Cubans Hear a Cardinal Speak on State TV

For the first time in the four decades of Fidel Castro’s rule, the prelate of Cuba’s Roman Catholic Church delivered a 30-minute prime-time sermon on the state’s tightly controlled national television Tuesday night, opening an unprecedented window on a religion long discouraged in this stridently Communist land.

The broadcast by Havana’s archbishop, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, was a watershed in Cuba’s church-state relations--the most dramatic concession that Castro has granted the church in advance of Pope John Paul II’s five-day visit here next week.

Flanked by a portrait of John Paul and a statue of the Virgin of Charity, Cuba’s patron saint, the fully robed Ortega delivered an impassioned endorsement and exaltation of a pope Ortega has known for 19 years.

“The pope is a fighter,” Ortega declared in his extemporaneous address, which walked a fine political line.

Punctuating his remarks with quotations from the Gospels, the cardinal praised the Polish pope’s patriotism toward his once-Communist homeland. Ortega equally highlighted the pope’s opposition to economic sanctions that punish the poor, specifically mentioning the U.S. embargoes against Cuba and Iraq.

But most analysts viewed the fact of Ortega’s address as far more important than its substance.

A top Cuban official called it a “positive” example of new cooperation between church and state in a nation where all religions were discouraged for decades.

Ricardo Alarcon, president of Cuba’s National Assembly, stressed that his government is “not at all concerned” that the anti-Communist pope’s visit will inspire dissent, opposition or any of the kind of political changes that followed papal trips through Communist Eastern Europe in the 1980s.

“We are not stupid. We are not crazy,” Alarcon told reporters before Ortega’s address Tuesday. “We are receiving a friend who happens to be the head of a state that has had good relations with Cuba always.”

He added: “It seems certain people of the planet are very interested to surround the visit of the pope with a rarefied atmosphere as if he were Attila, ravishing wherever he passes through and not letting even the grass grow.”

Alarcon conceded that the papal visit will have “political and social meaning,” but he asserted that it will be confined to developing “cordial and friendly ties” between the Cuban government and the Vatican and between the Cuban church and society.

As proof, Alarcon cited national elections held Sunday that he called “a massive confirmation of our political system by the people.” Official tallies announced Monday night showed that more than 98% of Cuba’s registered voters turned out to elect all 601 members of a new National Assembly in balloting that took place without violence, fraud or a single opposition candidate.

Diplomats and other independent analysts here said the vote appeared to be timed in advance of the pope’s Jan. 21-25 visit to demonstrate strong popular support for the 71-year-old Castro--who was among those reelected--and the Communist rule he introduced after overthrowing dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

Alarcon, who is one of Cuba’s highest-ranking officials, said the election results were “a clear message: The immense majority favors this system.”

Of the pope’s visit, he noted, “We have done and are continuing to do whatever is humanly possible to make this a historic event.” Cuban representatives of church and state and Vatican officials, he said, have prepared for it together “in perfect harmony.”

He neither confirmed nor denied a recent Spanish newspaper report that Vatican officials had discovered an electronic bug in a house the pope might have visited here. But he asserted that “the only microphones we should be talking about” are those brought in by the nearly 3,000 media representatives accredited to cover the papal visit.

Ortega’s Tuesday night speech, Alarcon added, should be viewed as a sign that the government is committed to normalizing relations with Cuba’s Catholic Church after an era in which priests and nuns were expelled from the island nation, public worship was forbidden, and church schools were closed.

The government began a gradual softening toward all religions in the mid-1980s. But church access to Cuban mass media has been one of Ortega’s principal requests for months.

In a series of church-state meetings to plan the pope’s visit, Ortega, 61, who was appointed by John Paul in November 1994 as Cuba’s first cardinal in 31 years, also has asked the government to broadcast the three Masses that the pope will celebrate outside Havana--in Santa Clara, Camaguey and Santiago de Cuba.

A church spokesman said that the pope’s Sunday Mass in Havana’s Plaza of the Revolution, which Castro is scheduled to attend, will be aired live Jan. 25, but he said that no decision had been made on the others.