Pope Meets With Castro, Agrees to a Cuba Visit

In a strategic reconciliation between two longtime antagonists, Pope John Paul II on Tuesday met with Fidel Castro and accepted the Cuban leader’s invitation to visit Cuba next year.

The Vatican hopes the 1997 trip will revive the church in Cuba after almost four decades of Communist rule. In negotiations leading up to the meeting between the anti-Communist pope and the Marxist revolutionary icon, the church said it would not accept a Cuban visit without guarantees that the Roman Catholic leader could travel freely in the country and meet with anyone he chose.

Joaquin Navarro-Valls, chief Vatican spokesman, called the meeting a step toward “normalization of the church and society in Cuba.”

After Castro took power in 1959, at least 350 Catholic schools were nationalized and more than 100 foreign priests expelled. Freedom of worship and religious instruction is limited to church premises. But Cuba’s increasing isolation in the world has made Castro more amenable to making peace with the church.

Set adrift by the fall of the Communist regimes that once supported the island with economic and technical aid, Cuba’s leadership has presented the papal visit as an international public relations gesture aimed at breaking the U.S.-led economic embargo of the island. The church opposes the 34-year-old American blockade, contending it causes suffering among Cuba’s poor.

“The last bulwark of communism in the West is presenting himself to the pontiff of Rome,” Italian state television said in a commentary on the visit. “Fidel Castro, atheist and priest-eater, is forgetting the past and looking to the future by going via the pope.”

Western diplomats here agree that the papal visit could weaken the already shaky economic embargo, which is opposed by Canada and other normally staunch American allies. But many diplomats also see the Catholic Church as a powerful force that, if granted more freedom in Cuba, could help open Cuban society.

In Washington, the Clinton administration said it has no objection to the pope’s visit despite Washington’s policy of isolating Cuba.

“The pope undoubtedly can play a constructive role in promoting democratic change and in protecting human rights in Cuba,” State Department spokesman Glyn Davies said. “Our hope is, if the visit takes place, that it will serve to further the cause of freedom for the Cuban people, which is the cause that we’ve championed for over three decades now.”

Recalling John Paul’s visit to his homeland of Poland as communism was crumbling there, Davies said the pope “brings a message of freedom wherever he goes.”

In a meeting with Castro after the papal audience, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state, raised issues of human rights and “national reconciliation” with the Cuban leader, Vatican spokesman Navarro said.

For his 35-minute meeting with the pope, Castro, 70, eschewed his trademark olive-drab fatigues for a conservative dark suit and tie. In a break with Vatican practice, no journalists were permitted to view the meeting between the Cuban leader and the pontiff. Vatican television showed Castro striding somberly between ranks of Swiss Guards into the Vatican library, where he sat across a small desk from the pope. The two men spoke without interpreters in Spanish, one of several languages the pope speaks fluently.

Navarro said that Castro, a graduate of Jesuit schools in Cuba, concluded the meeting by saying:

“Holy Father, I hope to see you in Cuba soon.”

“Thank you, my blessings on the Cuban people,” the pope is said to have responded.

The meeting was held under some of the tightest security ever witnessed in the Vatican. Castro was transported in a 16-car motorcade that included an Italian vehicle with a submachine gun pointing through its sunroof.

On Sunday, Cuban exiles unfurled a banner in St. Peter’s Square opposing the meeting.

While Castro was in the Vatican, Italian supporters of the Cuban leader posed for photographs with some of the Cuban security detachment. But plainclothes Vatican security guards intervened when the sympathizers attempted to display a banner picturing the Cuban revolutionary martyr Che Guevara.

During his four-day visit here, which began with his participation in the U.N.-sponsored World Food Summit, Castro has been respectful of the church but also on several occasions has made clear his objections to church policy on birth control.

At a news conference after the food summit, he said the world’s population is growing at “a terrible rhythm. . . . This requires planning, birth control. I think a lot of people are convinced of this. I think the Catholic Church itself, in fact, is convinced of this.”

Later, Castro added: “I think that in this world that is so complex and that is so selfish we have to be flexible on the question of birth control and in the procedure to achieve it.”

Castro, however, said he opposes abortion, noting it “is legal in my country, but we don’t like it. It is not advisable. It’s not that desirable, not that praiseworthy. We don’t like divorces either. It’s not desirable, but it is allowed by law.”

After his official Vatican meetings Tuesday, Castro toured the basilica of St. Peter’s. He later visited the Sistine Chapel and viewed Michelangelo’s masterpiece “The Last Judgment.”

Vittorio Anastasi, 73, a waiter at the Columbus Hotel near the Vatican--where Castro and Cuban diplomats in Rome hosted several cardinals for lunch--described Castro as being in a festive mood.

In a toast to his guests, Anastasi said, Castro spoke of his happiness at finally visiting the city he had studied as a small boy. In a two-hour lunch, the group dined on fish, risotto cooked in champagne and pastry.

“Castro seemed jovial, quite content,” Anastasi said.

Staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.