Cuba marks Good Friday
as a public holiday
April 6, 2012
Communist Cuba is marking Easter with a public holiday on Good Friday, for the first time in decades.
This follows Pope Benedict's visit to the country last week, where he requested the move.
Religious holidays in Cuba were cancelled after the 1959 revolution, and fewer than 10% of Cubans are practising Catholics.
Nonetheless, the Church is the most influential organisation outside the Communist government.
The Cuban government said it granted the request as a mark of respect, and to commemorate the "transcendental nature" of the pope's visit.
The Pope's predecessor, John Paul II, made a similar request before the last papal visit to Cuba in 1998, successfully persuading then-leader Fidel Castro to recognise Christmas as a public holiday.
A service at Havana Cathedral will be broadcast live on Cuban television, indicating the improving relations between the Church and the government, says BBC Havana correspondent Sarah Rainsford.
Religious or not, Cubans have welcomed the day off, and hope that the change will be permanent, our correspondent says.
Some described it as a sign that Cuba was opening up to the world.
"I think almost all Cubans think it's a very good idea," one told the BBC.
The holiday has only been declared for this year, but the government says it will take a decision later on whether to make it permanent.
Guess what! Not all is grim
and hopeless in Cuba -
the Washington Post tells us
Having just read a generally depressing post-B16 visit in Catholic World Report on line by a propagandist for the Cuban dissidents, it was almost providential that the next article I came across was this surprisingly upbeat report in the Washington Post, of all places. It is an article I certainly did not expect to find in one of the top international MSM opinion-purveyors, who have always depicted the Cuba story in stark black-and-white, admitting no grey tones whatsoever, and seeing not a single redeeming feature for Cuba. So, who cannot welcome a report such as this? For sure, we know the Washington Post is not shilling for the Castro regime, so this is no puff job for anyone... One can almost be sure reports like this were and are being conveyed to the Pope by his bishops in Cuba, along with the negatives.
Soon after Pope's visit,
Havana church hosts meeting
with former hard-line exiles
By William Booth
Friday, April 6, 2012
HAVANA — The setting was historic. The looming 18th-century Seminary of San Carlos in Old Havana. The attendance remarkable. A hall packed with professors, dissidents, clergy, bloggers, leftists, diplomats. The subject matter once unthinkable.
Just after Pope Benedict XVI left Cuba last week, the Catholic Church hosted a talk by Miami millionaire Carlos Saladrigas, who politely but directly said here in a public forum that socialism — the bedrock of the revolution — wasn’t working anymore on the communist-run island.
After his first visit to Mexico, Pope Benedict stopped in Cuba, formerly an officially atheist country.
“To be honest,” Saladrigas said later, “who could have thought such a meeting possible? Not me. Never.”
But the meeting was clearly a sign that there is cautious but visible change on the island.
Saladrigas, a Cuban exile entrepreneur and former hard-liner who has flourished in Miami, said that
“big changes in the next few years” were inevitable, and he advised young Cubans to stay put.
Although Saladrigas said that Cuba’s state-run economy needed to be opened to free enterprise, the 63-year-old investor also blamed the U.S. government and the anti-Castro Cuban exiles and their politicians in South Florida for perpetuating a standoff that has hurt Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits.
“Change is not easy, I know this personally,” he said.
“This was an event of tremendous importance, the first time that a prominent Cuban from aboard could express these thoughts in a large forum,” said Oscar Espinosa Chepe, an independent Cuban economist who attended the meeting. He remarked that Saladrigas and the dozen people who stood at the microphone criticized both the Cuban and U.S. governments — and even offered a few solutions — in voices respectful and calm.
There were tough questions, too, directed at Saladrigas. Participants asked how the Miami exiles could really help Cuba while still supporting the 50-year-old embargo. The questioners wanted to know how U.S.-style capitalism could replace Cuban socialism, without turning workers into wage slaves and leaving the most vulnerable at the mercy of the markets.
In the past three years, President Raul Castro has begun to open the Cuban economy to its citizens. The government now allows small businesses — like car washers, shoe cobblers, pizza makers — to operate, even hire employees, though it restricts the size and ambition of the enterprise.
The streets these days are filled with legal bazaars (and some blackmarketeering) as fledgling entrepreneurs dip their toes into the capitalist stream. Some neighborhoods in Havana look like a perpetual garage sale.
The for-profit produce stalls are piled high with fresh fruits and vegetables; the government bodegas that issue staples like rice, beans and oil still serve as a valuable safety net in a country where the average monthly wage is $25, though they feel less vital and look empty.
The state is trying in fits and starts to trim its unproductive workforce. It is beginning to shutter state-run cafeterias and has even floated the idea of ending ration cards.
Fallow lands have been offered to free-enterprise farmers, though they complain they can’t get access to tractors or fertilizers. Citizens can now buy and sell their cars — just not new cars — and their homes, too.
Although the Internet is limited and mostly dial-up slow, there are 1.5 million cellphones. Just a few years ago, ordinary citizens were barred from owning them.
Under Castro, the government is also allowing more space for criticism — though not dissent. One of the main beneficiaries of that change is the Catholic Church, which is providing community outreach programs, offering the kinds of services — breakfast for the elderly, free pharmacies, and computer, business and English classes — that were once the sole responsibility of the state.
Today the Church and the government appear to be working side by side. When he was in Cuba last week, the Pope pressed for more religious freedom. The Vatican wants the Church to be able to run schools and hospitals here. There was no official response to the request. But Castro did grant the Pontiff one wish — the government declared Good Friday a paid holiday.
If Havana is changing, so too is Miami.
When Pope John Paul II came to Cuba in 1998, it was Saladrigas who organized mass demonstrations — and backroom arm-twisting — that led the Catholic Church in Miami to cancel plans to charter a cruise ship to bring South Florida pilgrims to the island to greet the pope.
Saladrigas now says he was wrong, and he vowed not to make the same mistake twice. In the past year, with sponsorship from the Church, the Cuban government has awarded Saladrigas four visas to visit the island. (In the years proceeding, he was turned down eight times).
Last week the Catholic church in Miami brought 800 pilgrims in five planes to Cuba to celebrate Mass with the Pope, led by the Archbishop Thomas Wenski.
The exile community in Miami has more confidence in the Catholic Church in Cuba to act as a force for positive change, Wenski said, to help negotiate a “soft landing” as Cuba makes the inevitable transition to post-Castro realities. [That's not what we are told by the dissidents and their propagandists - which include all of MSM that I have read so far, other than this article - who consider Cardinal Ortega to have sold out to the regime for minor concessions to the Catholic Church, and who claim that the Church is doing nothing for the dissidents - despite the fact that Cardinal Ortega secured the release of many political prisoners and continues talking with the regime for further releases.]
“Of course, not everyone wants a soft landing. Some people want chaos and bloodshed and civil war,” Wenski said, “but those people are in the minority now.”
Wenski said that the Pope’s visit advanced everyone’s cause, at least a little bit. “Everyone needs the Church in Cuba, even Raul. Maybe especially Raul.”
Joe Garcia, the former director of the conservative Cuban American National Foundation, based in Miami and Washington, said that opponents of the last Pope’s visit learned that they missed an opportunity to engage.
“This time there was no real opposition. In Miami we saw the visit by the Pope as mostly a good thing, not great, but good,” Garcia said. “Though of course there were a few people who wanted to see the Pope get off the plane like Rambo and take out the leadership.”
Garcia said people in Miami were mostly disappointed the Pope did not meet with dissidents on the island, and that the Pontiff did not speak directly to the
harassment they faced.
[I think that is, for once, an honest description of what the dissidents in Cuba have had to deal with. Harassment, not persecution - if even Amnesty International no longer has a single 'prisoner of conscience' on its Cuba list, and all the dissidents in Cuba now most vocal against the Pope and the Church have really been free all these past many years to stage their protests and speak to international media.
Of course, there appear to have been a number of arrests and detentions in the days leading up to the Pope's visit, but the detainees were released after a couple of days without charges; and a number of dissidents twitted that they were kept by police from leaving their homes on the day of the Pope's Mass. As objectionable as this harassment is, they appear relatively minor compared to how totalitarian regimes, including the Castro regime in its early years, treat dissidents as a rule.
In the eyes of militant exiles in Miami, Saladrigas was a traitor to the cause, who had gone all soft, with his talk of reconciliation with the Cuban state and society.
Now they are watching him on television.
To the Castro government, Saladrigas once represented the enemy, the conservative, wealthy Miami fat cat, the true gusano, the worm.
Now he is granted visas to visit.
Kudos to the reporter and to the Washington Post for reporting something different that allows us to see another side of the situation in Cuba. It's the kind of 'balancing off' article I was looking for in the days before the Pope's visit but which I never found.
And here's the CWR report by a man who has produced three documentaries on the opposition movement and the Church in Cuba, so his sympathies are obvious. The dissidents had the same expectations of Benedict XVI that he could with a wave of his pastoral staff lift the totalitarian yoke of the Cuban regime, as the Jerusalem rabble had that Jesus as the Messiah would rid the Jews of the Roman imperium...
The continuing struggle for the soul of Cuba
In the wake of Pope Benedict's visit,
Cuban dissidents express frustration and anger
as the Castro regime continues political repression
and religious persecution
by Jordan Allott
April 5, 2012
A day before Pope Benedict XVI’s historic visit to Cuba on March 26, I was in Arroyo Naranjo, one of Havana’s poorest areas, meeting with Lilvio Fernandez Luis, a Catholic and the leader of JACU, or Joventud Activa Cuba Unida.
Lilvio spent the day showing me the life he has worked hard to create — a life built on a strong family and the courage to fight against the repression that the Cuban government has inflicted on its people for more than 53 years.
When I spoke with him, Lilvio wasn’t planning to attend the papal Mass at the Plaza de Revolution in the center of Havana on March 28. “I will attend Mass here at my home parish of St. Barbara just two blocks away,” he explained. “If I try and leave my neighborhood on the day of the Mass, I will most likely be detained by state security.”
Lilvio’s situation was not unique. Although the Church’s goal was to reach out to the Cuban people during Pope Benedict’s visit, many individuals and families found it difficult or impossible to participate in the three days of events organized by the Cuban Catholic Church and Vatican with permission from the island’s Communist government.
Despite the government’s limitations, however, Lilvio and almost everyone I talked to during my time in Havana believed the Pope’s trip would be a positive spiritual experience, if not a positive political experience, for the people of Cuba.
Throughout the past five decades, the Communist government of Fidel and Raul Castro has consistently repressed institutions and organizations not under their strict control.
Soon after the 1959 revolution, Fidel Castro declared Cuba an atheistic state and reduced the Church's ability to work among the people by deporting hundreds of priests and nuns, seizing all Church properties, and imprisoning and executing countless Catholics and others who expressed faith in God. As the decades passed, Christians continued to face severe discrimination.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, however, the Cuban government felt the need to ease up on its repression against the Church in order to receive economic concessions from Europe—aid it had previously received from the USSR. In 1992, Cuba declared itself a secular state and permitted Catholics and others to join the Communist Party, the country’s only legal political party.
In 1998, Pope John Paul II made a historic visit to Cuba. It was Cuba’s first papal visit, and the trip ignited hope amongst those who remembered John Paul II’s journeys to his native Poland (then Communist) in 1979. The Pope’s visits helped initiate the Solidarity Movement that ultimately contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
During his five-day visit to Cuba, Pope John Paul II held meetings with Fidel Castro and religious leaders, and celebrated public Masses in several cities. John Paul II spoke often about the nation’s need for individual responsibility, strong families, and a culture of life.
With his visit, Pope John Paul II brought spiritual hope not only to Roman Catholics, but also to the many other Christians and non-believers who attended the various public Masses and celebrations.
But certain topics were off limits during the Pope’s visit, including any public discussion of Cuba’s political prisoners. Many human rights advocates both on and off the island were disappointed that the Pope did not speak out in support of the opposition movement that had been working for religious freedom and human rights on the island. [The 'convention' uniformly employed by MSM in reporting Benedict's visit was different: that whereas John Paul II spoke forcefully in favor of the dissidents, Benedict XVI chose to do so only indirectly! Which is par for the course, in terms of the unfair and downright false reporting of MSM about Benedict XVI.]
I have traveled to Cuba on a number of occasions over the past few years, and have discussed issues of faith with Cubans from one end of the island to the other. More than in the past, during Pope Benedict’s visit, I found Cubans willing to discuss the restrictions placed on the Church by the government.
“The churches are crumbling and we don’t have permission from the government to make renovations,” Raul, a Catholic from Havana who is involved with his local church, complained. “We cannot communicate with the people because newsletters are restricted and the majority of people have been living a life without God for two or three generations. It’s almost as if we are starting from nothing.”
Raul’s wife, Yinet, agreed. “Starting from nothing and without any resources is very difficult,” she told me.
The Communist government has made small moves to allow the Church some independence over the past decade and a half. Politically, however, the government has continued to deny its people any opportunity for democracy or a say in their own future.
A 2003 crackdown on non-violent human rights and democracy advocates included the imprisonment of 75 men and women from across the island. Many of those arrested received sentences of 25 years in prison. In 2010 and 2011, the Cuban Catholic Church, with help from the Vatican and the Spanish government, negotiated the release and forced exile of most of the prisoners imprisoned during the 2003 mass arrest.
Many Cuba-watchers believe the Church’s new role of mediator is a positive sign, understanding the Church to be the only institution able to communicate with the Communist government from inside the island.
Others fear that the Church has grown too close to the Communist government. They wish the Church would do more to reach out to the dissident community and to speak up more loudly for the political rights of the Cuban people. [Cardinal Ortega has been doing that, to the extent that he can. The Cuban bishops' conference issued a formal statement in 2003 denouncing government repression, yet the Church in Cuba is also realistic enough to know that it can only do so much, and that its primary duty is to safeguard the interests of all Cuban Catholics first, ahead of crusading for the rights of a few hundred dissidents. Moreover, the critical dissidents who have never been imprisoned cannot claim to have any moral superiority over the cardinal who spent two years in a Castro labor camp.]
Pope Benedict’s visit started in Santiago de Cuba on the eastern end of the island with a greeting by President Raul Castro and a public outdoor Mass celebrating the 400th anniversary of the Virgin of Charity. The following morning, Benedict visited the Shrine of Our Lady of Charity in El Cobre, a few miles from Santiago. On his third day in Cuba, Pope Benedict offered a public Mass in Havana’s Revolutionary Square and visited privately with Fidel Castro before returning to Rome.
As Pope John Paul II had done 14 years earlier, Pope Benedict spoke of the need for Cuban society to return to a culture of life. Benedict, whose office cast the trip in the context of a spiritual pilgrimage, at times addressed political issues — often delicately, and on occasion more explicitly.
At the start of his visit, aboard the flight from Rome, he denounced Cuba's Marxist political system, which he said "no longer corresponds to reality." In Santiago de Cuba, he prayed for "those deprived of freedom." And he made several references to freedom in his final sermon in Havana, addressing a nation that has suffered under a totalitarian government routinely denounced for its abuses by international human rights groups.
While these statements and the spiritual solidarity the Pope’s visit brought were felt by many,
others felt the Pontiff, the most visible Christian leader in the world, could have done more to press the government concerning human rights, as well as religious and individual freedoms. [The Messiah syndrome, as usual, in which people expect a spiritual leader to lead a political fight when that is not his function, much less his priority.]
Cuba is still designated "not free" by Freedom House, and is still among its "worst of the worst" countries and one of "the world's most repressive regimes."
[It would have been helpful if Allott had attributed these judgments to some specific institution, and if he had also mentioned Amnesty International's acknowledgment that as of the beginning of 2012, at least, there was not a single 'prisoner of conscience' left in Cuba's prisons, and that the latest US State Department account said 'no human rights abuses' were reported in its last reportign period which covered the second half of 2012.]
During the Pope’s visit, more than 300 human rights advocates across Cuba were detained in order to keep them from speaking out publicly against the government while the world’s attention was focused on the island.
In fact, three days before Pope Benedict landed in Santiago, I was scheduled to meet with human rights advocate Sara Marta Fonseca outside a popular hotel in the center of Havana. Sara Marta and her husband never showed up for the meeting, and I was later told she had been detained on her way there. She was kept in jail for more than a week, until long after Pope Benedict had left the island.
Traveling around Havana I got the impression that the government was exploiting Pope Benedict’s visit in order to give the impression to outsiders that the government was tolerant of religious institutions.
The visit was also a boon to Cuba’s dismal economy. It seemed to me that more than half of the individuals I saw at the public Mass in Havana were foreigners. Billboards, posters, and other materials advertising the public events were located mainly in tourist hot spots.
In fact, more than one Cuban I talked to who had traveled to Havana from another part of the island told me they were in Havana illegally.
“The government is scared to have us here in Havana,” said Guillermo, who lives with his family outside Santa Clara. “It is illegal for Cubans to move about the island without permission. The government wants control and when people move freely, control is lost.”
[But they managed to come, anyway, so good for them!]
The sense of paternalism is evident to outsiders at all times in Cuba, but especially during large events when foreign journalists are present and the outside world is watching.
“It’s as if your parents are expecting an important guest and are afraid the children will make a scene,” Lilvio explained. “They are nervous about how we will act with outsiders around.”
One individual, Andres Carrion Alvarez, undoubtedly expressing the feelings of many, shouted "Down with the Revolution! Down with the dictatorship!" near journalists at the Mass at Santiago's crowded Revolution Plaza.
He was beaten and escorted out of the Mass by armed police and hasn’t been seen since. [What we saw on TV was that he was surrounded by three unarmed security men then escorted out of the Mass sector and led away by two man in civilian clothes. Was he beaten afterwards, and is it true he has not been heard from since? We only have Allott's conjecture. This was an episode some Western MSM reporter in Cuba could and should have followed up as a case history of what happens to dissenters who 'make a scene', but I did not see one follow-up report during the two more days that the Pope was in Cuba after the incident.]
In the case of Lilvio, the “parents” decided it was better if their guest did not have the chance to meet him and to hear about the abuse he and his brothers and sisters are suffering. Lilvio was detained the day of the Pope’s arrival.
Many people ask me if much has changed in Cuba over my four years of travel there. Not much, I tell them. There have been some cosmetic changes, such as allowing select individuals to set up small bodega-style restaurants in certain areas of the country.
But the regime is still as committed to “la revolucion” as it ever was. On the way to the airport I saw a sign that underscored the statement of Marino Murillo, vice president of the island's council of ministers.
Responding to the Pope's remarks about the failure of Cuba’s Marxist political system, Murillo said, “In Cuba, there will not be political reform.” Similarly, the billboard announced, “Our changes mean only more socialism.”
Despite the contradictory feelings I experienced over the course of my trip, I was left with one lasting sound from my stay in Havana: that of Pope Benedict’s voice speaking about God, faith, and family, blasting from televisions across the city as I walked Havana’s streets. A welcome voice and needed message, especially in Cuba.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 07/04/2012 01:59]