It has been said repeatedly that El Cobre, a small town of Santiago de Cuba, is the most visited of the island. The assertion may be true. There is the sanctuary where is venerated the statue of the Virgin of Charity, the Patroness of Cuba. For Catholics, as its name suggests, it is the virgin of love, mercy, compassion, grace and forgiveness. La Caridad is Oshun in the Yoruba pantheon, goddess of water and fertility, sexuality and gold, and also the love, the religion of African origin.
About 500 people come daily to the basilica and visitors spend a thousand during weekends and summer vacations. Some come from far away. With his visit, many pay a promise and others do inspired devotion and even simple curiosity. Attending the Mass that is said there is secondary for most of them, but no one wants to leave without seeing the image of the Virgin, with his crown and robe embroidered in gold, in whose breast shows the shield of the Republic.
In the Chapel of Miracles, preceding the virgin camerín, the faithful pay their promises and deposit their offerings. Pray and thank. They ask and plead. There, a motley collection of objects is accumulated. There is everything in this Chapel, from pens and cheap clothes to silver candlesticks and vases, jewelry and valuable vases of fine porcelain. It's quite a treasure offered up to Charity, which includes many scalpels and stethoscope; votes of patients who were present at the gates of death and back to life.
In a showcase can be a appreciated degrees and military decorations that belonged to soldiers and army officers of the Batista dictatorship, and other hallmarks of the rebel army, which overthrew and orders and medals won some Cuban combatants in the war in Angola .
Particularly stand out so some of these offerings. As White Gold silhouette of the Commander in Chief Fidel Castro, that his mother, Dona Lina Ruz, put in place in praying for the life of her son. The supporting his Nobel Prize medal, which in the 50s offered up to the Charity the great American writer Ernest Hemingway. The Cuban flag that paid him the veterans of the wars of liberation against Spain ...
Because Our Lady of Charity is also the Mambi Virgin. Of those who took up arms against Spain and took the name of mambises. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Homeland Father, and his men in 1868, the venerated at the shrine, and his image, pinned to the chest of many of the fighters of the Liberation Army, accompanied Cubans in their irrevocable decision to gain independence .
It was precisely thousands of soldiers and officers mambises, headed by Major General Jesus Rabi, who requested the early twentieth century and obtained from Pope Benedict XV in 1916, which Patroness of Cuba to the Our Lady of Charity is declared. In 1998 Pope John Paul II blessed his image during his visit to Cuba and made tax of valuable offerings. His day is September 8.
History and legend
Copper deposits that were discovered at the site were the source, the late sixteenth century, a population settlement Minas Real Sitio de Santiago del Prado was called, and that is the present town of El Cobre.
From there, one day in 1606, legend has it, three men came in order to find salt in the Bay of Nipe and returned with the image which has since been venerated in the village. After a storm they found floating in the waters of the sea on a board that read: "I am the Virgin of Charity."
Already in copper, they placed in a chapel and one day the image disappeared. She was found on top of the hill. They returned to the chapel and disappeared again twice more to be always found in the mound. It was so they decided to build a chapel next to the existing church, and when the construction of a new temple the Our Lady of Charity held at the main altar of St. James the position, the more prepared.
The discoverers were Juan and Rodrigo de Hoyos and Juan Moreno, names that with the passage of time became Juan Hoyo, Juan Indio and Juan Slave three Juanes "charge a symbolic function: they represent the ethnic elements and cultural values that have entered the composition of the Cuban people [...] indoafrohispano our people. "
That said Jose Juan Arrom, the prestigious Cuban essayist who made his career in the US, in his study The Our Lady of Charity: history, legend and syncretic symbol, then diving in many documents in the interest of reaching accuracies about the origin of the image.
Tells Arrom that at the dawn of Spanish colonization in America, a Spanish sailor, very ill, he was abandoned by his companions in a point on the south coast of eastern Cuba, gave an aboriginal chieftain an image of the Virgin . The Indians worshiped in their own way and the aforementioned cacique took pinned to his chest during the fighting: he believed that would ensure victory. But that is not, certainly, the image we know today and appeared in Nipe. The shrine is an image of the package, while the cacique, confirms Arrom, was painted on a paper.
An image of bundle of the Virgin of Charity of Illescas, Spanish town of Toledo, could have been taken to the Royal Site of Mines by the Spanish captain Francisco Sanchez de Moya. There was, in fact, that image, in 1608, according to a document certifies the time that Arrom played in his studio. The resemblance, and not just in name, between the Charity of Illescas and Charity is surprising, and perhaps the image that is in the basilica is the same that led Sanchez de Moya when he received the King of Spain order arranged in place a copper smelter and build a church. In the home of a hermit resident in the area was the image of Charity, after the popular imagination and fervor declined to appear in the waters of the Bay of Nipe to give rise to a beautiful legend.
"I do not want to go into the question of whether the forces that moved the image of Cobre to Nipe were human or divine ..." said Jose Juan Arrom, and plays immediately the words of Don Quixote: "God knows if Dulcinea or not in the world and if it is great or not great, and these are not things whose investigation must be carried to the end. "
I will not either, of course. Anyway, the Catholic Charity, the Ochún of the Yoruba, is and will be a symbol of understanding and love, and incontrovertible expression of Cuban identity, exalted in a legend that survives the passing of centuries.