Credit: Mirissa Neff

In Cuba, December 17th marks El Día de San Lázaro. The day is reserved—both by Cuban Catholics and by the far more numerous adepts of Santería, the Yoruba-born faith of its historical African slaves—for the patron saint of healing and rebirth. Thousands of Cubans stream toward a little church in the village of Rincón, twenty miles from Havana, to honor a figure depicted, in little statues and on key chains, as a hunched old man wearing purple and toting a cane. Even in the early years of Fidel Castro’s revolution, when the Comandante’s secular Marxism made religion forbidden, this ritual persisted.

Last Wednesday, as the pilgrims approached Rincón on a typically bright but cool December morning, there was little hint of the new resonance the day would carry. In the Juventud Rebelde, one of two daily national newspapers in Cuba and the official organ of the youth wing of the Cuban Communist Party, a simple notice stated that at noon, on state TV, Raúl Castro Ruz, President of the Council […]