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c h a p t e r s e v e n  Yéyé Cachita Ochún in a Cuban Mirror Joseph M. Murphy¡Ochún era en Yesá, decı́a ella, tan misericordiosa y accesible como en Cuba con el nombre de la Virgen de la Caridad! O .̀ s .un was in Ìjesa, she said, so compassionate and approachable like in Cuba with the name of the Virgin of Charity! —Iyalocha Ninı́ to Lydia Cabrera (Cabrera 1980: 69) Ninı́’s testimony to Lydia Cabrera about the Cuban name of O .̀ s .un reveals an extraordinary cultural resourcefulness and spiritual creativity. In crossing the waters of the Atlantic, O .̀ s .un’s devotees in Cuba encountered desperate challenges to their integrity and very survival. They responded by constructing a complex religious world in which O .̀ s .un could continue to protect and inspire them through a variety of new symbolic media appropriate to the new world in which they were exiled. They found in the image of La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre a means to represent O .̀ s .un in a number of social, cultural, and psychological contexts that extended her meaning and manifestations. This essay traces the history of the representation of O .̀ s .un as La Caridad del Cobre and explores the implications of such a strategy for understanding Osun in the Americas. I am arguing that the image of La Caridad del Cobre, while surely a mask that disguised O .̀ s .un’s worship from the police power of a brutal, slaveholding oligarchy, was also an innovative way to understand O .̀ s .un. La Caridad del Cobre is a “way” that O .̀ s .un is present to Cubans who come from an array of social, economic, and racial groups. A mask reveals as much as it conceals, and it is this dynamic simultaneity of inner and outer, African and Catholic, black and white, that informs my interpretation of O .̀ s .un’s reflection as La Caridad del Cobre. In order to see the sense and power of the representation of O .̀ s .un by a Catholic Virgin, it is important to see what La Caridad del Cobre represents. She is Cuba’s patron saint, identified with the self-image of Cubans as a people: in their suffering, longing, triumphs, and contradictions. When O .̀ s .un’s priestesses and priests chose to image O .̀ s .un through the island’s patroness they established a current of associations running between the two images of divine female power. The Yoruba chose La Caridad del Cobre to stand for O .̀ s .un and also to stand for themselves in the mosaic of Cuban history and society. It is worthwhile to explore the image of La Caridad del Cobre to see how it might reflect O .̀ s .un and present her to the Cuban people. * Long before sugar plantations extended over the island, the first wealth of Cuba was extracted from copper mines. In 1530 a large deposit of the mineral was discovered outside the eastern settlement of Santiago del Prado and was appropriately called Cerro del Cobre, “Copper Hill.” Native Tainos were the first laborers in the mines at Cobre, “recommended” to the backbreaking work by a colonial system of forced labor. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Spanish mine operators saw the advantages of African slaves, who were more resistant to European diseases and so devastatingly dispossessed that they had no alternative to the mines. In this environment of exploitation and toil, La Caridad makes her appearance . In a story known to every Cuban schoolchild, La Caridad appeared to three Cobre workers in a small canoe, caught offshore in a terrible storm in the Bay of Nipe. They prayed to the Virgin to save them, and in the miraculous calm that followed, they found resting on a floating plank a small statue of the Virgin. Carved in the plank were the words, Yo soy La Virgen de la Caridad, “I am the Virgin of Charity.” The testimony to this miracle comes from one of the men in the canoe, Juan Moreno, who in a deposition as an old man in 1687 recalled the events as taking place in 1611 or 1612.1 Moreno is characterized in the document as “un negro esclavo,” (a black slave) and “un esclavo del Rey” (a slave of the king). His companions are two brothers, Juan and Rodrigo de Hoyos, called “indios natuales del paı́s” (Indians...

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