Drums, Rum and Sweets Hasten the Spirits

Virtud, a Santeria priest, known as a santero, dances with a believer at a "toque de santos," a ceremony in which the faithful attempt to communicate with the spirit world. (Manuel Roig-Franzia -- The Washington Post)

REGLA, Cuba Drumbeats clapped off the facades of crumbling homes, persistently, seductively, calling to the faithful.

A woman dressed all in lacy white, stooped but graceful, stepped gingerly down the pitted street. Children stopped their street-ball games and backed away to clear a path. A little girl pointed and whispered. "Santera," she said, intoning the name for a priestess in the Santeria religion.

It was 3:30 p.m. in Regla, a city at the marrow center of Cuba's Afro-Cuban religious traditions, and it was time to summon the spirits.

The beat quickened. Hands slapping stretched goatskin.

Ten minutes later, after a man reverentially kissed the santera's forehead, the rhythm pulled her up a set of concrete stairs. She picked through the crowd in a cramped, six-foot-wide room turned steamy by the crush and heat of dancers. Three men pounded at drums pinched between their knees.

They had gathered for a "toque de santos" -- an elemental rite of Santeria that means "touching of the saints" and is seldom witnessed by non-practitioners. But this was no routine toque. This was something special. This was also the holy man's birthday party.

The holy man, a santero, or Santeria priest, walked into the throng of swaying dancers just before 4 p.m. He was dressed casually, in a white undershirt and tear-away athletic pants, and he was leaning heavily on a cane.

The santero, whom everyone calls "Virtud," the Spanish word for virtue, slashed a small, oval bamboo fan through the air. "Ooooh, yay," he called out. "Ooooh, yay," the crowd called back.

By 5 p.m., sweat drained in little rivers down the back of a squat man who had commandeered the center of the room with his lurching, plunging dance steps. He thrust his right arm into the air, collapsed to his knees, spun along the floor with his left hand as a pivot point, and did it all over again.

A thickly muscled man who had been leading the chant accompanying the drums loomed above the spinning dancer.

"Come on," he yelled, in the lyric Yoruba dialect.

"Come out," he said, beseeching a saint to enter the man's body. "I mean it. Nooooowwww."