Book ReviewsCachita’s Streets: The Virgin of Charity, Race, and Revolution in Cuba

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.14.1.0177
• Pages: 177376-180
• Published date: 05 July 2022
• Date: 05 July 2022
• Author: Gary Prevost

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BOOK REVIEWS

Jalane D. Schmidt, Cachita’s Streets: The Virgin of Charity, Race, and

Revolution in Cuba, Duke University Press, 2015. Pbk. 376pp. ISBN: 978–

0822359371

Reviewed by Gary Prevost1

Cachita’s Streets: The Virgin of Charity, Race,and Religion in Cuba by Jalene

Schmidt makes an important contribution to our understanding of both race and

religion in Cuba over a 400-year span of time. The study is based on extensive

archival work and contemporary field research by the author who is a professor

religious studies at the University of Virginia. The focal point of her study is the

patron saint of Cuba, the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre, also called Cachita. The

emphasis of her book is how diverse groups of Cubans – indigenous Tainos,

African slaves, Spanish colonial officials, Cuban independence soldiers, Catholic

authorities and laypeople, practitioners of African-based religions, and

Communist Party officials – have constructed and disputed the meanings of the

Virgin. By analysing these groups over time the author is particularly successful

in giving us a framework for understanding the dynamics of both religion and

race in modern Cuba. These topics are well covered in other scholarly works,

including John Kirk’s Between God and Party: Religion and Politics in

Revolutionary Cuba (University of Florida Press) and Esteban Morales’s Essays

on Race in Cuba (Monthly Review Press), but Schmidt’s focus on the struggles

over the Virgin of Charity provide a window into the intersectionality of religion

and race not previously studied.

As noted in the title, Cachita’s Streets, the author gives particular attention to

the occasions from 1936 to 2012 when the original brown-skinned effigy was

removed from her national shrine in El Cobre, a predominately black and mixed-

race village in eastern Cuba, and paraded through the streets. Among other

aspects Schmidt compares these public occasions to other public events occur-

ring in a similar time frame to tell the history of modern Cuba both before and

after the Revolution.

A recurring theme in Schmidt’s book is the complicated relationship in Cuba

between race and religion and the tension that exists down to the present time

1 Gary Prevost is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Latin American Studies at

the College of St Benedict and St John’s University (Minnesota).

DOI:10.13169/intejcubastud.14.1.0177