Pope looks to Havana '98

BY BRUCE JOHNSTON IN ROME
CARDINAL CAMILLO Ruini, the Pope's Vicar of Rome and head of the Italian Bishops' Conference, returned from Cuba this week, where it was decided that the Pontiff would visit the island at the end of January 1998.
Vatican Radio, reporting on the prelate's visit which it called a "pastoral field trip", said relations between the Church and the Cuban government were now in a phase of "normalisation".
It added that Cardinal Ruini had found that the Catholic Church on the island was undergoing "decisive growth and renewal".
Cardinal Ruini, who also briefly visited Haiti, met privately with President Fidel Castro as well as Cuban Church authorities.
Talk of a papal visit to Cuba the only Latin American country to which the Pope has never been began in earnest in November when President Castro, in Rome for the UN World Food Summit, extended an invitation during an audience with John Paul II.
That audience also served to unravel a tangle of red tape in order to allow the first wave of new missionaries onto the island in years. Vatican efforts to arrange a pastoral visit to Cuba began at the start of the present papacy more than 18 years ago, and were especially renewed in 1989 by the then papal nuncio in Havana, Mgr Faustino Sainz. Fears however that such a visit could prove disruptive following the fall of the Berlin wall led the Cuban authorities to decide not to invite the Pope at that stage.
Tension created between the island's authorities and the Church in the years that followed as Cuba sought to counter the Berlin wall effect came to a head in September 1993. It was then that the local ecclesiastical leadership called for political and social changes, an amnesty, and an end to police repression.
The government termed the Church counter-revolutionary, and accused the bishops of threatening the unity of the people. In October of that year the Pope gave the local bishops his full support, thus provoking another hostile reaction from Cuba.
But three months later, he made the first move to improve relations when, during a papal audience with the Vatican diplomatic corps, he called on the international community not to isolate Cuba.