Odds and ends

·         AP’s Andrea Rodriguez takes a good look at Cuba’s demographic crunch and the urgency it gives to the economic reforms.  At the end, an interesting speculation that a future Cuba could be a destination country for immigrants, which would help the worker-to-dependent ratio.

·         At Havana Times, Samuel Farber writes a critical review (in English and Spanish) of my Viewer’s Guide to Cuba’s Economic Reform (pdf), followed by some reader comments. 

·         In Commonweal, Tom Quigley looks back at Pope Benedict’s visit to Cuba.

·         EFE: Venezuelan opposition candidate Henrique Capriles criticizes Venezuela’s “gift” of oil to Cuba and other countries, differentiating the aid from the payment for medical and other services rendered.

·         Granma covers Vietnam’s decision to reduce its state sector to a set of essential functions, to have about half the economy in enterprises with majority state ownership and significant foreign ownership, and the rest in a private sector providing goods and services.

Odds and ends

• On the eve of the Cartagena inter-American summit, Colombian President Santos said “it doesn’t make sense” that Cuba is not included in these meetings, and he sees a “degree of hypocrisy in the way [the United States] treats Cuba and does not apply the same standard to other countries.”   

• Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff says there is a “consensus that this is the last Summit of the Americas without Cuba.”

• From papal biographer George Weigel, here’s a critique of the way in which Pope Benedict conducted his visit to Cuba.

• The Wall Street Journal on Cuban activists’ use of Twitter via cellphones and those who add funds to their cell phone accounts from abroad, an activity supported “in the past” by USAID, and perhaps still.

• The Herald on Cuba’s new entrepreneurs in Santiago.

• IPS has an interesting report on how foreign assistance projects die in the Cuban bureaucracy.

After Benedict's visit

In his final mass in Havana in his 1998 visit, Pope John Paul II blessed the cornerstone of a seminary that existed only as an idea awaiting Cuban government approval.  The rock sat for years in the hall outside Cardinal Ortega’s office.  Eventually construction of the seminary was approved, the Cuban government assisted, and the San Carlos and San Ambrosio seminary was inaugurated in 2010 with Raul Castro in attendance.  Dozens of future Cuban priests are training there now, a hopeful step forward for a church that has long relied heavily on foreign clergy.

This story comes to mind now as I read the analyses following the visit of Benedict XVI. 

I’m not one who expected the papal visit to spark big changes in Cuba, and I don’t have the visit plotted on a political scorecard.  The short-term impact of the pastoral visit was summed up by Miami Bishop Agustin Roman: it was a “spiritual retreat” for Cuban Catholics. 

The visit’s political impact, I would guess, will play out over years in the form of Vatican support for the Cuban church’s efforts to gain more space for its activities: education, media access, and more.  The government made a quick gesture in that regard by declaring Good Friday a work holiday (AP).

Some coverage from the past week:

Laura Wides-Munoz of AP’s Miami bureau accompanied Cuban Americans during their visits and wrote a very poignant article about their impressions, good and bad.

On the mass in Havana from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.  More from the Times on the remarks by Cuba’s economic reform czar, Marino Murillo, to the effect that the economy will continue changing but Cuba will not have political reform.

Benedict’s remarks at the airport before departing Havana

The text of the homily delivered March 27 in the Havana cathedral by Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski.

The Herald, from Santiago, on mission houses – the homes of lay Catholics in areas without churches where visiting priests say mass.

Pope Benedict's vote of confidence

It says something about Cuba that Pope Benedict XVI, at age 84 and traveling with difficulty, will spend three days on the island after visiting Mexico to greet the local faithful and meet bishops from around Latin America.

Benedict’s pastoral visit will cap Cubans’ celebration of the 400^th anniversary of their patron saint, the Virgin of Charity.  Thousands greeted the statue of the virgin in its just-completed pilgrimage through every Cuban province, taking two months to make its way through the Havana archdiocese alone.  Cardinal Jaime Ortega called the celebration a “springtime of faith” that drew out a hidden but latent religiosity in a people whose government once stigmatized all faiths except that of the communist party.

When Pope John Paul II visited in 1998, Fidel Castro was in charge and many expected the presence of a charismatic pope to spark big changes. 

Today, Cuba is changing on its own.  President Raul Castro is leading a deliberate but significant economic reform that promises to move more than one million Cubans from public to private payrolls and has already expanded the ranks of small entrepreneurs by 200,000.  Government enterprises are to turn a profit or be dissolved.  “We have to erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where one can live without working,” he says.

Cardinal Ortega puts it a little differently.  The economic system is “bureaucratic and Stalinist,” he said in a 2010 interview, and “creates apathetic workers with low productivity.”  With a “national consensus” solidly backing reform, delays only lead to “impatience and dissatisfaction among the people.”

Castro and Ortega make an odd pair – a communist who served four decades as defense minister, and a pastor whom the communists tried to re-educate in a work camp in the 1960’s. 

Yet their relationship is respectful.  Raul Castro attended a beatification ceremony in eastern Cuba and the opening of a seminary outside Havana.  They have a regular dialogue that marks the church’s acceptance by the government as an interlocutor about Cuban domestic policies.  In his day, Fidel Castro always preferred to speak to the Vatican over the heads of the Cuban bishops.

Cuba’s Catholic magazines are pushing the boundaries of the reform debate with articles – written by clergy, Catholic laity, Cuban academics, and Cuban Americans – making the case for a greater economic opening and freedom to travel abroad, and for the communist party to embark on political reform. 

In a sense, the church is serving one function of a political opposition by pressing the government to form policies that serve the public good, and to keep its promises.  But the church is anything but a political organization, and its public policy voice derives from what it conceives as its mission to look out not only for Cubans’ spiritual needs, but for their general welfare.  As an editorial in a church publication put it, ideologies “should be at the service of the Cuban people, not the other way around.”

This role comes with its share of controversy.  The church’s good offices were essential to the release of 130 political prisoners serving long sentences – reducing the number of prisoners of conscience recognized by Amnesty International to zero – but when all but twelve accepted an offer to leave for Spain with their families, the church was accused of weakening the political opposition and accommodating a form of government antithetical to Christianity. 

This argument will not be resolved.  The Cuban Catholic church has reached a prudential judgment that as a religious institution and Cuba’s largest civil society institution, it does best to use dialogue and debate to push for change from within, even if that change is incremental. 

That’s an unpopular posture among those who want all Cubans on the island to take on greater militancy.  But my guess is that Cubans on the island want changes that improve their daily lives and support the church or anyone else who promotes them.  Which is not to say that Cubans don’t cover the complete spectrum of opinions about the kind of government they would like to have and the kind of policies they would like it to adopt.  But they don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.  And militancy is easy from Miami.

Where does this leave Benedict, the “intellectual” pope described by Cardinal Ortega in remarks on Cuban state television? 

His visit will surely be more than pastoral.  One can imagine that he will seek greater space for Catholic religious or charitable activity, and make some requests of a humanitarian nature.

But Benedict is not likely to “open a new chapter in the history of Cuba,” as Lech Walesa predicted dramatically last week.  His embrace will be a vote of confidence in Cardinal Ortega and the Cuban church, and as the Vatican’s head of state he will applaud improved church-state relations in Havana.  But he will leave it to the Cubans to make their own history.

Odds and ends

• While reading recent discussion of the Pope’s upcoming visit to Cuba, this message to the Pope from Guillermo “Coco” Farinas, a Santa Clara opposition figure, stood out.  He writes “in the name of the Cuban nation.”

• What to make of this story by Alfonso Chardy of the Herald?  A Cuban doctor who served in Venezuela and availed himself of an immigration program that the Bush Administration created especially for Cuban doctors was denied permanent residence here because he was a member of the mass organization for young communists (UJC).  I’m not a big fan of the program for several reasons, one being that those Cubans who can find asylum in one country (granted, not all can) should be able to stay in that country, and there’s no need to create an entitlement to come to the United States.  But after enticing this doctor to come to the United States, the denial of permanent resident status puts him in immigration limbo, and his UJC membership seems a very flimsy reason.  His lip-service loyalty to the communist cause became clear when he deserted his post 15 days after arriving in Venezuela.

• Talk about a win-win-win situation – if pressures from Cuba’s friends had led to Cuba’s attendance at the April Summit of the Americas in Colombia, Havana et al. could have claimed victory, and Washington would have been left to figure whether to attend.  It turns out Cuba will not attend and never asked to attend, its foreign minister informs us, and now the President of Colombia is thanking Cuba for “generously saying it did not want to create a problem for the Summit or for Colombia.”  At the summit itself, it remains to be seen if Cuba’s friends will cause a little stink and force President Obama to deal with the issue of Cuba’s exclusion.  The Cartagena summit is an OAS show, and Cuba is not a big fan of the OAS.

• The Treasury Department clarifies rules for advertising educational people-to-people travel.

Church news

 

In advance of the Pope’s visit, AP takes a long and interesting look at the Cuban Catholic church and its leader, Cardinal Jaime Ortega.

The Herald’s Juan Tamayo interviews three independent voices among Cuban Catholics: a priest, a dissident, and a magazine editor from Pinar del Rio.

Radio Marti’s website reports on the recent return of Catholic Church properties that were confiscated in the 1960’s.

Photos are of the little church in Vinales, wrecked in the 2008 hurricanes, that has been repaired and spruced up and will be re-inaugurated in a ceremony this coming Sunday.  A parish worker told me that aid from Germany made it possible.

Odds and ends

• The Archdiocese of Miami announces a pilgrimage to Cuba to witness the Pope’s visit in March, with the option of seeing the masses in both Havana and Santiago. The Cuban Liberty Council’s Ninoska Perez calls the trip tourism and says it betrays a “total lack of ethics” on the part of the Archdiocese. In the Herald, Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski looks ahead to the Pope’s visit to Cuba.

• Herald: Speaking of pilgrimages, candidate Newt Gingrich schlepped to Versailles, Calle Ocho’s very nice, reasonably priced restaurant, café, and pastry shop. He was joined by Rep. David Rivera, who has endorsed him. Gingrich changed his position on Cuba, calling for restoration of the Bush travel restrictions of 2004. (Previously he said he would not reverse the Obama travel opening). He wants “a Cuban Spring that is even more exciting than the Arab Spring.” Plus full enforcement of Helms-Burton and indictment of Fidel and Raul Castro and their sisters and their cousins and their aunts. Plus new governments in Havana, Caracas, and Tehran.

• Attorney Jose Palli writes a sharp essay in the Herald about fear of change in Cuba.

• Granma covers an address by Dr. Ahmadinejad at the University of Havana in which he rails against injustice around the world and says that capitalism is “in decline.” He saw Fidel Castro during his visit and told Raul that Fidel had done most of the talking; a sign, Raul said, that Fidel “is really doing well.”