Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre

Around 1612, two Indigenous brothers, Rodrigo and Juan de Hoyos, and a young enslaved African boy, Juan Moreno, rowed out on the Bay of Nipe in eastern Cuba to collect salt. After a storm, they saw something floating on the calm water: a small statue of the Virgin holding the Child Jesus, fastened to a board inscribed "I am the Virgin of Charity." Remarkably, her clothes were dry.

The image was taken to the copper-mining village of El Cobre, near Santiago de Cuba, where devotion to her grew among enslaved people, mine workers and later the independence fighters. At the request of veterans of the War of Independence, Pope Benedict XV declared her Patroness of Cuba in 1916. Saint John Paul II crowned her in Santiago in 1998, and Popes Benedict XVI and Francis both prayed at her basilica.

On September 8 Cubans fill her basilica at El Cobre and parishes across the island with yellow flowers and processions. In Miami, the Ermita de la Caridad on Biscayne Bay, built by Cuban exiles and facing Cuba across the sea, welcomes thousands of pilgrims; a replica of her image brought from Cuba in 1961 is carried in procession, and the faithful sing her hymns late into the night.

Yellow, her color, appears on flowers, clothing and candles, and many Cuban families keep her image at home and wear her medal as a sign of faith and of love for their homeland.