Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, patroness of Cuba

By Prof. Dr. Daniel C. Afonso · Updated 20 October 2026

“Quoniam caritas ex Deo est, et omnis qui diligit ex Deo natus est, et cognoscit Deum” (1 Jn 4:7), “Love comes from God, and everyone who 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 most decisive theological syntheses in the whole New Testament: “God is love. And whoever abides in love abides in God, and God in him” (1 Jn 4:16). This affirmation is neither a poetic metaphor nor a devotional expression: it is the central confession of Christianity, formulated with the brevity typical of the Johannine style. All Christian theology can be understood as the progressive unfolding of this single insight. The Trinity is reciprocal love between Father, Son, and Spirit. Creation is love that overflows. Redemption is love that descends to the Cross. The Church is love shared among the brethren. And it is precisely this theology of love as charity, as a free gift received and given, that the Marian title of “Our Lady of Charity” inscribes at the heart of the Catholic faith. When colonial Cuba, in the seventeenth century, found in the waters of the Bay of Nipe a small Marian image with the tablet “I am the Virgin of Charity,” it received as a gift a theological synthesis that would run through the following centuries of Cuban national history: love is the only definitive identity.

II. The three Juans and the finding of the Virgin in the waters of the Bay of Nipe

In 1612, early in the morning of a day in May, three young men set out in a small boat from the northern coast of Cuba in search of salt for the workers of the copper mines of El Cobre, near Santiago. They were two indigenous Taíno brothers, Rodrigo and Juan de Hoyos, and an African slave boy about ten years old, Juan Moreno. Cuban history has affectionately christened them “los tres Juanes.” In the Bay of Nipe, after a night of storm, they saw a small white object floating on the waves. They drew near and discovered, to their astonishment, that it was a carved image of the Virgin Mary, dressed in white with a blue mantle, holding the Child Jesus in her arms, and fastened to a small wooden board with the inscription in Spanish: “Yo soy la Virgen de la Caridad.” The image came to them dry, with no sign of having been submerged in the turbulent waters. They took it to El Cobre. The Virgin was recognized as Patroness of Cuba by Pope Benedict XV in 1916, in response to a petition from the veterans of the Cuban war of independence. Pope John Paul II crowned her canonically in 1998, during his historic visit to Cuba. The ethnic composition of the three young men, two indigenous and one African, gave the devotion from the very beginning a symbolic dimension decisive for Cuban identity: the Virgin of Charity is the Mother who chose to manifest herself at one and the same time to the descendants of the three peoples who would make up the Cuban nation, showing that her motherhood knows neither ethnic boundaries nor social hierarchies.

III. By the Cross: the charity that withstands the darkest hour

The Gospel of John that accompanies this celebration places us on Calvary, at the moment when the charity of Christ reaches its most radical historical expression and when Mary is present as the silent cooperator in the mystery. “Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. Jesus, seeing his mother and near her the disciple whom he loved, said to his mother: Woman, behold your son. Then he said to the disciple: Behold your mother” (Jn 19:25-27). The charity that is manifested here has three characteristics that Cuban Marian theology perceived without difficulty: it is a charity that remains in the most difficult moment (Mary did not flee as the other disciples did), it is a charity that is handed on by spiritual generation (Mary is given as mother to a disciple), and it is a charity that unites those who differ (the community at the foot of the Cross is heterogeneous, several women of diverse origins and a single disciple). The whole theology of the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre converges on this founding scene: true love remains, is handed on, and unites.

IV. La Cachita and the Marian theology of Caribbean national identity

The Virgin of Charity of El Cobre, known to the Cuban people by the affectionate name of “Cachita,” represents a paradigmatic case in Spanish-American Mariology of how a national devotion can become a category of identity for a people. In a Cuba divided by slavery for almost four centuries, then by the wars of independence, then by the mass exile of the twentieth century, then by political polarization, the Virgin of Charity became a point of convergence for Cubans of the most diverse positions. Ernest Hemingway, on receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, offered the medal to the Virgin of El Cobre, depositing it in the shrine as a sign that the Cuban soul, of which he felt himself an adoptive part, found there its deepest spiritual reference. The Second Vatican Council recognized that the Church “embraces many popular traditions and cultural forms that give the Catholic faith its concrete richness” (cf. Sacrosanctum Concilium, 37-38). The Virgin of El Cobre is the Cuban form of this richness: a Mariology in which Mary’s love crossed the boundaries imposed by history and became the mortar of a national identity that, divided in everything, finds itself united when it looks upon that small image which three young men recovered from the waters of Nipe more than four centuries ago.