Pope and Cuba Split on Goals of Coming Trip

Their portraits are plastered throughout Old Havana--two septuagenarian exporters of revolution, crowd-loving orators and tireless propagators of rival creeds, poised for a long-awaited encounter.

The official government picture on walls and popular T-shirts shows Pope John Paul II clasping hands with his expectant host, Cuban President Fidel Castro. Another picture, distributed by the Roman Catholic Church, features only the pontiff and heralds him as “the messenger of truth and hope.”

John Paul’s arrival next week for a five-day pilgrimage across Cuba marks a historic overlap of interests between his activist, globe-trotting papacy, now in its 20th year, and Castro’s impoverished Communist regime, struggling into its 40th.

But the contrasting posters reflect diverging expectations for the visit, which will include a private meeting between the two men and four outdoor Masses in four cities, ending with a nationally televised liturgy in Havana’s Plaza of the Revolution on Jan. 25, with Castro present.

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The Cuban leader is welcoming John Paul as a fellow head of state and hoping that the pope’s moral clout will deliver Cuba quickly from its punishing isolation by the United States. John Paul is looking beyond to the day when Castro, now 71, will be gone from the picture.

Vatican officials say John Paul is coming to shore up Cuba’s Catholic Church--so it can play a strong, moderating role in a bloodless transition from Castro’s one-man rule--and to preach reconciliation between Communists here and anti-Castro exiles abroad.

To foster those long-term aims, the world’s most effective anti-Communist missionary has decided, at age 77, to engage the most charismatic of Communist holdouts mano a mano in a high-profile dialogue that promises to reward Castro with two immediate benefits: legitimacy on the world stage and a repudiation of the U.S. trade embargo against his island nation.

“The success of the pope’s visit should be the nation’s success, a success of the revolution,” Castro told Cuba’s lawmaking National Assembly of People’s Power last month.

“The pope is going to Cuba not to weaken the regime but to strengthen the church, and Castro knows it,” a Vatican official said. “Officially, this is a pastoral mission.”

But he added: “Whatever additional space the pope can open for the church there will have a far-reaching political impact. Freedom has a tendency to expand.”

Few events since Castro’s rise to power in January 1959 have carried as much potential to open the island to democratic influences, many church officials believe. The pope is one of Castro’s most prestigious visitors ever, and his church is the largest institution in Cuba not under state control.

Several hundred Cuban Americans plan to come hear John Paul--the biggest return of exiles for a single occasion during Castro’s rule. As part of a group that is scheduled to include six cardinals and two dozen bishops from the United States, they expect to join the largest crowds assembled here for a religious demonstration in four decades.

The pilgrimage is a pointed challenge to Washington because it highlights long-standing opposition by the pope and by U.S. and Cuban bishops to the United States’ 36-year-old embargo. The Clinton administration has voiced private reservations to the Vatican about the visit while saying little in public.

Cuba’s Catholic leaders have already declared the Jan. 21-25 visit a tentative success on the basis of hard-won concessions for the occasion from Castro.

He declared Christmas an official day off last month, 28 years after making it a workday. He gave the church space in state-run media and permitted a series of unprecedented outdoor Masses to publicize the pilgrimage. His government has agreed to bus worshipers to the papal Masses.

More crucial for the church’s health, he has agreed to let in dozens of foreign priests and nuns to rejuvenate the small, aging corps working on the island.

On the cobbled and pitted streets of Old Havana--now undergoing a face lift for the visitor--Cubans of all faiths are awaiting John Paul with guarded hope and cautious wonder but few expectations of further immediate changes.

“There already have been big changes . . . a lot of possibilities we never had before,” said Mayra Diaz, manager of a state-owned gift shop selling the $10 official T-shirts--the first Castro has ever allowed to bear his portrait. With genuine awe, she added: “I mean, you’re permitted to go there and pray, in public, with the pope!”

There is no sign here of opposition to the visit, but “I know Fidel’s invitation wasn’t welcome in certain quarters of the [Communist] party and the army,” said a Cuban scholar close to the church hierarchy. “And I can understand why. . . . Read this pope’s history.”

Hoping history will repeat itself, U.S. officials and Cuban exiles would like John Paul to stimulate audiences here by speaking forcefully in defense of human rights, as he did on electrifying missions that helped speed the collapse of communism in his native Poland and across Eastern Europe.

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Indeed, the synergy between the pope, who speaks Spanish, and the Cuban crowds, expected to number in the hundreds of thousands, will be the central element in a drama with unforeseeable long-term consequences.

But Cuba’s weakened Catholic Church and anemic political opposition pale in comparison with those in Communist-era Poland.

After taking power, Castro closed religious schools, nationalized church properties, denied equal opportunities to religious practitioners and expelled priests and nuns. Encouraged by the spread of liberation theology in the Third World, Castro became more tolerant of religion in the mid-1980s; by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba was no longer officially atheistic.

Although church membership has grown throughout the 1990s, surveys show that fewer than half of Cuba’s 11 million people are baptized Catholics and that about 500,000 practice their faith--far lower percentages than in Poland.

“It’s not the Polish pope going to Poland but the Polish pope coming to Cuba,” said Ricardo Alarcon, president of the National Assembly. “The pope is not going to provoke an earthquake here. He is going to open, a little more, the relations between the state and the Catholic Church.”

Castro journeyed to Rome 14 months ago to invite the pope and brought back the now-famous picture of them together. He calls the pope’s coming “a miracle” and promises to treat him “like a king.”

Why is Castro such an eager host?

For one thing, Cuba watchers note, the Jesuit-educated revolutionary is intrigued by the similarities, in populist style and message, between him and this magnetic and dogmatic pope, whom he once called “an outstanding politician . . . for his contact with the masses.”

He has read John Paul’s criticism of capitalist excesses and the burden of Third World debt and views himself as a world co-champion of the have-nots. He especially values the pope’s opposition to all economic embargoes on the grounds that they hurt only the poor.

Also, religious freedom is a condition for the growing economic ties with Europe that have helped Castro survive U.S. sanctions and for the humanitarian aid that flows to Cuba through Catholic charities. Finally, Castro is confident that he can keep religious detente in a delicate balance at home.

“There’s an awareness inside his party that the church is neither a major opponent nor a captive ally that can be tamed and housebroken, but a force that’s increasingly present in society,” said Thomas Quigley, a Cuba-watching advisor to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington. “Any good politician would want to join in helping that process move forward, so it doesn’t become oppositionist.”

But even mild criticism by Cuban bishops has irked the regime in recent years, and Quigley noted the obvious risk: “If the Cuban church gets too much prestige as a result of the papal visit, there could be a re-tightening of the screws.”

John Paul prays that will not happen.

“I hope that after my visit, the church can continue having, more and more, the liberty necessary to its mission and adequate space to continue serving the Cuban people,” he wrote in a Christmas message spread by Cuban media.

Specifically, the church in Cuba wants its own schools again, freedom to publish, permanent access to state-owned media and the ability to distribute--not just collect--Catholic aid from abroad.

John Paul is also positioning himself as a possible mediator to ease hostility between Washington and Havana.

Said papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls: “If the pope can contribute through his mission, which is ethical and moral, to find a solution to this unhealthy situation, he will do so wholeheartedly.”

A bipartisan group in the U.S. Congress wants to start a rapprochement by exempting food and medicine from the U.S. embargo.

Rep. James P. McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat who is coming to Havana next week, said he hopes John Paul’s pilgrimage will push the White House toward “a different approach in dealing with Cuba.”

That now appears unlikely.

“The pope’s visit will be embarrassing to the U.S. government because of the sanctions, but I don’t think it will shift policy one iota,” said Riordan Roett, director of Latin American studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. “The administration is trying to ignore the visit as much as it can.”

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Any easing of U.S. sanctions would meet solid opposition from Cuban Catholic exiles, whose strong lobbying has helped keep the restrictions in place.

Seeking to soften that resistance, Cuba’s bishops beckoned all exiles to come hear the pope. But exile leaders balked at what they called a breach of the embargo and forced Miami’s archbishop to cancel a cruise-ship voyage for Havana-bound pilgrims. About 130 worshipers have signed up for a less ambitious, one-day charter flight from Miami.

Still, not even the most militant exiles, who vow never to set foot in Cuba under the regime that drove them away, have anything against the pope’s mission.

“He has a moral authority that no other world leader has, and he will speak from that position of authority,” said Carlos Saladrigas, a Cuban-born Catholic and influential Miami businessman who, after hard reflection, decided not to come. “I’m going to pray real hard for the pope’s visit to be a success. I hope it is a catalyst for change.”

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Fineman reported from Havana, Boudreaux from Vatican City. Times staff writer Stanley Meisler in Washington and special correspondent Mike Clary in Miami contributed to this report.

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Pope’s Schedule

Jan. 21: Arrives in Havana

Jan. 22: Mass in Santa Clara, meets with Fidel Castro

Jan. 23: Mass in Camaguey

Jan. 24: Mass in Santiago

Jan. 25: Mass in Havana