ABSTRACT
The Abakua Society, a system of men's lodges, first emerged among Afro-Cuban island-born slaves who had established connections with the colonial-era religious brotherhoods of particular African "nations." The cabildos de nation, composed of African-born slaves, had reconstituted, distilled, and differentiated a spectrum of "ethnic" identities in Cuba among the subject populations. The Creole founders of Cuba's Abakua lodges sought out the Carabalí cabildos, whose various constituent peoples had been governed by local gerontocratic "leopard societies" on the continent. The "Carabalí" meta-ethnonym broadly encompassed Africans taken to Cuba from the borderland regions of present-day eastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon during the eighteenth century. Dramatic nineteenth-century changes in the economics and social contours of western Cuban cities shaped demographic shifts within the Abakua's membership and vice versa. By 1863 one of the two principal branches of the young Abakua society had openly begun to initiate Cubans of diverse backgrounds.
