Obama heads first for Havana’s cathedral

Shortly after his arrival in Havana on Sunday evening, in the first visit to Cuba by a US president since Calvin Coolidge arrived by battleship in 1928, Barack Obama visited the Cathedral of the Virgin Mary of the Immaculate Conception. Consecrated in 1789, the cathedral in the Plaza de la Catedral in Old Havana is one of 11 Catholic cathedrals on the island.

President Obama was greeted on the tarmac by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, then met US diplomats at the newly reopened embassy who have been working to normalise relations since Pope Francis mediated a thawing of US-Cuban relations in 2014. Mr Obama then went to the cathedral where he met Cardinal Jaime Ortega, who celebrated Palm Sunday Mass there on Sunday morning after a procession through Old Havana.

Ben Rhodes, Mr Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, told reporters that Cardinal Ortega “was particularly helpful in supporting the agreement on 17 December to normalise relations”.

The Catholic Church is Cuba’s oldest institution and the only important organisation independent of the Government. Under church auspices, hundreds of budding Cuban entrepreneurs at the vanguard of the country’s shift away from a rigid state-run economy are being taught business practices.

In the earlier years after the 1959 revolution, Fidel Castro’s regime actively persecuted clergy. The dictator, though educated by Jesuits, expelled hundreds of clergy, abolished Catholic schools and, in 1969, banned the celebration of Christmas. That ban was not lifted until Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1998. That visit began the process of rapprochement with Washington.

Just hours before Mr Obama landed on Sunday Cuban authorities arrested more than 50 members of the dissident group, Ladies in White, demonstrating to demand improved human rights. The group marches each Sunday after Mass at a church in a suburb of Havana. On Monday, Mr Obama met President Raúl Castro, brother of Fidel.