The ile system as practiced in Cuba descends from Yoruba religious structures carried across the Atlantic by enslaved people, overwhelmingly in the nineteenth century, and its survival owed a great deal to an institution the colonial and church authorities themselves permitted: the cabildo de nacion, a mutual aid association that Spanish colonial law allowed enslaved and free Black residents to organise along the lines of their African ethnic origin, ostensibly for burial funds and social support but functioning in practice as cover under which Yoruba, called Lucumi in Cuba, religious knowledge and initiation could continue.
Because open African worship was not tolerated, Lucumi practitioners paired their orisha with Catholic saints whose feast days, colours or attributes seemed to match, a correspondence that let devotion continue under a Catholic surface even as the underlying religious family, the ile, kept its own internal structure of godparents, initiates and seated orishas intact. The ile that exist today, each built around a godparent who initiated its members and traces a line of initiation back through earlier godparents, are the direct institutional descendants of exactly this arrangement, a religious lineage that had to be organised as a household rather than a public congregation for most of its history because no other form was permitted.