Surprise 2 1/2-Hour State-Run Telecast Lets Whole Nation See Papal Mass

Millions of Cubans awoke Thursday to an extraordinary announcement in their morning newspaper, the only daily in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

“Cubavision will broadcast Mass in Santa Clara,” said the headline in Granma, the official organ of the Cuban Communist Party’s Central Committee.

Then, for 150 uninterrupted minutes, the images on state television--the only TV broadcast available to most Cubans here--were even more startling.

For the first time since the earliest years of Castro’s Communist revolution, a Roman Catholic Mass was aired live, in its entirety, on Cuban TV--this time featuring Pope John Paul II. It was also the first time since Castro’s 1959 revolution that a priest was permitted to co-anchor a televised event--a massive, open-air religious gathering that included tens of thousands of believers and nonbelievers alike.

Father Pedro Freites, the Vatican Radio official who helped narrate the Mass, explained in detail the structure, mission and sacred rites of Catholicism to a nation that was officially atheist for a generation.

The surprise broadcast satisfied a major church concern about access to the government-monopoly media, an issue raised this week by Cuba’s Cardinal Jaime Ortega, 61. Late Thursday, the Vatican spokesman here announced that state television will broadcast live, nationwide, the pope’s homily and his coronation of Cuba’s patron saint Saturday in the eastern city of Santiago.

Ortega had won several other concessions before the papal visit, including his own 30-minute, nationally televised address last week. But before the pope’s arrival Wednesday, Ortega expressed dissatisfaction over a government decision against airing the pope’s three regional Masses nationwide.

Most experts here, who are scrutinizing the anti-Communist pope’s five-day visit for any signs of political shifts, viewed Thursday’s broadcast as a breakthrough.

With literacy here nearly 100% and almost every family having a television, they said, media access is a key measure of reform in a country that has lived nearly four decades under one-party rule.

But the true test, they said, will come only after the pope departs: seeing whether the narrow freedoms the church won this month will last, or even expand to include other nongovernmental groups.