Only God can save Cuba

dictatorship. After all, the prologue to the liberation of Eastern Europe was written by Karol Wojtyla, though the main text was later dominated by men like Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel. The Pope’s pilgrimage to Poland, his homeland, in 1979 saw the tidal waves of religion rising over the stagnant lie of communism. There would have been perhaps no Solidarity without the Vicar of Jesus Christ, and no eruption of the streets of Eastern Europe without the turbulence in Gdansk.

For John Paul II, liberation’s day after didn’t mark the end of history. Nor did it signify the real God’s inevitable triumph over the false Jehovahs of socialism. As he looked around the Christendom from the balcony of St. Peter’s, he almost resembled the Jesus of Kazantzakis: "I hate, I despise your festivities. I’m nauseous from the stench of the fatted calves you slaughter for me. Take away from me the tumult of your Psalms and your lutes". For him, the alternative to Marx didn’t mean Big Mac. Heartless capitalism was not his idea of freedom. His model for liberated societies: communism with a moral face. His post-communist encyclical could very well have been written by a Willy Brandt in catholic robe. He may say: "The concept of Jesus as a political figure, a revolutionary, the subversive from Nazareth, does not tally with the church’s teaching." This is only his answer to the liberation theologists of Latin America and elsewhere. But the concept of Karol Wojtyla as a political figure, a revolutionary, the subversive from Krakow, does indeed tally with Jesus’ idealism. For, in his words, "in the Gospel there is man, respect for man, and therefore respect for human rights and freedom of conscience."

In Havana his host will be the Old Man of an equally ambitious Gospel. Fidel Castro was once the hero of one of this century’s romantic liberation struggles. The liberation of Cuba inaugurated the New Man in Havana. That Caribbean heroism was the theme of the revolutionary ballads of the ’50s and the ’60s. Castro and Che, the comandannte and the companero, were our men of salvation, our most favoured guerillas. Castro and Che, currently the maximo lider and a skeleton on display, are today heroes of a weird community of ghost worshipers, mostly found in "third world" sanctuaries. In Castro’s Cuba, Marxism is a slogan, nationalism a manufactured frenzy, and religion a recently released demon. Freedom, ha, it is a flight across the Florida Straits. More than four decades ago, it marked a defining moment in the history of revolutions when Castro and 80 other heroes headed towards freedom in the legendary Granma. Today, ramshackle rafts are defying the vigilante to reach the shore of freedom known as Miami.

Castro, the lord of the bunker, would like to blame this viral fever in a socialist society on the Yanquee conspiracy. If capitalism for the Pope is a God-defying frenzy of consumerism, for Castro, it is a mean spirited enemy of socialist Cuba. Patria O Muerte — Venceremos (the fatherland or death — we will win), goes the cry from the bunker. The Gospel from the Vatican too is passionate. It seeks to revive the spiritual soul of Christendom. Between these two missionaries lie two ideas of justice and freedom. Their conflict is spiritual — a quarrel for supremacy. The idea of the just earth dominates both Christianity and communism. The arrival of the New Man is the subtext of both the theology of the Vatican and the fantasies of the Politburo. One was the opiate of the masses for the other. In the Marxist view, religion signified the intellectual pauperism of the primitive. As Leszek Kolakowski wrote, "Marxists, with very few exceptions, took up the topic of religious worship only in terms of its social and political significance … Hardly ever did they bother to reflect upon the claims of religious faith to truth — such claims having been dismissed ages ago, in their view, by the enlightened minds of the past". So communism banished the opium merchants. Though it is an altogether different story that it took the most successful opium merchant of our times to challenge the salesmanship of the communist.

It is this theological history of one-upmanship that provides next week’s meeting between the atheist and the Apostle a spiritual frisson. Castro, let down by history and harassed by "imperalism", has already allowed limited religious freedom in Cuba. That was a move as desperate as his recent attempt to market Che’s bones. The problem with Castro is that he is still a believer. Today, elsewhere in what was once the socialist land, it is either the Patriarch or the Archbishop who spreads the good news. In Cuba, the Patriarch of Truth is a man who has outlived his relevance. You have Octavos Paz, a convert: "Not only are the acts and the politics of the Castro regime a negation of democracy; so, likewise, are the very principles on which it is founded. In this sense the Cuban bureaucratic dictatorship is a real historical novelty on our continent: with it began not socialism but a revolutionary legitimacy aimed at taking the place of the historical legitimacy of democracy". It is, in short, the dictatorship of a false religion. An unkept promise, a redundant evangelist. The dictatorship of Castro is the last flash of communism’s religious pretence.

For Karol Wojtyla, Havana can very well be a millennial triumph. When the Black Madonna of Poland wept in joy in 1979, the moment marked the end of a pretence, the great communist pretence that the conscience of the people can be conditioned and controlled by ideology. By inviting the Pope, Castro hopes to co-opt his historical enemy in his last, anxious struggle for survival. Even if the Virgin of Charity weeps on that momentous day, Castro can say that the tears are a response to the unfair embargo against a nation of believers. The paranoid is capable of anything, even conning God.

But God has already shown that He cannot remain unmoved by ruins. And Karol Wojtyla has once shaken the earth. And no bunker survived then. Let us pray with the devil.