Feminine Tone folks and tourists from everywhere were moving all around the broad floor, looking at side altars, paintings, and statues, while the faithful were gathered in the pews up front, praying in preparation. I wasn’t sure how long we were going to to stay here, so I made my way up the nave to a narrow passage that leads behind the altar.
The ground floor chamber at the back of the basilica, underneath the sanctuary, is the room of miracles. It’s Our Lady’s antechamber, where she is represented by her son, who hangs in grim crucifixion over an altar of fantastic beaten silverwork. While she is at Mass, he accepts petitions and presides over a display of her power, her charity, and her remedies. The room is crowded with testimony, with pleas and thanks in a hundred material forms: canes and crutches, a prosthetic arm, real and plastic flowers, model sailing ships, bottles of beer and soft drinks, little lacquered cakes, sports trophies, school papers and diplomas, books, clothes, medals. Heaped notes and framed letters ask for help with crises and illnesses or tell the reader how Our Lady healed and rescued, delivered and saved. There are hanging cloths scaled with hundreds of tiny metal images of healed body parts—arms, legs, hearts, stomachs—and framed arrays of military badges and patches testifying to the Virgin’s intercession during combat in the Sierras, at the Bay of Pigs, in Angola. The tables hold maracas, books, hats, many dolls dressed in yellow with faces of many complexions, from deep black to pale rose. Images of the Virgin of Guadeloupe and John Paul II flank the crucified Savior; a battered saxophone hangs close by his outstretched right arm.
Of all the desires and tributes ever displayed in this room, two are most famous. One is the little figure of a soldier placed here by Lina Ruiz, mother of Fidel and Raúl Castro, while her boys were fighting not far away in these mountains. The other is the 1954 Nobel Prize medal brought here by Ernest Hemingway, which (having been stolen and returned once) is no longer on view. The hero of Hemingway’s last great novel, The Old Man and the Sea, a fisherman named Santiago who lives on the other end of Cuba, near Havana, pledges to make a pilgrimage to El Cobre if Our Lady will help him catch a great marlin: “Blessed Virgin, pray for the death of this fish. Wonderful though he is.”
I was here to pray for my stepbrother’s life. Back in New England, Peter was about to have surgery to remove a brain tumor. He’s about my age, with a wonderful young son, and of all the grown children on both sides of my mother’s second marriage, he is probably the most mutually beloved, the best ambassador. His condition was about as mortal as it could be, this side of inoperable. I’d asked my mother and stepfather whether they wanted me to put off this trip, but they insisted I go, so I was doing what I could.
None of us on the Craig side of the conjoined family is a “good” Catholic anymore, and my stepfather and his family are nonobservant Jews. But miracles aren’t reserved for the devout, and Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre isn’t petitioned and thanked only by dogmatic Catholics.
In fact, she isn’t just Our Lady of Charity, an orthodox avatar of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The patron saint of Cuba isn’t merely a saint.
She’s a goddess.
In the twilight of a morning in the early 1600s, two men and a boy pushed a canoe into the waters of Nipe Bay, Cuba. Almost cut off from the ocean by barrier islands, the bay is a little sea in its own right, a couple of hundred square kilometers broad and capable, when goaded by wind, of raising waves that could sink small ships. It’s also famous for its plentiful, voracious sharks. But the paddlers weren’t afraid, because the dark sea was calm.
The boy was Juan Moreno (John Black, or Black John), a slave from Santiago del Prado, a mining settlement a few miles west of Santiago de Cuba. It was a place almost everyone called El Cobre—“the copper”—for the ore that was mined there. He’d come more than sixty miles north across Oriente to get to Nipe Bay, where he was working alongside two brothers from Cobre. Juan and Rodrigo de Hoyos weren’t slaves, but they shared young Juan Moreno’s perch on the bottom rung of the colony’s social and economic ladder, being Taino Indian natives.
They had camped on an island in the bay, and were setting out to cross over and collect salt at a mine. But not long after they set out from the island, just as the uncertain light grew strong enough to see a little distance, they saw something white floating toward them over the water.
At first they had no idea what it could be, but as it drew closer they thought it might be a bird. Then the brothers said it looked like a girl. But at last it came so close that they could see a small statue of the Blessed Virgin, robed in white and carrying the Christ child in her arms. The statue was standing on a little plank, and when she was close enough they saw words written on the board, which Rodrigo de Hoyos read aloud: “I am the Virgin of Charity.”
When they took the statue into their canoe, they realized that her clothes were miraculously dry. Rejoicing in the miracle, the three stopped only a little while on the island, collecting just a third of the salt they’d come to collect, before rushing back to shore and sharing the good news at Barajagua, a cattle ranch about halfway on the road back to El Cobre. (Barajagua’s pastures supplied meat to the copper miners, the cobreros, who considered Barajagua an extension of their communal system. Juan Moreno and the Hoyos may have been gathering salt to preserve Barajagua beef.) From there the news flew ahead of them, and the administrator of the mines at El Cobre, Francisco Sanchez de Moya, sent word to provide the image with an altar and keep a light always burning before her—which had already been done before Moya’s command got back to Barajugua. Then Moya sent the mining village’s parish priest and the mines’ entire complement of royal infantry to bring the Virgin back to El Cobre in a grand procession; numerous townspeople joined in the march, and the statue was carried on their shoulders.
The Virgin was placed on the altar of the parish church while the people constructed a special shrine for her. A special Mass was sung in her honor and in the hope of receiving guidance from the Holy Spirit as to the hermitage’s location. Everyone had decided on an eminence known as La Cantera, “The Quarry,” but on three successive nights three mysterious lights appeared over Cerro de la Mina, the Hill of the Mine. The miracle marked the holy spot, and Our Lady of Charity and Remedies of Cobre have been working miracles in her shrine there ever since.
It’s a classic Marian tale. Lourdes, Guadeloupe, La Salette: the Queen of Heaven appears in a wild and lonely place to the poorest of the poor, offering hope and comfort to those most in need. It’s her pattern, the B.V.M.’s m.o.
But its few simple elements don’t suggest the half of what she means to the people of Cuba.
For starters, most major Marian apparitions are just that: immaterial appearances, divine holograms of a lady who arrives, speaks, and disappears. Relatively few involve the miraculous advent of a solid and permanent proxy, such as the statue of Our Lady of Charity. The Nipe Bay story doesn’t declare the statue itself a miracle; none of the witnesses or chroniclers insists that the image wasn’t made by man. What’s miraculous is its spotless passage across the stormy bay; Juan Moreno’s testimony uses the words sobre la espuma, “over the foam.” The miracle is in the power that brought Our Lady, clean and dry, to the men in the canoe.
If the statue isn’t a miracle, where did it come from?
Our Lady of Charity appeared in Nipe Bay in 1612 or 1608 or 1604 or thereabouts; the record is unclear. In any case, she arrived no more than 120 years after Christopher Columbus passed by on the first of his four great voyages.
On October 12, 1492, he’d made first landfall in the sandspit Bahamas, which his radical, entrepreneurial geography construed to be islands off the coast of China. “They do not carry arms nor know what they are,” he wrote of the natives, “because I showed them swords and they took them by the edge and ignorantly cut themselves.” Columbus pushed on through the archipelago and reached mountainous Cuba, which he believed to be a peninsula of the Chinese mainland province of Mangi.
He sailed southeast along about two hundred mile
s of Cuba’s coastline before crossing to Hispaniola—which he understood, correctly, to be an island, but mistook for Marco Polo’s Cipangu (Japan). There, his flagship hit a reef and sank, inspiring him to leave a number of sailors behind in the New World’s first European settlement, La Navidad. When he returned, late in 1493, La Navidad was a ruin, its sailors executed by Carib Indians for behaving like swine toward the local women.
The process of claiming this New World for Spain—and for Christ and his Blessed Mother—was aggressively furthered by men such as Alonso de Ojeda, a twenty-seven-year-old courtier and soldier with experience in Spain’s Moorish wars. Cocky as a Castilian Teddy Roosevelt, Ojeda distinguished himself by a boldness that seemed to dare the enemy to hurt him. Having taken terrible risks without suffering a single wound, Ojeda came to believe that he was under the Virgin’s special protection. He came into the possession of a figure of Mary, possibly as a gift from his patron, Bishop Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca, who became royal auditor of the Indies and Columbus’s most powerful enemy at the court of Isabella and Ferdinand.
According to some sources, Ojeda’s painted wooden statuette may have been the work of a Flemish artist, but others describe it as Spanish, a Madonna whose skin color reflected the mixture of African and European peoples in the once-Moorish kingdoms of southern Spain. This version of the story says she was known as la Virgen Morena, the Moorish (or black) Virgin.
However, there seems to be no question that Ojeda carried some such image with him to the New World. Fonseca secured Ojeda a place among the gentleman-adventurers who joined Columbus’s second voyage. He was clearly the bishop’s man, but he served Columbus by leading expeditions into the interior of Hispaniola in search of gold. Taking it upon himself to avenge the massacre at La Navidad and punish any native resistance, Ojeda prosecuted a campaign of murder and looting that the priest Bartolome de las Casas, earliest chronicler of the Spanish Conquest, called “the first injustice, with vain and erroneous pretension of doing justice, that was committed in these Indies against these Indians.” Las Casas credited Ojeda with “beginning the shedding of the blood which has since flowed so copiously on this island”—which is pretty much the same as saying he was the first killer conquistador, the guy who kicked off the next four centuries of genocidal subjugation of Native Americans.
And Ojeda’s killing was hardly confined to Columbus’s fiefdom of Hispaniola. With Fonseca’s encouragement, Ojeda repeatedly violated Columbus’s supposed monopoly on New World exploration rights, ranging the tropics from Venezuela to the Bahamas. (Ojeda’s expedition of 1499 carried the wannabe cosmographer Amerigo Vespucci on his first trip to the New World; Vespucci’s 1503 epistolary account of his real and imaginary adventures was published in several editions and a bestselling 1507 collection of New World voyages, and inspired the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller to name the new lands “America.”) On all his expeditions, Ojeda tended to kill first and ask questions later. He once attacked and destroyed a Venezuelan Indian town without warning, just to seize hammocks and utensils for a proposed settlement. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ojeda was incapable of solving almost any problem that didn’t involve fighting. All his attempts at colonization ended in Indian attack, mutiny, or starvation.
His final expedition was a litany of disasters, including his wounding by poison arrow. Though Ojeda recovered, his men believed that the Virgin had withdrawn her protection. The colony dissolved; Ojeda was kidnapped by incompetent pirates and shipwrecked on Cuba. This was in 1510, the year before the Spanish, well established on Hispaniola, invaded Cuba. Southeastern Cuba—the future Oriente Province—was filled with Indian refugees from war and slavery in Hispaniola, who warned native Cubans what to expect from the Spanish. Las Casas records a speech made by Hatuey, a Taino cacique or chieftain from Hispaniola, to his people in exile in Cuba:
“You already know that it is said the Christians are coming here; and you have experience of how they have treated the lords so and so and those people of Hayti (which is Hispaniola); they come to do the same here. Do you know perhaps why they do it?” The people answered no; except that they were by nature cruel and wicked. “They do it,” said he, “not alone for this, but because they have a God whom they greatly adore and love; and to make us adore Him they strive to subjugate us and take our lives.” He had near him a basket full of gold and jewels and he said. “Behold here is the God of the Christians, let us perform areytos [songs] before Him, if you will; and perhaps we shall please Him, and He will command that they do us no harm.”
All exclaimed; it is well! it is well! They danced before it, till they were all tired, after which the lord Hatuey said; “Note well that in any event if we preserve the gold, they will finally have to kill us, to take it from us: let us throw it into this river.” They all agreed to this proposal, and they threw the gold into a great river in that place.
Forewarned, the Cubans who first encountered Ojeda and his band of seventy shipwrecked pirates thought they might be slave catchers or the first wave of an invasion, and attacked them. Ojeda was forced to lead his Spaniards around village after village while they grew ever more hungry and weak.
Caught between the mountains and the sea, they found themselves lost in a seemingly endless mangrove swamp. Ojeda had rescued his image of the Virgin from the wreck, and he encouraged his men by setting the statue in the branches of a tree and praying to her whenever they stopped to rest. Still, after more than a month of slogging and starvation, they were still trapped in the mangroves, and only thirty-five of the pirates were still alive. Even Las Casas pitied him, writing that “the sufferings of the Spaniards in the New World, in search of wealth, have been more cruel and severe than ever nation in the world endured, but those experienced by Ojeda and his men have surpassed all others.” At some desperate point, Ojeda upped the spiritual ante and vowed that if the Blessed Mother showed him the way out, he would build a chapel in the first Indian village he came to and leave her beloved image there to win souls for Christ.
And when he and a few of the toughest pirates pushed ahead to dry land and collapsed in a village where the Indians took pity on them, sent rescuers after the Spaniards still in the swamp, and, in Las Casas’s words, “succored, cherished consoled and almost worshiped [them] as if they had been angels,” Ojeda was bound to keep his word.
Ojeda and his men eventually got back to Santo Domingo, where a few years later he died a pauper. The conquistador apparently repented, not of mass murder, but of the sin of pride; he asked to be buried under the doorstep of the monastery of San Francisco, “that everyone who entered might tread upon his grave.”
In the meantime, Diego Columbus, son of the Great Admiral, ordered Diego de Velasquez and three hundred men to invade Cuba in 1511. Velasquez’s lieutenants Pánfilo de Narváez and Hernan Cortés applied themselves with distinguishing brutality. The conquistadors set war dogs on the Indians to tear them apart, and punished resistance by hacking off hands and feet. Father de las Casas missed the occupation’s hellish opening phase, which ended with the capture and execution of Hatuey, who had been leading a spirited but hopeless fight against the remorseless Spaniards.
When Hatuey was tied to a stake, about to be burned alive, a monk tried for a last-minute conversion. Instructing the chieftain in the essentials of Christian faith, he promised a glorious afterlife as the reward for acceptance—and eternal hellfire for refusal. Hatuey gave it some thought, then asked if there were Spaniards in heaven. The monk replied that good Spaniards went there.
Hatuey immediately declared “that he did not wish to go” to heaven, Las Casas wrote, “but rather to hell so as not to be where Spaniards were, nor to see such cruel people. This is the renown and honour, that God and our faith have acquired by means of the Christians who have gone to the Indies.”
Las Casas tried to use his reputation as the Indians’ protector to minimize bloodshed, but nothing he did or said could persuade the Spanish to be anything more than a little less murdero
us. He witnessed horrific slaughters and documented conditions of slavery so brutal they seemed like halfhearted attempts to wring a little profit out of genocide.
But there came a day when Las Casas was traveling north from Bayamo as spiritual adviser to an expedition that was going to seize Camagüey. About halfway between the two towns, the priest and a force of about a hundred Spaniards entered a village that received them with unusual calm. The priest was brought to a rude chapel, where he found Alonso de Ojeda’s statue of the Virgin arrayed in bright cotton cloth and flower garlands. The villagers clearly loved the image, worshiping her with areytos and dancing. Delighted and moved, Las Casas offered a Mass, and the people brought their children to be baptized.
Some survivors of Ojeda’s pirate band were among the conquistadors, and their testimony to the statue’s sacred power made the priest offer to trade the cacique a beautiful Flemish statue for the one on the altar. This was a mistake. Next morning, when Las Casas returned to the shrine to say another Mass, the Virgin was gone. The cacique had taken her up into the mountains. There were rumors that the people were ready to fight if the Spaniards seemed intent on pursuing their treasure. Las Casas reassured the villagers and left his own Flemish statue as a gift to the absent cacique.
And that’s all we know until a century later, when Juan Moreno and Rodrigo and Juan de Hoyos saw a statue sailing toward them over the waves of Nipe Bay.
If the statue that found the three men in the canoe in 1611 or 1612 was Alonso de Ojeda’s devotional image, where had she been in the century between Las Casas’s sighting and her miraculous reappearance as Our Lady of Charity of Cobre?
No one knows, but everyone guesses. The best scholarship indicates that—whatever the truth of Juan Moreno’s story and the fate of Ojeda’s statue—there was already an image of the Virgin in El Cobre by 1604. She wasn’t Our Lady of Charity, but Our Lady of Guidance of Illescas, an image brought directly from Spain to the mining camp. This image may have been superseded by the marvelous statue from Nipe Bay, or gradually renamed to fit the sailors’ legend. In any case, from historical and cultural points of view, it’s probably most important to understand that, one way or another, the cobreros created a purely Cuban saint, a patron saint of Africans and Indians.
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