Connect with Her Late Mother Through Afro-Cuban Spiritual Traditions
What would compel a woman from Ohio to fly to Havana in search of her deceased mother through spiritual traditions—three decades after her passing? Meet Rebe Huntman, author of My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle, whose powerful story of loss, grief, and rebirth will leave you spellbound. At 19, Rebe lost her mother to cancer. But it wasn’t until 30 years later that her healing truly began—when she followed a spiritual call to Cuba and stepped into the mystical world of Afro-Cuban religions. Through seances, Santeria, and communion with gods, ghosts, and saints, Rebe discovered more than ancestral wisdom—she found her mother again. In this intimate interview, Rebe shares how her journey through Afro-Cuban traditions redefined grief and why these vibrant practices helped her reconnect with what was lost but never gone. This is a story of magic, miracles, and the transformative power of spiritual seeking across borders and beliefs. Ready to be inspired and uplifted? Don’t miss it!
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- Navigating grief that resurfaces decades later.
- Seeking connection with deceased loved ones through spiritual traditions.
- The power of seances and mediumship in bridging the gap between worlds.
- The value of pilgrimage as a tool for healing and self-discovery.
- Creating personal rituals to honor ancestors and maintain connection.
- How writing can be a transformative act of healing.
- Learning from Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions like Santeria and Spiritism.
- Understanding the role of gods, ghosts, and saints in everyday life.
- Embracing the messy, multifaceted nature of life and identity.
- Finding joy by confronting vulnerability and accepting imperfection.
- The concept of becoming an ancestor and leaving a positive legacy.
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS REBE:
- How did you initially react to losing your mom? What was your relationship with her like?
- Who helped you speak to your mother from beyond the grave?
- Share some of the things that you learned from the gods and goddesses of Cuba.
- What would you like to tell us about your book and about why you created it?
- You recommend writing as a healing tool. Why?
- If healing grief offers us the opportunity to keep the dead close, how does it act as an invitation to create space and rituals in our lives?
- What is the Rebe tip for finding joy in life?
GRIEF AND REBIRTH LINKS
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Rebe Huntman: Why She Traveled to Cuba to Connect with Her Late Mother Through Afro-Cuban Spiritual Traditions
I hope this finds all of you very well. I’m speaking to you from my studio in West Orange, New Jersey. I could not be more delighted to have the pleasure of interviewing the remarkable Rebe Huntman, a memoirist, essayist, dancer, teacher, and poet, whose work explores the profound intersections of feminism, world religions, and spirituality.
Rebe’s journey is one of reinvention, courage, and discovery, making her a true heroine of her own life and a role model for grief to healing and rebirth. At nineteen, she experienced the devastating loss of her mother to cancer. 30 years later, still carrying that grief, she found herself drawn to Cuba’s Festival celebrating Our Lady of Charity, which symbolizes hope, salvation, and Cuban identity.
Rebe’s search for her mother unfolded into a powerful personal exploration, one that challenged her understanding of self, her past, and the spiritual divide between the living and the dead. It led to her deeply moving journey of loss, transformation, and connection titled My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle.
It is a story of a woman navigating loss, family tragedy, and dysfunction while striving to become the person she longs to be, a daughter, a mother, and a keeper of the stories passed down through generations. Rebe’s journey is three-fold. It is a physical, literal journey from Ohio to Cuba, a psychological quest for connection with her lost mother and for healing from the grief of losing her mother at a young age, and a spiritual search for faith in Afro-Cuban religious traditions.
I’m looking forward to talking with Rebe, who divides her time between Delaware, Ohio, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, about how she found her way through her grief and back to her mother, who she had lost 30 years earlier, the world of seance, sacrifice, pilgrimage, and dance, which led Rebe to her deceased mother and a larger version of herself, the Gods, ghosts, and saints of Cuba she learned from on her journey, the value of pilgrimage, how the act of writing is an act of healing, and more for a fascinating interview that will surely bring an abundance of important healing insights about reinvention, courage, and growth from grief to healing to rebirth.
Rebe, a heartfelt welcome to the show.
What a lovely introduction. I’m so happy to be here and be able to discuss this with you.
I enjoyed your book. I read it as I was preparing for the interview. It’s a beautiful book. I’m always fascinated by the gods, the ghosts, the saints, and how these things come through because I’ve experienced some of this. I find that what we get from the spiritual world is non-sectarian. We’re all part of a collective. There’s so much wisdom, no matter where you turn, that can be gleaned to help people.
I can’t wait to share your story because it’s going to help give people insights like crazy and help a lot of people. You went about it. People go around connecting with their deceased loved ones in different ways. Yours was a very circuitous route, but fabulous. Let’s talk about that. Let’s begin by sharing your relationship with your mother with us. How did you initially react to losing her? What was your relationship with her like? How did that grief for her dramatically surface 30 years later?
Thank you for that question to start us off. I like to say none of us have gotten into this world without a mother. The mother is a central figure in all of our lives, even though the texture and shape of that relationship can be so vastly different. Some of us know our mothers. Some of us never meet our mothers. Some of us are close. Some of us are estranged. No matter what, it’s a very central relationship, and it was, for me.
My mother was my person. She was the person who was most interested in everything that I did as a child and who held me. In My Mother in Havana, one of the first scenes where I introduce my mother is through an episode that happened to us when I was ten years old. We were on vacation in Mexico. We were swimming, and we got pulled out to sea and almost drowned.
We were eventually saved by men who swam out for us, who were professional divers, but it was my mother who held me in those waters. She never let go of me. We were being pulled under, and then we came up for air and called for help. For me, that’s such a central metaphor for the relationship that I felt with her. She was the one person who would never, ever let me go and who would hold on to me through thick and thin. When I was nineteen, she died. That wasn’t part of the pact.
Your safety net disappeared. There it went, right?
Right. I was bereft, even though we’d seen it coming. My mother had been ill. She’d had surgery. She’d gone through chemotherapy. She’d gone through natural therapies. Yet, there was this magical thinking in all of the family members that we were going to beat it, and that death was not an option. I was bereft. I was a college sophomore. I had very well-meaning people around me. They were good people, but they gave me what I’ve come to think of as not helpful advice, which was, “Move on. Your mother’s gone. You’re here in college. Worry about your test next week. Make something of yourself because you want to make your mother proud. The way to do that is to keep moving.”
I’m a good student. I followed that advice all too well. For 30 years, I moved forward. I focused on my life and on making something in my life. Part of that making was pursuing a career in Latin dance and choreography, the very career that would take me to Cuba, where I would reconnect with my mother 30 years later. In the meantime, it was a slog. I didn’t want to make people around me uncomfortable. I noticed at nineteen, when I first lost my mother, people got uncomfortable talking about death, or thinking about death, or thinking that I would be uncomfortable if they brought up my mother, so I didn’t talk about her.
Our loved ones never leave us. Share on X
On the verge of turning 50, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. My grief surfaced in such a big and aching way, and in a different way. It felt like it had something to do with the fact that I was almost 50. She died when she was in her 50s. It had something to do with yearning for a role model, which surprised me, because I thought that by the time you’re 50, you know who you are in the world, and you’d be self-possessed and feel like a real badass. I didn’t feel like any of those things.
You had a void. You had a hole that had not been healed yet. It was sitting there.
I missed my mother, and I didn’t know how to connect with that or what to do with that. In my culture, growing up in the Midwest in the United States, A) I didn’t have any role models for how to deal with a 50-year-old woman who misses her mother. How do you connect with that? How do you give yourself permission to make that a central part of your life when you yourself are supposed to be all grown? The second was, where do you find role models for the kind of grown woman you want to be? Both of those questions led me to Cuba.
Thank goodness that I had that career and developed that career as a Latin dancer and choreographer, which had taken me to Cuba. It was because of that that I knew that if I went back to Cuba, I might find the answers I was looking for, which was A) How do I connect with someone that I feel like I’ve lost and that I myself have let go of? And B) How do I find a role model for the kind of woman I want to be in the world? I found those things amongst the spiritual mothers of Cuba and the Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions that keep the dead close.
Rather than saying, “Move forward to make something of yourself,” the Afro-Cuban traditions say, “The only way you can move forward and make something of yourself is by relying on the voices of those who’ve come before, our beloved ancestors who are whispering in our ears, guiding us, and saying, “Don’t turn left there. Turn right.” It is the opposite way of looking at grief, healing, and living, and our relationship with the dead that I found in Cuba.
It gave you a way to leave behind that lens that you had learned in the Midwest and process your grief in a whole new way and view it through a new lens, right?
Yeah. One of the mysteries of the book, My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle, is that my mother is not from Havana, and neither am I. My mother had spent time in Havana, and I talk about that in the book, but neither of us is Cuban. You mentioned in the beautiful introduction this circuitous path. It wasn’t linear. It didn’t make sense in a logical, linear, apparent way, and yet it made sense in that I could not have found the answers I needed to find in my own country, or I don’t know that I could have.
In your culture in Ohio, you weren’t exposed to a lot of mediums or anything like that. That was not a common thing for people, was it?
It’s not nearly as common as it is in Cuba, certainly. There are certainly a lot of eyebrows raised. There are people who believe in that kind of thing, and then people who don’t. There’s a lot of judgment, I feel, in my own culture and country. There is a lot of skepticism. The go-to attitude might be, “That’s cute that Rebe is off to talk with a medium, but she’s wasting her time. How silly of her.” I’m not saying that everybody in my culture believes that way, but that might be the dominant view. It’s because of that that you’re almost tiptoeing around apologetically, whereas you go to a place like Cuba, and the crazy thing there would be to not talk with the dead.
You went to an environment where you were very comfortable, and that gave you safety and made you sane instead of having to defend what you were doing all the time. Who is this Madelaine, who helped you speak to your mother from beyond the grave? That was your first experience, right? You found Madelaine.
It all came together all at once. Thank you for the beautiful introduction because the book, My Mother in Havana, takes the reader through a series of experiences that include pilgrimages to the mother of saints. It includes seances, what they call spiritist a misa, like a spiritist mass, Santeria initiations, and all kinds of things. All of these came to me all at once in a sense that once I started pulling at threads and what I wanted to do in Cuba and what I wanted to find in Cuba, all of these threads started unspooling all at once. One of them was Madelaine.
He is a spiritist who lives in a very small but sacred town called El Cobre, Cuba. It’s on the Eastern side of the island with maybe 11,000 inhabitants. I had heard of him through an anthropologist friend of mine who had been to El Cobre, and she had told me that he was very well-respected there as being the real deal. He was someone who, since childhood, could commune with the dead.
He always saw the dead and would tell his mother, “Mom, close the windows. There are dead people looking in on us.” She’d be like, “What?” because she couldn’t see them. He had this gift. Coming from a skeptical or not wanting to seem like the ditzy girl who’s going off to talk with a medium, I downplayed my interest in meeting with him, but it was very much an interest. I wanted to see what would happen when I met with him, and I did. We spent hours together one day.
I love the story in your book. I’m recommending it to people who are tuning in to this interview because your whole experience with him was amazing.
The prologue opens with me sitting with Madelaine. He asks me, “What have you come for?” I tell him, “I have come to talk with my mother. Can you help me?” Over the course of hours, he helped me. He works with the spirit of an escaped slave, El Cimarrón. He works through that spirit to communicate with the other side. I don’t want to give away too much. The reason why I don’t want to give away a lot about what happened there is not that I’m trying to be coy, but it is the story of it all. It’s worth reading the story. It’s more than just a punchline.
Let’s go to the gods, the ghosts, and the Saints of Cuba because you learned from them, too. Do you want to share some of the things that you learned from them? What did they teach you?
Yeah. The main ones that I connected with were Santeria and Spiritism. I encountered Spiritism through Madelaine, whom I asked to summon my mother’s spirit. Santeria is a beautiful religion and spiritual tradition that arose from the conflict and the meeting or the encounter between Yoruba enslaved people who were brought from West Africa to Cuba, and who brought with them their African gods and goddesses.
They had a very clear cosmology, but when they came to Cuba, the Catholic said, “Here are your new gods right here and your new saints.” In order to keep their own African gods alive, they looked at the Catholic saints and gods and said, “That one looks a lot like our Lady of Charity. That Mother Mary figure looks a lot like our river goddess, Oshun. We’re going to look at our Lady of Charity and pray to our Lady of Charity, but we’ll be communing with Oshun.”
That’s pretty smart.
Due to that, there’s this beautiful tradition that’s a real blending of Catholic saints and gods and African gods and saints. There is this sense that the whole world is alive and beating with spiritual essence and with the gods. They’re not just on some distant mountain observing us, but in Santeria, there are all these orishas or intermediary gods that we have daily experience with.
They’re around us all the time.
They’re around us all the time, and they’re instructing us like the dead are.
It’s coming through in the thoughts that we have and in different things.
In our very characteristics. For example, in Santeria, each one of us has a guardian orisha or a guardian God, who is there to instruct us and show us how to be our best version of ourselves. Each of the orishas has their own flavor. You are chosen by that orisha because you also have that flavor.
That’s very interesting.
An example is that my guardian orisha is Oshun, the fertility goddess. If you knew me and you knew all of Oshun’s characteristics, she is the goddess of love, fertility, and beauty. She’s a dancer. She’s a real badass, too. She’s got a lot of different things. My personality and hers are very much in sync.
Are you telling our audience that you’re a badass?
Yes. I found out I’m a badass after all, or that I aspire to be. Sometimes, I’m a badass. Sometimes, Oshun is a badass. They’re there, and they’re instructing us. They’re whispering to us and showing us how to live our lives as much as the ancestors are. One of the things that I learned personally in Cuba and that I wanted to share with my readers in My Mother in Havana is this idea that this world is beating and pulsing with all kinds of spirits that are available to us and that are there to show us the way.
For me personally, as a woman, the idea of having not just 1 in this book, but I find 2 spiritual mothers. One is Oshun, the West African River goddess, and the other is our Lady of Charity, this iteration and incarnation of Mother Mary. On the surface, it couldn’t seem more different. We think about Mother Mary being a virgin, modest, and humble. Oshun is this loud, in-your-face, beautiful fertility goddess.
With the way I had been raised, how can these 2 be 1? This was another thing where I had to leave my thinking and go to another way of thinking. I had been raised that a woman could be one thing or another thing. We could be smart or we could be popular. There was usually a right answer as to which side of the aura we should be on. In Cuba and with the orisha, it’s this and idea. We can be modest and humble like our Lady of Charity and larger than life like Oshun, simultaneously. That was a real change point for me to think about identity in those large and capacious ways.
A lot of people see life in terms of black and white. You have to be this or you have to be that. The truth is, there is so much color to each of us, and there are so many layers. You got permission to uncover your other layers, I would think, right?
Yes, which also has to do with the question of grief, too. I love that you said black and white. It is this black and white thinking of someone’s either gone or they’re here. There’s this in-between where they’re physically gone, but they’re very much connected.
It’s the same thing where I often ask people about joy. You can be in grief, but you can still have joy. Life is not this black and white either-or choice. That’s beautiful. It’s because of this that you became a larger version of yourself, because you gave yourself permission to have all these other layers of yourself. Would you agree with that?
I would agree with that. I gave myself permission to be both a grieving daughter who misses her mother and sometimes feels like a young girl, and sometimes feels like a real badass. Life is messy, and life is complicated. Embrace all of it.
That’s beautiful. In your book, My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle, you created it as a love letter, an invitation, a roadmap, and a tribute to mothers. What would you like to tell us about your book and about why you created it with those intentions? What does a person get from reading the book?
The book is exactly that. It’s a love letter to my nineteen-year-old self, the young version of myself that was bereft at the loss of her mother and didn’t know where to turn. By extension, it’s a love letter to any reader who feels in that same position of vulnerability, of loss, of not having the answer, and of not knowing where to go. It’s a love letter to the 50-year-old version of myself who had the courage to go and find the answers and create that DIY pilgrimage to Cuba to find those answers. By extension, it’s a love letter to the reader who wants to think about that as well and wants to think outside the box into these larger-than-life possibilities.
It’s a love letter to Cuba, a country that reached out inexplicably, but very powerfully, to mother me, and to the Mother Saints of Cuba, who I proudly introduce my readers to, who have so much knowledge and wisdom to share with us about what it means to be human and what it means to live full, messy, beautiful, grieving, healing, and joyous lives all at once.
It feels like an embrace. You read your book, and it feels like an embrace. You’re not only embracing all the parts of you, but you’re embracing all the possibilities for people. I did not know anything about Cuba, but it feels like there’s so much love, and they have not had an easy life there either. There’s so much love that they’re transmitting to each other and to people to welcome you the way they did. There’s a story you talk about about this woman named Apolonia, who also looks for her deceased biological mother and instead finds what you called her spiritual mother. This connects with your search for your own mother. Can you talk to us about Apolonia?
Yes, I would love to. Our Lady of Charity is Cuba’s Patron Saint. I’ve already referred to her as an incarnation of Mother Mary. She is, to Cubans, what the Virgin of Guadalupe is in Mexico. She’s this larger-than-life, important patron saint of the island who has been credited with all kinds of miracles. One of those miracles, the beginning foundational stories, there’s a young girl named Apolonia who, in the early 1600s, was an enslaved woman living in El Cobre.
She loses her mother, and she’s so bereft and disoriented in her grief. She’s having that magical thinking that I talked about earlier, where she decides to climb this hill where her mother used to work, thinking that when she reaches the summit, she’ll find her mother. It’s magical thinking. Her mother is gone, but she fully expects to find her mother at the top.
In a way, it’s magical thinking, but it connects with what you did because, magically, you went to Cuba to find your mother.
She gets to the top, and her mother’s not there. She’s so upset. She falls to the ground, and she beats her fist against the earth and cries out for her mother. In that moment, our Lady of Charity appears to her and says, “I am your spiritual mother. Go down the hill and tell everyone in El Cobre that I’m here to protect you and show you the way. Also, the whole town, you’ll be blessed,” etc. Apolonia, instead, climbs back down that hill, crying still, but from joy. It was from the joy of having found her spiritual root.
This is a famous story in Cuba. When you read about our Lady of Charity and her stories, you’ll read about Apolonia, but you don’t always hear the version that I told. In a lot of the versions, the mother is still alive when Apolonia goes to climb the hill and finds the spiritual mother. This version of the story was told to me by a priest at her sanctuary.
When I first heard it, I wept. I said, “That’s me. I’m Apolonia. This is what I’ve done. I’ve come to Cuba looking for my mother, Mimi Huntman, whom I found. I found ways to connect with her that are beautiful and that I am so excited to be able to share with readers.” I also found the spiritual route. I found both, the spiritual mother and a way back to my biological mother.
Would you like to share with us any of the ways that you found that your mother is connecting with you, or that you found to connect with her? It would be very helpful for our audience.
Yeah. It’s interesting. In the book, My Mother in Havana, I go through all these different experiences and initiations in the Santeria and the pilgrimages. There’s a lot of big thinking and a lot that I share that’s wonderful. The condensed version of it, the if-you-were-only-going-to-do-one-thing kind of version, is giving yourself permission to talk with your lost beloved.
Not just in Cuba, but in many parts of the world, the ancestral altar is such a prominent feature of the home. At least in my upbringing in the Midwest and the US, it’s not common. The idea of setting aside a space in the home for everyday communion with the lost beloveds is so beautiful. In the Yoruba tradition, they used to bury the dead beneath the floorboards of the house. The understanding is they’re there, guiding and whispering to you, so you want them as close as possible so you can hear those voices.
We don’t do that anymore, but we can put out a picture. I’ve got a very elaborate ancestral altar. In my case, it’s not just my mother. It’s my mother, my father, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, my stepmother, and my husband’s parents. It’s all of our shared dead. I have pictures of everybody I’ve got a picture of. My mother is right there in the middle. She has this big, beautiful photo.
It’s this normalizing of things. My ancestral altar is right in my writing attic, where I write. Every morning when I come up to my attic, the first thing I see are their faces. It’s very active, saying, “Hello there. I see you. Thank you for bringing me into the world. Thank you for guiding and protecting me. Thank you.” It starts out with gratitude. Multiple times during the day, I can be like, “I see you.”
They hear you.
Sometimes, it’ll be more elaborate. Sometimes, I’ll make dinner, bring it up here, and we’ll eat together. I’ll eat, and then I’ll leave a plate for them to finish. A friend of mine told me something once. She also works with the West African spirits. She said, “If you have a problem that’s tough and bothers you, you can sleep before the ancestral altar and ask that, through your dreams, the answers be revealed.”
There are all these ways to normalize the communication and make it part of everyday life. My stepmother, after my father died, used to take his photograph in a frame and dance with him every day in the house because they danced when he was alive. She continued that tradition. That, for me, is the most healing thing. It is opening up that channel of communication.
It is knowing that they hear you and knowing that they can respond in their own way, but with different messages that you get. My passion is to tell people to heal because the more you heal and remove the blockages, the better you can hear them. You recommend writing as a healing tool for people. Tell our audience why, if they’re grieving or they’re struggling, that it can be helpful to them. How did you discover that?
The most healing thing is opening up that channel of communication. It's beautiful knowing they hear you and can respond in their way. Share on X
I’ve discovered it by being a writer who has also been grieving and healing for a number of decades. I separate my advice into two different pies. There’s one advice for a person who is at the beginning stages of grief. This is the advice I wish I could reach back in time and give my nineteen-year-old self, which is to write everything you remember about the person.
I’ve lost so much over time. I know my mother wore red lipstick, but I can’t tell you the name of it. I know she had a favorite perfume. I can’t remember the name of it. I know she told fabulous stories, but I can’t recount one of them. I wish I had cataloged everything, but it required of me a willingness to sit with the messiness of the grief, to cry as I was writing, and to write nonsense in the sense that it wouldn’t have been writing for anybody else. It wouldn’t be writing that’s meant to be art or to help somebody else heal because that’s not where I was at. I needed a place to grieve and to catalog. I wish I had those notes, and I don’t.
Sometimes, when people are first grieving, they want to write something that’ll help the world or be some form of art or something for others. I don’t think that’s the purpose at the beginning. You come to a point, and for me, it was 30 years after my mother died, and maybe it doesn’t have to be that long, where you’ve had enough distance that you can make art.
By art, I mean you can ask some interesting questions and important questions beyond, “I miss my mother.” In the beginning, it’s, “I miss my mother.” Later, it’s, “Why do I miss my mother? What is the mother? If I have all but lost the texture of her, what am I missing, and how can I find it?” Writing My Mother in Havana was a transformative experience for me. I spent ten years working on it. It allowed me ten years to sit with these messy, beautiful, big questions and find some answers to share with others.
That’s beautiful. Speaking of messy, beautiful, big questions, you also had family tragedy and dysfunction that you healed through this, correct? Did I get that correctly, that in addition to healing from the loss of your mother, there was some family tragedy and dysfunction that you also got to heal?
I’m not sure what you’re referring to, but I would say yes.
From your childhood, were there things that happened that also enabled you to heal those pieces that were also sticking out as not addressed?
Absolutely. Part of writing My Mother in Havana was healing myself and finding answers about my own grief. Part of it was wanting to give both my mother and me a do-over. By that, I mean she was a very larger-than-life woman who lived a very small life. She had to sacrifice a lot of those big, beautiful, magical parts of herself in order to be my father’s wife and our mother. I felt that for myself growing up. In the culture that I grew up in, I was taught to play small as a young woman growing up. There were lots of ors. It was like, “You can be this or you can be that, but don’t ask for too much.”
It’s black and white.
It was very toxic. It was like, “Boys won’t like you if you’re too much.”
I got the same messages.
Lots of women do. Even if they’re not spoken out loud, they’re there in the air, those messages that are so toxic. What’s beautiful about the experience I had in Cuba, the writing of this book, and the sharing that I do about our Lady of Charity, Oshun, and the messages I got about permission to live larger than life, that was this secondary healing that feels profound and very much in tandem with the healing over the grief. Thank you for that question.
In my own experiences, I’ve healed the grief from the accident of losing my husband. I call it transitioning, moving on, and all of that. There’ve been so many other pieces within myself that are also healing. I know that when people heal or begin to go through the process of healing their grief, it often brings up more and gives them an opportunity to look at that.
My passion is about healing, and your book is so much about healing your grief, learning from it, and moving on. If healing grief offers us the opportunity to keep the dead close, which a lot of cultures don’t know, but which is what you learned, how does it act as an invitation to create space and rituals in our lives that also help? You learned to create rituals in your life, which also keeps your mom close to you. Can you talk to us about that? For a lot of people, when a person dies, they think, “Move on.” How are you keeping your mom close through different rituals that you learned?
The main one is the most mundane of all that I’ve already spoken about. It is creating physical space for that person to occupy in the house through the ancestral altar or through an invitation to speak. Sometimes, I’ll be at a restaurant that reminds me of a restaurant I was at with my mom when I was in high school, and I’ll reach across the table as if to hold her hand.
That’s beautiful.
It’s those rituals, and it’s normalizing them. In Cuba, there are so many rituals, and they’re so involved. I talk about them in the book. They’re beautiful and extensive. They’re all meant to do that same thing, which is to remind ourselves that the dead are there, and they are guiding us and protecting us, and so is the whole spirit world.
A lot of people do not understand. They’re missing out on something so beautiful and so helpful in their lives. I agree with you. I’ve learned the same thing. What is the Rebe tip for finding joy in life? What have you learned is the point of life, and how has this brought you joy?
Ironically, the very thing that I spent my whole life running from is the thing that brings me joy. This hearkens back to what I was saying with my mother being the 1950s quintessential housewife and my own upbringing being like, “I got to be perfect. I have to live up to these standards.” My whole life, I ran away from the messy parts of life. I wanted to be perfect. I wanted everything I did to be perfect. I wanted my mother to be perfect, and that she would’ve lived forever and would never have had this messy thing happen of dying.
One of the things I talk about in the book is one of my greatest regrets. As my mother was dying, I did not look full-on at what was happening. I looked away, and so did the whole family. We pretended it wasn’t happening. That’s a real disservice because we’re all going to die. It’s inevitable. Everyone we know and everyone we love is going to die. There’s a beauty and a joy in leaning into that rather than looking away.
We're all going to die. It's inevitable. Everyone we know and everyone we love is going to die, and there's a beauty in that. Share on X
One of the greatest joys I’ve had is seeing people since my mother passed and I’ve been able to sit with them, be present, look them in the eyes, and say the thing I never asked my mother, which was, “Are you scared?” and then the admission on my own part, which is, “I’m scared.” That’s very real in that there’s a joy in confronting that part of each of us and humanity. We’re vulnerable. We’re raw. We’re scared. Life is messy. A lot of times, we don’t know where we’re going. How can we lean into that instead of pretending that everything is all right?
That’s beautiful. I want to add to that from my own experience. When you are not afraid anymore of transitioning because you know there’s more, you know you’re going to be with your mother again, and all of that, it makes you more aware of, “What is the legacy that I’m leaving on this planet before I’m the one to transition?” Instead of looking at it with such fear and being like, “I’m going to die,” for me, I look at it like, “I am going to lose this bodysuit, but I’m not dying. What am I doing with my life until I get there?”
My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle
I love that. In Cuba, it’s so baked into Santeria and these other Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions this idea that we know that we’re going to die and that we know that we’re going to become an ancestor, which is a privileged position.
It is not in fear. It’s a blessing.
It’s an elevated position because we are then going to be the ones to whisper in the ear of the generations to come. There’s an incredible sense of responsibility with that in Cuba, of the sense of needing to earn that position. It’s how we live our lives.
It’s the legacy.
It’s having at the forefront of the mind, “Am I training myself to be the kind of ancestor that I would want?”
The wise ancestor. If I’m saying things to someone, it’s coming from wisdom in a good place. Your remarkable journey taught you that our loved ones never leave us. They are alongside us, guiding and protecting us, and whispering in our ear like an inner voice. Your fascinating book, My Mother in Havana, invites everyone who longs to connect with their own lost loved ones to know themselves, not as solitary beings making their way alone in the world, but as a part of a web of ancestors who accompany us at every step of the way. Thank you from my heart for sharing your incredible journey with its many healing insights on the show. I am very grateful. Thank you. Many blessings.
Thank you so much for having me. Blessings to you and all of your readers. It’s such a privilege spending time with all of you.
Thank you so much. To be continued, as I like to say.
Guest Links
- Rebe Huntman
- My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle
- Connect with Rebe Huntman on Instagram
- Connect with Rebe Huntman on Facebook
About Rebe Huntman
Rebe Huntman is a memoirist, essayist, dancer, teacher, and poet who writes at the intersections of feminism, world religion and spirituality. For over a decade she directed Chicago’s award-winning Danza Viva Center for World Dance, Art & Music and its dance company, One World Dance Theater. Huntman collaborates with native artists in Cuba and South America, has been featured in Latina Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune, and has appeared on Fox and ABC. A Macondo fellow and recipient of an Ohio Individual Excellence award, Huntman has received support for her debut memoir, My Mother in Havana, from The Ohio State University, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, PLAYA Residency, Hambidge Center, and Brush Creek Foundation. She lives in Delaware, Ohio and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
