Juan Carlos Alom's "Culto Obligatorio" probes the coercive undercurrents of ritualistic devotion within Cuba's syncretic spiritual landscape, capturing a horseshoe—emblematic of protective talismans in Afro-Cuban religions like Santería, particularly associated with Ogun's dominion over iron and warfare—bathed in an ominous red glow that suggests sacrificial blood, ideological fervor, or the heated forge of compulsory belief systems amid the Special Period's scarcities. As part of the "El libro oscuro" series, the silver gelatin print employs manipulative darkroom techniques to fetishize the object, transforming it from mundane artifact to a theatrical icon of mandated worship, where the horseshoe's nail holes puncture the illusion of voluntary faith, evoking the state's imposition of ideological cults paralleled with resilient ancestral practices. This conceptual layering interrogates the boundaries between voluntary reverence and enforced adoration, positing the amulet as a site of resistance and subjugation, where magical realism confronts political reality in a quest for cultural sovereignty.