Nicknamed “Cachita,” and revered by Catholic and non-Catholic Cubans, La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre is Cuba’s Patron Saint. In the Santeria faith (a synchronistic religion practiced in Cuba and elsewhere) Cachita is paired with the Orisha “Ochun.” Orishas are Yoruba deity.
Sometime around the year 1612, La Virgen de la Caridad appeared to a young black slave boy and two indigenous Cuban brothers. The boy, named Juan Moreno, was nine or ten years old at the time. The native brothers were Juan and Rodrigo De Hoyos. Commonly referred to, throughout Cuban history, as “Los Tres Juanitos,” the trio had gone on a canoe expedition to retrieve salt which was to be used for the preservation of meat at the Barajuaga slaughter house in El Cobre. El Cobre (Spanish for “Copper”) is an area in the Sierra Maestra region of El Oriente in the province of Santiago de Cuba, where I was born.
In October of 2002, I returned to Cuba, for the first time since I had left the island as a toddler. During my homecoming, I visited the statue of La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, in the basilica, where she is housed. Here I am to the left, standing in front of Caridad.
My mother and two of my siblings and I had returned to Cuba to sit at the bedside of my mother’s ailing brother, Carlos. In my second day on the island, Carlos died, in our presence, of lung cancer. He had just turned 55.
After Carlos’ passing, my brother José and I went with our cousin Jaime and Tio Juan (my mother’s oldest brother) up into the mountains to visit La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre and offer prayers for Carlos’ soul, for our ancestors and for the hundreds of our impoverished relatives who have remained on the island of Cuba. Below is a picture I took of my brother José on our way to see Cachita. The basilica is visible in the background of the picture.
The cathedral was empty, outside of peddlers who pushed wooden statuettes of Caridad into our hands. When we refrained from purchasing souvenirs; the vendors, agitated erupted with anger. One peddler scornfully yelled at me, “¡Puta Americana!” (“American whore!”) Another angrily threw a statuette of the Virgin at the ground by my brother’s feet, shattering it to pieces. We tried explaining to the frustrated peddlers that we have hundreds of hungry relatives on the island to whom we had given every last penny in our pocket, every last sock in our suitcase, every last suitcase with which we had come.
In the back of the cathedral, inside of the rectory doors, a woman in uniform was seated, selling faded pamphlets made of thin paper about the history of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. I tried reading one, but the lady forebode me to do so without buying one. I gave her the same explanation about my hungry relatives, but she still wouldn’t allow me to read it.
At an alter in the first floor of the cathedral were strewn all sorts of personal items as offerings for Caridad. A long-locked nephew of my mother’s, who had recently fled to America from Cuba, said that upon his return to the island; he would cut off his ponytail and leave it as an offering for Caridad whom he calls Ochun. My cousin practices Santeria and his patron Orisha is Ochun.
My eldest son, posed for me for the painting when he was nine years old (the same age that Juan Moreno was when he saw Caridad). I held our youngest son at the time, our baby, in my arms as my husband, snapped a picture of us. I used the photograph to paint Caridad and her baby Jesus. The two native brothers I painted from my imagination.
Not certain from which indigenous Cuban tribe the two brothers hailed, I painted on the canoe engravings of Taino effigies. The Tainos, were part of the Arawaks. The Arawaks were natives who lived in Cuba and all throughout the Caribbean. They had migrated to the islands from South America. Indigenous to the Oriente of Cuba, was another tribe called Siboney. My father’s grandmother Clemencia was a pure Siboney. She died, during Cuba’s War of Independence from Spain, as a victim of the Spaniards’ cruelty. For more information on my grandmother’s story, please see my painting, “Mambi en la Manigua: A Portrait of my Abuelo José Rodríguez Figueroa.” The Siboney were nearly exterminated by the Spaniards. In homage to my great-grandmother Clemencia and all of my indigenous Cuban ancestors, I painted the word Siboney on the other side of the canoe.
“After the people saw the miraculous sign that Jesus did, they began to say, ‘Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.’ Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.
In making the baby Jesus crownless, I attempted to emphasize this humility of Christ’s. I painted the Christ Child playing with the trio in the boat to emphasize Christ’s humanness. The second reason I did not paint a crown on Jesus, but on Mary only, was to give attention to the adoration of the Sacred Mother in Catholicism and Santeria.
Caridad’s statue rests high on a pedestal in an alcove on the second floor of the cathedral. As I gazed at the statue, I wondered if it was an original artifact which the Tres Juanitos found back in the early 1600’s, or if it was merely a statue made after the trio had seen the apparition of the Virgin.
In a canoe, on their way to the salt mines, the trio had encountered stormy weather. They camped overnight at Cayo Francés (the French Keys). When the weather cleared, they set to the seas again, before sunrise. On their way, they came across an image of the Virgin Mary. More than seven decades later, speaking in the third person, Juan Moreno (the slave boy) left a testimony (in Spanish), recounting the events that he had witnessed as a child. He said the following.
I translated the above from Juan Moreno’s original quote in Spanish below.
Inside of the the cathedral there pervaded a sort of peaceful yet melancholic spirit which seemed to empathize with the poverty, plaguing the city of Santiago. Standing before the statue, I asked Caridad to intercede on behalf of all the souls in Santiago de Cuba, whose impoverished lives I could never adequately describe in words.
In October of 2006, I spent nine days in Bangalore, India with my family for my brother Dan’s wedding to a wonderful Indian woman named Anupama.
My family and I agreed that if India is a third world country, then Cuba is a tenth world country.