Witness to Hope

by George Weigel

  D’Alema’s recognition of what he called “the failure of the attempt to liberate man in a purely materialist way” and his quest for “the ethical and spiritual motivations of political action” was a modest breakthrough in Italian cultural politics, for which John Paul could take indirect (and, through Threshold, some direct) credit.23 As the politics of the Italian left began to mirror the libertinism of the Scandinavian and North American left on the life issues and the sexual revolution, there would undoubtedly be new tensions between Italian social democrats and the culture-forming Church of John Paul II. But a new conversation had been opened because of John Paul II’s emphasis on the priority of culture. Its importance became even more evident in October 1998 when Massimo D’Alema became prime minister of Italy.

  APPOINTMENT IN HAVANA

  John Paul’s culture-first strategy of evangelization and social change got its toughest test in the second decade of his pontificate when the seventy-seven-year-old Pope fulfilled a longstanding wish to visit Cuba in January 1998.

  The Dance

  Cuban Catholicism had never been driven underground like the Church in Ukraine or the greater part of the resistance Church in Czechoslovakia during the communist period in those countries. But it had been persecuted in the early days of the revolution, and even after the persecution eased, the Cuban Church had been systematically frustrated in its efforts to reach out to Cuban society. As the impending collapse of European communism, and of Cuba’s welfare provider, the Soviet Union, put increasing pressure on the Castro regime, Church leaders in Cuba became more assertive and the regime seemed open to exploring new avenues of conversation as it sought a way out of its isolation. In 1988, New York’s Cardinal John O’Connor had gone to Havana to honor the memory of Father Félix Varela, a nineteenth-century hero of the Cuban struggle for independence who had died in exile in New York City. As O’Connor entered Havana’s cathedral to celebrate Mass one evening, he was met with tremendous applause and bombarded with small pieces of paper on which were written the names of political prisoners whose families hoped he might take up their cases with the government. O’Connor gave the names to Castro when they met for four hours, at the dictator’s request and according to his nocturnal habits—from 11:30 P.M. until 3:30 A.M. The New York cardinal, prepared to give as good as he got in exchanges with the volatile Castro, evidently made an impression on the Cuban leader. Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, broached the question of a papal pilgrimage to Cuba on another visit to Havana in 1988. A formal invitation from the Cuban bishops followed, and plans began to be laid.

  In late 1989, the Cuban bishops, impressed by events in Europe, wrote Castro and urged him to give up dictatorial power. The Cuban leader flew into a rage, denounced the bishops as counterrevolutionary collaborators, and denied permission for unloading a $500,000 printing press that had been shipped to the island from Germany for the Church’s use.24 Planning for a papal visit continued through a period of intensified repression, which was curiously combined with two changes in regime practice. In 1991, the Cuban Communist Party agreed to admit believers to its ranks, and in 1992 it declared the Cuban state officially “secular,” rather than “atheist.” At the 1992 World Environmental Summit in Rio de Janeiro, however, Castro accused the Cuban bishops of collaborating with the hated U.S. government, and the papal visit was called off.

  In 1993, the Cuban bishops issued a pastoral letter that deplored the sorry state of the island’s economic, social, and moral life. The bishops warned that many Cubans were living in “internal exile,” their aspirations fixed on things that could only be obtained outside Cuba, like freedom and consumer goods. The letter also blamed the regime for the mass exodus of refugees and urged that exiles be permitted to contribute to solving Cuba’s problems. John Paul strongly endorsed the bishops’ initiative, which outraged the Cuban government. In 1994, seeking to strengthen the local Church’s hand further, John Paul named the fifty-eight-year-old Archbishop of Havana, Jaime Ortega y Alamino, who had been imprisoned as a seminarian in one of Castro’s labor camps, a cardinal. Castro permitted Ortega to attend the November 26 consistory to receive the red hat. The dance between Rome and Havana continued, with the Pope sending unofficial personal representatives to the island (prominent among them, Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law) and Castro receiving them.25

  Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran was in Cuba from October 25 to 28, 1996. Castro kept him waiting until midnight for a meeting and then subjected him to a three-hour harangue, but the conversation was open again at the official level. The following month, Castro attended the World Food Summit being held in Rome and was received by John Paul II in a private audience on November 19. Castro formally invited the Pope to visit. John Paul thanked Castro for permitting him to accept the longstanding invitation of the Cuban Bishops’ Conference.

  Planning for the visit continued throughout 1997. The Pope and the Holy See were determined to make the visit the occasion to resolve several of the Church’s most severe problems in Cuba. There was a shortage of pastoral workers, because the regime was blocking the entrance of priests and nuns willing to work on the island. Complete lack of access to the media meant that the Church had no way to present itself to Cuban society. The proscription on the Church distributing humanitarian aid, which it could nevertheless receive, made the Church a collection agency for the regime. And the fate of the 900 or so remaining political prisoners in Castro’s notorious prisons remained to be resolved. None of these issues had been settled, and crucial logistical questions about public access to papal events in Cuba remained open, when papal spokesman Joaquín Navarro-Valls flew to Havana in October 1997, three months before the Pope was due to arrive.

  Navarro was instructed by Cuban officials to call Castro “Commandante.” He declined, saying that he would address Cuba’s president as “Mr. President”—a small but important signal that the Holy See was not going to play on the regime’s ideological ground. When the papal spokesman was ushered into the Cuban leader’s office at 7:45 P.M., Castro immediately said, “Tell me about the Pope.” Navarro answered, “Mr. President, I envy you.” Castro asked, “Why?” “Because,” Navarro replied, “the Pope is praying for you every day, praying that a man with your formation will find his way back to God.” The voluble Castro was, for once, silent. Navarro proceeded to describe John Paul’s normal day, stressing that his hour of private prayer before his 7:30 A.M. Mass was the best part of the day for him. Listening to this, Navarro recalled later, Castro looked like a man rediscovering old things from his childhood.

  It was then time to get down to the business of the papal visit. Navarro was blunt. “Mr. President,” he began, “the Holy Father is coming to Cuba on January 21. This is a fact. It’s not a possibility any longer. It is in the interest of Cuba that this visit be a great success. Cuba should surprise the world.” Castro said that he liked that, particularly the idea of “surprising the world.” Navarro then explained just what surprises he had in mind, and asked that the two men reach an agreement on what they understood by “success.”

  The first request was that Christmas 1997 be celebrated as a public holiday for the first time since the Revolution. Castro replied that this was very difficult, since it was the middle of the sugarcane harvesting season. Navarro said, “But the Pope would like to thank you publicly for doing this when he arrives at the Havana Airport….” Castro eventually conceded, saying, “It might be just for this year,” to which Navarro replied, “Fine, the Pope will be grateful to you. We shall let next year take care of itself.”

  Then there was the matter of the stalled visas for priests and nuns who wanted to work in Cuba. Castro said that things had already begun to move on this, but that it would take months to process the visas. Navarro replied, “But they’re needed now, to help prepare the people for the visit.” Castro asked, “How many do you need?” Navarro, thinking that he was taking a shot in the dark, answered, “Half of those on
the waiting list.” A few days later, fifty-seven visas were granted: exactly fifty percent of those on the waiting list.

  Attendance at papal events was another issue. The regime was resisting giving people time off from work, saying that it couldn’t grant a holiday for religious purposes. Navarro asked Castro, “Mr. President, how many heads of state have come to Camagüey or Santa Clara? Your government is providing an official courtesy to a head of state, not a religious holiday….” Castro agreedto give the local people six hours off on the day of the Pope’s visit.

  The meeting ended at 2:45 in the morning. The atmosphere, Navarro recalled, had been pleasant, even intimate, with Castro determined to show himself a gentleman. Hosting a Pope in Cuba was a completely new experience for him and for his country, and he wanted to do what he could to ensure the success the two men had agreed to pursue at the outset of their discussion. Castro had been particularly insistent on one point: “The Cuban revolution has never been anti-Catholic. You won’t find a single drop of a priest’s blood shed here, unlike the Mexican revolution or the Spanish civil war.” Whatever its empirical merits, the claim itself, Navarro thought, shed light on Castro’s personality. When they had finished their business, Castro walked Navarro to his car, exchanging jokes and reminiscing about his meeting with the Pope in Rome. It had been, the Cuban said, like a family gathering. Navarro left feeling certain that Castro had decided to do whatever he could to make the papal visit work.

  Other Cuban officials had to be cajoled into cooperation, though. Navarro also met with Caridad Diego, the head of religious affairs for the Cuban government and a hard-liner. When the conversation turned to the question of public access to the papal Masses, Ms. Diego tried to be soothing: “Don’t worry, Joaquín,” she said, “the squares will be full.” “I know, Caridad,” Navarro replied, “but with your people or mine? Remember Managua in 1983: Ortega stacked the crowd and the world saw what kind of guy he was.” Caridad Diego then started complaining about the price of buses and trucks, but finally agreed that the government would find enough transportation to get seventy-five percent of the people who wanted to come to the events. Navarro immediately said that he could get the money from one of the German Catholic development agencies, Adveniat or Miserior, to which Ms. Diego replied, “We’re not that poor.”

  Diego and Navarro also argued about television coverage of the visit. The Cuban government was happy to provide facilities for foreign television reporters at extortionate prices, but inside Cuba it proposed limiting TV coverage of papal events to a closed-circuit hookup with a feed into the foreign press center in Havana. Navarro replied that “Cuba will look ridiculous,” giving the world press a “virtual Pope” who could not be watched by the Cubans. Excuses about a lack of facilities could not be taken seriously. “You have twenty-four-hours-a-day TV on May 1,” the well-briefed Navarro reminded Caridad Diego, “and you gave blanket coverage to the reinterment of Che Guevara….”26 The issue wasn’t settled until the day before John Paul arrived, when it was finally agreed to do national television broadcasts of the arrival and departure ceremonies and the closing papal Mass in Havana, with regional TV coverage of the papal Masses in Santa Clara, Camagüey, and Santiago.

  Libertad! Libertad!

  Prior to the Pope’s arrival on January 21, 1998, the inevitable question was what difference his visit to Cuba would make. The arrival ceremony at José Martí Airport settled that. For the first time in forty years, Fidel Castro and his revolution were not the center of public attention. Another revolution, a Christian revolution that sought to restore to Cuba’s people their authentic history and culture, was being proposed. Castro, who throughout the visit combined a striking deference to the Pope with continuous anti-American propaganda, seemed to sense this. After the exchange of addresses, at which Castro had told the Cubans that they were historical victims and the Pope had quietly told the island’s people that they must be the architects of their own destinies, John Paul began to walk with difficulty to his Popemobile for the drive into Havana. For a split-second, Castro seemed to act as if he, too, should climb in with the Pope. Then he stepped back. For the next four days, Cuba belonged to another revolutionary. That experience falsified the claim visitors saw spray-painted on walls all over the country—“Fidel is the revolution. The revolution is Cuba.” Not any longer.

  After a triumphant entry into the Cuban capital, the Pope spent the night in Havana. From there, he flew back and forth to Santa Clara, Camagüey, and Santiago during the next three days. The themes of his major addresses were masterfully orchestrated to build one on another: from the family and the integrity of education, through the reinterpretation of Cuban history, and on to a full-throated call for a reborn Cuba restored to history and to the international community.

  At the first papal Mass, in Santa Clara on Thursday, John Paul confronted the Cuban regime’s monopoly on education, insisting that the state did not have the right to take the place of parents, who “should be able to choose for their children the pedagogical method, the ethical and civic content, and the religious inspiration that will enable them to receive an integral education.” That, said the Pope, quoting the Cuban poet-revolutionary José Martí, was how the children of Cuba could “grow in humanity…with all and for the good of all.” As for the past that the Castro revolution had tried to uproot, John Paul offered a different history lesson: “In Cuba, the institution of the family has inherited the rich patrimony of virtues which marked the Creole families of the past…. Those families, solidly founded upon Christian principles, were true communities of mutual affection, joy and celebration, trust and security, and serene reconciliation…. Cuba, care for your families, in order to keep your heartpure!”27

  At the Plaza Ignacio Agramonte in Camagüey on Friday, January 23, John Paul was met by 200,000 cheering teenagers, each of whom had been systematically propagandized by the regime’s atheism their entire lives. Under a blistering hot Caribbean sun, they sang, danced, jumped up and down, waved Cuban and Vatican flags that had been hand-pasted onto small sticks, and heard John Paul, speaking from an altar built atop a socialist-realist bas-relief of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, urge them to be the protagonists of their own personal and national stories: “Happiness is achieved through sacrifice. Do not look outside for what is found inside. Do not expect from others what you yourselves can and are called to be or to do. Do not leave for tomorrow the building of a new society in which the noblest dreams are not frustrated and in which you can be the principal agents of your own history.” And there was another history lesson. Ignacio Agramonte, the Cuban revolutionary hero in whose honor the plaza in which they were meeting was named, was in fact a man “motivated by his Christian faith [who] embodied the values by which men and women are distinguished as good: honor, truthfulness, fidelity, the love of justice… in the face of slavery, he defended human dignity.”28 As in Santa Clara, the Pope arrived looking tired, and those present wondered how he could make it through a lengthy ceremony. As he would do throughout the visit, he drew energy from the crowd, and got stronger as an event wore on.

  That evening, John Paul spoke to an audience composed primarily of regime-approved intellectual and cultural figures at the University of Havana. The Pope was weary and his presentation was not vigorous, but the audience, including major government leaders, sat like students being instructed by a venerable professor. After praying at the grave of Father Félix Varela in the university’s Great Hall, he evoked the memory of this beloved “teacher of teachers” and hero of the Cuban independence struggle to illuminate the Christian revolution he was proposing. Many Cubans, John Paul noted, considered Father Varela “the foundation stone of the Cuban national identity,” the “best synthesis one could find of Christian faith and Cuban culture,” and the man who had taught his countrymen to think well—by thinking freely. The Pope then gave the cultural screw another twist: “He also spoke of democracy, judging it to be the political project best in keeping with human nature
, while at the same time underscoring its demands.” Those included an education that stressed freedom for responsibility, and a civil society capable of sustaining the rule of law. No one present, including Fidel Castro and Caridad Diego, needed to be reminded that neither of these historic attributes of Varela’s hoped-for Cuban culture was very much in evidence in the Cuba of 1998.

  Félix Varela’s vision of the free and just society had been the fruit of his faith, which could still inspire an authentic renewal of Cuban culture and society today. Christian conviction, not ideology, had been the source of his personal virtues, his patriotism, and his enduring impact on Cuban culture. He had died, John Paul concluded, with the Creed on his lips “and a fervent prayer for the good of my country” in his heart.29