The story of an obscure Cuban legend is being reported in today’s Miami Herald:

News of Fidel Castro’s illness has renewed interest in an obscure legend involving Cuba’s patron saint and her prediction to a priest 150 years ago that one day Cubans would be enslaved by a bearded young leader — who then dies during the fourth decade of his reign.

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The legend, with some variations, begins in the 1850s and goes something like this:

A Spanish priest, San Antonio María Claret, had been sent to Cuba to become archbishop of Santiago de Cuba, coincidentally Castro’s home province. One day, while riding his horse through the province’s majestic Sierra Maestra — also coincidentally Castro’s mountainous rebel stronghold in the mid-1950s — La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre appeared to him in a vision, he later told his congregation.

She relayed to him the future of Cuba in the hands of a leader that resembled Castro, but years before his birth in 1926, he said. He will have long hair, a beard, wear a uniform and carry weapons. He’ll have followers, who will look just like him.

Claret claimed the virgin told him the young man would spend a short time committing acts that would violate God’s commandments. There would be turmoil and the spilling of blood. This could be interpreted as the 1959 overthrow by the rebel leader of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.

He would promise reforms to the Cuban people, who would welcome him with great love and fervor. But he would eventually betray, imprison and divide them and inflict them with great pain and heartache.

Claret said the virgin told him the young man would rule for four decades, and Cuba would be devastated during this period. In time, the young man would grow old. He would die and then the skies would become clear and blue over Cuba, freeing it it from the darkness that entrapped it.

Interesting.