‘God, not violence’
Cuban dissident arrests mark Pope’s brush with communism
Palmarito del Cauto, Cuba – At his tiny bungalow in the Cuban countryside, Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia juggles two mobile phones as he gathers reports of the detention of activists before the Pope’s visit today to the communist-ruled Caribbean island Cuba.
Although his phones are almost certainly bugged, the calls come in thick and fast, with Cuban authorities cracking down on dissidents as Havana prepares to welcome Benedict XVI.
‘‘It’s more than 55 so far,’’ Ferrer Garcia said. He picked up one vibrating mobile. ‘‘That’s one more.
‘‘The detentions began in Moa on Tuesday. Then Holguin. The people in Moa wanted to leave early to prevent the authorities stopping them at the last minute,’’ he said. ‘‘Of those 55, I don’t know how many are Catholics. I would say one-third at least.’’
The Pope’s three-day trip to Cuba is only the second papal visit to the country, after John Paul II’S mission in 1998. The unannounced highlight of the visit is expected to be a face-to-face encounter late today between the 84-year-old head of the Catholic Church and the 85-year-old communist revolutionary Fidel Castro, who once expelled hundreds of priests and nuns from the island, seized church property and banned Christmas.
The Pope might also find himself meeting a second leftist Latin leader: Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez returned suddenly to Cuba on Saturday night for a new round of chemotherapy for pelvic cancer. Silao, Mexico – Pope Benedict XVI has told hundreds of thousands of people at a mass in central Mexico that violence and the ‘‘power of armies’’ will not save people, pointing instead to the ‘‘higher power’’ of God.
The Pope referred to Christ the King, whose statue towers over the Bicentennial Park site for the mass, to speak of violence at a time when Mexico was suffering a brutal drug war and military crackdown – blamed for some 50,000 deaths in five years.
The Pope, who owes his rise within the church to his strong opposition to leftist ‘‘liberation theology’’, criticised the communist system on his flight to Mexico, where he began his trip at the weekend.
Urging Cubans to find ‘‘new models’’, he said that it was ‘‘evident that Marxist ideology as it was conceived no longer responds to reality’’. An estimated 60 per cent of Cuba’s 11.2 million people are nominally Catholic, but less than 2 per cent go to mass regularly.
Since John Paul II’S visit, the church has carved out greater space for its activities. Focusing on raising a new generation to replace Cuba’s ageing leadership, local priests teach parishioners how to run small businesses – now allowed in Cuba – and the church
‘‘His kingdom does not stand on the power of his armies subduing others through force or violence. It rests on a higher power that wins over hearts: the love of God,’’ the Pope said yesterday before an estimated faithful of more than half a million people gathered in the blazing sun in the Catholic state of Guanajuato.
The mass was a highlight on the last day of the 84-year-old Pope’s visit to Mexico.
The Pope travels to Communist Cuba today. has set up a business school in Havana in partnership with a Spanish university.
The church hierarchy has been widely criticised for cosying up to the island’s communist authorities. Cardinal Jaime Ortega, the Archbishop of Havana, recently held a special mass to pray for Chavez’s speedy recovery.
Venturing cautiously into a more political role, the Cuban church in 2010 mediated the release of the 75 political prisoners arrested in a 2003 crackdown known as the ‘‘Black Spring’’. But rights activists were unhappy at the release, because all but 12 of the prisoners were forced to go into exile in Spain with their families.
The church failed to speak out after 70 members of the ‘‘Ladies in White’’, formed by wives of political prisoners, were detained this month and warned not to attend papal masses. Ortega also provoked outrage this month by summoning police to evict 13 activists who occupied a Havana church to push the Pope to seek political reforms.
About 750 Cubans have signed an open letter written by the dissident Guillermo Farinas calling on the Pope to meet the opposition.
The Ladies in White have requested a symbolic ‘‘oneminute’’ meeting with the Pope, but the Vatican has remained noncommittal. Archbishop Dionisio Garcia Ibanez of Santiago de Cuba suggested at the weekend that the Pope would not have time.
In the sky-blue bungalow in the village of Palmarito del Cauto that serves as a party headquarters for their Patriotic Union of Cuba, Ferrer Garcia and his wife are under constant surveillance.
Besides tapping their phone, agents spy through the banana trees from the adjacent old people’s home.
Ferrer Garcia, a Catholic activist, was one of the 12 ‘‘Black Spring’’ political prisoners who refused to be driven into exile. His wife is a Woman in White. They have made protest T-shirts – ‘‘God, Fatherland, Liberty’’ – to reveal from beneath their outer clothes if they make it to a papal event without being detained.
Ferrer Garcia warns that the Pope’s visit will not lead to a ‘‘Cuban Spring’’.