My Mother in Havana

A memoir about the intersection of grief, creativity, and spirituality

Grief is always a journey, but it’s one our culture seldom encourages. We urge the bereaved to let go of their loved ones, to quickly wrap up the journey and move on. One of the many miracles in Rebe Huntman’s lush, lyrical memoir, My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracles, is that the trajectory of her grief experience led her to receive a permission she hadn’t even known she needed—to remain devoted to the mother she lost decades earlier at nineteen and, curiously, to even nurture an ongoing relationship beyond death.

Huntman’s grief journey began long before she recognized it as such. In 2004, just shy of forty, she traveled to Havana to study the Afro-Cuban dances she taught and choreographed in Chicago—dances she first saw when she was in high school and reluctantly attended a showcase at the studio where her parents took ballroom dancing classes. It was an event that would shape her creative life, a glimmer of an inescapable truth she recognized in an instant. “Even as I remained seated, a bass line grabbed me by my hips and feet, connecting me with a version of myself I’d always wanted to meet. A version opposite the straight lines and grids I’d been chafing against. A shape that was sultry and fluid, vast and alive.”

Despite a longstanding interest in the intersection of feminism and spirituality—Huntman had no idea how deeply her study of Afro-Cuban dance would lure her into an ongoing exploration of the divine feminine or how it might lead her back to the mother she missed so desperately. That hadn’t been part of the plan. Her aim was simply to track how far the dances she performed and taught—the salsa, mambo, and cha-cha-cha, for example—had, outside Cuba, strayed from their origins as offerings to the gods of the Afro-Cuban religions, such as Santería. She wanted to bring the authenticity of the movements back to her dance company in Chicago, but she returned with something altogether different.

Working with choreographers in Havana, Huntman learned about orichas—a pantheon of deities worshipped by Cubans. Intermediaries between the supreme God Olodumare and humans, they’re summoned through music and dance. She discovered that there are particular dance repertoires associated with each deity and soon became enthralled by those linked to Oshún, the revered goddess of rivers, love, sensuality, and prosperity. “Something about the river goddess felt at home in my body, as if something or someone were beckoning me toward some deeper version of myself, asking only that I take her hand, close my eyes, and follow. First one step. Then the next.” Captivated, she devoted her time in Cuba to learning Oshún’s movements and the rituals associated with her.

Nine years later, back home, she found herself deeply missing her mother, fearing she was forgetting her and losing their connection. She became determined to learn exactly what it was she was missing, just what version of a mother she was desperate to connect with. In the library at Ohio State University, reading about the sacred feminine, she discovered a book about the divine mother Oshún and Our Lady of Charity—Oshún’s Catholic equivalent who was equally venerated in Cuba. Huntman’s desire to return there in search of the sacred feminine and the choreography of the gods “had become like a physical pull. I wanted to find a way back to what I’d witnessed on that first trip.” She designed a 30-day immersive experience in Cuba, where for 15 days in Havana she again studied Oshún’s dances and worked with Santería priests and priestesses to learn about the rituals that honor and summon her.

Huntman then traveled to another side of Cuba, to the mountain town of El Cobre and the sanctuary of Our Lady of Charity, to be among the thousands of pilgrims who would convene there to honor her on her feast days. In El Cobre she also tracked down the home of a spiritist whose reputation for speaking with the dead had reached her all the way back home in Ohio. She appealed to him for help and was ushered into a surreal scene. “Around us every surface of Madelaine’s workroom spills over with the objects that bridge this space with the realm of the spirits: statues of saints clustered near jars of feather and stones. Water goblets filled with photographs of the dead. Bells and maracas; Buddhas and cigars.” Seated across from him on a wooden chair, she looked at Madelaine and summoned the courage to whisper, “I want to talk to my mother.”

From her immersion the culture of the sacred mother and her meeting with Madelaine, Huntman emerged with a certainty that the veil between the living and the dead is gossamer and porous, that she could celebrate the feminine divine while deepening and maintaining a connection with her deceased mother, keeping her close, as the Cubans do their dead.

Throughout her memoir, the author intimates that she was pulled or guided by her intuition to take each step, reminding me of Elizabeth Gilbert’s words near the end of her own spiritual journey in Eat, Pray, Love: “But I was always coming here” she observed. “I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you’re standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.”

Huntman’s writing is a marvel—bewitchingly lyrical and saturated with evocative sensory detail. What she achieves in this memoir is reminiscent of the spell Carlos Castanada cast in the famous tales of his tutelage under Don Juan, a Yaqui sorcerer, and his quest to become a man of knowledge. Like The Teachings of Don Juan, My Mother in Havana is a book to read slowly, to savor. To be captured by Huntsman’s prose, as with Castaneda’s, is to feel drawn into a vivid dream, one from which you may be reluctant to awaken.