La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre: The Patroness Cuba Never Left Behind

In 1961, when the Cuban government began restricting religious practice on the island, the image of La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre was quietly packed into luggage, slipped into coat linings, carried in children's school bags. The women who left Cuba in the first wave of exile — and the second wave, and every wave that followed — took her with them the way they took photographs and the addresses of relatives they might never see again. She is Cuba's patroness. Her image has crossed the Straits of Florida more times than anyone can count. And in Cuban households in Miami and Union City and the Bronx and wherever Cubans landed and rebuilt, she is still there — in the corner of the living room, flowers at her feet, a candle burning when someone needs something badly enough to ask. **Three Men on the Water** The origin story of La Caridad del Cobre is one of the most specific and beautiful founding miracles in the Americas. In the early 1600s, three men set out on a small boat in the Bay of Nipe, in what is now eastern Cuba, to collect salt from the sea. A storm came up. The bay grew violent. The three men — Rodrigo de Hoyos, Juan de Hoyos, and a young boy known as Juan Moreno — were tossed in the waves for days. The two men named Juan were Indigenous Taíno. The boy Juan Moreno was enslaved and African. These three men, from three different peoples, all of them at the margins of the colonial world, were the ones who received her. When the storm calmed, a floating board appeared on the water. On it was a small image of the Virgin Mary, holding the child Jesus, with a cross in her right hand. Around the board floated a cloth sign that read: *Yo soy la Virgen de la Caridad.* I am the Virgin of Charity. The image was dry. The cloth was dry. They had been floating on the open sea. **The Copper Mine and the Colonial Devotion** The three men brought the image to the copper mines of El Cobre, near Santiago de Cuba, where enslaved and Indigenous workers labored in brutal conditions extracting the copper that funded the Spanish colonial economy. A shrine was built. The devotion spread. The miners of El Cobre became her first faithful in the New World — workers with no legal freedom, no protection, no recourse, who found in the image of this small figure something that could not be taken from them. The tradition holds that the enslaved workers at El Cobre petitioned the Spanish crown for their freedom partly on the basis of their devotion to La Caridad, presenting themselves as her servants, her caretakers. In 1677, the Crown freed them. It is not a myth. The freedmen of El Cobre — and their descendants, the *cobreros* — are documented in colonial records. The basilica built for her in the town of El Cobre still stands. Pope Francis visited it in 2015. Pilgrims still climb the hill on their knees. **Cachita Meets Oshún** To speak of La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre without acknowledging her relationship to Oshún would be to tell only half the story. In the African diasporic religious tradition of Lucumí — known in Cuba and in Cuban-American communities as Santería or La Regla de Ocha — Oshún is the orisha of love, rivers, sweetness, and fertility. She is golden. She is associated with honey and copper and the color yellow. She is the mother who protects. During the centuries of enslaved Africans in Cuba, La Caridad and Oshún became identified with each other — not by Church decree, but by the living practice of people who needed both and who saw the same deep truth in both. Today, in homes throughout the Cuban diaspora, you will sometimes find La Caridad in a yellow dress surrounded by sunflowers, with offerings of honey and pumpkin nearby. This is not confusion. This is synthesis. This is what it looks like when two spiritual traditions meet in the same body of devotion and recognize each other. **She Travels Into Exile** After 1959, as the revolutionary government moved to restrict the Church, the parish church of La Caridad del Cobre in Havana became a site of resistance. Cuban families began making pilgrimages there before leaving the country, placing milagritos — small silver charms representing what they were asking for — at her feet. People leaving forever asked her to watch over what they were leaving behind. People asking her to reunite families that the Revolution was dividing. In 1961, a group of exiled Cubans in Miami commissioned a replica of her image and built the Ermita de la Caridad on the bay in Coconut Grove — oriented toward Cuba, sixteen miles across the water. The shrine is built to face the island directly. It contains soil from all fourteen provinces of Cuba, brought by exiles who wanted her to stand on Cuban ground even in exile. Cubanas brought small images to that ermita for decades — images carried out of Cuba, images that had survived houses being searched, images that had been hidden in false bottoms of suitcases. Some of them are worn down to almost nothing from being touched and carried and kissed for so many years. **What She Means to Cubanas Today** La Caridad del Cobre is a complicated inheritance. She holds the history of colonization and the resistance to it. She holds three men on a desperate sea and the enslaved workers who prayed to her for freedom and received it. She holds the exiles who left everything and built her a new shrine facing home. To be a Cubana and to carry La Caridad is to carry all of that. The island you may have never seen. The faith that survived decades of suppression. The grandmother who kept her hidden and the granddaughter who doesn't know the full story yet but keeps her on the shelf anyway. She is yellow and gold. She floats on water that tried to destroy her. She is dry when she should be soaked. She survived the crossing. So did you. *Keep reading: [Cubana: What It Means to Love a Country You're Still Waiting to Go Back To](/blogs/news/cubana-cuban-american-identity-pride) | [San Judas Tadeo: The Saint Who Rides With the Ones Nobody Else Prays For](/blogs/news/san-judas-tadeo-saint-devotion-meaning)* ---