Metropolitan Cathedral Basilica: rebuilt four times after pirates and earthquakes, over the still-unmarked grave of Cuba’s first governor

In Santiago de Cuba, a first chapel stood on this site around 1514, and became a cathedral in 1522, when the diocesan seat erected at Baracoa in 1518 was moved there. Spanish-language sources date the first wooden church, roofed with yagua palm, to 1528 instead: the sources leave the discrepancy unresolved. Pirate and corsair raids destroyed the building repeatedly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and earthquakes did the rest. The tremor of 11 June 1766, among the strongest ever recorded in Cuba, brought down the central nave. The quake of 1852 collapsed the side naves, the dome and the towers, and repairs ran until 1874. On 3 February 1932 another quake cracked the towers, the clock tower above all. The present building, the fourth, was rebuilt from 1810 and blessed on 24 April 1818. The facade seen today is neoclassical, with Corinthian columns, arches and two bell towers, and was redesigned by the architect Carlos Segrera Fernandez in the early Twenties of the twentieth century. The church was given the title of minor basilica on 15 February 1882, and has been a national monument of Cuba since 1958. A restoration completed in 2015, before the visit of Pope Francis, changed the outside from the traditional yellow to the present grey. Under the altar, according to several sources, lie the remains of Diego Velazquez de Cuellar, the first Spanish governor of Cuba, who died in Santiago on 11-12 June 1524 and asked to be buried here. Where exactly his remains lie can no longer be established. He should not be confused with the Spanish Baroque painter of the same name, an entirely different figure. The diocese was a suffragan of the archdiocese of Seville until 1546 and then of Santo Domingo, and was raised to a metropolitan archdiocese in 1803. It is not, as is sometimes assumed, the oldest diocese in the Americas: that distinction belongs to the archdiocese of Santo Domingo, erected in 1511. The present archbishop, by the most recent confirmed appointment, is Monsignor Dionisio Guillermo Garcia Ibanez, in office since 2007. The building faces Parque Cespedes, the main square of the city, named after Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, who on 8 October 1868 began the Ten Years War for Cuban independence from Santiago. No specific event inside the cathedral is documented in connection with the wars of independence, so the link is one of symbolic proximity rather than direct historical fact. On 22 September 2015 Pope Francis met families inside this cathedral, before celebrating mass separately at the shrine of the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre, some twenty kilometres from Santiago. The visits of John Paul II in 1998 and of Benedict XVI in 2012 to the city are well documented, but their main events were held at Plaza de la Revolucion and at the shrine of El Cobre, and no primary source confirms that either pope visited this building.