Herald of the new liberation

The Pope was greeted by leaders of Cuba past and present during his visit but he was there first and foremost to meet the island’s people. And they turned out in their hundreds of thousands to see him

After being hailed by the people as a liberating hero for opening a new future with the United States, Pope Francis came to Cuba to encourage its government in its path of reform and to help build a post-communist future. While never confronting the regime, the Pope spoke to what he called “the soul of the Cuban people”, affirming their distinctive values while inviting them to build on concrete human solidarity rather than empty ideology.

During his three sweltering days in Havana, Holguín and Santiago, the Pope was met by considerably larger crowds than his two predecessors, reflecting the far greater awareness of Francis on the island. This was partly because of his fame in ending the Cuba-US diplomatic stand-off and partly because the trip was discussed at length by the archbishops of Havana and Santiago on prime-time TV, the first time Cubans have seen bishops on their screens since the revolution in 1959.
Such openings reflect greater official tolerance of the Church since Raúl Castro began his reforms in 2008. It has become increasingly active in two areas traditionally regarded as monopolies of the state: care for the poor and education. As I saw at first hand in the days before the papal plane touched down, the Community of Sant’Egidio in Havana cares for the elderly, while five Catholic cultural centres – run by the Dominicans and the Jesuits – offer courses in ethics, business and languages in an attempt to provide an ethical underpinning to Cuba’s nascent private sector.

Yet it is too easy to exaggerate the significance of these initiatives, which are remarkable only because the Cuban Church remains – like the rest of society – under tight control by an authoritarian state whose siege mentality tends to regard any opening as an opportunity for the regime’s enemies across the Florida Straits.

Greeting him at Havana airport last Saturday, Raúl Castro daringly suggested that the Cuban Revolution sought to put into effect the Pope’s ideals, and that “we exercise religious freedom as a right consecrated in our constitution”. Francis’s response was deft but pointed. Greeting all Cubans, “especially all those who, for various reasons, I will not be able to meet, and to Cubans throughout the world” – an allusion to the two million Cubans in the US, as well as political exiles and jailed opponents – Francis spoke of the need for the Church to have “the freedom, the means and the space needed to bring the proclamation of the Kingdom to the existential peripheries of society”.

the real business of his speech came as he linked together Catholicism with Cuba’s struggle for autonomy. Referring to the 100th anniversary of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre as patroness of Cuba, he observed that the declaration had followed a request by veterans of Cuba’s independence wars who saw her as symbol of “a free and sovereign nation”.

The Pope added that the growing devotion to the Virgin – the Church here reckons half of Cuba’s 11m people turned out to see her statue when she was taken around the island in 2011 – was “a visible testimony of her presence in the soul of the Cuban people”. The expression echoed his words written as the newly appointed Archbishop of Buenos Aires in his 1998 book reflecting on that year’s visit to Cuba by John Paul II. Then he said that neither communism nor neo-liberalism reflected “the soul of the Cuban people”.

Without ever identifying the specific contours of a post-communist political future, Pope Francis spent his time in Cuba gently inviting its people to a new self-awareness. His airport address, which quoted St John Paul II’s call for Cuba to open to the world and the world to Cuba, affirmed the island’s “extraordinary value as a ‘key’ between north and south, east and west”, whose “natural vocation is to be a point of encounter for all peoples to join in friendship”. The normalisation of US-Cuba relations was a “a sign of the victory of the culture of encounter and dialogue” that the leaders of both countries needed to continue to pursue, he said, “as an example of reconciliation for the whole world”.

There is little doubt that the crucial next stage of what they call here el acercamiento, or growing close, is the lifting of the US trade and travel embargo, described by Raúl Castro to the Pope at Havana airport as “cruel, immoral and illegal”. The Church in Cuba (and Pope Francis himself) shares that view, aware of the impact not just on the economy but on families divided by the Florida Straits, as I witnessed at a Catholic parish house group last week when a woman broke down as she prayed for “an end to the blockade” – as Cubans call it – “and all that evil, so families can be together again”.

The Mass on Sunday morning in Revolution Square was rich in competing iconography: to the left, above the temporary altar, large banners showed St Mother Teresa tending to lepers and Pope Francis embracing a man with sores under the words “Missionary of Mercy”, the theme for the visit, while on the right, the iconic image of the Pope’s compatriot, Che Guevara, defiant and triumphant, under the slogan “To Victory Always”.

In suffocating heat, shaded by colourful umbrellas and using their Mass booklets as fans, 200,000 people silently absorbed Pope Francis’ homily on true service. In terms similar to those he once used with Jesuits in Argentina lured by the sirens of revolutionary discourse, he said Cubans should protect and embrace their distinctive calling “to care for these gifts which God has given you” and not to neglect them “for plans which can be seductive, but are unconcerned about the face of the person beside you”. With Raúl Castro and two other Latin-American presidents – of Argentina and Panama – present, he added: “Service is never ideological, for we do not serve ideas, we serve people.”

After Mass the Pope met an ailing 89-year-old Fidel Castro in a 40-minute informal encounter that – from the pictures sent out later by Castro’s son, Alex – both clearly enjoyed. Among the books the Pope gave El Comandante was one by Castro’s former teacher, Fr Amando Llorente, a Spanish Jesuit who taught at the Colegio de Belén in the 1940s, along with a CD of his homilies. Fr Llorente was expelled in 1961 – with hundreds of other priests – by his pupil’s revolution. Pope Francis went on to a formal meeting with Raúl Castro, which was followed by an exchange of gifts: Castro’s was a huge crucifix by the Cuban artist Alexis Leyva (known as “Kcho”) made of the wood of oars to speak to the tragedy of migrants who die at sea.

But while the Vatican’s considerable diplomatic retinue dug in with their opposite numbers, it was clear Francis was in Cuba to greet the people. That afternoon, he spoke powerfully without notes to priests and Religious at the cathedral in old Havana on the twin themes of poverty and mercy. His sweated face screwed in concentration, speaking slowly and emphatically, he described how the tenderness of God was in the slobber of a disabled person trying to kiss, and praised Religious who “burn away their lives” caring for “discarded material”. He urged priests to imagine that they had “a treasure in their hands, the mercy of God”, quoting St Ambrose that “where mercy is, there is the Spirit of Jesus; where there is rigidity, are just His ministers”.

Speaking afterwards outside the Félix Varela Cultural Centre – named after the priest who first urged Cuban independence – he urged young people to dream, to hope, to be open, and to build “social friendship” across boundaries, lyrically invoking “the sweet hope of the homeland which we need to reach”.

Later it emerged that two well-known dissident women had been detained when they had been due to meet Francis. The nuncio had contacted them to arrange a meeting with the Pope at the cathedral but they had been prevented from attending. In what may signal a new intolerance of Cuba’s security state, the Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi SJ was keen for journalists to know that “calls had been made” to the women, but he would not be drawn on why they never reached the cathedral.

On Monday the Pope celebrated Mass for 150,000 joyous Catholics in the eastern city of Holguín, preaching on Jesus recruiting St Matthew by his merciful gaze, a moment captured in Francis’ papal motto. He then went on to Santiago, Cuba’s second city, to pray at the shrine of the Virgin of El Cobre.

At Mass at the sanctuary on Tuesday morning, Francis again sought to recover the foundations of Cuba’s future, reflecting on the way the shrine had kept alive the roots and identity of the Cuban people.

In a veiled reference to decades of communist persecution of the Church, he praised grandmothers and mothers for “keeping open a tiny space, small as a mustard seed, through which the Holy Spirit continued to accompany the heartbeat of this people”, and called for a Church “which goes forth to build bridges, to break down walls, to sow seeds of reconciliation”.

On his way to a meeting with families in Santiago’s cathedral he went among the ones he calls the holy faithful pilgrim people of Cuba, clearly loving the flesh-and-blood contact with a nation he has often thought and written about, but never met. Then he left for Washington DC – in itself a historic act of bridge building – much like Jesus departing the family of Bethany for Jerusalem, fortified for the challenges ahead.

Austen Ivereigh is author of The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope, which is now out in paperback (Allen & Unwin) with a new epilogue.