According to the IIAS Spring 2008 newsletter, NRMs develop and evolve when the following 3 factors exist in a country’s situation. The first factor to present itself is a rapid political change, after which there comes an economic change in the status of a county’s citizenry, and lastly, the 2 previous situations present a nation or population’s desire for rapid social change.
One of these NRMs is the Santeria NRM which was brought to the country in the latter part of the 20th century by Cuban immigrants. Originating from the Yoruba population of Nigeria, the originators of the religion were 19th-century sugar plantation slaves who were brought to Cuba to work in the then expanding sugar trade. The 500,000 Yoruba men and women were known as “Lucumi” and established a notable ethnic presence in Cuba from that moment on.
Meaning “way of the saints”, the Santeria NRM often aligned their African deities with Roman Catholic saint counterparts from which the original Santerian beliefs originated. Known as Orishas, the Santeria saints were often based upon the adopted cultural or social patterns of other groups. These Orishas are often venerated for a specific deity purpose of things that exist in nature such as minerals, animals, vegetables, and humans. Each deity comes with its back story that is often used to help cure the poor followers. As with any religion, the religious representatives of the Santeria as priests and priestesses.
What makes the Santeria different from the other religions that it was based upon is that this religion has a 1993 supreme court decision supporting the religion’s use of animal sacrifice as a constitutional religious practice. A sickening practice that is frowned upon by the Roman Catholic church that the NRM was originally based upon.