Our Lady of the Exile Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami

This is a study of Cuban-American popular Catholicism, focusing on theshrine of Our Lady of Charity in Miami. Most non-Hispanic residents of Miami donot even know that the shrine exists, yet it is the sacred center of the Cubancommunity in exile. Founded in 1973, it is now the sixth largest Catholicpilgrimage site in the United States, annually attracting hundreds of thousandsof pilgrims.L L Combining historical and ethographic methods, Tweed's work drawson more than 300 structured interviews with visitors to the shrine, as well asdocumentry records, survey data, newspapers, periodicals and paphlets publishedby the shrine, and devotional letters written to the shrine from Cuba and theUnited States. His purpose is to discover not only why the shrine attained suchimportance and attracts so many visitors, but what it can tell us about largerissues of religion, identity, and place. He argues that while religious meaningsin a given ritual context are always constructed and contested, they are also,at same basic level, shared. In this instance, he contends, the shared meaningof Our Lady of Charity is diaspora nationalism. By means of the symbols of theshrine, he says, the diaspora "imaginatively constructs its collective identityand transports itself to the Cuba of memory and desire."