SANTERÍA is a religious tradition of African origin that developed in Cuba and that was spread throughout the Caribbean and the United States by exiles from the revolution of 1959. Santería began in the nineteenth century when hundreds of thousands of men and women of the Yoruba people, from what are now Nigeria and Benin, were brought to Cuba to work in the island's booming sugar industry. Despite brutal conditions, some were able to reconstruct their religious lives through a fusing of the traditions remembered from their homeland and from their encounter with the folk piety of the Roman Catholic church.

The Cuban Yoruba often used the iconography of Catholic saints to express their devotions to Yoruba spirits called orishas. The name Santería, "the way of the saints," is the most common Spanish word used to describe these practices, and...