CUBA-RELIGION: Detente Continues Apace

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Nov 26 1996 (IPS) - The thaw in the once frosty relations between church and state in Cuba is becoming more pronounced following the landmark meeting at the Vatican on Nov. 19 between President Fidel Castro and Pope John Paul 11.

The evidence in there in the gestures, including two particularly noteworthy ones. In the first, the Cuban authorities, changing a longstanding policy, issued entry visas to 40 foreign priests and nuns. And in the second the official press published the summary of a communique released by Catholic bishops — something almost without precedence.

Church sources told IPS that the government granted entry visas on Friday to 15 priests and 25 nuns from Colombia, Mexico and Spain. A similar number of applications is still pending.

This will represent the largest group of religious workers to travel to Cuba since the 1960s. Only 200 priests and 200 nuns remained after 130 were expelled and more than 2,000 left voluntarily following the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power.

A demand that religious workers receive entry visas was presented to the Cuban government by Jean-Louis Tauran, Vatican secretary of state relations, who visited here in October as a prelude to Castro’s trip to the Vatican.

For years, authorities tightly limited the number of entry visas granted to religious workers, whose scarcity had become one of the chief problems of the local Catholic Church.

Some 450 nuns and 250 priests are currently active in Cuba. Church leaders contend this number is far from adequate to serve a country of 11 million — and religion is enjoying a surge in popularity.

A majority of the clergy opposed the revolution and the Church became identified with opposition and dissident movements. This caused tension between church and state. The situation was aggravated when the government closed Catholic schools and denied religious organisations access to the state-controlled media.

Then in 1991 the governing Communist Party began a series of gestures by altering its official designation of itself as “atheist” and accepting that religion was just one more aspect of Cuban society.

At the end of his official visit to Cuba, Tauran said he had found the government willing to work quickly on solutions to the problem of the entry of a fresh crop of priests and nuns.

But other problems “require an adequate evaluation” he said and must be resolved through in-depth dialogue between political leaders, the Conference of Catholic Bishops and Apostolic Nunciature in Cuba.

The entire list of Church demands — including greater understanding of its social labour, construction of new churches and access to the media — is not expected to be totally satisfied before the Pope’s visit to Cuba next year.

Normally Cuban newspapers do not provide space for the pronouncements of the Conference of Catholic Bishops though they do respond once in a while in editorials to the opinions of church leaders.

But recently the daily ‘Granma’ — official publication of the Communist Party — published the summary of a press communique issued by the Episcopal Conference and signed by Cardinal Jaime Ortega.

In the document, the meeting between Castro and the Pontiff was praised. Cuba’s bishops expressed their confidence that the dialogue “will continue to develop and produce abundant fruit for the life of the Church.”

Further, the cardinal urged “the leaders of those nations whose historic, economic or humanitarian interests link them to Cuba to also seek a solution to the existing conflicts in dialogue.”

That episcopal conference declaration was warmly welcomed in government circles where Ortega’s calls were interpreted as a message to the head of Spain’s government, Jose Maria Aznar, who insists that any cooperation pact between the European Union and Cuba must be conditioned on progress towards political pluralism.

“I have not set any condition (on John Paul II’s visit) nor has the Pope,” Castro said after his meeting with the Pontiff.

Independent analysts say that underlying the relaxing of relations between the Catholic Church and the State is an unspoken agreement that the Vatican will support Cuba in its fight against the U.S. blockade, while Castro will give the church more space in which to operate.