Rendering Unto Castro

Pope John Paul II helped bring down the Iron Curtain in Europe, but he was no match for Monica Lewinsky in Cuba. Shortly after the Pontiff arrived for his historic visit to the communist island in 1998, the media horde stampeded back to the U.S. to cover the emerging sex scandal engulfing Bill Clinton’s presidency. But John Paul was probably just as glad the journalists left: it helped lower expectations about what he was supposed to accomplish. Cuba wasn’t Poland–Fidel Castro was a more daunting despot than Wojciech Jaruzelski–and John Paul knew that democratic change wouldn’t arrive on the island until after Castro died. In the meantime, his task wasn’t to bring the Cuban dictator to his knees; it was to help the Cuban church back to its feet.

Fourteen years later, John Paul has passed away and the 85-year-old Fidel and his younger brother Ral, who has taken over as Cuba’s President, are still alive. But the Roman Catholic Church that Pope Benedict XVI will find in Cuba when he visits March 26–28 is nothing less than reborn–and nothing less than the island’s first and only alternative institution to the Cuban revolution.

Cuban Catholics are celebrating a new seminary for priests–the first since Fidel all but shut down the church 50 years ago–and the 400th anniversary of their patroness, La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre (Our Lady of Charity). But they’re also hailing the recent release of 115 political prisoners, brokered largely by their 11 bishops, as well as the church’s increased training of civic leaders and entrepreneurs, including courses for that iconic capitalist degree, the M.B.A. “We’re breathing an atmosphere of change,” Cuba’s top prelate, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, told me.

The papal visit intends to shine a halo on the most important change the church is generating in Cuba: decommunizing the economy. The island is so cash-strapped that Ral will have to lay off up to a million state workers–almost 20% of the labor force–in the next year or two. To absorb them, he’s broadening the private sector; he recently decreed that Cubans can buy and sell personal real estate. And he’s decided the church is the only noncommunist entity he can trust to assist in that shift, mainly by grooming Cuban capitalists, without seriously challenging his rule. Last year Ral, who is 80, even offered a mea culpa for decades of blacklisting “Cubans with religious beliefs.”

But after praying at Our Lady of Charity’s shrine in the eastern copper-mining town of El Cobre, Benedict will still encounter a Good Friday’s worth of political pain in Cuba, as well as criticism of how the church is confronting it. Castro foes say the church should confess that it isn’t doing enough to spark regime change in Cuba–even as Castro fans fear that the church may be doing too much to kindle it. Cuban-American U.S. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairwoman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, calls Ortega, Havana’s Archbishop, a Castro “collaborator” more focused on the church’s corporate growth than on Cuba’s dismal human-rights record. Meanwhile, the independent Cuban Commission for Human Rights & National Reconciliation reports that police, working to dispel any notion that the Pope’s visit is the start of a Caribbean Spring, have made more than 2,000 “arbitrary arrests for political motives” since December and that progovernment militants are “violently harassing” the Catholic dissident group Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White) in cities like Santiago, Benedict’s first stop. Ral insists his government hasn’t ordered or condoned the bullying of democracy activists like the Damas. But his police made a point of rounding up and detaining scores of the women on March 18, including their leader, Bertha Soler, during one of their regular marches. (She and almost all the others were later let go.)

If a charismatic Cold Warrior like John Paul II couldn’t raze the tropical Berlin Wall, it’s doubtful an aloof theologian like Benedict XVI will. Still, Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski, who has aided the Cuban church’s resurrection, insists the ties between Havana and the Holy See are “opening new space for individual initiative and independent thought,” which he believes will hasten communism’s demise when Fidel and Ral are gone. Until then, Ortega says, the church has to guard against “overreaching.” But, says Juan Clark, an emeritus professor of sociology at Miami Dade College and the author of Religious Repression in Cuba, “while it’s admirable that the Cuban church is moving fences, eventually people are going to demand that you do more to tear those fences down”–as the church did in Eastern Europe a generation ago.

In the short run, the church does risk being used by the regime. But in the long run, the regime is taking the larger gamble. As repressed as Cubans feel politically, their bigger concerns are economic: most earn a meager $20 a month. Among the church’s most popular diocesan programs, as a result, are its clases de liderazgo, or leadership classes. They fill the vacuum left by state-run schools and universities–which know Marx but not marketing–by teaching Cubans the kind of free-enterprise skills they’ll need under Ral’s reforms. (Ortega’s archdiocese, apparently with Ral’s blessing, has partnered with a Spanish university to offer an M.B.A. program.) Just as important, they also impart the sort of community-organization tools once considered solely the domain of the communist state.

The Catholic charity Caritas, for example, hopes to launch a microloan project to help Cubans grow beyond the timbiriches, or tiny informal businesses that constitute the Cuban private sector so far, to larger private enterprises like small factories. If Havana and Washington permit it, nonprofit groups in the U.S. and Europe are set, they tell me, to channel tens of millions of dollars to Caritas for a microcredit fund. “My last hope is the church,” says Roque, a middle-aged former Cuban soldier in Havana who wants to start a courier service. “They help with extra food and are sending me to computer lessons.” Says Carlos Saladrigas, a co-chairman of the Washington-based Cuba Study Group: “The church is mobilizing Cuban civil society away from the state nonetheless, and that could have big democratizing effects down the road.”

The Jesuit-educated Fidel declared Cuba an atheist state in 1960: he banned Catholic media, expropriated church schools and exiled or hounded out 3,500 priests and nuns. Only 200 clerics remained to minister to millions of Cuban Catholics. The openly faithful, including priests like Ortega, were often sent to labor camps for “re-education.” The church began to regain its footing in the 1980s, and its fortunes rose further with the economy’s collapse in the 1990s, after the fall of Cuba’s benefactor, the Soviet Union. Suddenly sensing the usefulness of Catholic aid organizations like Caritas, whose Cuban chapter Ortega founded in 1991, Fidel proclaimed the island a merely “secular” state.

Then, in 1998, he welcomed John Paul II, and the planning of that event, says Wenski, was a watershed: “It gave Catholics there a new confidence and planted the seeds of civil society.” That was evidenced by critical new Catholic publications like Vitral magazine, one of Cuba’s first independent media outlets–and by increased friction with the state. Many if not most Cuban dissidents hail from Catholic groups like the Damas de Blanco, founded by the wives of political prisoners, and the Christian Liberation Movement, headed by Cuba’s leading dissident, Oswaldo Pay. Some 75 of his organization’s members were thrown into prison in 2003 after embarrassing Fidel by gathering the requisite signatures for a constitutional referendum on democratic reform.

It wasn’t until the more pragmatic Ral succeeded Fidel in 2008 that the church emerged as a political as well as spiritual player. Some clergy, like Havana Vicar General Carlos Manuel de Cspedes, opened dialogue with the all-powerful Cuban Communist Party; others tested the limits of that discussion, among them the Rev. Jos Conrado Rodrguez of Santiago, who boldly sent Ral a letter in 2009 complaining of “constant and unjustifiable human-rights violations” in Cuba. Though closely watched by the state, Rodrguez has not been jailed.

The real turning point was 2010, when Cuba’s bishops started an unprecedented mediation, along with Spain, that led to prisoner releases, including those of Pay’s group. Although critics like Ros-Lehtinen believe Ral forced the freed dissidents into exile–most left for Spain, but Ortega insists it was their choice–the effort gave the Cuban church new cachet. U.S. leaders not so long ago dismissed the idea of the church’s gaining any leverage with the Castros; now they’re imploring Benedict, as Florida Senator Bill Nelson wrote him in March, to “request a humanitarian release for Alan Gross,” the 62-year-old U.S. contract aid worker whom Cuba sentenced to 15 years in prison last year for taking illegal satellite-communications equipment to the island.

As a result, if the Pope fails to make prominent mention of human-rights issues during his visit, the church could indeed look as if it’s lamely sitting on Cuba’s fences instead of moving or toppling them. And that, as much as any overreach, could undermine the remarkable strides the Cuban church has made in a relatively short time. Indeed, many dissidents, some of whom tried to hole up in Havana churches in March to protest the recent spate of arrests, are scolding Ortega for not speaking out more loudly and are demanding an audience with Benedict.

Expectations about the church’s clout in Cuba, however, may still be overblown. A big reason: for all its recent advances, the Catholic Church doesn’t, and never did, enjoy the devoted popular support in Cuba that it had in Poland during the Solidarity days. “The church wasn’t as much at the root of Cuban nationality,” says Clark, a Bay of Pigs veteran. In fact, the Spanish colonial era bred anticlerical sentiment among Cubans long before the Castros’ 1959 revolution. That problem is compounded by the fact that the church in Cuba competes with other spiritual outlets, including Protestant evangelical faiths and the syncretic Afro-Caribbean religion Santeria–not to mention the cult of Fidel, who is still revered by many Cubans as a secular savior.

That reality, and the tight grip Ral’s military and state security still have on the country, have forced the church to steer its Cuba crusade more carefully. And right now its most effective weapon may be the contrast between its operations and a government bureaucracy that even Ral blasts for corruption and inefficiency. “I’m happy the government has at least given us a chance to open businesses,” Carlos Linares, a former teacher and coffee-shop owner in the western town of Viales, tells TIME. “But it is strangling us with the level of taxes.”

Many of the thousands of Cubans who’ve attended church workshops say they’ve learned from them how to do business legitimately after decades of often illicit hustling in a desperate black-market milieu. “The economic reforms need an ethical posture as well,” says Ortega. One participant from Santiago, who asked not to be identified, agrees. “I’m not really religious,” she told me, “but the church, as you’d expect, brings a moral framework that is sometimes missing as we struggle to get by.”

That might not yet constitute a Caribbean Spring, but Benedict can at least say the church is doing more to plant the seeds of democracy on the island than the U.S.’s 50-year trade embargo against Cuba ever did. And when the Castros are in their graves, it’s a good bet the Cuban church will still be on its feet.