Patroness of Cuba

Our Lady of Charity (Nuestra Senora de la Caridad del Cobre, affectionately La Cachita) is the patroness of Cuba, proclaimed such by Pope Benedict XV in 1916 at the petition of veterans of the wars of independence, for whom she had become a national as well as a religious symbol. Her image was solemnly crowned in 1936, and her basilica at El Cobre is Cuba's principal Marian shrine. Successive popes, John Paul II in 1998 and Benedict XVI in 2012, honoured the shrine during visits to the island, and Pope Francis prayed there in 2015.

For Cubans at home and in the diaspora, above all in Miami, where a shrine was built in her honour, she is a focus of national identity that reaches across political divisions. Her feast is kept on 8 September. Within Cuban popular religion her image has also been associated, in the syncretic currents of the island, with figures of Afro-Cuban tradition, though her standing in Catholic devotion is as the Mother of God under this title.