Basilica of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Around 1612, two indigenous brothers, Rodrigo and Juan de Hoyos, and a young enslaved African boy, Juan Moreno, remembered as the three Juans, rowed into the Bay of Nipe to gather salt when a storm caught their little boat. Praying through the wind, they saw something floating on the waves: a small statue of the Virgin with the Child on a board bearing the words Yo soy la Virgen de la Caridad, I am the Virgin of Charity, and the statue was dry. She was carried to the copper-mining village of El Cobre near Santiago, where Cachita, as Cubans tenderly call her, became the soul of a nation, declared Patroness of Cuba in 1916, her sanctuary on the hill of Cerro de la Cantera rebuilt in 1926 and reached by a long flight of steps. Every September the island celebrates her feast, pilgrims arrive dressed in her yellow with sunflowers in hand, and an old testimony survives in Seville's archives: Juan Moreno himself, at eighty-five, swearing to what the three of them saw on the water.