Cuba USA

To understand Pope Francis' visit to Cuba

by Salvador Capote

source alainet

If you do not see the brightness of the star in the night the fault is not the star but yourself". Leonardo Boff

On July 8, 2015, on the road between the airport of El Alto and the city of La Paz, Pope Francis stopped to pray near Achachicala, the place where the priest Luis Espinal ("Lucho" for Bolivians) was tortured and murdered the night of March 21 1980, just three days before the assassination of Monseñor Oscar Anulfo Romero in El Salvador and a year after the assembly of bishops in Puebla (1979) declared a preferential option for the poor. Luis Espinal, journalist and cinema critic, in addition to being a priest, was assassinated for denouncing the miserable situation of the Bolivian people and military repression. "I stopped here -- said the Pope to the crowd gathered there -- to greet you and above all to remember a brother, our brother, a victim of interested parties who did not want a struggle for freedom of Bolivia.

There has been much speculation about the gift from Evo Morales to the Pope of a crucifix in which the cross is formed of a hammer and sickle. Those opposed to Morales sought the opportunity to accuse the Bolivian leader of making fun of the Pope, giving him a "communist crucifix". Nevertheless, the history behind this gift is that it is a copy of a carving made by the priest Luis Espinal to express the common desire of Christians and Marxists for a more human and just society. In addition, after receiving the National Order of the Condor of the Andes, the Pope was awarded the Order of Merit that carries the name of the Jesuit Martyr. And this award also bears the image of Christ over the hammer and sickle.

Lucho was a Jesuit, as is Pope Francis and his alignment with the oppressed and with justice based on the Christian faith was in harmony with the engagement of the Company of Jesus, defined in their General Congregation 32, in accordance with which over 50 Jesuits have sacrificed their lives, struggling on the side of the people in diverse countries, to defend a form of the faith conceived as a communion with the poor, a faith tied to justice.

The General Congregation 32 (1975) took place in the spirit of the Vatican Council II and the Episcopal Synods that preceded it with the themes: "Justice in the world" (1971) and "Evangelization of today's world" (1975). This Congregation redefined the mission of the Jesuits, which in the future would be focused on the consecration to the service of the faith and the promotion of justice. This Congregation was attended by the Provincial of the Argentine Jesuits, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who would later become a Bishop and Cardinal of Buenos Aires, and finally elected Pope with the name of Francis. Pope Francis is, then, a Jesuit priest dedicated to Decree 4: "Our Mission Today" of the GC 32 of the Company of Jesus, which has impressive pronouncements. In it the Jesuits affirm that they "will not work for the promotion of justice without paying a price", and the price to be paid has certainly been high, irrigating with the blood of many martyrs the soil of Latin America and other regions of the world.'

Decree 4 speaks "[. . .] of the evangelical possibility that is a gift of God, of a communion among men based on participation and not on accumulation, on availability and openness and not on the search for the privileges of caste, class or race, on service and not on domination or exploitation" (4,16). It states that "[. . .] there is no true preaching of Christ, nor true proclamation of the Gospel, without resolving a commitment to the promotion of justice" (4, 27). And on these structures of domination it explains: "Social structures -- one daily acquires a more acute awareness of this -- contribute to model the world and man himself, including his ideas and sentiments, his most intimate desires and aspirations. The transformation of structures in search of the liberation of mankind, both spiritually and materially, remains for us closely tied to the work of Evangelization [. . .] (4, 40). (Free translation) Decree 4 not only defines lines of thought and action that are unequivocally on the side of the poor and the oppressed but also proclaims the need to transform the structures of society.

At the 5th General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean (CELAM), that took place in the Sanctuary of Aparecida, Brazil, the then Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was named to preside over the committee charged with editing the final document. His election was not accidental, of course, but in recognition of his relevant protagonist role in previous events that configured a theological and pastoral tradition in Latin America: "the preferential option for the poor and the marginalized" that the Conference of Aparecida reaffirmed and brought up to date and which confirmed the decision to give one’s whole life, even to the point of martyrdom, in the exercise of this mission. It was surely no accident that the man charged with revealing to the public the words of the future Pope Francis during his participation in the general congregation before the conclave was Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega y Alamino. In these words Bergoglio argued that the mission of the Church should be "to go out of herself and go to the periphery, which is not only geographical but also existential: where there is sin, pain, injustice, ignorance and religious indifference, where there is human misery”.

Fidel Castro, former Jesuit alumnus, recognized the influence of the teachers of the College of Belén, rigorous in organization, discipline and values -- priests who were able to inculcate a great sense of personal dignity -- in certain elements of his formation (2). In 1985 the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff visited Cuba at the invitation of Fidel. Boff informs that in the context of conversations that he had with the leader of the revolution, he had confessed: "Every time I am more convinced that no Latin American revolution will be true, popular and triumphant if it does not incorporate a religious element" (3). His brother, Raul Castro, who today is president of Cuba, after meeting with Pope Francis during his visit to Italy in May 2015, expressed: "He is a Jesuit and I, in some sense, am also, I was always in Jesuit schools [. . .].”

Now there will be an encounter in Cuba with the Jesuits, but this time with a Latin American Pope who knows, because he has lived them, the extreme social inequalities of the continent and who dreams of a poor Church of the poor, as he prophetically denounces the injustice of an economic system that puts money above the human person. Fidel has not failed to notice the common ground that exists between religious and revolutionary militants. "[. . .] I am certain that the same pillars on which one can today establish the sacrifice of a revolutionary, yesterday was established the sacrifice of a martyr for his religious faith. Definitively, the matter of a religious martyr, in my judgement, is that of a selfless man, an altruist, of the same matter that the revolutionary hero is made. If these conditions do not exist, neither the religious hero nor the political one can survive" (4). This common ground is what allows Pope Francis to dialogue with the Cuban government and people, with the same shared ethical language.

Is Liberation Theology still surviving? The present relevance of a theology, as Gustavo Guriérrez clearly explains (5), "depends in great part on its capacity to interpret the form in which faith is lived out in specific circumstances and times", that is to say, in their context. The theology that began to emerge in the times of the priest Camilo Torres Restrepo, Colombian proto-martyr of Liberation Theology, who coined the famous phrase: "If Christ were alive today he would be a guerrillero", pertains to an epoch in which armed struggle was the only viable option for oppressed peoples. Circumstances have changed much since then, and Bergoglio, we must say, disagreed with some aspects of this theology; but it is unquestionable that poverty, injustice and inequality, factors at the origin of Liberation Theology, continue today, more than ever, as central themes of theological reflection.

In the interval between the Conferences of Medellín (1968) and Puebla (1979), Latin America became not only the demographic centre of Catholicism but also it theological centre, and within this Latin American context, Cuba occupies a position of extraordinary interest for theologians because – to say it in the words of the Brazilian Dominican Frei Betto -- "from the evangelical point of view, a socialist society that creates living conditions for its people is of itself unconsciously achieving what we men of faith call God’s projects in history" (6). It is not by chance that Cuba, a country with a relatively small territorial extension and population, will soon have the privilege of having received the visit of three popes in a short period of time.

Pope Francis will visit a country in which, for over half a century, ethical-moral values have been exalted, where the Christian precept of love thy neighbour has been translated into equality, fraternity, solidarity and internationalism, where the devotion to the Virgin of Caridad del Cobre (Ochún in syncretic cults) forms one of the roots of our culture; where there is an ample coincidence between Christian and revolutionary thought. What has the Cuban revolutionary programme been if not "a preferential option for the poor"! But it must be recalled that the "poor" Cuban is not the same as the poor of other latitudes where poverty is not only the lack of material goods, but also the privation of services of health care, education and social assistance, where poverty means ignorance, alienation, discrimination, oppression, unemployment, exclusion, violence, sickness and even an unjust premature death. The "poor" Cuban child may not have electronic toys and may have only one pair of shoes, but he has a doctor, a teacher, food and a roof guaranteed, and more importantly, he grows up in an atmosphere of protection and love.

The term "socialism", as we know, involves a wide semantic spectrum. Cuban socialism is consequent with the revolutionary tradition that one can follow, without breaking continuity, from the origins of our nationality, with the seed sown from the teachings of Father Félix Varela at the beginnings of the XIX century and with giants of the ethical-moral world such as José Martí and Fidel Castro. If the common good is the principal preoccupation for defining the property of the means of production, there can be no doubt that Cuban socialism is the one which maintains more roots and solidarity in its principals. Perfecting Cuban socialism, making it every day more participative, more just, more human and -- why not? -- more Christian, should be the aspiration of all, and in this sense, I am sure that the visit to Cuba of Pope Francis, which is announced as a pastoral visit, will also be prophetic.

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