ODDS & ENDS.

Life in Cuba with all its charms and curses converges El Cobre, a small village outside this island nation s second largest city, Santiago de Cuba. The Basilica de Nuestra Senora del Cobre sits on a hillside overlooking this town. Since 1608 pilgrims have prayed to Our Lady of Charity here. Thomas Merton visited El Cobre in 1940. My own visit took place just a few months ago.

Devotion to this Madonna began when three fishermen found a wooden image of Mary floating on the Bahia de Nipe in northeastern Cuba. Its message read, "I am the Virgen de la Caridad." This statue was brought to the copper mine at El Cobre, and two years later the first hermitage was built there. The present church was built in 1927, just 11 years after Pope Benedict XV declared the Virgen de la Caridad patroness of Cuba, but hundreds of years after the Cuban people vigorously embraced and developed this expression of their faith.

Devotion to the Virgen de la Caridad also has a special relationship to the African-Cuban religion known as Santeria. Santerians venerate Ochun, the Yoruba goddess of love. They see in this Madonna a reflection of their goddess, as do many Cuban Catholics see in Ochun a reflection of Christ's mother. Such intertwined religious visions and traditions energize many Cuban believers from both spiritual traditions.

Nineteen years before Fidel Castro announced the success of his revolution in Santiago de Cuba to the city and to the world, Thomas Merton made a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Cobre. "It was one of those medieval pilgrimages that was nine tenths vacation and one tenth pilgrimage," Merton wrote. He prayed for priesthood, a wish eventually granted him. Both in The Seven Storey Mountain and The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton, he provided colorful glimpses of Cuban culture and church predating both Castro and Vatican II.

Fifty-nine years after Merton made his trek to El Cobre, I followed in his footsteps. Today's Cuba, celebrating the 40th anniversary of its most recent revolution, is an ironic place. Under Castro, Cuba has developed the highest literacy rate and longest life expectancy in the Caribbean. Yet economic depression, citizen restrictions, and lack of personal and social fulfillment hang heavy in the humid air.

A religious revival predating the 1998 papal visit continues to sweep the nation. John Paul II was more beneficiary than cause of this revival. Other faiths are also experiencing this renewed interest in religion. One Baptist congregation in Havana has grown more than 200 percent in the past several years. Great numbers also came to an evangelical celebration this summer sponsored by a consortium of Christian groups.

My own participation in this religious revival, a visit to El Cobre, went very much unnoticed, I am sure. A young man named David in Havana had asked me to pray for his success in the entrance test to a prestigious film school. I honored his request. I also prayed for the people of Cuba--that the suffering caused both by their own government and the U.S. government, which refuses to end its Cuban embargo, be lightened.

After Merton's visit to El Cobre, he sensed the virgin "handed me an idea for a poem, ... the first real poem I had ever written, or anyway the one I liked best."

After my visit to El Cobre, I penned my column. I hope my own two prayers at Cuba's most sacred religious site will be answered as effectively as Thomas Merton's supplication.

PETER GILMOUR ([e-mail]) teaches at the Institute of Pastoral Studies of Loyola University Chicago.