CubaPLUS Magazine

Aché for these times!

By: CubaPLUS
Feb 03, 2021
Aché for these times!

Much aché is needed in the difficult times of the Covid-19 pandemic that the planet is experiencing, although it is not a vaccine, but a term of Yoruba origin whose meanings include luck and energy necessary for things to get done as it should be.

The word Lucumí is widely used in religious ceremonies of Santeria or Regla de Ocha, but it is also widely used by a large part of the Cuban population, regardless of their beliefs and socio-cultural level.

That someone has aché, it is said of somebody who is lucky, also of a person who has personality, for example, and aché! you exclaim when you want to wish someone luck.

In the religious tradition of Afro-Cuban origin, it has several meanings, among them grace, luck, power, strength, energy, everything good, gift granted..., according to specialists’ description.

All human beings have their aché that has been given them by Olofi, the supreme God of the Yorubas. It can increase or decrease, it is spent and is even lost due to carelessness or bad actions against others, against the gods or against himself, points out the writer Inés María Martiatu, a student of these issues.

However, she comments, the parts of animals that are offered in ritual meals dedicated to the orishas, ​​deities of the Yoruba pantheon, are also called aché, and that kind of positive energy is transmitted from person to person in certain religious ceremonies. 

In the practices of Candombé of Yoruba origin cultivated in Brazil, the word aché is used with a similar meaning as in Cuba.

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