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FEATURE
By Frances Kerry
HAVANA, Jan 16
(Reuters) - When Cuba's President Fidel Castro emerged from his historic first
meeting with Pope John Paul at the Vatican in November 1996, the veteran
Communist leader sounded like an awed schoolboy.
"For me it's a miracle I have been able to meet the Pope,'' Castro
said, speaking in an unusually humble tone. He said he never would have dreamed
of meeting the Pontiff, calling himself a modest fighter and politician who did
not deserve such an honour.
Now the 71-year-old revolutionary is enthusiastically set to meet the Pope
again, this time on his home turf, as the Pontiff pays a visit on Jan. 21-25 to
the Caribbean island where Castro has held power since his 1959 revolution.
"We will do everything humanly possible so he feels good and satisfied
with the visit,'' Castro instructed Cubans in a speech to parliament in
December.
In the eyes of the world, the visit is a dramatic encounter between a
guardian of one of the last Communist states and the Polish-born Pope who
crusaded against East bloc communism. But in some senses it is also a search by
Castro for moral endorsement of his political work, and it throws the spotlight
on what the Cuban leader thinks about religion.
Castro has long insisted he respects religion, however limited the space
granted churches over nearly four decades by his government. And he has said
that political rather than religious considerations were at the root of past
tensions between the churches and the Cuban state.
Some observers also speculate that with age Castro's nonbelief, stated in
the past, may be softening. Last November, in a highly unusual nod to a force
other than politics or economics, he told Protestant church leaders to pray to
help Cuba recover from its economic crisis.
CASTRO WAXES SENTIMENTAL OVER CHRISTMAS
In his December speech, he announced he would grant Cubans a Christmas Day
holiday for the first time in 28 years. He seemed almost sentimental as he
recalled eating "apple, grapes and nougat'' at Christmas in his childhood
and insisted Cuba had not dumped the holiday for anti-religious reasons.
Last weekend, he was guarded when asked about his religious beliefs, saying
that as a politician and a revolutionary it was a hard question for him to
answer.
"If you say you are a nonbeliever it hurts believers, and if you say
you are a believer it hurts nonbelievers and you become in some sense a
preacher,'' Castro said. "I do believe in mankind and in the goodness and
nobility of man. I believe the world should live in a way that is just and
rational.''
Whether or not he shares the Pope's faith, Castro is clearly an admirer of
the man, perhaps as someone who is deeply committed to his ideas. Speaking about
him last weekend, he described the Pontiff as "a very intelligent, capable
person who is very convinced about his ideas, a person I appreciate and
respect.''
Such respect must stem in part from a Catholic background. In a long
interview on religion with Brazilian Dominican friar Frei Betto in 1985, Castro
recalled his mother's religious devotion and his own schooling, first at church
schools in Santiago de Cuba and then at Belen college, a Jesuit-run Havana high
school from which he graduated in 1945 with a glowing report predicting he would
"make a brilliant name for himself'' and "go far'' in the world.
'NEVER REALLY HELD RELIGIOUS FAITH' - CASTRO
Castro made plain that neither his mother's nor the Jesuits' faith had
brushed off on him. "Nobody could instill religious faith in me through the
mechanical, dogmatic, irrational methods that were employed,'' he told Frei
Betto, whose book on the interview was published in 1985 and is the standard
work on Castro's views on religion.
"If somebody were to ask me when I held religious beliefs, I'd have to
say 'never, really.' I never really held a religious faith,'' Castro said. He
added that he wore a cross around his neck during the armed struggle he led
against dictator Fulgencio Batista in the Sierra Maestra from 1956-59 because a
young girl who admired the rebel cause sent it to him, not because he had any
religious beliefs.
Despite this lack of faith, Castro said his early sense of values, of right
and wrong and of justice, were clearly influenced by his religious surroundings.
He also consistently admires the social values of Christianity, especially when
they coincide with his own views of social justice.
In his conversation with Frei Betto, an advocate of liberation theology,
Castro firmly declared there was no contradiction between Marxism and
Christianity. He added that legendary leftist guerrilla Ernesto "Che''
Guevara probably would have been "made a saint'' if he had been a Catholic
since he had "all the virtues.''
Castro's sense of Christianity as a huge cultural force in the life of
Western nations was illustrated by his apparent awe as he toured the Sistine
Chapel in 1996, when he called Michelangelo's Last Judgment fresco a "marvel.''
CASTRO GOVERNMENT'S HARSH STAND ON RELIGION
How, then, to explain the Castro government's harsh attitude toward
religion, which led if not to violent persecution then certainly to
discrimination?
Some Cubans, surprised and even irritated by Castro's new warm tone towards
religion, recall that he was after all Cuba's leader at a time when the
atmosphere was altogether less pleasant. After the 1959 revolution, church
schools were closed and more than 100 foreign priests were expelled.
As a priest in the 1960s, Cuba's current Cardinal Jaime Ortega spent time in
a correctional labour camp, and religious believers were barred from the
Communist Party until 1991.
Castro's explanation in the Frei Betto book, and since, was that the early
conflict with the Roman Catholic church was not with believers but with the
institution and its particular role in society. He said it arose because the
church was not "popular'' but was an institution of the landed and rich
classes who were affected by revolutionary reforms, and one whose clergy were in
many instances foreign and "reactionary.''
"Our first conflicts with the church began when they tried to use the
church as a tool as a party against the Revolution,'' he said. He said he had
held no dogmatic view on the nationalization of education "but if those
schools become hotbeds of revolutionary activity ... there's no choice.''
REUTERS
14:54 01-17-98 |