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Cachita's Streets
The Virgin of Charity, Race, and Revolution in Cuba
By Jalane D. Schmidt Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7531-9
CHAPTER 1
From Foundling to Intercessor
OUR LADY HELP OF SLAVES
This declarant said that when he was ten years old, he went, in the company of Rodrigo de Joyos and Juan de Joyos, two Indian brothers, to collect salt, having been in Key Franses in the middle of the Bay of Nipe for a long time en route to the Salt Mine. It was morning and the sea was calm when they left Key Franses before sunrise on board a canoe bound for the salt mine. In the distance beyond Key Franses they saw something white on the foam of the water but they could not distinguish what it was. As they approached, it appeared to be a bird, and as they got closer, the Indians said that it looked like a girl. Upon consideration, they recognized and saw the Image of Our Lady of the Most Holy Virgin with a Baby Jesus in her arms upon a small platform with large letters that Rodrigo de Hoyos read and which said "I am the Virgin of Charity."
— Portuondo Zúñiga 1995
On April 1, 1687, Juan Moreno, an eighty-five-year-old enslaved black creole ("Negro esclauo natural desta dho Lugar"), one of the original three individuals who found the effigy of the Virgin of Charity, gave a deposition to officials of the Catholic Church in Santiago de Cuba in which he "affirmed as a Christian" his testimony about his participation in the maritime finding (hallazgo) of the Virgin's image floating on ocean waters seventy-five years earlier. The clerics who transcribed Moreno's testimony, as, in their terms, a faithful "verbo ad verbum" (word for word) copy of his deposition, described the event as an "Aparicion" — the more commonly recorded Marian apparition phenomena in which an ephemeral Virgin is reported to have appeared to and even spoken with select seers. But Moreno himself described seeing "a white thing," retrieving an actual object, and as "having found (hallado) Our Lady of Charity." Continuing his account, Moreno said that shortly after the effigy of the Virgin of Charity arrived in El Cobre, the Virgin made known, by the miraculous illumination of three lights shining from on high on three successive nights, that she preferred for her shrine to be located on Mine Hill. From her shrine on the hill next to the residences of the village's enslaved miners, she dispensed miracles to her devotees, a number of whom, Moreno reported, journeyed from the nearby city of Santiago de Cuba, and even from Bayamo, some eighty miles away.
The Virgin of Charity was not always a national icon in Cuba (M. E. Díaz 2000b). Beginning in the early seventeenth century, the Virgin of Charity was, rather, the object of a regional cult in Cuba's eastern province, Oriente. There she was initially venerated by Indians in the Hato (ranch) de Barajagua on the coast of the Bay of Nipe. Next, a small population of Indians, enslaved Africans, and their creole black and mulato (mixed Spanish and African) descendants in the small copper mining village of Santiago del Prado y Real de Minas del Cobre (hereafter El Cobre) insisted that the Virgin of Charity was their heavenly patron. Given these modest beginnings, by what avenues did the Virgin of Charity come to such prominence in Cuba?
In this chapter, I provide an overview of the spread of the cult of the Virgin of Charity (hereafter "the Virgin") within the colonial history, culture, and landscape of Oriente in order to situate the reader within the Virgin's milieu. The Virgin was found in Oriente, a region of Cuba that at the time boasted fewer streets or other signs of development than the rest of the island. Institutionalization of the Virgin's cult took place because of, and amid, processes of creolization in which devotees applied their own emerging local cultural forms — what El Cobre's first chaplain Onofre de Fonseca called and later Cubans still often term "inventions" — to their veneration of the Virgin.
National symbols, such as Cuba's patron saint, began as figures in local histories prior to their attainment of more representative national status. Like all historical narratives, these local histories have their attendant tensions and ambiguities that accompany the construction of social memory. These local idiosyncrasies may remain embedded in the interpretation of symbols, and influence the direction of future interpretation, or portions of certain local histories may be muted, and other versions brought to the fore in the service of revised national narratives. In the case of Cuba's Virgin of Charity, her initial relationship with enslaved devotees in eastern Cuba was formative to the early growth of the cult in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — a time during which Cobreros (residents of El Cobre) revolted on several occasions, fled to nearby mountains, and credited the Virgin's miraculous intercession for their eventual manumission in 1801, or almost ninety years prior to general abolition in Cuba. That is, after a slave helped to find and to rescue Our Lady of Charity, the slaves then appealed to their foundling intercessor, who ultimately rescued them. But for much of the history of the cult, as historian María Elena Díaz (2000b) has noted, this signature relationship between the Virgin of Charity and her enslaved devotees in El Cobre has remained little known outside the immediate region and among select historians.
In the paucity of information that circulates about the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century origins of the Virgin's cult, anachronistic ideas have been inserted. Since the 1930s publication of Cuban ethnographic investigations of Afro-Cuban religions, followed by postrevolutionary "folklore" studies of the 1960s, and the further objectification and distillation of "popular culture" in the development of the tourism industry since the 1990s, when the Virgin of Charity and black Cubans are mentioned together, the link between this Marian figure and Cuba's black population is focused upon Regla de Ocha practitioners' devotion to an oricha named Ochún. But this cult to the Virgin of Charity in her Regla de Ocha camino (road, avatar, or expression) emerged among primarily free urban blacks in Lucumí cabildos (lay mutual aid and devotional societies) in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Havana and Matanzas — centuries after the seventeenth-century development of the Marian cult among Congo/Angolan and creole blacks in faraway rural Oriente under discussion here. For the colonial epoch being considered in this chapter, we must dispense with the anachronistic notion that the Cobreros' Marian devotion was, in whole or even in part, directed toward the Lucumí oricha Ochún (cf. Benítez-Rojo 1996, 15).
That the attention commanded by this comparatively recent Regla de Ocha version of some Cuban blacks' devotion to the Virgin of Charity — established principally among free urban blacks in western Cuba — would supplant the knowledge of the original black creole Marian devotion developed in rural eastern Cuba by El Cobre's enslaved miners during their revolts, cimarronaje (life as escaped slaves), and struggle for abolition speaks volumes about the dominance of sugar cultivation in the Cuban economy, the concomitant ascendance of Cuba's western region and devaluation of Oriente, and the resulting historical and ethnographic studies conducted exclusively in Havana and Matanzas that have served to consolidate preferred national narratives.
This book, in part, proposes a revised consideration of black religious practice. In the early seventeenth century, some Cobreros appeared to "invoke Africa as a horizon of memory, authenticity, and sacred authority," to use Paul Christopher Johnson's definition for African diaspora religions (2007, 53–54). For instance, one enslaved Angolan man in seventeenth-century El Cobre, who had apparently occupied a more socially elevated position in his native Central West Africa, insisted that he be called "King." But as a small, relatively stable population of Cuban-born bondsmen and women in El Cobre received no significant new imports of enslaved Africans between 1670 and 1830, Cobreros became more apt to invoke the Virgin of Charity to define their "horizon of memory, authenticity, and sacred authority." Rather than being the "crypto-religious" (Robbins 2011) keepers of African religious secrets more often sought, studied, and celebrated by ethnographers and other scholars of the Black Atlantic, extant archival sources suggest that seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Cobreros were practitioners of a popular form of Roman Catholicism that appealed to the Virgin, qua Mary mother of Jesus Christ, for assistance in their condition as slaves of the Spanish Crown in an isolated rural mining community in Oriente. Of course, as María Elena Díaz has noted, this does not preclude the possibility that Cobreros "in those early centuries did not create their own eclectic and informal beliefs and practices alongside those of a popular Christianity, itself full of miracles and magic and spectacle ... [and] ... cultivate a hybridized identification with certain creolized African practices" (2000a, 22).
But what is clear is that, as the seventeenth century continued and fewer of the slaves who were African born (bozales) remained, more Cobreros adopted Spanish surnames and described themselves as criollos, which is to say, born in Cuba. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century population figures from the town bear out the Cobreros' ethnic self- description. From 1620 to 1677, the enslaved population in El Cobre was stable, at around three hundred individuals. Since the Crown did not purchase new slaves again until 1830, there was no influx of newly arrived Africans for 160 years, meaning "the expansion of [El Cobre's] slave population ... was due exclusively to natural increase," such that by the late eighteenth century, some 80 percent of slaves were classified as racially mixed (M. E. Díaz 2000a, 32–33, 38–40, 327–28; Portuondo Zúñiga 1995, 190). Such were the demographic terms that impacted Cobreros' Marian devotion from the early seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries.
In the mid-twentieth century, ethnographers of the African diaspora sought to document phenomena that are said to represent "specifiable 'African' meanings" (Palmié 1993, 348). In the case of earlier twentieth-century ethnographers who examined the religions of peoples of African descent (Bastide 1978; Herskovits 1937), this quest often entailed the attribution of African ethnic origins to specific New World religious forms and practices that emerged in ethnically linked cabildos. Ethnographers have now largely abandoned their discipline's former diffusionist search for discrete African ethnic origins (cf. Barnet 1995) or source cultures (what Herskovits called "baselines"), to instead examine and model the ethnohistorical processes by which cultural and religious change occurred among African-descended populations of the New World.
Stephan Palmié (1993) has identified two complementary models for conceptualizing African American cultures: his own model of New World "ethnogenesis," and Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price's ([1976] 1992) "rapid creolization" model. Owing to their residence in coastal cosmopolitan urban settings — such as the western Cuban cities of Havana and Matanzas — where they enjoyed greater mobility, enslaved and free black nación members were able to form institutions that allowed them to reconstitute and reformulate the markers of African ethnic identity in a New World ethnogenetic process. But another complementary, albeit less celebrated, "creole" model of "Afro-American societalization and culture-building" (Palmié 1993, 348) has been too often overlooked by scholars of African American studies and religions.
Oriente's religious forms, typified by devotion to the Virgin of Charity and spirit mediumship practices, offer such "creole" models of societalization, which, in terms of their structure and content, share more characteristics with other British Caribbean locales and are arguably more widespread than the vaunted models of African diaspora religions found and reified in coastal locales such as Havana and Matanzas, or Salvador, Bahia, for that matter (Palmié 1993, 356n35). The institutionalization — that is, its power to reproduce and propagate itself across time — in Oriente of the cult of the Virgin of Charity was due to local creole inventions, as well as a combination with other inter-Caribbean ingredients that gained the attention of clerical audiences amid the Crown's presence, over a period of centuries, in a manner that other saints' devotions and Marian advocations in Cuba did not enjoy.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the cult of the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre was simply one miraculous saint and shrine among many in Cuba (M. E. Díaz 2000a, 123–25). Given the rusticity of this frontier region of Cuba's remote Oriente department and the low social status of her primary devotees, the Virgin of Charity was an unlikely Marian advocation to achieve island-wide prominence. The initial emergence and institutionalization of El Cobre's signature religious devotion beyond its immediate region can in part be credited to the influence of inter-Caribbean migration to Oriente — the raw ingredients of creolization processes that are so celebrated in the region. A careful ethnohistorical study of El Cobre should caution us against romanticizing creolization as "collective memory" that unifies or harmonizes formerly disparate elements, since this process of cultural and religious reformulation occurred within relationships of unequal power.
In the case of the institutionalization of the Virgin's cult, however, there existed some confluence between "popular" and "official" efforts, which in any case should not be neatly bifurcated. By examining the early seventeenth-century history of the finding of the Virgin's image in the Bay of Nipe, and ensuing processions from the Hato de Barajagua to El Cobre and within the village there, we will see a phenomenon that became a pattern in subsequent centuries: Authorities regarded low-status devotees' local devotions to the Virgin with cautious approval, while wishing to exercise a guiding hand to promote orthopraxis. Thus authorities commandeered public roadways for devotional purposes as street processions became powerful avenues of legitimization meant to normalize and institutionalize the cult.
The "Three Juans"
The official version of Cuba's Marian apparition is the 1687 notarized oral testimony — a portion of which appears as this chapter's epigraph — of the youngest of the three discoverers of the Virgin's effigy. Several features of this account are noteworthy. First, as the anthropologist Michael Taussig has noted with respect to the popular hagiographies of Latin American saints and Virgins, Marian apparition myths that include Indian seers often illuminate "focal points in social history, points charged with the messianic time of persecution and salvation of the moral community." It is "the magic of the Indian — pagan, militant, anti- Christ obstacle to the gold of the wilderness — [which] sets the Virgin on her redemptive course" ([1987] 1991, 197). In the Cuban case, the legendary 1612 finding of the image of the Virgin of Charity by two indigenous men and an enslaved black boy grants supernatural favor to those who were forced to labor in the royal copper mines of Cuba's eastern frontier for the profit of the Spanish metropole. The Virgin was not reported to have been introduced by foreign missionaries eager to convert colonial underlings, but rather found at sea by these very subalterns, on undulating water removed from land and established ecclesial structures.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cachita's Streets by Jalane D. Schmidt. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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