Castro’s Confession
Fidel Castro once seemed such a promising young Catholic.
The man playing host this week to Pope John Paul II has carried on a roller-coaster relationship with the Roman Catholic Church dating back more than 50 years to his days as a brilliant but rebellious Jesuit student.
The tyrant who went on to ban Christmas grew up in a solid Catholic household headed by a strict father and a deeply religious mother.
At age 17, Castro confronted a matter of life and death, an episode that a devout person might have called a religious experience. Seeing his mentor, a Jesuit priest, being dragged down a swift mountain stream, Castro plunged in.
“He was the strongest swimmer in the school, and when he saw I was drowning, he just jumped in and saved my life,” Father Armando Llorente recalled years later.
On shore, priest and boy knelt to pray. Then they wept together.
That same boy grew up to seize control of Cuba, declare it an atheist Marxist state, ban Catholics from high posts, confiscate church property, shut down Catholic schools and expel priests and nuns. He has alternately spurned and reached out to the church ever since, leading to the pope’s tour of Cuba.
Rarely has a pope been greeted by a host with such a checkered religious past. But history shows Castro has his reasons for extending a warm welcome.
The ups and downs along this wild ride reveal Castro’s political agenda and his world-class ability to manipulate people and events. The only consistent quality in the seeming contradictions is a cold, hard political cunning.
“For ordinary citizens of Cuba, religion is incredibly important. Everyone who looks at the island sees spirituality or religion on the rise,” said William LeoGrande, an expert on Cuban history at American University in Washington. “But for Castro, this is clearly politics writ large.”
At his victory speech upon entering Havana in 1959, the moment of his greatest triumph, Castro was blessed with a remarkable occurrence that left religious Cubans in awe. Someone released three white doves from a cage as the revolutionary leader addressed a crowd at Camp Columbia, the military headquarters of just-departed dictator Fulgencio Batista outside Havana.
The huge crowd gasped and cheered when one of the doves, long a symbol of peace, alighted on his shoulder and stayed there as he spoke. No one could have scripted a more dramatic demonstration.
To many Cubans, the dove signified divine acceptance of the guerrilla leader. Even today in revolution-weary Cuba, many people still recall the white dove.
But the reassurance that believers felt that day was quickly crushed. At the height of his intolerance, in 1961, Castro’s regime herded a bishop and 130 clergymen onto a boat and sent them out of Cuba. The Vatican responded by excommunicating him.
Cuban church members were denied jobs, excluded from government posts, harried and ridiculed. Soap operas on government-run television depicted priests as lechers or fools. Church services became pitiable, sparsely attended gatherings. Young Cubans were taught that religion was a trivial pursuit, irrelevant in Cuba.
“Even practicing Catholics did not baptize their children or teach them about God, lest their future be jeopardized,” said Father Jose Somoza, a Cuban-American priest in Washington. “So today, many Cubans do not know much about Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary or basics of the Catholic faith.”
Yet Castro stopped short of banning the church, as was done in China and other Communist countries. He found it most useful to keep the church functioning but contained through social stigmas and harassments. He never allowed it to become a rival power center but avoided turning believers into martyrs.
But Castro’s declaration of atheism and his regime’s repression of the church are only part of his puzzle. The other parts help explain why he ventured to the Vatican in 1996 to court the pope and why he hopes to gain from the pope’s visit.
At heart he was never very religious, Castro readily acknowledges.
Young Fidel quietly respected his mother’s faith and he put up with the Jesuits. He would dutifully arise at dawn, pull on his school uniform, attend church services and dazzle his teachers with his remarkable memory. He could recite long passages from the Bible and was especially fascinated by biblical depictions of war and conquest.
Castro admired the self-sacrifice and discipline of the Jesuits. At the same time, he showed flashes of rebellion, disdained the dogma of the church and accused some priests of falling under the sway of right-wing Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.
“On the one hand, he saw his teachers as good guys, just like in ‘Goodbye Mr. Chips,’ and on the other hand he accused them of being minions of Franco, anti-progressive,” said Thomas Quigley, an adviser on Latin America for the U.S. Catholic Conference, a church service group.
Castro has expressed some pride in the fact that the name Fidel derives from the Latin word faithful. And he has called San Fidel “my saint.”
When it suits him, Castro will weave religious themes into his rhetoric. He sometimes compares Christian ideals to those of communism. At times he has even compared his own struggles in a hostile capitalist world to the earthly persecution of Jesus Christ.
“When Christ’s preachings are practiced, it will be possible to say that a revolution is occurring in the world,” Castro once said in a televised speech.
Yet Castro, consumed with worldly matters, never expressed deep religious convictions.
As for his rescue of the drowning priest in 1943, Castro shrugs it off as an act of man, not faith. “Yes, I saved Llorente’s life,” he recalled years later.
“I would have done it for anyone, not because he was a priest.”
His tolerance of religion depended on the pragmatics of getting and keeping power.
“From the mid-‘60s on, you could not say the church represented any kind of a threat to him,” Quigley said. “And there were radical developments elsewhere in Latin America that made Castro realize the church may not have to be repressed, that it may be an ally.”
Meeting with foreign church leaders in 1985, Castro wistfully expressed a hope that he would someday meet the pope, a wish he fulfilled 11 years later.