CUBA: Church and Government, from Confrontation to Dialogue

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Jan 17 1998 (IPS) - Decades of tension with only one brief interim of dialogue appear to be at an end as the Catholic Church and Cuban government prepare for Pope John Paul II’s visit to the island.

The political will for rapprochement was shown last Tuesday, when Cardinal Jaime Ortega spoke to the population on television: an event unprecedented in the last 39 years.

The government, which controls all the communication media made a show of trust, allowing the leader of the Catholic Church in Cuba to speak live to the nation despite overt Church criticism of official policies.

However, Ortega chose to avoid political references in his speech, emphasising the common threads of Christian humanism and the Cuban revolution.

Aurelio Alonso, expert in socio-religious issues, said the only remainging Western communist country in the world was living through “a tug of war” in relation to the papal visit.

“The Church is trying to advance as far as possible to benefit its institutional future, while the State is trying to keep the advances within its permitted margins,” he said.

With the visit of the Pope “the Church will win space, although not as much as it would have liked, and the State will be force to accept this as long as the cost is not too great,” he added.

But one thing is evident. The Cuba of today is not the same as the nation which received the surprise news that Fidel Castro had met with the Pope in Rome in November 1996.

Little more than a year later, the Cuban people can attend open air mass, carry the Virgin of the Charity of Cobre in a procession through the streets of Havana and receive people carrying “the message of God” in their homes.

Official Communist Party daily, Granma, published an uncensored message from the Pope to the Cuban people, messages of welcome were stuck up in the doorways of churches and, for the first time since 1969, families were officially able to celebrate Christmas.

“What they are want say is that as well as tolerating believers in a socialist country, I have to live alongside them, and give them space,” said Esther More, a 52 year-old woman who classes herself as a communist.

More is one of the people who followed official policy for years, identifying all religious belief as ignorance and, worse still, an opposition stance.

Her family, like that of so many Cubans, was divided in the sixties, when her parents decided to send her four year-old brother to the United States alone as part of the Peter Pan operation.

The Peter Pan Operation, which involved the Catholic Church in Cuba and Miami, and the US government, led to 14,000 children leaving the island unaccompanied.

“I loved my brother like a son. I could never forgive my parents for believing the government would take away their parental rights and send the children to Moscow to be brainwashed,” said More.

A book published in the eighties by Catholic historian, Raul Gomez Treto set out five stages in Church-State relations since the triumph of the revolution: disconcertation (1959-60), confrontation (1963-67), rapprochement (1968-79) and dialogue (1979).

This scheme of periods now has more added on: the end of dialogue and the opening of a new period of tension which accompanied the collapse of socialism in Europe.

Alonso said, paradoxically, the change in the Catholic Church from a position of “silently accompanying” the political system to open criticism in the nineties had coincided with a U-turn in the official view of believers.

The Constitution was amended early this decade to exclude the definition of the Cuban State as “atheist,” while the Communist Party lifted its ban on believers.

“I think It would not be revolutionary, I’m speaking sincerely, it would not be political to unnecessarily provoke conflict between the revolution and religious sentiment,” said Castro in a recent speech in Parliament.

In an attempt to discredit a long list of speculations surrounding the papal visit, he stated the agreement was not subject to being “a success for the country and a success for the revolution.”

Some believe, the visit will imply “the end of the regime” and the authorities would do even the impossible to stop it from happening. For others, above all the more radical Cuban exiles in the United States, it will be a “blessing” for the Castro regime, which will see its international position reinforced.

“We are not worried, we are not stupid nor crazy, we are receiving a friend,” Parliamentary President Ricardo Alarcon told the house when asked what dangers the visit represented to the communist regime.

“If anyone wants to find extra meaning in the papal visit, they must look at what it represents in itself, which is nothing more than the amplitude harboured in the bosom of the Cuban revolution.”

The visit “is a situation which speaks of the possibility of normal relations between believers and non-believers,” said Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina.

Experts state the government, even if not fully prepared for the resurgence of religiousness reported in the nineties, are counting on the fact that while most of the population are believers, only a minority are Catholic.

“In Cuba there are 646 Catholic places of worship, 948 non- Catholic, mostly smaller than the Catholic ones, 548 authorised evangelical centres and around 3,000 unauthorised,” said historian, Enrique Lopez Oliva.

Sources in the Archbishopric of Havana said more than four million of the island’s 11 million inhabitants had been baptised and that the number of church weddings has doubled in recent years.

The government has allowed priests into the country in recent months and the Pope will be allowed to hold mass in the main squares. However, the government has not moved on other main issues, like giving the Catholic Church a fixed slot in the communication media.

An opening of this kind would be a privilege for the Catholic Church contravening the principle of the equality of cults, said Caridad Diego, director of the Religious Affairs Department of the Communist Party Central Commitee.

The same happens with education. In a country where free education is guaranteed to all citizens, the opening of a privileged or superior parallel system is out of the question.

The Vatican, meanwhile, maintained its condemnation of the US embargo on the island and sources within Vatican City said the Pope did not want Cuba to undergo what happened in Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union collapsed into savage capitalism.

In Cuba, the Catholic Church never gave up its critical position published in 1993 in the document “Everthing awaits love,” but has done everything possible to avoid causing tension over the papal visit.

This document, which provoked an impasse with the government, criticised the reigning political and economic situations, predicted a social catastrophe and called for radical changes in direction.

For Cardinal Ortega, the relationship established between the government and the Catholic Church in preparing the papal visit was as novel as the appearance of the first joint venture with foreign capital.

“Perhaps we have not been as successful as these companies, but there has been a possibility opened, indicating there could be greater openings in future,” said Ortega in December.

However, in an interview published this month by the Catholic Press Union magazine “Verdad y Esperanza,” and after a year of planning the visit, Ortega said he didn’t think dialogue “will be reached within the near future.”