Cuba after the fall of the USSR

It's Jesus, it's Jesus, they cry, looking up at a huge seven-storey high mural. It's a miracle, said a passing truck driver, who however did not choose to reveal his name. For this was the Plaza of the Revolution in the centre of Havana, Cuba and, who knows, it's possible that after the Pope has come and gone, the official line, that is to say Fidel Castro's view of things, of religion, the Vatican and the place of the Catholic church in Cuba, might change overnight. As it is, the mural was permitted by the government and financed and built by the church.

The other sight that many of the people who live in Havana thought of as something just short of a miracle was a traffic jam. It was caused by the couple of thousand journalists and television crews that have descended on the city, most of the Europeans, I should guess, for the first time in their lives. The standard television shot of Havana, for the past 30 years or more, has been of a seemingly half-busy city with a population mostly on foot, often in bread queues and a dribble of 1950s Chevys rattling along half-empty roadways. This is the first visit of a Pope during the long reign of the Castro regime, though the idea of it occurred to Castro so long ago as 1979, when John Paul II condemned the American embargo on trade with Cuba. The Pope was on a visit to Mexico then and Castro, we are now told, invited him to stop by. The Pope declined.

So much is being expected by so many different factions and people both inside and out of Cuba, that it might be well to sketch the history of American policy toward Cuba, which has been special and intense since Fidel Castro first hurtled into our consciousness out of the mountains in the late 1950s, with what we were told was a ragged band of guerrillas, determined to crash the corrupt regime of the dictator, Batista.

On the very first day of 1959, Batista fled. Castro stormed into Santiago, on to Havana, next month took over as premier and appeared in Washington in the spring, as democratic populist hero, dedicated, he swore, to setting up not a Communist, please, but a humanistic regime. And in the beginning there was, both in Washington and in the media, much sympathetic coverage of Castro and his declared aims. He did seem a rousing radical alternative to the usual South and Central American sequence of corrupt dictator and tin-pot Communist rebel. Much was expected of the promised elections but 38 years have gone by and there have been no elections.

Within that first year, Castro stunned Washington by signing a grand trade treaty and acquiring a hundred-million-dollar credit with the Soviet Union and in no time he was denouncing what he called American economic aggression. The United States for decades had owned most of the sugar and much of the tobacco and other crops. President Eisenhower practically abolished the sugar quota and announced that the United States would never allow any Communist-dominated regime to flourish anywhere in the western hemisphere. This was not a wild, impromptu threat. It was a reminder of the oldest American foreign policy doctrine. A doctrine first asserted, coincidentally, against Russia and her claims on Alaska at the beginning of the 19th Century. Finally, in 1823, President James Monroe proclaimed the doctrine, ever after bearing his name, which declared that Europe and the Americas were separate spheres of influence and that henceforth the American continents are not open to colonisation by any European power.

Well now by that time, Eisenhower's time, the Monroe Doctrine had gone to sleep in the history books but Eisenhower roused it and made clear it was certainly going to apply to any Soviet designs on Cuba, a country on whose behalf, little more than 50 years before, the United States had fought Spain, to help secure Cuba's independence. Premier Khrushchev simply retorted that the Monroe Doctrine was dead and that the Soviet Union would protect Cuba with rockets, if the United States tried to invade Cuba. Which, almost as soon as Kennedy had succeeded Eisenhower, the United States tried, in an inept invasion attempt that failed. And then, as we all know, Khrushchev began secretly to build nuclear missile bases in Cuba and that led to the Kennedy-Khrushchev stand-off and on to the tiptoe of nuclear war and the Soviet back-down.

Ever since, 30 odd years ago, Castro dropped the pretence of being a humanist and declared that he was a proud Marxist, Cuba has been a chronic nuisance in the Caribbean and American-Cuban relations officially non-existent. When the Soviet Union collapsed, nearly seven years ago, the hope sprouted high in Washington that without a economic prop from Moscow, the Castro regime would expire in general poverty and revolution and during the next four years there was very little petrol, electricity, food or production of anything. But Cuba did not collapse. The United States Senate was so irritated that it passed a bill threatening to prosecute any country that did business with Cuba, a fairly outrageous act that nobody paid attention to and that President Clinton has discreetly managed to put on the back burner. Meanwhile Cuba, while not exactly flourishing, is enjoying what, for a Communist country with perpetual rationing and no visible outside means of support, is a sort of boom. Castro has allowed trade in dollars, he's relaxed the state's hold on small business, foreign investors are coming in and financing new production.

But as for the expectations held by, we're told, on the one hand the Catholic church, on the other by Castro himself, what is to come out of the Pope's visit? I think we can best reduce our great expectations to a modest scale by puncturing the main preconceptions held by Americans, and perhaps by much of the rest of the world, and the two most widespread preconceptions in this country, which are perhaps even rampant in Europe, are that Roman Catholicism is overwhelmingly the chosen religion of Cubans and that Castro has only recently had the idea to invite the Pope, by way of demonstrating that Cuba is one Marxist state where religious persecution plays no part. First, the main religion practised in Cuba, by a large majority, some say 70%, is something most of us have heard little about – Santeria. A faith that came originally from Africa, it assumes a supreme being who delegated to various spirits the protection of human beings. In Cuba these spirits have been given the names of Catholic saints. Their help is invoked through elaborate rituals that are said to be a very high and reputable form of voodoo. So let's say half, five and a half million of Cuba's 11 millions practice Santeria. There are one million Protestants, the rest, four million at most, are Roman Catholics and when Castro came in he acted like a true Marxist. He declared that Cuba was an atheist state, that religion was the well-known opiate of the masses, the state took over all the Catholic schools, 260 of them, foreign priests were banished, public religious processions and public masses were prohibited. They still are. But Castro recently declared Cuba to be a secular state, not atheist and as for the notion that he only lately conceived the idea of a papal visit, there's surprising evidence to show that for ten years at least he's been planning it.

Before the Soviet Union collapsed and the Catholic church became very visibly the chief support of the foodless poor, Castro staged a well-publicised two days' visit with a Brazilian priest and out of this dialogue came a book, a best-seller in Cuba, called Fidel and Religion. He now had gentler recollections of his early Jesuit training. He called Christ a great revolutionary. He believed that Karl Marx would have approved of the Sermon on the Mount. Castro has never broken diplomatic ties with the Vatican and in the last two years has been pressing for the present visit. You may remember it was such a vividly different image of Castro. You were meant to remember the day in 1996 that he walked majestically but humbly into the Vatican in a totally unfamiliar and beautifully cut double-breasted suit. He never looked less like a tyrant who imprisoned and tortured dissidents. We'd never seen him before in anything but the fatigue uniform of a guerrilla officer. It was evidently on that visit that the Pope agreed to visit Cuba. And this time, in our first sight of their meeting, Castro preserved the same posture of deep respect and tendered a helping hand in that same, or possibly yet another, beautiful double-breasted suit, reinforcing for the onlooking world the picture of a dignified statesman of the finest, bourgeois chop.

Castro, even in his fatigues and raggedy beard, has always had charisma and comparing him in retrospect with some of his Marxist predecessors in Poland, East Germany, Romania, it becomes harder to see a Communist dictator who has his country in a total grip, who allows a minimum of opposition, who has no intention of yielding a tenet of his original Marxism. Except, it seems – or it may be a strong desire to see if the Catholic church can be allowed a new freedom inside a Communist state – perhaps he's saying, as Castro's unique experiment in wedding the church's traditional concern for the poor with his own Marxist conviction which he claims to share with Aristotle, that the first job, the first virtue of government is the care of the poor. It would also be very acceptable to Castro if the Cuba the world saw in these four days convinced Washington that a 30-odd year trade embargo, but more, a threat to punish all other nations that trade with Cuba, is not only something beyond any right known to international law, but is also no sensible way of easing Cuba into a more democratic life as the rest of us know it.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.