HAVANA -- Elena Ulloa wears two crosses over her pink blouse, one silver and the other wood, as she whispers a reluctant confession: At 80 years of age she is just getting to know God and the church again.
Ulloa was born into a Catholic family, but during the height of Cuba’s religious repression in the 1960s and 1970s, she feared that going to Mass would hurt her children’s chances at university degrees and competitive careers. She ignored the powerful draw she felt to join the church and prayed silently at home instead. In the mid-1990s, after her son and daughter moved to Spain and the Cuban government loosened its grip on religion, Ulloa returned to her Catholic roots.
She attended Pope John Paul II’s historic Mass at Havana’s Revolution Plaza and remembers his departure “like it was yesterday.”
“I was standing outside the airport and a light rain was falling,” she said. “The pope joked: ‘Is it that the Cuban people are crying because the pope is leaving?’ I feel we still have him present.”
Four years after the pope drew hundreds of thousands around the island to plazas named for Cuba’s communist revolution, the church remains the only non-governmental institution capable of convoking the masses. It is that independence that creates tension with the government.
Although church membership hasn’t mushroomed, the pope’s legacy has been to loosen the “religious inhibitions” built during three decades of repression, Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega said. The church is regaining ground, especially in remote towns where baptisms, catechism classes and Masses are held in private homes. Ortega occasionally speaks on the government-run radio stations for holy days, and about a dozen church magazines have cropped up.
This gradual expansion is not so much a result of government approval, Ortega said, but rather of the church’s willingness to push ahead.
“This is space we have won,” he said. “We haven’t asked for permission for the things we do. There is a series of rights, which as a religion the Catholic Church has. We try to put those rights into practice.”
After Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, Cuba’s historically weak Catholic Church saw an exodus of the faithful. Castro, who attended Jesuit school as a boy, expelled hundreds of foreign priests on grounds that they were aiding counter- revolutionary movements. Others, including Ortega, were forced into agricultural work camps along with artists, gays and others deemed undesirable.
Today fewer than 300 priests minister to the island’s 220,000 active Catholics, about 2 percent of the population.
Ortega pointed to a number of “dynamic” churches, which serve the spirit as well as the flesh since Cuba lost $6 billion in annual Soviet subsidies in 1990. Every day, Ulloa’s Church of the Miraculous Medallion offers breakfast and lunch to about 170 senior citizens, whose monthly pensions amount to less than $3.50. The church also houses a library, laundry service, a barber and tailor for the elderly. In the afternoon it hosts workshops for teens with Down syndrome and in the evenings, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Nearby prayer homes have tripled to 60 since 1997, said the Rev. Jesus Maria Lusarreta of the Miraculous Medallion church.
“The pope’s visit was a tremendous awakening, like a family that hears a noise in the night and gets up,” said Lusarreta, a Spanish priest who moved to Havana in 1993. “Even if some go back to bed others remain awake. In this parish not many have gone back to sleep.”
Although several Catholics interviewed said they still think communist co-workers eye them with suspicion, officially there is no contradiction between revolution and religion. Ten years ago, Cuba changed its constitution, becoming a secular rather than an atheist state.
Caridad Diego, who heads the Communist Party’s office of religious affairs, pointed to three Protestant pastors who serve in the 601-member National Assembly.
“There is no activity in any part of the country which a believer cannot take part in,” she said. “What counts is your attitude and your responsibility.”
Diego offered one caveat: “What preoccupies us is for religious beliefs to be manipulated against the revolution. [The church’s message] should be a religious message, not a political message.”
Analogies to Poland in the 1980s were rife during the pope’s visit as many hoped there would be a challenge to the one-party system and communism would fall here, too. But Cardinal Ortega said he did not share those “exaggerated” expectations, adding that they were out of line with the pastoral nature of the papal visit. Just to make sure the church’s message remains religious, a long-standing request to reopen parochial schools, which were closed in 1961, remains a distant dream, Ortega said.
In the economic realm, Cuba watchers have seen cracks in the embargo, which the pope criticized as “ethically unacceptable.” This month several anti-embargo members of Congress and American business executives dined with Castro, and ships laden with U.S. rice, wheat and corn continued to glide into port. They are part of the first commercial food sales to Cuba since 1962. Last week the head of Cuba’s food-import program said new food contracts would follow an easing of licensing procedures or an end to financing restrictions.