Cuba - Lonely Planet [349]
When planning your visit to this area, remember that the coastal road from Baconao to Guantánamo is closed to nonresidents.
Getting Around
Cubacar ( 68-63-63; Club Bucanero) has cars and mopeds. There’s also a branch at Los Corales.
The Servi-Cupet gas station (Complejo La Punta; 24hr) is 28km southeast of Santiago de Cuba.
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EL COBRE
The Basílica de Nuestra Señora del Cobre, high on a hill 20km northwest of Santiago de Cuba on the old road to Bayamo, is Cuba’s most sacred pilgrimage site. In Santería, La Virgen de la Caridad is associated with the beautiful orisha Ochún, the Yoruba goddess of love and dancing, who is represented by the color yellow. In the minds of many worshipers, devotion to the two religious figures is intertwined.
The copper mine at El Cobre has been active since pre-Columbian times and was once the oldest European-operated mine in the Western hemisphere (by 1530 the Spanish had a mine here). However, it was shut in 2000. Many young villagers, who previously worked in the mine, now work over tourists in the parking lot of the basilica, offering to ‘give’ you shiny but worthless chalcopyrite stones from the mine. You’ll find that a firm but polite ‘No, gracias!’ usually does the trick. The road to the basilica is lined with sellers of elaborate flower wreaths, intended as offerings to La Virgen, and hawkers of miniature ‘Cachitas,’ the popular name for The Virgin.
Sights
Stunning as it materializes above the village of El Cobre, the Basílica de Nuestra Señora del Cobre ( 6:30am-6pm) shimmers against the verdant hills behind. Apart from during Mass (8am except on Wednesday, with additional Sunday services at 10am and 4:30pm), La Virgen lives in a small chapel above the visitors center on the side of the basilica. To see her, take the stairs on either side of the entry door. For such a powerful entity, she’s amazingly diminutive, some 40cm from crown to the hem of her golden robe. Check out the fine Cuban coat of arms in the center; it’s an amazing work of embroidery. During Mass, Nuestra Señora de la Caridad faces the congregation from atop the altar inside the basilica.
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ASK A LOCAL
The Virgen of El Cobre is known as ‘Cachita’ in Cuba and holds an intense spiritual power over the people. Legend says the statue was first found floating in the Bahía de Nipe by three fishermen caught in a storm in the early 1600s. The fishermen survived and brought the virgin back to El Cobre where she became a venerated figure.
Yarelis, El Cobre
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The ‘room of miracles’ downstairs in the visitors center contains thousands of offerings giving thanks for favors bestowed by the virgin. Clumps of hair, a TV, a thesis, a tangle of stethoscopes, a raft and inner-tube sculpture (suggesting they made it across the Florida Straits safely) and floor-to-ceiling clusters of teeny metal body parts crowd the room. The most notable is a small golden guerrilla fighter donated by Lina Ruz, Fidel Castro’s mother, to protect her son during his Sierra Maestra campaign against Batista. Until 1986, the 1954 Nobel Prize won by Ernest Hemingway for his novel The Old Man and the Sea was also on display, but in that year a visitor smashed the showcase’s glass and carried the medal off. The police recovered the medal two days later, but it has since been kept in a vault, out of sight and reach.
Follow the signs through the town of El Cobre to the Monumento al Cimarrón. A 10-minute hike up a stone staircase brings you to this anthropomorphic sculpture commemorating the 17th-century copper-mine slave revolt. The views are superb from up here; walk to the far side of the sculpture for a vista of copper-colored