Ripples of Change Create More Openness in Cuba

HAVANA —  The pope’s portrait on the choir’s T-shirts had faded, and only a few hundred families were gathered on the broad lawn of this capital’s San Juan de Dios sanctuary as Cardinal Jaime Ortega mounted the pulpit.

Six months to the day earlier, Pope John Paul II had electrified hundreds of thousands of Cubans in the Plaza of the Revolution with calls for freedom and hope. But the crowds and the camera crews, which had made Ortega the symbol of Cuba’s newly empowered Roman Catholic Church during the papal visit, were long gone.

The cardinal didn’t even mention the anniversary in his low-key recent sermon on family values. Not that anyone outside the sanctuary would know it. Neither Ortega nor any other Cuban church official has appeared in state-run media here since the pope left town Jan. 25.

Rather, as has been the case for decades, all eyes were on President Fidel Castro as he celebrated an anniversary far more important to his regime: the 45 years since his first guerrilla attack on the forces of former dictator Fulgencio Batista.

Castro spoke for nearly five hours, and not once did he mention religion. Fit, lucid and fiery at 71, the Cuban leader delivered this message: He and his Cuban revolution are as strong as ever--despite a 36-year-old U.S. embargo, innumerable CIA plots on his life and even the unprecedented visit of an anti-Communist pope.

The contrasting images suggested that little has changed in Castro’s Cuba six months after the pope tried to open up this tightly controlled society. And interviews with dozens of Cubans here last week appeared to confirm Castro’s prediction that the papal presence would have no dramatic effect on either Cuban society or his regime.

Cubans Speaking Out on Religion, Politics

But inside their homes and in the newfound safety of their churches, priests, lay workers and even nonbelievers here say that their lives have changed in subtle but substantial ways in the months since the pope called on Cuba to open to the world--and on the world to open to Cuba.

Although the Communist Party’s rule remains omnipresent and life for most here is a continuing daily struggle, many Cubans have begun to speak more openly about their beliefs--religious and political alike--without repercussions from the government. Some credit the pope, while others share the Castro regime’s view that the papal visit was just one step in its own gradual opening of Cuban society.

Predictably, the most immediate impact has been in the Catholic Church and in other faiths.

As Father Jesus Maria Lusaretta, a Havana parish priest, put it: “Cuba, religiously speaking, was like a great forest that had been leveled. They chopped down all the trees, but the roots were still there underground. When the pope came, he gave them water, and he brought out the sun.

“Now we have a forest with tiny trees. You can barely see them. But come back in a year, three years, 20 years. It will be a great forest again, reaching up to the heavens.”

Lusaretta pointed to his Miracles of the Virgin Church as proof. After the pope left, he won government permission to build additions to the church and its free dining room for the elderly--expansion projects once unheard of in a land where church lands were seized, sanctuaries shuttered and open worship outlawed until about eight years ago.

And in the barrios where Lusaretta says he does 90% of his work, his parishioners, he said, are more open about almost everything.

Entrepreneurs Sense a ‘Greater Opening’

Vladimir Alvarez, 35, and Aurelio Moreno Lopez, 47, demonstrated the phenomenon recently as they spoke with a Times reporter at an overcrowded seafront cafe.

Alvarez and Moreno said they are partners in a small sandwich stand called “the Challenger,” which they own under laws that opened small parts of Cuba’s socialist economy to the private sector several years ago. Both men said they had attended John Paul’s Mass six months ago--Alvarez as a curious nonbeliever and Moreno as a former Communist who has rediscovered his religious roots.

And both said they sense “a much greater opening” in their society since that January day when the pope called for freedom in the same Havana plaza where Castro had declared his socialist revolution nearly four decades before.

“We’re here talking to you, a foreigner, out in the open, about so many things,” Alvarez said. “That alone is proof that things are changing.”

Moreno agreed. “The pope’s visit was a great advance,” he said. “During the week the pope was here, of course, it was an enormous opening. The things he said from platforms throughout Cuba have never been said here before in our lives.

“But even now, we all think and speak more openly. There are limits, of course. But I really do believe that things are changing, not just because of the pope but because it’s the natural course of things.”

Church Magazines Widely Circulated

Cardinal Ortega likened the process to “a stone thrown into a lake, generating concentric waves, drawing circles on the surface that are each time wider and more open, and moving through the depths of the stagnant waters where the island of Cuba seemed to float in these recent years.”

Speaking to religion writers in New Orleans in June on the impact of the papal visit, Ortega added that the most concrete result “can be seen in certain new focuses in official attitudes and words . . . indicators of a new, more open and flexible attitude for the future.”

Although the church still has no access to the official media and has yet to win permission to reopen its religious schools--two of its key demands during the pope’s visit--an array of its magazines is published and distributed widely each month with the government’s blessing. More than 200,000 copies of the pope’s homilies also have been distributed throughout the country, Ortega said, reaching even the most remote villages and poorest barrios.

The Ozores family in Havana’s La Vibora neighborhood is among the many who have read them. And they agreed that the homilies--indeed, the pope’s mere presence--marked a defining moment that has inspired them to think and speak more deeply about their lives.

“Since the pope came, I think the Cuban people have lost a little bit of their fear, and I think that will happen more and more,” said Eduardo Ozores, a 28-year-old junior high school teacher who attended the pope’s Havana Mass as a crowd-control worker for the church.

To illustrate, Ozores, his brothers and father talked for hours, openly assessing the hardships and contradictions of Cuban life.

In the six months since the pontiff’s visit, the prices of water, electricity and gas have gone up, while the men’s meager government salaries remain the same. Although they praised the government for continuing to provide free health care and education and to subsidize the basic staples of life, they added that such essentials as soap, antibiotics and other medicines often are unavailable in the state-run ration shops that are still a lifeline for most Cubans.

Crime also is on the rise. Although Havana still ranks among the safest capitals in the Americas, petty theft, prostitution and drug trafficking are increasing. Last week, a taxi driver was killed during a robbery--an unheard-of crime here.

What is more, the government’s decision in 1995 to permit dollar trade when it opened narrow sectors of the economy to private ownership has utterly skewed Cuban society.

Bellboys, maids, hairdressers, taxi drivers and others who work in Cuba’s booming tourist industry have access to those dollars--and to the ultramodern shopping malls that trade only in dollars--while government doctors, scientists, professors and technicians earn meager salaries in pesos. As a result, a foreign diplomat’s maid is 10 times richer now than his doctor.

Ozores, for example, earns the peso equivalent of $8 a month teaching his eighth-graders. His father, a retired government architect, receives a $9 monthly pension in pesos. Even his elder brother, a cardiologist, makes the equivalent of just $20 each month. The bellboy who sneered at him on a recent weekend at one of Cuba’s new holiday resorts earns that much in a day.

“It’s an inversion of the values of our society,” Ozores said. “In material things, I would say everything here is about the same as it was before the pope came--or perhaps a bit worse.

“The Cuban economy really has become a market economy,” he said. “So we must take the bad with the good that comes with that.”

Castro Concedes More Work Needed

Castro and his senior ministers have acknowledged the contradictions that have come with their limited free-market reforms, introduced when Cuba lost billions of dollars in subsidies after the Soviet Union’s collapse.

In his anniversary speech, Castro stressed the great strides the nation has made in health, education, medical research and public services since he took power in 1959. But he conceded that the government now must try to “perfect” the rest: shortcomings that he and most other Cubans blame largely on the U.S. embargo.

“No doubt, the embargo is a factor,” Ozores said. “I feel as if we’re always beginning, beginning, beginning. And there’s always something that stops us. There’s been this U.S. blockade. Every four years, there’s another U.S. president. And every four years, we hope he will begin a new policy.

“For us, it’s always the beginning of a new era. But with the pope’s visit, I feel a new era really has begun. Perhaps the outside world wanted to see big, dramatic changes in Cuba. This cannot happen here. It must be a slow, gradual process. The visit of the pope was a step--a very important step--in a long stairway.”