Fully sanctioned by Cuba's communist government, the peaceful religious march included a tractor that pulled a float with people playing the roles of Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus, and three men on horseback representing the Three Kings.
Starting in the late afternoon, the procession wound its way through Old Havana's narrow streets, where hundreds of people waved and smiled from the windows of their home in dilapidated buildings of wood and stone.
"Merry Christmas," several cried out. "Thank you!"
"We are very excited because we have been allowed to demonstrate our faith so publicly," said Raquel Requeny, a 53-year-old Catholic. Requeny said there had been no religious procession along Havana's Malecon since she was a young girl in the early 1960s, in the first years after Fidel Castro assumed power.
"This is marvelous," said Carlos Rodriguez, 61, a retired military man who said he stopped going to church soon after the revolution, but began attending Mass in recent years as relations warmed between church and state.
Cuba was officially atheist from the early 1960s until 1992, and religious believers were banned from the party, the military and several professions.
Since the collapse of Cuba's Soviet bloc allies, however, officials have softened their approach toward organized religion. Catholics and other believers in 1991 were granted permission to join the Communist Party.
Saturday's procession was another victory for Cuba's Roman Catholic Church, which has made steady but modest gains in extending its reach since Pope John Paul II visited the island in January 1998.
The government also granted church leaders' request to transmit the pontiff's annual Christmas Day message from the Vatican on state television.
Religious processions, once common before the revolution, were banned in the early 1960s after political opponents used them to speak out against the new communist government. Some turned violent.
But there were no problems Saturday as Cardinal Jaime Ortega, Cuba's top Roman Catholic churchman, accompanied the procession in robes and miter of white with gold brocade. The procession wound along the eastern end of the crumbling Malecon seawall, with the Fortress of San Carlos de la Cabana guarding Havana Bay in the background.
Carrying signs identifying their individual parishes and singing Christmas carols, the people in the procession turned down a side street and up to the plaza in front of Havana's towering baroque stone cathedral.
With a blue-robed choir and clouds of incense, the cardinal and other church leaders celebrated Christmas Mass.
The first outdoor religious processions since the early 1960s were permitted in the months leading up to the pope's visit. Much smaller, they consisted of several hundred people walking through the streets behind people carrying a statue of the Virgin of Charity of Cobre, Cuba's patron saint.
Earlier this year, the government allowed the church to hold modest street processions commemorating Good Friday, and the feast day of the Virgin of Charity.
© Copyright 1999 The Associated Press