Attached Paper In-person November Annual Meeting 2026

Healing as Liberation: Santería, Lo Cotidiano, and the Moral Imagination of the Cuban Diaspora

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

What does it mean to heal in exile? This paper examines ritual healing among displaced Cuban communities in Miami, where Santería and Catholicism coexist not as competing doctrines but as interwoven threads of a single moral ecology. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and Latine theological ethics, I argue that ritual healing is not merely therapeutic or sacramental; it is a liberative process through which the traumatized reclaim agency over body, memory, and future. Situating the paper at the intersection of liberation theology, Afro-Cuban religious studies, and trauma theory, I draw on Gutiérrez, Isasi-Díaz, and De La Torre alongside Beliso-De Jesús’s treatment of ritual as epistemology and Lederach’s moral imagination to trace four ways Santería ritual enacts healing for the displaced: relational restoration, the holding of paradox, divine encounter, and the breaking of intergenerational trauma. Among displaced Cubans, the future is not an abstract horizon; it is ritually practiced in the present.