In the photo I am a two-year-old in front of the basilica of the Virgin of Charity, La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, the patroness of Cuba, herself representing the merging of Spanish, African, and Taíno religious icons. My hair is tied back in braids ending in two large bows. I’m dressed to the nines, in a white dress embroidered at the chest with a Chinese pagoda. My face wears an insecure smile as I hold onto my mother’s skirt. She has her left arm around my shoulders, her right one holds my baby sister Alicia.
My grandmother stands next to us. Mami is fashionably dressed according to early 1950s style, a tailored outfit with shoulder pads and a pleated skirt. Abuela, as usual, wears linen, a jacket with short sleeves to deal with the high temperatures of the Oriente province, and a straight skirt. Mami’s hair is parted on the left side and falls freely just below her ears; Abuela’s is braided on top of her head. Mami smiles, Abuela wears a severe look.
We had all come to the basilica and had our photograph taken standing at the top of the staircase leading up to the church. The church stands atop a very high hill, and from that vantage point, you can see the range of the Sierra Maestra in its vast expanse. Mami had experienced difficulties during her pregnancy with my sister Ali and Abuela had made a promise that if the baby was born safe and sound, the three of us would go thank la Virgencita, the Little Virgin. Mami and Papi had married in their thirties, I was born when Mami was 38; Ali when she was 40. I don’t know what her complications of the pregnancy were, but Mami had to have cesarean sections for each of our births. Ali was born in October of 1950, and so that photo had to be taken late in the year. And there we were, frozen by the frame most likely taken by my father who never went anywhere without a camera. The image captures the moment when I may have begun to realize that I had to share Mami with someone else. After all, this was an important trip, and it was dedicated to the healthy birth of my sister. Throughout the years I had always wanted to return to La Caridad del Cobre to reenact that stance in front of the basilica.
And so, when on my second trip back to Cuba after having left at age thirteen because of Fidel, our organized tour of Santiago de Cuba gave us a free day, some of us decided to hire a taxi and go to El Cobre, the town that was built in the sixteenth century to mine copper, the town where supposedly three fishermen–one white, one black, one Taíno–had lost their way at sea and the Virgencita parted the clouded heavens and led them to safety. The basilica had been built in 1927 to honor that event. We formed a group of four on our pilgrimage to El Cobre. Tania, an Afro-Cuban composer went to visit the black virgin; Peter, a photographer from New York was there to record our visit; and Tim, a musician from New Jersey went just for the ride.
During lunch the previous day I had shown the group pictures of my daughter Rachel and of my paternal cousin Raúl and his wife Carmen who had migrated to Spain but now were living in Miami. Tania couldn’t believe her eyes and exclaimed, “This is my godfather Paderewski! He told me to look for a woman with perfect skin! It’s you!”
Raúl and Carmen had befriended Tania during the time she was struggling to become a pianist in Havana. They had a piano in their apartment, and that’s where Tania practiced on a daily basis. Tania had also visited with them in Miami prior to her departure for Cuba. We had both been told to look for each other, but in the excitement of the trip neither of us had done so. From then on, Tania and I would go everywhere together, and Peter and Tim would tag along. On the way to El Cobre by taxi, Tim took a nap with his head on my shoulder while I fixated on the dark green foliage covering the hills leading to El Cobre.
La Caridad del Cobre rises across from the southern mountain range in the south of Oriente province. On a clear day, its pink coral façade makes a sharp contrast against the green mountains and the brightest of blues. Once at the top of the hill, one must climb a broad set of marble steps up to the back entrance. Once inside, visitors are immersed in the strong perfume of flowers crowded into myriad small vases placed on tables provided by the church for that purpose. The Virgin stands inside a glass case atop the altar. She’s black and wears a golden yellow robe and crown. Her body is made of wood, carved by the Taíno fisherman to recall his own deity. The dress is much like that worn by the infanta, the daughter of the King of Spain immortalized by Velásquez in his famous painting of The Ladies in Waiting, Las Meninas. The Virgin wears yellow, signifying the color of the Yoruba deity Ochún, who represents sensuality and charm. The statue can be rotated on an axis to allow her to face the congregation during mass; otherwise, she faces the back of the church to greet entering visitors. To the right of the virgin stands the national coat of arms with white and blue stripes on the left half, the royal palms on the right and above, a golden key, representing the importance of the island of Cuba as the gate to the Caribbean. To the Virgin’s left, stands a large Cuban flag, a red triangle with a while star, and six blue and white stripes, one for each province of the original republic.
El Cobre has been the destination of countless pilgrims who pray in gratitude, leave offerings, and bring petitions. On large rectangular tables the faithful have placed small religious and large military medals; someone has left a bit of earth in an amber bottle; even Fidel’s mother left an offering after he came down triumphant from the Sierra Maestra in early 1959. Several glass cases enclose more valuable objects, pieces of jewelry, rosaries. On the walls hang crutches presumably left by those miraculously healed. El Cobre represents fertile ground for the Cuban imagination, a place where symbols of religion, history, literature, and film converge and cohabit. There is, for example, an empty space in one of the locked containers. It bears a note attesting to the fact that Ernest Hemingway had left his 1954 Noble Prize medal, which was subsequently stolen. Tim, a great fan of Hemingway, had asked the locals for all the details of the theft and learned that at first the medal had not yet been found in spite of the fact that the robbers were apprehended quickly. They had thought that the medal was solid gold and were going to melt it and sell gold nuggets so that the theft would be hard to trace. And that was the police’s worry–to find those implicated by the robbery before they melted the medallion and found out that it was not solid gold. When the police eventually retrieved the medal, they gave it to the Bishop at El Cobre for safekeeping until a decision could be made about its future location. A group of filmmakers had made a short film about the incident called Operation Thunder.
By now, our impatient taxi cab driver beeped incessantly. Tania and the others were outside bargaining with young boys who sold bits of copper ore to the tourists. The old woman who had taken us on a tour of the church offered me hers and I gave her a tip for sharing all her stories about the place. I hurried around the altar and went down into one the pews. The church was now deserted, votive candles shed a warming light, and I couldn’t help but kneel facing the altar. In Camagüey, the city where I grew up, I was used to enjoying the quiet and the coolness found in colonial churches. As I prayed a Hail Mary in my mind, I heard someone’s padding footsteps off to the side, then the click of a camera. Peter could not resist the temptation of stealing my image during my moment of solitude. He thought I wouldn’t hear his sneakers on the polished marble floors. Even though I knew he was there, I let him take the photograph. I closed my eyes, bent my head, and allowed him to turn me into the object of his representation, bringing back for me the memory of my father who had photographed his growing family thirty years prior to my visit in the late eighties.
Long before we carried smart phones to record every supposed significant moment of our lives, we relied on snapshots to derive meaning from moments in our pasts. At least in my family, the album with black pages full of photos framed by silver corners seemed to create a narrative of both time and place. Why is the photographic image of my grandmother, my mother, my sister and I in front of El Cobre so significant? What does it record that I should return to it so insistently decades later?
The image that my father captured in the photograph is that of three generations of women drawing a line of matriarchs beginning with my Abuela Luz who widowed early and raised eight children, followed by my mother Flora who chose a teaching career before marrying and having two daughters, and ending with my sister and I, who like Mami before us, devoted ourselves to service professions (teaching and social work), but also chose to be mothers. Clearly the snapshot emphasizes continuity, but given the experience of my sister and me in the Cuba of the 1960s, it would also come to signify rupture and loss.
In January of 1962, as part of Operation Pedro Pan, my sister Ali, then eleven, and I, then thirteen, embarked on a journey away from family, language and culture, a journey that my parents believed would save us from becoming adults in the first land ruled by a Marxist-Leninist ideology. Ali and I would become adults, professionals and mothers far away from the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, precisely the same landscape where Fidel Castro rose against Batista, and the landscape where La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre embraced the Spanish, the African and Taíno cultures that came to signify Cubanness.
When as a mother in my late twenties, living in the New England states and unsure of my own identity, I made the decision to travel back to Cuba to confront the losses I had incurred in the 1960s. And what better way than to gaze into the eyes of the little girl confronted with the loss of her mother’s lap, yet secure in her love? Photographs have a way of transporting us back in time and rooting us in a specific place. When in 1987 I returned to El Cobre, I could stand in the same place Abuela, Mami, Ali and I had occupied in October of 1950. By doing so, I could recall the ties that bound the women in our family. The narrative that the photograph depicts tells a very specific family story, yet, because of the place it was taken, it also had the virtue of returning me to a historical time that signified rupture from everything I had known until 1962. By returning to El Cobre, by walking in the basilica and standing before La Virgen de la Caridad, I was also able to recover my Cuban identity represented in all its religious, national, and cultural symbols, an identity that I could then internalize even as I, again, left the island to build a family in the United States.
When my parents left Cuba to be reunited with my sister and me, they could bring precious little. My father insisted on bringing the family album. Now I understand why.