During the transatlantic slave trade, thousands of Cross River Africans, primarily Ejagham, Efik and Igbo speakers already initiated into Ekpe lodges in their home region, were forcibly transported to colonial Cuba. In nineteenth century Havana and Matanzas, these captives and their descendants reestablished the institution covertly as Abakua, a mutual aid and initiatory society that preserved core elements of Ekpe practice, including its graded titles, its masked leopard spirit performance and elements of the Nsibidi script, adapted to an urban, enslaved and later free Afro-Cuban context very different from the Cross River city states that produced the original tradition.
Ivor Miller's research, conducted with the cooperation of Ekpe titleholders in Nigeria and Abakua initiates in Cuba, and informed by his own initiation into Ekpe, traced the specific lodges, titles and ritual vocabulary that link documented nineteenth century Abakua foundations in Cuba back to named Cross River communities of origin, a degree of continuity unusually precise for an institution transmitted through the slave trade.
Abakua became deeply woven into the social and cultural life of Havana and Matanzas, influencing Cuban popular music, particularly rumba, and surviving decades of official suspicion and periodic repression by colonial and later Cuban authorities who, as in the Cross River homeland, treated an autonomous male initiatory society as a potential threat to public order. Abakua remains active in Cuba today, and its relationship to Ekpe is documented closely enough that titleholders on both sides of the Atlantic treat the connection as living, exchanging visits and formally recognizing each other's initiations.