My mother wept softly as our plane landed in Havana. It was the summer of 1999, and I was in my early twenties, nearly the same age my mother had been when she was imprisoned by the Communist regime. She later fled to the United States, but the 1998 visit of Pope John Paul II to the island gave her the confidence to return for the first time since 1961. I remember being glued to the television as a vehemently anti-Communist Catholic pope from behind the Iron Curtain visited a nation that had once expelled priests and religious sisters, closed churches, and declared itself an atheist state in its constitution.

One of Pope John Paul II’s stops was at the Shrine of Our Lady of Charity near Santiago de Cuba. The shrine commemorates Mary’s appearance to three men, two indigenous and one enslaved, who nearly perished at sea in 1612. The three men prayed for protection from Mary and saw a vision of her. When they reached shore, a piece of wood bore Mary’s image, inscribed with the words, “I am the Virgin of Charity.”

A shrine was built for her at El Cobre, a copper mine on the island’s eastern end, and has been expanded over time. Because El Cobre was the site where slaves in Cuba were granted freedom in 1801, Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre (Our Lady of Charity of the Copper Mine) became a symbol of freedom for the Cuban nation, especially during the fight for independence from Spain at the turn of the twentieth century.

Pope John Paul II’s visit resulted in a slight loosening of the restrictions Cuba had placed on religious worship. Cuban exiles like my mother, who were previously banned by the Cuban government from visiting their homeland, were now allowed to come. The prospect of returning brought back horrible memories to my mother: she recalled being locked in a women’s prison and hearing of executions. Several of her college classmates were shot by a firing squad. Her uncle was condemned to death but died of natural causes in prison before the sentence was carried out.

After landing in Havana, my mother and I drove through the beautiful countryside, searching for El Dolores, a sugar mill her family had operated in a village.

“There it is!” my mother exclaimed, pointing at a giant tower. “El Ingenio Dolores.” We drove along a road lined with palm trees and parked our Russian Lada near the batey, the village surrounding the sugar mill named for Our Lady of Sorrows, about an hour’s drive from Havana.

As we stepped out into the humid Cuban air that summer of 1999, my mother took a deep breath, savoring the scent of sugar being refined at the mill. The natural beauty was breathtaking; towering palm trees and the vibrant red leaves of a flamboyanttree welcomed us. The village remained practically unchanged – the only indicators of the passage of time were the dilapidation and abandonment of the same buildings that had stood there forty years earlier, including mostly small homes, an abandoned gas station, and a boarded-up church.

We were welcomed in the batey next to the sugar mill by villagers, one of whom carried the baptismal cards of my family members who had been baptized in the local church that they had built.With a big smile, she said, “I thought maybe you would return someday, and you might want to see these!”

After the Cuban Revolution, the church had been converted to a movie theater. Now the building stood vacant; its windows’ empty frames covered with wooden panels. Inside, wild grass grew on the dirt floor. The few rays of light that streamed in flickered like candles.

We were taken to the house of one of the lay Catholics who had not abandoned his faith. Like many in Cuba, his backyard was filled with various knickknacks and random pieces of equipment. In a country where the economy had come to a standstill after the Soviet collapse, every object had potential uses. He smiled as he led us to something special, removing one wooden beam after another to uncover a large black tarp.

“Las vitrinas!” my mother exclaimed as the tarp was pulled back, revealing two stained glass windows from the church. We admired one window framed by roses. In the artwork, Mary held Jesus on her lap, surrounded by angels and shepherds who were worshiping him. The roses my mother had searched for were gone from the yard in front of her grandparents’ house. Still, it seemed some roses had survived in people’s hearts amidst the thorns of religious persecution.

The second stained glass window spared from the iconoclasm of the Communist revolution depicted Mary standing at the foot of the cross, her hands crossed, her eyes distressed, her heart wrenched with grief. Scripture tells us that Jesus cried out in anguish from the cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”(Matt. 27:46).

Cubans at El Dolores had had no opportunities for Mass, confession, or sacraments for decades. Yet the slogans of the revolution had not erased the memory of fundamental Christian prayers. Groups met secretly to pray. In a land where the Bible was viewed as a tool for government subversion, the rosary, which consists of meditations on twenty scenes from scripture, served to preserve the memory of the faith.

The Cuban government had placed loyalty to socialism above all other ideals. The ruling Communist party had promoted atheism, closed many houses of worship, and discouraged public displays of religion. Yet the Cuban people remembered their spiritual mother.

The salty air and high winds eroded the triumphant faces of the then-still-living Fidel Castro and the long-dead Ernesto “Che” Guevara on walls and billboards across Cuba. Meanwhile, in private homes, I saw no images of Communist heroes. No one spoke of Castro or Guevara as if they were friends. Instead, Mary – depicted as Cuba’s patroness and protectress, Our Lady of Charity – reigned inside Cuban homes. Time and again, people referred to Mary as someone close to them in their struggles.

Cubans’ images of Mary at the foot of the cross were a rejection of the modern concepts that human progress is merely material and that our desire for communion with God is an illusion. Mary had lived through tumultuous violence; she was a mother who understood their fears and longing to keep faith alive through patience, lamentation, and hope.

One woman told my mother how, in desperation over her daughter’s illness, she had prayed to Mary, but her daughter had not been healed. She tore a picture of Our Lady of Charity from a calendar on her wall and stomped on it. Not long after, her daughter was healed.

“Our Lady of Charity understands a mother’s desperation when her child is suffering,” my mother said.

My mother also visited a man whose son had died by suicide. In his living room, his wife lay catatonic while he recounted how his son had set himself on fire. The room’s only decoration was a 1950s British motorcycle draped with two pictures of Our Lady of Charity. This family, engulfed by darkness, clung to the images of Our Lady of Charity as drowning souls might reach for a lifeline.

In another village where my mother had lived, we attended Mass at a church where the walls remained, though the roof had collapsed. A woman entered with flowers for the image of Our Lady of Charity. She told us she spent most of her time alone at home and had never set foot in a church before, yet she came into this roofless building to experience Mass for the first time. By bringing flowers to Mary, she made a tangible connection to an immaterial reality in which she placed her trust and hope.

After my seventh trip to Cuba, in 2005, this one alone, I drove to the airport in Santiago de Cuba with my friend Marcos. For two weeks, I had been distributing money, books, and religious items to political dissidents. On one occasion, after visiting a journalist documenting human rights abuses, I had been followed by the Cuban police, but I was not detained.

Now that I was departing, I raged against the abuses I had heard about from dissidents. Cuban Americans like me frequently wonder why those on the island don’t resist the regime more. “Why don’t people fight harder?” I asked Marcos.

“Margarita,” Marcos replied gently, “you are about to board a plane. One hour later, you will be in Miami, taking a hot shower and enjoying a café con leche. If I could join you on that plane, I would. But I’m not allowed to leave Cuba.”

His response humbled me. I was moved by the endurance and courage of those who were harassed and whose loved ones were jailed. People like Marcos, a medical doctor, adult convert to Christianity, and dedicated religious educator, performed daily acts of love and service, not demanding that God instantly relieve all their burdens, as I had.

“Somehow, in this atheist country, God granted me the gift of faith,” Marcos continued. “I’m grateful to have found a community of love in the Catholic Church. After I drop you off, I’m going to visit an elderly woman who lives alone. I’ll bring her some milk and spend time talking with her. You may not think I’m doing much, but this is the vocation God has called me to, and I will keep pursuing it.”

His brotherly rebuke stirred my conscience. Resistance isn’t always about grand gestures. Marcos reminded me that, like Mary at the foot of the cross, the steady presence that refuses to allow fear or hatred to prevail holds a power no government can stop.

As my plane lifted off from Cuban soil, I carried the deep imprint of lessons learned from Cuba’s many public as well as quiet heroes. Their acts of courage, charity, and mercy showed me that the kingdom of heaven belongs not to those who combat injustice by dominating others, but to those who can remain steadfast in the darkness, trusting in a light that no earthly power can extinguish.

In the years following my first visit to El Dolores with my mother, our family raised enough money in the United States to reopen the church. The beautiful stained glass windows were put back in place. Villagers had also hidden the sagrario, the tabernacle, where the blessed host is reserved.

Mary stands in those windows, surrounded by roses, holding the infant Jesus and staying with him at his cross. She remains there, not promising freedom from the cross or roses without thorns, but inviting people home to God, their father.

A few years after the church was rebuilt, the Cuban government dismantled the sugar mill of El Dolores. Piece by piece, the giant machinery that had operated for two centuries and sustained thousands of lives was gone.

But, my mother wrote, “God’s house was standing restored. It stood there with the people after the sugar mill was gone, reminding everyone that God is with us, always in our need, and remains with us no matter what darkness.”

During his 1998 visit, Pope John Paul II prayed at the Shrine of Our Lady of Charity that Mary would “gather together your peoples scattered throughout the world.” The Cuban nation can only become “a home of brothers and sisters” through reconciliation rooted in self-giving love. Mary’s title, Our Lady of Charity, he said, “evokes thoughts of the God who is Love” and “recalls the new commandment given by Jesus.” Mary’s “name and image are sculpted in the mind and heart of every Cuban, both within and outside the country, as a sign of hope and a focus of fraternal communion.” Mary came “to visit our people and wished to remain with us as Mother and Lady of Cuba, throughout its pilgrimage along the paths of history.”

In the secret rosaries prayed during decades of atheist rule, in the woman who brought flowers to a roofless church, in the villager who hid stained glass windows wrapped in a tarp and protected by wooden beams, I had witnessed how Mary’s motherly love had helped prevent belief in God from being extinguished in Cuba. 

This essay is adapted with permission from When Mary Calls: Surprising Encounters with the Mother of God (Odysseus Books, 2026). Copyright 2026 Margarita Mooney Clayton. Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing LLC.