Pope Francis and Cuba

The visit of Pope Francis to Cuba in September is shaping up as an unusually important diplomatic event, both for Cuba and for the Holy See. It should reveal whether Raúl Castro's effusions after his meeting with the Pope about returning to the Church after a lapse of nearly 70 years had any practical meaning, personally or for Cuba.

By then it should also be clear whether the revival of full diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States, which the Pope facilitated, is likely to lead to any liberalisation of the Stalinist dictatorship the Castros have been inflicting on Cuba for 56 years. Most importantly, it may cause Pope Francis to make a choice he has so far avoided in his relations with undemocratic countries, between principally emphasising human freedom or the jargon of redistributive economics.

The Pope being an Argentine who lived through the years of the military juntas (without a trace of collaboration for the Church's critics to exploit, as they did Benedict XVI's tour as a Hitler Youth draftee on an inactive anti-aircraft battery before he deserted), there is great curiosity in the Americas to see where he will come down in the struggle between the fading far Left and the region's generally more successful free enterprise countries. Brazil (though governed by a social democratic party), Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru have done much better than the far-Left regimes originally inspired by the Peróns (Argentina) or the Castros: Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Pope Francis naturally feels these Latin American issues very strongly and wrote a slightly turgid book about Pope John Paul II's visit to Cuba in 1998, a trip which did lead to some liberalisation of the treatment of the clergy in that country. Francis presumably is influenced by the tumultuous history of his Jesuit order in South America; its dissent from the severity of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial regimes was an important factor in the Society of Jesus being dissolved from 1773 to 1814 (other than in Prussia and Russia, where it was protected by Catherine the Great).

Francis's past criticism of the American embargo of Cuba may imply that he is rather credulous about the standard Leftist claim that the US is the cause for the almost complete economic failure of Castroite Cuba, or it may merely indicate that he is tactically aware of the best methods and arguments for combating the incursions of the anti-Catholic far Left in Latin America; both could be true. For his own reasons, this Pope seems not to have attached much credence to the legitimate grievances of the United States against Cuba: that Castro seized American assets in Cuba without a cent of compensation and tried to foment violent revolution by godless communists all around Latin America for decades, unsuccessfully and most spectacularly with Che Guevara's efforts in Bolivia in the mid-1960s.

The Pope generally uses the Leftist word for the embargo, "blockade", as if the US Navy had never relaxed its stranglehold on the island briefly imposed during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when in fact the embargo is entirely porous and is not observed by any other important country

in the Americas, including Canada and Mexico.

The Castros have produced such an unrelieved economic and human rights disaster in Cuba that the country has been a perfect laboratory experiment for the United States to illustrate the failings of communism.

With the end of the Cold War and the practical inability of the Russians to continue to bankroll Cuba's guerrilla and agitprop efforts in the hemisphere, the US is not much concerned how the Latin American countries are governed, though increasing prosperity is good for everybody: it reduces the numbers of poor Latin Americans pressing at the American border, and provides the hemisphere with a greater economic hinterland opposite Europe and China and Japan.

The next three months will show whether, in the extreme winter of its long despotism, the Cuban Communist Party is prepared to abandon or at least loosen its totalitarian control. Indications of this would include going far beyond the toleration, announced by Raúl Castro, of practising Catholics in the country's sole political party, and would include releasing political prisoners, allowing dissent, ceasing to persecute activists such as the brave Ladies in White (relatives of political prisoners), cooling off the denunciatory Committees for the Defence of the Revolution in every neighbourhood and ending its continuing (though much diminished) subsidising of subversive efforts in other countries.

The Pope has a right to demand and expect the opening up of the media to Catholic opinion, permission of Cubans to travel and have access to the internet and foreign media, and an end to the display of the burlap bag, in which Che Guevara's corpse was returned, in Havana's Museum of the Revolution as an obscene imitation of the Holy Shroud of Turin.

Latin America and the world will be watching to see if the Pope's efforts generate any progress in these areas – and, if they do not, whether he will continue to push at a closed door and indulge the atheistic and anti-democratic Latin American far Left, which it would not, on its merits at governance, deserve. Pope Francis, by destroying the Church's enemies' caricature of it as an anachronistic association of aged celibates and deviates scolding the world about sex, has gained greater general admiration than have any active secular leaders. Cuba affords him the opportunity and the duty to show his mettle and his priorities in secular matters.