94 STEPHEN WILKINSON

 Los fifiigos forman una asociaci6n tenebrosa de robo y pillaje, para entrar
 en la cual, tiene el ne6fito que [...] beber sangre de gallo [...] y depu6s
 como ultima prueba de valor, le entregan un pufial para que salga a la calle
 a probar el hierro, lo cual hace dando una pufialada al transeunte que mejor
 le parece [...] (1970:21)

 Such ideas, according to Cabrera, were denounced as 'pura invenci6n' by
the old devotees of the cult with whom she talked. Her informants wished to
divulge their secrets to her as a corrective:

 Este error, calumnia la mas humillante para el fi'fiigo lo es para toda la
 gente de color-, decidi6 a un anciano, a SaibekM, y otros iniciados, a romper
 su silenio y aclararnos su Misterio con verdadero interns, aunque se sabe
 en qu6 consiste el gran secret de Abakua. (1970: 11)

 When, in 1904 a twenty-month old white baby was kidnapped and later
found murdered, this racist myth took a macabre turn. As Aline Helg has
documented, the so-called Zoila case became a public scandal in which the
AbakuA were blamed for the murder (1995: 109-113). According to HeIg, the
hysteria resulted in the authorities appointing a white judge to investigate the
killing. A series of white witnesses testified to the guilt of a brujo, African born
former slave Lucumi Domingo Boucourt, and a Cuban born black, Juana
Tabares. They were garrotted for the murder in 1906. The case had followed
the murder of Celia, a young girl in Havana, apparently at the hand of a black
assailant. The twin cases thus confirmed the racial stereotyping. Such was
the pervasive power of these rumours that even before the Revolution in 1959,
nannies were still warning their rich charges that if they were not good the
idifigos would take them away (Sosa 1982:12). HeIg adds that this journalistic
mythologising was given academic support by the ethnologist Fernando Ortiz,
whose early racial theories of crime are discussed below (1995:112).
 Thus when La hija del policia was made, there was already a climate of
suspicion and fear of the Abakua cult prevalent in white Cuban society, and
the film itself was both a cause and effect of this. In this respect, in common
with much detective fiction of the time, and the Sherlock Holmes stories in
particular, the film shares a fascination with the racial, exotic and possibly
supernatural as the source of evil. In such stories as Conan Doyle's The Speck-
led Band, The Sign of Four or Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone it is the Orient
from which all manner of evil is perceived to stem.4 Edward Said in Orientalism


4 In The Speckled Band the murder is effected by the use of a trained snake that the
murderer has recently brought back from his travels in India. Holmes describes it
as 'a swamp adder -the deadliest snake in India.' A red herring is provided in the
story by a camp of gypsies outside the house who seem to be the most obvious