Basilica of Our Lady of Charity, El Cobre

El Cobre takes its name from copper, the ore that was mined there under Spanish colonial rule using, for much of the mine's history, enslaved and free Black laborers, a workforce whose descendants would go on to shape the very devotion the village is now known for. The shrine's founding story is a fisherman's story rather than a miner's: around 1608, three men out on the Bay of Nipe, two indigenous brothers and an enslaved boy named Juan Moreno by most tellings, are said to have found a small wooden image of the Virgin floating on a board, dry despite the water around it, and carried it back to shore. What grew from that image over the following centuries was shaped as much by who was carrying it as by the miracle itself. Cuban soldiers wounded in the wars for independence from Spain petitioned Rome to make the Virgin their national patroness, which Pope Benedict XV granted in 1916, and the church built for her on the hill above El Cobre in 1926, a rise once worked for the copper the town is named for, was raised to the rank of basilica by Pope Paul VI in 1977. That is the devotion's Catholic history, complete and independently sufficient to explain the shrine's national standing. It is not, however, the whole of what El Cobre means in Cuba. Santeria, the tradition that developed among enslaved Yoruba people and their descendants working sites very much like El Cobre's own mines, identifies the same image with Ochun, the orisha of rivers, love and gold, and does so without treating that identification as a a departure from Catholic devotion rather than a rival to it. A Cuban visiting El Cobre today may address the figure as the Virgin, as Ochun, or, as is true for a great many pilgrims, as both across the same visit, which is precisely why the shrine is described, across religious and political lines within Cuba, as belonging to the whole country rather than to one confession alone.