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By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January
18, 1998; Page A30
MIAMI, Jan. 17—Bishop
Agustin Roman stood before the altar in Miami's Sanctuary of Our Lady of
Charity, a rambling, white-vaulted building erected on a coral promontory on the
shores of Biscayne Bay as a shrine to Cuba's patron saint. The Sanctuary is a
church for the more than 500,000 of South Florida's Cuban exiles who adhere to
Catholicism, and Roman, 69, a severe, white-haired man in frail health, is
Miami's leading exile priest.
The Archdiocese of Miami has scheduled hundreds of special events to help
the exiles commemorate Pope John Paul II's historic five-day visit to Cuba next
week. But along with this unity of purpose over an event in the exiles' island
homeland, the visit is bringing into sharp focus the Miami church's deep
ambivalence over the strategy it should pursue in promoting democracy in Cuba.
Much like the flock it administers to, the church here is divided.
The pope favors engagement: lifting the U.S. trade embargo, strengthening
the Cuban church and opening a dialogue with Cuban President Fidel Castro. Miami
Archbishop John C. Favalora and several other Florida clergy will travel to
Cuba for the pope's visit in a show of support.
Roman, by contrast, is persona non grata in Cuba, but would not go there
even if he could. He believes in isolating Cuba to force categorical systemic
changes, a hard-line stance that has prevailed in Miami's organized exile
community and to a large extent informed U.S. government policy toward Castro
for decades.
"I pray every day" that Castro's communist government "will
change," Roman said, but as long as this does not happen, the Sanctuary,
overlooking the sea from whence they came, remains an expression of the exiles'
obsession and frustration.
And their anguish. When the pope formally crowns the original image of Our
Lady of Charity as Cuba's patroness, Roman and the exiles will hold Masses
celebrating the event. But, as they have done in ceremonies spanning nearly 40
years, they will have to use a replica.
Cuba policy is an enduring controversy within the Miami church, but it
spilled into the open late last year over a proposal by the archdiocese to
charter a cruise ship to take 1,000 pilgrims to Cuba for the pope's visit.
"It was my idea, and it seemed eminently logical," said Bishop
Thomas G. Wenski, the Polish American chief of Catholic Charities for the
archdiocese. Passengers would go to the pope's Masses, but live aboard ship,
thus avoiding a violation of U.S. rules barring most U.S. citizens from spending
money in Cuba.
For the next three months, the proposal served as a rallying point for
hard-liners who charged that the cruise, "a universal symbol of frivolity,"
according to one letter written by prominent Cubans to Favalora, would
trivialize the Cuban diaspora.
In the end, Favalora and a group of conservative Catholic activists crafted
a Solomonic escape: There would be no ship because of "serious tension in
our community," Favalora said in a mid-December statement. Instead, there
would be an airplane that would fly pilgrims to Cuba and back for the pope's
Sunday Mass in Havana's Plaza de la Revolucion.
The plane, chartered by the archdiocese, holds only 183 people and is fully
subscribed by clergy and lay faithful paying approximately $250 for the round
trip, Wenski said.
"We were able to defuse the tension without sacrificing the principle,"
Wenski said.
But he is under no illusions that the truce will last, or that the
ideological struggle—and the church's embroilment in it—has ended.
Should the pope press hard for an end to the U.S. embargo on Cuba, and
should the U.S. Conference of Bishops support him in a resolution, the Miami
archdiocese may be required to take a stand on an issue where up to this point "we've
just been kind of agnostic," Wenski said. "We'll get the heat anyway,
whether it's our initiative or not, because we're here."
It is not a battle that Wenski seeks to avoid. An unabashed advocate of
engagement, he regards the debate as "very healthy," with "moderate
voices" among the exiles getting a better hearing than in the past. He
acknowledges, however, that "many of our Cuban pastors are sensitive to
hard-liners, whether out of conviction or fear."
No one questions Roman's convictions. Nor those of Cuban-born the Rev. Jose
Menendez, who has programmed the computerized carillon in his Corpus Christi
Church to play the Cuban national anthem hourly from the moment the pope lands
on Cuban soil Wednesday until he leaves at 7 p.m. Sunday.
Unity will be readily apparent next week, when the Miami archdiocese's 111
parishes will celebrate hundreds of special Masses, vigils and processionals in
an expression of solidarity with the pope.
"We will all be praying for justice and peace and for healing and
grace," wrote Favalora in a recent letter to his pastors. "Wouldn't
it be a grand show of our communion with the Church in Cuba if we filled our
churches to capacity on those days?"
Radio Paz, the archdiocese's radio station, will broadcast the pope's four
Masses live, accompanied by commentary and discussion in Miami by two exile
priests.
A replica of Our Lady of Charity has visited several parishes during the
run-up to the pope's arrival in Cuba and will be returned to the shrine in a
processional Tuesday night to be followed by a Mass at the Sanctuary and a
24-hour vigil.
The Sanctuary was built in the 1970s from contributions collected from the
exiles over several years. "We asked people to contribute an hour's wages
every week," Roman said. "I personally carried $30,000 in pennies to
the bank."
Inside the Sanctuary, the trappings of exiledom almost fall away, to be
replaced by a different ambience. The priest's chair, Roman said, is carved from
the bole of a single Cuban palm tree. The rough-hewn pews, he explained, evoke
the benches used for centuries by cane-cutters in Cuba's sugar camps. The six
soaring rafters overhead, he said, represent Cuba's six traditional provinces—Camaguey,
Havana, Las Villas, Matanzas, Oriente and Pinar del Rio—a motif echoed by
the small, six-sided obelisk below the altar.
Each facet, he said, contains sand, stones and soil from each province, and
each is adorned with a single pebble from the site of the original Our Lady
Shrine in El Cobre, outside the eastern Cuban city of Santiago. The obelisk is
held together by cement mixed with Cuban water.
The shrine's centerpiece is a sepia mural behind the altar painted by exile
Teok Carrasco in 1976. It depicts Our Lady of Charities surrounded by the major
events of Cuban history beginning with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in
1492.
Virtually the entire mural displays images familiar to every Cuban, but to
end the mural Carrasco has summed up the exile experience in one terrible image:
an open boat adrift in the Florida Straits, with a family bailing for its life
and a mother and child hugging each other and staring at a future laden with
anguish and uncertainty.
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