By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Oct 14 1995 (IPS)

A report that Pope John Paul planned to visit Cuba next February, allegedly heard in a foreign radio broadcast, sent tremors through the island this month and underlined the strained relations between church and state.

The Permanent Conference of Catholic Bishops was quick to deny any knowledge of a papal visit and although there has been a steady flow of contacts between Cuban officials and Vatican representatives, local observers opined relations were still far from “cordial.”

“Each party lives with the expectation of being stabbed in the back by the other,” said one political observer.

Previous rumors of a visit by the Pope have been attributed in hardline official circles as a maneuver by the Church to help bring about the end of communism in Cuba – as it fell in Eastern Europe.

Sources close to the Catholic hierarchy say there is no reason to expect closer relations with the government.

“Although relations may be better than before, the essential problems remain: the Church in Cuba does not have access to the communications media, and it cannot open schools,” a source close to Cuba’s Cardinal Jaime Ortega told IPS.

The government took over Catholic high schools in Cuba in 1961, denied the Church any access to the mass media, and substituted historical dates for religious celebrations as the country’s holidays.

On one side, the revolution of Fidel Castro relegated Catholicism to the temples and depicted it as “senile,” “antiscientific” and even “counterrevolutionary.”

On the other, the Church hierarchy worked on the principle that there was no common ground between the Catholic faith and a communist society, “intrinsically evil and perverse.”

According to Irania Luzardo, who studies Church-State relations, “the most affected were the Catholics themselves: those who disagreed with the system opted to leave the country. Others, who benefitted from revolutionary measures, stayed and found themselves living in a sort of internal exile.”

For several decades, ordinary Catholics hid their faith out of fear that they would not rise up the social ladder or obtain a good job, or that their children would not have a good university career simply because of their religious beliefs.

“The fact that, in large measure, fear, pretense and disguising one’s faith have been left behind has meant a genuine process of internal liberation,” Ortega said earlier this year, referring to the considerable increase in the number of Cubans who regularly attend church services.

While for years the baptizing of a child could “mark” a family forever, the opening that Cuban society is experiencing in the 1990’s is reflected in the annual increase in baptisms. In Havana alone, they rose from 16,604 in 1987 to 33,192 last year.

Among those attending church services, in addition to the faithful, are youths who have chosen the “mode of the cross,” girls in search of a Catholic facade that would help them meet a Spanish husband, opportunists at monthly breakfasts and opposition elements anxious for a space for expression.

But although the Church is not neutral, neither can it be, in Ortega’s words, “that nonexistent opposition party in Cuba, because that would take it away from its mission.”

In his paper “Human Promotion, Cuban Realty and Perspectives,” the vicar general of Havana, Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, went further in stating that while President Fidel Castro lives and is in a position to govern, it would show a “lack of political realism” to conceive of a social project without his leadership.

Although considered one of the most solid anti-establishment elements within Cuban society, the Catholic Church disillusioned many with its insistent call to national reconciliation as the way to solve the serious problems of the society.

The message of unity of all Cubans, both in Cuba and abroad, was the main point of the pastoral letter “All Hope for Love” in 1993.

That text provoked official condemnation by critics of the political system and analysis of the causes and effects of the economic crisis that began in 1990.

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference stood with Cuban authorities in May, in supporting the immigration agreements with the United States to avoid dangerous emigration on the high seas and to reject any attempt at hardening the economic blockade of the island.

But at the same time, it stressed the need to eliminate a sort of “internal blockade” that generates discouragement and discontent among most Cubans who decide to try to emigrate.

For those who go to church in search of a channel for their anti-government sentiments, the current message of the clergy seems “defeatist”, “empty” and “full of concessions.”

Although some Church positions coincide with official policy, authorities view with suspicion anything coming from the clergy and would have preferred that Cardinal Ortega had not visited Miami last May.

According to researcher Francois Houtart, the government’s sensitivity to a recovery of a social role by the Church is “obviously considerable,” considering that in the past the institution used the political realm to ensure its existence and reproduction.

During a socio-religious studies conference in June, Houtart noted that with the introduction in the Cuban economy of elements of the market, “religious institutions have seen an opportunity to develop new or renewed functions.”

In his judgment, “in a situation of economic, social and cultural transformation, religion can assume an ambivalent character,” and its role “cannot be interpreted in too mechanical a fashion.”

For Ortega the challenge of the Cuban Church is that it must insert itself into a “materialist world without any ideals,” where people live in a sort of “practical materialism,” concerned only with eating and living.

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