The Three Juans and the Patroness of Cuba

The story of Our Lady of Charity begins on the water. Early in the seventeenth century, tradition holds, three workers, remembered as the three Juans, crossed the Bay of Nipe on Cuba's northern coast to gather salt and found a small statue of the Virgin and Child floating on a board, dry despite the waves, inscribed Yo soy la Virgen de la Caridad, I am the Virgin of Charity. The image was carried inland and eventually enshrined near the copper mines of El Cobre above Santiago de Cuba. There her devotion grew into something larger than any one community, embraced across the island's divisions of race, status, and region, and bound up with Cuban identity itself through wars of independence and exile.

Pope Benedict XV named her patroness of Cuba in 1916, and she was solemnly crowned in 1936; her sanctuary at El Cobre is Cuba's principal Marian shrine, and her feast on 8 September draws pilgrims from across the island and its diaspora. She is depicted as a small, richly robed Madonna above the three figures in their boat on a stormy sea.