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By Marc Frank
HAVANA (Reuters) - In their New Year predictions, high priests from Cuba's Afro-Cuban Santeria religion told followers on Thursday to watch their health and spending, care for their families, guard against crime and drink less alcohol amid a punishing economic crisis entering its sixth year.
"Measures must be taken against increasing delinquency," said the Letter of the Year by high priests, known as Babalawos, from the government-recognized Yoruba Association of Cuba and publicly presented on Thursday in Havana.
The letters are a prophecy of misfortune, disease and other events and how to cope with them, which Santeria followers anxiously await every year.
Millions of Cubans practice the ritual-filled religion, which fuses Catholicism with ancient African beliefs brought to Cuba by slaves.
"Analyze economic investments and their consequences, eliminate piles of garbage and care for and respect marital and family integrity" the letter continued.
The priests' forecasts come five years into an economic crisis that has stricken Cubans with worsening shortages of food, medicine, fuel and other goods amid power and water outages and crumbling public transportation and garbage collection.
The island nation's Communist government blames the economic crisis mainly on U.S. sanctions while admitting it has made mistakes in managing the crisis.
Over the years a few groups have split from the association, and some now issue their own Letter of the Year.
Babalawo Lazaro Cuesta, of the independent Organizing Commission of the Letter of the Year Miguel Febles Padron, said at another press conference a few miles (km) away that its message signaled many of the same dangers ahead, but also the need for the government to let go of a vision and methods dating back to the Cold War.
"Attachment to the past does not reveal present solutions or future plans," the letter states as it warns of "crooked paths."
Cuesta, a key organizer of the priests, said "crooked paths are the inadequate decisions we make, they are the obsolete ideas we propose, the incorrect way of seeking solutions to the problems that human beings have."
(Reporting by Marc Frank; additional reporting by Nelson Acosta and Alien Fernandez; editing by Sandra Maler)
