By Ron Howell. Staff Correspondent.
Newsday.com.
December 26, 2000
Santa Clara, Cuba-Christmas trees flourished on this communist-ruled island
yesterday as Cubans celebrated the birth of Jesus in what has become an uneasy
truce between religion and government.
Havana's overture to Christians-called the apertura-began a crescendo in the
early 1990s and culminated in January, 1998, when Pope John Paul II visited the
island and called for more freedom for Catholics and political dissidents.
In honor of the papal visit, the government declared Christmas a national
holiday, a gesture welcomed widely here.
Still, many are cautious. The peace between the government and Christian
leaders is an uneasy one, fraught with memories on both sides of perceived
betrayals and injustices committed over 40 years.
In this city of 250,000 people, where the pope celebrated a mass in 1998 and
declared that the "values of the Gospel of Jesus Christ...are never a
threat to any social project," the family of Lazaro Castillo gathered on
Christmas Eve.
Castillo, 37, a first lieutenant in the national police department, greeted
a steady stream of neighbors and relatives who stopped by for brief visits.
They reminisced and laughed. They drank beer and ate pork and rice and
beans.
In a corner of the small living room sat a knee-high artificial tree, decked
with lights and tinsel. It was the family's very first Christmas tree.
Castillo, a baptized but non-churchgoing Catholic, had brought it home as a
gift for his daughter, Leisy, 8, when he returned Saturday for a two-day holiday
furlough from his police base in Havana. Leisy was ecstatic at the gift. She
jumped up and down and hugged her dad.
In this proud but mostly poor country, there is no real tradition of
exchanging gifts at Christmas. Once, before the 1959 revolution that brought
Fidel Castro to power, some families gave presents of candy and small toys to
their children on Jan. 6, the day of the Three Kings, known elsewhere as the
Wise Men. But that tradition was almost completely lost since Castro.
As for Christmas, "It has always been the custom in our country for
families to gather on La Noche Buena," said Castillo, "but this is the
first time so many people are buying trees and celebrating." Castillo's
arbolito, or little tree, was made in China and cost him 10 pesos, the
equivalent of about 50 cents in U.S. currency, he said. Policemen in Cuba
generally make about 800 pesos a month, or about $38.
Yes, Castillo said, it was a humble ornament, but it symbolized the extent
to which he and Communist Party militants like him are openly embracing the
trappings of one of Christianity's most important holy days.
His mother-in-law, Cary Horta, 52, who believes in the 1959 revolution with
a religious fervor, said: "The church and the people fell apart for many
years, but now they are pretty well united." Indeed, 190 miles away to the
northwest in Havana yesterday, during his homily at the midnight Mass, Cardinal
Jaime Ortega did not criticize the government at all. He spoke instead about the
need to strive for a healthy soul even more than for a healthy body.
True happiness, the archbishop of Havana said, "is when parents love
each other, in spite of the difficulties they face." While the words may
have been an implicit challenge to the very high rates of divorce in Cuba under
Castro, they sounded more like kindly advice from a father to a child.
The placidity of the message was reflected in the peacefulness of the
Nativity scene outside the Cathedral, which dates to Spanish colonial rule.
After the 10:30 a.m. Mass yesterday, Ortega carried a statue of the baby
Jesus from its crib inside the church and placed it in an empty cradle at the
Nativity scene outside, next to the statues of Mary and Joseph, the Jesus'
parents.
This was the way Christmas was celebrated yesterday and in recent
days-Nativity scenes and family reunions, and hope for good relations between
the government and organized religious denominations, especially the Catholic
Church, which for centuries has been the most important religious institution in
the country.
But underneath Ortega's placid sermon-and beneath the assertions of unity by
Communist Party militants here in Santa Clara-rests a foundation of distrust
that has persisted between devout Christians, particularly Catholics, and the
government.
Back in Santa Clara Castillo and his mother-in-law sounded angry as they
spoke about the reasons why the government has been suspicious of the Catholic
Church. They cited the church's role in Operation Peter Pan, during the early
1960s when Catholic priests spread rumors that Castro was planning to take Cuban
children from their parents and send them to the Soviet Union. Working with
anti-communists in the United States, Cuban priests organized a surreptitious
airlift, sending 14,500 Cuban youngsters to live in the United States, while
their parents stayed behind in Cuba.
Church officials, while not denying their involvement in Operation Peter
Pan, complain the Cuban government began resurrecting the episode earlier this
year, as a propaganda tool during the Elian Gonzalez standoff with anti-Castro
Cubans in Miami.
At the Catholic cathedral here in Santa Clara, the Rev. Paulo Buttigieg said
the Catholic Church initially supported the ideals of the 1959 revolution-the
sharing of wealth with the poor, the delivery of free health care to all,
universal education-but that it finally broke with Castro because he turned
radically to the left. He began taking away individual freedoms and embracing
atheistic Marxism, which frowned on religion as an "opiate" of the
people.
Little by little, over the 1960s, '70s and '80s, open celebration of
Christmas dissolved as party militants steered clear of anything having to do
with the Catholic Church and other religions deemed to be too conservative.
"The root of the problem was the extreme measures taken by the
government," said Buttigieg, one of about 200 Catholic priests in Cuba,
about half of whom, according to church officials, are from foreign countries,
largely Spain.
Buttigieg was sent from his native Malta to Cuba two years ago, when the
government permitted dozens of foreign priests to come and work here in the wake
of the Pope's visit.
Down the block from the Cathedral is a Baptist church where the pastor, the
Rev. Homero Carbonell, acknowledged that people feel freer to practice their
faiths, but said many like him often have a hard time obtaining permission from
the government to attend church conventions in other countries. He nevertheless
said that membership has been growing, with 534 registered at his church and
more than 14,000 in the Western Convention of Baptists in Cuba. He said there
are even more members of Pentecostal churches than there are Baptists in Cuba,
but offered no figures. He conceded that the Catholics have probably baptized
more than any other faith, although many baptized Catholics also worship
Afro-Cuban deities.
Speaking for the Catholic Church, Buttigieg expressed the hope that the
future would bring an abundance of prosperity to the people of Cuba and to its
Christian believers. He dreams that some of the boys will grow up to be priests
in the Catholic Church and say Mass on Christmas and other holy days.
"That is our need now," he said. "Our priests now are coming
from outside.
We need to work hard as our priority to have vocations here."
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