In the last couple of weeks on many forums on Facebook there has been a lot of controversy about the practitioners of Palo Mayombe in regards to race, class, ethnic authenticity. Who are the rightful practitioners of Palo Mayombe and who are these unforseen practitioners to supposedly destroy a spiritual consciousness. What is the terrible truth to me as I am informed of all of this nonsense it is from a place of racial bias and inequality that harbors racism. See Palo Mayombe would have never existed if it were not for the plight of three classes of people who came to make Palo what it is today. We will start off with the not so obvious plight of the native people’s who were here and enslaved to work for gold and all other types of commodities to bring to Portugal,Spain, England Etc. Lets put the Old World of Europe and the Middle East. 
THE FIRST PEOPLE TO INHABIT THE LAND THAT WAS NEVER NEW. IT WAS ALREADY OCCUPIED BY THE PEOPLE. WHO WERE TAINO. PEACEFUL FISHERMAN AND PEOPLE OF SCIENCE AND MEDICINE. WHO THE SPANIARDS ALONG WITH EVERY OTHER EUROPEAN AND ARABIC NATION LAID CLAIM TO LANDS OF MANY DIFFERENT OWNERS. ENSLAVING, TORTURING AND DEHUMANIZING THEM INTO EXTINCTION AND DEATH.
Taken from Tainogallery.com (all rights reserved)
“Columbus did not discover a lost or unknown land. There was a flourishing civilization of native Americans. The primary group was the Arawak/Taino Indians. Arawak is the general group to which they belong, and describes especially the common language which this group of native Americans shared. They ranged from Venezuela through the Caribbean and Central America all the way to Florida. However, the particular group of Arawak-speaking people who lived on the island of Hispaniola were the Taino Indians.
The Taino civilization indigenous to the Greater Antilles-Caribbean Sea (Hispaniola) flourished in the islands including Cuba, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Jamaica and Puerto Rico before and during the time when Christopher Columbus landed on the beaches of the New World in 1492.
Through archeological excavation much has been learned about the Taino as well as documentation from Fray Ramón Pané. Fray Pané was appointed by Columbus to record the Taino customs. Living amongst the Tainos, Fray Pané learning their language, religion and worship of the zemi gods as well as Taino music, and culture.
Some Pre-Columbian historians consider the Tainos as Arawaks because they spoke Arawakan and had originally traveled to the Caribbean from the Amazon Basin in the North Eastern part of South America during the 6th century.
The Taino society was basically a gentle culture – in fact the word “Taino” means Good and Noble. Their society was characterized by happiness, friendliness and a paternal, highly organized hierarchy.”
Yet you never hear of the contributions that they have made to this religion and the corpus of understanding that has come along with it. Now we will speak of Angola, Bantu and all the tribes that were effected in the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. Taken from the National Geographic Human Geography.(all rights reserved)
“The Bantu Migration was a massive migration of people across Africa about 2,000 years ago. The Bantu Migration is the most important human migration to have occurred since the first human ancestors left Africa more than a million years ago. Lasting for 1,500 years, the Bantu Migration involved the movement of people whose language belonged to the Kongo-Niger language group. The common Kongo-Niger word for human being is bantu.
The Bantu Migration was a southeastern movement. Historians do not agree on why Bantu-speaking people moved away from their homes in West Africa’s Niger Delta Basin. They first moved southeast, through the rain forests of Central Africa. Eventually, they migrated to the savannas of the southeastern and southwestern parts of the continent, including what is today Angola and Zambia.
The Bantu Migration had an enormous impact on Africa’s economic, cultural, and political practices. Bantu migrants introduced many new skills into the communities they interacted with, including sophisticated farming and industry. These skills included growing crops and forging tools and weapons from metal.
These skills allowed Africans to cultivate new areas of land that had a wide variety of physical and climatic features. Many hunter-gatherer communities were assimilated, or adopted, into the more technologically advanced Bantu culture. In turn, Bantu people adopted skills from the communities they encountered, including animal husbandry, or raising animals for food.
This exchange of skills and ideas greatly advanced Africa’s cultural landscape, especially in the eastern, central, and southern regions of the continent. Today, most of the population living in these regions is descended from Bantu migrants or from mixed Bantu-indigenous origins.
The third massive human migration in Africa was the African slave trade. Between the 15th and 19th centuries, more than 15 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic Ocean to be sold as slaves in North and South America. Millions of slaves were also transported within the continent, usually from Central Africa and Madagascar to North Africa and the European colony of South Africa.” …..
As I am getting to my point I want you to understand that this is the only way to educate foolish people and this oblivious form of racism that is inherently wrong in the 21st century. We will talk about the contractual agreement of European Indentured Servants. 
Taken from Wikipedia…..
Indentured servitude was a form of debt bondage, established in the early years of the American colonies and elsewhere. It was sometimes used as a way for poor youth in Britain and the German states to get passage to the American colonies. They would work for a fixed number of years, then be free to work on their own. The employer purchased the indenture from the sea captain who brought the youths over; he did so because he needed labour. Some worked as farmers or helpers for farm wives, some were apprenticed to craftsmen. Both sides were legally obligated to meet the terms, which were enforced by local American courts. Runaways were sought out and returned. About half of the white immigrants to the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries were indentured.
However, indentured servants were exploited as cheap labour and could be severely maltreated. For example, the seventeenth-century French buccaneer Alexander Exquemelin reported malnourished and deadly beatings by the servants’ masters and generally harsher treatment and labour than that of their slaves on the island of Hispaniola.[1] The reason being that working the servants excessively spared the masters’ slaves, which were held as perpetual property as opposed to the temporary services of servants……
Any Questions?
Why would I put this breakdown of History in the Americas? Simple this established all the practices of ritual Africa, Native worship and Colonialism to influence what we now know as Palo. So can we lay claim to a religion that was formed from the same blood sweat and tears of my people just like we are united in practice so should we be united in respect. I am a palero from the United States and many of us here have never gone to Cuba. Does that make us less of a practitioner of faith because I am not Cuban? So I say to the small supposed elitist group why initiate other cultures and other ethnic people of color. If you claim that we are outsiders looking in? What would happen if every palero here who was not of Cuban descent stopped going to you? It was nice to benefit from getting paid for ritual work and ceremony but we are not allowed to practice because the exclusivity of Afro Cubans? I think that Palo has been branched around the world because it needed life and new faces. We are the new faces of Palo. We practice an afro cuban religion with respect and honor and will defend our right of practice. Stop making this religion into a separatist movement because you will earn a lot of enemies. We are in a new world practicing and bringing forth a new breath of air to a once dying ideology. Support us and stop trying to be against because Palo Mayombe now is for the world and no longer belongs to one group.
Tata Musitu.
Mano con Mano nunca ndiaka, dia que ndiaka mundo acaba.