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By DAVID BRIGGS
.c The Associated Press
MIAMI (AP) -
The "mother church'' of Cuban-American Catholics is a former automobile
showroom on Flagler Street in the heart of Little Havana, a huge, pink building
simply furnished with wooden pews on a hard floor.
The vibrancy of the Mass on a recent Sunday - children crying, votive
candles glowing, worshippers huddled before religious statues even as the priest
distributes Communion - is unchanged from the 1960s, when Cubans first found
refuge in Miami, 200 miles from their native island.
But the neighborhood has changed.
Little Havana has become Little Nicaragua. And Cuban Catholics, like
generations of immigrants before them, have moved to more affluent sections of
the city or to suburbs where their children feel more comfortable in
English-language services.
As Pope John Paul II prepares for his first visit to Cuba this week, the
once monolithic preoccupation with a return to a homeland free of communism is
losing strength as a new generation assimilates into American church and
culture.
Those who have become part of mainstream American Catholicism, and who favor
a moderate approach to Fidel Castro, see in the papal visit an opportunity to
open contacts with and help the 4.5 million Cuban Catholics gain more religious
freedom.
But for those who have never given up hope of returning to Cuba, and who
liken themselves to the ancient Israelites in Babylonian exile, the visit of
this pontiff who shook Europe's communist regimes ignites hopes of a triumphant
homecoming.
"I am sure if the holy father is going to Cuba, Castro will
disappear,'' says Monsignor Emilio Vallina of St. John Bosco.
Cuba has relaxed restrictions on religious freedom in the 1990s, and the
church in the United States wants to build on that by seeking openings to Cuba.
But it isn't simple.
Even the U.S. hierarchy's support of humanitarian aid to Cuba runs afoul of
ardent backers of the U.S. economic embargo.
The extent of opposition to Castro was shown last month when the church in
Miami was forced to cancel a cruise to Cuba for the pope's visit.
Tens of thousands rallied in Miami, objecting to a luxury vessel carrying
Cubans over the same route that multitudes have taken in flight from Castro's
regime, braving sharks and storms on home-made rafts.
"It is now evident to me that the cruise ship has become a source of
serious tension in our community,'' Miami Archbishop John C. Favalora conceded.
Favalora still plans to attend the pope's main Mass in Cuba, but some
prominent Cuban-Americans won't set foot on the island until Castro goes. Gloria
Estefan, for instance, turned down an offer to during the visit.
And yet, it is no longer easy to pigeonhole Cuban Catholics. Time,
prosperity and language have blurred the old notion of a community united in
dreaming of a return to Cuba.
Sharing a lunch with her handicapped mother at St. John Bosco, Nieva
Palacios said her son and his friends do not feel the emotional pull of the
Cuban national anthem, or understand the hardships endured by their refugee
parents.
"They take a more materialistic view, unfortunately,'' said Mrs.
Palacios, whose family fled Cuba in 1960, when she was 12.
Mrs. Palacios was married in St. John Bosco and still comes back
occasionally, but her family now attend Mother of the Redeemer Church on the
more affluent outskirts of the city.
Today, the family kneeling in the pews in St. John Bosco, wearing white
shirts and freshly polished shoes, is likely to be Nicaraguan, while an older
Cuban Catholic couple - he in a Miami Dolphins sweatshirt, she in a red
sweatshirt that says "Jesus is the reason for the season'' - head for St.
Agatha's in the north end of Miami.
Miami is not the sole center of Cuban Catholicism-in-exile. A church group,
Cuban Ecclesial Reflection Communities in the Diaspora, has members everywhere
from Australia to Switzerland. In the United States, sizable Cuban Catholic
populations live in New York and New Jersey.
But no U.S. city has more Cuban Catholics than Miami. A 1988 census found
that 60 percent of the archdiocese's 1.2 million Catholics were Hispanic. Today,
Bishop Agustin Roman estimates there are more than 500,000 Cuban-American
Catholics in the archdiocese.
Each has a different story.
Monsignor Vallina, born in Cuba in 1926 and ordained in 1952, was forced
into exile along with more than 100 other Catholic priests in 1961, the year
Castro closed all parochial schools. He came to St. John Bosco in 1963, and
stayed.
A small, humble man, he works at an old desk in an office filled with
mismatched chairs, and he can still picture the first waves of Cuban refugees
who filled the apartments around the church.
It was for those people - many of whom came with no more than $5 and the
clothes on their back - that he set up a church and school, and gradually added
a health clinic and soup kitchen. Now, at age 72, he is finally building a new
church.
But its congregation will be two-thirds Nicaraguan. Its neighbors are a
Nicaraguan restaurant and the Minimarket Nicaraguense.
"The people keep the faith. ... I try to evangelize all the people,''
says Vallina.
Unlike some immigrant groups, Cubans fled more for political than economic
reasons. Top-heavy with educated professionals, they moved up the economic
ladder relatively swiftly.
Sonny Diaz, a layman who helped coordinate the aborted papal cruise, said
his three grown children - one in Texas, one in Virginia and one in Miami - also
feel comfortable in churches with mixed populations, where Mass is celebrated in
English, their language.
"They are mostly like any American Catholics,'' he said.
In recent conversations outside city churches about the meaning of being
Cuban Catholic, the talk was more about their religious life in America than
about the shared refugee past.
Sipping strong Cuban coffee at Cafe San Michel, a little outdoor cafe
outside St. Michael the Archangel Church, parishioners talked of shared beliefs
in the Virgin of Charity and San Lazaro, and of the tendency of many Cuban
Catholics to mingle church rituals with more Afro-centric practices such as
Santeria.
"The Catholic Cuban is not pure, pure, pure,'' said Jorge Alipio Munoz,
a lay minister to the sick who arrived from Cuba in 1970.
Catholic leaders publicly worry that Hispanics, who make up as much as
one-third of the nation's 61 million Catholics, may be targets for
proselytization as they have been throughout South America.
But in Miami, Cuban Catholics insist there is little danger, even though
some say they know of people who have joined smaller Protestant evangelical
groups or been regularly visited by Jehovah's Witnesses.
"It's a force that you have to recognize, but here, because of the
bonds of the Cubans ... I don't think they could penetrate here,'' Mrs. Palacios
said.
Cuban Catholics say they have found a home in the church here, where their
special feast days are celebrated in the archdiocesan cathedral and the church
has placed a growing emphasis on small groups and religious movements such as
Cursillo that generate the sense of tight-knit community.
"All the churches over here have a Spanish Mass,'' said 51-year-old
Barbara Aubin, who came from Cuba in 1967. "Otherwise, they don't make
it.''
If part of the reason the pope is going to Cuba is to promote a sense of
identity among island Catholics, the visit is having a similar effect on the
exiles.
At a recent Mass at a Miami seaside church, the procession to the altar
began with a papal banner, followed by a statue of Our Lady of Charity, patron
saint of Cuban Catholics, that was brought from Cuba in the 1960s.
The statue has been making the rounds among all the churches with large
Cuban-American populations.
Cubans remember the pope's historic 1979 visit to his native Poland, and see
it as the beginning of the end of Communist rule in Eastern Europe. They hope
the Cuba visit will have the same effect.
That's why Dr. Carlos Belloj, 30, who came from Cuba just six months ago,
views the visit with a skeptical smile, not quite believing it will happen.
"I'm not sure,'' he says. "When I see the pope in Cuba, I'll
believe that.''
AP-NY-01-17-98 1109EST |