El Cobre, Cuba: Images, Voices, Histories – UC Santa Cruz
 
IMAGES > MARIAN DEVOTIONS AND RELATED TRADITIONS > THE HERMITAGE IN MIAMI
 
shrine image

<   8   >


<   Miami hermitage’s gift shop.


Like other secular and religious tourist sites in the USA and elsewhere in the commercialized modern world of tourism, the Miami hermitage has opened a modest gift shop that sells kitsch religious paraphernalia to the visiting public and to devotees. The commerce in religious objects, however, has a very long history in the Christian world particularly in pilgrimage centers and shrines where images, chromolitographs, rosaries, candles, holy water and earth, even relics and other paraphernalia were sold to devotees to take back home as charged tokens of holy places and as souvenirs. Santería botánicas are another modern version of the commerce in mass religious paraphernalia and many of the objects for sale in these places, particularly the images of saints, are the same as those sold in modern Christian stores and tourist gift shops.

The Miami hermitage's gift shop sells mostly Marian related paraphernalia but kitschy commodities include anything from rosaries and holy water to key holders, post cards, cheap jewelry and other trinkets. Candles and veladoras, traditionally a standard item in many churches and shrines, however, are not sold here since candle lighting is not a permitted practice in this hermitage despite its designation as a "shrine." A wide array of Marian holy cards representing canonical images in the painterly tradition as well as popular renderings of different Marian advocacies such as the Mexican Guadalupe and the Cuban Charity of El Cobre are displayed on a rack. The Sanctuary in El Cobre, Cuba, has not opened a church or state gift shop yet but some locals used to sell handcrafted souvenirs and small mineral rocks to visitors.