Catholic Church and Cuba: a complicated history

After decades of staunch atheism and hostility toward Catholicism, Cuba’s communist government has slowly mended ties with the Church and today even allows it to push for change on the island – to an extent. Below is a brief history of relations: Just weeks after Fidel Castro led a band of rebels to overthrow Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, relations between the new government and the Church descended into what sociologist Aurelio Alonso calls “a very tense” three years. During that time, Castro declared his revolution atheist and deported 136 priests for their alleged opposition - something unheard of in predominantly Catholic Latin America. “It was the revolution’s most radical, violent decision regarding the Church,” said Alonso, who has authored several books on religion in Cuba. The “maximum leader” followed that up by imprisoning other clerics in labor camps, including Jaime Ortega, who is today the head of the Cuban Church. Castro also expropriated numerous Church properties and nationalized all private schools, including Catholic ones. Despite several overtures from the Church in the late 1960s the Cuban government held to “a very atheist outlook, tightly aligned with Soviet communism,” said Alonso. Castro, who was raised Catholic, permanently cancelled the Christmas holiday in 1970. In 1975, the ruling Communist Party banned Christian members. Alonso traces the roots of the regime’s reconciliation with religion to the mid-1980s. In 1985, Brazilian priest Frei Betto published a book of interviews with Castro called “Fidel and Religion” in which the Cuban leader voiced support for liberation theology, a leftist Catholic movement born in Latin America. The same year, reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, the start of deteriorating ties between Havana and Moscow. It was a period of “progress and rapprochement” between the Castro regime and the Church, said Alonso. In 1986, the island’s clergy held a National Ecclesiastical Meeting where they decided to shift the Cuban Church’s focus to missionary work, such as helping the poor - effectively distancing themselves from the anti-Castro opposition and adopting a more pragmatic, conciliatory approach toward the government. The Communist Party for its part ended its ban on religious members in 1991. In 1992, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Cuba amended its constitution to abolish more than three decades of state atheism and outlaw discrimination on religious grounds. Two years later, Pope John Paul II named a man seen as a conciliatory figure to head the Cuban Church: Ortega, the cardinal imprisoned in the 1960s. Despite the Polish pontiff’s vehement anti-communism he and Castro had a respectful relationship that nourished the budding rapprochement. In 1996, Castro travelled to the Vatican and got a promise from the pope to repay the visit. Two years later, John Paul II made the first papal visit to the island, issuing a famous plea at his mass in Havana: “Let Cuba open to the world and let the world open to Cuba.” The quote foreshadowed the current pope’s role in mediating Cuba’s recent detente with the United States, which for five decades sought to topple the communist regime by isolating it. NAMPA/AFP