El Cobre

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The hills that rise behind the road from Santiago de Cuba run to red. The color is the ore in them — copper, weathered to rust at the surface, bright enough that a prospector could read the deposit from a distance — and the Spanish who came in the first decades after the conquest found it and set men to dig. The village that grew below the workings took the plainest name it could: El Cobre, the copper. On a height above the old mine stands a white basilica with three towers, and inside it, behind glass, above the altar, a small dark-faced Virgin in a mantle of gold holds the Christ child and a cross. The tradition says she was found on the water — floating on a board over the Bay of Nipe, on the island’s far northern coast, dry in the middle of the waves, with words on the board that read Yo soy la Virgen de la Caridad, I am the Virgin of Charity. The gold of her robe answers the copper of the hill. It answers something else besides, and to climb the hill is to meet both.

Copper, and the men who dug it

The mine came first, and the shrine grew out of it. The reddish outcrop above the village is counted among the oldest worked copper deposits in the Americas — the first the Spanish opened in the New World — prospected in the sixteenth century and dug, by the scholarly reckoning, from around 1530, with open-pit operation documented by the following decade. The town and its mine began as the Minas del Prado, or Santiago del Prado, worked at first by pressed indigenous labor and then, as the native population collapsed, by enslaved Africans brought for the purpose. For more than three centuries the deposit was mined by unfree hands. A British company reopened the workings with Cornish miners and steam pumps in the 1830s, an American concern took them over at the start of the twentieth century, and the pit was not finally abandoned until the turn of the twenty-first, when it filled with a mineral-bright lake. But the settlement that matters here is the older one: the community of the crown’s slaves.

Their story is exact, and unusual, and it has been reconstructed in detail. In 1670, when the private concessionaire who held the mine failed to keep it, the Spanish Crown took the workings and the people on them into its own hands and made the villagers royal slaves — the direct property of the king of Spain rather than of any planter. These were the cobreros, and their condition was slavery of a strange and negotiable kind. Belonging to the king and not to a master, living far from the sugar districts in a settlement of their own, they held land, kept families, worshiped at their own shrine, and pressed the Crown for a century over the terms of their bondage. When in 1780 the Crown moved to hand them back to the heirs of the old concessionaires, the villagers answered with flight, with rebellion, and with a literate cobrero, Gregorio Cosme Osorio, whom they sent across the ocean to lay their case before the king in person. It took sixteen years and two monarchs. In 1800 the Crown conceded collective freedom to the community and formal title to the lands around El Cobre — an emancipation without parallel among the slave societies of the New World, won a full lifetime before Cuban slavery was abolished in 1886. The historian María Elena Díaz set the whole of it down in The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre, and her title names the three powers the cobreros lived between. The Black Marian devotion of El Cobre was not laid over the slavery from outside. It was born inside it, on the hill above the mine, and its people made this Virgin their own.

The finding on the bay

Under the documented history runs the tradition, and the tradition begins on the water. It holds that around 1612 three laborers set out in a canoe across the Bay of Nipe, on the north coast of the island far from El Cobre, to fetch salt for the meat of the mine. The bay was rough. On the swell they saw something white, took it at first for a bird, and drew close to find a small carved image of the Virgin with the child in her arm, riding on a board, and on the board the words Yo soy la Virgen de la Caridad. Though it had been in the sea, the image was dry.

The three are remembered as los tres Juanes, the three Juans, and the fuller telling names them: the brothers Rodrigo and Juan de Hoyos, and a young enslaved African, Juan Moreno, still a boy at the time. Here the accounts diverge, and honesty keeps the divergence rather than smoothing it — in the versions that have come down, the salt-gatherers are variously remembered as an Indian, a criollo, and a Black slave, and which of the men was which is not fixed. What is fixed is that the earliest surviving witness to the whole event is Juan Moreno himself. In 1687, an old man of some eighty-five years, he gave sworn testimony recalling the finding from his boyhood — a deposition set down seventy-five years after the fact, and the document from which the story as the shrine tells it descends. Spanish-language scholarship notes plainly that the account “mezcla la historia con la leyenda,” mixes history with legend; the date and the details of the finding are debated, not settled, and the apparition tradition and the documentary record are two different registers that ought not be run together.

The image, the tradition continues, was carried first to the settlement of Barajagua, near the bay, and given a rough shelter there. From Barajagua it was brought inland to the mining town of El Cobre. And there it began to move on its own. It was found gone from its place in the morning, the story goes, and found again on a hill above the village, again and again, until the cobreros understood where the Virgin meant to live and built her a shrine on that height. The basilica stands on the spot the legend marks. Whatever a skeptic makes of the wandering image, the historical fact beneath it is that a community of the king’s slaves, on a copper mountain, took a small Virgin of Charity for their patroness and would not be moved from her.

The national sanctuary of Our Lady of Charity on the hill at El Cobre, in the copper country west of Santiago de Cuba. Photograph by Sarbelito Avila, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The yellow Virgin and the river

To the santero and the santera, and to a great many Cubans who would also call themselves Catholic, the Virgin on the hill is not only the Virgin. In La Regla de Ocha — the Cuban orisha religion the Yoruba nation rebuilt in the cabildos of the island, also called la Regla Lucumí — the gold-robed Caridad del Cobre is served as one being with Ochún, the orisha of the rivers and of all sweet water, of gold and honey and love, the youngest and, the tradition says, the most tender of the great powers, whose color is amber-gold and whose number is five. The identification is not loose. It is read off the image point for point. The Virgin’s golden mantle is Ochún’s yellow; her finding afloat on the bay, and her home raised above the water, answer Ochún as the mistress of the sweet waters; the copper of the hill is the very metal of the orisha’s ornaments; the charity and mercy the Virgin embodies are Ochún’s own domains of love and abundance. On the eighth of September, the Virgin’s feast, a santera in Havana or Matanzas may carry a covered jar of honey down to the nearest river and set it at the water’s edge — and the yellow she wears there is the same yellow that fills the road up to El Cobre.

The African root is named here in plain prose and set down: Ochún is the Cuban Lucumí form of the Yoruba orisha Osun, honored on her river at Osogbo in the Yoruba country of what is now southwestern Nigeria, and carried to Cuba in the last, cruelest decades of the Atlantic trade. What crossed the ocean was reborn on the copper hill, continuous with the old devotion and not identical to it. This joining of orisha and saint is the matter that scholarship has debated longest, and the debate deserves its due. The older, thinner account called it simple disguise — African powers hidden behind Catholic images to escape the priest’s eye. Some of it surely was camouflage, in a colony where drumming to the orishas could be punished. But for the santero and for many ordinary Cubans the two are not a hiding place and a hidden thing at all. They are one presence with two names, and the devotion to Cachita is as sincere as the devotion to Ochún. The Cuban scholars who first listened long enough to write the religion down as the priests told it — Lydia Cabrera in El Monte (1954), Natalia Bolívar Aróstegui in her later surveys of the pantheon — record the pairing as living faith, not deception. Whether it began as protective cover, as genuine dual devotion, or as both at once in different hearts, is a question the record leaves standing, and to climb El Cobre is, for many who make the climb, to greet la Virgen and to salute Ochún in a single act.

The details a given house keeps for Ochún — her roads, her particular colors, the offerings her people set for her — vary from lineage to lineage, for Regla de Ocha is a decentralized, orally transmitted faith with no single altar that speaks for all. What does not vary is the place. Wherever the honey is carried, the river it is carried to runs, in the end, toward the same sea that belongs to Yemayá; and the hill it climbs toward, when it climbs, is this one. El Cobre is where the most intimate of orishas — the river-woman met privately at the water’s edge — is also, because her Virgin is the patroness of the nation, the emblem of the whole island. No other Cuban shrine carries that double weight.

Patroness of Cuba

The Virgin of El Cobre went to war before she was crowned. In the long struggle for independence from Spain, the mambises — the fighters of the liberation army, many of them Black and of the eastern country around Santiago — carried her medal into the field and prayed to her as the Virgen mambisa, the Virgin of the insurgents. When the fighting was done, it was the veterans who asked for her recognition. At their written petition, Pope Benedict XV declared Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre the patroness of Cuba by a decree signed on the tenth of May 1916, and her feast was fixed on the eighth of September. The documented honors that followed are precise, and unlike the finding they admit no dispute. The image received a canonical coronation on the twentieth of December 1936, under Pope Pius XI, during a Eucharistic congress at Santiago de Cuba. The present basilica on the hill was raised in the 1920s — the sanctuary built and dedicated in 1926 and 1927 — and Pope Paul VI granted it the rank of minor basilica on the twenty-second of December 1977.

Three popes have since climbed to her. John Paul II came in January 1998, in the first papal visit the island had seen, and on the twenty-fourth of that month crowned the image Queen and Patroness of Cuba. Benedict XVI came in March 2012, on the four-hundredth year of the finding, and presented the shrine the Golden Rose. Francis celebrated Mass before her on the twenty-second of September 2015. Each visit was a national event, and each turned on the same small figure the cobreros had carried up the hill three centuries before — a Black Virgin from a slave village, become the sign under which Cubans of every kind, at home and in exile, recognize one another.

The front of the shrine the pilgrims climb toward — the basilica of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, the holiest Marian sanctuary in Cuba and, for the santeros, the seat of Ochún. Photograph by Escla, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The hill today

The shrine has outlasted more than one attempt to quiet it. After 1959 the Revolution’s decades of official atheism pressed on all the island’s faiths; public devotion thinned, the great pilgrimages shrank, and the santeros served their orishas out of the eye of the state. The guarded reopening of the 1990s — the lean years the government called the Special Period — restored the processions and the climb, and brought with them religious tourism and a market in the sacred that are their own kind of pressure on a holy place. Through the suppression and the reopening alike the eighth of September has been kept. The road still fills with pilgrims in yellow, some walking the last stretch on their knees, some leaving crutches and photographs and tokens at the Virgin’s feet, some carrying honey to a river the same day and for the same golden woman. It is one of the island’s great pilgrim roads, kept as the road to San Lázaro at El Rincón is kept and as the crossing to the black Virgin of Regla over the Havana bay is kept, each hill and each shore holding a Catholic saint and an orisha at once.

One thing must be named and refused. For two centuries the Cuban orisha religion has been slandered from outside as brujería, as “voodoo,” as “black magic” and “Satanism,” and its rites sensationalized into lurid copy. At El Cobre that flattening takes a gentler, commercial form — the yellow-souvenir Virgin, the pilgrimage worked into a photo-stop — but the older brujería slander behind it was a weapon against the faith, not a description of it. That even Fernando Ortiz, who named the very process of transculturación that made a Yoruba river-orisha Cuban, once trafficked in the brujería trope is a caution the account of the Afro-Cubans takes up in full. The living record refuses the slander. El Cobre is served today, in the present tense, as the seat of Charity and of Ochún at once — a shrine over a copper-mining slavery whose freed cobreros made this Virgin theirs, and a hill where two of the island’s faiths keep the same feast without either canceling the other. The pilgrims who climb it in September are not confused about who waits at the top. They know exactly, and they call her, without having to choose, Cachita.

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