Guayaba, and Guayabo are words for the same thing. That is, the delicious favored fruit of the Caribbean, the Guava. Guava contains a higher level of Vitamin C than that of the orange and is packed with Iron, Calcium, Vitamin A, and Potassium. The Guava is also said to improve blood sugar levels, improve digestion, and even reverse aging.
In Cuba, the leaves of the Guava are sometimes used to wrap the meat before it is smoked in a BBQ, thus producing a savory flavor.
But why are there so many words for the same fruit? The origin of the word Guava begins with the Arawak, the indigenous people of the Caribbean from whom the Taino descend. The original Arawak word for the Guava is “Guayabo” which was later changed to “Guayaba” by the Spaniards.
As early as 1493, a Spanish Friar named Ramón Pané began writing about the Taino while living on the island of Hispaniola, the second largest island in the West Indies. The island of Hispaniola is currently divided politically into the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
The original text of the Ramón Pané book, “An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians” has been lost but was reconstructed in 1974 by Yale scholar and Cuban professor, José Juan Arrom. This work was later translated into English by Susan Griswold in 1999. This reconstruction of Pané's text is the primary source used by modern scholars of Taino religion today.
It is from the work of Pané that we learn of the Taino’s love for the guava fruit.
An excellent paper by Maria Poviones-Bishop, which concerns the Taino’s mythological beliefs, and from which much of our post information is sourced, can be found here:
The Taino believed that after death, the spirit of the dead went to the afterworld which was known as Coaybay. The God of the Underworld in Coaybay was named Maquetaurie Guayaba. Here we see the word Guayabo/Guayaba associated as the name of the Taino Lord of the Dead.
The Taino ancestors believed that the spirit of the deceased was called an op’a. The op’a, who were nocturnal were thought to come out at night to eat guayaba/guava fruit and also accompany the living. The nocturnal consumption of guayaba is primarily associated with tropical bats, who spend their days hidden away in caves. So, the Taino may have believed that the form that the op’a took during the day was that of a sleeping bat. The bat is a mammal that is able to fly and this is consistent with the Taino idea of the op’a not being bound to the earth in the same way that a human is.
Because the op’a were shapeshifters they were also able to take the form of the guayaba/guava fruit itself. When the op’a were in human form, the only way to distinguish them from a living person would be to examine them for a navel. The dead did not have a navel and thus, no physical link to a mother on earth.
It appears that the Taino may have had a strong belief in regeneration of life or in reincarnation. The spirits of the dead were simultaneously associated with the guava-eating tropical bats that spent their days inside caves and with the ability to transform into fruit. Rather than death being a punishment or a reward, it was a natural transition from one existence to another. And a happy one, as with the setting sun the op’a were able to leave their caves to be among the living again.
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