Regla, across the harbour from Havana, is the clearest place to see two things that get flattened in most accounts of Afro-Cuban religion.
The first is that the pairing is not a confusion. The church at Regla holds a small black Virgin, Our Lady of Regla, patroness of the bay and of sailors. In Regla de Ocha she is Yemaya, orisha of the sea and of motherhood, whose colours are blue and white. On 7 September the image is carried in procession through streets crowded with Catholics and initiates together, many wearing blue and white, and the same person will frequently light a candle in the church and make an offering at the water.
The nineteenth-century origin of that pairing was coercion, Catholic observance was compulsory and African worship punishable, so orisha were attached to saints whose imagery or feast could carry them. But it has been two centuries, and treating the Catholic layer as pure disguise misdescribes what people do now. Some houses have deliberately stripped it out in a re-Africanising move aligned with Nigerian practice; others hold that the saints are genuinely part of the religion. That disagreement is live and internal, and neither side is the authentic one.
The second is that Abakua is a different institution. Regla and neighbouring Guanabacoa are strongholds of the Abakua, a male initiatory society descended from the leopard societies (Ekpe/Ngbe) of the Cross River region of what is now Nigeria and Cameroon. It has its own membership, its own initiations, its own secrets, its own ritual language and its own lodges, juegos, and it is not Santeria, not a branch of it, and not a variant of it. Outsiders conflate the two constantly. Its material is restricted to initiates and is not set out here.
The enabling institution was the cabildo. The cabildos de nacion were mutual-aid and festival societies organised by African nation and tolerated by the colonial authorities. They provided a legal shell within which drums, liturgical language, initiation and priesthood could be maintained rather than merely remembered, and they are the principal reason Lucumi religion in Cuba was reconstituted with as much structure as it retains.
The present tension is commercial. The republic policed the religion as witchcraft; the revolutionary state after 1959 was hostile to religion generally, easing from the early 1990s. It is now practised openly and has become part of what Cuba shows visitors. Practitioners have been vocal about the cost: ceremonies staged on demand for tourists, initiations sold to foreigners at prices no Cuban would pay, and priests whose standing rests on a foreign clientele rather than on a house and a lineage. That objection is the reason this site is recorded as inappropriate for commercial placement.