She led the effort to build Miami’s Our Lady of Charity shrine and connected exile Cubans
Georgina “Gina” Nieto, one of the founders of Miami’s Our Lady of Charity shrine known as la Ermita and first president with her late husband Tarsicio of its confraternity — one of the main lay Catholic associations for Cuban exiles — has died. She was 95.
She died on Saturday surrounded by relatives and friends after she was hospitalized in Miami for health issues related to her age, daughter Lourdes Garrido said.
“She was … sick but happy in her faith, anxious to be reunited with my father,” said Garrido, noting that her mother asked to be buried with her medal of the Archdiocesan Confraternity of Our Lady of Charity, with an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on one side and the Virgin of Charity on the other, a graphic expression of its motto, “To Jesus from Mary.”
Through her activism in the confraternity — founded in Cuba in the 17th century and then established in the Archdiocese of Miami in 1968 by a group of exiles — Nieto helped to build a shrine dedicated to Cuba’s patron saint that would become a symbol of the
Catholic faith for Miamians of all nationalities.
Nieto was also a key figure in the Rosary Crusade, a call to families to pray the rosary in the 1960s and 1970s, when lay leaders like her carried small urns with the image of the Our Lady of Charity and sketches of the planned shrine to promote the campaign among the first waves of Cuban refugees.
Helping the Rosary Crusade at the time was a young seminarian, Thomas Wenski, then assigned to the St. Benedict Catholic Church in Hialeah and now the Miami archbishop.
The Nietos were “people who saw their true baptismal commitment. They were not Catholics in their own way. They were practicing Catholics, committed and untiring,” Wenski said in an interview Tuesday.
Nieto also played an important role in the Cuban Municipalities in Exile (in Spanish, los Municipios Cubanos en el Exilio) ,a network of community associations that arranged social gatherings for people that came from the same towns on the island. Their pilgrimages to what was then a small chapel on the water’s edge, next to Mercy Hospital, cemented the Christian ministry among Cubans in Miami.
Wenski said Gina and Tarsicio were among the first collaborators of the Rev. Agustín Román, the shrine’s first chaplain and years later the first Cuban to be appointed bishop in the U.S. Catholic Church. When Román was not at the shrine — at the time he was also Mercy’s chaplain — telephone calls to the shrine were answered by the Nietos at their home in Hialeah.
Georgina Suero Álvarez was born Feb. 13, 1926, in La Palma, in the western Cuba province of Pinar del Rio, the daughter of Aniceto Suero Rodríguez and Pilar Álvarez Blanco, both descendants of immigrants from the Asturias region of Spain.
She studied at the González Academy in the city of Pinar del Rio and earned a teaching certificate at age 18. She taught for the next two years, first in an urban school and then in another in the countryside. “I would spend 15 days in the countryside. I went on horseback. I always loved the countryside,” Nieto said in a 2012 interview.
She married Tarsicio when she was 20 and the couple moved to the Rancho Boyeros municipality and later Havana. In late 1960, when she was 34, the couple left for Miami with children Lourdes and Manuel. With little money, the family rented a small apartment near downtown Miami. Neighbors later told her that Archbishop Coleman Carroll had called Cubans to gather on Sept. 8, 1961, for a Mass in Spanish to mark the feast day of Our Lady of Charity.
“I thought we would be a small group, because we had no idea of the number of Catholic Cubans who were living here at that time,” Nieto said in 2011.
To the surprise of Nieto and many others, the event at the Bobby Maduro baseball stadium brought together more than 30,000 Cubans. On that day, the image of Our Lady of Charity venerated today in the Miami shrine was brought clandestinely from Cuba.
Six years later, during another huge Mass, Carroll urged the Cuban faithful to build the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Charity. To watch over the spiritual side of the project, the Confraternity of Our Lady of Charity was created and the Nietos became its co-presidents.
An office in their garage was the base for the fundraising campaign to build the shrine to the Virgin Mary. “We stuffed envelopes, we sent letters, we received calls,” she recalled in 2012. “In short, we moved.”
Sister Eva Pérez-Puelles, superior of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul in Miami, an order that helped Father Román run the shrine, recalled that Georgina Nieto stayed in touch with the shrine and the nuns throughout the years.
The shrine was built in 1973 and awarded the rank of a national sanctuary by the U.S. Conference of Bishops in 2002.
“She was a person who had a great love for the Virgin of Charity and knew all the people who cooperated to build the shrine. Everyone loved her,” said Pérez-Puelles. She added that the confraternity was “Román’s right hand.”
“The confraternity was the backbone for the lay people in the construction and maintenance of the shrine, and Gina and her husband were fundamental for that,” said Julio Estorino, a Cuban historian who was president of the confraternity, along with his wife, in 20052006.
Her death “closes a chapter on what was the first generation of Cubans in exile. They were the start of the enormous growth the Catholic Church saw in Miami,” Estorino added.
Nieto is survived by siblings Manuel, Norma and Marina; son Manuel Nieto and his wife, Carina; daughter Lourdes Garrido and her husband, Pedro; eight grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
The funeral Mass and burial took place Wednesday.
Daniel Shoer Roth: 305-376-2167, @DanielShoerRoth