ABSTRACT
In the course of a period of at least two decades of massive, often violent repression, beginning in late 1904, Cuban social science and Afro-Cuban religions came to enter into mutually constitutive relations. The Cuban Republic laboured under the lasting heritage of a misguided colonial development scheme, and its unintended social, cultural, and most painfully for contemporary nationalist thinkers biological results. Sharing important structural features with the North American obsession of the sexual defilement of white women by black men, the image of the disembowelled body of white female children sacrificed to African deities for the sake of healing illiterate ex-slaves invoked not only a symbolical inversion of the projected future of the Cuban nation. The complex intertextuality between physiological and moral discourses, and the enormous semantic productivity of the metaphoric linkages between ethnography and epidemiology, sanitation and punishment, science and domination Fernando Ortiz established in Los negros brujos immediately impacted a wide discursive field.
