This dissertation is about what happened when Afro-Cuban religions were brought to South Florida in the wake of the Cuban Revolution and the implementation of LBJ’s “Great Society” initiatives. It charts how in the process of Cuban racialization into the amorphous “Hispanic” category (new at the time), power brokers in the community sought to regain their “white” status but were faced with the challenge of Afro-Cuban religion, a threat to regaining whiteness. As more Cubans immigrated to the area, media coverage of Afro-Cuban religions grew more and more hostile, frightening Cubans in the area. In order to address this complication some managed to reframe Lucumí, arguably the most visible Afro-Cuban religion, through the cultural competency paradigm initiated in the University of Miami, Department of Psychiatry. Afro-Cuban religions were described as a mental health network which helped immigrants manage the stress it took to adjust to life in the United States. For a biomedical audience, it is easy to read this as a temporary issue that would resolve itself. Yet Afro-Cuban religions in general, and Lucumí in particular, are thriving in the area decades later. This success is, in part, because of the religion’s historic habitus of being both “seen and unseen” by the Catholic church and colonial authorities in Cuba, a habitus that transfers to biomedical institutions in the US. In the process of reframing Lucumí as a mental health care system practiced by Cubans, and depicting Cubans as white, despite the ethnic diversity of the island, imagery around Lucumí identity shifted: what was considered a “black-African” religion in Cuba, became a “white-Cuban” religion in South Florida. By charting how the effort to make Afro-Cuban religions visible and seen by biomedicine participated in reframing Lucumí identity in the wider social context, while examining how in quotidian experience the micropractices of the religion kept it in a comfortable invisible and unseen space within biomedical institutions, I explore religion as negotiated process.