Ten years after Pope John Paul II’s historic visit to Cuba, the nation is still adjusting to its relatively new, and sometimes ambiguous, religious freedom. On a recent morning in Havana, Juan Javier Triff (a Catholic youth leader and computer engineering student) reflected on the continual need to explain his faith to his friends, or even beyond that, the role of religion in Cuban society. “With so many years of revolution here that they’ve been putting that fear into people’s heads,” the tall, curly-haired 22-year-old says, “even in my dorm room, when people see me praying, they say ‘What are you doing praying? They’re going to catch you!’”
In fact, after the expulsion or self-exile of tens of thousands of Christians in the early 1960s, religious Cubans were often maligned as bourgeois or anti-revolutionaries, and ostracized in their work and social lives. Fearing religion’s ability to organize the masses, the government banned religion and barred believers from the Communist Party. Between the 1950s and 1980s, the number of Cubans who were openly Catholic dropped from approximately 80 percent of the island’s population of 11 million to close to 40 percent. Yet since the 1990s, the Cuban government’s attitude towards religion has gradually thawed, an evolution marked by the Pope’s 1998 visit.
Triff, who calls himself “a patriot” with immense “gratitude to my country,” says that, unlike older generations of Catholics, he simply has not experienced persecution. He has heard stories of the revolution’s early days, when listening to the Beatles and American music was illegal, and people of faith hid their beliefs. The experiences of older Catholics upset him, he says: “I feel the same as when I see the statue of John Lennon in a [Havana] park now, and my mother’s cousin was put in jail for having long hair.” Yet sitting in his parents’ home with roosters crowing in the garden outside, Triff says he tries to teach his peers about the progress since those days. “I tell them, ‘Man, the Cuban Constitution says everyone can profess their religion.’ People—even if it’s favorable—have fear of change.”
Change on the Horizon
Change is a word on the lips of millions across the island. With Fidel Castro’s handover of the Communist Party throne to his brother last month, however, came little indication of plans to alter the nation’s status quo. Instead, Cubans are left searching for hints in Raul’s speeches and the state-run media: will salaries rise to a livable wage? Will the dual-currency economy, which leaves Cubans unable to afford daily necessities and food, be abolished? Will the country pull itself out of its prolonged post-Soviet economic crisis? Will Cuba open to the rest of the world in commerce and exchange of ideas?
On an official level, the notion of change is itself a touchy subject: news reports over the past few months have detailed the arrest of Havana teenagers for wearing plastic bracelets reading “change,” as well as the preemptive detention of dissidents around International Human Rights Day and the police beating of protesters inside a Catholic church in Santiago. Under Raul, the government has publicly taken measures to promote openness—doubling the page count of Cuba’s main newspaper, publicizing reports of corruption in state-run businesses, organizing employee gatherings for Cubans to discuss problems and inefficiencies in the workplace—yet many Cubans complain of a controlled social stagnation which has gone largely unaltered for decades.
While the nation’s future is still unknown, in the ten years since the Pope’s visit there has been a significant increase in religious freedom: believers can worship openly, and are less likely to be blocked from jobs or universities. Church congregations are swelling (although mainly in Protestant denominations, which have doubled since the 1950s from approximately 250,000 to an estimated 500,000 members). Churchgoers are even allowed to join the Communist Party, and Raul Castro’s first order of foreign policy business, two days after the election, was to meet with Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state.
A Lost Generation
Yet for older Catholics, like 56-year-old Marcos Garza (a pseudonym), the government’s past mistakes are hard to forget. In the 1960s, Garza witnessed blatant government hostility to religion; especially in his public school, whose administrators relied on a lookout near the local church to report the names of children seen attending services. “The preschool teacher used to say to the kids, ‘Close your eyes, and ask God to give you a piece of candy,’” Garza said. When the children opened their eyes, and saw there was nothing there, “the teacher said, ‘See? God doesn’t exist.’ Then she would tell them to close their eyes and ask Fidel for a piece of candy.” While the children’s eyes were closed, the teacher went around putting candies in each of their hands. “When they opened their eyes, she said, ‘See? Fidel does exist.’”
In Garza’s neighborhood, Sundays were a spiritual battle: the government-run neighborhood organization planned activities (complete with treats and games) to coincide with Catholic holidays to dissuade children from attending church. One Palm Sunday sticks out for Garza; because religious adults were particularly afraid of repercussions, they sent their children to collect their palm fronds. A neighborhood game day was planned, so the kids went to church, rang the bell to call other children to pick up their own fronds, then went on to the state-run game day, Garza says. “There never were game days after that.”
Garza continued going to church, though few others did, and his college years in the 1970s were arduous. He and friends gathered in secret to listen to the Beatles, a Communist Youth minder was assigned to follow him, and Garza was carted to meetings where other students denounced him for being Catholic. “It was a circus. For me the university was like a test of faith, like taking poison.” On one of those darkest days, Garza ran into a friend: “He told me, ‘There are eras for men, and men for eras. We are not men for this era.’”
After Garza graduated, and admitted on job applications that he was Catholic, he was barred from working for years, and then finally given a job barely related to his field of study. “My family kept pointing out along the way what could have been. People had to stand up to their families, who couldn’t understand why they let themselves miss opportunities. It must be put in bold: We were marginalized, ostracized, persecuted. We were a lost generation.”
“Now everyone has their beliefs”
For many, the pressure was too intense: Catholics now in their 40s and 50s lost most of their peers to emigration, and few young people joined the church in their place. Then, in the 1980s, the slow thaw began: after building relationships with Latin American liberation theologians, in 1985 Fidel sat down for interviews with a Brazilian Dominican friar that were published that year in a book, Fidel and Religion. By the early 1990s, Cuba was in the throes of a post-Soviet economic and social crisis, provoking many to look for existential solace, and in 1992 the government declared itself secular after 30 years of classification as an atheist state. Cubans began flocking to church, especially immediately after the Pope’s visit, and both syncretic Afro-Cuban religions and Protestant denominations exploded.
As living conditions deteriorated, Garza saw many newcomers at church, including the neighborhood busybody who had spied on Catholic children for his school in the 1960s. Some Catholics have difficulty accepting the ease with which people are now able to attend church, saying young Cubans don’t understand what they went through and see church as simply another social activity. “Believing in God was a sin, a tremendous sin,” said an employee of the Havana archdiocese who asked to remain anonymous. “Not now. Now everyone has their beliefs.”
Yet looking towards the future, youth leader Juan Javier Triff believes that Cuba’s Catholic Church must do more to attract young followers. (Of his church’s approximately 100 parishioners, only six are young people.) In many ways, Triff is a product of the revolutionary period around him: He wishes the kids he sees hanging out drinking would dedicate some of their free time to community service, as his group is doing with an outreach program for the elderly. And he believes that religious values could improve daily life in Cuba, where he says people are often thinking of themselves (littering, refusing to give bus seats to the elderly) rather than the greater good. For the Mass presided over by the Vatican’s Cardinal Bertone last month, Triff himself carried the offerings of water, wafers, and wine, and recruited his youth group to help with logistics. “When things change in this country in the future,” Triff says, “I want to feel like I did my part.”
Others, however, wish that Bertone had been more forceful in his conversation with Raul Castro and pushed for a release of political prisoners and the loosening of restrictions on freedom of speech. According to the Catholic news agencies, Bertone did express “the Church’s concern for prisoners and their families,” and when he offered a list of prisoners to be considered for humanitarian release, Castro in turn mentioned a swap for five alleged Cubans spies imprisoned in the United States. “Authorities have promised me more openness in the print press and the radio” for religious broadcasts, Bertone was quoted as saying. “We do hope for some openness, because nothing is impossible.” Following the meeting, the Cuban government immediately touted the Cardinal’s condemnation of the US embargo.
Meanwhile, Cubans are left without access to non-governmental news sources or the internet. And some from Protestant denominations, whose charismatic character and exponential growth maybe be seen as more threatening to the government, still complain of subtle discrimination and limits on church growth. “In the meetings, they all toast their glasses together, but it is the people who are left affected,” said Garza. “The problem is that those who [persecuted us] remain in power and haven’t answered for this. I think we are in a moment of transition; I have no doubt that we are playing with fire. Only God knows how to get the iron out of the fire. And how to put out the fire.”
