c. 1998 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ The upcoming visit of Pope John Paul II to Fidel Castro’s Cuba _ set to begin Jan. 21. _ has been widely portrayed as an ideological showdown pitting the world’s leading religious anti-communist against its best-known remnant of godless communism.
The reality is more nuanced.
As the world’s most influential religious leader, the head of the Roman Catholic Church is a powerful moral force whose staunch anti-communism is credited with helping undo communist governments in his native Poland and elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc.
Castro, meanwhile, is a confirmed nonbeliever who profoundly mistrusts what he regards as the reactionary impulses of religious institutions _ particularly those of the Catholic Church, the religious body with which he is most familiar.
However, the Cuban president is, by his own account, no dogmatic anti-religionist. Instead, he’s someone who appreciates religious commitment _ at least when it is manifested in ways compatible with his political views.
Likewise, the pope is by no means a capitalist tool. Nor is he a captive of U.S. policy toward Cuba; John Paul opposes the U.S. economic boycott of Havana on humanitarian grounds. Rather, in accord with longstanding Catholic social teachings, the pontiff has harshly and repeatedly drawn critical attention to the negative human consequences of unbridled capitalism.”Where the pope and Castro come together is a view of a civil society in which people act out of altruism and are not corrupted by greed,”said Anthony Stevens-Arroyo, president of the Program for the Analysis of Religion Among Latinos (PARAL) at the City University of New York.
In a 1988 encyclical, for example, John Paul said”the goods of this world are originally meant for all. The right to private property is valid and necessary, but it does not nullify the value of this principle.” That same year, in a speech to the Council of Europe, he questioned whether”it is utopian to ask that when decisions of an economic nature are made, there should be consideration of the trials of those who lose through unemployment a part of their dignity and sometimes even their strength to hope.” Castro, meanwhile, has said”it is possible for Christians to be Marxists as well, and to work together with Marxist communists to transform the world.”The Cuban leader has also dismissed Karl Marx’s famous declaration about religion being”the opium of the people”as an overstatement and has said religion can be a force for good as well as bad.
Religious and political”heroes,”Castro has said, are”made of the same stuff.” Thomas E. Quigley, a Cuba expert with the U.S. Catholic Conference in Washington, said Castro”has even described himself as a Christian in the sense of the Sermon on the Mount”_ the concise rendering of Jesus’ ethical teachings and identification with the poor contained in the Gospel of Matthew.
The pontiff’s social-justice views are well known. Castro’s views on religion _ which are complex, often contradictory and inseparable from his political beliefs _ are less known.
By far the most extensive exploration of Castro’s views on religion are contained in the 1987 book”Fidel and Religion”(Simon and Schuster), which is primarily a transcript of long interviews Castro granted Frei Betto, a Brazilian priest associated with the liberation theology movement that swept much of Latin America during the 1970s and early 1980s.
Liberation theology interprets God as the liberator of the poor and oppressed. Critics, including the pope, have dismissed liberation theology as warmed-over Marxism and a cause of class conflict.
In the book, Castro _ who described his mother as a devout Catholic and who was educated in Catholic schools in Cuba _ said he never was a Christian”believer.”But he spoke fondly of the selfless acts of Catholics and other religious believers, although he categorically rejected Christian teachings about displaying love for one’s enemies. He also emerged as an enthusiastic supporter of liberation theology, calling it a historic development in the life of the church.”The book was a severe embarrassment for hardline communists,”said Harvard Divinity School professor Harvey Cox, who wrote the introduction to the English-language edition of”Fidel and Religion.””The book was a shock to ideological anti-religion communists because Castro in no way expressed the sort of blind atheism so often associated with communists. Castro clearly respects people devoted to a cause, including religious causes. He’s a very complex man and his attitudes toward religion are as complex as anything else.” Yet Castro did declare Cuba an atheist state in 1962, from then on keeping those who professed religious faith out of the ruling Communist Party until 1991, when official atheism was dropped and Cuba was proclaimed instead a secular nation.
Castro also expelled foreign priests from Cuba and closed all Catholic, as well as other private, schools, except for seminaries. Protestants also had their troubles, including the arrests of several dozen Southern Baptist pastors, and Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Kingdom Halls were closed.
In”Fidel and Religion,”Castro said he clamped down on the church not out of any abhorrence of religious faith, but out of fear religious institutions aligned with the Cuban establishment he ousted would become staging grounds for undermining his revolutionary government.”All of the privileged social classes that had a monopoly on the church were against the revolution, so when in organizing the (communist) party, we excluded those who believed in God, we were excluding them as potential counterrevolutionaries, not Catholics,”Castro said.”Circumstances,”he continued, required Marxist ideological purity, but that”doesn’t mean that all Catholics were counterrevolutionaries.” Marcos Antonio Ramos, a Southern Baptist pastor who fled Cuba after the revolution and is now acting dean of Miami’s South Florida Center for Theological Studies, agreed Castro’s record is”not completely anti-religion, like the Soviet Union was in the 1920s or China in the 1970s.”If you were a religious person and made an open statement in support of the revolution, you were OK,”said Ramos, who leads a 300-member congregation in the heart of Miami’s Little Havana section.
But, added Ramos, Casto’s comments in”Fidel and Religion”are an exaggeration of his willingness to accept religious expression during the early decades of his leadership of Cuba.”It’s true people were not executed or put in jail just because they said they were religious,”said Ramos, author of”Protestantism and Revolution in Cuba”(University of Miami Press).”But people actively participating in religion were persecuted again and again by having their educational opportunities limited. Nor could they get high- or even middle-level posts in government jobs,”he said.
(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)”There was an environment of ideological persecution. Even some Protestant and Catholic people who were prominent in the government in the ’60s simply stopped going to church.” The Cuban dictator’s distrust of institutional religion _ and, in particular, the Catholic Church _ appears to stem to some degree from his experiences as a Catholic school student.
In”Fidel and Religion,”Castro spoke bitterly about the right-wing Spanish priests who dominated the Cuban Catholic Church of his youth and their support for Spain’s fascist Franco government. He also faulted his Jesuit teachers for emphasizing”willpower”and dogmatism over informed judgment in matters of faith.”It seems to me that religious faith, like political belief, should be based on reasoning, on the development of thought and feelings. The two things are inseparable,”Castro said.
But for all his dislike of his Catholic education _ he called school religious training”mental terrorism”_ Castro also praised his Jesuit teachers for instilling in him”a strong sense of personal dignity, regardless of their political views.” Those Jesuits, Castro said,”valued character, rectitude, honesty, courage and the ability to make sacrifices. … The Jesuits clearly influenced me with their strict organization, their discipline and their values. They contributed to my development and influenced my sense of justice _ which may have been quite rudimentary but was at least a starting point.” (END OPTIONAL TRIM)
Cox, the Harvard Divinity School professor, said since”Fidel and Religion”was published Castro appears to have moved toward even greater acceptance of religious faith _ and even institutions.”There is no reason to believe anything else, as witnessed by his willingness to host the pope,”Cox said.”Today, I’m told Castro is sympathetic toward the Zapatistas (the largely Indian rebels in southern Mexico) and taken by (Mexican) Bishop (Samuel) Ruiz,”who has backed Zapatista demands.
Mario Paredes, a Catholic official in New York, said he has heard the Cuban leader speak positively about the pope and the church during visits with Castro and church officials.”Fidel Castro believes the pope is one of the highest moral authorities in the world,”said Paredes, executive director of the Northeast Hispanic Catholic Center, a church agency co-sponsored by seven dioceses and archdiocese stretching from Boston to Washington, D.C.”He believes the pope is a great witness of what faith is all about.” Stevens-Arroyo of PARAL said what is happening today in Cuba _ particularly in regard to religious expression _ is akin to what occurred in the former Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev.”There’s a kind of perestroika, an opening, taking place for Castro. Some of it is forced by economic conditions (in Cuba), some of it is just the mellowing of an aging strongman,”said Stevens-Arroyo.”Where it will end is anybody’s guess.”
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