Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre

The story of Our Lady of Charity begins on the water. Early in the seventeenth century, tradition holds, three workers, remembered as the three Juans, crossed the Bay of Nipe on Cuba's northern coast to gather salt and found a small statue of the Virgin and Child floating on a board, dry despite the waves, inscribed Yo soy la Virgen de la Caridad, I am the Virgin of Charity. The image was carried inland and eventually enshrined near the copper mines of El Cobre above Santiago de Cuba. There her devotion grew into something larger than any one community, embraced across the island's divisions of race, status, and region, and bound up with Cuban identity itself through wars of independence and exile.

Pope Benedict XV named her patroness of Cuba in 1916, and she was solemnly crowned in 1936; her sanctuary at El Cobre is Cuba's principal Marian shrine, and her feast on 8 September draws pilgrims from across the island and its diaspora. She is depicted as a small, richly robed Madonna above the three figures in their boat on a stormy sea.

The devotion is inseparable from the mining town of El Cobre (Spanish for copper) in eastern Cuba, near Santiago, where royal copper mines were worked from the sixteenth century largely by enslaved and later freed Africans, the cobreros. The small statue of the Virgin, found floating in the Bay of Nipe according to the tradition, was brought to the mining district, and there a shrine grew around her. Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the community of El Cobre, and especially its people of colour, made her their own, and her sanctuary became a centre of Cuban Marian devotion drawing pilgrims from across the island. The Virgin is shown as a small crowned figure in golden or yellow robes, holding the Christ Child and standing above the three little figures in their boat, the three Juans, on the tossing waves of the bay.

Devotion crystallised into formal recognition twice in the twentieth century: on 10 May 1916, Pope Benedict XV, acting on a petition from veterans of the Cuban War of Independence, declared Our Lady of Charity Patroness of Cuba, and on 20 December 1936, during the Eucharistic Congress at Santiago de Cuba, her image received a canonical coronation. The shrine has since drawn three successive popes to Cuba, John Paul II in 1998, Benedict XVI in 2012 and Francis in 2015, each visiting El Cobre in turn, a continuity of papal attention unusual for a Marian devotion rooted so specifically in a single mining community's local history.

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.