RELIGION-CUBA: Catholic Schools, Back on the Front Burner

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Jun 19 1998 (IPS) - Five months after Pope John Paul II’s historic visit to Cuba, one of the main aspirations of the Catholic Churchthe re-opening of private schoolslooks like a battle that has been lost even before it has begun.

The question of the re-opening of Catholic schools emerged again this week with the announcement of a visit by the Vatican’s prefect for religious education, Cardinal Pio Laghi.

The government of Fidel Castro closed all Catholic schools in May 1964 as part of its nationalisation of private educational institutions.

The director of Religious Affairs of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, Caridad Diego, said re-opening Catholic schools would grant the Church privileges, something that was not possible in a system that establishes the principle of religious equality.

Diego pointed out that there are also more than 50 protestant churches and religious expressions of African origin on the island, which would also have to be granted that right.

Cardinal Laghi arrives next Friday, on the first mission to Cuba by a high-level representative of the papal Curia since the Pope’s January visit.

The cardinal’s full agenda includes participation in the mass held for the saint’s days of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in the Havana cathedral. He may also meet with government officials.

“Do not fear, open your families and schools to the values of the gospel, which are never a danger to any social project,” John Paul II said in the sermon he delivered in Santa Clara, 300 kms east of Havana.

The Pope himself recalled those words in a Jun. 9 meeting in Rome with Cuba’s bishops: “May the message I left in Cuba be given continuity and produce abundant fruit under your guidance,” he told them.

Besides its desire to open its own schools, the Catholic Church wants access to the communication media, visas for a larger number of religious personnel, and permission to build places of worship.

The Church says it would offer private, high quality and pluralistic education.

But the Cuban government continues to stand firm in its defence of the free of cost egalitarian public education system, which is compulsory up to the ninth grade, and it does not look ready to yield any ground.

Although there have been no public rows between the Church and the government, the controversy was reignited by the Pope and kept alive since his visit by local Catholic publications. It also underlies government pronouncements on education.

“We have neglected quality in exchange for gratuitousness,” complained an editorial in the latest issue of Vitral, a magazine published by the Catholic Centre of civic and religious education of the archdiocese of Pinar del Rio, 176 kms from Havana.

“We Cubans cannot choose the philosophical focus, pedagogical methods, religious orientation or the kind of school we want for our children,” said the editorial.

Nevertheless, the magazine acknowledged that the entire population has access to public education.

Aurelio Alonso, an expert on religous matters, said of the closing of the schools in the early years of the revolution that “the transformation required in the field of education did not leave room for the subsistence of a privileged parallel educational system.”

The announcement of Laghi’s visit to Cuba was preceded Wednesday by an editorial in ‘Granma’, the newspaper of the governing Communist Party, titled “Education: the Veins of Our Revolutionary Culture.”

Granma contrasts the achievements of Cuba’s educational system with the average 13 percent illiteracy in the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean, where more than 43 million people are illiterate.

In Cuba, 99.7 percent of six to 11-year-olds and 94.5 percent of 12 to 14-year-olds know how to read and write, and there are more than 531,000 university graduates, in a country of 11 million.