Pope reaches out to Cuba

SANTIAGO DE CUBA, Cuba – In a historic trip to Cuba on Monday, Pope Benedict XVI reached out to island residents and exiles alike, urging Cubans to “build a renewed and open society, a better society.”

Benedict became only the second pontiff to travel to Cuba, a nation where the Roman Catholic Church has gradually gained ground as the communist government has been forced to reform many of its policies. Before his arrival, Benedict criticized Cuba’s Marxism as an obsolete model in need of change.

“I carry in my heart the just aspirations and legitimate desires of all Cubans, wherever they may be,” Benedict said in an airport welcoming ceremony in Santiago de Cuba. “Their sufferings and their joys, their concerns and their noblest desires, those of the young and the elderly, of adolescents and children, of the sick and workers, of prisoners and their families, and of the poor and those in need.”

Benedict was greeted at the airport by President Raul Castro and senior Roman Catholic clerics, while thousands of Cubans from the island and abroad lined the routes his motorcade took in sunny, seafront Santiago de Cuba, Cuba’s second-largest city. They tapped drums, waved Cuban and Vatican flags and chanted Benedict’s name.

Castro used the welcoming ceremony to promise religious freedom for Cuba’s diverse panoply of believers who range from Catholics to practitioners of Santeria. And he condemned the 50-year-old “economic, political and media blockade” imposed by the United States against the communist government, that in some way worsens “but will never separate us from our truth.”

The president has embarked on an unprecedented though slow path of economic reform in which Cubans for the first time in nearly half a century can open businesses and buy and sell property. But political freedoms lag behind. Dissidents, regarded by the government as subversives, said they’ve been ordered to steer clear of papal events.

As darkness fell, Castro and members of his Cabinet, all dressed in white guayaberas, sat in the front rows of a vast Mass presided over by Benedict in the Antonio Maceo plaza (named for a commander in Cuba’s 19th-century fight for independence from Spain). Local organizers built an altar for the service, constructing it in the shape of a papal miter, or hat, and festooned in colors of white and blue to represent the sea.

As the Mass got under way, a young man jumped up and yelled, “In Cuba, we are not free!” He was taken away, apparently by police.

Many of the faithful who came from afar to see the pope said they hoped he would foster more change.