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.c The Associated Press
By HUGH A. MULLIGAN
AP Special
Correspondent
SANTA CLARA,
Cuba (AP) - It all came back to Luis Lugo as his tour bus, filled with American
papal pilgrims, passed the mist-covered sugar cane fields:
The Sunday afternoon cockfights, the bull that chased him across the fields,
the 12-foot snakes that lurked in the cane breaks, the cheers and "Oles!''
for the semi-pro baseball team of factory workers his father sponsored.
Now an investment adviser in Philadelphia, Lugo was reared just a few miles
from Santa Clara, 180 miles east of Havana, where Pope John Paul II celebrated
his first Cuban Mass on Thursday.
He had not been back since he was 11, when his family fled Cuba after Fidel
Castro's government confiscated the family tomato cannery and threw his father
in jail.
"I thought my world ended then,'' said Lugo, one of some 400 U.S.
citizens who flew to Cuba under the sponsorship of the Northeast Hispanic
Catholic Center, an agency of the New York Archdiocese.
Looking out the bus window at the horse-drawn carts, boys playing baseball
in a barnyard, the tin-roofed sugar mills and the bohios - thatched huts - he
was surprised and saddened.
"How little has changed since 1961,'' he mused. "My poor Cuba. She
needs all the pope's prayers.''
Those with Lugo came from many states and diverse occupations. Dr. Clement
Cunningham, retired from family practice in Rock Island, Ill., spent his spare
time visiting Havana hospitals to assess medical needs.
Chris Gilson, a Catholic Relief administrator from Baltimore, studied ways
to cut government red tape to get more food and medicine to people in Cuba's
countryside.
Meeting casually with local clergy, the dozen U.S. priests in the group
found Cuban pastors astonished and elated at how far Castro has allowed them to
go in matters of religion because of the papal visit.
Not only were Catholics allowed to build a high altar in Havana's Revolution
Plaza, Cuban communism's most revered shrine, but they added an elevator to lift
the frail pope into the pulpit for this Sunday's Mass without bothering party
bureaucrats for permission.
All of a sudden, nuns fingering rosary beads were kneeling in front of the
National Library, now adorned with a nine-story mural of Jesus, bigger even than
the effigy of Che Guevara across the square.
The U.S. priests saw Catholic youth groups on street corners with bongo
drums, trumpets and maracas to serenade the pope as he passed by with hymns in
throbbing rhumba rhythms.
"When people congregate for reasons other than sports or party rallies,
the government always before became very nervous,'' a local pastor told them.
Some among the Cuban clergy they met even ventured to hope that Castro, now
nearing 72, might be returning to the faith that Jesuit fathers tried to hammer
into him at a Havana school he later confiscated and turned into a military
college.
"What a miracle that would be,'' enthused one Franciscan friar.
Yet many of the visiting priests, like Father Carlos from Allentown, Pa.,
were appalled at how little even educated Cuban Catholics knew about the pope
after decades of having their faith suppressed.
One history major at Havana University, just months away from graduating
with honors, said she knew the pope was "a very good man,'' but she did not
know he was Polish or that he lived in Rome.
Joining the pope in Cuba wasn't easy for the pilgrims. The size of the group
kept changing. Nearly 25 were turned back at New York's John F. Kennedy airport
when the Cuban government denied them visas at the last moment.
"No one knows why. There was no pattern to the refusals,'' said Randal
Teague, a lawyer from Alexandria, Va., involved in Catholic charitable projects.
"But the Cubans have an excellent intelligence network everywhere and
probably have their reasons.''
But those who made it hoped their presence in Cuba might make a difference.
Each was allowed to bring in 22 pounds of extra baggage, and they loaded the
plane's cargo hold with health and medical items.
"For me, seeing the magical effect the pope has had on our people and
the hope he has brought them made the $2,000 cost of my trip worthwhile,'' said
one Cuban exile, a philosophy professor from Boston who asked that her name not
be used. "I will visit an aunt and two cousins here, and I fear for them.
But now I also have hopes for them.''
AP-NY-01-23-98 1534EST |