RELIGION-CUBA: Churches Re-establish Roots among Faithful

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Jul 31 2001 (IPS) - Relations between the Catholic Church and the Cuban government appear to have moved beyond the tensions of the past four decades, passing now into a period of rapprochement, paving the way for growing religious devotion among some sectors of the Cuban population.

“It has been a process that has evolved favourably,” said Caridad Diego, head of the governmental Office of Religious Affairs. She characterised relations between the Fidel Castro government and all religious institutions in the country as “positive”.

Monsignor Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, vicar of Havana’s Catholic archdiocese, acknowledged that Pope John Paul II’s 1998 visit to the island improved the religious climate here and initiated a process of change “in the right direction.”

Diego and De Céspedes provided their assessments of the situation during the International Meeting for Socio-Religious Studies, held in Havana earlier this month, and which drew some 200 experts from 16 countries.

Research by the governmental Department of Socio-Religious Studies, organiser of the event, indicates that 85 percent of the 11.2 million Cubans profess some sort of religious belief. The remaining 15 percent declare themselves to be atheist.

The studies show that just 15 percent of those who claim a religious faith belong to an organised religion, such as the Catholic Church or one of more than 50 Protestant groups active in Cuba.

As far as Catholicism, the research survey says three percent of the island’s population attend Mass with regularity, 15 percent report occasional attendance, especially for certain religious ceremonies, and 60 percent of the respondents had been baptised.

Religious activity in Havana, home to 2.2 million people, maintains “positive variations,” according to the archbishopric’s figures.

Catholic authorities report that the number of people who received first communion grew from 746 in 1990 to 2,244 last year, while baptisms rose from 27,609 to 33,735 in the same period.

However, experts in religion point out that the Cuban reality is one in which baptisms hold a sense of ritual protection, which does not necessarily involve a commitment to the Catholic Church.

Within the Cuban panorama there is a convergence of Catholicism, religions of African origin, spiritism, Protestantism, US-based Pentecostalism, and Judaism.

“To undergo the initiation of the ‘Regla de Ocha’ – a religion with African origins that is also known as ‘santería’ – one must be baptised first,” Milagros Guzmán, a ‘santera’ for more than 20 years, told IPS, underscoring the crossover between certain faiths.

For his part, professor Jorge Ramírez Calzadilla stressed that none of the religious variants has achieved predominance in this country, which is why one cannot label the Cuban people in general as being a Catholic, Protestant or Santeros.

Ramírez Calzadilla commented that beginning in the 1990s a rise in religious sentiment became evident, due in large part to greater social openness and to the economic crisis that erupted here following the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the European socialist bloc – once the island’s primary trade and financial partners.

“During difficult times – and this has been true historically – interest in religion tends to increase,” said Ramírez Calzadilla, head of Havana’s Department of Socio-Religious Studies.

Monsignor De Céspedes, meanwhile, attributed this rise to the January 1998 arrival of Pope John Paul II, reflected in the “notable increase” in expressions of religious faith and in the greater comprehension demonstrated by non-believers during the months prior to and following the pontiff’s visit.

“Afterwards, little by little, that fervour declined until it reached a level of stability,” commented the priest in his presentation about the religious reactivation in Cuba during the 1990s.

Some signs of this reality are the reinstatement of the Christmas holiday and the liturgies and processions performed outdoors, a style not often seen in Cuba since the early 1960s, he said.

Furthermore, there has been an increase in the number of visas granted to foreign priests and nuns who wish to remain on the island, and “the habit of frequent communication” between government officials and the men and women of the Catholic Church has remained in place since the preparations for the papal visit more than three years ago.

Sources close to the Catholic Church cited as proof of this improved communication the fact that authorities were able to defuse tensions caused by measures Havana’s provincial authorities were said to have drawn for “confronting the rise of religious influence in the capital.’

The case was handled “at the highest level” and the national government-controlled media condemned the apparently anti- religious endeavour, said a source consulted by IPS who confirmed that President Castro had met in May with cardinal Jaime Ortega.

But even within this climate of dialogue, the Catholic Church in Cuba still has some demands that have been left unsatisfied, measures that would allow them to better serve the faithful among the Cuban population, according to Church officials.

“There are spaces that continue to be off-limits, such as access to the communications media and the possibility of participating in the education system, which makes it difficult to establish a presence in many of the country’s different realities,” commented a priest in Havana.