The Pope and Castro--a Rapproachment in the Making

When Pope John Paul II receives Fidel Castro at the Vatican next month, he will both be poking a finger in the eye of the Clinton administration and encouraging it to rethink its tough policies toward Cuba.

The planned encounter will be the culmination of years of secret Vatican diplomacy that has already vastly improved relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Cuban regime. Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, a Frenchman and the Vatican’s foreign minister, is due to arrive in Havana this Friday, at the invitation of the Cuban government, to prepare the Holy See event and discuss future ties.

The occasion for the first-ever meeting between the pope and Castro is to be the Cuban president’s expected presence at a summit of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome next month. Inasmuch as the Vatican and Cuba have never severed diplomatic ties, the protocol allows the pontiff, as the Vatican’s head of state, to greet Castro as a fellow head of state at the Apostolic Palace.

John Paul II and Castro may not spend more than 15 minutes together, and the Cuban leader’s “courtesy call” may be little more than a photo opportunity, but, politically, it would be a powerful signal sent to Cubans as well as to Washington.

The visit will further reduce Castro’s international isolation. The week before his meeting with the pope, Castro will be in Santiago, Chile, to participate, for the third consecutive year, in the annual summit of Latin American and Caribbean heads of state. He will seek and probably obtain a resolution condemning the United States for its Helms-Burton law, which allows U.S. citizens to sue foreign corporations over investments in properties once owned by them and nationalized during the Cuban Revolution. Next month, the European Union, along with Mexico and Canada, also plan to lodge another complaint with the World Trade Organization on what they consider to be U.S. attempts, using Helms-Burton, to impose its law upon other countries.

The Vatican’s principal interest in Cuba is to help create conditions for a peaceful political transition in the post-Castro period, as well as to enhance the church’s standing on an island whose population is at least nominally Catholic. Since 1990, Vatican contacts with Havana have multiplied, with “private” visits by high-ranking cardinals to confer with Castro and the leaders of the Cuban church. Archbishop Tauran’s official trip is the climax of these efforts.

For Castro to be received by John Paul II means, pure and simple, recognition of his political legitimacy. The next step would be a visit by the pope to Cuba, the only country in Latin America where he has never set foot. As matters now stand, this may occur in October 1997, when John Paul II is to tour Brazil, his only scheduled stop in the Western Hemisphere next year. But, of course, it could happen sooner, if both sides so desire.

Significantly, Cuba’s Cardinal Jaime Ortega, who has been deeply involved in the negotiations between the pope and Castro, declared in an interview earlier this month that “it seems that a climate has been created in favor of the holy father being able to come to Cuba soon.” A papal visit would aim to help bring about a “reconciliation” among all Cubans--the pro-Castro and the anti-Castro at home and abroad--and thereby ease a transition to democracy.

“Reconciliation” is the key concept--and word--used by Ortega at a time when Washington’s stated policy is to achieve Cuban democracy through the ouster or fall of Castro. In his private meetings with Clinton in 1993 and 1994, John Paul II is known to have emphasized the need for a more realistic--and compassionate--U.S. policy toward Cuba in order to avert what could be a bloody power struggle after Castro dies.

The intriguing question, of course, is what Castro has to gain by making concessions to the church and by meeting with the pope in Rome and, even more, by possibly receiving him in Cuba, an idea he had quietly opposed for many years. Unquestionably, at one time the Cuban president feared that John Paul II’s mere presence might trigger mass demonstrations against his regime. In any case, the pope wouldn’t even consider a trip unless Castro had relaxed controls on the church.

The Vatican and the Cuban church believe that, as part of a liberalizing trend --economically but not yet politically--underway in Cuba, Castro has concluded that there is more to be gained from treating the church as a partner than as a permanent ideological foe. Within such a framework, a papal visit might further legitimize him.

Castro began his own careful moves toward the church in 1990, after the collapse of the Soviet Union deprived him of powerful political and economic support. The Vatican responded almost instantly to his overtures, dispatching Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, the pope’s star diplomatic emissary, to review the situation in Cuba. More visits from Vatican emissaries followed.

To encourage the church’s advances, Castro lifted the ban on Communist Party members’ religious practices. When John Paul II named Ortega as the first Cuban cardinal since the 1959 revolution, Castro financed the trip of 200 Cuban Catholics to attend the ceremonies in Rome. Then he allowed the church to open a Caritas (Catholic humanitarian aid) office in Cuba to distribute food and medicine from abroad. Soon after, Etchegaray was permit to establish a branch of his Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission, which promotes human rights. Next, permission was granted, for the first time since 1959, to foreign priests and nuns to enter Cuba and teach in parochial schools.

The most important turning point in the church-Castro relationship came late last August, when the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party issued a long document analyzing the situation. It stated that religious practice is “not a problem for the Cuban revolution, provided that it promotes disinterested love for one’s neighbor, protection for the weakest or handicapped, unity of the family, social justice, moral and citizenship virtues, love and sacrifice for the motherland because those who do not behave accordingly negate not only their nation, but their faith.”

Cardinal Ortega responded to the document last month, in a homily delivered at the sanctuary of the Virgin of Copper, the patroness saint of Cuba. “The novelty that makes this analysis interesting to us,” said Ortega, “is its open recognition that religious faith implies a mission for Christians, and therefore for the church, in the family and in the human community, a mission that identifies believers as true men and women of the faith.”

“If the letter and the spirit of this analysis are observed in relation to religious faith,” Ortega continued, “the comprehension might grow of what the church and Christians who form it really are.” It was in this context that the cardinal said the “climate” for a papal visit has considerably improved.

Problems remain, notably the church’s demand that it be given access to radio and television, which will be one of the matters taken up by Tauran. But the Cuban president had already created his own climate for this emerging state of affairs when Cuban television broadcast images of him conversing with Archbishop Beniamino Stella, the papal nuncio in Cuba, and top Cuban churchmen at a diplomatic reception late last month. That was another first; the next “first” for Cuban television and its audience may be the image of John Paul II and Castro shaking hands at the Vatican.