A Shrine Built Facing South, Toward the Island It Mourns

The Ermita de la Caridad, the National Shrine of Our Lady of Charity on the shore of Biscayne Bay in Miami, was built in 1973 with donations raised almost entirely from within Miami's Cuban exile community, more than a decade after Fidel Castro's revolution sent Cuban Catholics fleeing to South Florida in the numbers that reshaped the city after 1959. The shrine's conical shape and its altar were deliberately oriented to face south, toward Cuba, so that worshippers praying to the patroness of Cuba, whose devotion dates in Cuban Catholic tradition to a seventeenth century apparition near Santiago, would be facing the island most of them could not return to. It functions less as an ordinary parish than as a devotional and civic anchor for a displaced community, hosting the anniversary Masses and processions that keep a specific exile generation's religious memory organized around one site.

That transplanted Cuban Catholicism sits alongside a much older Spanish Catholic layer, St. Augustine's 1565 mission predating Jamestown and Plymouth by decades, and a newer Haitian one, Vodou practiced alongside Haitian Catholicism among Florida's Haitian immigrant communities. Evangelical Protestant and Catholic identification are tied at twenty two percent of adults each in Pew's 2023-24 study, Florida's growth having layered new religious geography over old rather than replacing it.