Medicinal plants in ethnobotanical and religious traditions in Cuba: a first review and updating.

The knowledge about medicinal plants coming from the traditional ethnobotanical culture is receiving a lot of scientific interest in these years, due to the low cost and the easier availability of herbs with respect to the common pharmaceutical products.In Cuba the use of herbs is very extended, because of the hard living conditions before the Revolution that forced the community to use internal resources, and because of the lack of drugs caused by the embargo. Just a few of the plants used by the traditional religious groups of Cuba, the Santeria, have been scientifically investigated, even though many of them could be a vast reservoir of knowledge for future scientific research. In the taxonomy of these species, the correspondence between local name and scientific one is often mismatched and because of that the use of herbs is prone to errors. The experimental project was conducted through a preliminary bibliographic research, interviews and taxonomic control. A list of plants was obtained in which there is correspondence between local names and scientific ones and in which traditional and scientifically recognized uses are compared. The results show that ethnobotanical traditions in Cuba are still very used by the local communities, which demonstrate to have an extensive botanical knowledge in their culture, but there is the need to update and improve it. Only a small part of the herbs used in Cuba have been scientifically investigated; therefore, it is necessary to start further studies about the local flora, check the effective medicinal properties, find new bioactive compounds previously unknown to science. Our work has led to a review of the local names, in correspondence with the current systematics. We have also demonstrated the usefulness of keeping alive the traditional knowledge of indigenous communities