The Aquatics’ Revolution
A reclusive Cuban community relies upon water alone as a source of spiritual and medical healing.
SEPTEMBER 21, 2023
Cries of pain shake the house. A cloth curtain hangs from the wood ceiling, hiding the room the sounds come from. It sways occasionally, moved by the summer wind, or else by the shrieks that split the dawn. Behind the curtain, somewhere in that unhappy room, it sounds, from the high wailing that wrecks the idyll of this plain in the Viñales Valley’s Sierra del Infierno, like some wounded beast has come here to die.
Outside, ten people—Juanito and Victoria’s children and each of their spouses—sit on the living room’s two wooden rockers and two armchairs, the four stools around the dining table and the small loveseat. They gaze emptily at the walls, elbows on knees and faces in hands. Nobody talks. It’s quiet except the insufferable hum of the giant white-footed mosquitos swarming everywhere and the rhythmic croak of frogs celebrating the drizzle outside.
Each cry echoes on the damp wood. You can see the sounds slicing like knives into the family member’s starved faces, which could be masks until the next moan makes them draw their eyebrows down, harden their cheeks, and clench their jaws until their teeth touch. In the curtained room, 82-year-old Juanito lies on a bare mattress. His wife Victoria, 80, stands beside him, wet-eyed, running her hand silently over his torso. She and Juanito have been married for 54 years. A pair of metal bowls sit on the ground, one full of water and one half-empty. In each one, there’s a rag and a metal cup with no handle.
Juanito asks Victoria to help him sit. Slowly, hands intertwined, they get him upright. She sets the full bowl on his thighs. He dips his hands in and closes his eyes, slurring inaudible words that could be a prayer. Victoria shuts her own eyes and weeps. Juanito turns his hands into a vessel, scoops up water, and douses himself: his head, his back, nearly his whole body. He runs the wet rag over his side, where the pain from his intestinal hernia and kidney infection is worst, and then sinks to the mattress again.
Juanito starts sweating so hard he looks like a melting chunk of ice. Soon his expressions of pain and anguish return, disfiguring his face. His mouth twists; his eyes turn up and roll; his teeth dig into the thin, dry meat of his lips. Once again, the house shakes with his cries. His family is here, but none of them can get a doctor to calm his suffering. For more than 80 years, nothing has healed, saved, or guarded Juanito but water.
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Juanito was born in 1935 in the Cayos de San Felipe, an isolated community in Pinar del Río, a province of western Cuba’s Guaniguanico mountain range that became a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1999.
Juanito had been sick since birth. At two years old, he weighed only 13 pounds. His lungs barely worked. Anything his parents could scrape from their small farm, with its handful of working animals, went toward specialists and medications, none of which helped. Eventually, the doctors told his parents to stop wasting their resources. They said that Juanito’s lungs hadn’t developed correctly in utero, and he didn’t have long to live.
But change was on hand in the Cayos de San Felipe, according to the magazine Bohemia and the newspapers archived at the National Library of Cuba. They tell the story of Antoñica Izquierdo and the aquatics, which you can watch in the 1971 feature The Days of Water, directed by Manuel Octavio Gómez and produced by the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográfica. It shows the day Antoñica, a mother of seven, was overtaken with despair at her powerlessness to help her youngest son, age two, who was suffering from the sudden illnesses simply called “fevers” in those days. She and her husband couldn’t afford the journey from their rocky, rural home to a doctor who could treat their son. Antoñica left the boy on his bed of palm leaves, knelt at her altar, and begged God for help. Her husband held their child, who was trembling so badly that both of them shook.
Before long, the Cayos de San Felipe transformed from an impenetrable tangle of hills, brambles, and greedy red mud to a site of incessant pilgrimages.
Hours later, Antoñica returned. She said, “I spoke to the Virgin. She told me how to save our son.” Without hesitating, she peeled the boy’s clothes off, wrapped him in white rags, and carried him through the dark mountain night to a nearby creek. She plunged him in the water and bathed him, praying. On the walk home, his body cooled down. It was January 8th, 1936, and as far as Antoñica and her husband were concerned, a miracle had taken place: the fever was gone.
No records or scholars can say whether the boy’s fevers came back after his cold bath. Antoñica later claimed to have been blessed with a second divine apparition, after which she announced, “I am the Virgin Mary’s appointed protector of the wretched of the earth, designated to heal and cure them without self-interest, without asking a cent, without using medicine—only with water.”
Her visitations happened between 1936 and 1939. Before long, the Cayos de San Felipe transformed from an impenetrable tangle of hills, brambles, and greedy red mud to a site of incessant pilgrimages. People beat paths through the thickets and massed outside the home of Antoñica Izquierdo, the water healer.
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Only weeks before he took to bed in pain, Juanito was working the fields as usual. Now 82, he is long used to the bullying sun, and farms wearing a wide palm-leaf hat and a soldier’s olive drab shirt and pants. No shoes. Juanito is a gentle, laughing man, hard of hearing and blind in his left eye. A peasant whose body bears the scars of a lifetime of labor. His hair, once light, is dark brown. His formerly pale skin is lined and coppery. His palms and the soles of his feet are pure steel.
Despite his age and physical limitations, Juanito chooses to get up at dawn and join his children in their tobacco fields, or in the plots where they grow yucca, taro, beans, and corn. He gets home after 2 p.m. in the afternoon, his clothes soaked with sweat and feet caked with mud. Days before his agony begins, he stands on the threshold of his home after a morning of work and says, “I was on death’s door as a boy. According to the doctors, I had no hope, but Antoñica cured me — and look at me now, after 80 years.”
In 1937, Juanito’s parents, rather than drown in the powerlessness of waiting for their son to die, took him to Antoñica Izquierdo. So many people thronged around her palm-roofed house that they had to wait several days to see the mythic water healer. When they did, Juanito says, she looked hard at him and told his parents, “Don’t give this boy any more medicine. Bathe him in the spring for nine days.”
“Our belief is healthy,” Juanito says. “It’s rooted in our faith in water, but we understand that, in the end, a person who’s going to die will die, no matter how many doctors they have.”
Before visiting Antoñica, Juanito’s parents made a vow: if she healed their son, their family would never see a doctor again. After the baths, Juanito wasn’t just healed, but healthy. His father lived to 92; his mother, 93, after living more than 60 years with water as her only medicine. They were one of the first aquatic families.
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“Our belief is healthy,” Juanito says. “It’s rooted in our faith in water, but we understand that, in the end, a person who’s going to die will die, no matter how many doctors they have.”
Juanito’s story of transformation from sickness to health isn’t unique. For years, thousands of people visited the Cayos de San Felipe, saw Antoñica, and watched their health improve.
At her trial, Antoñica said, “I’d rather be called a murderer than let anyone say God isn’t a healer, or isn’t working miracles through me.”
And then, in April 1936, Antoñica was arrested, taken from her home in full view of a crowd of people bunched tightly together, waiting to be cured. It had been raining torrentially for days, and the pilgrims, who had nowhere to take shelter, slept outside. According to The Days of Water, the authorities jailed and tried Antoñica for killing a man found decomposing next to a creek. Pinning his death on her suited both Pinar del Río’s politicians and its doctors, who, newspapers reported at the time, objected not just to Antoñica’s practices but also to her existence.
At her trial, Antoñica said, “I’d rather be called a murderer than let anyone say God isn’t a healer, or isn’t working miracles through me.” By then, her fame was so great that a lawyer named Navarro, a major political player in Pinar del Río in the 1930s, grounded his campaign for Senate—which he won, beating the incumbent, Pedro Blanco, by a wide margin—on getting the healer out of prison. Navarro defended her, and she was ultimately found not guilty. His victory would cost Antoñica her life.
After she was released from prison, she returned home and continued healing the needy, including Juanito. But she remained a target of rancor from the Cuban establishment — so much so that she instructed her faithful to burn their identity documents, quit any political parties or social groups they belonged to, throw their medicines in the trash, and never again set foot or allow their children to set foot in a hospital, school, or job center. From then on, she was not only a water healer, but her adherents’ guide and spiritual protector.
Antoñica and her followers lived on land that belonged to the onetime senator Pedro Blanco, whose seat Navarro won after defending her at trial. Bitter at his defeat, Blanco took revenge by expelling the healer and her adherents from his property. A brutal conflict followed. Many aquatics died fighting the senator’s men. Others fled the Cayos de San Felipe. Antoñica was taken captive once again and sent to Mazorra, a Havana mental institution where she spent the rest of her life. According to psychiatrists there, she was gravely deluded and suffered from visions. They isolated her completely, perhaps as a taste of her own medicine. She died of anguish in 1945, in a room with wet, moldy walls and only one small, iron-barred window to admit sunlight. It was a dungeon, and it destroyed her.
Years passed, and in 1959, Fidel Castro and his bearded rebels took power. News of the revolution didn’t reach the aquatics for a long time, and didn’t matter to them when it did.
Meanwhile, those of Antoñica’s followers who escaped Blanco’s whip-bearing overseers and the humped cattle they released to wreak havoc among the aquatics carried their possessions through Cuba’s western mountain ranges, drifting like zombies until they reached an area even harder to penetrate than the Cayos de San Felipe: the Sierra del Infierno. In order to be sure their persecution had ended, or in order to settle calmly and comfortably, they dynamited one of the region’s mogotes, or freestanding hills. Once it was destroyed, they cleared a trail leading to a mountain so steep it could only be climbed on foot or by horse. On that mountain, the aquatics created a community that was isolated from the world, just as Antoñica wanted.
Years passed, and in 1959, Fidel Castro and his bearded rebels took power. News of the revolution didn’t reach the aquatics for a long time, and didn’t matter to them when it did. In their community, politicians and institutions were irrelevant. At the time, their biggest issue was transporting and burying their dead. Everyone was tired of carrying coffins down miles of mountain trails.
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After Castro declared Cuba a socialist nation in 1959, the aquatics’ part of the Sierra del Infierno and the U.S. military base at Guantánamo became the only pieces of the island that the revolution couldn’t touch. Today, 75 years after Antoñica Izquierdo’s death, aquatic families still cure themselves with water rather than going to doctors or hospitals; still refuse to engage with the Cuban state, carry ID, or join social groups; still don’t send their children to school, though most do let them learn to read and write. Only the passage of time threatens their faith. Aquatics — especially young ones — who travel to the lowlands and encounter the advances of modernity rarely return to their narrow rural lives.
After migrating from the Cayos de San Felipe to the Sierra del Infierno, the aquatic community grew to 27 families. Now there are two, broken into eight households. More aquatics live in the town of Viñales, maintaining their beliefs after abandoning life in the mountains. Others have gone even further, creating a new community in the rural section of the municipality of San Cristóbal, in the province of Artemisa. At one point, there were 1,000 aquatics in San Cristóbal, the biggest population on record. There, 70 families, or about 200 people, remain.
So much water runs though the Sierra del Infierno’s underground springs that there, instead of shrinking from sunlight, the mud defies and defeats it. Horses’ shoes get packed with mud and splash grenades of it as they walk. You can ascend the mountain on foot, but it would be a brutal trek. Some paths are rocky and wet enough that even horses have to tread carefully; others are swamps of red mud where horses rear and toss their heads as they go.
But off the trails, the Sierra isn’t infernal, but peaceful. All you can hear is wind and birds trilling as they flutter from branch to dewy green branch. Below is the Viñales Valley with its imposing stone mogotes. Halfway up the slope is a plateau, a resting spot. It’s the only straight section of the path, and the only one with hard ground. On either side of the trail are dozens of mango trees whose aroma curls playfully into your nose.
Black chickens pop from the bushes, pursued by tiny chicks whose feathers are a marbled mix of yellow and black. A working dog runs, tongue flapping, after a small crowd of pigs, herding them through a barn door. Someone has notched triangles into the dog’s ears to prevent mange. Milagro and Berto, an aquatic couple, live nearby. Milagro, 50, is a stout, light-skinned woman with short hair and an elusive manner. Anything that sounds like a question makes her frown and slip away, offering some excuse. She’s tense around anyone who isn’t from the mountain. Berto is small and brown-skinned, still athletic at 51. He wears glasses and a wide-brimmed hat, and, though he’s friendly, he barely talks. Getting a single sentence out of him is a struggle.
Milagro and Berto very rarely go down the mountain. Unless they have a sick relative to see or need a new part for their fridge, fan, or TV, they stay on their own property, where their only visitors are family members who come up from the lowlands, the hired hand who knocks on the door daily before starting his chores, and the tourists who hike the Sierra to look at the valley from above or catch a glimpse of the aquatics’ life.
“It helps when tourists come,” Milagro says, “but the land supports us. Most of our crops, we eat.”
In addition to cultivating yucca, corn, and taro, the couple juice three tanks’ worth of criollo mangoes every morning with their hired hand, skinning hundreds of fruits with small, sharp knives before cutting them into chunks that cover their fingers with thick, sticky threads of juice. They crush the peeled mangoes between wooden rollers and heat the resulting juice over a low flame for forty minutes so it doesn’t ferment. You can buy it, or their homemade lemonade, for $1 per bottle.
Milagro and Berto live in a stone house with one solar panel. Building it took them 27 years. They hauled building materials up the mountain with oxen while living in a palm-roof shack that still stands next to the house.
“You wouldn’t guess,” Berto says, “but that house is better for storms than the stone one. It’s gotten us through tornadoes.”
In 2008, five families still lived on the mountain. But then Hurricanes Gustav and Ike hit Pinar del Río, destroying the Sierra del Infierno. It was deforested, devastated. “We all lost our roofs and our crops,” Berto explains, “and so three families went down the mountain.”
All three of the families who moved after the hurricanes left them homeless have maintained their faith, like the aquatics who descended earlier. Milagros notes, “It was the difficulty of life on the mountain that drove them away, but they brought the water with them. They ran a pipe from the spring to their houses in town.”
Milagro says that many non-aquatics climb the mountain to drink spring water, “to get cured.” She says that she and Berto have no documents identifying them as Cuban citizens, but that if a cop asks them for ID on one of their rare visits to the lowlands, they only have to say they’re aquatics to be let go. She says, “Not once in my life have I taken medicine. If I get sick or have pain, I soak rags in water and put them where it hurts.”
Berto puts in, “A person’s faith goes a long way. My cousin broke his foot recently, and I splinted it with water. He’s already walking. What has no cure has no cure.”
Aquatics treat everything this way: with water, and by themselves. Birth is no exception, though the Cuban Ministry of Health launched an initiative in the 1980s to identify pregnant women and monitor their pregnancies. Once labor starts, women — even those who would prefer not to — must go to maternity hospitals. Or as Milagro puts it disdainfully, lowering her gaze, “When they hear someone’s having a baby, the cops and doctors come and drag her to a hospital in town.”
Milagro has two children. Her daughter, 28, was born in a maternity hospital after provincial authorities, tipped off by the police, dragged Milagro down the mountain in front of a shocked, weeping Berto.
“I didn’t want to go,” she says. “And my daughter has never been healthy since she was born in that hospital.”
Her son, who’s 21, was born at home. While pregnant, Milagro hid her belly and dodged the nurses who came up the mountain; once she could no longer pretend she wasn’t having a baby, she began hiding in the woods. “I’d wake up and go alone into the trees until it got dark and I could come home," she explains. She escaped the health workers, had her baby at home, and gave him his first bath in the spring.
“I tried to teach them our faith, but it wasn’t an obligation,” Berto says, curtly and resentfully. Neither of their children lives on the mountain or is an aquatic.
“It was their decision to go,” Milagro agrees. “It’s why there are so few of us now.”
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“People trade their religion for the bright lights of the world, but Antoñica knew they would. She said it would happen the same way it did before the Flood: the faithful would decrease in number,” says Izquierdo’s great-nephew Bernardo, leaning on a windowsill in his uncle’s house. Bernardo is 49, but looks like a healthy old man. His features—hooked nose, taut lips revealing sharp piranha teeth—are intimidating, as is his direct gaze. His eyes are large and oval, and both his hair and his eyebrows are halfway white.
He belongs to the Rodríguez family, the other aquatic clan remaining in the Sierra del Infierno, even higher up than Milagro and Berto. Bernardo, who lives in San Cristóbal, is visiting. He limped up the mountain: less than two months ago, while repairing his toilet, he tripped, fell, and sliced the tendons in his left foot. His scar is fresh and badly tended, with dead skin still clinging to it. Volcanoes of pus suppurate from the wound. Bernardo says he’s treated it with water, water, and more water—and that look, it’s started to heal.
“God created nature, and that’s what we trust,” he says. “We don’t carry state ID because Antoñica told us the Earth would have only two parties: that of God and that of man.”
In the Rodríguezes’ house, the only appliances are a radio and a refrigerator, which are all they can have. On the side of the house is a solar panel, given to them by the state, that supplies just enough power to run their two machines and light the house at night.
All the Rodríguezes were born on the mountain, without doctors, and all of them remain aquatics. Bernardo’s uncle Antonio, 62, still has a pair of black-and-white photos showing Antoñica sitting among her seven kids. Bernardo came up the mountain to see Antonio, who’d been bedridden with kidney pain for days.
“I prayed and put wet rags over my kidneys,” he says proudly, “and a couple days later, I went to the bathroom and passed a stone. After that, the pain was gone.”
In the field outside his uncle’s house, Bernardo points out a decapitated boa more than a yard long. He cut its head off with his machete. “We’ve had much bigger,” he says, “but we don’t need to fear them. A person can do anything with faith.”
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Atop the Sierra del Infierno is a unique viewpoint: a palm-roofed shack where a pair of aquatic cousins sell cold water, soda, and local beers that hikers can drink while appreciating a stunning view of the valley. Neither cousin lives on the mountain, but Juan Carlos, 27, says, “Religion is in the heart. Where you live isn’t important. It’s not like you have to sign some contract.”
Juan Carlos hardly looks like an aquatic. He has waist-long blond hair and does not farm, or dress like a farmer. At a glance, he appears to have all his teeth, which no other aquatics do. He’s a mountain guide. Five years ago, he had a romance with a Portuguese tourist he met while leading an expedition. Eventually he married her, and he’s emigrating from Cuba soon.
Neither Juan Carlos nor his cousin Félix, 43, went to school. Both are semi-literate. Félix says, not bitterly, “I’ve never minded. In life, you learn as you go.” But he adds, “It does keep young people from continuing our tradition. My daughter’s boyfriend isn’t an aquatic, and I bet someday she’s going to go to the doctor or do something else that isn’t in our faith.”
After the revolution, the government started trying hard to break the aquatics’ isolation, even building a school in the Sierra. For decades, aquatic parents refused to send their children there.
Félix’s daughter is a teenager. She learned to read and write from Marcelino Collara Martínez, a 51-year-old teacher who the Ministry of Education dispatched to the mountain. Twice a week, he leaves his house at dawn and bikes six rocky miles from the town of Viñales to the base of the sierra before climbing the mountain on foot to teach three aquatic children — one third-grader and two eighth-graders — in a roughly built classroom.
“I can teach them math and Spanish. No science; nothing to do with the human body or sexuality; and no history, since that would involve teaching evolution,” Collara says. “I got the course plan approved by the government. It beats not teaching them at all.”
Marcelino has been traveling to the mountain for 17 years. He’s tall and lean, like a marathoner who trains at altitude before descending to big cities to win races. His limbs are long and sunburned, his mustache thick. “None of the kids are smart or curious,” he says. “And none of their families care about anything but reading and writing. After ninth grade, I lose them.”
After the revolution, the government started trying hard to break the aquatics’ isolation, even building a school in the Sierra. For decades, aquatic parents refused to send their children there. In the mid-’80s, some allowed their kids to learn to read, but the teacher on hand created trouble. “He fell in love with a married aquatic and took her to live in town with him,” Marcelino says. “After that, the community rejected all the teachers who showed up until me.”
Marcelino earns 671 pesos, or $30, a month. When he isn’t biking to the mountain or teaching atop it, he gathers cans, plastics, bottles, cartons, and other recyclables to sell by the kilo. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to support his family.
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Pedro Luis is a Viñales resident who, without meaning to, has lived alongside aquatics his whole life, though he’s not one. At 70, he’s an endless fountain of stories about the aquatics he’s known in his neighborhood and at the agricultural co-ops and forestry service where he’s worked.
Sitting in his little living room, he recalls a man who he supervised at one co-op who passed out while plowing. “It was his appendix. We had to rush him out of the field to the hospital, where he had surgery right away. We only remembered he was an aquatic afterward. He could never go home after that. He moved to another town.”
In the ’90s, when Pedro Luis worked in forestry, his boss was an aquatic. “He can barely walk now. Somebody hit his leg with an ax by mistake, and he tried to cure it with water. It never healed, and now everybody knows him as Antonio with the limp.”
One of Pedro Luis’s neighbors married an aquatic and went to live on the mountain. “She got burned all over her body somehow, and instead of taking her to the ER, they left her in bed and put water on her. Within days, maggots ate her while they watched.”
But none of Pedro Luis’s surreal stories revolts him as much as the aquatic treatment for tooth pain. “First, they get a branch and break it in half. Next they turn it over so it leaks thick gunk, like drool, and they put the gunk on the tooth that hurts. Eventually it breaks into pieces, they spit them out—and no more pain!”
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Silence falls over the Sierra: Juanito is no longer howling. Victoria leaves the room, eyes on the ground. She looks sorrowful. She’s been up for hours. She takes the metal bowls, both empty, to the patio, letting weak light in through the door. A breeze moves through the house. It’s morning.
In the living room, Juanito and Victoria’s children and in-laws are asleep, contorted into strange positions. One wakes when his mother passes through the curtain, and she tells him, “He’s sleeping. His bleeding stopped.”
Juan, her son who woke up, is 33, and has the warmest relationship with his parents of the five. “I was born after my dead brother,” he says. “We were twins. It was a complicated birth, since it happened at home, without help.”
He and his siblings regret their childhood and feel that the aquatic tradition imposed an animal’s life on their mom. “None of us went to school,” Juan says sadly. “None of us can do much but farm. Our dad taught us that. We’re teaching our children to live differently.”
Outside, Victoria runs water into the bowls, but she won’t be able to carry them back inside. After 47 years without medical attention, she can hardly bend over. Her spine is wrecked, and she has chronic cardiopathy, hypertension, fibroids, and thyroid problems.
“When I lived on the mountain,” she says, “I worked as a seamstress and had to carry what I sewed up and down. I’d haul 110 pounds of cloth on my back, and that ruined my health. My hemoglobin got down to 7, and I decided to leave the mountain and stop being an aquatic.”
Victoria got badly ill 12 years ago and chose to seek help. Her kids thought her marriage would be done. All of them visited her during the two weeks she was hospitalized, but not Juanito. When she was released, he was waiting at the foot of the Sierra del Infierno to embrace her. Days later, they moved to the lowlands.
“Still,” she says, “I was terrified at first. I hid my pills from Juanito and took them when he wasn’t around.”
A rooster crows. The sun rises over a hill. Water clatters from the tap into the metal bowls. Victoria takes an old pot from the wet ground, pours corn into it, and walks through the patio, tossing food to her hungry chickens. She sits on a tree stump to watch them eat. Inside, Juanito screams once more, frightening the fowl, who scatter, terrified, through the yard.
PHOTO: Yaroslav Shuraev, via Pexels