Cuban Cardinal Wears Mantle of Nation’s Hopes

The banner outside the Sacred Heart Church in Havana’s La Vibora district proclaimed, “Without Christ, there is no true liberation,” and pews inside were packed with the elderly, the infirm, the pained and the desperate.

At the pulpit stood Cuba’s man of the hour--the balding, cherubic cardinal who wears the mantle of a long-isolated nation’s hopes, prayers and dreams.

Fully armed with his golden staff, angelic smile and soft tenor, Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega was saying one of his final Masses before Wednesday’s arrival of the Holy Father he calls a friend, Pope John Paul II. In a Communist land where public prayer once was discouraged, his homily last weekend was titled “The World of Pain: Awaiting the Visit of the Pope.”

“But what a moment Cuba lives!” the smiling cardinal proclaimed from the pulpit, in advance of a visit that will boost the image of Havana’s archbishop and his church as has none before it. “What a moment our church lives! It is a moment of God in our history.”

And it is Cardinal Ortega’s moment.

At 61, this sugar-mill worker’s son who will take center stage with the pope here this week has emerged as a singular symbol--and his life a metaphor--for a church that now stands as a separate force in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

Today, the Roman Catholic Church is the only major institution here outside state control. Through four decades of imposed silence, and most recently with Ortega at the helm, the church has quietly transformed itself into a growing, populist institution that analysts say is second only to the government in power and persuasion.

“The Catholic Church is the only organized opposition party in Cuba,” conceded one senior Cuban official last week.

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As its undisputed leader, this cardinal of humble roots, modest education and great political savvy is emerging as the only public counterpoint to Castro himself. Concluded one longtime political analyst here: “There are only two politicians in Cuba. Fidel and Jaime.”

Since John Paul appointed him in 1994 as Cuba’s first cardinal in 31 years, Ortega has proved himself a capable and respected leader within the church and a deft diplomat outside it--too diplomatic for some, too confrontational for others.

For the last year, the cardinal has used the coming papal visit to marshal the church’s forces, quietly indoctrinating and strengthening his institution nationwide, parish by parish. From the pulpit at 13 unprecedented public Masses that the government permitted last fall, Ortega and a traveling replica of Cuba’s adored patron saint, the Virgin of Charity, have drawn tens of thousands of Cubans into churches and into the fold.

In a nation where the Communist leadership expelled priests, confiscated church land and shuttered religious schools just three decades ago, Ortega also has presided over the church’s most rapid growth at Cuba’s grass roots in centuries.

Priests and lay brothers have gone door to door throughout Cuba since last April. And, in recent years, the number of baptisms has soared; the church says it performed a record 75,000 in 1996.

Backed by staunch supporters in the Vatican, the cardinal has navigated a diplomatic minefield to open new religious space in a once-totalitarian state, culminating in his live, half-hour nationwide address on Castro’s tightly controlled state television last Tuesday.

But reaction to his performance that night reflected the divergent views of Ortega within the church and elsewhere in Cuba, where the majority still adheres to Afro-Cuban religions that use the church’s icons but not its doctrine.

While supporters praised the speech as “transcendental,” some priests said Ortega toed the government line too closely. They said he stressed the punishing impact of the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba over Havana’s human rights record.

Others said the cardinal came off as aloof, even arrogant--an image reinforced by the episcopal motto that Ortega chose when he became a bishop, “My grace is sufficient for you.” Still others criticized Ortega’s speech for language that went over the heads of many Cubans.

During Mass in one poor Havana parish last Wednesday night, several parishioners asked their priest: “That guy on television last night, who was he?”

Added one longtime political and social analyst here: “It was an opportunity for the cardinal to become popular, a figure in his own right. Instead, he started preaching . . . using cryptographic language.”

At stake in the cardinal’s performance this week, and in the months and years ahead, is whether Ortega and his church can build on their new profile--not to challenge Castro but to influence government policies on human rights, personal freedom and political space and to serve as a true catalyst for change.

“Certainly the Catholic Church’s interest is not to destabilize the country by making the overthrow or the death of Castro their principal focus,” said Shawn Malone, a Georgetown University professor who specializes in the Cuban church. “The church is interested in continuity and a slow, peaceful transition.”

“The cardinal is a figure that now stands in counterpoint to Fidel,” said a 55-year-old Cuban priest in Havana who asked not to be identified. “What worries us is that Ortega is very good when he speaks for 15 minutes, but then he disconnects, much like Fidel. We say that he is like a pilot who asks for a runway but cannot land.”

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Born Jaime Lucas Ortega Alamino in a poor barrio of western Cuba’s Matanzas province, the cardinal has risen in the clergy in a way that appears unlikely on paper. His official church biography states that he attended a “prestigious” elementary school, but his advanced studies lack the credentials of many other Cuban clerics.

Ortega attended the lesser of Cuba’s two seminaries, an institution run by the Canadian Fathers of the Foreign Missions, who sent Ortega to Quebec to finish his theological studies.

But his career as priest, bishop and cardinal has reflected the struggle of the church itself, which under pressure from the state retreated from Cuban society just three years before Ortega’s ordination.

In 1961, after Castro officially declared Cuba a socialist state, 131 priests were expelled, and the Catholic faithful became virtual pariahs. To be a devotee meant no access to many university slots, professions and top government jobs. Religious schools were closed, and the number of priests in Cuba fell from 670 in 1957 to just 200.

Five years later, Ortega and several other priests were ordered to perform their military duty in a re-education camp, where they worked for a year alongside homosexuals, artists and others considered by the Castro government to be unfit for military service. And in the decades after his release, Ortega toiled along with the rest of Cuba’s clergy in quiet isolation.

“The church had retreated into a silent state,” said the Rev. Oscar Perez, a Havana parish priest who was ordained in 1975, at the nadir of the church’s influence.

As it slowly rebuilt itself in the ensuing years, though, the church transformed itself from the elite, urban enclave it had been before Castro’s revolution.

That transformation drove away many foreign priests and the foreign-influenced Cuban upper class that had been the church’s parochial base.

“The priests weren’t pastors of the people,” said a senior Cuban official. “It was aristocratic. There wasn’t a single priest who would let his robe touch the mud.”

“In a sense, Castro was the midwife of a church that really found itself and built a solid structure,” concluded Robert E. White, former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador and head of the Center for International Policy in Washington.

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The church has also become more nationalistic. In the weeks leading up to the pope’s visit, Catholic families volunteered to make hundreds of thousands of Cuban flags for pilgrims to wave at the pope’s Jan. 25 Mass in Havana.

Throughout that transformation, Ortega played a leading role. He launched church-based youth groups all over the island.

Ortega also has reached beyond the island, traveling to Florida to meet members of the hard-line exile community and to preach a message of reconciliation. That mission won him wide praise from moderate Cuban Americans but also harsh criticism from the hard-line exile leaders, who view him as a dangerous ally of the Cuban government.

Vatican officials say they would like Ortega to be tougher on human rights abuses, but they and most independent church analysts conclude that the cardinal is at the right place at the right moment in history.

“Cardinal Ortega is the man for the job,” said Georgetown’s Malone. “He seems to have drawn equal amounts of criticism from the hard line in Cuba and the hard line in Miami. He doesn’t waffle on either side, and that bodes very well for his role.”

Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux at the Vatican and Times researcher Dolly Mascarenas in Havana contributed to this report.

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Profile:

Jaime Ortega

Archbishop of Havana

* Age: 61

* Personal history: Born in poor area of Matanzas province; attended prestigious, private elementary school and public high school; studied theology in Cuba and Quebec; served one year at a re-education camp for homosexuals, misfits and religious devotees.

* Career highlights: Ordained in 1964 at Cathedral of Matanzas; named bishop of Pinar del Rio province in 1978 by Pope John Paul II; appointed archbishop of Havana in 1981; elevated to cardinal in 1994; elected second vice president of the Latin American Bishop’s Council in 1995.

* Interests: Music (is an accomplished pianist and composer); fostering new callings to the Cuban priesthood; reconstructing Cuba’s decaying churches; expanding the role of the Caritas charity; reuniting Cubans at home and in exile.