On the evening of September 8, 1997, I sat in the stands of the Hialeah Park Race Track in Miami amid thousands of Cuban exiles as their national patron saint, The Virgin of Charity of El Cobre (La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre), slowly made her way down the homestretch, a space much more accustomed to the hoofbeats of quarter horses than to the chants of religious processions. She sat perched iconically atop the rear seats of a shiny, new, white convertible Mercedes Benz, top down, between two Catholic priests, behind a driver wearing a white guayabera, while the crowd, mostly dressed in white or yellow, waved Cuban flags and enthusiastically chanted “Viva Cuba Libre!” (Long Live Free Cuba!). To evoke Durkheim, it was “collective effervescence” (not to mention totemism) at its very best, surely cementing attendees’ unified, and further unifying, understanding that society—at least their understanding thereof—is God (Caridad), or that God (Caridad) is society. I was left wondering what counter narratives to this politically myopic anti-Castro splendor might feature in processions for Caridad back in the homeland, in Cuba, a place my own grandfather had left for New York in 1924, and more generally I puzzled over what such processions would look and feel like there, and of how remarkably different they must be from this spectacle in South Florida. Thanks to Jalane Schmidt's wonderful first book, I now know.

Cachita's Streets is a well-researched, thorough, insightful, and important historical and ethnographic study of Cuban devotion to Caridad del Cobre, whose cult is rooted in one of the earliest apparitions of any Catholic saint in the Americas, dating in this case to 1612, when an icon of Caridad was reportedly found floating in a bay off of eastern Cuba (Santiago de Cuba province; Oriente) by three fishermen. Being the patron saint of an island nation that was born out of the strife of colonialism, slavery, and the erasure of its native population, a place that would later endure the brutality of dictatorships, US imperialism, and a communist revolution—an island that for 500 years has been socially characterized by racial diversity and mestizaje—the Caridad symbol and all that it reflects have always been hotly contested. This is a salient sociopolitical, religious reality that Schmidt illustrates marvelously in both her historiography and ethnography. The book seeks to answer the following questions (10): “How have various sectors imagined Cuba's pre-eminent religious symbol, the Virgin of Charity? How have these groups brandished their local definition of the Virgin in their attempts to univocally represent the nation? How have street performances, with their amplified public displays, been an important modality of these Cuban parties’ mobilization of the Virgin?” For the most part, the answers that Schmidt provides are very well founded.

Especially compelling is Schmidt's deft employment of “streets” as an analytical trope, as is her careful weaving of the categories of race and politics into the book's narrative. Also of note is the study's convincing refutation of the widespread scholarly and ideological assumption that Cuba's cult of the Virgin of Charity is in reality a facade that masks underlying devotions to the Yoruba orisha (spirit) Ochún, and Schmidt's resultant affirmation of the sincerity and depth of Black Catholicism in one corner of the Americas is quite refreshing. What is somewhat unfortunate in this regard, however, is the author's failure to consider the influence of popular Kongolese Catholicism on the cult of Caridad, for many slaves and free blacks in Cuba had long been devotees of the Virgin Mary in West Central Africa, whose history there dates to the late fifteenth century.

Relatedly, in her drive to establish Caridad as “Cuba's homegrown Marian legend” (169), Schmidt too hastily dismisses the cult's highly probable Iberian origins, thereby muffling Caridad's earlier iteration in Spain and the real likelihood that this avocation of the Virgin Mary had been venerated in Cuba earlier than 1612. Though Schmidt alludes in passing to “Our Lady of Guidance of Illescas” (25), who indeed has a minor presence in Illescas, a municipality in Spain's Toledo, Castile-La Mancha province, in reality the major Marian icon in Illescas is not Our Lady of Guidance but Our Lady of Charity, who clearly resembles the patron saint of Cuba, whether in Santiago or Hialeah. At least one earlier scholar, whose work is actually critiqued in this book, has in fact argued that Caridad of Illescas had been brought to Cuba early in the sixteenth century, but Schmidt, for whatever reason, does not entertain the idea.

Could it not be, therefore, that the icon found at sea by the three fisherman in 1612 had been brought to Cuba earlier by Spanish missionaries and was perhaps lost or stolen and somehow wound up floating in a bay for “the three Juans,” as the fishermen are known, to stumble (or paddle) upon? Could it also not be that Caridad was once known elsewhere on the island than Oriente, independently of the El Cobre icon? Regrettably, Schmidt relies too heavily on secondary sources in discussing the colonial era to generate any genuinely new insights into the cult's hybrid origins. Kongolese and Iberian cornerstones are surely part of the bedrock of Cuban devotion to Caridad after all, as well as Taino devotion to the Native American fertility goddess Atabey, an important baseline Caribbean religious form that Schmidt also does not consider.

Schmidt is certainly not the first anthropologist to struggle with historiography; they (we) are in fact legion. For history is a discipline that is far more evidence-driven and positivistic than the sometimes whimsical, increasingly self-reflexive social sciences in which Schmidt was trained: religious studies and anthropology. One wonders what fruitful stones the author might have turned had she bothered doing research in Spain, for most of the important archival discoveries by historians of the Caribbean have been made in London, Madrid, and Paris, rather than in Kingston, Havana, or Port-au-Prince, the archive being, as it were, the product of the sovereign—and the sovereign invariably took its dirty laundry home when run out of town. Nonetheless, Schmidt's outstanding ethnography far outweighs the flaws in her ruminations about colonial Caribbean religious culture. Most of the book is focused on the twentieth century, after all, and that part of the text is much better researched than its earlier sections, while insights from Schmidt's extensive interviews, her keen ethnographic observations, and her sensitive biographies—Lula and her father Reynerio in chapter 3, for instance, are vividly introduced to the reader—amount to some of the finest scholarly material that we have on Cuban religious culture.

The twentieth-century focus of this book pivots serially on several watershed years (1936, 1951–1952, 1959, and 1998), whose meanings and sociopolitical intrigues are informatively and craftily outlined. This alone makes Cachita's Streets essential reading for anyone interested in Cuban religious history. Caridad's surge in popularity in Cuban collective consciousness, for example, owes a great deal to her 1936 coronation as “The Queen of Republican Cuba” (101) by the nation's Catholic bishops “‘for the better veneration of the faithful,’” a ritual that was readily approved by the Vatican, and which was re-performed by Pope John Paul II during his historic visit to the island in 1998. Schmidt thus takes the reader on an immensely gratifying ride through twentieth-century Cuba, in all of its undulating politico-religious contours, with the greatest delight being its arrival to her superb ethnography, dating to an initial visit to the island nation in 1997. The author's aggregate of three years’ worth of sometimes challenging fieldwork in Cuba does much to make this one of the most significant recent offerings in the anthropology of Caribbean religion.