Watch Day in Remedios, Cuba

I arrived in Havana on a hot day last September and stayed overnight at the postmodernist Telégrafo Hotel, located at the corner of Prado and Neptuno streets, a place known as the birthplace of the cha-cha-cha, a style of Cuban music that became popular in the 1950s. Early the next morning, I left for the town of Remedios, located in the middle of the country, 320 kilometers east of the capital. Most of the road to Remedios is lined with marabú bushes, a species that was brought from Africa in the nineteenth century and which has become a plague in Cuba. The only other distractions encountered along the way were several conejitos, or bunnies, the local name for the service stations, and a few banana and cheese vendors.

San Juan de los Remedios is a sleepy municipality of 46,000 people (6,000 in the historic center), located in the Province of Santa Clara, in a territory that during the early colonial period remained outside the control of the two government seats in Cuba, Havana to the west and Santiago to the east, and therefore its residents partook freely in commerce and contraband without much interference from the Spanish crown. Today, Remedios still feels like it is far from everywhere. Isolation and lack of development pressure helped preserve its historic character, but a high water table, frequent hurricanes, and the colorful but lethal parrandas—a traditional Christmas festivity involving loud noise and fireworks—threaten the core of its historic fabric, especially its churches: Ermita del Buenviaje and San Juan Bautista de los Remedios, the main reasons for my visit and the subjects of the Watch Day 2012 celebration.

The original San Juan Bautista was built in the late-sixteenth century and was modified in the following centuries. Between 1944 and 1955, the Franciscan order who had assumed the control of the church in 1904, undertook a major restoration funded by Eutimio Falla Bonet, a local philanthropist and a relative of the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, Maria Teresa Mestre y Batista-Falla. The Ermita del Buenviaje dates from the seventeenth century, and was built by the community to celebrate the rescue of a wooden image of the virgin Mary shipwrecked near the coast of Remedios. The virgin of Buenviaje, as it was called because of its miraculous recovery from the sea at the end of her voyage from Barcelona where it was made, is one of the three most famous devotions in Cuba. The Remedios virgin is the only one that remained Spanish and Catholic in essence, while the other two—the mestizo Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre in Santiago, the black Virgen de Regla in Havana—became Ochún (Cobre) and Yemayá (Regla) through syncretism between the Catholic and the Yoruba religion from Nigeria.

The Ermita lost its stained glass windows due to a parranda-related explosion in 1995, its roof was damaged by a hurricane in 2008, and its doors have remained closed since 2000. The Bishop of Santa Clara, its current owner, has over 80 properties to manage and not enough funds to maintain them. However, the community is enthusiastic in their support of the churches, and Remedios has strong tourism potential because of nearby Cayo Santa Maria, a popular beach destination easily reached through direct flights from Canada to Santa Clara.

Hopefully, through international support and local resourcefulness, the Ermita del Buenviaje will be rescued, and by 2015, the year of the 500 anniversary of Remedios, the community can celebrate again the end of a good voyage.