Cuba & the Pope

Pope Benedict XVI went to Cuba, made a few speeches and left. The visit was a victory for socialist Cuba in many ways.

What it revealed, once again, was that the Cuban Revolution and its leaders are strong because they have the support of the masses of people. The turnout for the Pope was respectable but not overwhelming. As even the U.S. press had to point out before the visit, Catholicism is not a deeply rooted religion in Cuba; Santeria is more popular, especially among Afro-Cubans.

Cuba’s main problem is not with Catholicism. It is with U.S. imperialism, which has tried — and failed — for more than 50 years to bring down the revolution through an outright invasion, years of sabotage and assassination attempts against its leaders, a blockade meant to destroy the island’s economy, and the cultivation of a small dissident group with ties to Miami gangsters and other remnants of the despised dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista — a U.S. puppet if there ever was one.

The biggest problem for the U.S. ruling class is that the Cuban people understand all this. They know that their leaders are truly on their side, having sacrificed along with them when the going has been tough. The people refuse to be bought with false promises of what they would get if they would only turn against the system that has given them a magnificent educational establishment, the best health care in the hemisphere, and a bond of solidarity with all the struggling peoples of the world. “Vende patria” — someone who sells their country — is about the worst thing you can call a Cuban.

The Cubans have just been through a lengthy process of revising and updating their legal and political structure. Proposals on all the issues were brought to the people — at their workplaces, their schools, their neighborhoods — for discussions in which they could criticize, accept, reject, amend and improve the new laws. This is how Cuban democracy works — and it is infinitely better than the bought-and-paid-for electoral system in capitalist countries that always gives the same results: the rule of the bankers and bosses over the masses of the people.

Nevertheless, the State Department and White House were hoping to turn the Pope’s visit into a propaganda blitz against the Cuban Revolution. They wanted him to call for the freeing of their paid agent, Alan Gross. They wanted him to meet with the so-called Ladies in White, a group whose politics echo the State Department. And they didn’t want him to say anything negative about the blockade — the U.S. calls it an embargo — that not only prevents U.S. firms from engaging in normal trade relations with Cuba but even punishes other countries that do so.

The Pope had all of Latin America to think about. He knew that Cuba is very popular there, and that if he acquiesced to Washington’s demands he would lose standing in what is in many ways the last bastion of the Catholic Church. So in the end he said nothing about Gross, didn’t meet with the Ladies in White, and publicly deplored the embargo — as do 99 percent of the countries in the world every year when the U.N. General Assembly votes on this subject.

We congratulate Cuba for how the Pope’s visit was handled. The leaders showed confidence in the political maturity of the Cuban people, and the people showed that they deserve that confidence.