By Frances Kerry
SANTUARIO DEL COBRE, Cuba (Reuters) - Locks of babies' hair, pictures of happily wedded couples, sporting trophies, a golfball-sized gallstone and a hand-written appeal for better times in Cuba are heaped together in a glass case.
They are the touching, sometimes bizarre tributes displayed at the shrine to the island's Roman Catholic patron, the Virgin of Charity of Cobre. Hundreds of people come every day from all over Cuba to the sanctuary 12 miles from the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba to pay homage to the Virgin, pray for help or leave some tribute in thanks for a favor granted.
"We ask for peace, health and spiritual tranquillity,'' said one pilgrim, a woman who traveled overnight on an aging bus with a parish group from the central city of Santa Clara. The highlight of their visit was a service in front of the statue of the Virgin on the upper floor of the shrine.
On Jan. 24, Pope John Paul II will crown the image of the Virgin of Cobre during a Mass in Santiago, 530 miles east of Havana, as part of his historic five-day visit to the communist-ruled island.
It will be an important moment for many Cubans, even those who are not practicing Catholics. The small image was crowned in 1936 by then Archbishop Valetin Zubizarreta after being declared Cuba's patron by Pope Benedict XV in 1916.
"Now it will it will be the real coronation, it is a great thing that it will be him who does it, the pope himself,'' said sister Ohelia Oliveiras, a nun who was distributing copies of St Mark's gospel at the entrance to the sanctuary. "The Antonio Maceo square (in Santiago) is going to be small given the number of people who will go to the Mass.''
Maceo, a hero of Cuba's wars of independence against Spain, is said to have paid tribute to the Virgin of Cobre before he left to take up the fight. Sometimes she is called the Virgin of the Mambises after the name of the 19th century independence fighters and is very much a symbol of Cuban nationalism.
According to the most popular history of the Virgin of Cobre, three boatmen discovered a floating wooden statue of the Virgin in 1606 in the Bay of Nipe in northeastern Cuba and brought it to El Cobre, a copper mining town. The present sanctuary was built in 1927.
The Virgin of Cobre is depicted as mulatto, making her attractive across Cuba's multihued racial spectrum. She also has an appeal beyond pure Catholicism as the Santeria deity Oshun, who is a maternal, sensual figure, a mistress of love, femininity and water.
Santeria, a religion of African origin, came to Cuba with the slaves who were brought there under Spanish colonialism. A process of mingling, "syncretism,'' has produced parallels between Santeria divinities or saints and the Catholic saints.
Whether inspired by revolutionary or Catholic faith, or neither, many Cubans have a sentimental attachment to the Virgin of Cobre. Historian Olga Portuondo wrote that after Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution crowds surged to the shrine to give thanks for the end of Fulgencio Bastista's dictatorship.
In her history of the Virgin of Cobre, Portuondo briefly sums up what followed: "Social tensions prompted many faithful to leave the Catholic Church. With the revolution, the people looked for the conquest of heaven on Earth.''
Not all the people put their faith in politics alone. At the sanctuary, visitors leave flowers, candles and other personal mementos. Couples give thanks for having granted them a child. Beside the huge gallstone is a note recounting its extraction. There are medals from sporting victories and numerous signed baseballs.
Soldiers of Castro's rebel army left tributes, as did Cuban ''internationalists'' after 1959 -- people who went abroad as soldiers, doctors or teachers to help spread Communist Cuba's revolutionary ideals.
American novelist Ernest Hemingway, who lived for years in Cuba, dedicated the medal of the Nobel Literature Prize he won in 1954, although it is no longer on display.
Devotees of the Virgin of Cobre also include Cubans who went abroad after the revolution. Exiles built their own shrine in Miami in the 1960s, and the display at El Cobre includes a photograph of two Cuban boat people standing next to a large picture of the Virgin of Cobre at Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in southeast Cuba in December 1994.
The two, giving thanks after their perilous journey in a raft over the Florida Strait, were among more than 20,000 boat people who were initially camped at the base after being picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard at sea during a mass exodus of Cuban boat people in August and September of 1994. The boat people were allowed to go to live in the United States in May 1995.
The appeal for change in Cuba, on display recently, was in a letter from a Spanish tourist, Jacobo Bergareche, who prayed that "poverty will end for this extraordinary country'' and said he hoped that when he returned to Cuba he would be treated "as a person, not just as a bearer of dollars.''
Three years ago an anonymous letter-writer, a 25-year-old medical student about to graduate, left a sad personal testimony to Cuba's economic crisis of the 1990s and one of its effects -- the resurgence of prostitution on the island.
She said she was "selling her body'' and asked the Virgin of Cobre to "save my health and that of so many girls who through necessity, tiredness and lack of horizons are dedicating themselves to this profession.''
She said she would bring her medical diploma to the Virgin when she graduated but this was not worth much since doctors' pay was useless and they work like "slaves without hope.''
REUTERS
10:37 12-10-97