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I argue that practitioners of Palo Monte/Mayombe in the city of Santiago de Cuba construct a religious genealogy inclusive of spirits to affirm their sense of an "African" identity in contemporary Cuba. I will demonstrate that these practitioners' sense of being African includes an understanding that they are the ritual descendants and stewards of the blended spiritual knowledge created by sixteenth and seventeenth century AmerIndian Taíno and Kongolese inhabitants of eastern/Oriente, Cuba. I will show how practitioners' use of natural elements from forested spaces of Oriente, along with artifacts from Cuba's colonial history, allows them to create and maintain a religious genealogy that positions spirits, particularly colonial Africans, as significant others. Such activities assist Palo practitioners' creation of their "African" identity that is born out of the island's Oriente sociohistorical circumstances. I assert that such understandings also give credibility to the local idiom "Oriente is the land of the dead" because this particular location contains skeletal remains of the colonial dead as well as the site of natural/sacred elements Palo supplicants use to engage their spirits.
I found three key features/functions of Palo practitioners' spirit genealogy. First, the principles of reciprocity, covenants of confidentiality (con permiso), and trust (confidanza) set the parameters of how Palo supplicants lived an "African" life style. Secondly, Palo worshipers' engagement of African spirits was central to their understanding of their identity as "Africans." Finally, Palo worshipers' construction of a religious family genealogy inclusive of spirits presented alternative achieves from which supplicants created their self-defined "African" homeland in Oriente.