I would prefer to live with the people,” said the padre “right among the poor, as some of the priests do in Latin America. No priests in Cuba do so.” This young Cuban priest, ordained seven years, struggles with his future. Not whether he will work as a priest. That is clear. He will. But how will he live and work? He prays and consults his spiritual director about the unrest he feels. “Is it from God or not?” he ponders.
I had met the padre some weeks before. We had talked a bit. Today, a Sunday, we stood on the crowded bus (all buses in Cuba are crowded—if they come at all) talking as we rode from the barrio after Mass. He had invited me to accompany him to the small neighborhood chapel built before the Revolution for a congregation of about 150. Now after years of peeling and cracking in the humid Cuban climate, the weary building held 30 Sunday worshippers. One of the two sisters who help with the liturgy told me, “Thirty is the usual number. Many are fearful to come.”
The padre celebrated the Mass traditionally, reverently, informally (a tough combination). At the homily he introduced me to the people, told them of my visit from the United States and of my interest in the Church in Cuba. He suggested that instead of his giving a sermon they tell me something about the Catholic Church in Cuba.
Immediately a woman sitting by herself stood and spoke of how well she got on in the Cuban regime. She proclaimed almost as a challenge: “I practice my Catholicism faithfully and openly. I take part in community activities. I am respected though not always agreed with.” As she went on, I wondered if she had given this speech before and if she had been told that I would be there to hear it. (After the Mass the sacristan said that she had been a combatant in the Sierra Maestra with Fidel and Che, and that she came to the Sunday Mass only occasionally.) After she sat down, no one spoke for a long moment.
Finally, several of the older people quietly but firmly disagreed with her. They said that Catholics in Cuba are penalized. A teacher insisted that he could rise no farther in his profession “because I am a Catholic.” Another told of how the best engineer in his factory, not a Catholic but an openly religious person, had been systematically and obviously overlooked for promotion.
After the Mass, when the outspoken woman had left, several confided that they did not trust her. They suspected she had been sent by the local CDR (Committee for the Defense of the Revolution), a neighborhood crime watch, but also admittedly a surveillance group which boasts of “safeguarding the purity of the Revolution.”
The padre baptized two babies after Mass. More of the people drifted over to chat with me. Some spoke of the fear they feel when they come to Mass. One said that he did not attend Mass in his own neighborhood, but went across Havana on Sundays. He pointed to the two couples with the babies. Both of them came from 100 miles away so that they would not be seen having their children baptized in their hometown. “One of the fathers is in the military,” I was told, “and it is particularly important for him not to be identified as a Catholic.” Someone commented, “Many military people are Catholics. They have religious images in their homes, but they keep them well hidden.” I thought of the centuries of the hidden Catholics in Japan.
Some sisters had the previous year lived in the sacristy of this chapel until they could move into their permanent residence. Shortly after they arrived they began a catechism class. About 40 children enthusiastically began. Once the neighborhood heard about the classes, all of the children suddenly stopped coming. “Fear of discrimination in the neighborhood and in the school,” someone said. Everyone nodded.
As we rode back on the bus, the padre seemed a mixture of faith and sadness. He spoke of the Sunday Mass and of the young who were not there. He spoke with special affection of them. “The Church does not meet their questions, their concerns.” He told me that many of the laity were ill-formed. “There has not been true evangelization,” he lamented. “Especially so in the countryside, where priests are fewer and less prepared and where the distances are so great.”
The padre admitted that “there are committed young laity in Havana and the larger cities,” but immediately he added, “In general the laity and especially the older Catholics are much too dependent on the hierarchy.” Again he returned to the young Catholics. “Many of them want to leave Cuba, so even now they are only half here and not willing to work with the Cuban Church as a lifetime commitment.”
The padre’s commitment was clearly lifetime. That is why he wanted to live among the people. That is why the Church movements in Latin America, for example the comunidades de base, attracted him. “The Cuban Church is too little affected by these movements,” he said, “and too much influenced by the Church in the United States.”
He hopes to travel in Latin America and learn more about the Church there—unlikely given Cuba’s travel restrictions on her citizens. Unlikely, too, that for the present he will be able to work side by side with his fellow Cubans, living as one of them. But he prays to be a faithful priest fully devoted to the Cuban people and the Cuban Catholic Church. He is.