CUBA: Pope Calls for Liberty and National Reconciliation

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Jan 24 1998 (IPS) - The coronation of the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre by Pope John Paul II became an event in favour of liberty, dialogue and the reconciliation of all Cubans.

The Pope called on the Virgin to “bring together her children in reconciliation and fraternity,” in a greeting directed to “all the children of Cuba who revere the Virgin of Charity in any part of the world.”

We are going to crown, he added, the image of the “mother of all Cubans, without distinction of race, political opinion nor ideology.”

Hundreds of thousands of people filled the ‘Antonio Maceo’ Revolution Square in Santiago de Cuba, 967 kilometres from Havana, during the penultimate mass of the papal visit.

Cuban Vice-president Raul Castro, and Culture Minister Abel Prieto were amongst those attending the mass paying homage to the Patron saint of Cuba.

The mixed-race virgin of Cuba, known as Charity of El Cobre, by the Catholics, and Ochun, by the santistas (an Afro-Cuban faith), goddess of love and the family, is considered in this country as one of the founding elements of the Cuban nation.

“He who does not love God, does not love the Nation,” said John Paul II, quoting Antonio Maceo, the independence fighter hero whose name is bourne by the square in Santiago de Cuba – a man who always wore a medallion of the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre on his chest.

“History teaches us that without faith, virtue disappears, the moral values darken, the truth does not shine, life loses its transcendent aspect and even the service of the nation can stop being fed by deeper motivations,” he said.

The Church “is not seeking any form of political power,” said the Pope and, at the same time, defended the duty and rights of the lay Catholics “to participate in public debate in equality of opportunities and in an attitude of dialogue and reconciliation.”

For the Pope “the good of a nation must be encouraged and procured by the citizens themselve via peaceful and gradual means.”

“In this way, each person, enjoying freedom of expression, the capacity for inititive and proposal in the bosom of civil society and suitable freedom of association, could collaborate effectively in the quest for the common good,” he said.

In Cuba all alternative political associations opposed to the governing Communist Party are prohibited, the press is monopolised by the State and any group must be given the official nod before it is allowed to meet.

The sermon Saturday followed a harsh message of welcome from Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba Pedro Meurice Estiu who presented “the soul of a nation” as a diadem of “realities, sufferings, joys and hopes.”

“The nation lives here and lives abroad. The Cuban suffers, lives and hopes here and also suffers, lives and hopes abroad,” he said.

“We are a single people who sailing pell-mell over all the oceans continue to seek unity, which could never be fruit of unconformity but of a common and shared soul on the basis of diversity,” he added.

Estiu presented the Pope with all those Cubans “who find no meaning in their lives, who have not been able to choose and develop a life project.”

“I also present you a growing group of Cubans who have confused the nation with a party, the nation with the historical process we have lived through in the recent decades and culture as an ideology,” he said in criticism of the official tendency to think the Nation and the Revolution mean the same thing.

“This people has defended the sovereignty of its geographical frontiers with true dignity, but we have quite forgotten this independence must be rooted in a sovereignty of the human being,” said Estiu, asking the Pope to pray for the prisoners.