Cuba's Virgin of Charity

On April 1, 1687, Juan Moreno, an 85-year-old black creole slave (Negro esclauo natural desta dho Lugar), one of three original discoverers of the effigy of Cuba’s Virgin of Charity, gave a deposition to officials of the Catholic Church of Santiago de Cuba in which he “affirmed as a Christian” his account of the finding (hallazgo) of the Virgin’s image floating on ocean waters seventy-five years before. Lost for three centuries, More-no’s notarized testimony was rediscovered in 1974 and reads

This declarant said that when he was ten years old, he went, in the company of Rodrigo de Joyos and Juan de Joyos, two Indian brothers, to collect salt, having been in Key Franses in the middle of the Bay of Nipe for a long time en route to the Salt Mine. It was morning and the sea was calm when they left Key Franses before sunrise on board a canoe bound for the salt mine. In the distance beyond Key Franses they saw something white on the foam of the water but they could not distinguish what it was. As they approached, it appeared to be a bird, and as they got closer, the Indians said that it looked like a girl. Upon consideration, they recognized and saw the Image of Our Lady of the Most Holy Virgin with a Baby Jesus in her arms upon a small platform with large letters that Rodrigo de Hoyos read and which said “I am the Virgin of Charity.” ¹

The twentieth-century Cuban intellectual Jorge Mañach once asserted, “There is no nation without the Virgin of Charity.” ² But the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre (hereafter, “the Virgin”) was not always a national icon. Rather, Cubans’ ongoing reflections upon and debates about their preferred national characteristics—including racialization—have intertwined with religious devotion to produce a complex creolized (“mixed”) account of their nation (patria) and its patroness (patrona).