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Forced to succumb to a life of enslavement, African-turned-Afro-Caribbean slaves devel- oped a collective image of their beloved homeland and forged an unbreakable chain of solidarity among their many ethnicities. The collective recreation of Africa as manifest in the imagination of Afro-Caribbean slaves through the practice of Cuban Santería and Haitian Vodou in sixteenth- to eigh- teenth-century Cuba and Haiti catalyzed their resistance to European subjugation. In partic- ular, these recreated cultural memories served as a foundation for the enslaved to subvert the dominant culture and resist enslavement. Syncretism fails to properly acknowledge the Afro-Caribbean slaves’ efforts in challenging the imperial regime and the role these efforts played in maintaining their African roots. The tumultuous yet hopeful history through which Cuban Santería and Haitian Vodou evolved reveals that the African spirit continuously takes on new forms but never dies.

This article begins by analyzing the possible interpretations of the Spanish word el monte. In Lydia Cabrera's El monte it is a cosmos or a setting where the spirits are born, where they reside, it is their oikos, their home, precisely where they decide on man's fate, and everything that is necessary to perform magic. In the monte of the herbalists and the santeros, everything that is natural is also supernatural. Through an ecocritical approach to Lydia Cabrera's representation of the monte —work considered to be the santería bible— this article analyzes Cabrera's monte not as a forest primeval or nature untouched but through Cuban environmental history. In other words, through the idea of nature regarded simply like a raw material to be exploited, as well as a history of indifference to the protection of the natural world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]