Our Lady of Charity of Copper, Patroness of Cuba

“For charity comes from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” (1 John 4:7), “The love comes from God, and whoever loves is born of God and knows God.”

I. God is Love: The Fundamental Theological Test of Christianity

The First Letter of John offers the Church one of the most beautiful and decisive theological syntheses of the entire New Testament: “God is love. And whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4:16). This statement is not a poetic metaphor nor a devotional expression; it is the central confession of Christianity, formulated with the typical brevity of Johannine style. All Christian theology can be understood as a progressive unfolding of this single intuition. The Trinity is reciprocal love among Father, Son, and Spirit. Creation is overflowing love. Redemption is love that descends to the Cross. The Church is shared love among brothers. And it is precisely this theology of love as charity, as a free gift received and given, that the Marian title “Our Lady of Charity” inscribes at the heart of Catholic faith. When colonial Cuba, in the 17th century, found in the waters of Nipe Bay a small Marian image with the inscription “I am the Virgin of Charity,” it received as a gift a theological synthesis that would span subsequent centuries of Cuban history: love is the only definitive identity.

II. The Three Johns and the Discovery of the Virgin in the Waters of Nipe Bay

In 1612, early one May morning, three young men set sail from northern Cuba’s coast in a small boat to gather salt for workers at El Cobre copper mines near Santiago. They were two indigenous Taíno brothers, Rodrigo and Juan de Hoyos, and an African slave boy of about ten years old, Juan Moreno. Cuban history affectionately dubbed them “los tres Juanes.” At Nipe Bay, after a stormy night, they spotted a white object floating on the waves. They drew closer and discovered, to their astonishment, that it was an image of the Virgin Mary carved in white with a blue cloak, holding the Baby Jesus in her arms, affixed to a wooden board with the Spanish inscription: “I am the Virgin of Charity.” The image arrived dry, without any sign of having been submerged in the turbulent waters. They took it to El Cobre. The Virgin was recognized as Cuba’s patroness by Pope Benedict XV in 1916, in response to a petition from Cuban independence war veterans. Pope John Paul II canonically crowned her in 1998 during his historic visit to Cuba. The ethnic composition of the three visionaries—two Taínos and one African—from the outset gave the devotion a decisive symbolic dimension for Cuban identity: the Virgin of Charity is the Mother who chose to manifest herself at once to descendants of the three peoples that would make up the Cuban nation, demonstrating that her motherhood knows no ethnic boundaries nor social hierarchies.

III. At the Cross: Charity that Withstands the Darkest Hour

The Gospel of John accompanying this celebration places us at Calvary, in the moment when Christ’s charity attains its most radical historical expression and Mary is present as a silent cooperator in the mystery. “Jesus’ mother and his sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene were standing near the cross. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple he loved standing there, he said to his mother: ‘Woman, behold your son.’ Then he said to the disciple: ‘Behold, your mother'” (Jn 19:25-27). The charity manifested here has three characteristics that Cuban Marian theology recognized without difficulty: it is a charity that remains in the most difficult moment (Mary did not flee like the other disciples), it is a charity that is transmitted through spiritual generation (Mary is given as a mother to a disciple), and it is a charity that unites the different (the community at the foot of the Cross is heterogeneous, with various women from diverse origins and a single disciple). All theology of the Virgin of Charity of Cobre converges to this foundational scene: true love remains, is transmitted, and unifies.

IV. La Cachita and Cuban Marian Theology of National Identity

The Virgin of Charity of Cobre, affectionately known by the Cuban people as “Cachita,” represents a paradigmatic case in Hispanic-American Mariology of how a national devotion can become an identity category for a people. In Cuba divided by slavery for nearly four centuries, followed by independence wars, then massive exile in the 20th century, and later political polarization, the Virgin of Charity became a convergence point for Cubans from the most diverse positions. Ernest Hemingway, upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, offered the medal to the Virgin of Cobre, placing it in the sanctuary as a sign that the Cuban soul, of which he felt an adoptive part, found its deepest spiritual reference there. The Second Vatican Council recognized that the Church “embraces many popular traditions and cultural forms that give concrete richness to Catholic faith” (cf. Sacrosanctum Concilium, 37-38). The Virgin of Cobre is the Cuban form of this richness: a Mariology in which Mary’s love transcended the boundaries imposed by history and became the cement of a national identity that, divided on everything, finds unity when it looks at that small image recovered from the waters of Nipe over four centuries ago.