268 Chapter 12
Huntington and Metcalf, 1979: 2; van Gennep, [1909] 1960). How-
ever, at the same time, life cycle rituals may represent a moment of
change, being an event that carries the potential to transform and
redefine social relations. In Cuba, it seems that death has the potential
to downplay some of the divisions that are central in day-to-day social
relations.
In this paper I will explore how a man/father may become inte-
grated into the kinship structure at this life stage, whereas women’s
relations proceed as usual. Funerals differ from other Cuban life cycle
rituals in regard to the types of kinship and gender distinctions
observable in the ritual for instance in the sense that in funerals, men
tend to take on a more prominent role than in other life cycle rituals.
Moreover, on the institutional level, funerals differ from other
Cuban life cycle rituals in the sense that they are the only ritual where
both socialist and Catholic practices are combined. The 24-hour wake
takes place in a state funeral home, but after the wake, at the Havana
main cemetery of Cristobal Colon, the great majority of bodies are
blessed by a Catholic deacon before being laid to the ground.^2
A Brief Look at the Historical Context of Cuban Funerals
A central aim of the 1959 Cuban revolution was to radically transform
Cuban society and create a new socialist state based on egalitarian
principles (see e.g. Ramonet & Castro, 2007: 7, 16, 21, 41). In order to
make a radical break from the pre-revolutionary past, the field of life
cycle rituals was also to be transformed (see also Roth, 1990). Since
the objective was to build a society without differences in terms of
equality of wealth, race, gender, age or place of residence, funerals
were not supposed to reflect any of these distinctions. Moreover, the
new socialist funerals were to be atheist and devoid of any type of
bourgeois symbolism—for instance, the socialist newspapers were to
be free of the pre-revolutionary ‘society’ announcements informing
- The material for this paper was collected via ethnographic fieldwork in Havana in
2007-2008. The names of the informants have been changed throughout the text.