Loris Zanatta - 10/04/2012

     The Pope who visits one of the remaining bastions of Communism sounds like a history-making event. Indeed, everyone was looking forward to the gestures, the words, the meetings that would have made Benedict 16th visit to Cuba an historical one. And many people were hoping that it would not go down in the history books as the faded copy of the one carried out in 1998 by John Paul II, which had engendered so many expectations, but had given rise to nothing worthy of note. However, it was unlikely that we might witness history-making gestures and hear unexpected words. And not only because this kind of meeting is mostly planned in the smallest detail. But above all because the Pope was thinking to it as an island populated mostly by Catholics while he visited it. And to its future, towards which he underlined, not accidentally, that the Cubans are already projected.

     To assess the contents and the outcome, then, it will be worthwhile considering that the timescale of ecclesiastic diplomacy is lengthy and no less lengthy is the timescale of Cuban politics. And that the methods and aims of either one are opaque. Both of them - this is the only certain aspect – have been working for an evolution for years. Its aim, however, is for the Castro brothers to preserve the regime, while for the Church its gradual and painless opening. The same silent method of Church and State at bottom aims to achieve diametrically opposite goals. On that backdrop, it could certainly not have been the Pope, so cautious and mindful of the long-term effects of every gesture of his, to throw into the Cuban pond the stone capable of endangering years of painstaking labour. Indeed, the years following the visit of John Paul II, during which the regime has set aside its by now anchorless atheism and the Church has recovered a good deal of its freedom of action, albeit at the price of taking care not to rise up as the champion of civil and political liberties.

     So, if we look carefully, what was staged at Havana was an expected and predictable role-playing scene. No different from what happened fourteen years ago. Pope Benedict XVI has therefore invoked liberty, but in conciliation, that is without attacking the regime; he evoked an open society and alluded to the Cuban exiles, but he stroked the surface of Castro’s ideology by recognising the proud Cuban resistance to the United States embargo. It is true that before reaching the island he had denounced Marxism as a useless and mistaken residue of history, thus pointing the finger at the official ideology of the Cuban regime. But, once the Cold War had finished and universal Communism had disappeared, the survival of Castrism is the best demonstration that under the Marxist blanket it is Cuban nationalism that supports the scaffolding. And it is in that nationalism and in its achievements that the Church is often fond of detecting a deep Christian undercurrent.

     It is to that nationalism and to its undisputed totem, José Martí, and to the enemy that it fuels every day, the United States of America, that Raúl Castro harked back to when answering the Pope. Certainly not to Marx and even less to Lenin. Everything, then, remains immobile and as we knew it would be? Nothing basically changes in Cuba, except for the tepid ongoing reforms that dole out economic freedom with a dropper without even a glimmer of hope for political freedom? And can the present Pope do something in this regard that his predecessor hadn’t already tried unsuccessfully? Apparently he can. But perhaps only apparently. Historical events do not always appear to be so instantly, but only with time and with the prospects that they give. And it is precisely on time that the Church has been banking for years: both the Church of Rome and that of Cuba. What does the bet consist in? First of all the Church aims to play a fundamental role in the formation of the future executive class, the one that will pick up the reins of Cuba when the Castro dynasty will be extinct.

     For this to happen two things are necessary, for which in these years the Church has been willing to sacrifice other goals, including, often, attention to dissent and to the dissidents. It needs freedom of action, to form the Catholic rank and file, open parishes and seminaries, parish bulletins and free access to the faithful. And it needs dialogue with the regime, in the belief that the new executives won’t come from nowhere, but mostly from the breeding ground that has dominated Cuba for decades, as also occurred at the end of so many analogous regimes. This, however, brings us to the second, more delicate and subtle bet of the Catholic Church in Cuba. Once Communism had fallen and the nationalism designs of the regime by now manifest, here we have the cultural, ideological, spiritual battle to define the essential traits of Cuban nationalism; to lay the ideal foundations on which one day the new political and social order in Cuba will be based.

     The idea that its cornerstone is the people’s and the nation’s Catholicism is the weapon that the Church is gripping in such a crucial albeit undeclared conflict. An effective weapon, judging from the growing number of Cuban Communist officials who invoke evangelical precepts to support the regime’s much-lauded social policies. If the Pope’s bet is successful, the Cuban transition to democracy will in time leave many people who had been hoping to see it come closer to the United States and their liberal civilisation feeling disappointed. The new Cuba will indeed continue to see the USA with some suspicion, to say the least. If it should lose that suspicion, instead, the risk will be to seem to have been an ally or an accomplice of a totalitarian regime; and to lose prestige and influence at length, while the Pope will be blamed for not having met the dissidents nor Las Damas de Blanco, and the Archbishop of Havana for having called the regime’s police force to evict the people who had gathered in the Cathedral.

Loris Zanatta
(University of Bologna)