It was in 1531 that, according to the apparition legend first recorded over a hundred years later in 1648, Juan Diego’s visionary experience of the Virgin of Guadalupe was miraculously mapped onto his tilma (tilmatli in Nahuatl) or woven cloak. This painted cloth, hereafter referred to as the tilma image, is said to be the same relic venerated today in the basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City (fig. 1). However, no sacred image is invented from whole cloth, to use a highly appropriate metaphor here, and the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe is no exception. Moreover, its very materiality makes it vulnerable to the passage of time, the laws of physics and human intervention. As an object of human craft produced post-Conquest, it has a traceable genealogy within the combustible mix of art modes, mixed media and theological tracts found circulating in early colonial New Spain.

On the afternoon of June 15, 1574, the conflict between the Franciscan Order and the local governor of the province of Yucatán intensified. A heated controversy had emerged between the recently appointed bishop of Yucatán, Fray Diego de Landa, and the provincial governor, Francisco Velázquez de Gijón. On that afternoon, the dean of the cathedral of Mérida, Licenciado Cristobal de Miranda, went to the home of the provincial governor with a message from the bishop. The governor had recently received an order of excommunication issued by the bishop for his actions against several Franciscan friars.

Franciscan historian Antonine Tibesar’s study of the early evangelical accomplishments of the Franciscan Order in the Andes constitutes a landmark contribution to an insufficiently examined subject. Trying to detach his work from Joachimist debates, Tibesar did not deem the spirituality shared by peninsular friars to be relevant in explaining their poor early evangelical results. Although Tibesar acknowledged such shortcomings, he sustained that they were caused by an apathetic Franciscan engagement in parish work among the Indians. The inexperience of Spanish friars and the turmoil of the civil wars that ravaged the Andes in the aftermath of the conquest greatly explain this situation, he sustains. Additionally, Tibesar advances the idea that the undecided approach towards Indian conversion amongst sixteenth-century Franciscan authorities was the major cause of these first evangelical failures. Troubled by the hardships of life in Indian parishes and concerned about the lack of familiarity with parish administration among the Order’s ranks, the Franciscan establishment sent the friars contradictory orders, thus preventing them from bringing together a more coherent evangelical plan.

The exact date on which the first Franciscan friars arrived in Cuba remains unknown, but it was certainly during an early phase of the conquest. Regardless of the exact moment in which the friars disembarked on the island, it is important to note that it marked the beginning of a long history, a history almost condemned to obscurity and from time to time the object of harsh criticism and impassioned indulgence, and more often recorded through partial constructions than through investigation and reasoning. Perhaps because of the complexity of its peculiarities and/or for certain socio-political determining factors that will not be analyzed at this time, Cuba has been one of the marginalized territories of the American ecclesiastical historiography. Nevertheless, in recent years, interest in ecclesiastical themes has grown incrementally among some scholars who, striving to fill the voids, have opened new lines of research and venture to investigate the older documents of the archive.