Cuban Americans Urged to Keep Hope

Preaching religious revitalization and unity, Cardinal Jaime Ortega y Alamino, archbishop of Havana, delivered a message here Sunday urging Cuban Catholics not to shut the door of hope opened by Pope John Paul II.

Ortega, the leader of the Catholic Church in Cuba and the first Cuban cardinal in more than 30 years, made the comments during a convocation at St. Ignatius Church at the University of San Francisco. The cardinal was invited by the Jesuit university to receive an honorary doctorate for his efforts to promote religious freedom in the Communist regime.

During the convocation, Ortega spoke of how the pope’s visit to Cuba in 1998 helped reduce some of the state controls on religious freedom and establish pastoral goals for the millennium.

But, Ortega said that as time goes by, the impact of the pope’s visit should not be allowed to fade and “become a memory.”

“This hope should not be defeated,” Ortega said to about 500 people gathered at the church. “Although the more positive and open climate of 1998 now seems a thing of the past . . . we should not allow that the door opened by Pope John Paul II to hope be shut.

“The church cannot halt before the negative signs trying to darken a better future,” he said, adding that the climate of “serenity [and] greater tolerance that followed the visit of the Holy Father to our country should prevail in spite of crises and difficulties of every type.”

Ortega, now the island’s spiritual leader, was once considered an outcast by the Communist regime and put behind barbed wire in forced labor camps for religious people in the 1960s.

The 62-year-old church leader has played a pivotal role in guiding the Cuban church through a revolutionary period of change, smoothing the way for the pope’s visit last year and persuading the Communist government to declare Christmas a holiday for the first time since 1962.

But although theologians have noted a religious resurgence on the island nation, a report on international religious freedom released by the State Department last month found the Cuban government continues repression of worship and harassment of religious activists. The cardinal’s silence on this and other political issues has frustrated many among the powerful Cuban American exile community.

Ortega walks a dangerous political tightrope, advocating religious freedom while being careful not to criticize the regime of President Fidel Castro. His reluctance in taking a bold stand against Castro and his opposition to the U.S. embargo has angered many Cubans, especially in Miami, some of whom have taunted him as “Judas” and “traitor.”

Although church gains since the Communist Revolution in 1960s have been modest, church leaders still consider them important in a country that was once officially atheist, expelling foreign priests and closing church schools.

The Cuban community on the West Coast is modest, with only about 1,500 Cuban Americans in San Francisco and 7,500 in the nine-county Bay Area. In Los Angeles County, there are about 46,000 Cubans. Many were drawn to California because of jobs. Others received refugee assistance from groups like Catholic Charities. Still, several hundred Cuban families and students from the University of San Francisco turned up Sunday night to hear the cardinal’s message. Josephine Casanova drove from Alameda.

“It was wonderful to hear his voice again, to hear that Cuban accent,” said Casanova. “I was back home.

“His message was of hope and, for Cubans, that’s all we can hold on to: hope in God.”