ACCORDING TO HARRINGTON, THE CEMI “WAS LOOKING TO THE EAST AND WAS PLACED IN A WAY SO THAT AT A CERTAIN HOUR OF THE MORNING, A SUNRAY ENTERED A CRACK ILLUMINATING HIS FACE, AT LEAST IN JUNE AND JULY.” FERNANDEZ AND GONZALEZ POSIT THAT THE LOCATION OF THE FIGURE MARKED THE BREAK TO THE ANNUAL RAINY SEASON.
his effort, which elucidated the cycle of Taíno nature deities and their various representa- tions in cave altars as well as representations or expressions in language and sculptures made of wood, ceramic, conches or stone. In the book “An Account of the Antiquities
of the Indians,” Arrom provides his account of Friar Ramon Pané’s discussion of Boinayel:
They also say that the Sun and the
At 4 feet tall and about 25 inches wide, the Idol of Patana is impressive. Here, author and curator José Barreiro is transporting the idol within NMAI’s Cultural Resources Center in Maryland.
In Taíno cosmological practice, the
people invoked Boinayel for the early (May) wet season rains. The Sun and the Moon also came out of the same cave, according to Ramón Pané, the Catalan friar who, at the order of Christopher Columbus, kept a chronicle of Taíno beliefs from about 1495 to 1498. Pané lived with relatives of the cacique Guarionex and was specifically assigned to seek knowledge of the Taíno spiritual tradi- tions, customs and rituals (or “idolatry,” as Columbus called it). Pané’s brief but won- drous manuscript—the earliest treatise on an American Indigenous culture—was nearly lost to usefulness until it was rescued by José Juan Arrom, who untied the linguistic knots left by a history of mistranslations. Arrom deciphered a great deal of Taíno culture with
20 AMERICAN INDIAN SUMMER 2019
Moon emerged from a cave located in the country of a cacique [chief] named Mautiatihuel, which cave is called Igua- naboina, and they hold it in great es- teem, and they have it painted in their fashion, without any figures, with a lot of foliage and other such things. And in the said cave there were two zemis [cemis] made from stone, small ones, the size of half an arm, with their hands tied, and they seemed to be sweating. [The Taíno] valued those zemis very highly; and when it did not rain, they say that they would go in there to visit them, and it would rain at once. And one zemi they called Boinayel and the other Márohu.
Cuban speleologists Racso Fernandez and
Jose Gonzalez have studied the Caverna de Pa- tana as a ceremonial center. The scholars took astronomic, speleometric and meteorological measures. In their article, “The Enigma of the Native Petroglyphs of Cuba and the Insular Caribbean,” they conclude that Indigenous people came to Cuba from La Española (Do- minican Republic and Haiti) and recreated “a ceremonial center in Cuba where they carried out astronomic rites to identify the arrival of the rainy seasons.” They also concluded that the Idol of Pa-
tana represents Boinayel. The idol’s position in the cave, Fernandez and Gonzalez argue, “is supported in mythological stories from La Española and in investigations done in the Dominican Republic.” The two schol- ars write that the cemi, which occupied the central place in the ceremonial center of the cave, is a “representation of the God of the
Rain, Boinayel, found also by Dominican
petroglyph experts in Dominican Republic in the Square of Chacuey, Sabila’s Cave and the pictography of the El Ferrocarril Cave.” According to Harrington, the cemi “was
looking to the East and was placed in a way so that at a certain hour of the morning, a sunray entered a crack illuminating his face, at least in June and July.” Fernandez and Gonzalez posit that the location of the figure marked the break to the annual rainy season. This position was illuminated during the summer solstice, “when the sun reaches its maximum distance of the equator (21 and 22 of June).” This date is important for “manioc” (yuca) farmers in a country such as Cuba that has had only two climatic seasons (dry and rainy) because, the article notes, the climate has shifted to almost daily afternoon rains. Taíno cemiism was widespread across
the large Caribbean islands; caves of Iguana- boina could be found on many of them. The indigenous pantheon, as reported by Pané, appears in iconic replications in conch, stone or ceramic, with carvings and draw- ings of one or another among the complex of cemis associated with the altar of Iguana- boina on the island of Hispaniola as well as in Patana on Cuba.
A CONTESTED EXTRACTION
Soon after the statue was removed from the Cuban cave, it became a contested symbol. In the sensitive history between the United States and Cuba, the serration and casual expatria- tion of the statue was considered an insult—a century-long national grievance for the Cuban academy and the Indian-descendant commu- nity where the cave is located. Fernando Ortiz, Cuba’s predominant scholar during the first half of the 20th century, complained that Cu- ban researchers now had to travel to a foreign museum in order to study it. As Angel Graña and Eugenio Fernandez reported in their “Cuba Arqueológica” article, Antonio Nuñez Jimenez, a Cuban geographer and high official in the Revolutionary government, wrote, “the Idol of Patana, cut into various parts, took
PHOTO BY NMAI STAFF
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