Shameless and Free: A Trans Diaspora Story with CasSandra Calin

Summary

Rev. Alba welcomes CasSandra Calin, a queer, feminist, Black-Cuban healer, who is passionate about spirit work, identity, divinity and pleasure. Together, they explore what it means to claim shamelessness as a spiritual, political, and embodied practice, especially for Black, queer, and diasporic people whose lives have been shaped by religion, race, gender, and colonial identity rubrics.

CasSandra reflects on growing up with multilayered shame coded as holiness, humility, and goodness—stories reinforced by Christianity and white Christian Supremacy that fractured connection to body, desire, culture, and self. From reclaiming Cuban identity without fluency or permission, to navigating Afro-Latinidad, anti-Blackness, exoticization, and erasure, this episode traces a powerful arc from performance and respectability toward belonging in one’s own body. CasSandra and Rev. Alba talk about diaspora, the queer and trans church in Cuba, ancestral recognition, and the profound healing that happens in community.

The conversation moves into spiritual violence—how God-language is weaponized to justify harm—and the slow, liberatory work of shedding those narratives. Rev. Alba shares how queerness, therapy, prayer, food, fire, poetry, and nature have become sites of resistance, healing, and pleasure. We discuss the difference between being “gay” and being queer, agency as a spiritual muscle, therapy as ministry, and the questions that can ground us in an overwhelming political moment. We close by honoring ancestors—blood, chosen, intellectual, poetic—and the feminine, magnetic, expansive lineages that make survival, joy, and freedom possible.

CasSandra Calin (she/her/hers) is a queer, feminist, Black-Cuban healer, who is passionate about spirit work, identity, divinity and pleasure. She has recently returned to school to obtain her Doctorate of Social Work. Her intention is to study the mental and spiritual wellness of LGBTQ+ activists. CasSandra is overjoyed to have been a part of Soulforce’s work to sabotage white Christian Supremacy since she first joined the 2015-16 Soulforce Southeast House Fellowship.