The man who has led Cuba since 1949, and who was widely expected to remain in office until he died, is stepping down from the presidency. The relationship of Fidel Castro with the Church was more complicated than might be expected in such a ‘devout' Communist
Fidel Castro's sense of his own immortality, legendary during his 49 years as Cuban leader, was never more in evidence than in some of his attitudes towards the Catholic Church. It is said that his advisers had to remind him that Catholicism had been a force in Cuba for half a millennium and was likely to be around after the Comandante en Jefe himself was long gone, and so he had better start to make accommodations with it. Castro is still alive, but his decision this week to step down from his role as president will still come as a surprise to many who had expected him to hold on to power until the very end.
Castro's relationship with the Church has been complex and ambiguous. Indeed, any visitor to the shrine to Our Lady of Charity, the patron of Cuba, in Santiago will find the prayerful offerings and gifts that his devout mother, Lina Ruz, made to the Virgin in return for her son's safety during his guerrilla struggle. One of Castro's close aides, promoted to the rank of commander during the Sierra Maestra campaign, was the Catholic priest Fr Guillermo Sardiñas, with whom he retained a lifelong friendship. After Castro's arrest in the wake of the failed uprising in 1953, he owed his life and his freedom to the guarantees of the Archbishop of Santiago, Enrique Perez Serantes.
As a brilliant student of the Christian Brothers and then the elite Jesuit-run Bethlehem College in Havana, Castro was to retain an abiding respect for the austerity, rigour, discipline and the self-sacrificing commitment of his teachers. In the 1980s, Castro was to shock his comrades with a speech delivered at a party congress in which he held up the example of a religious sister, Sor Fara, a Vincentian nun who ran a hospice for the disabled, as a perfect model for good Communists to emulate. Among the must-see sites for every visitor to Cuba were the old people's homes and day centres run by religious communities but fully funded by the state.
But the Cuban revolution and Castro's relationship with the Church were victims of their time. When Castro and his guerrilla army triumphantly entered Havana on 1 January 1959, the winds of the Second Vatican Council had yet to blow through the Church. This was a time when Rome was warning Italian Catholics, under pain of excommunication, against voting Communist. The emergence of the theology of liberation in Latin America and its progressive message of social justice was a decade away.
So, while some commentators insist that the revolution and Castro's "26 July Movement" (named after a failed attack on that day on a Santiago barracks in 1953) were universally popular, others close to the Church remember the early years of the revolution not as a honeymoon but as a time of mutual distrust. One of the first acts of the Government, the nationalisation of education, came as a cruel blow to the Catholic Church, which in Cuba, unlike in other parts of Latin America, possessed neither great wealth nor lands, but ran a first-class, but elitist, private school system.
The involvement of several Catholic priests in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, followed by Castro's declaration that the Cuban state was to be both socialist and atheist, marked the end of the shortlived period of tolerance, and unease turned into confrontation, with the Church doing much to help Cubans escape into exile to the US. The state cancelled Christmas, restoring the holiday only in 1997. In the aftermath of the invasion not only Catholics but all "believers" were deemed by the Government as unsuitable for membership of the Communist Party, effectively barring them from a whole range of careers in public service. In this period the "military units to aid production" - the notorious "Umaps" - were created as labour camps for "antisocial" elements, including beggars, petty criminals, homosexuals and even some seminarians.
Cardinal Jaime Ortega, Archbishop of Havana for the last three decades, spent 18 months in a Umap until they were closed down on the direct orders of Castro. For the next two decades, to all intents and purposes the Catholic Church became invisible, denied an outlet to the media and public manifestations of religion.
However, it was the Church of Latin America that had a profound impact on Castro. The "option for the poor" embraced by the 1968 conference of Latin American bishops in Medellín, Colombia, led in time to Castro's becoming a close friend of the Mexican Bishop Sergio Mendez de Arceo. In 1985, the publication of Fidel and Religion, a series of conversations between Castro and Frei Betto, a Brazilian Dominican friar, topped Cuba's bestseller list for months.
In the same year, the Church celebrated the culmination of a two-year process of internal reflection in the National Ecclesial Encounter, in which it committed itself to becoming "incarnate" in the people of Cuba and re-engaging in its missionary purpose. Confrontation and silence developed into dialogue and a level of cooperation. Hesitantly and with setbacks, a process began that led to the visit of Castro to Rome in 1996 and Pope John Paul II's visit to Cuba in 1998.
The most significant challenge for the process was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which led to Cuba being increasingly gripped by a siege mentality after the loss of its major trading partners and allies in the socialist bloc. The lifting of the ban on Catholics being members of the party in 1991 was seen as a gesture that was too little and came too late: but as a result many members of the party went public about their Catholic beliefs.
For its part the Catholic Church has long been at pains to avoid confrontation. If it has problems with the Government it has preferred to deal with them in private rather than allow the enemies of Cuba - particularly successive US administrations - to use the Church as a stick to beat the regime. Church leaders have been clear and unequivocal in their condemnation of the economic and trade boycott and they have generally been discreet in their well-founded criticisms. The future leaders of Cuba may well find a valuable ally in the Church in their efforts to make a peaceful transition to democracy, and avert unwanted intervention in the country by the United States.
Fidel Castro's sense of his own immortality, legendary during his 49 years as Cuban leader, was never more in evidence than in some of his attitudes towards the Catholic Church. It is said that his advisers had to remind him that Catholicism had been a force in Cuba for half a millennium and was likely to be around after the Comandante en Jefe himself was long gone, and so he had better start to make accommodations with it. Castro is still alive, but his decision this week to step down from his role as president will still come as a surprise to many who had expected him to hold on to power until the very end.
Castro's relationship with the Church has been complex and ambiguous. Indeed, any visitor to the shrine to Our Lady of Charity, the patron of Cuba, in Santiago will find the prayerful offerings and gifts that his devout mother, Lina Ruz, made to the Virgin in return for her son's safety during his guerrilla struggle. One of Castro's close aides, promoted to the rank of commander during the Sierra Maestra campaign, was the Catholic priest Fr Guillermo Sardiñas, with whom he retained a lifelong friendship. After Castro's arrest in the wake of the failed uprising in 1953, he owed his life and his freedom to the guarantees of the Archbishop of Santiago, Enrique Perez Serantes.
As a brilliant student of the Christian Brothers and then the elite Jesuit-run Bethlehem College in Havana, Castro was to retain an abiding respect for the austerity, rigour, discipline and the self-sacrificing commitment of his teachers. In the 1980s, Castro was to shock his comrades with a speech delivered at a party congress in which he held up the example of a religious sister, Sor Fara, a Vincentian nun who ran a hospice for the disabled, as a perfect model for good Communists to emulate. Among the must-see sites for every visitor to Cuba were the old people's homes and day centres run by religious communities but fully funded by the state.
But the Cuban revolution and Castro's relationship with the Church were victims of their time. When Castro and his guerrilla army triumphantly entered Havana on 1 January 1959, the winds of the Second Vatican Council had yet to blow through the Church. This was a time when Rome was warning Italian Catholics, under pain of excommunication, against voting Communist. The emergence of the theology of liberation in Latin America and its progressive message of social justice was a decade away.
So, while some commentators insist that the revolution and Castro's "26 July Movement" (named after a failed attack on that day on a Santiago barracks in 1953) were universally popular, others close to the Church remember the early years of the revolution not as a honeymoon but as a time of mutual distrust. One of the first acts of the Government, the nationalisation of education, came as a cruel blow to the Catholic Church, which in Cuba, unlike in other parts of Latin America, possessed neither great wealth nor lands, but ran a first-class, but elitist, private school system.
The involvement of several Catholic priests in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, followed by Castro's declaration that the Cuban state was to be both socialist and atheist, marked the end of the shortlived period of tolerance, and unease turned into confrontation, with the Church doing much to help Cubans escape into exile to the US. The state cancelled Christmas, restoring the holiday only in 1997. In the aftermath of the invasion not only Catholics but all "believers" were deemed by the Government as unsuitable for membership of the Communist Party, effectively barring them from a whole range of careers in public service. In this period the "military units to aid production" - the notorious "Umaps" - were created as labour camps for "antisocial" elements, including beggars, petty criminals, homosexuals and even some seminarians.
Cardinal Jaime Ortega, Archbishop of Havana for the last three decades, spent 18 months in a Umap until they were closed down on the direct orders of Castro. For the next two decades, to all intents and purposes the Catholic Church became invisible, denied an outlet to the media and public manifestations of religion.
However, it was the Church of Latin America that had a profound impact on Castro. The "option for the poor" embraced by the 1968 conference of Latin American bishops in Medellín, Colombia, led in time to Castro's becoming a close friend of the Mexican Bishop Sergio Mendez de Arceo. In 1985, the publication of Fidel and Religion, a series of conversations between Castro and Frei Betto, a Brazilian Dominican friar, topped Cuba's bestseller list for months.
In the same year, the Church celebrated the culmination of a two-year process of internal reflection in the National Ecclesial Encounter, in which it committed itself to becoming "incarnate" in the people of Cuba and re-engaging in its missionary purpose. Confrontation and silence developed into dialogue and a level of cooperation. Hesitantly and with setbacks, a process began that led to the visit of Castro to Rome in 1996 and Pope John Paul II's visit to Cuba in 1998.
The most significant challenge for the process was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which led to Cuba being increasingly gripped by a siege mentality after the loss of its major trading partners and allies in the socialist bloc. The lifting of the ban on Catholics being members of the party in 1991 was seen as a gesture that was too little and came too late: but as a result many members of the party went public about their Catholic beliefs.
For its part the Catholic Church has long been at pains to avoid confrontation. If it has problems with the Government it has preferred to deal with them in private rather than allow the enemies of Cuba - particularly successive US administrations - to use the Church as a stick to beat the regime. Church leaders have been clear and unequivocal in their condemnation of the economic and trade boycott and they have generally been discreet in their well-founded criticisms. The future leaders of Cuba may well find a valuable ally in the Church in their efforts to make a peaceful transition to democracy, and avert unwanted intervention in the country by the United States.
Fonte: Clare Dixon , The Tablet, 25 February 2008.
