Abakuá: The Secret Brotherhood Born to Resist

In 1836, in the port neighborhood of Regla — just across the bay from Havana — a group of enslaved Africans founded something unprecedented in the Americas: a secret society modeled after the Ékpè fraternities of southern Nigeria. They called it Abakuá, and nearly two centuries later, it remains alive, secret, and powerful.

It is the only African-origin initiatory society to survive in the Western Hemisphere. It is not Santería. It is not Palo. It is something entirely different: a brotherhood of men — with codes, hierarchies, sacred drums, and a founding myth that crosses the Atlantic.

From Calabar to Havana: The Ékpè Journey

The story begins at the Cross River, in what is now southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon. There, the Efik people developed the Ékpè society (“leopard”) during the 18th century — an organization that regulated trade, administered justice, and guarded spiritual knowledge.

When the Atlantic slave trade tore thousands from the Calabar region, among the captives were initiated Ékpè members. They carried something no slave ship could confiscate: ritual memory.

On the docks of Havana, where enslaved people from different African nations were mixed under brutal conditions, that memory became organization. The founders belonged to the Apapá Efí people and served as domestic slaves in Havana households. Meeting in secret, they recreated the Ékpè structure, adapting it to the New World.

1836: The First Potencia Is Born

The first Abakuá lodge, or potencia, was founded in Regla under the name Efík Butón. Soon more followed: Efí Abarakó, Efí Embemoró, and dozens more throughout the 19th century. Each potencia was autonomous but connected by the same rites and one sacred drum: the Ekué.

“Friendship is one thing, and Abakuá is another.” — Saying among ecobios

The Ekué is the heart of the Abakuá mystery. It is said that from this consecrated drum emanates the Voice, a sound only initiates can hear during the most sacred ceremony, the plante. The Ekué is never publicly displayed; it remains hidden in the fambá, the ritual chamber of each potencia.

Crossing the color line

Initially, only men of African descent could join. But in the 1860s, something extraordinary happened: the first white members were admitted. The potencia Acanarán Efó broke the racial barrier, creating a fraternity that — in the middle of a slave society — united men of different races under a common oath.

Ethnographer Lydia Cabrera, who spent decades documenting the tradition, considered this the making of “Cuba’s first integrated society” — an achievement that the Republic itself wouldn’t attempt institutionally for decades.

The Íreme: Dancing Spirit

If you’ve ever seen an image of Abakuá, it was probably an íreme — also called diablito (“little devil”) — the most iconic masked figure in Afro-Cuban culture.

The íreme wears a colorful checkered costume covering the entire body, with a pointed hood and a ritual staff. It represents an ancestral spirit that descends during ceremonies to purify the space and maintain order. Its movements are rapid, angular, almost mechanical — nothing like the fluidity of rumba or danzón.

Basque-Cuban painter Víctor Patricio de Landaluze immortalized the diablito in his 19th-century genre paintings. Those images — created from a colonial gaze — paradoxically became the first visual records of a tradition its practitioners kept in absolute secrecy.

The Three Kings’ Day dance

The íreme’s most famous public appearance was during the Day of the Three Kings (January 6), when colonial authorities allowed enslaved Africans to parade through Havana’s streets with their drums and costumes. The ñáñigos used this window of freedom to show — without revealing — fragments of their sacred tradition.

Ñáñigos: Between Honor and Marginality

Society members were popularly known as ñáñigos, a term likely derived from the nyanya raffia chest piece worn in Ékpè and Abakuá ceremonial costumes.

The society imposed a rigorous moral code on its members:

• Absolute loyalty to brothers (ecobios)
• Never betray the potencia’s secrets
• Courage in the face of adversity
• Protect the weak and families of fallen brothers
• Never inform on a fellow ecobio to the authorities

This code — which in practice functioned as a social safety net for the most vulnerable — was viewed with horror by Spanish colonial authorities. Ñáñigos were persecuted, imprisoned, and deported to Spain and the prisons of Ceuta and Fernando Poo. The National Museum of Anthropology in Madrid still holds Abakuá drums seized during 19th-century raids.

Controlling the docks

Despite persecution, the Abakuá achieved something remarkable: control of port labor in Havana, Matanzas, and Cárdenas. Ñáñigo stevedores formed a labor network where being an ecobio guaranteed employment, protection, and solidarity. This influence over the docks — similar to what labor unions would achieve decades later — gave them real economic power that no other Afro-Cuban organization matched.

Abakuá and Cuban Music

Abakuá’s influence on Cuban music is immense, though often invisible to those unfamiliar with the codes.

Chano Pozo — the Cuban percussionist who revolutionized jazz alongside Dizzy Gillespie with Manteca (1947) — was Abakuá. The chants he introduced into bebop were ñáñigo chants, and his conga playing bore the imprint of ritual drums.

Arsenio Rodríguez, the blind genius of the tres, was a member. So were countless rumberos from Havana and Matanzas solares. In rumba, Abakuá chants and drumming patterns blend naturally with Yoruba and Kongo rhythms.

Contemporary timba — with bands like Los Van Van and La Charanga Habanera — continues incorporating Abakuá references in lyrics and rhythmic patterns. And in Cuban hip-hop, collectives like Orishas have sampled ñáñigo chants, bringing them to a global audience.

Abakuá Today: 150 Lodges and Counting

According to researcher Ivor Miller, approximately 150 Abakuá potencias are currently active in Cuba, concentrated in Havana, Matanzas, and Cárdenas.

After decades of repression — first colonial, then republican, then revolutionary — the society benefited from reforms in the 1990s, when the Cuban government relaxed its stance toward Afro-Cuban religions. The íreme even became a tourist attraction, appearing in folk shows and official imagery of Cuban culture.

But the Abakuá maintain a clear line: the tourist spectacle is one thing, and the sacred plante is another. Initiation can only take place in Cuba, requires the consensus of elders, and secrecy remains absolute. As the ecobios say:

“What you see in the street is the flower. The root, nobody sees.”

Three Religions, One Crucible

Abakuá exists alongside Santería (of Yoruba origin) and Palo (of Kongo origin) as the three great Afro-Cuban religious traditions. Many Cubans practice more than one simultaneously — a babalawo of Ifá may also be an Abakuá ecobio and Palo practitioner — in a practical syncretism that reflects the Cuban view that each tradition offers different tools for navigating life.

This coexistence is one of Cuba’s great particularities: a small Caribbean archipelago that preserves, alive and practiced, African religious traditions that in many cases have disappeared or been radically transformed on the continent of origin itself.

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From the docks of Calabar to the solares of Havana, Abakuá is living proof that memory cannot be chained. Small but tireless — like the zunzún.