The Cross River region of what is now south-eastern Nigeria and western Cameroon holds a set of male title societies, known among the Efik as Ekpe and by related names among the Ejagham, Efut and their neighbours, which governed trade, settled disputes, enforced debts and held authority independent of any chief. Men bought their way upward through ranked titles, and the society's authority rested on that structure rather than on lineage.
Efik and neighbouring people taken to Cuba in the slave trade of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries arrived in Havana and its port districts in numbers, and were permitted to organise in cabildos de nacion, mutual aid associations grouped by African origin, which the colonial authorities tolerated as a means of control. Within that framework the Cross River society was reconstituted. The tradition dates its first lodge to 1836 at Regla, across the harbour from Havana, and further potencias, also called juegos, were founded from it by a process of authorised descent that the society keeps track of.
Membership was initially confined to men of Cross River origin, then extended to Africans of other origins and to Cuban-born black men. A juego of white Cubans was initiated in 1863, and that step is treated in the society's own history as a decisive one.