The Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre and Cuban national identity

This dissertation maps a cultural and ideological history of Cuba from the 1830s to the 1940s through a close reading of literary depictions of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, Cuba\u27s patron saint. My aim is to demonstrate that the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre serves as a repository of history that captures competing discourses on Cuban national identity as founders of the Cuban nation struggled to envision differing versions of national identity. José Ramón Betancourt\u27s Una feria de la Virgen de la Caridad (1838) exposes the precariousness of the reformist position caught between annexation and separatism in the first half of the 19 th century. Later, when the Virgen appears in the war memoir A pie y descalzo (1891) by Ramón Roa, she signals to the anxiety experienced by Cuba\u27s revolutionary leadership toward black participation in the Ten Years War (1868–1878). In Nicolás Heredia\u27s Leonela (1893) the negative depiction of the Americanized John/Juan as “la Virgen del Cobre” places U.S. influence at the very heart of Cuba\u27s formation as a nation and problematizes the ideological position of many of the founders of the First Cuban Republic (1902–1933). A reading of Via crucis (1910, 1914) by Emilio Bacardí shows that the blind devotion of the Cuban masses to the Virgen del Cobre is associated by the author with the disavowal of blackness by both Spaniards and Cubans. For Bacardí this was the principal reason for the failure of the Ten Years War, and for the eventual demise of the newly formed Cuban Republic. Finally, I show how Luis Felipe Rodríguez\u27s Ciénaga (1937) criticizes the rising popularity of the Virgen del Cobre and presents the phenomenon as a symptom of the political lethargy of the Cuban masses and of Cuban intellectuals. Unlike Bacardí, Rodríguez proposes a solution to this inactivity by inviting readers of his fiction to “write” a new Cuba