CUBA: Church and State Broadcast Sign of Understanding

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Jan 14 1998 (IPS) - The appearance of a Cardinal of the Catholic Church on the screens of State television in Cuba appeared to augur a new period of understanding between the Church and the State.

Jaime Ortega, 61 year-old Cuban cardinal and archbishop of Havana, Tuesday, became the only Catholic priest to have spoken on television since the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.

And over the last fourty years no-one, except for President Fidel Castro himself, has addressed the people on television without some level of official authorisation of the content of their presentation, and even more importantly, live.

“We can reach an understanding,” was the implicit message Ortega sent the authorities during his half hour spot, and, it appears this was also what the government implied in allowing the broadcast to take place.

Pope John Paul II, who will visit Cuba next week, stressed his concern over “any type of economic sanction or economic measure which can damage the people,” and opposes the embargo the United States has imposed on Cuba, said Ortega.

In an attempt to present the Pope to the population of the island, the cardinal spoke of John Paul II’s concern for the situation of Eastern Europe before the fall of the iron curtain and, at the same time, stressed his rejection of the effects of the neoliberal adjustment measures in these countries.

Meanwhile, Catholics on the streets in Havana were amazed at the broadcast in a country which was declared constitutionally atheist until 1992.

“All we Cubans can feel we are members of a big family,” said Ortega at the beginning of his message directed at Catholics, believers in general and all those on the island who declared themselves atheists.

In the half-hour slot he also had time to explain basic details of Catholic culture and, apparently, left the position of the Catholic Church on the island clear, although the thread runnig through his presentation was always concentrated on John Paul II.

Observers said, had he wanted, Ortega could have transmitted a message of “dischord” while remaining “elegant” by discussing only the papal visit to the island.

But Ortega, who chose his own agenda, left aside the demands of the Church on the island and appealed to the humanist essence of Christianity, perhaps the most important point of contact between the Catholic Church and the Cuban revolution.

“Some rights cannot be taken while others are abandonned. It is impossible to speak of certain liberties, forgetting the fundamental rights to food, to the possibility of access to means of curing illnesses, to study and develop,” said the Cardinal.

The message included no references to Cuban government policy nor to Fidel Castro, to increasing religiousness, nor did it call people to attend the mass to be celebrated by the Pope during his visit to the island from January 21 to 25.

However, he inaugurated a new stage in the rhetoric of the Cuban ecclesiastical hierarchy which, according to analysts, could mark the beginning of a return to the dialogue which began to be seen between the Church and the State in the eighties.

The Cardinal broke with the hyercritical line of “Everything awaits love” which had defined the position of the Catholic Church in Cuban society and in its relations with the State since 1993.

This text criticised the political system in Cuba, the economic and social situation on the island, and proposed changes to tackle the “exclusive and omnipresent character of the official policy” and the limitations imposed “not only on certain freedoms” but “on freedom itself.”

Inclusively, following the meeting between Castro and John Paul II in November 1996, an article published in the archbishopric magazine in Havana, “Palabra Nueva” under the title “Love is still waiting,” established the statement was still in place.

But on this occasion the Cardinal held back from making direct criticisms of the government or demanding civil rights like the freedom of expression or political belief and he followed the official Cuban position on human rights.

“There cannot be a selection of right, they are all complementary,” he said.

At the same time, he also left open the option of differences within understandign by criticising the right to abortion and the death penalty, both of which exist in Cuba, as violations of the right to life.

“For the Pope the defence of life is the first of all duties, because it is the first of all the rights of man,” said Ortega, questioning the use of the death penalty as “a valid way of preventing evil in society.”