years showed the insidious overlap of memory, imagination, and fear. But looking back now, the devil himself showed me—and still shows me—the generative overlap of memory, imagination, and trickery.
*
I don’t know what my dad and his childhood friend spent the Santero’s money on, but I know that however I’m envisioning the story is wrong. In my imagination, these boys are dashing between the polished fins of classic cars with their hands full of piss-smelling pesos. There are colorful but crumbling facades of Spanish colonial architecture in this memory too, all of Cuba in a postcard-ready state of hallowed decay.
There’s nostalgia here, a reverence and grief for a history that was never mine. I grew up feeling alienated from the culture and language of my dad, which is a typical feeling for the son of an immigrant. Celia, Desi, and my dad’s earnest attempts at getting me to care about baseball and church, both of which gave out by the time I was a teenager, are some of the few braided threads that connect me to the island, but to confuse the island with the construct of Cuba is to fall for an illusion. My dad grew up speaking Spanish, but that language was itself an instrument of dispossession. It’s no more the Cuban language than Guanahatabey of Lucumí is. Catholicism and baseball are imports as well, extensions of the colonialism that reconfigured and repressed customs considered demonic. He was the product of a much earlier Satanic Panic before he started reproducing another.
I’m brown enough and have a weird enough last name to get questions like, “Where are you from originally?” or the classic, “So, what are you?” The feeling of indignation, shame, and genuine bafflement at those questions is also common for us second-generation Americans. But as a Cuban American, there hardly seems to be a place to be from. And as far as the what is concerned, I’m something other.
Other than what, I don’t know. But I do know that the first time I put on a wig, heels, ice blue lipstick, and a flock of paper butterflies pinned to my dress, I looked just like Celia and couldn’t help but whisper to myself, like an invocation: ¡Azúcar!
Unlike my dad, I dance all the time and have always loved it. When I first started going out to clubs, I especially loved spending hours beforehand assembling glittering outfits and applying tropical-colored makeup. I never thought of this as drag since I was never performing anyone other than myself. I was a kitschy one-person carnival in candy-colored wigs and nickel-plated jewelry that left green splotches on my skin by the end of the night. In a shady club in the warehouse district of Denver, I could step out looking like Celia Cruz, and feel fabulously at home in my queer mongrel skin.
When I tell people I’m of Cuban descent, they sometimes ask if I ever want to go back. I become indignant at that question too, as if I have somewhere to go back to, some site of authentic belonging. The only place I ever felt that way was in those clubs, where I realized return was more an act of imagination and self-styling than memory. I grew up watching Desi Arnaz, but I grew up wanting to be Celia Cruz, an icon with a cracked kind of beauty. Desi was the perfect American, but Celia was in league with something dangerous, something queer and sacrilegious. For me, displaced Cubanness overlayed suburban whiteness, and instead of making something family-friendly like season six of I Love Lucy, the friction between them sparked something devilish.
*
In Vancouver, Washington, there’s a place called The Devilish Little Things Museum. It doesn’t have a website, but it does have a social media presence. You can find them on Instagram, and there you can see highlights from the collection and send the museum’s sole operator and curator a DM requesting a tour. She only offers tours by appointment, but don’t let that deter you. Chances are she’ll be able to squeeze you in between errands and chores. The museum, which was once a church with a small congregation, is also her home, so she’ll probably be happy to show off her collection of devil-inspired artworks and objects for the small price of eight dollars.
Her name is Marion, and she’ll greet you at the door with her ancient Papillon named Max. If it’s cold and blustery out, she’ll draw a thick velvet curtain over the front door after you come inside and she takes your coat. Before the tour begins, she’ll show off a few things that are for sale, offer you coffee or water or even wine, and only then ask you to pay admission. Once you do, the tour can begin.
Marion has been collecting devils for twenty-five years. Her collection primarily comprises antiques, folk art, and mass-produced knickknacks. There are absinthe spoons with svelte, sexy devils on the handles. There are Black Forest wood carvings of hooved satyr-like devils. There are tea sets with red devils on the teacup handles. There are papier-mâché devil masks and props from silent films. There are beadwork tapestries depicting horned devils with enormous dicks. It’s a rambling collection of nearly every kind of object imaginable, but there’s a singular focus to the collection. The devil on all of these things could hardly be called Satan, Baphomet, or Lucifer. There’s nothing religious or demonic about any of the representations. Instead, every representation is the trickster mischief-maker version of the devil. It’s the version of the devil that wears red tights, has a pointed tail, and sometimes a thin little mustache. It’s the sexy, silly, kitschy, and extremely gay devil—not the embodiment of sin and evil, but the embodiment of indulgence and delight.
I visited the Devilish Little Things Museum with my brother and sister-in-law the day after Christmas. During the tour, my brother asked, “Why do you think the devil turned from the evil character in the Bible to a trickster character in these folk traditions?” Marion seemed confused by the question and not sure how to answer. Obviously, she knew there was a distinction between the biblical Satan and this devil that her cluttered collection was focused on. For her, though, this kitschy devil was more of an aesthetic preference than a socio-historical phenomenon. Plus, so many of her satyr-like representations were clearly pre-Christian in their roots. She knew early Christians dressed up their beliefs in Pagan rituals and imagery to sell the new religion to would-be practitioners, and that applied to the devil as well. Maybe what baffled Marion about my brother’s question was that he had it backward. The devil didn’t go from a moralizing construct to scare Christians away from sin into the fun-loving and imagination-sparking transgressor; it was the other way around.
The trickster-transgressor illustrates the act of boundary-crossing and rule-breaking as generative and vital. Mischief is the engine that drives humanity. Like we learn from so many stories of Eleguá and the other tricksters across history—like Hermes, Krishna, Coyote, Papa Legba, and so many more—to make mischief and to cause havoc is to ask where power lies. We find tricksters at thresholds and crossroads, liminal spaces where here and there are hard to discern, because they dismantle the binaries and hierarchies by which we order our lives. Marion’s devils in red tights have raucous orgies and carry their giant dicks in wheelbarrows because those fringes of the taboo help us make vital nonsense of our codes of propriety.
American Christians during the eighties and nineties were quick to correct anyone who said the devil was in hell. They insisted that, no, the devil was here on earth, among us. In a way, they’re right. If the devil were anywhere, he’d be riding the Great Chain of Being up and down, moving across realms and snipping holes into the fences meant to keep him out. Of course, that’s not what they meant. They were simplifying the devil from the trickster into the embodiment of depravity. If mischief is the engine that drives humanity, such a simplification signals the death of that engine. Instead of the devil offering a way to ask where power lies, he’s just a way to divest power from queer people, children, anyone vulnerable, anyone on the outside.
*
By the late 1950s, with Castro’s ascendance to power, Santería landed in a slippery liminal space, which is, of course, where it belongs. The religion was fundamental to Cuban cultural heritage, in no small part because of its preoccupation with interrogating power and seeking justice. Stories, like the one about Eleguá winning his freedom from Olodumare or the other about Obatala drunkenly failing to create man, showed gods who challenged, tempted, and fought one another. Power circulates and is contested in Santería, and the possibility of wresting power from the tyrannical was just as important to the enslaved early practitioners of Santería as it was for the communist revolutionaries.
Post-revolution, the newly formed communist government couldn’t endorse the religion, but they could repurpose it into a set of signifiers. The religion was turned into signals to the practitioners that non-practitioners would otherwise miss. During his inauguration speech in 1969, Castro had two white doves, one perched on his shoulder and the other on the podium. It was an instantly famous image, one that seemed to communicate a message of peace, especially to Western media. For Cubans at the time, though, those doves symbolized the orisha Obatala, the god of creation and purity, the god for whom doves are the primary sacrificial animal. Obatala is also a messenger orisha, imparting divine messages to humans. Bedecked in white doves, Castro used visual cues to evoke God’s covenant with Noah in the Old Testament and the divine messenger of Santería simultaneously. People saw what they wanted to see.
What did my dad see? What did Desi Arnaz see? What about Celia Cruz? Whatever they saw, they eventually learned they’d have to turn away from it, though they’d all do it in different ways.
In the Satanic Panic, people saw what they wanted to see too. What I saw is hard to put into words. I’ve shied away from the word hysteria when talking about the Panic because it’s so gendered and loaded with violent connotations. Shared delusion also seems to miss the mark because it seems to excuse the bad actors who shaped the events. Many weren’t deluded at all, but bent on generating widespread terror and destroying lives. I even think the name Satanic Panic is misleading, the way it suggests a discrete set of events with a beginning and end. Looking at the political right, it’s hard to say the moral panic over ritual abuse and subliminal messages corrupting our kids has stopped. That panic’s as strong as it’s ever been.
What I saw was a confounding paradox. As a child, I was at risk of SRA at the hands of evil—as in queer—devil-worshippers. The danger was so acute, I could already be the victim of SRA and not know it. As a queer kid, though, I was as bad as those devil babies on Sally Jessy Raphael. It’s an impossible bind, but both ends of this trap are made-up. Satan is just the name for all things other, all things scarily ungendered or overgendered, all the beautiful things that show us how porous our barriers really are. The Satanic Panic brought into focus my dispossession from the Cuban culture, but that same culture taught me ways to survive. I suppose I, too, see what I want to see, or at least I hear what I want to hear. When I hear Celia Cruz’s voice, I hear the unruly sound of severance and ceremony singing together. That’s the sound I dance my father’s steps to.
Sources
Canizares, Raul Jose. “Santería: From Afro-Caribbean Cult to World Religion.” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 1, 1994.
Cruz, Celia. Para le Eternidad, Machete Music, 2016.
De La Torre, Miguel. Santería: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004.
Eberle, Paul and Shirley Eberle. The Abuse of Innocence: The McMartin Preschool Trial, Prometheus Books, 1993.
Maoran, Maha. “Santería in Cuba: Contested Issues at a Time of Transition,” Transition, no.125, 2018.
Nuñez, Luis Manuel. Santería: A Practical Guide to Afro-Caribbean Magic, Spring Publications, 1992.
Pazder, Lawrence and Michelle Smith. Michelle Remembers, Congdon & Lattes, 1980.
Reinhold, Robert. “The Longest Trial: A Post-Mortem,” The New York Times, 24 January 1990.
Patrick Milian (he/him) is the author of The Unquiet Country (Entre Ríos Books) and the chapbook Pornographies (Greying Ghost). His work has recently appeared in Gulf Coast, Poetry Magazine, Carolina Quarterly, and the Lambda Literary Award-nominated anthology Between Certain Death and a Possible Future. He lives in Seattle and teaches at Green River College.
